[Early Spring 1832, and this is Courfeyrac. Well, a sort of Courfeyrac, and I hope I haven't twisted him too much because I'm quite attached to him. I also hope the Cafe Musain is where I think it is...]
One More Dawn, One More Day
“As we
know, Courfeyrac was an iconoclast who respected nothing.” – VH (Told you I
should stick to parodies – September ’02) Back to the Pretentiousness | Back to the
Gibberish
Always so cold, in the hour before dawn, though I don’t make a habit of being out – or indeed conscious – at that time. I glanced up at the window of the apartment I had just left - whose occupant I had agreed to meet after leaving the Café Musain the previous evening - shook my head and smiled slightly at the ground, then walked on. I didn’t know whether I’d see her again but, well, c’est la vie.
Of course, it’s even colder when one’s been idiotic enough to leave one’s gloves waiting forlornly on a table in the back room of a café with only several empty wines bottle for company, but since I would pass through the Place Saint Michel on my way home anyway, it wasn’t much of a detour to return to Musain and retrieve them. I walked along the Rue de Grès and, when I reached the café, was more than a little surprised to see a faint glow at the window. It was too misted to see in more than vaguely, but I thought I could distinguish the hazy outline of a white shirt and a fair head leaning somewhere near the table. One should never be expected to think clearly at five in the morning and for a very brief, sleep-deprived moment I entertained the distressing and comical possibility that it was a hungover Enjolras. Much as the idea amused me, I remembered then that he’d left before I had, but Jean Prouvaire had stayed after most of us had gone as he often does, quaintly eccentric poetry-writing insomniac that he is - perhaps he’d fallen asleep mid-canzone. I pushed the door to the back room open quietly, anxious not to startle him because that is, after all, rather easily done.
Jehan was indeed, or rather had been, writing at one of the tables and was now slumped over it, his arms crossed over its surface and his head resting upon them, one artistically ink-smudged hand draped serenely over the edge of the table. Much of his face was obscured either by the folds of his shirtsleeves or by his scruffily tied-back hair, bright in the lamplight, but from the doorway I could see his eyes were closed in sleep. He looked no more than ten years old and I wished I wasn’t the only one here to see him.
I stole over and shook him gently by the shoulder. “Jehan, I think - ” He stirred abruptly, turning to me with an uncomprehendingly astonished expression and grey-blue eyes wide with surprise. I couldn’t help but stifle a laugh.
“Courfeyrac! What on earth…” His confusion was perfectly understandable but he was at least coherent enough to seem glad to see me. But then Jehan’s always pleased to see anyone, he’s too good-natured not to be, even when they’ve just crept into Musain at five in the morning and woken him unceremoniously from some dream about Spenserian stanzas or…oh, I don’t know poetry. I don’t pay attention to what I study half the time, let alone what dear absent-minded starry-eyed head-in-the-clouds Jehan does for his own unhealthily academic entertainment.
“I left my gloves behind,” I explained, glancing at the empty tables and eventually retrieving my abandoned hand-wear, “then I saw the light at the window and wondered whether you’d really stayed here until such an ungodly hour of the morning.” I moved to stand beside him again, resting a hand on the back of his chair, and nodded at the scribbled-on sheets of paper strewn over the table. Apparently they’d absorbed him sufficiently avidly to cause him to lose consciousness over them. “Poetry?”
“Oh…” He made a half-hearted attempt to gather them together a little, but he isn’t really given to organisation. People who dress with their eyes closed very rarely are. “Something like that, yes. I wasn’t tired and, well, you can’t just leave this sort of thing, so I thought I’d stay here and watch the sun come up.” That innocent, faintly bashful smile of his lit his face for a moment, to be replaced by the familiar concerned look of slight confusion. “You never get up before lunchtime, and you’re awake. That’s far stranger, surely.”
It wasn’t an accusation, because it came from Jehan, and in any case it was perfectly true. “I was on my way home from seeing…well.”
“Oh, of course.” He lowered his eyes and smiled that diffident smile again, understanding instantly, and chuckled softly with what I took to be indulgence, gesturing to the chair across the table from him. “For goodness’ sake, Courfeyrac, sit down and stop looking so abashed.”
I obeyed the former, at least, and laughed a little as I did so. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jehan. You always make me feel as though…” I tailed off, smiling at him as he tilted his head to one side to look at me quizzically. “You and your high-minded romantic rhetoric. You think I’m a licentious, profligate, dissolute…” I was only teasing, and he doesn’t mind that. I even flatter myself enough to think that, sometimes, he’s grateful not to be treated like a wilting wallflower for once. I might be too pragmatic to understand much of his romanticism but I do know he can laugh at himself for it; I might not always be sensitive enough to soothe those highly-strung nerves of his but I’m sure he’s not made of glass in any other sense than his complete transparency.
“Do I ever say so?” His tone was mockingly accusatory – amiably so, of course – and he raised his eyebrows exaggeratedly.
“No. That’s exactly why it bothers me.” We both laughed, but it was true. He condemned nothing - not my reckless dissipation or Grantaire’s drunkenness or Enjolras’ austere coldness, as it seemed next to someone as soft-hearted as Jehan - however sincerely he disapproved of it, and paradoxically the absolution made me conscious of guilt where censure would have made me dismissive of it.
He shook his head and smiled. “You want to believe you’re more of a licentious, profligate, dissolute…” – he parodied my tone affectionately – “than you are, that much is obvious.” He chuckled again. “Perhaps you wish you were more like Marius.”
“Oh, dear Marius.” I rolled my eyes, but smiled. Whatever else Marius is, he’s happy; and whatever I say, I’m thankful for that. “The boy’s all starlight and piano music and rose petals.”
He laughed at that, recognising no doubt the reflection of himself in my description, and smiled at the ground again. “Rather poetic for you, Courfeyrac.”
“As good as madmen, poets are – so Grantaire says,” I said lightly. “And you can see why, if he’s using you as his archetype - ”
“Oh, you…!” He screwed his face up, laughing, then leaned back in his chair, gazing upwards wistfully. “I do wish you could see yourself the way I see you, Courfeyrac.” I raised my eyebrows. As predisposed as Jehan is to adulation, I could hardly think of a less appropriate object of it than myself. “Really. Well, all of you. I know you think I’m just spouting sentimental romantic nonsense, but…you laugh at Marius but he sees the whole world differently, the way he is at the moment.”
“Rose-coloured spectacles – ”
“No, not at all!” Suddenly he had one of those flashes of elated passion that suffuse him with a kind of rapturous enthusiasm and leaned across the pile of papers to catch my hands impulsively. “He thinks this girl’s an angel, perfection incarnate, all the light and life in the world made manifest – something like that, doesn’t he?”
“His vocabulary at present consists solely of a collection of sighs of varying degrees of longing, but if he were vaguely articulate then yes, that’s what he’d say.”
“And he’s right.” He smiled again, his voice ringing with a kind of triumphant delight. “It’s not that love’s blind, Courfeyrac – she really is like that and he’s the only one who can see it. We’re all like that – it’s not an invention or a delusion or a daydream, the whole world really is the way he sees it.”
Dear Jehan, always so sincere… “I’m not sure I believe you, Jehan. I probably wish I did.” He smiled at that, his head on one side again, and released my hands. “I believe you believe it. That has to count for something,” I added, laying a hand on his arm.
“Of course it does. It’s all sentimental romantic nonsense, really, Courfeyrac; you know what I’m like.” He smiled again and waved his hands at me. “You look exhausted. Go home. And hope Marius isn’t waiting up for you.”
The image of Marius waiting at the door with his hands on his hips squealing “And why didn’t you come home last night?” elicited a slight chuckle from me, which in turn wrung a smile from the now concerned-looking Jehan. “Oh, he will be worried,” I grinned as I stood up, ruffling his ill-behaved hair and laughing at his affected glare. “Sweet dreams, Jehan,” I called over my shoulder as I left.
It was still freezing when I stepped outside, but I noticed somewhat absently that the darkness was already fading towards the east. All so peaceful, Jehan would have said, the streets hushed in the pale cold light as I walked in the direction of the Rue de la Verrerie, and presently the sky began to take on a faint rosy tinge, intensifying to an orange-crimson nearer the horizon. I stopped dead and stared.
“My God, it’s beautiful - !”
I ran impetuously onto the Pont Neuf and leaned over the railings, watching in breathless wonder as the river became liquid gold in the reflection of the bright early sun, and then –
Good grief, Courfeyrac, listen to yourself. What would Grantaire say?
Concluding that Jehan was only talking sentimental romantic nonsense ninety-nine per cent of the time after all and pushing my hands further into my pockets, I shook my head, smiled slightly at the ground and walked on. C’est la vie, indeed.
