Work Text:
Here is what Enjolras knows best: the world is no more cruel than it is kind. It reacts to what one submits to it. Grow lazy enough to become money-hungry and you will fall to the gambling tables. Work, and whatever you are working towards will rise to meet you. Break bread in communion to make a brotherhood; withdraw from the world and watch the world withdraw from you. Likewise, a revolution is at the behest of its inventors.
When he was ten, he tried to argue his father out of putting down the work dog. It worked. The dog lived for a week before it died on its own, too elderly to keep up with the grueling vineyard days. His father told him that he would acquiesce not because Enjolras had convinced him, but because he needed to learn that good, clean fighting is a better tool than any wealth, any fame, any popular success. Speak, and knots will begin to loosen. Speak, and the dog will be allowed to manage its own fate. Speak, and be careful of living sainthood.
If it is done well, people will not even know you are doing it. So he put away the knife and scrubbed up his son’s hair so it stuck up from his head. Enjolras spent all those remaining days with the dog - as soon as he finished rhetoric and geometry he curled up with her in her sleeping spot beside the kitchen.
The world is nothing. The world is what you make of it. Enjolras has folios and quartos stacked beneath his desk and they all say the same thing, over and over, chasing language that captures real truth: act, or else nothing will come to be. “Thou mayest,” says God. Let me see what may come of this creation I’ve offered you - you, people, you, Enjolras, you, Paris. There is no inherent. There is no status quo except for the tenuous, veined rule of dead monarchs. And what is that to me? So he writes. What is that to us? All we have received, all the mountain streams, all the arable land, all the buildings of monstrous proportion, what does it mean? In one hundred separate essays he says: it means nothing but that we have resources of revolutionary proportion. It means Robespierre and Marat slept on the same ground we walk on now.
In one hundred separate essays he has failed to put to words the body-wracking consequence of free will. That there is nothing but action; there is no human impression on this earth but action. The Catholics taint us all with original sin. The Lockes of the world are hopeful that the government will succumb to their philosophy, forgetting that a philosophy without action as enforcement is as bad as the Second Estate claiming an alliance with the Third without observing the tennis court oath. Fools! All of them fools.
He expounds this in meetings, too. What pushed you here, to the backroom of the Corinth? What motive incensed you to more than thought? His hand deals a fatal blow to the air - stabbing, rending. You, Grand-R, why? Prouvaire, Joly, why carve away your passion and profession for the sake of this room, of these men?
Courfeyrac and Combeferre ask him to sit down. He does.
Action! He gestures from the chair. We are the forces of fate. We are the spinners, the trimmers.
When they leave this meeting, a Wednesday or a Friday, in spring or fall, they leave together, tumbling from the backroom to the bar to the cobbled street that rises up from the Corinth like a prohibition tide. Even the least tipsy stumble over it. Most head further downtown, some rest nearer to the hospital, and a few have a walk to the outskirts, where the houses melt out into the ground, before they can sleep for the night.
Enjolras goes with Combeferre. He has his own room, one with a pallet of blankets and a tiny writing desk, one with all of his books and most of his drafts, but he has not seen it in a week - more than a week. He does not want to see it. No one else has seen it; it is his, a lonely, solitary possession, and as the summer thickens and swells around the city he does not want to be alone. It would be suicide. Combeferre knows it; he did not offer his apartment, nor did he ask Enjolras to let him stay in his. He herded him like a sheepdog away from the alley up to that empty building and pressed him on towards the hospital and the student-flats surrounding it.
You’ll be better here, he had said. You’ll keep your footing.
They go together, they go down the path they know blind, though Paris always has a candle-stub for them to see by. Enjolras is not drunk, not even warmed by a glass of wine, but still he shivers as he walks. Combeferre regards him from a step behind. What’s wrong with you, then?
Enjolras does not think of his body. His body is happenstance, a fact he must endure because he cannot abandon it. He is not sick until his mind is injured. He is not exhausted until he cannot produce legible sentences. He does not think of flesh or blood or bone because none of these things are the elements of revolution, not for him - he is not the soldier but the strategy, the engine that hauls miners down the shaft. For some, yes, the body is a tool. It is a weapon, on occasion. It is motivation: get this far, and you may eat again. Get this far and you will have toppled what you know to be wrong. Get this far and you will finally rest.
But Enjolras dislikes motivation; it implies something superficial, as though he must force himself to do the work he does for some reward. He writes and orates and organizes and commands because it is most of his soul. He is not his body. He is not his heart, or the matter of his brain. He is not sick, because he can still think clearly. Yes, there are aches. Yes, there is a chill in his guts, tightening his tendons. No, he is not sick. He is well. There is nothing wrong with him. I am well, he says. I have an essay to edit when we make it home.
Ah. And who will distribute the essay?
Gavroche has another printshop for us to employ. Did you not hear him at the meeting?
Enjolras is well; his head is thick with language, with tomorrow’s work, with where Bousset will be on the 27th and where Prouvaire is going to meet Grantaire and when Courfeyrac intends to pay the last printshop. They are close.
This summer - it is the summer. The summer of action. Like this spring was the spring of action, the athlete’s daring push towards the line from which he must jump. They are nearly to the line. Soon they will see just how far they really can jump. They will see if they have been training for the right sport at all.
Enjolras. Combeferre’s hand, ever broad ever warm, checks his shoulder, then grips the nape of his neck.
Get off me. I’m no kitten.
Enjolras, slow down. He releases his neck but walks closer to him now, so that Enjolras is forced to become conscious of the trembling that rolls down his spine and through his shoulders. He tenses all his muscles so he doesn’t shake out against Combeferre’s close-clothed arm.
I’m well, he says. Leave me alone.
When they find themselves in the apartment, Combeferre observes him for a moment, nods to himself, and wanders to the little cabinet that holds his bread and wine. Enjolras sits at Combeferre’s desk. It is essentially his own desk, now. It has all the work he needs, all the declarations almost finished, all the appeals in sherds of outline.
The paper - what is it? Another of the same essay. He left off on a sentence: and is not the Earth, as assured in Scripture, bequeathed to the most disenfranchised of our nation? The paragraphs ramble before that; a good kind of rambling, that of warm passion. He treads a fine line. Spark, but do not immolate. The inkwell is already open. The quill fits like a second appendage in his hand and delivers to him the comfortable pains of writing in wrist and palm.
There is something heavy across his shoulders. He turns around and finds his eyesight bleary, smudged by his concentration on the page.
You were shivering, says Combeferre, with his back turned. Under this essay there’s a little collection of moth sketches that Combeferre did the first day Enjolras stayed with him - he made him sit still and quiet in front of the fire, just to see if he could do it. Went poorly. But Enjolras got the moth sketches for his trouble and Combeferre got something to talk about in his medicine classes.
He writes a little more. Not much more. This page runs out, and he finishes a third of the next, but his fingers are shaken by tremors unrelated to the regular pain. Here is action before you, audience to the stubborn thinker: he writes on, refusing the limits of the mortal body, forgetting that he is not alone. He might well be alone.
When he writes like this the words do not come from him; they come through him, and leave him free to think of other things while his hands obey whatever the truth demands. They fail, every time, but they come closer with time. He thinks of his boyhood dog, the one who laid down and died on its own, unaware that it had been saved those few days before. He thinks of the cool halls. He thinks of the maid who had no time for him, for the mother who had no time for him, for the father who died too early to have real time with him. He thinks of throwing handfuls of rose-scented dirt over his grave. There is an action. Of walking back to the house. There is an action. Of sleeping alone that night, without the blanket of his father’s prayers, and knowing that this is his life, now, that he is best when he is lonely, he is sharpest and most courageous when his causes are the people, rather than a person, and collapse, rather than assassination. There is an action. There is movement, directionless movement.
He has five more pages by the time he falls asleep. There is an action, if one is generous. Combeferre is somewhere beyond him, watching him, filling the hard space against his head with a cushion, staying up with a treatise so he might sleep. He dreams not of words but of smells, of sounds, dry grass and bare feet pounding down the hill. It's action for the pleasure of it, the pleasure of feeling the jolting steps, the sweat running down arms, the air singing through hair. When he wakes he will be for the people - for now, he is for himself.