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Bossuet had been surprised to see Enjolras carrying a case of wine into the Corinthe, and he said as much to Joly.
"Are you sure it was Enjolras?" Joly asked, pausing in his struggle with an ancient and very decrepit armchair to rub his nose. "It could have been someone else who looks like him."
"With the same glowing hair?"
"There are plenty of men with golden hair."
"And such fine legs?"
"You yourself are evidence that there are those among us mortals in possession of such legs as well." Bossuet ducked his head in acknowledgment of the compliment, and Joly continued. "Did you see him from the front or the back?"
"It was from the back," Bossuet admitted, wedging his shoulder under the chair and planting his feet firmly so he could lift with his legs. "But really, Joly, how could I mix someone up with Enjolras, with the way he carries himself like the Winged Victory of Samothrace and always walks like he's been charged with saving the world before dinner-time? Be honest, have you ever met anyone who could be observed in motion for ten seconds and be mistaken for Enjolras? Ready--three, two, one!"
They shoved together and managed to push the chair high enough to tip it over onto the top of the barricade, where it settled in with a shudder and a giant cloud of centuries-old dust. Joly sneezed and dug in his pockets for a handkerchief. Bossuet offered him his, which, by some miracle, he hadn't yet lost.
"You make a strong argument," Joly said, between sniffles. "But I must ask you, which is more likely: That you saw somebody with the same hair, the same excellent legs, and the same victorious bearing as our Enjolras--or that Enjolras brought wine to the battleground where we hope to birth the new Republic?"
"Point to you," Bossuet acknowledged. "So we have a double on our barricade--a . . . what's the word, dob--dop--?" He gestured vaguely. "You know what I mean."
"Doppelganger," Joly said, with the certainty of a man who has had to cram hundreds of foreign words into his head in medical lectures and now can't stop doing it accidentally. He offered the handkerchief back to Bossuet.
"You'll need it again."
"True." He stuffed it into his pocket. "I did bring three of my own, but they're all in my coat and I'm not sure where I've left it."
"We should take care that it doesn't get absorbed into the barricade," Bossuet suggested. "The thing has already swallowed three beds and an omnibus; it might gulp down a coat without even noticing."
* * *
"The question is," Joly continued, as if the past twenty minutes (an eventful period of time in which they had played dice against a gamin for Joly's coat, lost so miserably that the gamin had a claim to both their coats as well as Bossuet's hat, traded the promise of three dozen sweet buns for said garments, and been scolded by Grantaire for corrupting the youth with games of chance) had been nothing but an eyeblink, "if Enjolras has a doppelganger on this barricade, what does it portend?"
Bossuet sighed wearily. "Does it have to portend something?" Ever since he'd met Joly and Prouvaire, his life had been riddled with omens of various sorts, trivial little events that he never would have thought anything of, but which Joly and Prouvaire insisted were warnings of the most grisly fates. (None of them had ever happened--yet--but that didn't seem to dampen Joly and Prouvaire's enthusiasm for predicting them.) He didn't know whether to blame the number of portents on his terrible luck or to suspect that his everyday luck was so bad precisely because he was spending all of it on avoiding these even greater calamities. Either way, he was tired of hearing about them. "Couldn't it be . . . I don't know, a positive sign--an indicator of supernatural aid?"
Joly considered this. "Aid from whom--or what?" He crouched down at one end of the coffin they'd been sent to fetch, and Bossuet scurried to get the other end.
Bossuet shrugged, jostling the coffin in the process. "I'm just grasping at straws," he confessed. "But you have to admit that a legion of Enjolras doubles, marching in like avenging angels with the fire of revolution in their eyes, is a heartening prospect. Even one additional Enjolras--well, it's like getting a whole dozen new volunteers, isn't it?"
"And if he--or they, if your legion theory plays out--are bringing us wine, I can't object," Joly said. "But really, we must ask an expert."
"Must we?" Bossuet whined. "Wouldn't it be better not to know?"
"If you know, then you can prepare," Joly said placidly. "Case in point--you're going to want to tread carefully just now, you're just getting to the point where they've pulled up all the cobblestones."
Joly's warning came a moment too late, as Bossuet's boot had just slipped off the edge of the last cobblestone. Luckily, he managed to keep his grip on the coffin, and his dancer's reflexes saved him a wrenched ankle.
"Where do you want this one?" Bossuet called to Feuilly as they approached the barricade.
Feuilly frowned. "Not here, not where we'll have to stare at it for hours and hours," he said. "Take it around to the front of the barricade and throw it on somewhere. Make the guardsmen climb over dead men's bones to get to us; maybe squeamishness will stop some of them."
"There's no body inside," Joly pointed out patiently. "Obviously, we would have removed it first." But Feuilly had already turned away to answer one of the dozens of people calling his name. "Oh look, there's Prouvaire."
Prouvaire's eyes lit up when he saw their offering to the barricade. "There's a poem in this," he said as he helped them maneuver their burden around the still-ragged end of the growing barricade. "Building the cradle of a new world from the tomb of the old, something like that."
"We have a question for you," Joly said, after they had found a spot for the coffin between the omnibus and an improbable garden arch and were catching their breath. "Bossuet saw something earlier today, and we want to know what it means."
"A dopper--dob--eh, a double," Bossuet said. "Someone who looked just like Enjolras, going into the Corinthe with a case of wine."
"The doppelganger is an omen of death, is it not?" Joly asked, not looking particularly concerned about it, Bossuet thought.
Prouvaire wiped his forehead, looking up at the sky as if the texts he was thinking of were inscribed there. "Not always," he said, and Bossuet's heart leaped. "The doppelganger can signify many things. Of course, nine times out of ten, it's a portent of death or tragedy--one thinks of Donne's vision of his wife passing by with a dead child in her arms, the very day that, a country away, she was giving birth to their stillborn daughter. Or Shelley's meeting with his own double, who asked him 'How long do you mean to be content?' Two weeks later, he drowned in the Bay of Spezia. And in The Devil's Elixir, seeing his doppelganger drives Medardus to madness, causing him to wander in the wilderness for months, fighting his double." Prouvaire cocked his head to one side, considering. "Although in that case, the doppelganger turns out to be Medardus's lunatic half-brother, and not a supernatural portent at all, so perhaps it is not relevant to our case. Although it does still drive him insane."
"The lesson there being, I take it, don't go mad because of what you saw," Joly instructed Bossuet, who nodded.
"I will try my hardest," he said sincerely. "But, Prouvaire--you said a doppelganger can have other significances as well?"
Prouvaire nodded. "Of course. Its essential meaning is not Death itself, but a warning--one who sees their double is rejecting the material and turning too much to the spiritual; perhaps this causes a splitting of the soul, or simply enables the original to see into a world that is usually closed to us."
They scrambled back over the quickly-growing end of the barricade, Bossuet giving Joly a hand to steady him, then almost being thrown off-balance himself when a shutter shifted under Joly's feet.
"It's in Prometheus Unbound, this idea," Prouvaire continued. "The poet says, 'For know there are two worlds of life and death: / One that which thou beholdest; but the other / Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit / The shadows of all forms that think and live / Till death unite them and they part no more.' So you can see why the apparition of a doppelganger might be a sign that one is nearer to the world of death--but it can also simply signify an overbearing interest in the spiritual realm, and thus serve as a warning."
"So it might be a sign that we are thinking too much of the spiritual?" Bossuet asked, trying to reel Prouvaire's ramblings back into a practical application. "We must not let our political aspirations and dreams of the New Republic distract us from the material necessities required to get there."
"We do have a tendency to soar off into the theoretical in meetings," Joly sighed. "Enjolras in particular. But I think we keep a solid grip on the practical details--tallies of weapons and barricade locations and such--as well."
"Which is exactly as it must be," Prouvaire said. "One cannot experience the Sublime--or achieve the ideal political state--without a solid balance between the two worlds, between the ideal and the physical, between spirit and mud. We must dream of a new world, but we must also build a solid barricade."
"Warning taken, thank you," Bossuet said. "Don't neglect the mud." He glanced down at his splattered trousers. "No worries there on my part. I suppose I could keep an eye on the others, make sure Enjolras gets properly besmirched."
"Or it might be a more personal warning," Joly suggested, "aimed at one person alone." He turned to Bossuet, unable to entirely suppress the smile that was twitching at his lips. "Have you perhaps been turning away from the impulses of the flesh?" (Bossuet knew without him saying the image in his head--the tangle of limbs in his bed the previous night, red wine spilled on the sheets, petticoats and trousers scattered across the apartment.)
Bossuet drew on all his powers of dissemblance and answered, straight faced, "Perhaps I have. I feel I've led rather too ascetic a life lately." (Wrestling with Musichetta for the last petite duchesse, Joly licking the smear of chocolate icing from his cheek after his inevitable loss.) "Do you think this could be a sign that I need to indulge my base desires more fully?"
"It is most probable," Joly said solemnly, having mastered the urge to smile.
Prouvaire looked from one to the other, unimpressed. "You two aren't fooling anyone, you know."
* * *
Twenty-four hours later, Bossuet limped back inside the cafe, staggering under an armload of paving stones. His eyes stung from the smoke and his clothes reeked of sweat and gunpowder and blood. Wearily, he deposited the stones where Feuilly directed around the Corinthe. The word was they were transforming the wineshop into a fortress, but, seeing the stones being piled up at every window and entrance, Bossuet couldn't shake the feeling of being walled up inside a tomb.
Bahorel was dead. Prouvaire was dead. The little gamin he owed three dozen sweet buns to was dead. He should be weeping for them, or trembling in fear for what the next few hours would bring, but he found himself strangely wrung out, too exhausted to feel much of anything.
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and was surprised to find the fabric come back not only damp with sweat but streaked with blood. Perhaps he shouldn't have been so prodigal with his only handkerchief, he thought. He glanced about the room, looking for Joly, thinking he would try to beg an extra handkerchief or a joke off of him.
The last time he'd seen Joly, he'd been hunched over a dying man's chest, soaked in blood, screaming for bandages. Now he was silent, his face pale under the soot and blood, standing quietly beside Courfeyrac's flurry of nervous activity as they worked together to nail boards over the door to the kitchen. (And how strange that was, Joly walling himself off from his hospital; how strange it was that it was safer for the patients to be separated from their doctor!)
"Here, Bossuet," Feuilly was saying, motioning with his chin toward another stack of stones that had just been carried inside. "Can you put these up at the other window? Just like this, with space in between for a musket barrel."
He picked up the stones and wove his way through the swarm of students and workmen in the little room toward the window he'd been set to barricade. (Once, they'd thought to defend the street; now they despaired of protecting even these few windows and doors.)
And that was when he saw it again: Enjolras carrying a case of wine.
It was clearly Enjolras himself--from this close up, there was no mistaking that halo of hair (unique among all the golden heads in the world, no matter what Joly might claim), nor the resolute set of his shoulders, the steel in his eyes that clashed so strikingly with his angel's face. His face and hair were damp with sweat and streaked with soot from the gunpowder, but there was not a scratch on him; the only spot of red on his whole person was the little ring of the tricolor cockade that Courfeyrac had pinned to his coat the morning before (only that long ago?). Bossuet had not thought about doppelgangers since the first shots were fired, but now, seeing Enjolras strangely unmarked by blood or wound, a chill washed over him.
But the figure stumbled on the uneven first step of the staircase as he carried the bottles upstairs, and Bossuet suspected a true omen of doom would have a little more dignity. Just to be sure, he kept an eye on the stairs as he continued to move paving stones under Feuilly's direction. Enjolras returned a few moments later without the bottles, to all appearances his own self, in the flesh.
But just to be sure: "Enjolras, are those your bottles?" Bossuet asked him.
"They are," Enjolras said gravely.
Bossuet cast a meaningful look at Joly. "I see." Unfortunately, Joly was busy holding up a board against the door while Courfeyrac, laughing a little frantically at his lack of skill at such things, tried to nail it more securely in place. "Are we to toast the new Republic on our victory?"
Enjolras shook his head. "I had hoped never to open these bottles."
Bossuet frowned. "I know you're against abuse of the fruit of the vine, Enjolras, but isn't that going a little too far? Wine can make a fellow's head muddy, to be sure, but it can also supply courage when the natural reserves of spirit falter, and--"
"They're full of aqua fortis," Enjolras interrupted. "We're going to throw them when they come in." He motioned with his head in the direction of the street, where, on the other side of the barricade, the guardsmen were gathering themselves for another attack.
"Oh." Bossuet swallowed hard. Joly had once burned himself with aqua fortis in some kind of experiment. Bossuet had never been clear on the purposes of the experiment, partly because the horrible burn, all yellow and blistered, which Joly had examined with such matter-of-fact interest had made Bossuet's head go fuzzy; with Joly's chattering voice withdrawing quite a long ways away down a dark tunnel, it was impossible to follow the explanation of what he and Combeferre had been doing, and Bossuet had not cared to ask again, after the world had gone back to normal. The burn, to Bossuet's great astonishment, had healed, but Joly still bore the scar, a patch of shiny, white skin stretched across his wrist. "Oh," he said again.
He should feel better, he told himself, knowing that there was no doppelganger, and no ill omen was looming over the barricade after all. But somehow, he felt worse than before.