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I.
“Say, Louiset! Do the fan-makers have any sort of compagnonnage?”
“I never heard of any. Maybe up by the Oise, where they make all the sticks? You’d have to ask one yourself. Why?”
“We’ve got a baby fanmaker here--on his way to Paris.”
“Paris! This child? They’ll catch him up and put him in a pie! --Anyway, I don’t know anything about fanmakers. You don’t see them making their tour. Why fans, boy?”
“The man from the foundling hospital knew a person with room for an apprentice.”
“All the way in Paris? Are you sure someone hasn’t been telling you a story?”
“I’m to meet the curé at Villefranche--”
“Hallo! What’s all this, friends?” The newcomer could only have been a few years older than Jeannot; he looked younger than the traveling workmen who had fallen in with him on the road, but he leaned in amongst the group as if he’d never doubted his place anywhere. The group spread out at the roadside--one of the coopers put his hand to his adze--but then it recomposed itself to include the arrival.
“Ah, well, we were just keeping an eye on this little infant. Found him walking by himself.” That was the oldest of the coopers, a man of twenty-four or twenty-five. He took it upon himself to make introductions for the newcomer, though he hadn’t for Jeannot. In return the newcomer announced himself as Jean Pierre L’Opinion Bahorel.
It got a reaction. L’Opinion? Fucking Jacobin! Do you know what those fuckers did in Lyon? Jean Pierre L’Opinion Bahorel took up a fighting stance. One of the coopers took up his adze. Jeannot--just an ordinary Jeannot, rarely trying to claim his full Jean-Raymond Feuilly--took a step back. Only the oldest of the group remained placid; for his part he took up the attitude of a man about to deliver a speech. “Come, now. ‘Do you know what the Jacobins did in Lyon?’ You don’t know either. You weren’t born then. Anyway, the Emperor rebuilt the town. My parents risked their lives, showing the tricolor when the king came back to France. They gave me one of those republican names from the calendar. If they hadn’t changed it when that kind of thing got too dangerous, you’d be calling me Oats now.”
“Hear, hear,” said L’Opinion. “You can see this man is practicing to be a Rural Sage, a fount of country wisdom!”
“I could change my mind about kicking your ass, kid,” said the cooper, and then it looked like peace. The five of them started moving down the road again, the head of the group asking Jeannot for his story. It began to sound improbable to Jeannot himself as he told it: the inspector charged with the Lyon hospital foundlings--visiting them yearly in their foster homes and setting them up to learn a trade--had, apparently on a whim, asked if he’d like to go to Paris, where he knew a person looking for a boy to train up as a fan-painter. Jeannot was to get himself to Villefranche, only eight miles from his village, and from there the local priest would take him to Paris by diligence.
The coopers questioned him closely. What was the name of this foundling hospital man? (M. Bernard.) Had Jeannot known him long? (All his life; he came once a year.) He was an honest man, no one said anything doubtful about him? (Only that he was from the north and had Parisian ideas.) About what? (Politics.) And why was he sending a Lyonnais foundling up there, anyway? Don’t they have orphans in Paris? (The man with the fan workshop was his cousin.) (Ah, exclaimed L’Opinion, Nepotism! Dear familiar corruption.) How old are you, boy, are you even twelve? (Thirteen next month.) Do you know this curé at Villefranche? No? Then we will take you to find him; it is along our way to Mâcon, where our compagnonnage has a chapter.
Several year later he would think back and suddenly recognize that the coopers were young, concerned, and utterly perplexed at how to help a stray foundling. As it was, he hung back and brooded on their unfair mistrust of him. The “Jacobin,” finding this dull, soon nudged himself in amongst the men ahead, who were more inclined to talk.
Jeannot stretched his ears at the words Mère and Père. But it was just more about this brotherhood of theirs, this compagnonnage. The Mère and Père were innkeepers--or perhaps the Mère was the inn itself--some arrangement where they paid dues and the brotherhood would help a man if he were out of work. It was the first Jeannot had heard of it. He’d been apprenticed--unofficially, under the table--to a sign-painter, but he was not a sign-painter who cared much for his trade or his fellow tradesmen.
Soon they were questioning L’Opinion. Was he a farmer or a craftsman's apprentice? Was he looking to join a trade brotherhood? “Ha, no! I’m going it alone--on my way to Paris, solo, like the fanmaker there!” It was plainly the wrong answer. The coopers began to talk exclusively about work and workshops, and L’Opinion fell back beside Jeannot. Conversation failed him there as well.
Their silence lasted nearly to the outskirts of Villefranche. The group moved automatically aside for a wagon--and then the farm-woman driving it pulled round to block the road. JEAN-PIERRE-L’OPINION BAHOREL, IS THAT YOU? DOES YOUR MOTHER KNOW YOU’RE OUT HERE? I KNOW DAMNED WELL YOU’VE A YEAR OF SCHOOL LEFT! GET YOURSELF INTO THE BACK OF THIS WAGON THIS MINUTE OR I’LL COME DOWN THERE AND GIVE YOU SUCH A WHIPPING--
Chaos! The mule pulling the wagon looked down its long nose at them all, he and Jeannot the only still and silent figures in the road. The coopers were busy bundling their “Jacobin” into the back of the wagon, ruffling his hair, laughing, cheering for L’Opinion’s formidable aunty.
It was the last Feuilly saw of Bahorel for some years.
--
Nothing nearly so dramatic happened during the rest of the journey to Paris, though it was the farthest he’d ever been from his home. The coopers saw him to the church before going on their way to Mâcon; the curé saw him to his new master’s door before going on his way to business in Calais. And M. Gonsault, the boss, walked him cheerfully down the street to the workshop.
The workshop itself was airy and well-lit, as it would need to be. He had barely any time to take the place in, though, before the workers left their tasks and crowded around him. They were all women and girls, six or seven of them, looking him over and asking M. Gonsault questions over the top of his head. So this was the apprentice his cousin sent? All the way up from Lyon! Well, what was his name?
“Feuilly? Feuilly! We can’t call him that! ‘Hey, Marie, get me a feuille,’ and she comes over with this little Lyonnais. --What do they call you at home?”
“Jeannot.”
“Of course they do. A good little Jeannot. Is that your first pair of shoes, kid?”
“Well, we can’t call him that either. I vote Léon.”
Feuilly had not been aware his name was up for vote. But apparently it was. The fanmakers made quick work of him: his Lyon origin, his sandy-brown hair that wouldn’t flatten down, his evident ferocity. Léon it was. All this while M. Gonsault went downstairs to attend to a business matter; when he came back there was no rush to return to work. “Where are you going to put your little apprentice,” asked the woman who had named Feuilly.
“Well now, I thought one of you married women could take him home--”
“Oh, did you! And you thought his meals would cook themselves, did you? Have you ever thought what a boy of twelve eats?”
“Of course there would be some additional money--”
“--And the messes they make, boys. He’s a peasant, he doesn’t know how to hop over the gutter, he’ll track everything in. And I suppose we’ll just mend his clothing too along with the rest of our work--”
In the end, it was agreed that he would sleep in the workshop and get his meals at the café on the corner; any sewing would be undertaken as paid work. The women’s friendliness returned instantly. Indeed, one of them walked him to the café and introduced him to the couple that ran it; on the way she said, “Listen, don’t take it the wrong way that we didn’t want you to stay with us. Maybe in a little while you can work something out. But it’s just--the boss is a good boss, right, but women have to watch out. We’re already paid less than men, shut out of the good jobs, and give a boss half a chance and he’ll be assuming we can mind his kids and mend his shirts and cook his meals. And you--you’re an orphan, right? From the hospital? There, that means he doesn’t have to pay you while you’re his apprentice. For how long? Till you’re twenty-one, just food and lodging? Mmhm! Oh, like I said, he’s not a bad boss, I bet he’ll do something for you before then, but of course it’ll be his idea, the goodness of his heart. --Well, here’s our café. Mère Moulin, here’s our apprentice. Don’t let him get drunk and break all the windows! Don’t let him spend all his money on girls!”
II.
It was at that café that he met L’Opinion again. Somehow over the years the place had grown foreign: not foreign to Feuilly, but it had taken on a flavor that was not Parisian. The fanmakers still went there, but they shared the space with Greeks, who came because Mère Moulin had once been Aspasia Yannatou and made coffee the right way. And then, of course, when a Polish family moved into the building next door, it was natural that they should go to the café, and that their friends should... The fanmakers sat at a particular pair of tables and shrugged their shoulders a bit at all the foreignness, but it wasn’t any less their café.
Their tables, however, became somewhat less Feuilly’s table. It was one thing for a boy of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, to sit with them--a rather small boy, quiet, and just the one of him, with no crowd of gangling friends to make crude jokes. And the women never made him unwelcome as he grew older; he often joined them. But they seemed glad to see him make his acquaintance among the other patrons of the café.
There were other cafés in Paris, of course. Sometimes he went to them. On Sunday and Monday, naturally, one went out to the barrières for the lemonade or the chocolate, the little white wines or the hot brandy, the fresh air or the dance-halls, depending on the weather and one’s purse. But the Café Apollonia was where Feuilly might be found, most nights, when he was nineteen or twenty, and that was where Bahorel found him.
The first Feuilly knew of being found was a loud voice in his ear shouting So you made it to Paris after all! As he’d been in Paris for some seven years, he took it to be a mistake. The man who had invited himself to Feuilly’s table laughed delightedly, and took off his hat. “We met on the road to Villefranche. You may remember my dramatic exit, pursued by an Aunt, but you’ll be glad to know I survived the experience, and the subsequent year of so-called Education--there, you do remember!”
“L’Opinion,” Feuilly said quietly, close to laughter but not quite there yet. “Or don’t you use that name now?”
“I mostly get ‘Bahorel,’ these days. Lots of last names among the students. And you, Jeannot?”
“Feuilly. Léon, they call me at work.”
“You’ve been transmogrified! From a foundling country mouse to the king of beasts! But let’s not say king.”
“Still not shy about politics?”
“Mm. --So, what’s this place? I’ve only been to half the eateries in Paris so far. It’s hard work.”
Feuilly looked down at his meal, and then around the room, still torn between laughter and offense. “It’s a café. They give you coffee, you know? You buy a meal, a drink...?”
“The devil! Next you’ll be telling me you sit in the chairs and eat your food at the tables.”
“Well, what can I say? It’s a café, a workers’ café. You’re a student, you said?”
“Don’t hold it against me,” Bahorel said, laughing, and then again more seriously, “Don’t hold it against me. My parents drive a hard bargain and it was the only way to get to Paris--as our son the law-student. And Paris, that’s the only place where anything changes.”
“What do you want to change?”
“Everything.” It should have been airy nonsense but it wasn’t. The hunger in the man’s eyes made Feuilly look away. “I want to break into the middle of it all and pull it down around me on either side, and then see what comes up. It must be better than what we have now.”
“You really aren’t shy.”
“And you are.” Bahorel shook his head. “--Ah, it’s good to hear someone speaking Lyonnais again, real country Lyonnais. You didn’t even notice you’d slipped back, did you? Ha! And that over there, that’s Greek they’re speaking, isn’t it? Modern Greek. Not schoolboy Greek.” He drummed his fingertips on the table, and Feuilly thought he might leave, but he turned again and caught Feuilly’s eye. “So what have you been up to?”
“I-- I make fans?” The man held his gaze, evidently unsatisfied. “I paint the leaves. And we do some brisé fans. The painting, I mean, not the carving.” Still not enough. “I read? Um. History, mostly--? Like--oh--like why the Ottomans hold Greece, and what do the Russians have to do with it--people hardly know, many of them--here we are, at my workshop, and we eat shoulder to shoulder with these good people from Mani, and maybe we Parisians say to one another, Did you hear what happened at Chios? Terrible!, but if you ask anyone why it’s happening, they can’t tell you, beyond saying Well, you know, the Turks. I don’t mean that I’ve gotten far figuring it out, but--well, it’s hard, you know, I ask my friends here but the older people don’t really speak much French--I wish I knew Greek--”
“Modern Greek.”
“Well, of course modern Greek.” Feuilly thought for a moment the man was about to offer to teach him--it seemed like a moment for anything--then realized suddenly that he’d been talking freely and quickly and probably loudly, and his face began to burn with a feeling of irrational betrayal. “But anyway. You know all about this.”
“Very little, in fact. Do you read Byron?”
“I’ve heard the name.”
“He has a poem about the Ottomans storming the Acrocorinth a hundred years back. You might like it. I’m sure he takes poetic liberties--there’s a bit of a love story--but…”
“Oh--I’m not very interested in love stories.” For some reason Bahorel looked amused. Feuilly finished his cup of water and began to tidy up his plate. “Anyway, it was very nice to meet you again, Monsieur Bahorel. I hope you are enjoying Paris, and--”
“Slow down! Don’t bolt, I’m not--I’m not laughing at you. It is nice to talk to someone from my part of the country. Someone who isn’t a lawyer’s son for generations back. My family are farmers. Look, I’m having a party tonight. Let me give you the address. No, for God’s sake, don’t worry about dressing, it’s just people. People who aren’t from Paris. It’s a wonderful city but there’s more to the world… Humor me? Come on, you saw me getting threatened with a beating by my aunt, laughed at by workmen, you owe me.” A pause. “And the food will be good. My mother sent up preserves from our own garden. And some cheeses. And sausages, you know they don’t make them the right way up here, you might be eating horse or cat, but these are from good fat Lyonnais pigs. Try to tell me you don’t miss that.”
Feuilly’s childhood had not featured sausage so extensively that he could say he missed it, exactly. It had been more of a beans and brown-bread childhood. But he found himself at Bahorel’s rooms that night, sitting between a Polish violinist--highly trained, but now working dance-halls--and an artist with great enthusiasm for Greece but very mistaken ideas about its present circumstances. Feuilly left early--early and still sober, but talking eagerly with the violinist, who happened to live on his street.
Bahorel invited him again. And again. Every few months he seemed to throw together parties like this; sometimes you’d meet the same person twice in a row and realize they were regulars, or sometimes you wouldn’t know anyone. Once he met his own neighbor there: Bahorel shoved him and Laigle together, laughing at their mutual astonishment. To make the hospitality less one-sided Feuilly would invite Bahorel to meals at the Café Apollonia.
“Poor Mère Moulin,” he was saying one day, after a year or two of this. “She’s calling it La Pologne now, instead. You remember Szymek Abramczyk--the musician?--his friends meet here every week. It’s supposed to be literary, but mostly it’s political. I don’t think the Moulins mind, really. Vive la Pologne, she says.”
“And what about your own politics, Feuilly? Still shy about that?”
“I like to say discreet.”
“And you think I’m indiscreet.”
“You said it, not me. --Anyway, aren’t you busy tearing everything down, left and right? I didn’t think you were interested in groups. Worker’s associations, Polish newspapers, clubs. Regular meetings in the faubourgs. Collecting subscriptions to fund public lecturers.”
“I might surprise you.”
“Oh, I’m sure!”
III.
But it was Feuilly who surprised Bahorel. The year had just turned over, 1825 to 1826; a cold night. The feeling was still returning to Feuilly’s fingers and toes when Bahorel opened the door to his knocking.
“Christ, it’s you, Feuilly? I haven’t seen you in--what, weeks? Where have you been?”
“Saint-Pélagie, for two months.”
Bahorel’s face turned serious instantly, to Feuilly’s relief. His voice was much quieter at his next question. “You? Feuilly, in jail? What for?”
“In connection with a labor dispute. I’m lucky it wasn’t two years.”
“What, with your fan-maker? I didn’t hear of any kind of demonstrations there.”
“No--not my workshop--it was only on suspicion, they didn’t really have anything on me. Listen, can I come in?”
“Of course.” But Bahorel hung in the doorway a moment, still blocking the way. Feuilly shifted his weight on tired feet. “I have some friends over. --Christ, Feuilly, don’t be an ass, you don’t need to go--I can tell them to clear out if you’d rather be alone. But you might like them. Well, one’s just your old neighbor, Laigle, you remember him. The other’s a law-student he found, just up from the Haute-Loire. I want to know what you think of him. But should I ask them to go?”
Feuilly had very little desire to meet one of Bahorel’s collection of oddments--or to wonder just how much of a collected oddment he was himself--but he had less desire to go back into the cold or ask anyone else to. He shrugged. A moment later he regretted it, because Bahorel took the shrug to mean that it was all right to haul him bodily into the room and stand him in front of the guests, a hand heavy on each shoulder, and announce Feuilly as “a man returned from a sojourn among all the best republicans in prison--no, don’t you dare try to hide the stains on your shirt, Feuilly! He may look mild, but they call him the Lion at his workshop.”
Feuilly endured the expressions of interest, then deprived Bahorel of some spectacle by asking in an undertone to borrow a washbasin and shaving kit, and perhaps a clean shirt. Still, when he came back into the sitting-room, Bahorel pressed him down to sit on the couch next to the new law-student and put a wine-glass in his hand. He stared at it--and then noticed that the other man was looking at his own still-full wine-glass with nearly as much bemusement.
“I, ah--”
“Have you known Bahorel long--?”
They both laughed awkwardly; only then did Lesgle take pity on them and make introductions. "Feuilly, Enjolras. Enjolras, Feuilly. Don’t worry, friends. We’re all republicans here."
At one in the morning, Enjolras was telling Feuilly that he should keep his mind on France. She had her own greatness, and would bring about her own salvation; they could do nothing for other nations except by example. Hadn't Robespierre said--
Feuilly told him they didn't much care for Robespierre down in Lyon.
Enjolras told Feuilly, white-faced, that he was very much mistaken about Robespierre.
Feuilly told Enjolras that he was very much mistaken about Poland, and indeed all of Europe.
They were still in Bahorel's sitting-room when the sun rose.
IV.
Taking the diligence down to Lyon seemed like a luxury, but it was paid for by subscription--by someone else's subscription, for a change. Feuilly had never before been the one invited to speak, for all that he'd done the legwork in bringing speakers to Paris. Lecturers in history and economic theory, to speak to workers' groups; correspondents from Greek newspapers; political refugees from Poland. He would much rather have been sending one of them down to Lyon. It was their uprising to talk about, properly.
("But why wouldn't they ask you," Enjolras had said. "You've made the Polish revolution plain to me, and I was a very poor student when we first met."
"Feuilly is shy-y-y," Bahorel had said to that. "I don't think he is," Enjolras had answered; and "Oh, yes I am," Feuilly had said. "May I come with you?" Enjolras had asked, and had persisted, politely, until Bahorel made them both laugh with his "Let him come with you, Feuilly. You can sit in the diligence and keep each other warm with mutual admiration.")
The diligence seemed like a luxury, but a practical one. He could hardly have taken the time away from work to travel on foot--even in the current slack season. And this gave him a chance to re-arrange his notes ten, fifteen, twenty times. "Enjolras, do you think it's too much to try to fit in this part on Romania? It connects with Greek independence, and it's all part of understanding about Russia, but--oh."
Oh. Enjolras, still sitting perfectly upright and contained, had fallen asleep. Feuilly penciled a question mark next to the doubtful paragraphs and closed his eyes as well. Across from them, two Englishwomen were talking, head to head. He had enough of the language now to pick up a little. Marriage, they were talking marriage, trusting their language to give them privacy. It was a matter of one of them accepting an offer of marriage, or continuing her position at a girls' school. It's work either way, her friend said. Work and children, children and work. --But one had to think of one's old age, the other said. Marriage could be a companionship. --Wasn't there companionship among the schoolteachers? And sometimes a bright student would keep in touch, maybe take up the profession herself, stretch your shared ideas a little further than you'd ever seen yourself. --But there was such a thing as love. --Oh, love, there are a hundred kinds of that.
At least, he thought that was the conversation. He might have been quite wrong.
He woke when the coach stopped at an inn, and found Enjolras smiling at him. "You were quite lost in thought," he said. It was a polite fiction, but Feuilly smiled back and agreed: "Yes, about companionship."
V.
(1814)
“Jean…Raymond...Feuilly.” The man from the foundling hospital said it the same way every year, when he came to make his inspection, and then he always said the same thing after. “Still alive, eh? Not bad, you.”
Probably the words were callous, but every year they were delivered as if the news of Feuilly’s continued existence was a pleasant surprise in an otherwise dreary day. He liked these visits. It may have been that M. Bernard said the same thing at every nurse’s house that he went to--but perhaps not. By the time he was twelve, Feuilly had seen quite a few children miss their yearly roll call.
It was not Mère Lucenay’s fault. She was a conscientious wetnurse and foster-mother, whether her charges had two married parents, paying her, or no parents at all, and the money coming from the hospital; she used the money given to her to feed and clothe the children; she was as kind as any of the other adults Feuilly met with. But children died. Babies died; foundling babies in particular died. By the time he was twelve, Feuilly was the only foundling she’d had for so long. Not bad, you. And now it was time to move on.
“So what can you do?”
“I can paint.”
“Paint! Where’d you learn that? --What, is it some great secret? Ah, let me guess, let me divine, Mère Lucenay sent you out to work a bit early, one of those little arrangements where someone else feeds you and she keeps the hospital stipend. Say no more, say no more, you are the soul of discretion. What do you paint?”
“Well--signs--for shops--”
“Do you know your letters?”
“Pretty well.”
“Here’s my pen; show me.”
“I never used a pen.”
“Never used a--Oh, France, you leading light of learning!” These asides were familiar to Jeannot from past encounters. M. Bernard said something like it at least once every time they met. “You’re not afraid to try, boy, are you? It’s just a goose quill, it doesn’t bite. There, you dip it, so. Write me your name. Or my name, or any name you like, write me a Bible verse--I suppose you’ve learned at least one--ah. There, now. Don’t worry about the blotting. Shh, I have reams of paper at home. Go on, make me some little placard, some bit of sign-painting--let’s see what you--oh! Oh ho ho, you little Jeannot, you have no head for politics! Liberté, Égalité ? That’s out of season, young man. The Emperor’s in Elba, we’ve a king again. I could send you to jail for that-- No, no, steady there. It was a joke. But watch your words, boy. Goodbye liberty, goodbye equality. They used to put fraternity as well, you know… But let’s see, let’s see. --How would you like to go to Paris?”
Jeannot had been staring glumly at the blotted and apparently criminal sign he’d made. A spatter from the quill had ruined the perfectly straight line of the border he’d put around the words, and another had changed an accent mark into a crown. How would you like to go to Paris made him blink and stare until M. Bernard frowned. “Listen, Jean-Raymond. This is the time to speak up. My cousin’s put up a new business. Fans. He’s got a shop full of women but he says he’s looking for a sharp boy to train. We can see what you make of yourself, lad. In Paris. Or if you like your sign-painter, very good, you can likely go on with him, or stick to farming--Paris, is it? Paris, then. We'll see what you make of yourself.”