"Why don't you drink Enjolras?" Grantaire had asked him one night at the Cafe Musain.
"Most likely for the same reasons that you do. It delays reactions, and dulls the mind." He had answered vaguely, before carrying on to Combeferre and Joly, "Now, as I was saying, Lamarque is trying to pass a new law on healthcare for the..."
But there was another, much darker reason that Enjolras so faithfully abstained from alcohol. He kept it buried deep inside himself, and the reader may imagine that it contributed to his great compassion for the oppressed.
Felix Tholomyes was his name. The father of our young revolutionary. The very Tholomyes who fathered Cosette Fauchelevent had gone on to live a very posh life. Continuing a very successful, if dishonest, career in the law, and had captured for his wife, a young, beautiful, cowering, Aristocrat. They had one son.
Although his life seemed to have taken a turn for the better, his habits, had not. Most nights, Enjolras's father would come home stumbling drunk, and boiling with uncontrollable rage. Most mornings, Enjolras and his mother would wake up still bloody and bruised from last night's beatings, and trembling, would attempt to tidy the house without waking their drunken torturer.
"Promise me Enjolras, my angel boy," his mother would whisper through scabbed lips, "you will never drink of the poison to which your poor father is a slave to."
"I promise mama."
"He really does love us you know," she would say when he was gone to work, "it's that poisonous wine. It controls him."
He didn't believe her. As Enjolras grew, he saw more and more what his father was. A tyrant. And he saw more and more that the people of his beloved France, were bruised and bleeding, because of the tyrant King Louis Philippe.
Enjolras studied politics for the People, and learned to fight, so that someday, when he was strong enough, he would be able to defend his mother.
One star filled night, he had stayed late at the library. Too late, it seemed. His mother lay dead on the floor, and his father knelt, sobbing, over the body he had sucked the life from.
In a fit of rage, the thirteen year old boy hit his father with a broken chair leg in just the right place. His skull cracked, and Enjolras was an orphan.
But he kept the promise he'd made to his mother, and to France. Someday, he would be strong enough to save them. He just hoped this time, he wouldn't be too late.