When Grantaire calls out to Bossuet and Joly:
“I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie cheese. I enter.”
he’s probably lying.
He shouts it from the stairs as if it’s an awkward excuse to join them, which I believe it is, because he says it after “Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table”, and he says it ”while they were busy with their first oysters”, but he says it before Joly and Bossuet were served their cheese.
Grantaire didn’t die for cheese. I think he died because he didn’t want to be alone.
Grantaire knew what his friends were planning, and he was out wandering the streets for hours in what was probably an unsuccessful attempt to escape or forget it. In the midst of his rants he described the things he’d seen: the library, a girl who could be called Floréal (who he was close with, by the way, close enough to see her room and presume she was happy, yet distant enough to say “not two months ago” as though he hadn’t seen her since then), an old lantern at a junk-shop, the dew, the frost, the purple of the morning rising on the hills —all before 9AM, on a day which was raining.
To me, he sounds like someone who has been awake all night, or for several. Perhaps that’s why he slept so soundly through the entire émeute.
The route he canonically took to arrive at Corinthe isn’t very straight, either. Look at this highly informative map (which I mostly ripped off from this one.)
He was “passing by”, but from whence to where, when he was the one who discovered and was possibly most attached to Corinthe of any of his friends? When he apparently looked so terrible that “at the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the table,” an amount which can’t have been usual since it seemed to alarm one of his closest friends?
Perhaps he’d been intending to enter to drink and then saw that Joly and Bossuet were there already. Perhaps he’d wandered there half-hoping he’d find them. Perhaps he’d first gone to find Floréal first, and then seeing her so elated, felt that all he could do was leave. Either way, he feels the need to announce his presence with astonishing awkwardness, even for him.
yes jfc this all of this
preliminary gaieties in general just gets me embarrassingly emotional okay, and it’s a chapter that’s worth reading and rereading if you’re a grantaire stan because there are so many tragically bittersweet little details to be found even if you leave out the main speech (don’t leave out the main speech)
in some ways i actually find preliminary gaieties more emotional that orestes fasting pylades drunk :/ of all chapters this is the one which hammers home to me just how much grantaire loves and cares about his friends, and how hopelessly miserable and conflicted he is about the imminent fighting. the intimacy between he and both j/b and the corinthe staff gets me all verklempt too ugh it is the BestWorst chapter of the book for me honestly in terms of characters & emotions :( such bittersweet sads
(Now might be a good time to point out I don’t actually think Grantaire died because of cheese. ;) )
But oh, yes, Preliminary Gaieties is absolutely wrenching. Sclez did a really good analysis of Grantaire’s speech in that bit once, and just…argh. I like the bit about R and kids especially- he gives Gavroche’s friend Navet ten sous, and (along with Bossuet) tries to get him to stay for breakfast, and refers to him by name once he’s left. I think it’s those moments that show who R really is, beneath the sadness and the ranting and the occasional obnoxiousness…
Anyway, you have no idea how glad I am that Grantaire got to spend the last day of his life with the two people who might well have loved him best.