Joly hurried in, glad to be out of the cold and in the warmth of the Cafe Musain. Paris in November, with cold winds and the threat of snow and sleet, was not a place of which he approved or thought healthy. He called for some wine, and produced a bag of apples he had bought earlier, in the hope that they might stave off a chill.
Enjolras had been talking earlier about the prisons, and the dire conditions their inmates had to suffer. It had made Joly think; that was a prison of the flesh, but prisons of the mind were far more insidious and far harder to attack. The mindset that caused people to turn away when the aristocrats apostrophised and scorned grisettes, for example; that was a difficult thing to neutralise.
Feuilly knew all about that, of course. Why, you could hear him talk for hours on how the aristos mistreated and mismanaged people! He was probably the one, of all of them, who appreciated it not only intellectually but emotionally. There he was now, telling Grantaire (the only one still listening) about the partition of Poland. No need to worry that he did not know his enemy.
Enjolras - well, one never quite knew with him. It would seem that he knew about such things, but they did not apply to him. He always seemed somewhat set apart from them all, perceiving what they did, and understanding it, but not doing so himself. A puzzle, still.
Jehan, of course, went his own sweet way. He would never be ruled by what society thought - indeed, one could hardly be sure that he knew at all! He seemed to have been born innocent of such things and never disabused.
The rest of them, though, including Joly himself, were all more or less bound by such dictates. Bahorel deliberately rebelled against them at all opportunities, and showed his awareness thus; Combeferre more effectively subdued them by ignoring them only when circumstances insisted that he should do so. Bossuet laughed at them, Courfeyrac tossed his head, and Grantaire got drunk to spite them.
What of he, himself? How bound was he in the prison of the mind? Joly did not know. He tried to ignore such inbred rules, but they were hard to distinguish from the dictates of conscience and morality.
He tossed aside his apple core and reached for his wine instead, leaning forward to hear more of whatever Jehan was talking of to Bossuet.