Grantaire did not go to General Lamarque's funeral.
The day was as black as the capitaine's soul felt when he woke, cold and alone, although he dimly recognized the bed and flat as Combeferre's. He was creature of complex troubles and simple pleasures. Grantaire had dressed slowly, not eager to sally forth into the ominous gloom and damp of this day, and all the more eager to take shelter from it once he had left the flat. For this purpose, the delightful smell of an excellent brie selected for him the wine shop in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the Corinth. Already cheered by this happy fortune, the libertine leader was even more delighted to discover therein Joly and Bossuet, sharing oysters, a baguette, and the beginnings of a cold made worse by the beginnings of a storm outside. Plied with food and wine, the couple greeted most amiably their Capitaine. Grantaire nearly forgot the foul foreboding he'd experienced upon waking in their singular bohemian gaiety.
This most pleasant breakfast-party, nevertheless, was fated to endure two significant interruptions. The first arrived in the form of a gamin, a friend of one of the little hangers-on named Gavroche. He had a message from, ostensibly, Enjolras-- some ridiculous bit of code Grantaire vaguely remembered Combeferre mentioning, almost passively, that meant Lamarque's funeral was now in progress. This unwelcome intrusion, though it earned an instinctive guffaw, had the side effect of nearly marring his newfound pleasant levity with the weighty business of revolution. Joly and Bossuet were tempted in spite of the rain. Their Capitaine stopped them from such foolishness with a word and a glance.
"I'll not interrupt my good breakfast to take part in the state-sanctioned puppet show the King will make out of the death of our Hero. I prefer Punch. Here gamin, go take in a show." And he tossed the boy a louis.
The urchin flashed them all a gap-toothed grin and disappeared into the street, shouting, "Death to Polignac!" Grantaire groaned.
The consumptive and the bald L'aigle de Meaux were too busy nodding at his back-pocket wisdom to notice this, however, and were all too pleased to resume their breakfast, with mounting jocularity. Grantaire, already two and a half bottles in the pale, chimed in with a secret desperation seeking to outreach the re-awoken gloom spreading up from his depths.
Several hours and bottles later, Grantaire, Joly, and Bossuet were roused from their stupor by a fantastic sort of procession in the street. Grantaire, intoxicated to the point of joviality, looked up and blanched quickly. It was Enjolras, brilliant and flashing, a sudden burst of the sun in the almost night colored sky, leading a column of insurgents, and Combeferre among them. They had weapons of an amazing sort of variety all, and brandished them wildly. The spectacle would have been amusing in a stage melodrama, but here it shocked Grantaire suddenly sober. He sprang up, wheeling into the Rue de la Chanvrerie amid shouts from the hypochondriac and the Eagle of Meaux.
"Where are you going?" Grantaire demanded of the procession, the head of which screeched to a halt at his voice and turned a little ways into the street.
"There is a riot," said Combeferre mildly.
"To make a barricade!" shouted Enjolras, wild with excitement. "They've rallied at Saint-Merry."
Grantaire bit his tongue, thinking quickly. The swell of some fifty to a hundred or devil-may-care faces behind the leaders stirred like the anticipatory trampings of a cavalry charge. In a heartbeat, and with an inward curse, he grabbed Enjolras' arm and exclaimed, "Let's make it here! This is a good place for a barricade."
"Hear hear!" shouted Joly, more sober, but still congested. He had come out to greet their friends despite his phobia of the weather. Enjolras smiled, and at a signal from Combeferre; the great ferocious band rushed into the Rue de la Chanvrerie.
In the tumult, Grantaire had not let go of Enjolras' arm. The fevered firebrand discovered this in his feeble attempt to help the builders in their preliminary destruction. In his bright intoxication, it took him a moment to register fully the deep and furious scowl that distorted Grantaire's grotesque features almost to the point of humanity.
"It is done then," Grantaire seethed, half in fury, half in terror. "I hope you like a bed of oak as much as a mattress, petit. Tell Combeferre I shall be in the cellar. Getting drunker." He released Enjolras' arm almost harshly, stalking into the wine shop past the hysterical Madame Hucheloup, who was wailing in an agony that served well to augment the birth-pains of the Barricade. As for the poor, bewildered Enjolras, he stared at the hulking afterimage of his Capitaine Grandeur until a hand on his shoulder startled him out of it.
"Enjolras. Come on, give us a hand with these barrels. We've still got to block off the Rue Mondetour." Enjolras turned his unreadable gaze on Combeferre, who sighed. "Don't worry about it, Enjolras. It will pass."
"Today?" snapped Enjolras, "Or tomorrow?"
"There will be one." Combeferre said quietly. Enjolras had already disappeared behind the wineshop, into the Rue Mondetour.