He looked at me with eyes I thought
I was not like to find;
The voice he begged for pence with brought
Another man to mind.
Oh, no, lad, never touch your cap;
It is not my half-crown:
You have it from a better chap
That long ago lay down.
Turn east and over Thames to Kent
And come to the sea's brim,
And find his everlasting tent
And touch your cap to him.
- A E Housman
Courfeyrac is a grasshopper memory, a flick of movement in waving green fields.
Remembrance comes at odd moments. A student with his cravat loose, leaning over the balconies in the gods at the theatre, hands cupped to his mouth as he cries his merry mockery at the stage, his laughing friends trying to pull him back. A note in the rising rill of joy at the table next to him in a restaurant, and Marius looks up with a start and still expects to see a familiar curly chestnut head among the crowd of students at the next table. The angled head of a young man admiring the prettily turned ankle of a girl stepping onto the sidewalk. The flare of a coat.
He starts as he hears the voice at his side, begging for a sou. It has a particular pitch – not humble, but as of one where amusement might be lurking just behind the deferential façade. He looks down into the green eyes of the beggar, and is confused for a moment. But just a moment. The face is thin as Courfeyrac's was not; the high bridge of the nose is unlike that of his lost friend. The resemblance is fleeting. A leap from one blade of grass to another.
Months after he had first ventured outside again following his long convalescence, he had run into an acquaintance, a friend of Courfeyrac's, while strolling in the Gardens. Marius had tried to break away as the student had eagerly sought to tell him details of what had happened in the Rue de Chanvrerie, of how their friend had become embroiled in the emeute. Cosette had tightened her grip on his arm as the man had prattled on, oblivious. Marius pretended ignorance.
"His parents came up to Paris once the bodies were identified – they were able to claim him. They had no idea of his political activities and then one summer day they're standing in the Paris morgue, arranging for his collection, like a stray parcel. How very like Courfeyrac, wasn't it?"
"There wasn't a cruel bone in Courfeyrac's body" he said. And the friend suddenly came to himself, the delicious gossip losing some of its tang. He made his apologies and left.
So the de Courfeyracs had taken him away. It would have been better to leave him with his friends, in one of those mass graves for the unclaimed. Marius could not be sure which one, and could not ask. He would sleep the sounder with such a vanguard.
Another flick of memory. A conversation about the catacombs that, at the time, had no significance. He could smell the smoke from his friend's cigar.
"The de Courfeyracs have been mouldering in the chapel crypt back at home for generations…I could not abide such stuffy company. I'm going to ask them to bury me upright in my boots beneath a dance hall…"
He reached into his purse and took out five francs. He had been in Courfeyrac's debt to the amount of some 10 louis when they went to the barricades. Early in their acquaintance he had rejected the offer of a loan and had accepted help only in finding an occupation and in selling what personal effects he could, but by the end he had taken money regularly. Courfeyrac, liberal in his advice on women, clothes, how to conduct himself in society and how to hold a billiard cue, had never once asked a question about the money he loaned Marius. The regular five francs for Thenardier had been passed over without hesitation, and while his eyes and smile invited confidences if Marius had cared to share them, he asked nothing in words.
For Courfeyrac the iconoclast there was little that was sacred, but he did know of at least one great sin – that of being mean with money or affection. He was unstinting with both.
Courfeyrac giving money to children on the street, as if hardly aware he did so, carrying on his conversation at the same time. Courfeyrac buying flowers from poor street vendors, pitiful wildflowers that he gave to the next girl he saw. One could accept his gifts without humiliation. There was no sting in his giving, not cold charity here – he handed out money as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if passing a few coins to a ragged child or a sum of money to a friend were a matter of course, hardly cause for comment, not even cause for notice.
At least I gave him a few hours more, thought Marius, recalling his arrival at the barricades. He was glad he no longer remembered the note of fear in Courfeyrac's cry for help as a National Guardsman had advanced on him, knocked to the ground. But he was sorry that the impression of the warm embrace once the assailants had been temporarily driven off had faded as well. "If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" He knew these things had happened - both the cry and the embrace - but only because he reminded himself that they had, replacing the actual memory with a reconstructed recollection.
He had purchased only a few hours more for his friend, but these things mattered when how one fell was all that was left. I hope he died on his feet after all.
Perhaps those few hours had in some way paid back what he owed to Courfeyrac – a debt that could never be entirely settled, not in this life.
He gave the five francs to the boy, who returned enthusiastic thanks for the unlooked for generosity.
All these years later, when the horror of the barricades had faded into a vague nightmare, it was the laughter and not the grapeshot and gunfire that rang most loudly – laughter in a reign of fire. The wrenching sorrow is long gone, leaving only that occasional grasshopper flick of memory.
"No, do not thank me…." He began, but the green-eyed child was skipping away in the crowd.
It was no bad thing to be in debt to Courfeyrac.