Montparnasse mingles unwillingly with the Latin Quarter's paupers and consumptives. Two nights back a job went wrong - he had a full purse, but they'd all agreed to stay out of sight and trouble for a week. All very well for Claquesous, perhaps; but too dull for Montparnasse, who kept lodgings but lived in Paris. Two days cooped up (in the bare room that isn't fit for company) was long enough.
But the students! Their cheerful admissions of meals skipped, flats abandoned, as though poverty were some proof of virtue. Perhaps it is; he doesn't wish to know. Montparnasse takes care not to be poor. He loathes the ill-fitting, threadbare clothes needed to pass for one of them; no better than a tradesman. All their haunts come with nonsensical histories, significances of this sign or that paint passed down each year. Their cafes and women are like their coats: worn out. They're only fit for pick-pocketing when the better districts are overrun with cops.
Montparnasse gives up on another wineshop - the barmaid hideous, the wine no better, the close room stifling - and stumbles out the back. Not to the street, but into a perfect din of a back-room. Dark as an ironsmith's, but loud as a theatre. He recoils, only to find himself blocked by more men trying to enter. Montparnasse steps aside wordlessly, hand on the frame to slip back through. The posture feels familiar; he realizes he's only lacking a knife to hand for it to be entirely routine. But the last man - the man he'd stop for directions, whose throat he'd cut once his friends had gone on - that man sees him and stops, hand slipping off the door's handle. "Lord - it's you, isn't it?"
Montparnasse fixes him with the blank stare most find disconcerting. "I don't know you." He truly doesn't. The man is no comrade, not a thief or a cutthroat. Some libertine, or perhaps a debauched student. He's a perfect gargoyle, but that means nothing.
The ugly man laughs, and Montparnasse's grip tightens on the knife in his pocket. "But I'm certain of you. Here - a drink! Are there any more glasses?" Incredibly, Montparnasse finds himself towed in.
"Oh, he's alright, Enjolras - one of your abaisse. I know him." And the man laughs again. He was drunk already, Montparnasse realizes. But he follows the man's gaze to see the 'Enjolras'. A pale boy who'd stood up from the corner with a sour look like an old judge, ready to say 'guilty' and go to his supper. Montparnasse sneers, and turns his back to sit.
"It's Grantaire, by the way." Montparnasse only nods. It's the constrained way Grantaire sits down - half-healed cuts pull, Montparnasse has reason to know - that finally reminds him. He smirks and raises a glass.
Grantaire flips all the dominoes, starts a new game, and Montparnasse plays along.
Sitting in the middle, his chair keeps being jarred by a bald man and he can't entirely ignore the din. He watches the door and Grantaire, he realizes, can see the boy at the corner table. Montparnasse could tell him it's ridiculous, but only puts down a piece and kicks under the table, vicious, to get his attention.
The blond firebrand - who had briefly regaled the entire room with even more senseless noise, during which time Montparnasse cheated without shame or subtlety - raps on the table to clear them out. Montparnasse leaning back against the wall, careful to watch the the entire room and unconfident of his ability to notice the gendarme should he approach.
It's time to go.
"Very well, very well," says his sponsor, glancing at him. "I suppose I'll have to take my young friend here as well."
Montparnasse meets the firebrand's eyes this time, catches the narrowing when he asks if Grantaire's 'young friend' has a name. So he rises fluidly from the bench, conscious of his old, drab coat. "Montparnasse." Extends his hand with a razor-sharp smile. Another flash of discomfort or disbelief; the man he'd cut up and screwed starting to stand, but he hardly matters now.
Montparnasse presses his advantage, tightens his grip on the blond boy's hand - then steps in to kiss him, open mouthed. He leans into it, giving them all a show. A hand close at Enjolras's neck to keep him still; dropping the boy's hand to get to his coat pocket. Then steps back and laughs - at the stunned man who's just some other kind of fraud. At the poor gargoyle, flushed and muttering some apology, some 'too much to drink'. Both of them - all of them - fools. "No, no - I've had my fill of nonsense. I'll take my leave - goodnight!"
He finds the door and the street at last, his head swimming.