#lmss16

           One such pup strutted through the slush on the streets, nimbly pressing through the worst of it despite the gracelessness of the fact that the shoes were for a man, and they had one flapping sole.  It had come loose that morning.  The pup muttered to himself, a sort of theatrical aside between his chipped teeth.

           “Bah! Why! I’ve found my paw in a trap, me! Well! Kick it off and loose the foot? Well!”  And so on, whistled between the gaps in his teeth like the wind whistled, tuneless. He appeared sickly, with yellowish cheeks and perpetually chapped lips, but his eyes were bright with life and not with fever.

           “Hello,” called another wolf to the pup.  A forlorn howl.

           “Why!” barked the younger one (not that the lanky-legged, second wolf was much out of metaphorical puppyhood himself).  “Hullo, is that you, then, Montparnasse?”

           The hailed Montparnasse – waiting with irritated patience in the narrow overhang of a pâtisserie – sniffed morosely. “Gavroche.”

           “Is it your nose again?  Have you rouged it, or is it of your own making?”

           The raw-nosed dandy sniffed again, with a savage, warning note to the wet resonance.

           “Stuff it with something besides your own snot next time, if you’re trying for a nobler line,” chuckled the pup, with a good-natured jeering. “It slopes too much as is; means you’re a thug no better than anyone.  Buy yourself a set of quills.  Or ask a friend with a solid arm and a steady aim to set it for you.”

           Montparnasse snuffed.  “I’m waiting for someone.”

           Gavroche flung the woolen shawl over his shoulders with a low whistle.  “A lady?”

Sniff.

“A man!” Gavroche gallantly adjusted the ends of his lady’s shawl over his sharp shoulders.  “Well! Would it be that yellow-haired lass on the corner?  The one who forgot her skirts at home, and is instead wearing gentleman’s pants?  … Have you anything for me?” he asked, a seeming afterthought.

“Biscuit,” said Montparnasse, and then added with sick rudeness, “For you.”

“Ah!” sighed the child melodramatically, “If only that were the case.  There are biscuits and there are biscuits, and my belly’s never full.”

“It may be shortly,” came the muttered reply, sunk to nearly a conspirator’s hiss, “If this job goes down right.”

“And what’s the job, then?”

“Things.”

“Ah!” Vibrating with shivers despite the moth-eaten shawl, Gavroche tisked. “Sure, sure - or you could go straight to La Force.  One never knows how biscuits bake this time of year.”

           “One never knows,” returned Montparnasse slyly. “With the exception of this one.  It can’t go wrong.”

           “Well, if something turns up, send to my address. I’ve yet to hire a porter, so query M’sier Gavroche without spending a calling card.”  He again flung and re-arranged the ends of the shawl, fussing with them until he had replicated the elaborate knot at Montparnasse’s own smooth throat.  “It may be tricky, though; I’m inquiring about a better situation.”

           Montparnasse half-curled him a smile and touched at his hat – turned to the side, as was the fashion.  Gavroche repeated the gesture.  He wore no hat, and no pomade, so the elegance was lost, but not the spirit of the gesture.  With that, the pup trotted off.

           Montparnasse turned his attention to the personage Gavroche had indicated on the corner, and instantly felt both a surge of judgmental satisfaction and bewilderment.  The man – despite the long hair, the figure cut was slight but definitely masculine – had made no efforts to adhere to any seeming sort of protocol when it came to his dress, which appeared to be coupled of items that should have never been paired together in the same century, let alone violently come together on the same thin body at the same time.  He had been stamping his feet on the corner with two companions, keeping himself warm by moving his arms – oddly graceful, as if he were conducting instead of fending off cold.  He had parted ways from the other two, and was rapidly walking down the street toward Montparnasse, a vivacious sort of spring to his walk, as if he was unafraid of the winter.  

           The man raised his head acknowledged the loitering Montparnasse with a dip of his chin.

           “Hello, Monsieur.  What a day!”

           Montparnasse acknowledged the gesture.  “Much too short,” he answered.

           The man stopped, and tilted his head with birdlike inquiry at the undisguised rancor in Montparnasse’s tone.  “Monsieur is very busy then?”

“I’m a man of Business,” said Montparnasse, capitalizing it.

“Ah, and since, like flowers, most business needs daylight to grow, you find the snow unsatisfactory.”

Montparnasse did not correct the stranger on the nature of his work.  “If the business is good, I will become a man of leisure.” He cast an eye over the clothes of the stranger again, from shoes to the hair.  “You appear to be a man of great leisure,” he declared.  It wasn’t so much the freakishly out-of-style cut of the clothing that had brought Montparnasse to this conclusion as the material – some of it at the throat was a near-oriental, hand-painted silk. He’d always had a good eye for quality beyond his means.    

           “On the contrary,” replied the soft-spoken stranger with a gravity divorced from his delicate tone, “I am a student, and to be a student is to eternally be a man of business.”

           The man’s accent struck him; distinctly southern. Montparnasse snorted wetly at it.  “What sort of business?” he inquired.

           “Mankind,” said the student.  The tone was more open and airy than when Montparnasse had answered ‘things’ to Gavroche with equal brevity.  It invited further conversation, whereas Montparnasse had not.  

           “I could have sworn you were going to say books instead of men,” retorted Montparnasse, without keeping a smug sort of pleasure in his voice for his slight attempt at verbal dexterity[i].

           “One eye on the page, the other on God,” returned the student with an enthusiasm that rang with mirth; “A moon can orbit both earth and the sun.”  

           Montparnasse had the vague discomfort of realizing that he was intrigued, and that if he didn’t abruptly quit the company of the stranger he would end up engrossed in a conversation.  Still, he had told Babet the place, and Babet had yet to show. Surely he could keep one eye on the student, and one out for Babet.  The latter was hardly God.

           “So you’ve resigned your whole life to the business of Mankind, then?”

           The student smiled – a sudden burst of sunlight, it seemed, in the gray, waning afternoon.  “Why, of course.  But natural law says nothing about business being uncomfortable.  The sublime work is an ecstasy; an easy yoke.”

           “And what could be more sublime than cafés and theatres?” inquired Montparnasse, with a casual sort of indifferent jab, to see how the stranger would react.

           To his surprise, the man laughed, seemingly un-stung, and in concurrence.  “What indeed? I go to the theatre to study the audience, not the actors, and end up learning of the play; one must never forsake mythology for the same reason – the small gods teach about large men.”

           “I’m afraid that’s too intellectual for my taste,” replied Montparnasse.  “I have to keep both feet on the cobbles if I’m to live properly.”  He found, to his grudging annoyance, though he didn’t know why he was annoyed at himself, that he was being very careful to sort through his sentences before he said them to avoid argot.  

           “But what is the intellectual but a study of the profound and simple?” asked the stranger, coming up on his toes with a sudden burst of intensity.  “To write poetry, to play the flute, to weep over a child, to pity women, to come side by side with men; to look up and reconcile oneself to acknowledging another man as equal? What better way to study mankind than to walk side-by-side with fellow men?”

           Montparnasse suddenly noticed a man waiting on the opposite, snow-slushed corner who had the distinct air of a man not wanting to be kept waiting on the corner.  Ah. Babet had arrived. Well, he thought with wry amusement, he had an equal to acknowledge, and for the most elegantly simple of reasons – to get a job done. Surely his new companion couldn’t help but approve.  

           “Unfortunate, but you must excuse me,” he said, and found himself genuinely reluctant.  

           “Good heaven – I have kept you, haven’t I, and with your illness, and this weather besides.”  The student tucked some blondish hair – long, out of style, and whipping into his eyes – behind one of his small but prominent ears.  “Please, forgive me.  Sometimes I’m so warmed by my heart that I forget the feeling in my fingers entirely.  Go about your business.”

           “And you to yours,” said Montparnasse, and then, with grudging respect, “Monsieur?”

           “Jean Prouvaire but Jehan, please, and dispense with Monsieur.”  He laughed gaily.  “Enjoyable tonight, my business.  Speaking of the theatre, I’m attending.”

           “Myself as well,” said Montparnasse with a sniff. “It’s going to be quite a performance.”

           The student seized Montparnasse by the hand – despite the soiled handkerchief clenched between two languid, gloved fingers. “Find us, if you can – my friends and I. We could continue to discuss our affairs over something much more warming than this air.”

           “I will,” said Montparnasse, and was surprised that he almost meant it.  Another day, he would have.

The two inclined their heads to each other, and went their separate ways.

           Montparnasse was left with the business of thinking as he walked across the street to his business meeting with the bare-headed, pale-eyed Babet, nearing opaque in the gathering promise of fog.  Patron-Minette was involved in the Grand-père job; success was assured, Montparnasse would take his cut, and at the same time, could circumvent direct involvement in case something did go sideways.  Eponine didn’t like the cheap seats; she always complained of the press of the crowd and the smell.  Very well, he could afford better than the floor, courtesy of their new bourgeois.

           The student – Jehan – had been right.  What rule was there against a little pleasure in business? Montparnasse sniffed heartily, redoubled his grip on his cane, and set off at a leisure pace for his rendezvous, and then after that, Gorbeau 50-52.  He had plenty of time to arrive before the curtain went up.