I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another. –Rousseau.
A knock at the door interrupted Combeferre and Enjolras' quiet evening of sitting at the table together with their textbooks and paperwork and notes for pamphlets. Enjolras glanced up.
"Are you expecting someone?" he asked.
"No." Combeferre got up. "Although it could be Marcel. You know how his visits are."
When he opened the door, his guess proved right. A dark-haired young man in worn but well-made clothes stepped inside in his typical furtive manner, slipping off his coat as he did.
"Hello, Marcel," Combeferre said. "Come sit down…how is Lydie?"
"Hello," Marcel responded. His restless eyes cast about the flat as if searching for something, but Combeferre had learned long ago not to be unnerved by his nervousness. Marcel Desmarais had his mannerisms, and he had his reasons for them.
"Lydie is fine," he added, taking the spare seat at the table. "She's leaving scratches all over my hands when we play lately, but she's happy and growing."
Combeferre smiled gently. "I'm glad." Marcel's bond with the kitten was certainly something, a relationship of comfortable trust that Combeferre still could not manage to form with him. "And your work?"
"Still the same." Marcel examined some of the scratches on the backs of his hands. "I'm currently translating Rousseau's letters into German…it's a pain, but at least I'm familiar with the text."
"Translating into your second language is always harder," Combeferre agreed. "Still, at least Rousseau is interesting."
"Sometimes too interesting for me to focus properly." Marcel's glance darted to Combeferre's face, then back to the table. "I read an odd bit in a letter to Voltaire this afternoon. 'I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.'"
Combeferre's eyebrows rose. "And you find that odd because…?" he queried.
"Well, because—because it's counterintuitive, isn't it? I mean, in context it's a fairly religious statement; he goes on with to talk about his faith in the immortality of the soul and a well-meaning Providence, which he'd believe in until his last breath...but the statement itself? Why would you hope more as your suffering increases?"
He couldn't help the corners of his lips turning up a little—not in mockery of Marcel's bitter earnestness, but in quiet sympathy. So that was the problem. "Greater suffering leads to greater hope because it creates a greater awareness of our need for hope."
Marcel's eyebrows rose in turn as he crossed his arms, both defensively and aggressively. "It also creates a greater awareness of just how improbable our hopes are. Suffering produces despair, not hope."
"It certainly can." Combeferre knew it as well as Marcel did, and partly at the same hands. Hands of a man now dead, thank God—Combeferre had been technically free of Inspector Desmarais' horrific grasp as soon as he and Enjolras had been released from the police depot where they had encountered him following a minor offense, but that in itself was no resolution, and Marcel, the inspector's nephew, had been unable to even consider a new way of life until his uncle's sudden death. "But in the end—in the end, it does not have to. In the end, it can be an impetus for desiring and creating change."
"Suffering is a trap," Marcel argued. "It contains the mind inside itself, inside its own circumstances."
"It can be that too." He passed a hand over his face. Had he not spent weeks, months, circling within his own despairing mind and convinced that there was no escape on earth? "But it does eliminate complacency and leave us with a choice. Hope or despair. Change or resignation. And you, Marcel—you changed. All our enmity, all the harm you did me and how I misunderstood you…for all you talk of being trapped by suffering, you allowed it to change you, and you are already finding a better world."
"A better part of this one, maybe. Hardly a new world, and hardly any further hope." Marcel shook his head. "Think what you like. I just know that me—I've suffered too much in this world to be able to hope for another."
Combeferre looked at him with compassion. "I understand. Believe me, I understand and have thought the same. Nevertheless, I am resolved: I will always hope to see the dawn of a better world, whether beyond the grave, beyond the barricade, or through the quiet years of progress and healing. And I am prepared to take any of those paths to see my hope realized."
Marcel gazed at him with troubled eyes, then abruptly rose, put on his coat, and left the flat.