The gathering at the Musain by turns fascinates and intimidates him. These men – they are alive with the sort of verve you imagine, but are never sure whether you truly believe in. They are in equal parts lively and solemn, full of a camaraderie brought about by shared ills.
They are educated; educated in the way of universities and, for some of them, extensive libraries in their family homes. Their eloquence is of such a natural, unpractised sort that they are languid about it, some of them. He envies them their ease, and feels shabby by comparison. Shabby and diminutive and not at all sure what he is doing here.
The man named Courfeyrac and another he will later learn is named Bahorel wave him over to sit with them. "Feuilly, my friend!" Courfeyrac says with an inimitable, unabashed exuberance, and, so saying, leaps up from his seat to greet him, pumping his rough hand in his own smooth one. Feuilly is somewhere between impressed, pleased and discomfited. He sits, and Bahorel slides a bottle over to him.
What one must understand is that Feuilly did not have parents whose ideals he could, growing up, either absorb or rebel against the way we so often do. He had known as a child only the jumbled, cold headiness of playing with other street-children. Older, seeking to better himself, he found himself set apart further still from the rest of humanity. Now he was neither desperately poor nor by any stretch of the imagination close to affluence, and this put him in a strange hinterland. He observed, and languished, and tried time and again to re-learn and reform his idea of himself. What the rest of us might with knowing pretension call formative years, he did not have. A man grown, still he saw himself only half-made. He knew others in distant countries, better than he knew himself. Diligent, he schooled himself against these thoughts, which were neither conducive nor admirable nor any good to anyone, but they were there nevertheless.
And so the second time he arrived at the Musain, it was with a careful spring in his step and a delighted air. "Joly!" he greeted, "Combeferre! What news?"
Combeferre looked at him askance, but Joly launched into some story, and he was saved.
The next day, it was worse. "Oh, the thing about women," he said to Courfeyrac, "is that there are just so many of them. We cannot be expected to be steadfast; what is virtue, but an ideal?" And Courfeyrac laughed and agreed heartily, and his confidence was bolstered. He went on. He concocted stories, jokes; cultivated an air of perfect frivolity. He was malleable, luminous.
He was tired.
Enjolras caught up with him one evening as he was leaving the Musain. The other man had a focused, frank intensity; he was different from his friends. Feuilly admired him, in that way one admires a favourite author or philosopher, and felt half a child for doing so.
"I must be frank," Enjolras said to him, "What do you want of us?"
Feuilly stopped in the middle of the street and turned, slowly, as though afraid to look what lay behind him. Enjolras faced him with his arms folded.
"Want of you? I don't -"
"You are affecting airs, Feuilly, and I do not believe I need to tell you how foolish that makes you. You jest and prattle with Courfeyrac and Bahorel; you philosophise with Combeferre and Prouvaire. Which of those men are you? Your life has not been easy; I cannot imagine you really go about with so little... weight on your shoulders as Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac is a good man, and loyal, but he is like air – impossible and irrepressible. I do not think that is true of you. And how can you be an advocate of justice if you are not an advocate of truth?"
Feuilly's heart lurches. He has a sense of plummeting and yet feeling curiously light.
"I don't know what you mean," is all he manages to say, finally.
Enjolras' stare is level – bold and calm. "Good evening, Feuilly," he says, and steps past him, and in a moment has melted into the crowd, lost from sight even as Feuilly turns to call out.
Sleep will not come, tonight. He lies open-eyed and stares at the ceiling. What is he? Who is he? It seems to him that people exist only in relation to others – but he has no others; not really. He exists only in relation to Greece and Italy and Poland; to unknown men and women and children in places he has never been to. He is an everyman, he thinks. That is all well and good, but how is one supposed to make any difference at all in the world, if one is an everyman?
Over and over these thoughts churn. Paris is his home, yes, but who does that make him? A Parisian. A Parisian who can, or at the very least tries to, turn his gaze outwards to the wider world. Of the people, and for the people. He can do his best to be a voice for them, and perhaps that will be enough. Perhaps to leave a mark, to effect change, you must only know what you are, and not precisely who. (And really, does anyone ever know that?)
The next day, they meet at the Corinth. Feuilly smiles at Courfeyrac and Bahorel; greets them with a different sort of warmth than is usual. That they do not notice, and greet him in return only with their usual grins, speaks volumes.
He sits beside Jehan Prouvaire, opposite Combeferre and Enjolras. They are discussing Rousseau.
"He is right, Rousseau, I think," he adds to the conversation, "Certainly about one thing at least. I think we are all born innocent; the world makes us otherwise."
Combeferre launches off at a pattering tangent about innocence. Enjolras catches Feuilly's eye. Neither of them says anything; what passes between them is an ineffable sort of understanding, a strange pride on the part of the one, reciprocated by an uncertain sort of relief from the other.
Teacher of Justice, he might be. But though we may be born innocent, we are not born wise. First, he had been the student of Truth.