To Hide the Sword - Chapter 2
Enjolras was a woman.
On the surface, it changed nothing. In everything that mattered, it changed nothing. What did it matter if Enjolras was the priest of the Republic or its vestal virgin? They had all been charmed by Enjolras' frail, girlish exterior before discovering the iron conviction that lay beneath it; they had all been awed by this pale, beardless, beautiful youth who carried the spirit of ninety-three in his sad, otherworldly eyes, who spurned everything that was not the Republic and merely smiled his distant virgin smile on his friends' loves and lives and pleasures. It should not have mattered to Combeferre that the youth was in fact a girl. Shocking as it had seemed at first, it made sense. The thing almost explained itself. It was almost a logical extension of Enjolras' paradoxical nature, and it changed nothing of what was important to Enjolras and to the rest of them. The iron conviction was not softened; indeed, it only seemed starker in the light of what Enjolras must have overcome to achieve it.
And yet Combeferre was troubled. A thousand questions flew pell-mell through his head whenever he had a moment to himself, ideas, speculations, demands to re-evaluate everything he thought he knew. Disordered wondering would get him nowhere, he knew. What he needed was a stretch of time alone to compose his thoughts and then talk to Enjolras in private. Would she want to talk about it? Enjolras was usually too caught up in the higher cause to talk of herself and was loath to indulge in this sort of personal reflection, but then again, perhaps this was the reason why. Perhaps she refused to engage in a personal life that might endanger her secret, and now that someone else was in on the secret, she would want to share everything she ordinarily had to surround with a mantle of utter silence. Such a secret could not be easy to keep. Once she had a chance to share the burden of a lifetime of hidden tribulations without endangering herself, surely she would want to break the silence—and maybe it would help Combeferre understand.
And then there were the questions that Combeferre hardly even dared raise to himself, built as they were around secret smiles and the shadows that loom in the space of things left unsaid. He was not sure he had the right to ask them, but that didn't keep them from troubling him.
Combeferre had long since accepted his own nature. What came naturally to other men did not come at all to him. He had tried to love women as he should, and had succeeded only in loving them as sisters and friends; the only true desire he had ever felt had been in the arms of other men. He had denied it, struggled against it, and finally analyzed it as he would any other social problem. To accept that it was harmless had been easy; to accept that it was not wrong had taken much longer. Many times, he had rejected his conclusions for fear that his own inclinations were falsely leading him to absolve himself. But in the end he was forced to admit that his penchant for his fellow man was immutable; that to indulge in it harmed no one; that it could not be unnatural or the product of debauchery, springing up as it did so naturally and purely within him; that the sterile coupling of two men was perhaps not as sacred as the union of the sexes, but that to engage in it was no more worthy of reproach than bedding a woman without the aim of procreation. Independently and without knowing it, he had recreated the defense of the antiphysicals in Thérèse Philosophe, with this advantage over Mademoiselle Bois-Laurier: his philosophical rigor forced him to accept his reasoning and take it seriously instead of dismissing his conclusions out of prejudice and disgust. In any case he refused to become one of those men who, weighted down with their self-loathing and unable to rid themselves of the vice that so attracted them, became nothing but their vice: the quintessential soft, weakened pederast. Combeferre was determined to use what nature had given him. He had decided long ago that if it was likely he would never procreate, he could at least make his contribution to future generations by using his intellectual capacities to the fullest extent possible; and if he had covert liaisons with men from time to time, well, it was at worst a harmless fault to count against the achievements of his life.
But Enjolras had thrown him into all kinds of doubt since the moment they met. Combeferre had never been in love. Infatuation, lust, schoolboy friendships that went beyond normal friendship, all these things he had known in varying degrees; and he had felt within himself the capability to fall in love, a yearning for the divine union of souls falling into alignment. Enjolras tantalized and frustrated him at every turn. Combeferre could never shake the feeling that if he ever fell in love, it would be with Enjolras; that they were two parts of the same whole, united in purpose and compensating for one another's faults. Enjolras gave force and drive to Combeferre's ideas, and at the same time he seemed to allow Combeferre to add depth and nuance to his conviction, to soften his rigidity. And yet Enjolras made Combeferre doubt his conclusions on whether his inverted nature was acceptable. No sooner had Combeferre begun to suspect that Enjolras shared his nature, than his mind recoiled before that Spartan austerity. How could Combeferre dare suspect that Enjolras' aversion to women, his grim chastity, a certain feminine charm, meant that Enjolras would ever seek that sort of union with him? The mere thought of the terrible look Enjolras would give him if he broached the possibility made his face redden in shame, and all his reasoning began to look like excuses for his base desires. Surely if Enjolras were like him, he had chosen chastity rather than lower himself to unnatural coupling with another man.
And then just when Combeferre was sure that all his wonderings were no more than vain, shameful fantasy, Enjolras would make him doubt again. His hand would brush Combeferre's as they were working side by side, and just when Combeferre ws ready to die of shame from the electric spark that shot through his skin at the contact, Enjolras would keep his hand there just a moment too long and withdraw it hastily, with the faintest uncharacteristic flush of pink on his cheeks. A meaningful gaze, a word that could easily be misinterpreted, a certain intimacy that he afforded no one else—and Combeferre would be cast back into the agony of doubt.
And now it turned out that Enjolras was a woman.
Combeferre knew that in this secret, speculative part of himself he should have been overjoyed. It explained Enjolras' behavior, at least, if Enjolras was attracted to him and holding back for fear of betraying her secret. Pride, too, perhaps, an unwillingness to go from being a friend and a leader to being no more than a mistress. That, at least, was no obstacle, for Combeferre had not for a moment imagined he could lose respect for Enjolras if they ever became lovers. It would be easy to think he should be relieved to discover that Enjolras was a woman and that his desire was not for the twilight passions of two men, but for the healthy love of male and female. But Combeferre was too honest with himself to be relieved. He had thought himself capable of falling in love with Enjolras when he had thought Enjolras was a man. Enjolras as a woman still had his respect, friendship, veneration, even a bit of newfound tenderness, but Combeferre didn't know if he was capable of falling in love with her.
There, that was the problem. That was the source of his disquiet over a discovery that ought to have changed nothing. It changed nothing that was important; Enjolras was first and foremost the priest or priestess of the Republic; but it was the unimportant, the personal, that had been troubling Combeferre for years, and that was now giving rise to a thousand unanswered questions about Enjolras' past.
He felt that if he could learn who she had been before her transformation into a young man, and what her motives were for the transformation, he might be able to unravel the snarled mess of uncertainties in his head. Had she donned male clothing as a mere convenience to further her ideals, or was she a fellow creature of the third sex, a Sapphist whose masculine inclinations had not stopped at love? What of her chastity? Did it come of natural purity? Was it, too, the product of convenience and dedication to a higher cause? Was it a grim mantle thrown over past faults? A final bastion of feminine dignity for a woman who had forsaken the modesty of skirts and thrown herself into the public square, not to be bought and used and trampled by the masses, but to lift them up from the mud?
Combeferre was alone with Enjolras several times in the aftermath of the riots, but never in sufficient privacy to bring up the subject. In the absence of information, his mind turned over and over upon itself, spinning his uncertainties and suppositions into elaborate theories.
In the most noble and plausible of these theories, Enjolras was some sort of visionary called upon by a higher power to save France from her oppressors, a Jeanne d'Arc of the Republic. Or perhaps she was the intellectual daughter of the previous generation's Théroigne de Méricourts and Mary Wollstonecrafts; equally disgusted by the tyranny placed upon her sex and the tyranny placed upon her country, she had liberated herself from the one in order to liberate France from the other. And yet Enjolras showed little concern for the plight of women, usually leaving such topics to Combeferre. Surely a person of such dedication and principles would not stay silent on her most passionate subject just to keep from arousing suspicion as to her sex.
His more fanciful suppositions were fueled by an additional curiosity: the practical question of how a young woman could pass herself off as a man—as a law student even—in modern-day Paris. Had she first assumed male dress to pursue some Sapphic passion, and found it more to her liking than the constraints of wearing petticoats everywhere? Had she perhaps, like so many other girls, been led to Paris on false pretenses by a lover who promised her the world and delivered only bitter disappointment, and had she then decided to take matters into her own hands? Perhaps she had assumed his identity and his place in the university, and the very name of Enjolras was a falsehood and a blasphemy, the name of the man who had deceived her. Combeferre blushed over these theories; they jarred discordantly with the Enjolras he knew, but if she was already concealing her sex, he had no way to know to what extent the Enjolras he knew was a mere persona.
And yet these were not the most lurid and fantastical of the theories that his brain produced. Strange ideas issued forth from the tangled web of question and conjecture: Enjolras was some sort of mythical androgyne; Enjolras was a madwoman with delusions of being a man; what if Enjolras had been raised as as a boy from the very beginning, ignorant of her true sex until adolescence? Impossible thoughts, disrespectful thoughts, the stuff of boulevard melodramas piecing itself together in his head: a difficult childbirth where the woman loses the ability to conceive again and almost loses the baby, a family desperate for a male heir, a girl-child passed off as a boy, a snarled knot of coincidences and deceptions where all the threads are neatly tied off at the end and everyone falls into their proper place. What was Enjolras' proper place?
Thus did Combeferre torment himself while waiting for a chance to talk to Enjolras alone. His wait was long, as Enjolras was impossibly busy in the night and day that followed the riot, and when they finally saw each other in private, it was under circumstances far different from those Combeferre had imagined.