Combeferre was waiting for him at the appointed hour. "You got my message, then."

"Faniel suggested it was urgent."

"Not so urgent it couldn't wait three days." They chatted whilst walking, keeping any possible eavesdroppers at bay through their constant movement. "I just want to know what your lot think they're playing at."

"What do you mean?" Combeferre looked hurt. Feuilly hadn't meant to accuse anyone of anything. Over the past few days, he had become resigned to the idea that the interest these young men had in serious politics was merely one interest among many they might have. It was disappointing that Combeferre, who did seem deadly serious, was involved with dilettantes, but there was nothing to be angry about.

"Not on me," he tried to correct. "Their actions Wednesday proved you're all nothing but a lot of amateurs. A professional or a careful man would never have hailed me in front of a gendarme and then have to cover his mistake. If that's your affair, then that's what it is. But it isn't something I have any intention of joining."

"You feel Courfeyrac covered you badly?"

"He did damned well considering he caused it in the first place. He's quick, I'll give him that, but he's quick in all ways. Excitable. A child."

Combeferre smiled. "Impetuous, I think you mean. Yes, he is that. But he means well, and he understands far more than he is generally credited."

"Impetuous," Feuilly repeated, trying to commit the new word to memory. "The fact remains that you all may be accustomed to friends and comrades being the same thing, but a student cannot hail a workingman with impunity." He was very pleased he had managed to come out with "impunity". "The real trouble is he brought girls into it, and the law doesn't give a damn about feminine virtue. Bahorel told you about when I was arrested."

"Of course. One cannot be silent about such information, though I am sure you might prefer it so."

"Did he leave out that the women were taken in, too? Do you want Mlle Lavisse and some stranger taken in because M. Courfeyrac noticed the gendarme's eyes on us too late?"

"I take your point. And it is very like Courfeyrac. He will be the first to admit that his foot is in his mouth much more often than out of it. But he is more careful than you think him, and quick, and a great friend, and I trust him with my life, as one must do in this endeavour. I ask only that you judge him as himself, not through my eyes. But you must spend some real time with him, not merely a quick chat at a public dance."

"If he is as impetuous as you say, do you think his spirits extend to mountain climbing?"

"What a question! I put little past him sometimes if there is the slightest chance of fun in it." Was there a hint of disapproval in Combeferre's tone? "But it is a strange question, you must admit."

"Did you happen to see what your fellow students did to the pont Saint-Michel before dawn on Monday? It must have taken the police hours to obliterate."

"No. That bridge does not lie in my ordinary travels."

"And I'm the first to tell you of it?" Feuilly asked skeptically. But he shared the pun and was rewarded with a genuine laugh from Combeferre.

"I heartily approve. I wish I could claim credit for our group, but I cannot. Language is a wonderful thing to play with, don't you agree?"

Combeferre had some sort of witchcraft in him, Feuilly thought later, for there was no reason such a simple statement should seem an embrace. But it was, to Feuilly's delight. "If you missed the fun at the bridge, did you at least catch the triumphal entry?"

"I stayed away. I fear hypocrisy more than anything, and I dared not show up only to not shout the praise required. I cannot have failed to notice the substantial increase in visibility of the law these past weeks. Did you go?"

"I did. What's another lie among so many? I can cheer on command. That parade reminded me far too much of the occupations. Soldiers, soldiers, and more soldiers."

"Caesar's triumph or the reoccupation of Paris?"

"Neither is appropriate, is it? The man inherited naturally. I think it was the invasion, the entry his brother had the sense not to take."

"How sad that we miss Louis, who gave us so much cause for rebellion these later years as he violated his own charter."

"It was a parade of fear and a fête of fear." Feuilly relaxed under Combeferre's deft encouragement, and his annoyance got the better of him. "Three times the normal security at the theatres," he gesticulated at the absent king. "Three times the normal security at the fête, and they have always had a heavy presence at the dance halls I know best." He entirely forgot he was admitting to very unsavoury company. "This is a man terrified of his own people because he knew we weren't going to cheer for his damned expensive coronation. And no one believes the so-called sacred ampule was miraculously preserved when we all know damned well it was smashed in the Revolution. God doesn't make fakes sacred: that piece of glass was a golden idol if I've ever seen one. The Church debases itself with this alliance."

"The Church does what is good for the bishops who grew accustomed to living like nobles, with all the privileges, before we rightly curtailed their power."

"It's not fair to the good priests or to God."

"Are there good priests?"

"Maybe in your neighbourhood they're all angling to become bishops, but there have always been a scattering of good ones in mine. I think I can give my life over to God better than they can, for they still have to serve the bishops, but I've made my selfish choice and I can't begrudge them their selfless one."

"Really?" Combeferre asked in surprise. "The religious are generally conservative."

"No, the conservatives want to think every man who believes in God believes in divine right. But divine right doesn't make sense. God didn't sacrifice his son to put us all under earthly domination by mortal man. That is Caesar, and I prefer the separation. Conflating them is how the Church has so blackened itself."

Combeferre gave him a strange look – something confused or curious, perhaps, but not an expression easily read and a novelty thus far in his interactions with Feuilly – and returned abruptly to the original subject. "A frightened man often lashes out in his fear."

Feuilly suspected he had managed to badly reason himself into an inappropriate corner and was grateful enough to follow Combeferre back to a topic he understood better. "Isn't that what we've already seen? The indemnity punished everyone who might not have appreciated Waterloo."

"It rewards his supporters amongst the nobility and tries to move the double vote in his favour. The sacrilege law has brought in the Church."

"And the Haitian indemnity?" Feuilly asked, curious as to what a more educated mind had made of that travesty. A people already free by force of arms should not have had to pay a generation later for their rights. It was as if the Austrian solution to the Greek question were postulated some twenty years after the Turks had given up fighting.

"That is an outright theft, but it creates support among that class that was forced to flee their slaveholding crimes."

"A monarchy of blood."

"As they all are, though this king never earned the title. A monarchy of blood should have the guts to spill some rather than merely appropriate other men's sins."

"I wish I'd come up with that myself," Feuilly admitted, chastened again by the student's great knowledge and the clever way he made such grand use of it.

Combeferre looked away and gave an embarrassed laugh, but he clasped Feuilly's shoulder at the same time in a friendly manner. "I'm not so brilliant as you must think me. We're all feeling our way."

The summer passed in like fashion. Combeferre set a meeting place outside the barrières, and they spent the Sunday afternoon walking out into the countryside where they could not be followed in secret by anyone who wished also to overhear their conversation. As the summer progressed, they occasionally sought the shade of a market gardener's orchard and feasted of his strawberries or peaches on Combeferre's sou. Feuilly accepted the treats reluctantly at first, uncertain of the meaning behind Combeferre's largess. A man's orchard was not a pleasure garden, but Montreuil peaches were usually a gift to a very different sort of friend.

"Before you go any further, I should tell you I like girls. I only like girls," Feuilly emphasised.

Combeferre looked confused for a moment, then he broke out into the embarrassed smile Feuilly was beginning to know so well. "You thought -? Oh dear, I am sorry, yes, I can see – I never meant to frighten you. Yes, now I see all too well. One does hear stories, and I do not know whether they are entirely true or not. I, too, enjoy the company of women for those purposes. Rather too much so, I'm afraid," he added ruefully.

"Too much?" Feuilly asked skeptically. He had initially somehow assumed that Combeferre held himself above petty attachments like the Spaniard had to Mlle Lavisse, though for a moment he had wondered if it was because the student continued to seek him out because he preferred male company. Combeferre was so upright and so knowing that it seemed impossible he could be a perfectly ordinary young man after all.

"Too much for my comfort. It is profoundly unfair that the men of my class are expected – encouraged – to use the women of your class for our pleasures. As a class, we think so much of the purity of our women, yet we defile every working class girl, from the shop assistant to the housemaid. If they work for our enterprises, we can threaten to revoke their livelihoods; if they are strangers to us, we pay them for their attentions whether they have a pass or no. And then we hypocritically rail against the immorality of the working classes: at the women for giving in when we have given them no choice, and at the men for taking our scraps in the same way. Our choices are corruption or celibacy, and I wish celibacy were easier, for I cannot abide corruption. Yet I greatly enjoy the company of women."

"If celibacy were easy, the Church would not require it of its servants. They say the devil puts temptation in our path, but sometimes I wonder if we don't need a devil with God testing us like he did Job. Not just seeing if we give in, but how we give in, how we repent. If we try to mitigate the evil that man is capable of. Prostitutes don't figure, anyway." Was any of this as comforting as he intended it to be? "I've known plenty in my time," he forged ahead. "In unprofessional ways, too. There was a time I never had to pay. You can feel sorry for them if you like, but they made the choice, even the ones without a pass. The real professionals, with their evening dresses and private rooms, it's how they elected to make their living, learned how to do it same as the woman who makes silk roses. If you pity women in general for getting their own living, then you're a clueless bourgeois; if you pity the process by which some choose to do it, then you're a fool. My first girl was a pross, a pretty girl who preferred lying on her back to any other work. We were together for years; I never paid a sou. It's just a trade, no shame in it for the girls who are really in it."

"But the working classes must believe in women's purity, mustn't they? The women who would rather remain honest but who are corrupted by the employers or who have their heads turned by false promises at dance halls. This is where the sins of my people lie."

"Most girls are no better than they should be. It's Paris. The pure are few and far between. In any case, it shouldn't matter," Feuilly said, reminding himself as well as instructing Combeferre. "Do you know how hard it is to get married legally? It's expensive. Some people can't get the documents. So maybe it shouldn't matter how long a marriage in the 13th arrondissement lasts when we choose not to cloister ourselves in an abbey. We're not allowed to make it permanent in the sight of God without having made it permanent in the sight of the state, so the judgment for this failing should come from Him, in all His knowledge, not from the men who deny it us."

"Are such allowances made for the women who have entered these unholy temporary marriages with men able to marry but who will never marry them? The mistresses and kept women? Are they not ruined?"

Feuilly had never considered the situation as he had never met any of those lucky women. "Aren't they really prostitutes? Paid in kind rather than in cash? The gifts must end up with the Jews or at the Mont de Pitié in the end."

"I suppose you are right," Combeferre conceded reluctantly. "Still, I worry about ruining a girl's future prospects."

"Most girls are no better than they should be, and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of possible husbands." Did he sound bitter? He had not meant to, but there was Vivienne, no better than he should have expected, and every girl who rejected him at a dance hall, and Charlotte Menet must have given Didier Whoever everything and was not shunned by her family or friends. Even the girl at Lapeyre's had hands on her day after day and did not seem to mind. Only if one was already married or a real lady did it seem to matter. But at least Combeferre did not want to merely take what was so often taken by right of arms, damn the consequences for the lovely victim. "I think this is one time you and I both have the same rights. You're simply in a better position to use them."

Combeferre thanked him. "There are philosophies that seem eminently logical until put in practice, when all the complications of the world appear designed to test a man's fortitude. If the consequences of an act are morally neutral and thus only the intention matters, but one's intention is inherently subjective and so often self-serving, the categorical imperative is much more difficult to live than to theorize." Feuilly would not have been surprised to learn his utter ignorance was written on his face, for Combeferre immediately dropped into an explanation. "Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who sought to explain both the origins and the true meaning of morality. The consequences of any action are morally neutral, so we must judge the morality of all action by the duty in which the action was conceived. But I fear I have either entirely misunderstood his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals or I find myself in utter disagreement the moment it is challenged. I cannot recommend the book. His political philosophy is extremely interesting, but I wonder how much one can really live in an idea."

Feuilly's education grew by leaps and bounds merely from listening to Combeferre speak, for Combeferre never checked his discourse nor did he hesitate to suggest a more apt word to clarify the thoughts Feuilly grasped at. But his knowledge of Combeferre grew as well. The more Combeferre divulged, by incident rather than intent, the more Feuilly understood what he had meant when he had insisted Feuilly did not want his place in the world.

They were sitting in someone's peach orchard, under the shade of trees laden with small green fruit. How they had got on the subject of time, Feuilly could not remember. "A medical degree takes four years and a thesis, and while I cannot say I have wasted a year already, it feels very like. I hope I might have as much time again in which to do as much good as possible, but I do not count on it." Combeferre's confession was unaccountably sad, and Feuilly worried he meant something other than taking his degree.

"Is it consumption?" he asked.

"Not at all," Combeferre replied with an embarrassed smile. "I am in perfect health. It is merely that my father has been very kind, but I know that his kindness is temporary. In ten years, something must be settled, and my brother is not yet even nine years of age. It would be an unfortunate imposition on the child to count on him to save me from my duty to our family's enterprises."

"You father will pay for medical school and not let you actually be a doctor? You must be rich as a king!" Ships, Feuilly remembered. Combeferre's father might be a one-man Venice.

"And like a king, our wealth brings with it responsibility. Hundreds of men's livings depend on my father's choices; their widows and orphans depend on his continued profits so that he may afford charity to the families of the sailors who are lost. More than two hundred people, if we count such dependents, with my father at the head. One day it shall be mine, and I do not know that I can leave so many people's lives in the hands of managers who may not care as much as I do for the men rather than the profits. Sometimes I fear the business is really a state in microcosm. While I know in the depths of my soul that the monarchy ought not to be, and I feel as if it is wrong to have so much capital concentrated in the hands of so few men, I do not know how far I am willing to go when faced with this example. Our people are sailors and ships' captains and clerks. It makes no sense to have a ship held in common by the crew, not when so much risk must be borne by so few who can stand to lose nothing. And then, what of discipline aboard ship? Decisions cannot be made by vote in the middle of an Indian Ocean typhoon. And yet, the Spithead mutineers elected their leaders, and they were an exemplary set of men who did not permit petty tyranny to destroy their better natures. But then followed the men of the Nore, who were not so wedded to their duties and loyalties and fell into the wrong. A pay dispute and outright treason are such different things, and even then, I do not know how I should have felt as the target of the Spithead men. One must always be willing to hear that one is wrong, yet it is always a hard truth to understand."

Who the hell were the "Spithead mutineers"? Feuilly decided he could find out later, for he was much more interested in Combeferre's role in all this. "What do I know of or care for capital? I'm not asking for fortunes to be broken up. The rest of us make our livings off the rich, not in spite of them. If your women never needed new wallpaper, or wanted to redecorate wholesale, or buy new furniture, or have several fans each, I would never have had any legitimate work at all."

"I find that unfortunate."

"I don't. I've learned never to begrudge an honest living. There's something in the Bible about always having the poor, right? You can't get rid of the entire class permanently. Not even Christ could promise that. But there's a difference between poor, felonious, and dying. I should know – I've been all three. The last two can be relieved, and the last eliminated in the sense I mean. You can't eliminate crime any more than you can eliminate the poor, but you can divorce the two, make it so that the poor man doesn't feel he must turn criminal, and that alone should make your people fear us a little less. Not every starving bastard will take your purse, but more starving bastards means more men who might consider committing such an act. And you could give us some say in what becomes of us. It's very little to ask."

"It is a great reordering of the structure of society."

"Hardly. I ask only to be treated as a man. Let us suppose, as I know nothing of the truth of the matter, that my mother was a prostitute and my father was one of her clients." A flash of shock over Combeferre's normally composed face gratified Feuilly. Combeferre was so rarely shocked. "At the moment of my birth, the product of this perfectly natural, and possibly even legal, union, was I less worthy of the rights of man than you were at the moment of your birth?"

"Not at all," Combeferre answered promptly. "Do you really think such things of your family?"

Feuilly shrugged. "I don't remember my mother at all, so it isn't as if there's any truth I've ever been privy to. But I'm a vain bastard in my way, and either I take after one hell of a belle, or my father was no ordinary client. Maybe she was a housemaid ill-used by her master, maybe an artist's model. Maybe I was just blessed or cursed with traits that are little good to me in the long run. The things I'm good for might as well be castles in Spain, and I have to accept that. I may not be much of a man by the standards of my people, but I think I might be by the standards of your people, so I'd like just that much in rights before the law. Is that too much or too little to ask?"

"Too little, I think. The Charter has granted equality before the law."

"But you and I both know the Charter has never been worth the paper it was printed on," Feuilly interrupted. "I want universal suffrage. It's the only right that matters, since it can guarantee all others. Sure, I'd also like stipends for deputies heavy enough to allow workingmen from the provinces to serve, universal free primary education for men and women, subsidised secondary education for those who warrant it, and equal treatment before the law in practice rather than just in theory, but universal suffrage can make all of those things possible in future if I'm not the only one with those particular wishes, while none of those things will ever be granted by the men who serve in the Assembly now. Particularly, I hate to say, equal treatment before the law. The hand of practice falls far heavier on me than I'm sure it does on you."

"I do not doubt it," Combeferre admitted. "At home, I am less careful, as my family position protects me. I am too well known to be permitted to suffer the heavy hand of the law. It will not be so lenient here, yet I have no doubt that I would have greater consideration, even in a treason investigation."

"Men like you get private cells with furniture, they get visitors, they have meals brought in from cafés rather than have prison slop forced on them. The guards love men with money." Feuilly did not bother to keep the trace of bitterness out of his speech. "They have no use for men like me, who have to demand the list, crowd into public courts, and pay little in the way of bribes."

"An overhaul of the prison system, too, is in order."

"No," Feuilly insisted. "It is what it is. The real criminals know it well enough, and its ins and outs keep them occupied. It's the men who can't stand a stretch and only acted in desperation, not for kicks, who need kept out of there, away from the real criminals who can give them quite an education. A government who works for us, not just for the rich and noble, may be helpful enough on that score."

Much of their discourse was similarly innocent yet frequently shading towards danger. Combeferre talked more freely of himself when moving about in the open air, as if the freedom in nature could be approximated by the roads and fields surrounding Paris. The brother he had mentioned was his only sibling, a boy eleven years his junior. His father was as liberal as could be, but any boon granted now could easily have a payment due down the road. His mother, well, the less said, the better, it appeared.

As the summer progressed, Feuilly let out a few details of his own situation. It was not a deliberate reciprocation, something rendered necessary for fear of seeming too secretive, but a sharing of Combeferre's sense of freedom from prying eyes and improper judgment.

"You have no family at all?" Combeferre asked one day.

"None. No mother, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, or sisters. Brought up on the kindness of strangers for their own profit." Feuilly was uncertain if he had made it sound as flippant as he wished or as bitter as he frequently was.

"I envy you," he replied sadly. "Not for the details, they must be terrible in themselves, but for the freedom. You are bound to no one; your way is clear."

"I am bound to no one, but I receive nothing from anyone. No one to educate me, no one to set me up in an apprenticeship, no one to see that I had a roof over my head or food even every couple of days. Those are the details."

"I wish I could give you the benefits that I have had. But only the education, I think; I would wish my mother on no one."

"Your fine education is almost certainly no good to me when all I've ever needed was the opportunity for work. There've been dreams, sure, but they all come down to that. And it isn't just for myself that I want to labour. There's no salvation in selfishness. I don't know that there's salvation in work, but I can't think of any other way.

"Do you want to understand what it is I've been stuck watching my whole life, constantly reminded it's never for me? I don't know that you can – I don't know that anyone can – but listen up. There's not a poor man in the world who wouldn't rather be a rich man. Half the artisans of Paris harbour dreams of being the boss of their own place someday, and they can make it happen, too. And the boss of his place, maybe with some skill and some luck, can put by, can pull himself up a rung to petit bourgeois, renting a place of business and a separate place to live. A little more luck, a little more skill, a generation on, a damned good idea, perhaps – pulls up a few more rungs, starts to approach your sort of people. But it isn't for people like me, and it never has been. I've earned my living my whole damned life, never had a handout from anyone if they could get a share in what they used me for. Fine by me – work meant bread, sometimes even a place to sleep. I've worked my whole life, and I've kept my eyes open my whole life, and I know what's good for some men isn't good for others. I know it all too well. Ambition ruins as many men as it fires to glory, and everything I've tried beyond my place has fallen apart around me. But I was almost there once, so it doesn't seem like such a stretch this time. When I was fourteen, I conceived this ridiculous notion, thanks probably to fragments of novels and a handful of vaudevilles, that if I worked very hard, and was very eager, I could convince a lawyer or a notary to take me on as a clerk, and I would prove the best clerk he ever had, and then I could take what money I saved and what knowledge I had gained and set up on my own in some provincial town and earn a little house all on its own and a beautiful wife of decent family and be able to educate my children in a better manner than I ever had." He laughed. "And before that, no one would have taken me for a fool. At least God made sure I could not hold those ridiculous ambitions long enough to become bitter about their failure. All I want now is to earn my bread honestly, as that's hard enough for one lifetime."

"Fourteen is the age for making ridiculous plans," Combeferre agreed. "When I was fourteen, I took my friend Henri Enjolras down into the woods on our property, picked out a tree to be our liberty tree, and we watered it with our own blood while promising that we would start the revolution over again. You can still see the scar." He pushed up his sleeve so Feuilly could see the fine white slash across the blue veins in his left wrist.

"But you're actually doing that," Feuilly argued.

"It doesn't make it any less ridiculous. We cannot start a revolution ourselves. What we can do is see that as many men and women as possible are prepared when the time seems right. For the revolution to be just, it must be the final step, the action taken when it is proved beyond all doubt that this king and his followers in the Assembly have no one's interests in mind but their own. He will prove it, and we will act, but he will have started the revolution. It must be a direct result of his failures, not our desire for blood. But I think fourteen is the age when a boy discovers he is desperate to be seen as a man. If you still want a future of that sort and think only that it has been held out of reach by false reasons, by the bourgeoisie closing the gate behind them after they have achieved their leaps, I could hand you the tools to achieve something similar right now."

"I don't think I could live that life. I don't think it's an appropriate life. And the whole point was that I'd go out and do it, that I wouldn't be handed anything. I was handed a life, trained well in a trade I had real talent for, had respect in my neighbourhood as if I were older than I was. I set it by for what I hoped were the first steps in achieving that ridiculous dream. And I picked it back up again twice because I thought that might be all there was, but I can't live that life, either. It was something forced on me for another man's profit, and that's no way to live. I still don't have steady work, but I'm not a slave to another man's ambitions, and that makes it easier to take. I haven't got much bread, but at least I've still got my soul. And if I had that cottage and that wife, I'd be wondering every day if it were a curse rather than a gift and when it would all fall apart because I know better now. A man can't go from the streets to high respectability without doing some very disreputable things. I won't have it handed me, and I won't do what's needed to get it, but I'm at peace with that. Dare I hope you can understand at least part of it?"

"I fear we have more kinship than we both might wish. I'm sorry," Combeferre quickly apologised. "That sounds as if we, due to our respective upbringings, ought not be kin, and that was not at all what I had intended."

Feuilly had not even registered that Combeferre's sympathy might indeed have had a different meaning, yet he was still grateful for the apology. "I understand. Sometimes I wonder if this is coincidence or if Bahorel somehow knows us too well."

"He hasn't the penetration. So I am grateful to whatever chance is to be thanked, human or divine."