A Friendly Chat (Tag: Mylene)

[MYLÈNE LACOQUINE]

Oh great! Now she had really killed the mood of this conversation, had she not? Mylène bit the inside of her cheek in anger at her own slip-up, bringing such a sour and sad note into their talks about funny things. Had she been any more prepared for the subject of beating, she would have been able to compose herself, but Feuilly had just brought it up out of the blue. Clearly, once again Mylène hadn’t thought her words through, she never did usually, but then again usually the outcome of that wasn’t as disastrous. She long since hadn’t thought back on that time in the leather manufactory, she didn’t even dream about it anymore. But forgetting something completely was a lot harder than she had imagined. Just because it was a different reality now didn’t make it any less real.

Now, how to make the best of it, how to swing their conversation back to normal? Feuilly didn’t exactly make it easy for her either, since his discomfort was almost palpable. He was an earnest and honest man, much less prone to disregard any embarrassing situation with a joke, like for example Courf would have done. Louis rotting head, gladly she hadn’t slipped up like that in front of HIM! Now she could only hope Feuilly wouldn’t carry that into his circle of friends. Of course, he wasn’t one to gossip as far as she knew, but she could not exaclty swear him to secrecy either. That would just put much more emphasize on the topic than it was worth, and maybe would make him curious instead of bedridden. But Feuilly showed his comiseration in a calm thank you that wasn’t really necessary in Mylène’s eyes. Either way, she inclined her head, a mischievous smile slowly creeping back on her face. “Dun’ thank me, thank the landlady. ‘m jus’ the messenger, or so te say. An’ anyway, I like te be nice te me favourite customers.” For that were the lads and Feuilly especially, there was no doubt of it. They had shown her a world she longed to see, and for that a little food and drink and a smile here and there was never enough recompense.

Mylène gave a laugh and a nod as Feuilly pointed out that Versailles probably had been built by those poor workmen of Paris – or at least their ancestors. “No doubt o’ tha’!” she agreed, shaking her head. “But ironically, the buildin’ o’ Versailles gave ‘em a home as well – since the stones needed for it come from the carrières beneath our feet.” Leaning closer and lowering her voice as if to tell him a grave secret, she then continued: “Did ye know tha’ even the ABC café has access te them old quarries an’ catacombes? Ye can walk sous-terrain all the way from Hôpital Cochin an’ Jardin des Plantes te this place – if ye know the way ‘course. A man could easily get lost dun’ there!”

His enthusiasm was anything if not contagious and Mylène felt her own hope rekindling, even though she knew how hard it would be to rally the mass of the poor to their cause. “If they know somethin’s really gonna change for ‘em, then they’ll come”, she pointed out. “Bu’ the lifes o’ the poorest stayed more or less the same even after the First Revolution. Part o’ why they’re so angry – and resigned. T'will need some good arguments from our side."

[CHRISTOPHE FEUILLY]

Feuilly genuinely did appreciate the food and drink. It was a rarity for him, before falling in with the Friends of the ABC, to eat in such cafes. Especially in districts frequented so much by students and intellectuals, classes of people that part of him envied, part admired, and part was glad he was not. He enjoyed the food as well as the company, and knew that no matter what came of their revolution, he would not regret the time he had spent here.

“Sometime you should show me,” he answered with a grin when she told him about the access via the catacombs and quarries beneath the Paris streets. “Maybe when it's not raining.” He had no doubt the place would flood, and he expected that the rain—even without the threat of flooding—would drive more people underground. Although the people of that almost literal underworld might be ripe for revolution, he knew better than to assume that they would not perhaps try to rob or attack an intruder into their world.

Mostly, though, the idea just struck him as interesting. He'd never been beneath the city; outside of the more working-class districts of Paris and the places he had been with his friends, he knew he could get lost even on the surface. He did not have a native's familiarity with the city, even after several years there. He did not know if Mylene was a native Parisienne or not, but she certainly knew its more secret paths better than he.

He nodded when she pointed out that lives for many hadn't changed much after the first revolution. Of course that was the case; if it were not, perhaps there never would have been a cause for further upheaval. For himself, Feuilly privately almost hoped that much of his own early life would have turned out differently if the first revolution had been entirely successful at changing lives. He did not want other children to grow up as he had, even if it was not as hard a life as he might have had working at the docks or begging to survive. He was not unhappy, but he felt at times that life had been unjust to him.

In the end, he was almost glad for the injustice, however much it had hurt him. Without it, I might never have found the revolution. Still, he wished that he had been taught to read as a small child like the others, that he had at least had the option of an education not administered by himself, not purchased at the price of too little sleep and a headache from squinting at a page in poor light. He wished to give that opportunity to others who found their place in life more similar to his than different.

“Our arguments convinced me,” he said in a hopeful voice. If hope could pick up a working class orphan from Marseille and drop him into the midst of revolutionary ferment in Paris, he was almost certain it could inspire people who called that city's streets their native home. “Others, too. And I don't just mean people of means.”

He had wondered at first how people like Enjolras, like Courfeyrac, like any of the others who came from good families, families with the money to educate them, had come to care for the dream of revolution. He hadn't understood what they could gain from it, and nothing in his life had ever suggested people from that sort of life might really want people like him to become their equals.

“If the people were only taught to read, it would be so much simpler...” Teaching himself had opened his mind to things he had never before considered. It had given a form to his longings for freedom. “Our ideas would be like fire. France must belong to all of us, just like every other country should belong to its people!” He couldn't quite contain a grin.

[MYLÈNE LACOQUINE]

The thought of visiting the catacombes again caused a few conflicting emotions inside of Mylène, but excitement prevailed and dominated clearly. It had been a long time since she last had ventured down there, a few months surely! That was unlike her, but then she hadn’t had any need for it. whenever she had wanted to go somewhere, she had either taken the plain streets – it was a miracle to her sometimes still that she would just walk the streets without trying to sneak after someone to pick their pockets or sauntering over the market, actually buying something instead of stealing – or she had taken her favourite way, bee line, however difficult that might be with houses and walls in the way. The subterrainean way had been her home for such a long time, but it always had born a feeling of necessity. One had to be a true lunatic to actually LIKE the morbid, damp and dangerous athmosphere of the Parisean underground. And yet… it was always a thrill. Would she still know every way, every turn and every dead alley by heart? Would anythig have changed concerning the vaults and the ossuaries?

“A literal raincheck on that one then!” she agreed and gave a mocking two-fingers salute to seal their bargain. “Hope you’re not afraid of bones… there might be some on the way… or more than some, depending on where you go. If it’s the area around Montparnasse…” You really unlearned skittishness and being creeped out when growing up down there as a child, starting from merely eight years. And being around so much remains of people had further consolidated her firm beliefs of equality. Bones just looked the same, whether the skeleton had belonged to a noble or a mere beggar.

He might be right in that the boys arguments had drawn many a person to their side, she herself was another example for that. She had been against inequality and injustice before, but only their words, their recitings of works she had never even heard of before, their sole THINKING had ignited a spark deep inside of her and it had grown into a mighty flame until this very day. “They just need more people to actually stop and listen long enough”, she pointed out. The devil knew it was hard to capture people’s interest these days. Most of the working class Mylène was now mingling with and most of the beggars and thieves she remembered had long since lost their ability to care. They reminded her of oxes sometimes, continunously trodding forward without looking left or right, neck bent under their yoke. Whoever would lift it from them without warning would probably get an empty and surprised glance… and then maybe a reaction. Or they would just continue to walk on.

“I'm jus' about learning te write and read… Courf’s been teaching me”, she commented, but then shrugged. “But ye need leisure for such things… leisure many people dun ‘ave, and therefore they dun see much sense in it. Readin’ a book won’t buy any bread at first… but whom I tellin that”, she finished with a wink. “’m yet te see the full sense o’ it… or ‘ve not been given the right things te test me readin’ on.”

[CHRISTOPHE FEUILLY]

Feuilly had never spent a considerable length of time beneath the streets of any city. In Marseille as a child he had known many of the twisting paths and secret places where a small boy could fit and an adult man could not; whether a child worked or not, he still had some drive to explore and to play provided he remained healthy enough to do so. There had been desperately little time for it, though, and the punishments for being caught wandering about when he was supposed to be either working or locked in the shop (a precaution against theft, he eventually realized) were often quite stiff.

He had once, however, sneaked into the catacombs beneath the old abbey in Marseille as a small boy with the help of one of the other child workers from the shop. The bones had made him shiver then, but the effect had been far more because of the prowling about of his companion—determined to frighten him and convince him that he was a brigand prepared to slit his throat—than because of any true fear of the remains themselves.

“I'm not afraid of the dead,” he answered in a tone only halfway serious. It was true enough; there was very little some bones beneath the streets of Paris could do to him, and he was not some sheltered bourgeois to have never seen death and the corpses of its victims. Whether he was afraid of death as an event that would inevitably happen to him—sooner or later—he was less certain. “I don't suppose some bones will hurt me.” Another small smile crossed his face.

“Sometimes people listen. It's just that... well, a lot of us don't believe that students like them would know what they're talking about.” It wasn't that they didn't trust that, say, a medical student might learn to become a doctor, or a law student a lawyer—the problem was that these young men might as well have alighted from the moon. It was easy for them to talk about a life they never had and never would experience. “People like you and me might be able to get some that would never listen to somebody like Enjolras or Courfeyrac.” They each had their role in developing a revolution, and Feuilly knew quite well that there were some who would sooner be won over by his stained hands and sometimes tattered clothes than by winged, explosive words.

Feuilly remembered when he had first decided it was necessary to learn to read. It was not an easy thing to do, and, daunted, he had from time to time nearly given up despite the sense that this was the first step to something better. He'd been punished for it, even, caught asleep at a work table with a sheet of newspaper spread in front of him and one of the shop's rather expensive Carcel lamps lit. “It doesn't buy bread,” he agreed almost solemnly, “but it shows you things. Things you didn't know existed before, because nobody ever bothered to tell you.” There were many things no one would ever bother to tell people like them, things they were left to learn for themselves.

The attraction of the newspapers to Feuilly's childhood eyes had been, at first, the vague idea that they told a story he couldn't decipher unless he learned their code. Then it had been the realization that a wide world existed beyond the tangled city streets, places that the ships in the harbor told him existed but which he couldn't imagine ever visiting. Sometimes he would daydream about becoming a sailor on one of those ships and seeing, finally, somewhere far away and foreign—but the idea of drowning worried him, and he hated the prospect of climbing up onto their tall sails. The fledgling fanmaker had wondered why no one ever bothered to paint those sails, expansive canvasses that could have told a thousand stories—perhaps even collected images of those necessarily exotic places they visited.

For a man born to live on his own labor and, more likely than not, die young, he always had been a bit of a dreamer.