Lisette

Chapter 7 ~ If Domestic Poultry can Exist Side by Side with Real Birds

One afternoon, we (that is to say, Courfeyrac, Marius, Bahorel, Combeferre, Enjolras, and I) were walking across to the Corinthe, a favourite café of Bahorel's, originally discovered by Grantaire, and an alternative to the Musain. I wasn't paying overmuch attention to the conversation, and had instead taken a degree of interest in watch how some of the girls who passed us made such sheep's eyes at Enjolras, and yet he never appeared to notice. I could hardly blame them - he was hardly unattractive, with his marble skin, long, fair lashes, blue eyes, tall figure, and blond curly hair ruffled in the breeze...

Bahorel's cry of "To hell with these old bourgeois tragedies!" on sight of a theatre poster brought me back down to earth.

"You're wrong, Bahorel," Combeferre replied. "The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and they must be left allowed to go on doing so. Costume-drama has its place in the scheme of things, and I am not one of those who in the name of Æschylus deny it the right to exist. Nature contains its own self parodies. Take a beak that isn't a beak, wings that aren't wings, fins that aren't fins, paws that aren't paws, agonised squawks that make you want to laugh, and you have a duck. But if domestic poultry can exist side by side with real birds I see no reason why our 'classic' tragedy should not exist side by side with the antique."

As Bahorel continued the argument, I lost interest again. I had been to the theatre now and then, when I had first arrived in Paris and had a little money. I had found in the plays a pleasant distraction from daily life, though I could barely differentiate the story line of one from another, now. All the stories blurred together as one, with love stories, death scenes, mistaken identities, all whirling together in the gaudy, gilded little box of the stage that I had looked down on from the Gods. They tended to be about grand people and far away places, with balls, and romance, and sparkling dresses, and things that I could never aspire to. Tragedy, perhaps, was something more easily achievable, though it was hardly something to aspire to. Nevertheless, to be able to spend time in a great big room where, for even just a little while, the world was a different place...

We turned a corner, down another road, and Courfeyrac's voice broke into my day dream:

"Do you see where we are?" he was saying to Marius. "This is the former Rue Plâtrière, now named Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, after a curious household which lived here sixty years ago. Jean-Jacques and Thérèse. Children were born to them. Thérèse gave birth to them, Jean-Jacques gave them up as foundlings."

Enjolras responded sternly: "I won't hear a word said against Jean-Jacques. He is a man I revere. True, he disowned his children; but he adopted the people."

"He abandoned his children?" I couldn't help asking. "Who was he? I know he wrote some of the books you have - I have seen his name - but I know very little about him."

"He was a writer, and a philosopher, and one of the men I most admire," Enjolras continued. "He inspired Robespierre, and St-Just to do away with corruption and superfluities during the Revolution. He believed that in upholding the common good, the deficiencies of individuals could be done away with."

"But he gave up his children?"

"Both he and Thérèse were impoverished - they were struggling to support themselves, her mother, and her siblings. And he didn't want to see his children ill brought up by Thérèse's family, who were badly educated and ne'er-do-wells, the lot of them. The education they were to receive in the foundling hospital was inevitably going to be better than anything they would get at home. And he did ask after his son, but no record could be found."

"It must have been a difficult thing to do. I knew plenty of women who had to give up their children to foundling hospitals, or leave them on church doorsteps, or find others to look after them. So much of the factory work especially is impossible to do if you have a child whose father has died, or abandoned you. Things like the sewing that can be done at home can at least be done while looking after children, but they pay so much less."

"Plato, in his Republic, advocates the sharing of all wives and children, and that no child should know who his parent is. But I don't think that such a system would be fair, and it's certainly not one that Rousseau would suggest. He did not want to give up his children - it was done out of necessity, like the women you mention."

"So, in your Ideal Republic, how would you solve such a problem, then?" I asked. Such conversations as these with Enjolras were always enjoyable. While I had the practical knowledge of what life was like for so many of these people, he had the reading, and the philosophy, being able to explain different ideas and viewpoints, some of which I had never considered before. "Were I to be a wife, I should hardly like to be shared. I don't wish to be considered property, even if that is all I am according to the law. And nor should I like to give up my hypothetical children. But to give education to all, regardless of position or wealth - surely that would help?"

"The difficulty there, of course," he responded, "is making sure that there is equal opportunity for education for all. With wealth distributed the way it is, and the way education is currently managed, those with wealth can pay for private tutors of the best kind, and their child can receive tuition tailored entirely to their needs and abilities. Meanwhile, those who have no wealth but can scrape together the money for their children to go to a dame school are able to give their children the most basic abilities to read and write, if that. And simply being able to read and write, and to remember facts, is no good at all. Being able to think, and criticise, and understand, and see things from different points of view - that's what really matters."

"More than that," I added, "I think both the wealthy child and the poor child are both lacking opportunities - the wealthy one to experience manual labour, and the poor one to experience more intellectual things. Letting them find what they really like doing as an occupation is surely going to make them happier, and them enjoying that occupation would be an asset to the country as a whole. There must be so many who never find out what they truly enjoy. Being able to grant children schools where they can learn who they are - where they come from - what's out there in the wider world, and where they fit in it - that must be the most important thing."

Such exchange of ideas - on almost any topic - was something I had never experienced before, and something that I was beginning to enjoy, and grow more confident in, as I read more, listened to the others, and began to develop my own ideas, outside of just those necessary for survival, for once. Such discussions were never encouraged when I was at home with my father and brother - though I had had a decent education, it was much more in how to do things - how to read, write, sing, play, dance - than in how to put any of the information gained from those activities together to reach new ideas. And after my father's death and my brother's downfall, I had had no time, energy, or money for any of those old pursuits. But now, with a means to support myself again, and being treated as an equal by these young men, who were willing to take me seriously, and discuss and argue with and teach me, I was finding enjoyment in life, instead of merely subsistence.