"Praise be to Mao, Lenin, Castro and Marx! May all of France be someday guided by their wise philosophies. Then, we would see all Frenchmen and women dedicated to equality, so that the slums would disappear and everyone would live in an era of peace and prosperity. Damn the monarchs! Damn the bourgeoisie in their fancy palaces and nice furniture and armies of servants. Almost all of France's wealth is concentrated in the hands of the very few. But we can fix that. And that is what Enjolrasist Communism is about."

That's what the pamphlets say, anyway. I don't think they're doing much good being distributed amongst the poor. Are they ineffective? Badly written? I asked that sycophant Grantaire what he thought of them, and he said they were lovely and that in that respect they matched my eyes. I've never seen my eyes. I've always been too poor to afford a mirror. That's the sort of thing I want to change—I want to make France a nation in which nobody is too poor to afford a mirror. Hell, for all I know, my eyes are hideous and Grantaire was being sarcastic. That drunken bastard.

It's not easy being a Communist in nineteenth-century France. All the peasants are so used to being poor that they don't really want to do anything about it. That's why it's my job to show them that there's a new life about to start when tomorrow comes. And it's my job to convince them that the best way to create that new life is to put every piece of property in the country under control of the government, to be handed out in a fair and equal manner. That government, of course, would be led by me.

Oh, perhaps I should introduce myself. My name is Enjolras, I am very loud, and I have this little red book here that I'd like you to read. You might learn something from it.

I've spent years of my life trying to drum up a revolution to topple the mirror-owning sons of bitches at the top of Parisian society. Using potions of my own devising (mostly morphine, with a bit of thyme) I have brainwashed a large portion of the Parisian homeless to join my cause; I've even won a couple over by speaking with them face to face and convincing them that Red France is a cause worth fighting for. A while ago, some street-whore suggested that I print out pamphlets to better spread our message, so one day Grantaire and I got drunk and stole a printing press. With the pamphlets thus created, we won over a rather large crowd of students with nothing better to do than to topple the government. What, do you think people actually go to university to study?

In other news, our sole supporter in government, General Lamarque is ill. With syphilis, so they say. Well, that's what you get for being a man of the people. As soon as he is dead, nobody will be looking out for us, and that's when I, Enjolras, will make my move. With the help of my mates, we'll build a barricade out of anything we can find (representing all building materials equally; how very appropriate) and fight off hordes and hordes of National Guardsmen. When we emerge victorious, the whole city will flock to my banner (a scrap of fabric I borrowed from a red-light district) and we will march in lockstep, singing all the while, to the royal palace, where I will instate myself as Dear Leader of France.

I know it's a suicide mission. I don't really care whether we live or die, to be honest. I just know that even though we may die, our deaths will aid the cause of freedom, and that someday some more successful, perhaps more intelligent leader than I will succeed, and that he will remember us on the barricade. That is worth dying for, in my opinion.

Maybe the reason the poor people don't react to my pamphlets is that they can't read. Yes, that's it. Literacy and mirrors. That's what I want for the French people.