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Courfeyrac wore an extremely ugly yellow banyan whenever he made cartridges. An unwanted hand-me-down of his father's, the robe which had suffered tea-stains mopped up by bits of royalist newspaper now bore traces of gun oil and a fine dusting of black powder. If, God forbid, Courfeyrac were to be careless with his candlesticks one evening, it gave him a sense of peace to know that the banyan's demise would be ensured with his own.
He would never have predicted that cartridge-making would become a closet enterprise, but he had the time, and the space, and the money, and the privacy, and a very large chest. Thus, he learned how to make paper cartridges. His workshop was humble, but his products impressed even the most storied rioters. Neat paper packages of musket ball and powder, tied shut, ready to be ripped open by a set of gnashing teeth and poured down a barrel, all lying in wait under a thin layer of his linens.
At half past one, he was using up the last dregs of powder. He found his true calling in large-caliber cartridges, with the paper rolled around a pleasantly fat candlestick, but tonight he was using his remaining stores to make a handful of petite revolver cartridges. His lamp, a safe distance away from his powder pouch, did not cast much light. He could make large cartridges by feel in the dark, he thought, but the tiny ammunition required a watchmaker's patience and eyes, of which he had neither. His patience, at least, was saved by an interruption: a quick rapping at his door.
"Who knocks?" said Courfeyrac.
"Opportunity," was the reply. It was Enjolras, who so liked to make this joke, especially when he was delivering something, that Courfeyrac always answered the door with the same question, in case it was him.
Courfeyrac wiped his hands on the banyan, stepping over the linens on his way towards the door. He cracked it open, blocking the view of his desk just in case the concierge had decided to investigate him. Enjolras slipped past.
"I wasn't sure if I'd find you awake," said Enjolras. "There's a new patrol, I think, guarding my normal street. I had to take an unusual route."
He had trodden mud across Courfeyrac's linens. "Evidently. You didn't run into trouble?"
Enjolras shrugged. This could mean anything from 'I evaded them completely' to 'I have made a sworn enemy,' but his nonchalance, at least, could be trusted. If he didn't see it as trouble, then it wouldn't result in trouble. Yet. Sometimes Courfeyrac's mind liked to attach a pesky 'yet' to the end of definitive statements.
"For you," said Enjolras, and took out five thick envelopes: black powder, sealed with rust-colored wax and the imprint of a dove carrying a rose. The envelopes smelled strongly of orange flower water. Courfeyrac had suggested disguising powder as love letters to a polytechnic student as a joke sometime last year, but the definition of absurdity was expanding by the day. Powder delivered as love missives became a bit of a fad, at least locally. Jehan had been thrilled, and requested that Courfeyrac save the powder-tinged envelopes for him.
"I am overwhelmed," said Courfeyrac. "I've just finished the last batch you gave me. This is an utter onslaught."
"Faint-hearted in the face of love, Courfeyrac?"
"Faint-eyed, maybe." He took the envelopes from Enjolras and cracked open the first. Acrid gunpowder mingled with the orange flower water. As Courfeyrac replenished his powder pouch, Enjolras leaned over his desk. Enjolras was familiar with the work, so to speak, but had never seen the studio.
"This is peculiar paper," he said, holding up a near-translucent paper triangle.
"Hair curling papers!" said Courfeyrac. "Quite thin, as you can see, which makes them easier to load, and perfectly shaped for their purpose. In Venus's vanities lurk Minerva's machinations."
"Of course," said Enjolras. "As you have no need for vanities—"
"Because my hair naturally curls, yes, of course—"
“—You can repurpose them.”
“Of course.”
"Of course."
Courfeyrac tucked the other powdered love letters into his chest with the rest of the cartridges, as though they all needed time to acquaint themselves. The chest was not quite half-full, but not far off from just that. A few more nights spent denying himself a nice dinner, and he'd have half a trunk. In a few months, he would need a second chest.
Enjolras rolled one of the new revolver cartridges between his fingers. "These are very fine," he said.
"Please tell Bahorel," Courferyac replied. "He says I sacrifice efficiency for style. 'Paste and a scrap of newspaper,' says he. 'Rabbit skin glue? Stop priming your canvas! You are paid by the killing, not by the commission, Boucher!'"
Courfeyrac peeled a bit of dried glue off his banyan sleeve. "Though, perhaps, it was an aesthetic judgment. If so, he is wrong. These are not bullets rocailles, as anyone can see."
"I don't have your eye for art," Enjolras replied.
Perhaps a year ago, Courfeyrac would've taken this as an invitation to shut up immediately. The same sorts of underhanded remarks flew like grapeshot at any number of dinners and balls he'd attended: Perhaps that's how they're doing it these days. Well, I wouldn't know where to begin. I suppose it makes sense to you. Enjolras, however, did not hide any meaning under his failure to see something, other than the request: show me.
"A bullet rocaille," said Courfeyrac, "would obviously be a patch-and-ball; the ball would not be so undignified as to enter the maw of its musket without some scrap of brocade to ease its way. The stem, so to speak, is universal: cylindrical, filled with powder. Atop our stem is a bloom of oiled patch, in which rests our bullet. Nothing is choked closed with twine, you see; there is not even a bit of glue involved. The whole mess is held together by fear alone."
Enjolras began to smile, as he often did so in stages. "A temperamental paste."
"Precisely! Which takes us to the neoclassical style, when luxuries were cast off. Flour paste is enough to keep our cartridges whole; they do not need to withstand the elements, though, as the balls are packaged and dispatched nearly on the same day. We assume the form of a Roman pillar, no patches or fripperies." He opens the tin which once held sweets, and now holds his failed experiments: only one bullet rocaille, sitting in a sad stain of its own grease, and a half-dozen permutations of the neoclassical style. Neatly folded at the top and bottom, with no twists, and no chokes, they had taken him under a minute to make. "You might admire its genius simplicity, but perhaps you wonder how you might identify its tail from its snout? Your explosive friend from your exploded foe?"
“Genius without humanity fails itself,” said Enjolras. “What Buonaparte took a lifetime to learn.”
Courfeyrac closes the tin. "I could not abide by any of these follies," he said, shaking out a fresh sheet of curling paper. He laid his candlestick on top, capturing the paper's tail end, and began to roll it into shape. "I knew my cartridges must be distinctive as they were distinguished. My bullets are of the Romantic sort, full of sturm und drang.
“No patch, as the air is tense enough to create its own seal." He selected a musket ball from his pouch, making a show of examining it in the faraway light of his lamp. Placing it gently into the paper tube, where it rested on the end of the candlestick, he continued, "The chokes, I realized, are a necessity. The ball alone, wrapped in its paper shell, has no motivation to break free." Several lengths of silk thread, the thinnest his tailor could find, sat ready. He selected a dark red and tied one length tightly above the ball, and one below. "I reasoned, place a restraint on man, and man breaks free. Why not the same with musket balls?”
He withdrew the candlestick and took his powder measure from its residence in the banyan pocket. Measuring out forty grains, he poured it gently into the cartridge, like a lover pouring wine for his paramour. "A twist to its tail has the effect of a cyclone; another choke secures the tempest's momentum." The glue needed reheating, but is still liquid enough for the purposes of his demonstration. He spread a stripe along the edge of the paper, sealing the combustion into its envelope.
"Finally," he said, "I realized that my cartridges must not be so boorish as their ancestors. They have the benefits of enlightenment; they must be saviors, not murderers. The difference between them is love. And, like Byron, they are amorous; so I give each cartridge their parting gift, which they shall pass along to the unfortunate enemy.”
Courfeyrac kissed the cartridge with a loud, smacking noise.
"The kiss of death," he said.
He expected Enjolras to laugh. The smile had been going through its paces, not quite at his eyes yet, but it rested on Enjolras's face like half a sunrise. The joke had not landed.
It might have been because Courfeyrac hadn’t been telling a joke. He's kissed every cartridge he's ever made, even the patched one. He couldn’t even quite remember why he did it the first time, and he had not paused to consider it any time since. It was simply a part of his process: roll, place the ball, choke, pour powder, choke, seal, kiss. Into his treasure chest it went.
The first time might've been an act of relief after sweating and swearing over a small pile of ruined parchment and twine and musket balls and powder, all placed dangerously close to his candle so he could see what the hell he was doing. When he had finally mastered that useless little thing, his fingers slipping over themselves, he had kissed it: the fruits of his labor. He'd poured out the powder and attempted to load it into his rifle in a test of speed and found that the patch material was too thick; no matter how he'd rammed it down the barrel, it refused to load. The damn thing would not accept its duty, rejecting Courfeyrac's ugly little mess of paper and grease. Put this into a rioter’s pocket and he’d be shot a dozen times over before he even primed his rifle.
Fine, he'd thought, I'll give you something more stylish. No patch, then; an easy-to-swallow little container, neat and martial, as described by an old man who frequented the Musain and swore that he'd seen Davout use the style at Austerlitz. But he'd imagined his friends struggling to tell tail from head in a fight, and, in the split second of feeling for the reassuring musket ball in its envelope, finding themselves dead in some unknown little gutter. Still, he'd kissed those cartridges.
Courfeyrac wasn't a liar and meant what he'd said about his cartridges. They were meant to be easy to use, not easy to make, and they would not fail their allies, nor would they be merciful with their enemies. He'd tested the accuracy of each design and found that this final style was the most accurate: when he aimed to kill, he would kill. A bullet meant for the heart or the head would not stray to the gut. That, surely, was a mercy.
The sophisticated engines of war had found new ways to ensure death, rather than let the victim sway to and fro in his own mortality for days to come. Would there be a day, he sometimes wondered, when the veteran would cease to exist? When war simply killed those it intended to kill, and was too terribly precise to let anyone have a gruesome chance at life? The end of small miracles, of lucky escapes, of the murky distance between trigger and target. Courfeyrac had stared down gun barrels before and had always found himself sure that there would be some cosmic movement in his favor, a misfire or a hesitation. He wondered what it would be like to look at a gun and know that there was no future.
Yes, he kissed every bullet.
Enjolras withdrew his handkerchief, deploying it with a single shake. Wrapping it once around his index finger, he wiped the corner of Courfeyrac's mouth. It was a gentle movement, cautious of itself. Withdrawing his handkerchief, he revealed a trace of black powder, a faint footprint on a white field.
Patria, perhaps, wore too much rouge.
Enjolras spoke softly: "A kiss of death for one is a kiss of life for another."
Courfeyrac pulled at a fraying string at the banyan cuff, so steeped in powder and oil that it had turned black. "Sadly, mankind does not seem able to give without taking."
"Not yet," said Enjolras.
When Courfeyrac looked up, Enjolras completed the smile he had abandoned. At a riot, it was ignition, a call to action, an expression so sure of its own happiness that it made one want to crush the opposition that might threaten that happiness. It seemed that utopia was at the door, that the impossible had been accomplished when you weren't looking.
In a quiet room, it was still a call to arms, but there was nothing to crush, nowhere to direct the sudden flood of fellow-feeling coursing through his chest like warm brandy. The impossible future was upon him for just a few moments: not a delusion, but a brief vision that demanded homage from reality.
Courfeyrac kissed his cheek without the enthusiasm of a hello or the frankness of a goodbye. Something for its own sake. Enjolras turned his face to kiss Courferyac's cheek, too, and as they pulled away, some tiny roughness, like sandpaper, passed from Courfeyrac's face to Enjolras's. There was no dark powder stain left on him, though.
"I'm satisfied with your method," said Enjolras. "I'll tell Bahorel not to question it."
The future did not dissipate after Enjolras left. Courfeyrac hid his supplies, nestling the cartridges together and tucking the muddy linen around them. He covered the chest with the banyan, draping it to look aristocratically unconcerned with itself, which wasn't hard to do, and found that Enjolras had dropped his handkerchief before leaving. He wiped his hands and face with it, making a mental note to have it laundered with his linen and returned later, before blowing out his light, and only hesitated for a moment before pinching the smoldering wick between his fingers. No sparks, no flash, not yet.