Grantaire, affecting an expression of disgust, slung an arm around Bahorel's shoulders and turned to the door. "Come on, let's go dance with pretty girls at the Grande Chaumière. There's nothing to be found here tonight but the twittering of birds, or perhaps of dreamers, which amounts to the same thing: a great deal of noise, which gaping simpletons take for the sublimest of music, but which in reality signifies nothing and accomplishes nothing, except in the case where the prattlers are birds of ill omen trumpeting a glorious bloodbath to come. Truly I don't know why I come to the Musain anymore. The wine is bad, the birdsong is ear-splitting, and Louison has a most unbecoming wart on her chin. I'm better off breaking my feet trying to keep up with the grisettes and their can-can."
As he left, Enjolras caught his sleeve. Grantaire stopped short.
"Why do you keep coming here, Grantaire?"
A strange expression spread over Grantaire's misshapen face. "Madness," he said. "Intoxication. Both. It must be, because I know of no good reason why I should seek out such a sorry flock of dreamers."
That night, tolerably drunk and rejected by all the grisettes he'd pursued, Grantaire dreamed. Sprawled across his empty bed, he dreamed he saw Enjolras in the guise of St Michael, trampling him underfoot without seeing him as Grantaire lay insensible in the gutter outside the Grande Chaumière. Enjolras drew his sword and launched himself into the heavens, and Grantaire barely had time to press a kiss to the heel lifting itself from his face as the air resounded with the beating of mighty wings.
He awoke to find that he'd soiled his sheets in the night. Cursing himself, cursing the dance-hall absinthe that had given him such grotesque dreams, cursing whatever demon had given him bad luck with women so that it could invade even dreams such as that one with lust, he rolled over and groped on the floor for a bottle of brandy. In the absence of any magical spring of Lethe, he'd have to settle for whatever measure of Oblivion his aqua vitae would grant him. Above all he was determined not to think about it. It meant nothing, after all. It was only a dream, and what were dreams but the meaningless twittering of the mind as it slept?