A/N: Enjolras is a very farouche young man, something we don't always get a sense of in fanfic, with a few notable exceptions. In Hugo's work, he is still and self contained in combat before exploding into action and employing, among other moves, the canne de combat/bâton rose couverte move. Even in the 1820s, when savate was being formally developed as a discipline in Paris, it was already linked with moves involving cannes or bâtons. Canne de combat was developed in the early 19th century as a means of defence by men carrying canes.
"...la rose couverte, que l'on fait pour salut, est la plus jolie arabesque, dessinée au bâton, que l' on puisse voir ; les voltés, les écarts de cote, les coups de travers pleuvent drus comme grêle) ; ce salut est vraiment très-gracieux et très-élégant. Après cela, les maîtres se mettent en garde, et les hostilités sont ouvertes, les cannes tourbillonnent et s' entre-choquent en pétillant...''
Théophile Gautier
"Give me your cane, Joly."
Joly, startled, darted a glance to where Enjolras stood. His chief's hand was outstretched slightly back in Joly's direction, but his eyes were firmly forward, not moving from the five men that confronted them.
Joly wasn't taking in many details about their assailants – not so much because of the lack of ambient light in the side street, but because two of them had rather wicked looking unfolded jambettes, held in a grip that suggested their wielders knew well how to use them. Remarkable how that drew the gaze and the attention.
His cane? What good was his cane going to do in a situation like this? It was a good cane, yes, but it would be quite useless against two armed men and three more who looked as if their mothers had mated with a bull.
It had not been his preference to walk so close through these shadowy neighbourhoods near the Louvre at this time of night. But they had been returning from a late meeting with the workers, and Combeferre had heard of some early flooring that had been uncovered during the recent demolition of a decrepit building – an underlying medieval mosaic floor, he had said with the delight most other men reserved for unearthed pirate treasure, and between Courfeyrac's enthusiasm for an adventure and Enjolras' indifferent willingness to accommodate Combeferre, the four had found themselves in that warren of streets between the little gate leading to the pont du Carrousel and the rue du Musee, amidst rotting and condemned buildings.
It was only when they turned into one of the darker passages near the marshy ground bordering the rue de Richelieu that Enjolras had bent his head to Combeferre and whispered something to him. The latter started slightly, and then looked back over his shoulder. "I hear them too," Courfeyrac said, his voice uncharacteristically serious. "How long?"
"Probably since the rue Saint Denis," Enjolras said. It was only then that Joly realised that their footsteps had echoes not of their making.
"Running would seem the prudent course – there seem to be more than one or two of them" Combeferre observed coolly.
But it turned out to be too late for that particular judicious course of action – "this is a blind alley", Enjolras said softly, and behind them the stalking men fanned out across the means of escape.
One in particular stood in the lead of the others, bracing his legs wide (perhaps, thought Joly a touch irrelevantly, because his thighs must be as wide around as tree trunks and he needed a wide stance), He was dressed, Joly's mind noted helpfully, in a ridiculously tight, short and very blue tailcoat and a yellow waistcoat that had already popped one or two buttons across the broad chest.
And oh, dear...he was sizing up to Enjolras, and Enjolras was not backing down. Combeferre and Courfeyrac flanked him, but what was Joly to do? He had to support his friends, of course, but this could be more than bruising...it could well be bloody.
"Lapins!" Said blue-coat. "A word with you."
"What word could you want with us?" was Enjolras' cautious opening gambit. Absurdly and just a bit desperately, Joly wondered if perhaps these might be working men – after all, two were dressed in smocks – and perhaps, just perhaps they might be interested in the brotherhood of man and...
"A word of warning. You students spend too much time slinking around the soldiers stationed on the left bank and the ateliers, filling everyone's heads with discontent. Boys shouldn't play such games. Attend to your studies and your pierreuses."
Joly wondered what a pierreuse was – what little argot he knew came from the south. Courfeyrac chuckled (goodness – he really did laugh at everything!). "Some of us can attend to our studies, girls and our politics" he said in that far-too-light voice, "although I would not put such an emphasis on the studies."
Enjolras flicked out his hand to the side in warning, and Joly hoped that Courfeyrac would take the cue and just shut up.
When blue-coat smiled, he had very ugly yellow teeth, like a half-torn up strip of paving stones.
"Then we'll have to persuade you. Good – I was hoping for an excuse to acquire your pocket watches."
Joly worried about Enjolras.
Not about his intelligence or ability to sway others. Listening to Enjolras speak or engaging him in conversation was a refreshing experience. It left one feeling as if all superfluous matter in the engagement had been burned away, to leave you with the purity of an idea or an argument tempered like steel. He was as remorselessly logical in his analysis as a Euclidian equation, almost mathematical in his precision. And then, just as one thought him cold, he surprised you. His words caught fire, and the passionate belief spilled from him in a series of soaring images. In those moments, those who listened to Enjolras and his ideas saw beyond the sordid shadows of the present flawed world, and the vista beyond the apocalypse opened up to them. He seemed less a being of flesh and more an idea incarnate, a conduit to another state of being.
But that flesh...well, it was that which concerned Joly. That mind was housed in a curiously frail, terribly young body. He seemed – well, feminine wasn't the right word, but certainly androgynous and far from the broad-shouldered ideal of a hero. Those shoulders carried the weight of their Revolution, and sometimes it seemed they were too thin, and the task too much for a young man who looked almost a child in his youthfulness.
Consumption? Some congenital weakness of the heart? He must have weak lungs – perhaps that was why he didn't smoke? Joly caught himself gazing at Enjolras' wrist one day, where the blue-green veins were visible through clear, pale skin. How could that thin wrist have the strength to wield a sword?
"You're worried about Enjolras?" Combeferre had said in amazement when he broached the subject.
"Yes," Joly responded, suddenly conscious that he sounded perhaps just a bit prissy and possibly even nosy. "He doesn't seem terribly robust. I wonder if he might be anaemic, or perhaps have some pneumatic condition?"
Combeferre laughed. "Don't worry about Enjolras – I know he looks as if a strong wind might carry him away, but he's one of those fellows that will probably outlive all of us."
And with that dismissal the subject was dropped. He knew they thought him overcautious – called him a malade imaginaire, the stock character beloved of caricaturists and playwrights like Molière. But really, who better than he to know that sickness was real, and that disease might attack any of them?
He shuddered when his friends laughed about "pneumonia dresses," those flimsy gowns with their low cut bodices exposing far too much of the chest. He remembered Annette, his pretty older sister, who had shrugged off their mother's suggestions that she take a warmer wrap one evening on her way to a Bal Masqué. It was one of the winter season's highlights, and she had more to concern herself than with any threat of exposure. She had walked out the door in a cloud of chiffon and lace, her neck and shoulders bare, her flimsy satin cloak trailing behind her as she stepped into a friend's waiting carriage. He did not see her return in the early hours of the morning, but the next day she had complained of a headache and aching limbs. "Too much dancing!" she had laughed, but the laughter had a strain to it.
The next day, when the fever began, they diagnosed pneumonia. Within the week, they had put her in the frozen earth.
Pneumonia was one of the things he thought of as he lay awake at night, wondering if his heart beat was too slow or too fast, or whether his skin too flushed and warm or too clammy and cold. He thought about his toes – were they beginning to lose sensation? What about his other limbs? Did they feel heavy? Did they ache as if the bones longed to be free of the flesh? And then he'd be up, leafing through his medical texts, convincing himself by morning that he had any number of fatal maladies.
"Don't do it to yourself, Joly" Combeferre had told him kindly. "You know that if you read a catalogue of symptoms you're as likely as not to imagine you have them all. There's not a soul alive who, on reading a book of diseases, hasn't been convinced that he has some rare ailment or other."
"It's hard not to read medical texts when one is a medical student" Joly had replied with good humour. And hard not to let it prey on the mind when you saw what sickness did to a body, how disease invaded and perverted its functions. The masses of dark growths in the organs, the slime of pus and mucous in a sickly being, the wrongness of unhealthy tissue either enflamed and red or far too pale...he expected he'd become indifferent to it all by the time he graduated and, indeed, when he was watching a dissection he was able to detach himself from the cadaver before him.
It was later, in the small hours of the morning, when things came back to warn him and he worried that the tightness in his chest might indicate the onset of consumption. He wished he had someone with him, then – someone warm and vital and alive. "Find a mistress," was Courfeyrac's sympathetic advice, and Joly was beginning to think he was right.
Catching Enjolras coughing three times over the space of half an hour in the Musain one evening, he had thought himself vindicated.
"Enjolras, are you alright?" Enjolras did not look up from his papers.
"Perfectly, I assure you."
Another cough, stifled with his hand.
"Come, you are not!" He jumped to his feet and put a hand on Enjolras's wrist to feel his pulse. Enjolras, bewildered, let him. "I am a physician in training –" he started
"Six month's training," Courfeyrac supplied, amused.
"...in training, and I know you're trying to conceal some symptoms from me..."
"I don't know what you're talking about." Enjolras said firmly, trying to tug his hand back.
"You are pale, you don't eat, and you have been coughing all evening."
Enlightenment dawned on Enjolras' face. "Oh! That – Courfeyrac has apparently found some new and exotic tobacco, and it seems to be stirring up an irritation in my throat."
"So sorry, dear chap," Courfeyrac said, waving the cigar that was the culprit in a wide circle in the air. "A friend brought it back from America for me – quite a wild, rough strain, but so invigorating in its raw and rebellious state..."
Combeferre started laughing at him. "You attribute the character of Bahorel to a strain of tobacco?"
"And Joly attributes Enjolras' ticklish throat to a fatal malady!' Courfeyrac said with a grin. Joly blushed and sat down. Enjolras returned to his notes, ignoring the good-natured chiding.
Still, Joly worried. What would become of Enjolras if the wordy skirmishes turned into physical demonstrations on the streets, as it seemed likely they would?
And now, as predicted, here they were. Facing down five men in a place already no doubt filled with bad humours and malignant vapours. Erratically, he worried about how bad a beating he would receive – would he be able to make his classes?
Then Enjolras ordered him to hand over his cane. And it was an order, given in a tone that assumed immediately compliance. Combeferre would have explained...Courfeyrac would have requested it with panache ("sorry, old man, I must ask for the loan of your cane..."). Enjolras commanded. Joly obeyed. Enjolras had not taken his eyes off the two armed men, moving slightly to the side so they had to follow his movement. Courfeyrac and Combeferre seemed to respond to some signal, or else they knew what to do, as they parted ways, dividing the attention of their assailants.
Enjolras shifted his grip slightly and then began to...well, to twirl the cane. He lifted it over his head, spinning it with a smooth motion of his wrist. Joly blinked, because the movement evoked, of all things, the symbol for infinity. Two crossing ovals...that was the motion as the cane picked up speed and force with gathering momentum. It tilted forward, like a protective shield.
Which side moved first he could not tell, but suddenly both Enjolras and the two armed men made a move towards each other, the men advancing with knives held in a threatening gesture. Enjolras changed the angle of the cane, and with a hard impact that must have smarted, knocked the blade out of the grasp of the closer man. Then without pause he changed the angle of the swing, moving the cane from a horizontal to a vertical angle, before moving sideways to knock the other man's hand. His assailant grunted in pain with the smack of the wood on his fingers.
La rose couverte, Joly suddenly remembered. That's what it was. A movement the bâtonists used...he'd heard it jokingly referred to when a nervous man waved his cane in front of him to deter an advancing dog, but this was nothing like that motion. This was firm, economical and precise, Enjolras moving fluidly from one movement to the next. As the disarmed knife wielders came at him with beefy fists raised, the student pivoted neatly on one foot, bringing the other leg up parallel to the ground and swinging it round to slam into jaw of one and knock him back. He then did something with his feet that Joly couldn't quite follow – it looked as if he was tangling them in those of the man still standing, tripping him.
The third man – the hulking one in his blue coat - launched himself into the affray, bursting the arm cysts of his sleeves as he swung with a bellow, roaring a stream of invective about pantres. He was brute force incarnate, a mountain of flesh – and he was soundly driven back by a short, sharp rap of the cane before Enjolras dropped his weight to his forearms (for one moment, Joly thought he might be doing a handstand, but no, he never reached that angle)and drove his feet backwards and squarely into the man's midsection with a bruising force. Then back on his feet in one smooth leap, swinging the cane with the entire force of his torso behind it to provide momentum, right into the side of the man's head. All this was done without Enjolras uttering a sound, each move performed in silence and with precision.
As fascinating as the spectacle was – and it took longer to disentangle the separate movements in his head than it did for Enjolras to execute them - Joly was brought back to a recollection of his other two friends and the remaining assailants by a muffled grunt, turning to see Courfeyrac getting much the worst of it from a man in a worker's smock who could swing his firsts very easily. Joly, who hadn't been in a fight since he was involved in school yard scuffles, did the only thing he could think of doing and launched himself on the man's back, grabbing his arms around the biceps. My, but the man had prominent tendons and veins in his neck, which Joly now had a very close view of, along with what looked like a nasty rash creeping up under the thug's collar, but which he hoped was just dried skin. The man almost jerked his arms from Joly's grip immediately, but the student hung on grimly, hoping at least to slow him down with the weight of his admittedly not overly bulky body. He took an elbow back in his chest that caused an "oof" of air to escape, but now Courfeyrac had recovered himself.
"It's unsporting," he gasped, "but hold him, Joly!"
Joly did so, and Courfeyrac landed a few blows before what Joly recognised his own cane was brought down on the man's head with a hard crack, and with a thud he dropped soundlessly and solidly to the cobblestones. The man who had squared off with Combeferre, sizing up matters, caught up blue-coat from the ground, who staggered before launching into a run with his comrade's arm under his, followed at a running lurch by one of the knife wielders.
That left one assailant standing, if only just. Enjolras again used that tangling movement with his feet that knocked them out from under the other man. "Coup de pied bas," Combeferre said approvingly. "Enjolras, you've been refining your savate!" The brute was left lying on his back, breathing heavily with narrowed eyes. He turned his head to spit on the ground defiantly.
Enjolras pressed the end of the cane to the man's throat as if it were a sword tip. Joly himself almost forgot it was just a stick, so he could understand why the man stilled himself.
"Names. Who employed you?" Enjolras said harshly. The man pursed his lips into a thin line. Courfeyrac dropped to a squat beside him and clasped his hands together loosely, cocking his head to the side.
"I'd answer if I were you," he advised conversationally. "Don't let my friend's fair hair fool you – he's no Parisian, but rather one of those savages from the South. Only half civilised. I can't answer for him. Come to that," and here he grinned wickedly, showing his white teeth. There was blood on his lip. "I'm from the South as well. As you see, our veneer only runs so deep. Whatever they pay you isn't worth a sound beating...or worse."
"You wouldn't-" The man began, then looked at Enjolras' face. What he saw there in that white stoniness seemed to indicate to him that Enjolras just might.
"Jean Duvalney," he spat out. "A 20 franc job."
"And who employed him to intimidate us?"
"Do you think they'd confide in me? But I'll tell you this for free – you're not the only little clique of students they want to persuade to pull their heads in."
Enjolras nodded, standing down. "Go."
The man struggled to his feet, no one offering assistance. He took his departure without making any effort to ascertain the state of his one remaining unconscious colleague on the paving stones. Combeferre instead went over to him, rolling him onto his side and giving him a cursory examination. "He'll live," he told Enjolras.
Joly, still trying to catch up with all these developments, only caught the broadest flow of the hurried conversation that took place between the other three men.
"Duvalney. Think he's gone in with the Sûreté?" Enjolras asked. Courfeyrac scratched the side of his nose.
"Why not? Most of them are more or less reformed criminals –some less reformed than others. I wouldn't put it past him."
"Or someone is simply paying him a wage to make our lives difficult. This is not the first scuffle in a back street targeting voices raised importunely. Mostly it's been workers, though – some of the men in the rue des Gobelins took a bad beating the other week..." Enjolras observed, and as the three continued the discussion. Joly nudged the man on the ground with his foot, wondering how long it would be until he awakened and, oh, goodness...what would be the repercussions of this..."
"Joly? You planning on staying here all night?" asked Courfeyrac. His split lip gave him a rakish air, but somehow he had retained his hat throughout the scuffle. "I don't know about you, but we're making our way back to a wineshop where I know we can get some medicinal sprits." They were all looking at him expectantly.
"Now you see something of the underground war," Enjolras told him, holding out a hand. "No man will hold it against you if you choose not to partake."
At that, Joly shook himself. "As long as it doesn't happen every day," he said, smiling and taking Enjolras's hand briefly. "I think I can stomach it."
Courfeyrac clapped him on the back. "Find yourself a mistress! Nothing inspires a man to fight better..." he draped his arm around Joly's shoulder. "And thank you, by the way, for that opportune rescue."
"And for the loan of your cane," Enjolras said, handing it back to him. Joly gazed at it with something just short of wonder – it seemed so slim, so innocuous, that it was difficult to believe that in certain hands it might prove to be such an effective and even deadly instrument.