Chapter Text
July 1832
It is not long after that night that Courfeyrac and Combeferre are heading north to Paris in a diligence that they privately suspect has been around for the past forty years. it is a five-day journey ahead of them, and the woman next to Combeferre keeps coughing, not into her elbow or her handkerchief, but into his ear. Luckily it’s only an annoying noise and the feel of the air moving. Still, by the time they stop in Limoges, he is well and truly sick of it, and only Courfeyrac pointing out things outside the window can keep him from wanting to sink through the floor.
“I think she doesn’t like us being inside,” Combeferre whispers.
“We’re clearly not well enough to go on the outside.”
“I know, she’s being ridiculous. Doesn’t mean she has to be nasty about it, we paid for our seats and she can’t kick us out.”
“That’s the spirit!” Courfeyrac nudges him gently with his elbow and laughs. “This won’t be so bad after all.”
It has been all of one day.
The journey does, in fact, get worse.
The next day takes them halfway to Vierzon, and the minute they get out to stretch their legs Courfeyrac collapses onto the street. It is has been a long, bumpy day, and the thought of three more days of this makes him want to go back home. He would probably say as much to Combeferre if not for the realization that it would take longer to get back than it will to get to Paris. Besides, Joly, Bossuet, and Musichetta are expecting them. Combeferre gives him a hand up with his good arm and pats him on the back. “Two days down, three to go.”
“Last night—”
“Wasn’t so bad.”
“Good beds in that inn, might have to go back to Limoges some time.”
“Good dinner too.”
Courfeyrac nods, remembering the stew. “Speaking of dinner, we should probably stop standing around.”
Combeferre offers his arm, he takes it, and it is another good night.
The morning, however, finds Courfeyrac’s leg protesting any movement. The past few days of sitting for hours at a time in a confined space where he can’t stretch have worn on him. It is a choice between brandy (which worked before the barricade; his leg is worse now) and Combeferre’s small store of laudanum. He chooses neither, and forces his leg to comply.
He asks for the brandy when they have been going for three hours, some eighteen or twenty miles. The woman next to Combeferre judges him, by her expression, but the pain has grown too much to bear. Combeferre hands the bottle to him and he drinks it as it is. It goes better with a glass. Nonetheless, it works slightly, and he manages to take a nap. That night is hard.
The night after finds them in Orléans, and they almost cheer. They go to find wine to give their friends instead, and Courfeyrac watches the bottles carefully. They stay that night with a friend of Combeferre’s who comes across them in the wineshop and insists on them coming home with him and telling their tale.
It’s a hard tale to tell, but they do tell it after dinner, sitting outside in Pietro Sarto’s garden, the little bit of Italy he’s built in France, drinking his own wine. Courfeyrac likes this man, he thinks. He thinks so even more when Pietro notices his distinct limp and the way he leans on his cane or on Combeferre and offers to go find something he has lying around.
The something is a liniment Pietro concocted himself after 1830; that brings them back to the two young men’s story, and they stay up late in the summer twilight talking. Pietro has their same views, that much may be seen by both the fact that Combeferre met him on the barricades in 1830 and the way he listens and responds to their account of what happened in June; Courfeyrac wishes he could introduce him to Feuilly.
The night passes well, Pietro makes them promise they’ll visit again, and they arrive in Paris late in the afternoon. They are stiff and travel-sore, but Joly is there to meet them and help with their luggage when they get out of the fiacre. There isn’t much of it, but he insists on taking one of Courfeyrac’s bags after hearing about his leg.
Musichetta sighs and orders them both to sit down the instant they get inside. “You didn’t need to come immediately.”
“Combeferre got your letter around the third of July; it is now the twelfth.”
“Precisely.” Musichetta nods. “You could have waited.”
“Didn’t want to. You said you had news about Enjolras?”
“That should wait until after dinner.”
“Which is when?” Combeferre drops his good arm around Courfeyrac’s shoulder.
“Half an hour, or just about.” She shoos Bossuet and Joly off to take their luggage to the guest room, and once they come back returns to the kitchen with Joly. Bossuet sits down with the air of someone who has not known what it is to feel happy in a long while, and Courfeyrac’s heart aches for him, for all three of them. From what he knows Bossuet and Joly have been recovering together, safe with the girl they love, since the seventh of June. They had no assurance that any of the others were alive, most likely, until they had received Combeferre’s letter late in the month; for three weeks they had heard nothing.
“So, Lesgle, how have you been?” Courfeyrac stretches, catlike, and taps his friend’s ankle with his foot.
“Not so good, but better now. Even better now that you two are here.” He smiles, and for a fraction of a second it’s the same old Bossuet Laigle de Meaux, who used to smile like that with his feet up next to Joly’s books in the backroom of the Café Musain.
“Eagle of words,” grins Combeferre, “it’s good to be talking to you again.”
“I could say the same.”
They talk, falling into the old patterns, the old words come easily, they smile and laugh the way they haven’t in over a month, and they don’t notice Joly standing there until he drops a hand onto Bossuet’s shoulder.
“Jolllly of the four ailes and his eagle,” remarks Courfeyrac off-handedly.
“What does that make Chetta then?”
“A songbird, no less.”
“A linnet or a finch?”
“A bird-of-paradise,” determines Combeferre.
Joly grins, freckles crinkling in the corners of his eyes. “Dinner time. You should tell her that, mon ami.”
“I will let Courfeyrac have the honor.”
They go into the kitchen and sit down at the table, talking and laughing. Courfeyrac attempts to repeat his and Combeferre’s remarks to Musichetta, but she swats at him good-naturedly and he ducks, sliding onto a chair. Combeferre sits next to him, their shoulders touching. The other three sit on the other side, Musichetta nods at Joly to say the grace, and the evening begins. Dinner, it turns out, is cassoulet after the recipe Enjolras had given to Bossuet one evening late in November three years before. In a way, it is a part of him with them, and Combeferre swears he can hear him cheerfully arguing with Prouvaire over the right recipe, Languedocien and Provençal chiming together. Enjolras had put in hard work to learn his own dialect. Prouvaire had learned his from birth. Such is the difference between families, that one rich man will attempt to assist in the stamping out of a dialect (which is, perhaps, its own language) and insist that his family speak only standard French, and that another rich man will teach his sons and daughters their language alongside “correct” French. He and Prouvaire are the only ones who had the latter kind of father.
“Penny for your thoughts,” says Joly, seeing that his eyes are far away.
“Occitan, or Provençal as it is called after one of its dialects.”
“Oh? Do tell,” says Bossuet. He and Musichetta are both from the north, unlike all the others.
“There is French, and there is a language, or several languages, that are not French but are spoken in France. Those in the south are les langues d’oc, or Occitan, or Provençal (yet that is one dialect of it). You have heard them, you have seen me annotate them in the dictionary— for why should our words, the way we speak, not be important? These dialects, then. Gascon, which is mine, and should and would be Courfeyrac’s by right. Languedocien— Enjolras’, Feuilly’s, Joly’s. Provençal— Jehan Prouvaire and Bahorel’s. Auvergnat— Grantaire’s.”
Bossuet reaches across the table to clap him on the shoulder. “That is the Combeferre I know!”
Combeferre ducks his head, smiles, and takes a bite. It is exactly as he knows it will be; familiar, comforting, heartening, filling. It reminds him of the past, but that is no bad thing. “Good sausage,” he says, after a while of silent eating.
Musichetta nods. “Joly brought it home, I don’t know where he found it.”
“Mhm.”
The rest of the conversations that happen over dinner are similar, quiet and peaceful and happy. They do not speak of the past, except insofar as one of them brings up something another had said to illustrate one of Combeferre’s points. For that is mostly what they speak of, language. Combeferre thinks of how Prouvaire and Feuilly would like this conversation, and he nearly lets the tears fall.
After dinner they move back to the sitting room, Combeferre and Courfeyrac supporting each other and the other three talking softly together. They sit down comfortably, and Joly is the first to speak. “We said we had news of Enjolras, did we not?”
Courfeyrac nods shortly, just a slight inclination of his head. Combeferre takes his hand and holds it tightly. “You did.”
“The news is this. Enjolras is not dead.”
Courfeyrac clutches back at his friend’s hand. “So, he is alive?” It is only because of the facts that it hurts to move and that Combeferre is half in his lap that he doesn’t jump up from his seat and shake Joly violently or break something.
“Barely. He was badly wounded. The friend who told me this told me that he won’t let anyone see to him; I don’t know myself how true that is. He is barely alive, he was badly wounded, he has not healed yet, and he is ill.”
‘Where is he?” Combeferre determines not to weep until he is in bed that night.
“In prison, Sainte-Pélagie. He has already been tried, a month ago, and his sentence ends in September. It may be shortened due to his ill health. I hope that is so; not that I hope he is in a bad enough way for that, of course. Just, the sooner he is back with us, the better.”
“Only three months?”
“I do not know why. I’m grateful for it, though. September is not so far away.”
“Just over a month and a half,” agrees Courfeyrac. “Could we…” he trails off, waving his hand vaguely.
“Visit? Yes, though you should probably put your affairs in order first.”
“When was his trial?” Combeferre cuts in abruptly.
“About a month ago, as I said. Few days after—” the silence is more telling than any word could be. Bossuet takes his shaking hand and kisses it, and Joly leans against him as if to reassure himself that they are both alive.
“So you knew nothing of the rest of us until two weeks ago?”
“Your names weren’t in the lists of the dead, so we hoped you were alive, but we didn’t know.”
“Have you heard anything of Feuilly?”
“I’m afraid not. He’s probably alive, but…” Bossuet sighs as if he’s been turning several possibilities over in his head for the past month, which he probably has.
“But.”
Courfeyrac shifts, stretching out his leg and wiggling it. “Grantaire?” Someone has to ask about him.
“There were three names we knew. You won’t have to be told the others.”
There is silence then, for long minutes. Then Musichetta lays a hand on Joly’s shoulder. “They have been buried.”
“By whom?” Combeferre’s voice is choked, solemn, shaky.
“Grantaire by us three. We couldn’t find his family. Prouvaire by his family and his,” she waves a hand to encompass a crowd, “literary friends. Bahorel’s mistress buried him alone.”
“Alone.” Courfeyrac shakes his head at the thought and squeezes Combeferre’s hand, pulling him in close. “Could we maybe visit them soon?”
“Not without Enjolras.” That is the one thing that Combeferre is certain of— that they cannot go without him.
Courfeyrac hums and nods. “Tell us again, how did you two make it out?”
And so the evening passes with the five telling stories, and sobs are no longer choked back, and they all end up weeping by the end of it. They go to bed eventually, continuing to mourn.
Some ten days pass in which Combeferre and Courfeyrac settle their affairs and gradually move out of Joly’s rooms into their own. They make inquiries about Feuilly but find nothing; Paris is large enough to swallow up one wounded twenty-year-old orphan with no family save for what he’s made himself. If he is alive but does not wish to be found, he will come out when he pleases. If he is dead, he is dead. If he is in some state between the two, they can but hope he has someone to care for him. He hasn’t written to them; Combeferre had said to his father to forward any replies to his rooms in Paris, and neither he nor Courfeyrac have received anything. Amélie Prouvaire continues to write; they encourage her to come back up north; she says she may come later in the year, when meeting her brother’s friends will not hurt so much. Courfeyrac hopes Feuilly will emerge by then.
They agree to visit Enjolras in the last full week of July. Joly and Bossuet decline to come, but they say that they might come later.