Le Beauté du Diable
Summary: Courfeyrac's life was filled with women. The one who touched his life the most, however, was one he had never met.
Author's Note: Please forgive me, I am not fluent in French. Courfeyrac, Marius, etc., are the magnificent invention of Victor Hugo. Madame Pain is a fancy, but I am sure she is real in the form of many women around the world.
The gunpowder barrel was empty.
With a merry kick, Courfeyrac sent it to the bottom of the pile. There was something inappropriately jaunty about him, his curls slicked to his brow beneath the brim of his hat, his boots besmirched. He looked quite the heathen. His mother would swoon at the sight of his loose collar, as his cravat served now as a dressing for Marius' head.
Pocketing an empty cartridge, he swaggered over to his comrades. They stood stupidly at the edge of the barricade to watch the advance. The pieces of furniture and assorted other findings that made it had begun to look less sturdy, though they stood yet under the smattering of bullets from the guests in their streets. He ducked another shower.
"Bete comme ses pieds!" he exclaimed cheerfully, the words following a low whistle: the National Guardsmen were as dumb as their feet. "They can't shoot worth anything."
He straightened, eyeing the troops. They were costumed like circus monkeys. No, he decided; like birds. What fine plumes adorned their hats, petits oiseaux! – what fine targets. The ostentation and idiocy of it was so charmingly characteristic.
As the blue-and-red uniforms scrambled for their cannons, the revolutionaries braced themselves for the impact. The wall held firm for the moment. Courfeyrac feigned amused pity for their adversaries and the embarrassment they must be feeling while in his breast his heart imitated the drum.
Earlier, he had distributed the cartridges of powder with a smile, but he had to tell the recipients that for a "proper conversation," they should wait to reply until the Guardsmen had fired first. His friends had been conscious enough of the importance of conserving powder.
"Let us even the odds, mes amis!" He brandished the sword with a flourish, his father's crest glinting dimly in the lingering mist. How often it rained here. Sometimes Paris felt more like England than the other part of France where his family held land.
After the Revolution, they had left the continent for a brief while; his father had been uneasy that there would be another outcry against aristocrats, and that the outcry would become a massacre. Even M'sieur de Courfeyrac had known better than to trust Napoleon, though for different reasons than his son later would consider.
Buonaparte the outsider was detested by Courfeyrac's leader as the enemy of la république, Enjolras' motivation, and in part Courfeyrac's. Enjolras was one of those rare men who would die for an idea and needed no women to fire his passion. Courfeyrac had never professed such nobility.
Christian de Courfeyrac was a child the first time he heard his father speak of England.
"That's what he deserves, the devil!" proclaimed M'sieur de Courfeyrac triumphantly, closing the front door to their country home with the same exertion with which he might have closed out a real devil.
Christian looked up from a ball of yarn, uncertain of who the "he" was, or what he had deserved.
Though Christian could see from his seat on the floor the beads of sweat on his father's neck, Pere did not seem aware of the heat. "Order will be restored."
"What's happened?" Christian demanded, little brows furrowed.
"Shhh, Christian. Be good." Maman touched his head affectionately before moving past him to her husband. "Welcome home, M'sieur."
Pere did not seem aware of Maman, either. He continued talking of the politics he did not expect his wife to understand. "Those English fiends have proved themselves good for something yet."
Toying with the food on his plate, Christian was innocent for the moment of the events of Waterloo, or the expectation of the return of King Louis, who had fled to Ghent when Napoleon took his throne back. So too was the boy ignorant of his father's own flight from Parisduring a revolution in which aristocrats were in just as much mortal danger as kings – a revolution which seemed to him repulsive rather than justifiable until he was eighteen.
But at the time, his older brother was wiser. "Tutor says England and France used to be allies," Philippe said proudly. "Under Louis... Louis..."
"XIV," Pere supplied, mouth pursing. "But that was long before I visited, and never shall be again."
Visited? Christian was dumbfounded. His father had gone to England without his knowing it? It seemed impossible that the stuffy old man could have done anything besides pace the chateau with his guests clinging near like the smoke of his pipe. Besides, England was the Enemy. What could have possibly made his proud and patriotic father go there?
They had been at the barricade for twenty-four hours, during which they had had no rest, and no food. Courfeyrac had noticed some time ago the bulge in Marius' vest pocket that he had determined to be the silhouette of a roll. Undoubtedly it was waterlogged by rain, yet no less seductive.
Marius, Courfeyrac thought fondly, had a disgusting amount of restraint, though generally it was applied more towards women than food.
Poor Monsieur l'Abbé. If their revolution succeeded and they lived, he could only hope Marius would spend his remaining time on Earth more wisely. The man in love ate like a caged animal, but denied himself other tastes. Courfeyrac regretted encouraging him to take a job as a translator; all the young man did was read. He had barely removed his nose from his books long enough to realize the occurrence of a revolution.
The revolution had only seemed a gathering of the saints for a time. They'd had some sport at the expense of the guard which had been created by Louis-Philippe as the people's militia. To them, they seemed the devil, but with no real glimpse of hell. Only with the Incident that required the bandaging of Marius' brow had panic begun to set in on some faces, and that had been received outside the barricade. Gavroche...
Courfeyrac set his jaw in a grim smile. Gavroche had been trying to get them more powder. He had gone singing: "Le nez dans le ruisseau."
Rousseau had never cared for the children.
A bullet had grazed Marius when they were rescuing the riddled little body. The makeshift plaster was applied with solemnity before Courfeyrac joked with renewed fervor. He and Combeferre and Jehan, sweet Jehan, recited a love poem afterward while they waited to die, something for which Gavroche hadn't the patience: "I stayed there pale and believed in God."
The first breach of the center wall missed him narrowly. He laughed.
"They have taken my hat," he declared, shaking his head towards the cannon whose one errant ball had neared its goal. It had, perhaps, been lost some time ago without his noticing, when he had been emptying his gun into the pool of red uniforms around the cannon.
As he anticipated it could be a while yet before the Guard proved any reasonable threat, he busied himself arranging his assortment of weapons. This was meant to be comforting, had he not had too many pistols that would go unfilled and unfired.
There could be no planning for it, but as far as was in their power, they had gathered the bottles of absinthe. Grantaire could have no use for the drink now. It was of the devil, some had said, and Courfeyrac hoped it felt like hellfire on any assailants who might breach the wall.
His sword, too, might prove useful; the sword that had been given to his family in its fourth generation of nobility, as was customary to families loyal to the crown, would now be employed against that very system. Noblesse militaire, indeed.
The sword would be an excellent surprise for the National Guard, as the aristocracy were the only ones permitted by law to bear one. And why should the son of a landowner care to defend the rights of the poor?
The second time he heard his father speak of England, Courfeyrac was sixteen. He thought he felt oppressed, when he had yet to learn of real oppression, idling in the countryside, away from the adventure he presumed was to be had in the city. He amused himself by perusing the rotting treasures in the home where his father and grandfather had both been born. There were scandalous novels to be read. And when he discovered an old shawl, wrapped around what must be another book, he assumed the contents were most tantalizing of all.
Being found unwrapping the parcel was not the worst activity in which he could have been discovered, but his father's cheek was pale with rage nonetheless.
"Don't touch that. It's filthy."
"Forgive me, Pere; I did not know." Still Christian maintained hold of the book.
The elder de Courfeyrac knew by then what would not earn his son's sympathy, and what would. "It is a woman's," he added, only slightly gratified when Christian reverently set it aside.
What sort of woman's? If filthy, it must have been from a lady of the town!
Taking up the ragged cloth, M'sieur de Courfeyrac inspected it. "An old English beggarwoman's," he recalled, lip curling as he swiftly unwound the shawl before Courfeyrac could think of smelling it for some musty Elysian perfume.
He was not to see the shawl again; he expected his father had promptly discarded it. But the book it had held was exposed. Christian read voraciously.
His grandmother's diary was not as salacious as he might have hoped. It transfixed him for entirely different reasons. He read, stunned, the account of his father's trip to England which he had nearly forgotten.
M'sieur de Courfeyrac, too, had forgotten. Time and war had sapped the de Courfeyrac's coffers, and time and debt had sapped M'sieur gratitude.
His father's parents had taken him to England to escape Robespierre's radicals and their guillotine. Young de Courfeyrac knew nothing of the language when he arrived. When his mother discovered he had not returned from his daily constitutional, the police were summoned in broken English. They found him by a fire, wrapped in a woman's shawl and eating a stale loaf. His father demanded a restoration of his honor by repaying the woman, but she refused, even though she had nothing. In the diary, she was called Madame Pain – the woman who had given bread.
At once Christian longed to meet her, this old woman, though the flower of youth and beauty had long faded from her cheek, if she were even yet alive.
And so too he knew what he wanted to study at university, when he was sent there, without an inheritance of the land – and not just women. Truth, he had learned, could be found in the written word.
He suffered through adolescence at the chateau, engaging in the occasional diversion of small and untraceable acts of subversion. He found his voice, and was far too charming to chastise.
In triumph the second son marched off to university, where he flirted with grisettes instead of meeting the daughters of respectable men, lent out his father's money too liberally to the friends he attracted, and absorbed himself in debates that he always began with an apology. All the behavioral indications of a man of enlightenment, naturally.
Paris became Mecca in that he first saw a crowd roused by a prophet. It was there he worshiped the trinity of liberté, egalité, et fraternité, summoned forth by Enjolras, in whose thunderous eyes he saw the dream of General Lamarque.
He fell in with the friends of the abased. From his surname he dropped the de and soundly teased anyone who addressed him undesirably – even Madame Hucheloup, who really ought to know better.
Ah, Madame Hucheloup. So much talk of revolution had occurred in her little shop. She had been good to them. He regretted now that he could not see her – or drink more of her wine, if Grantaire had not imbibed it all, but he must remain steady.
He could see no one here aside from the schoolboys, the red. It was a sentence unpunctuated. The exchanges of fire at the other barricades had ceased; the faint sounds had died. Courfeyrac, too, went quiet.
No one had come to join them but the old père binding up wounds.
The Guard's sharpshooters had been efficiently dispatched, but the injuries would come too fast now to be salved. The barrage of cannon fire continued, and they had nothing with which to answer. He had taken up his sword, but it would only be effective once the wall had been broken, and then he must use it with all ferocity that became a man choosing to meet death. For he was the center.
Marius, on the extremity of the barricade – Marius, who had saved them all – had his distinctive nose all but obscured in congealing blood. Courfeyrac might have teased him about an inability to attract a mademoiselle, but he was too far away to hear among the booms of their death knell, and his laughter lodged in his throat.
Were the people not to come? They could yet do so. They could come bringing powder and morale. They were just behind those locked-up windows. And for this instant, he felt like the abaisse: in the streets while others looked down upon them; in view, in reach, and left without hope. Uncovered.
He had given away his cravat, and the shawl had been taken from him when he had not been able to speak for it.
That was before he had learned to fight, if one could ever learn. These wild eyes around him had only ever taken in stories and poems, he realized. Jehan trembled as if to expire. The night was over and the chance to escape had gone with it. They could only hope for deliverance.
Whatever had brought them here was lost to them now; lost in the feel of the breath tightening their chest, the blood pounding in their temples – the incessant sound of the cannon. Perhaps the other men were thinking of themselves and of their duty, or of their desperation to die valiantly. There is something primal and inexplicable in such moments, when a man breaching the barricade can become not a man but the base thief of one's life, and one strikes without thinking, with anything available. This did not frighten Courfeyrac as he anticipated the cannon and guns, for though he thought of his amis, he did not want to watch them die.
His dark eyes swept to Enjolras, poised at the other exterior of the piled furniture as if of more impermeable marble. In his soul, he felt nothing could pass the man. His courage was thus momentarily reinforced.
In times of heightened feeling, he thought too, as did his fellows save Grantaire and Enjolras, of women. His zeal was fired by thoughts of his mistresses, as was proper, though in a collective form, as there had been a profusion of them.
There was a hazy thought of another woman unknown and unattractive, unbidden.
He had never seen Madame Pain. But in these streets, even though she was a lifetime and a stretch of sea away, she was everywhere. Since he had arrived in Paris with the goal of having women and lofty conversation, she had been the spectre of his thoughts. He had seen her huddled by the gates, and crouched outside of palatial gardens, and lying dead in the gutter. Her face was always different, but haunted him all the same.
Every time he had opened a book, she had been there. Her children were the abandoned of Rousseau's; she his neglected paramour. She had been there observing when he had first met Marius and encouraged him to lay aside his admiration for Bonapartism. She had been a stranger to him and a stranger to her government. She was here. This revolution could be hers; the Channel could be a conveyance of truth, spreading seeds of ideas that would bear fruit in other lands. And here he had determined to die for her, even if he could do nothing else for her, even if it would do nothing for her.
His life had been spent mostly in selfish sin, but perhaps, at its end, he would be forgiven. He had always had hope of mercy in spite of the suffering he'd seen on Earth.
I stayed there pale and believed in God.
He held his sword-hilt loosely in one hand, a bottle of absinthe to smash in the other on the head of an assailant. He did not have long to wait. In all his life he had not been a patient man, but that was at an end. His expression softened.
Now he remembered his mother.
Combeferre had sung of preferring a mother's love to the glory of Caesar's sword. Enjolras claimed in a reverent whisper the maternity of France.
Christian, Maman had said, be good.
He hadn't listened, most of the time.