There was an old portrait on the wall that showed both the boys. "I should take that down," Danae Combeferre thought. "Just for a while. Marguerite may come, and she may not want to see her son's face on the wall… if she does, maybe I should give the painting to her." But the size and the height at which it was mounted would make it awkward for her to try to take it down herself. She should ask Gilles to take it down, but she had spoken little to her younger son about Hughes now that he was gone.
Would it be easier or harder for her sister to look at this family portrait? Madame Enjolras would not look at it and see the son who came home last Christmas. The fifteen-year-old Laurent standing behind the painted couch looked like an absolute girl. Why, he could almost have been Marguerite in her youth. And yet it was that pretty child whose death she could almost make herself believe. He had always been dramatic, like the Grantaire boy, on or off. Her nephew was stuck "on." All his life, when Hughes was in trouble it had been because he was chasing after one of them, jumping in when he failed to herd them back.
But maybe mothers never knew their sons as well as anybody else. Where had Hughes been in 1830? Safe, she knew, but she had never pressed for more and he had never volunteered it. Maybe she knew just enough to know she shouldn't ask. She remembered now, her little boy with bright eyes as he listened years ago to his grandfather telling a story of the time he had seen Benjamin Franklin in Paris. Maybe it ran in their blood: her father had plainly been captivated by the son of the candle maker with his words of liberty and his fur cap. But still she could not make the pieces fit: the stories which captivated her son told of a diplomat, not a general.
A sound down the hall distracted her from her thoughts. Footsteps of a person trying not to be noticed. "Gilles," she called for him.
"What is it, Mother?"
But as she glanced to the picture again, she stopped. "Never mind."