Papa once told her that war was the best time to make a profit. Spirits were high, people had death wishes, and everyone was looking to get drunk. Éponine was beginning to believe that that was true.
These days, the Café Musain was packed from mid-afternoon until the infant hours of morning. 'Ponine sat in her little corner today, a short reprieve from wandering the street corners looking to be paid for her company.
The mug she nursed didn't quite drive out the chill, but it numbed her aches enough to stop the throbbing, and Éponine supposed that was the best she could ask for.
Someone dropped into the seat next to her. It was that yellow-haired man, the one with the impossible name, who made all those serious speeches.
"You," he said, with a breath heavy with wine and eyes overflowing with dreams, "are patria."
Éponine glanced up from her warm fingers to regard him coldly. "I'm what?"
"You are patria," he repeated, this time with an accusatory finger shoved near her face.
She blinked. and then pushed his hand away, edging further from him. "Sorry, m'sieur, but some of us have a hard time understanding your fancy ways of insulting people."
He shook his head no no nonononono. he slurred, "You are patria. patria, patriae, first declension noun. Latin. You're our country. You are representative of the disenfranchised, those the government has abandoned, those who have been trampled by the bourgeoisie. You are everyone who does hard labour for little pay while those born with money own every means of production in this nation, occupy every seat of power, are able to perpetrate and perpetuate institutionalised ills against those without the means to retaliate. You're who we fight for."
Woe to the urchin who tried to understand that; Éponine didn't even try. she wiggled a tooth that was loose in the back of her mouth and told him placidly, "I don't recall asking you to fight for me."
"But you need me to!" he insisted. "Things much change! Someone must champion the cause."
"I'm not a cause, m'sieur." He was getting very hard to ignore, both hands reaching out to grab one of hers. "And you are drunk."
"I'm not drunk, I'm making you see!" he said with a hysterical laugh. "A Paris, free from the shackles of poverty, free from the monarchy that gorges itself on the suffering of those it claims to lead. a Paris, where all men are on equal footing, where all men are citizens! Don't you understand your own oppression?"
"Not when there are drunk men yelling about it in my ear, m'sieur." But he would not go away, would not leave her be, would not stop breathing on her and touching her and she felt phantoms of other hands ghosting over her skin, and so she wrenched her hands angrily away and ran out of the café.
(They'd never understand.)
Enjolras would remember very little of the incident the morning after (with a splitting headache and an ache in his right eye; it had been a while since he'd gotten drunk), and sought to remember why he felt such an overwhelming sense of shame. Éponine didn't forget a detail, but did her best not to remember.
(She was good at that.)