PART ONE
Pyrexia ~ Chapter 1
Since his arrival in Paris in the Spring of 1824, Enjolras had picked up many good habits, and only a few bad ones.
For as long as he could remember, his father had cast a distrustful eye on the city. He had been a student at the Sorbonne himself once, but that was before it had been suppressed by the Revolution. While the conjugation of Latin verbs and the expansion of algebraic equations had changed little since M. Enjolras' time, he harbored a deep suspicion that nothing else was the same.
Enjolras the younger harbored a suspicion still more terrible: perhaps his father was right.
The temptations of the city were great for even the most impoverished of workingmen and the most unsophisticated of peasants, but for a young student of some means, they were endless. M. Enjolras had feared – perhaps not without cause - that his son would be seduced into vice or, worse still, laziness.
At sixteen, Enjolras had been a pensive boy, given to violent moods. He dreamed a little, and thought a lot, delighting more in the process of reasoning than in the reaching of any particular conclusion. When the subject of morality was broached, he would sigh, wearied by rights and wrongs, concerned only with how a situation could have arisen where such a judgment might need to passed.
People called him apathetic when they were being polite, amoral when they were not. They said he had the makings of a libertine in him. On none of these accounts were they entirely incorrect.
His father had waited two years before sending Enjolras to Paris, to see if the problem would clear up with age; had he held off much longer, the damage might have become permanent. But by the end of his first month in the city, something that had long lain dormant in Enjolras' breast had begun to stir.
Being new to Paris, friendless, burdened with free time, and not yet acquainted with the maze of alleys and unmarked doors, Enjolras walked the Champs Elysees like a tourist. Though sometimes, he found it hard to look straight ahead when he did. No matter how far he walked, the boulevard was eternally before him, pointed like an arrow at the horizon. Stretched so long that the horizon curved and the earth dropped away before it.
That point where horizon and road met seemed somehow wrong to him. It repelled, like a limb twisted by a badly broken bone.
And yet Enjolras returned. Every afternoon he went, so that his shadow would drag behind him or rise to meet him, depending on which way he turned. He felt that he, too, was becoming straight. That he was, not receding into the distance, but unwinding like ribbon from a spool.
He was learning, with time, that he, too, had a final destination. But that he, too, had much to examine along the way.
He wrote a letter home every week, and he hid nothing. If M. Enjolras was flustered by his son's politics, he never let on. He was far more concerned whether or not Enjolras was attending his anatomy lectures, and if he had yet squandered his allowance.
Some of Enjolras' most passionate polemics appeared in the letters he sent home to his father. They were a whirl of radical ideas, fierce denunciations, and skilled rhetoric. He was answered with inquiries into how his winter clothes were holding up and requests to procure a copy of The Last of the Mohicans as soon as he found it available.
Had it been anyone else, Enjolras would have spent days in what felt like an icy rage but looked like a sulky pout. But he loved his father dearly, and so he forgave him his flaws.
He even bought him a copy of the damned Mohican book, though surely he would have perished of shame if any of his comrades from the University ever saw him with such rubbish.
When he fell in with the labor movement and the Socialist salons, he became eloquent for the first time. He learned to talk to almost anyone about almost anything, and, when he couldn't talk, to close his mouth and nod convincingly. He channeled his natural thoughtfulness toward the subjects of greatest importance. Between classes, organizing, recruitment, studying, culture, and dreams, he had no time for apathy.
He eschewed drinking, gambling, and dandyism - though he grudgingly saw the crude appeal of them - only women held not the slightest interest for him. This troubled him sometimes and puzzled him often. Surely there was some innate flaw common to all women, invisible to the conscious mind but unable to fool the subconscious. Something viscerally repulsive.
Many times, Enjolras had vowed to investigate the matter and at last come to some definite conclusion, but something else always interrupted him before he could make much progress.
Paris had instilled but one bad habit in him, and that was a love of the night. For a long time, he had always gone to bed early, sometimes nodding off at his desk over a book before he even knew sleep was coming. When that happened, the book bled over into his slumber, and he dreamed himself as the subject of whatever it was he had read about: a cathedral, a battle, an insect, a letter, a rivalry.
This had not bothered him before, but now he found it deeply disturbing. He would start awake from such dreams drenched in a cold sweat, with a deep sense of foreboding.
And so Enjolras no longer read before retiring to bed.
Instead, he would walk after dinner. To stroll the streets of Paris during the day was a respectable pastime, but he knew that if he did that he was bound to see only one type of person and he was more a promenader than a pedestrian. It was only in the evenings, when the factories closed and the theaters opened, that you could see the city for what it really was.
He rarely walked the Champs Elysees these days; he was more interested in the twists and sidestreets and cul-de-sacs. The capillaries of the city. Branches of branches of branches.
And if he was ever worried that the labyrinth of the inner city, charming and enigmatic in daylight, became dangerous when the sun went down, he never let on. He considered it more hazardous to his health by half that he did not sleep until later and later, and yet his responsibilities continued to compound and he still rose at the same early hour each day.
"Insomnia is a symptom of a tumor on the brain," Joly informed him one day.
"I don't have a tumor."
"Or a lesion…"
"I'm sure I don't have a brain lesion, either."
Joly's eyes narrowed, and he looked him over with the gaze of a compulsive gambler. "Have you counted the number of breaths you take in a minute while asleep?"
"How am I supposed to count while I'm asleep?"
"You don't do the counting yourself. You get someone to sit with you while you fall asleep and then count for you."
"I don't doubt I'd sleep poorly with someone watching me like that. I'd be nervous."
He could not help but notice that Joly had edged away from him slightly, as if whatever he had was contagious. "Parasites in the intestines," he said shrewdly, "Can disrupt sleep patterns, too."
"Don't mind him," said Bossuet, who had been listening intently. "Joly's just jealous. Insomnia is one affliction he hasn't tried yet."
While Enjolras appreciated the support, he was not bothered much. Joly tried to warn him that sleeping so little at the beginning of life could shave a decade off the end, but that seemed a small loss. It wasn't that he wanted to die, but he didn't want to live to be obsolete, either.
More than that, he didn't want to give up the night.
Paris seemed to exist under a different sky than his home in the South had. In the country, you felt free; in the city, you could see the bars of your cage with undeniable clarity. Between the streetlights and the pollution, there were almost no stars and the moon sometimes looked sickly and gray. But Enjolras was no sentimentalist, no contemplator of moonlight on black water or the arc of Orion.
He found constellations on earth instead. For there were streets where the fading light framed a tenement building just right, and made it look like a fortress locked down before a siege. Places where the shadows fell on the spires of Pont Neuf and made them seem, when taken at a glance, like heads mounted on pikes.
It had snowed for three days straight, and on the fourth day the sun had peeped out hesitantly and melted the drifts to gray slush. But when the sun set it turned the dirty puddles red, and they looked to him like puddles of blood around his boots.
He knew the resemblance was but a cursory one, and it withstood only the most fleeting of scrutiny.
But he was not the only one who saw it.