A Word on Enjolras and Grantaire’s Death Scene

just-french-me-up:

I once told @ragnar-rock i’d tell her about this scene and I feel like I might burst

Remember that Grantaire could have gotten out of this alive. He could have stayed hidden, sobering up in a corner for days on end but the silence awoke him. The café was such a lively, noisy place that the silence is deafening. We have a word for it in French : un silence de mort. And it literally is a silence of death.

And as other people pointed out, he doesn’t even spare a glance to the guards, it’s no use, it’s already over. He only has eyes for Enjolras, etherally beautiful in all his glory and tragedy, the flamboyant ideal of the revolution embodied in a single man. And if Enjolras is the allegory of an ideal, Grantaire is the allegory of Paris and France itself. “The people too must rise”, right? Well guess what, the people, embodied by Grantaire, DID RISE. The cynic, the one who took great care in beliving in nothing rose and marched to his death because he believed in Enjolras, aka the Revolution.

I love his little stumble, it’s almost like he can’t wait to reach Enjolras, he’s drawn to him like a moth towards the light. Because it’s what Enjolras is, the light in the darkness, the promise of better days. And Grantaire chooses to die because life would be meaningless without Enjolras, without the marble lover of liberty. “La liberté sinon rien” : liberty or nothing.

Grantaire didn’t stumble to his death. Grantaire held salvation by the hand and looked at death right in the eyes, defiant until the very end. France and Liberty, so indissociable, dying together rather than being apart.