[Given all of the differences Enjolras had found, even among rough contemporaries, or those whose dates matched on some accounts that they might have overlapped, Enjolras would almost be shocked now to meet many people from the Paris he had come from here unless he's personally known them, or at least of them. Hell, he could run into someone like Victor Bloody Hugo and not be convinced that they exist within the same universe, even though he's actually met the man. Not that he's got a penchant for the Romantics, anyway, but the point remains, he supposes. Something of it anyway.
An alliance may, at first, have seemed better than a king had the subject come up, but then again, what had most of the parliament been in action but a united group of bourgeoisie who strove to protect their own self assured importance and interests above all else. There were, well, so many horrible things that seemed to function most of all as universals and could be taken to so many terrible extremes no matter what the differences making up a world were. He did not doubt that there could be a better one, but perhaps the work of the Utopia he had seen from the barricade was still the work of centuries, maybe more than those, in the making.]
After all, I've not gotten to the first day of the revolution itself yet.
[He's confiding this with a little nod, then glancing about for somewhere they might sit, mostly for the reason that he tends to ramble and there are three more actual days to get through. ]
Here we are [He's saying, after a moment, finding a perfectly comfortable looking table and pulling out a chair for Midii before taking one across from her, his hands splayed across the table as he thought where to continue.]
As it transpired during our meeting, and the messages we'd gotten, it was expected that the workers, and the others who were being harmed directly by all of this, would try to form a revolt in the next day. There was the hope that things would go to barricades, and it seemed as if, perhaps, our time had come.
I think we spent that night, almost all of us, trying to plan for what may come. It had occurred to all of us to some degree we might not all meet again, or we may meet again in a world that was changed. We spoke to some of our larger society, learned where some barricades were the most likely to be placed, and where we could expect to stir up fighting reasonably. It was one of the best nights, and the best three days that followed them, you know.
[It's a time that Enjolras can think of even the friends he lost here, in addition to those who did not come, with smiles as bright and vibrant as he is just now.]
I had rarely felt, even Paris herself, had never felt so alive, so filled with hope at that point of the night and into the next day. And when the people gathered, we were there to meet them, to attempt directing things, really. I left a lot of that up to the others, especially when they sent out members of the military to patrol. My friend Bahorel was, well, always rather fond of riots and tearing things up and throwing them at people who deserved it. He was in charge of a good deal of our group's area of influence and getting things started that day.
[You know, to put it mildly. There are less politic ways to refer to Bahorel, probably, but Enjolras does want his friend to remain in a good light in this re-telling so phrases like 'one stop destruction' and 'reincarnated god of mayhem and chaos' are best left in his mind.]
So things got on to twilight, and the mobs attacked. I think we had no more streetlamps in Paris after that night, really. But what started as just a riot quickly became something more. When the fighting really started, and the next day, as all of the insurgents across the city tried to capture some of our most important landmarks, some of our group separated. Feuilly, the best of us, and some of the others with more noble purposes in mind, went to La Louvre, not to capture, but to guard it so that everything within, our greatest works of art, could not be harmed as a result of the mob or violence.
Everyone fought across the city. I was on a barricade with most of my friends then, and we took on a little damage, saw some of those who'd joined us killed, friends of ours, even, but none of our set of nine. We were lucky to be spared that fate, then. And we kept on for three days of it.
[Three days which, actually now, are something of a blur to Enjolras. They had not stopped to eat or sleep, after all, so that the whole revolution comes to him in bits of memory, rather than a full construction of events. That was until the end and how it had been ruined, then.]
It finally felt, it truly did, as though we finally had won. The more buildings those on our side gathered, the closer a republic seemed, the truer that it was.
[His next words are a sigh,deeply sad and disgruntled at the same time, and the next words are darkly bitter. ]
no subject
An alliance may, at first, have seemed better than a king had the subject come up, but then again, what had most of the parliament been in action but a united group of bourgeoisie who strove to protect their own self assured importance and interests above all else. There were, well, so many horrible things that seemed to function most of all as universals and could be taken to so many terrible extremes no matter what the differences making up a world were. He did not doubt that there could be a better one, but perhaps the work of the Utopia he had seen from the barricade was still the work of centuries, maybe more than those, in the making.]
After all, I've not gotten to the first day of the revolution itself yet.
[He's confiding this with a little nod, then glancing about for somewhere they might sit, mostly for the reason that he tends to ramble and there are three more actual days to get through. ]
Here we are [He's saying, after a moment, finding a perfectly comfortable looking table and pulling out a chair for Midii before taking one across from her, his hands splayed across the table as he thought where to continue.]
As it transpired during our meeting, and the messages we'd gotten, it was expected that the workers, and the others who were being harmed directly by all of this, would try to form a revolt in the next day. There was the hope that things would go to barricades, and it seemed as if, perhaps, our time had come.
I think we spent that night, almost all of us, trying to plan for what may come. It had occurred to all of us to some degree we might not all meet again, or we may meet again in a world that was changed. We spoke to some of our larger society, learned where some barricades were the most likely to be placed, and where we could expect to stir up fighting reasonably. It was one of the best nights, and the best three days that followed them, you know.
[It's a time that Enjolras can think of even the friends he lost here, in addition to those who did not come, with smiles as bright and vibrant as he is just now.]
I had rarely felt, even Paris herself, had never felt so alive, so filled with hope at that point of the night and into the next day. And when the people gathered, we were there to meet them, to attempt directing things, really. I left a lot of that up to the others, especially when they sent out members of the military to patrol. My friend Bahorel was, well, always rather fond of riots and tearing things up and throwing them at people who deserved it. He was in charge of a good deal of our group's area of influence and getting things started that day.
[You know, to put it mildly. There are less politic ways to refer to Bahorel, probably, but Enjolras does want his friend to remain in a good light in this re-telling so phrases like 'one stop destruction' and 'reincarnated god of mayhem and chaos' are best left in his mind.]
So things got on to twilight, and the mobs attacked. I think we had no more streetlamps in Paris after that night, really. But what started as just a riot quickly became something more. When the fighting really started, and the next day, as all of the insurgents across the city tried to capture some of our most important landmarks, some of our group separated. Feuilly, the best of us, and some of the others with more noble purposes in mind, went to La Louvre, not to capture, but to guard it so that everything within, our greatest works of art, could not be harmed as a result of the mob or violence.
Everyone fought across the city. I was on a barricade with most of my friends then, and we took on a little damage, saw some of those who'd joined us killed, friends of ours, even, but none of our set of nine. We were lucky to be spared that fate, then. And we kept on for three days of it.
[Three days which, actually now, are something of a blur to Enjolras. They had not stopped to eat or sleep, after all, so that the whole revolution comes to him in bits of memory, rather than a full construction of events. That was until the end and how it had been ruined, then.]
It finally felt, it truly did, as though we finally had won. The more buildings those on our side gathered, the closer a republic seemed, the truer that it was.
[His next words are a sigh,deeply sad and disgruntled at the same time, and the next words are darkly bitter. ]
The closer it had seemed...