Early morning, June fifth, 1832
A cold rain greeted Jehan when he tossed open his window. Still waistcoatless but already sashed in tricolor, he stuck out his head and shoulders to feel the air. The clouds, gray and expectant, didn't quite cover the sky. It would be a dappled day, thought Jehan, with patches of rain and sunshine. Bad day for a funeral procession, perhaps, but a good one for an émeute. A day that light would pick a quarrel with darkness.
He smiled. Taking his musket from the corner, he laid it across the table so he wouldn't forget it and began to stuff cartridges into his pockets. One didn't fit…it ought to, though; he had brought them all home in his pockets last night. He loaded it into the gun instead, and that was that.
Then he straightened the blankets on his bed and moved the gun there to clear the table. Jehan glanced at his pocketwatch on the desk. Good, he still had time.
After visiting a drawer and a few shelves, he laid five cases on the table, and began to open them one by one.
The first was his old ivory flute, the one his father had bought him when he first came to Paris and to the Conservatoire. Four keys, conical bore…no tuning slide. He grimaced. Tuning slides were one of the greatest inventions of all time. "Good old days of tuning with your embouchure," he muttered as he picked it up and played two octaves of a D scale.
It was a bit of a pre-émeute ritual for him. A pointless one, really, but it was what he did. All of his instruments came out and he played them all, at least a little. In 1830 there had only been three cases on the table. Last year he had participated in several minor riots of protest and there had been four. Those times hardly counted, really. They weren't even close to proper revolutions. But just in case, he always told his music goodbye.
He fingered his way through a bit of a Mozart concerto, one of the last things he'd performed on that flute. He'd forgotten how the cadenza went, he realized. Ah well, he'd make his fingers remember it some other day. This morning was not the time. Jehan put the ivory flute away.
The next case was his piccolo. Rather a rude thing to play at this hour of morning, he decided, so all he did was long tones. When they started getting into the high register, he quit. After pressing his lips against it one last time, he put the piccolo back in its case as well.
Oh, his keyless E-flat! It had been forever since he'd played it…old-fashioned, made of ash. He'd heard a teacher playing one like it and fallen in love with the sound. Melancholy, it was. Marvelous for simple tunes and airs. Slowly he raised it to his mouth and meandered through a minor folk song, his eyes closed and his fingers moving fluidly on their own.
In a spirit of contrast, he opened the case of his Boehm next. His E-flat was a flute of the past; this was a flute of the future. A new design, new fingerings, keys on every hole—and made of silver. He'd just gotten it in from Germany a few months ago. He pulled a sheet of music off his shelf, an etude for double-tonguing. The tone of the silver, as he played, was bright, both lively and oddly technical. He was still getting used to this Boehm model and its peculiar sound.
The last case, and it was his own flute. Not that the others didn't belong to him, but this one…he belonged to it, too, somehow, belonged to this smooth piece of ebony with a conical bore and five keys. He knew it, all of its patterns, all of its oddities. But today as he connected the head joint to the body, the familiarity was mixed with reverence.
Jehan glanced over at his pocketwatch. There was time still, but not much.
He laid his lips on the flute, and it came alive. Music happened. It took him a moment to even realize what he was playing. Oh, that was it, the allegretto from Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach's Hamburger Sonata. His fingers and his breath left his mind behind, and he played.
About six minutes later, he held the last note a tad longer than he usually did. He wasn't going on to the rondo, much as he would have liked to. No, he'd be going out in a few minutes, heading to the funeral, and if he were to die in the revolution to follow, what better thing to have last played on his flute than La Marseillaise?
So he played it. Loudly. Ringingly, stirringly. He let it carry him away. The simple verse, the verse ornamented, a change of key, one verse more. Vive la France, he thought. Vive l'avenir.
He finished. He put the other four instruments back in their places. But his own flute he took apart and carefully cleaned. Then, reluctantly, he nestled it into its case and whispered goodbye to it by name. "Till tomorrow," he added.
The case went on his desk. On his desk—oh, there was the villanelle he'd been writing last night. That one line in the third stanza…he grimaced. He couldn't leave a potential last work sitting on his desk with an awkward line like that. He folded it small and crammed it into his pocket with the cartridges. Maybe he would think of how to fix it in the course of the day.
His desk was recently organized, and that meant the things he most wanted or needed to do was in plain sight. He shuffled through a few more papers—music, an essay, a translation. So many things undone…
Ah well, he thought. There's always tomorrow. Today, I go to pick a fight with darkness.
Jehan ran a hand over his flute case one more time, threw on a waistcoat and coat and hat, grabbed his gun off the bed, and headed out to meet Bahorel for Lamarque's funeral.