Enjolras had always been a solitary child. For as long as he could remember, the fields and streams of his father's estate had been the only places where he did not feel ill at ease. To keep far away from the shadowy corridors of the empty house his father occupied, the prodding of his tutor and the leering smiles of rare visitors, was the sole escape route his life provided. His father had often told him off for such unsociable manners and an unsmiling demeanor, it was inappropriate and impolite, he said.
It must have been for this reason that, at thirteen years of age, the sheltered and innocent Enjolras had been allowed a little more freedom in the shape of a place in the local secondary school. Whatever the reasoning, it had been his father's greatest mistake. The school had served as a window into a world whose icy breath forever disturbed the eternal summer of Enjolras's childhood.
Sitting underneath his favourite elm tree on the bank of a little stream, Enjolras's thoughts drifted towards their usual target. They had taught him so much in that school, gerunds and Euclid and the greatness of Homer, yet they forgot to dwell on problems far more essential. Nobody explained to him, even when he asked, why there were women with babies sitting on the ground outside their school, even when it rained or snowed. Each time he brought up the puzzling matter of why there were children half their age going up chimneys or carrying weights, people simply threw him an uneasy smile and told him not to ask so many questions. At any mention of that other side of their town, those other people that seemed for some reason so different from themselves, he was simply told to mind his own business. Some people were more fortunate than others, it seemed. Either that, or, according to his old nurse, this was the Lord's way.
The ease with which these neat phrases were thrown around frightened Enjolras. He understood what it meant to have a hard heart and no compassion, this concept was entirely familiar to him. What he could not grasp was why seemingly good, kind people appeared to simply not see the importance of the questions he asked. It was as if they lived their lives in pretense, wrapped in a cocoon of health and wealth, denying the existence of those others that walked past them on the streets every day. What did it mean to mind his own business? Was it simply another way to avoid responsibility?
Every day he tried to lay it all out in his mind, yet this was not a simple matter of facts to be put into an equation. The dark pictures whirled before his eyes, all coming together into a wave of unanswered questions that threatened to overwhelm him. What, was there really no compassion to be found in the world? Should one simply ignore the suffering and wrongdoing around him? Could it be true that people thought only of themselves and would not rise to help their neighbours? Were they all just fated to pretend, to fill their lives with duties and distractions and to forget the gaping tear in the fabric of the world?
"No," Enjolras cried in desperation, barely noticing that he was speaking out loud. "It cannot be so."
"It cannot be so."
The words sounded as if they had been spoken by someone else, though at the back of his mind he knew that he was completely alone.
The sky above him shone with an unparalleled brightness, through the feathery clouds that soon formed into shapes bizarrely resembling the avenging angels from his illustrated Bible. Perhaps they really were angels because soon they began to speak. They spoke of the tortured past and the glorious future and the struggle to come and the sacrifices that must be made and they filled his head with visions of the people in unity and concord, of universal happiness, of freedom and peace and everything that his world lacked.
Later, when he was back inside, his heart no longer racing and the troubling questions having settled temporarily into the back of his mind, Enjolras recalled that strange afternoon and concluded that he must have fallen asleep in the sun.
That couldn't have been entirely true, he ended up realising, because the visions and voices followed him through the years. From time to time, and with increasing frequency, whenever he was tired, run down, overwhelmed with the grandeur of the task he was faced with, they would return and give him a glimpse of what he was fighting for. At first it bemused him, in time he got used to it. Perhaps this was not an entirely normal occurrence, yet there were many ways in which Enjolras found himself not entirely resembling ordinary people and this was the least important one.