"I suppose you will be Le Comte Grandeur, at the end of this?"
Although he was not particularly in a joking mood, Honoré could not resist the jibe. Grantaire responded with a grimace of amused appreciation, though Combeferre and Enjolras, grim bodyguards at his flanks, aimed puzzled frowns at the both of them. On the whole they marched in silence; Reille, Grandeur, Combeferre and Enjolras in the fore, Chauvert, Honoré's remaining officers, and Grandeur's Lieutenants behind. They twice ran across a small group of guardsmen and pressed them into service through Grantaire's well-placed words and Reille's well-executed, officious silence. Thusly, it was a force of two hundred fifty or more that presented itself at the Saint-Merri Barricade, surrounding and surprising the men who assaulted it from the street.
"Soldiers of France! Lay down your arms." This was Honoré's line. Grantaire followed hard upon.
"It is I, Grandeur, Captain of the revolution who speaks to you now. Upon the stones lie dead of two sides, which are the same side. You murder you the wrong things. You soldiers, you old men: by killing your sons, you murder the future, you dash apart the dream and you piss on the ideal. Weep, O' fathers of France, and be ashamed! "And you, you insurgents, by shooting at your uncles you murder your credibility. You squander your power to change the world on a few moments heat; you bury your ambition beneath ashes and rubble and you spill out your promise in rivers of blood. You are each afraid of the other-- what you might have been and what you might become! Desist at once. To win the world, be ruled by me. It is always folly, is it not, to spend too quickly?"
There were nervous laughs at this, Grandeur continued.
"Come with me then; there are more seasoned ways to use this ardor, which I will show you."
"It is truly Grandeur!" Someone shouted in the silence that followed, a silence which admitted plainly that the shots had ceased. A cry arose from behind the barricade, and a man wearing the decorations of July 1830 upon his breast and a red cap upon his head sprang to the top of the construct.
"Hear the voice which speaks for a thousand bodies, here arrayed! I am the leader of this barricade and I say I will follow Grandeur!"
Another cheer and the commander of the attacking unit saw and sought out Honoré, salmon in color all through the face.
"General! What is the meaning of this!?"
"It means change, M. Delessert." Said Honoré mildly, recognising the man, "Crashing through like so many runaway elephants. A man may decide whether he wishes to be moved with it, or trampled under it."
"I know where you were at Waterloo!" Delessert growled.
"And so do I."
The other commander, realising that he had lost the advantage of numbers, of superior technology, and of authority all in one fell swoop took such knowledge like a man and forthwith surrendered his saber to Honoré. Honoré barely let it touch his fingers but long enough to pass it to Grandeur, who thrust it high into the air. The crowd en mass erupted into a kind of exultant mania, shouting his name and cheering: but Combeferre saw him wince, and knew his side still pained him.
Grandeur, on the other hand, in spite of the reflex, barely noticed the hurt. Gone was the sick self-awareness of his joke as he spoke now to these masses, replaced with a euphoria known hitherto only in the land of nod or the bed of some other delectable dream. He looked upon his growing force as from within the clouds, and he heard his own voice and was moved by it. The cool steel of M. Delessert's sword in his hand seduced him with its promise of victory and the faces all around, by their belief, touched in him the need to believe.
And when Charles Jeanne, that proud figure, that soldier with the decoration of 1830 on his jacket and the colors of 1832 on his cap, neither the less honourable than the other, when that worthy strode up to him and shook his hand and called him their Marechal, Grandeur was skyrocketed to the very heights alluded to by his nick-name, his eyes burning with a conviction that alarmed Combeferre and delighted Enjolras once more.
"Let us go then, friend Jeanne," He said to the other celebrated Captain, "And we will eat victory with our cake."
There was no doubt in any heart, even his own, that he meant these words.