#just a fun lil intertextual comparison i wanted to make!

[syrupsyche]

Enjolras as a reverse Galatea (and as Remedios the Beauty!)

Reading the Les Mis letters as well as @cliozaur 's points on how Hugo keeps making Enjolras prettier and prettier as the barricades go on made me realise that Enjolras is basically a reverse Galatea.

Galatea, if one doesn't know, is the statue from the myth of Pygmalion. She comes to life after her sculptor Pygmalion falls in love with his creation, and prays for the goddess Aphrodite to bring her to life, thus transforming her from marble to flesh and blood.

Enjolras, in contrast, goes from life to...well, un-life? He becomes less human and more heaven-like/statue-esque as the chapters progress; here's just a snippet of his gradual changes:

Prepping the barricade:

"his beautiful, austere face" (4.12.3)

"said the handsome Enjolras" (4.12.7)

The execution of Le Cabuc (4.12.8):

"Enjolras' cold, white face"

"with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman’s face"

"His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity"

"His virgin lips closed"

Afterwards:

"fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of the dawn" (5.1.3)

"his blond locks fell back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo" (5.1.4)

The killing of the artillery sergeant (5.1.8):

 "a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras’ marble cheek."

Enjolras goes from simply being "beautiful" and "handsome" to being compared to angels, the dawn and, of course, marble- a perfect, reverse Galatea. It also isn't surprising that many of his physical changes happen when Enjolras does something that brings him closer to condemnation- killing Le Cabuc and the artillery sergeant, for instance. As I've mentioned in the tags of cliozaur's post once, the closer Enjolras is to death, the more unreal he becomes. He, as Galatea's opposite, slowly transforms into something so unreal and heavenly that there is no other option for him at the end of this fight but to quit life altogether, and return to the heavens.

A similar comparison would be Remedios the Beauty from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Remedios was so beautiful that her looks would cause men to kill themselves; she "was not a creature of this world", instead, she was a "creature of exceptional purity" and did not seem to know or care about anything regarding love or sex (Sounds familiar?). In the end, her beauty had bloomed so much and so dangerously that she began to rise into the air and quite literally ascended to heaven.

Though she's not quite the revolutionary leader like Enjolras, interestingly enough Remedios was also described to be "as if she’s come back from twenty years of war", similar to Enjolras' glance that looked as though "he had already, in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary apocalypse" (3.4.1). Both Remedios and Enjolras are also surrounded by death (Remedios and the men who killed themselves for her; Enjolras and the men whom he killed), and both become so pure and chaste that they can no longer exist on earth and instead, must leave it altogether.