Work Text:
“Today it is the first of May,” said Joly, closing the door to their back room behind him. “And I’ve never been more grateful to shut myself indoors.”
Outside it was a pallid spring day, maybe more heat than was typical, and Paris was blooming. Its blossoms were a draught-weakened crop of flowers behind iron fences, and the fashionable strollers who had spent the winters and much of the colder spring days inside.
Inside the café, Joly was welcomed with a typical reaction, which was that part of the room ignored him, a few people laughed or shrugged, and Bossuet said, “Called for his jollity” in English so accented it was incomprehensible. Combeferre waved him down from the corner, excusing himself from a small group having a grave conversation.
“Joly! Good evening, I am glad to see you. I don’t know if you’ve heard,” he said, taking Joly aside and away from the door to bring him up to the prevailing conversation. “Marigny has left Paris to recover. Birague is dead, some of the fellows from the law school only told me this morning -- and now we hear General Lamarque is ill as well as the Prime Minister.”
“Gracious God,” said Joly, and he refused wine when it was offered. “And I overheard outside the halle aux blés that tomorrow the price of grain will be higher by a factor of four. If the city has bread in a week’s time it will be fixed at more than four times the price.”
“In Croix-Rousse,” Enjolras was saying, at the other end of the room, with a circular in his fist and sweat staining the cuffs of his shirt. Their conversations were brought variously to rest as his voice rose: “In Croix-Rousse fifteen more of the jacquard weavers have died since last Tuesday, seven of them women, five of them mothers. Three more were younger than thirteen, and when we were so we still called ourselves children.”
Joly had his back to a wall, and in front of him the familiar forms of his friends were standing.
Bahorel had one foot on a chair and his hat in his hands. He said when he was being serious that the companions of his childhood were peasants, and their children would die without ever reading that among their chief rights was resistance to oppression.
Combeferre, standing beside him with a thoughtful frown, had stopped making excuses for his absence from class. He said that his interests were subordinate to his passions, and all of them less than what was required of him.
Grantaire was standing like the rest of them, an attitude neither reverent nor resolute, but one so unsteady that he seemed to be upright chiefly because of the strength of his grip on the chair-rail.
“I do not say this to enflame your passion or to win a reaction; this is not a public court, and you are all my friends.” Enjolras was saying. “We are straightforward with each other. We are not born for ourselves alone, so we have such a thing as a duty, and though our way is lit with philosophy our work must be essentially mundane.”
Bossuet put a hand on his bald head; he was sweating, the room was very hot with the warm day and the good attendance. Bossuet never explained himself; merely spread his hands wide and said what else would I be doing?
“Today the water in Paris is no less foul than it was yesterday,” Enjolras said. “Today grain will be the cheapest of the spring, so by winter it will be precious, or gone. My meaning is this: we will be given one moment to act and it will be soon. It will be directed by the price of gunpowder, by how well we abandon our hobbies, and by our tolerance for this hot room.”
Enjolras did not explain why the heat of the room was an issue; clearly it was, for they were all uncomfortable. But there was another gloss on that speech -- one moment, soon -- they would not be in this room come autumn.
“Say something about why,” said their founder. There was soot or gunpowder smudged on his fair hair, like someone had carelessly flicked ash on gold. He didn’t seem to notice, pacing across the basement and back, fist under his chin. “It is critical that we say why.”
It normally took more of them to write, set, and complete the flyers in the old basement at Indiana and Wells, but so far only four of them had arrived. There was the man currently writing, the leader of their group who was occasionally dictating, a poet-turned-organizer, and a working man, formerly of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company whose German was as good as his English.
They were all terrified in subtle ways, none of them over thirty years old, and the march down Michigan on Saturday had been spectacular. Even at their most cynical they could not have said that it would invite such an ugly reprisal. The poet and the worker were smoking very aggressively, their founder continued to pace, and the writer tried to keep his hand still and legible.
The writer wore spectacles, and he held them up with one hand as he labored over the draft with the other. There had been no opportunity to repair them, one of the sidebars bent in the crush of the group -- the mob, the thing that people became when they had no way to escape, when they could not see the direction of gunshots and the Pinkertons gave them no time to decide. Blood was no longer leaking from his scalp; it had dried in his ear, so he put his handkerchief down and wrote something.
He read aloud, “To denounce the latest atrocious act of the police, the shooting of our fellow-workmen this afternoon.”
“-- Yesterday afternoon,” said a voice called from the stairwell. “This won’t be printed until tomorrow morning, so say yesterday afternoon or no one will come.” He was the poet, or he had been, and he’d made a living at it when he stopped attending his classes or answering his parents’ telegrams.
He met their founder there in Boston, inspired with a final poetic sentiment by the pristine blond youth who had studied under Albert Parsons, and they’d gone together to Terre Haute for the Knights of Industry. Then Pittsburgh, and then finally Chicago, where he now sat in a basement room with his hand shaking around a cigarette. Someone had smashed his knee with the end of a pistol, and he had fallen down the last five stairs and hadn’t advanced further, lighting up and occasionally criticizing the writing from the stairs.
“The shooting yesterday afternoon,” said the writer, lifting his pencil to reread. Not half an hour ago he was deaf from that same shooting; his hearing was still tenuous. He had been a medical student before this, and thought himself unaffected by things that were gruesome, but obviously had been wrong.
“It’s good,” said their leader, his fist leaving his chin to strike the open palm of his other hand. “Now set it.”
“Before we do, we have perhaps an inch left if we want the German to fit, and the title. Is that insufficient?”
There were voices in the stairs -- the rest of them were arriving from the McCormick, having been delayed, and they crowded down the stairs as the poet budged off to the side.
They counted each other off, looking for damage or missing faces, and there were none. They had not planned for this, had not even met here often, but somehow all of them had made it to the same place, within an hour of the same time.
“That chap died,” said one young man, about twenty-five and already bald, his hat long gone and trampled. There was a vivid smear of blood on his cheek, and his hands were worse.
“We took him off down the block and tried a tourniquet in the alley,” said a younger medical student, whose normally neat appearance was ruined by soot and blood and a missing necktie. “It didn’t help. The Pinkertons have good aim, or maybe bad.”
Their founder stopped pacing, and put his hand on the wall, either to lean or to keep still. “Did he say anything? Did he say it was an accident? I’m sure it was an accident.”
He had been shouting at the police agents, defending the legal strike and three of them had simply cocked their pistols and taken lazy aim at him.
In one very loud second he was knocked to the ground and surrounded by his friends, and beside him a stranger fell roughly to his knees, having stood in front of those three shots that had fired off simultaneously.
The man was a stranger but he was clearly not a worker, he had been better-dressed than all of them before he’d started bleeding, though no one could have called him handsome at his best. He gave a very unserious shrug at his own condition, and said, “Well, Apollo, aren’t you grateful?” and everyone had been too shocked to answer.
The bald man shrugged, wiping at his face and leaving behind a darker smudge. “He asked after you, if you’d left or if you were still taunting the strikebreakers. And then when it was clear we weren’t doing much good we all started asking his name, and he said, ‘Simply the letter R will do, upper-case if you please,’ and told us that he refused to die with some other man’s necktie on his leg, so we took it off, and very shortly after -- well.”
The founder nodded, gravely. He was only twenty-two years old, and had not even seen a grandparent dead before this. He drew his brows together in moment of solemnity for the stranger who’d saved his life and died, then recovered from it.
“Let us assure that man’s memory that his actions today were not in vain -- and promise tomorrow will be Judgment Day for these monsters and their bloodhounds. We have only one opportunity to stand behind our cause in greater numbers than before. We have only one chance, to finish this, and it is tomorrow at Haymarket Square."
“The administration has shut down in Nanterre,” the student’s voice rang in the public square, he stood barely taller than his regular height on a garden wall, and his blond hair was dark with rain. “Yesterday, the second of May, but we are just finding out this morning."
The crowd made a loud and indistinct noise, and he shook his head, and then his hand with the newspaper in it, and they grew quiet.
“And they are threatening anyone who participated in March 22nd with expulsion.”
No, said the crowd, and solidarity, and they booed as if Nanterre might hear them if they were loud enough. Some windows opened onto the square as the noise attracted interest.
“The de Gaulle government hides a truncheon behind its back,” the speaker said, quieter, and the people at their windows leaned out or started to come downstairs. “And now we are seeing it face-to-face.”
One of his friends, whose glasses were fogging up from the warm day and the rain, offered him an umbrella.
He waved it back.
“But our ancestors taught us, the truth is great and prevails, and time and time and time again we have renewed the struggle, now is the time to renew it again, not to be over quickly but to be the beginning of a longer struggle, probably a permanent struggle.”
There were eight of them behind him, seven from the UNEF and one of indeterminate allegiance who was their friend, despite that he might have hated them. He was from Paris as very few of them were, and had grown up dreading ever attending class at the Sorbonne. He described himself as ugly enough to be praiseworthy, and he was generally good company though he did not seem political. Rain ran down his face as he watched the speaker. He had said he did not give a rat’s ass about Nanterre, but now he was standing in the rain to rally for it.
“On Monday, May 6th, we will unleash ourselves on this city, for our peers in Nanterre and for these sad attempts to make us into voters and not students. But we are students -- so let’s look to precedent. Precedent says we should tear up the streets.”
The crowd approved, and grew.
“I don’t know if this is our only chance, but it’s our first chance; May ’68 is when it begins. Let’s make no plans for when it ends."
Feuilly had yet to arrive, for his days were longer, and when he did he would take off his workman’s coat and prove that his hard-won education had only put a bellows to the fire of some axiom; man is born, and so he must have been born free.
In a moment Courfeyrac was saying they had better start buying powder, or the price would go up and they would have a lot less of it. “Or,” he said with a grin that was not like the one he wore when he was laughing, “we shall be arrested, which won’t do, and what are you smiling at, Prouvaire? Let me guess. You’ve been arrested thousands of times and we shouldn’t worry about it.”
There was some laughter, and Courfeyrac put his hand on Prouvaire’s shoulder to show that he’d been only joking.
“No,” said Jehan. “I was merely thinking, that everything begins the same way. Here we are talking about carbines and powder and we could be saying, what is the third estate? We could be in Sevastopol saying we are tired of dying; we could be at the shores of the Red Sea, we act to justify what we know, that light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Grantaire, who had been still as Enjolras’ voice cut the room, now put his head on his arms and laughed at length, straightening in his chair only to wipe a hand down his face. “Oh, what wretched stuff,” he said, still laughing. “I’m sorry, I apologize, Prouvaire, forgive me. Be consoled that I will only criticize you here and now, for this is all we have.”
“Yes,” said Enjolras, seizing on Grantaire’s words and surprising all of them. Grantaire especially lifted his head and stared, for a silent moment.
“And I apologize to you too, if I’d known you were attending so diligently I would have made the most of it,” said Grantaire, obliquely.
Enjolras shot him an intense look that was something between anger and sadness. “Well in this case you’re right, what you said, this is all we have, I agree. Nothing is infinite, not even oppression. So it is within our power to make any struggle the final one; if we commit to finality we have no other opportunity.”
“Well,” said Grantaire, and shrugged. “How upsetting.”
