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Jehan sat deliberating. The window at his back whistled faintly, warning of the ruthless wind lashing through the streets without; the fire at his side crackled and spat with the smell of musty wood and burnt bacon, foreboding the inedible supper he must have if he remained. His stomach grumbled at him. Striking out for home would mean passing by the open door and smiling owner of the green-curtained bistro whose name eluded him; he might have a lovely cutlet and an apple salad. Staying here meant a fire and a warm chair, however, and no long passage through the icy, blowing streets. The food would be deplorable, of course – worse than deplorable and less than food. He propped his book upon his knees and turned to face his dim reflection in the frosting window. He was warm; he was hungry; he was undecided; he was Gaius Gracchus. Wretched man that I am! Whither shall I go?
He was alone in his uncertainty, if not in the Corinthe. Combeferre was more than ready to flee, judging by the way he kept ostentatiously adjusting his coat, which he had buttoned to his chin. Jehan doubted he would soon escape, though, as Enjolras was plainly dead set on staying and had not yet chosen to acknowledge that his conversation partner was making every human effort to bow out.
"The man is a great fool," Enjolras was saying, more grim than stern. His lips were pressed together in a reproachful line. "He puts so much in writing that would go better unsaid – that shouldn't be so much as whispered in the wrong company. Has he no discretion? It's enough to make me wonder if he's been bought." He laid the offending letter on the table beside a smoking candle. "They are not wealthy men, to be sure, in the Rue Tarane. Betrayal can come cheap if a man is desperate, and I have never been sure of them, but even so –"
"This one's more like to be an idiot than an informer." Combeferre took up the letter, looking it over not unkindly. "I know him. He means well. His passion is … untempered by intellect, that much is true."
Enjolras raised his eyes to the fire. "True enough," he said, half a sigh. "I've met him only once, and nothing would do but that I would sit down with him to supper. He kept me for two hours, though I had business elsewhere."
"A great vile brute of an idiot, then," Combeferre said with a little too much heat. Ignoring Enjolras' sudden glare, he pressed on: "But no spy. You may write him back without fear of your replies being sold to the authorities. Whether he's to be trusted to keep them from being intercepted might be a different matter altogether. Now, if you have no objection –" He stood, plucked his hat off the back of his chair and pulled it as far down around his ears as it would go – "I have business elsewhere." Jehan thought his smile looked a little sad.
"There are only a few more to sort through. I should like your opinion on –"
"In that case, I authorize Prouvaire to speak for me. He's a master of putting himself in someone else's shoes - poets always are. Goodnight, my friend." He laid his hand on Enjolras' shoulder and went out the back way, stopping only to give Jehan a fond goodnight.
Jehan shook his hand with long-suffering grace, though in truth he hardly minded at all – his mind had been made up for him, and there was nothing the matter with that. Chance made better decisions than he did, more than half the time.
Enjolras looked at him as though he hadn't realized he was there. "You're staying late this evening." The door swung shut; the draught made the fire leap and twist and throw red shadows over the pile of paper at Enjolras' elbow.
"I can't bring myself to face the wind just yet." He smiled, setting his book aside and crossing his arms over his chest against the swell of cold Combeferre had let in. "I'd rather suffer the food here than stumble my way home, waiting to be snowed upon. Shall I help you? I know two or three of the men in the Tarane – perhaps we can appeal to one with a greater sense of tact." Jehan was an old hand at writing polite letters full of words that told more than they said, though his addressees were not often political men.
"By all means. Let me come to you," Enjolras said, raising a hand when Jehan made to rise from his chair. "Combeferre has left his place a mess of crumbs, as usual." He gathered his papers into a neat bundle, tucked them under his arm, and balanced his coat, two books, and his wine in his other hand. The wine made even, gentle waves against the side of its glass as he crossed the room – and very nearly sloshed over the rim when he stopped abruptly before the map that hung on the wall beside the fireplace. His brow creased, his lips parted; his shoulders squared up to a downright military angle. His entire posture spoke of affront.
Jehan blinked, and strained his eyes to see what on earth could have halted the man in his tracks quite this way; it was only when a log snapped on the fire and a flare of sparks illuminated the aging parchment that he could discern the two small, hand-written lines, scrawled in pencil off to the west of Nantes. He drew his face into a careful blank. The culprit, apparently, was graffiti.
Enjolras' voice was thick with a rather pious indignation. "Is that –?"
"Goethe?" Jehan cut in, before anyone could say German, not that one was any better than the other. "Yes. He's just died, you know." And a table full of French students had spent an hour this afternoon arguing about whether he deserved a drink to mourn his passing, or to celebrate it. I don't give a damn what some rheumy old Hessian thought about my grandfather, Courfeyrac had declared, drowning out his detractors, and you can pick his rotten corpse clean for being a miserable complacent, a lover of tyrants, a histrionic skirt-chaser. But the man could string his words together, and today I'll have them venerated. 'Seele des Menschen, wie gleichst du dem Wasser!' How like water is the soul of mankind -
And how like Courfeyrac is water, Grantaire had huffed, lethargic and waspish in one of his rare ill tempers. Bland, transparent, and given to babbling unless stopped up. But Courfeyrac had been undeterred, and would not be satisfied until the poet's words had been immortalized. The map had had the misfortune of being the only nearby surface that could be marked without a chisel.
"Has he? May he meet his just reward in the hereafter." The stiff chill in Enjolras' tone would have been quite enough to allow Jehan to come to his own conclusions regarding Enjolras' opinions about this particular rheumy old Hessian; the way he smeared the written words into a greasy gray smudge with his thumb left no doubt whatsoever. Enjolras put the map behind him, depositing his goods upon Jehan's table, and wiped his fingers on his waistcoat before beginning to shift his books to a nearby chair.
And the stain of Goethe's last farewell will be washed out by week's end, no doubt. He couldn't bring himself to feel very sad. The verse might have been dashed off in a book, scratched into a table or carved into the walls themselves, and no one would have felt the sting of disrespect – but anyone with even a tepid measure of country love could see that there were some symbols better not defaced, no matter how old, how yellowed, how creased at the corners. That the map had survived near forty years unscathed spoke to its venerability; like a very old man with very sharp wits, it was a precious rarity, wisdom incarnate, albeit without much of a sense of humor. Old men had such fragile dignity, he thought, watching Enjolras' papers pile up beside him, and so did righteous causes – particularly those that had been lost before. To make either look ridiculous could be as bad as a death blow.
Jehan called in a plate for supper; and so it was that he fell to work with Enjolras over hard bread, dry meat and a cheese of indistinguishable origin. It was a quieter sort of occupation than he had come to expect from the demands of seeding the revolution, and it involved rather more copying. There were letters, second drafts of letters, crumpled second drafts on the floor, and finally acceptable editions to be written out again and again, one for each of the groups that made the ready fuse that wound through waiting Paris. It was dull work, too, affording him little time for thoughts higher than blot and fold and more ink. The means of justice, he had time to observe, were so much less glamorous than the ends.
There came a pause, long after the bread had staled, the meat had cooled and the cheese had achieved a texture worthy of great scientific curiosity. Jehan hardly noticed, for a few minutes, busy as he was smearing the side of his hand black against the paper that lay smudged and furling against the table. But soon enough he heard it; a silence that was full of something, tense with potential like the ringing interval between bells sounding the hour. He glanced up from his latest copy, half-finished and nigh illegible in his wearied handwriting.
Enjolras' face was shadow, hidden beneath the hand that shielded his eyes from the light of the oily white candle that sat in a pewter cup upon the table. The fire danced in his hair, disheveled and limp; it made the dull black of his waistcoat into something warm and nearly satin; and it glinted off the nib of his pen, which sat motionless under his steady hand, bleeding into a scrap of envelope. A letter lay before him, finished but unsigned. Jehan knew each word by heart – they'd spent enough time wrangling them into place.
It was a strange meditation to behold. In the dark of night, in the silence of this empty and dilapidated wineshop, when the city went about its business just outside the window and yet so very, very far away – in times like these, Jehan knew, a man could feel a crushing solitude, or a sublime connection to the force of life that joined each person at the heart into that entity called humanity, or simply a burning desire to make himself heard. What lay behind that face obscured by darkness?
The sharp slap of Enjolras' hand landing on the table filled the room for one short second. He sucked in a breath, bracing himself against the back of his chair. His mouth was hard with resolve, but there was something in his eyes that seemed to speak of doubt. Perhaps it was only the light.
"I do not know him," Enjolras said. "Not even enough to send a letter and to trust that my words won't be repeated to – no. How can I write to him?" Rue Tarane glittered black and wet across the top of the page. "And writing is the least of it. If I can't be sure of him in this, then what is he worth? Nothing. Less than nothing."
Are you talking to yourself? Jehan wondered, more fascinated than vexed. "He's one man," he said quietly, to test his theory.
Enjolras glanced over at him and regarded him a moment – very much as though he had forgotten he was there. "One man may break the chain," he said. "One foolish man, one selfish man, one lazy man, or one too soft, too stubborn, too slow …"
The air felt heavy with smoke, all of a sudden – unbreathable. Jehan wondered what the weight of all those possibilities must feel like. "And yet we must rely upon so many men," he replied, trying a smile. "None of them perfect, to be sure, but all good."
"The risk remains." Enjolras lifted his pen, but let it hover in the air. "And must not be cast lightly aside because of someone's good intentions."
Yet how lightly he cast those intentions aside, with a jerk of his head and a flicker of a sneer; how like water, thought Jehan, are the souls of men. "It does, of course." He folded his grey stained hands in his lap. "And no man with any sense would hope to be spared the failings of others. It's a human certainty that one of them will fall short – too short." He took in the pile of letters, hardly daring to count them. How many had he copied? His fingers ached. This was so little like the slow, ponderous writing he preferred. "You deal with men. There is no reason to believe some will not disappoint." And surely fools were to be forgiven; surely that was the beauty of it all. Passion, that most imperfect of all emotions, was what had drawn them all together.
"No reason, no." Enjolras' fingers tightened around his quill. "And yet they must not."
Jehan sighed. "Hoc volo, sic jubeo – sit pro ratione voluntas." I wish it, I command it – let my will be the reason.
Enjolras only looked at him, blank; and then his eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch, and the corner of his mouth turned up into something like a smile. "You will it, do you?"
"Not I." And Jehan let his eyes drift over to the map, its familiar, beloved lines striking out at him like shadow lances in the dim and constantly moving light. Here it seemed almost animate.
Enjolras did smile, then. Another log collapsed in the hearth, banishing the dark for an instant with an incendiary red. When it faded, the lines of Enjolras' face were burned into Jehan's eyes just like the coasts, borders, roads and rivers that made up that lost country on the wall.
He blinked, and they were gone.
Enjolras had gone, too – he had stood from his seat and gone to stand before the place where France hung on the wall, his hands upon his hips. Slowly, he drew a pencil form his pocket and began to write where he had so recently banished Goethe's words. In an awkward, tilting hand he laid out Juvenal's dictum. And then he returned, took up his pen, and set to writing, his back straight with satisfaction, his very being seemingly buoyed by the presence of the inescapable command.
Jehan left him to his work and to his vigil, not long after that. But before he stumbled down the stairs toward home, crossing through the inhuman cold and suffering the wind that sliced through the city along the river, he stopped to read Enjolras' handiwork. It made him smile; pro ratione voluntas, indeed. He had to wonder what Courfeyrac would make of it, when next he came in. No doubt everyone would find it fitting. There was an order that would not be denied; more than the wind and water of man's components, there was the Will.