Chimera
For Logic and Philosophy Week 2020.
“I’ve met a chimera,” Combeferre said. “Come and see him.”
Enjolras rubbed his tired eyes and looked up. Combeferre stood in his doorway, flushed and breathless with delight. He still wore his greatcoat, and he had brought in with him the scent of the cold evening streets, bitter with coming snow.
Enjolras had been writing for hours, marshaling his thoughts on the tightening censorship of the press, the revolt in Lyon, and the growing unrest in Paris. There were men from the Cougourde he was to meet at six. It would be wise in the remaining time to eat something.
But Combeferre had not looked this happy in months, and their plans for revolution were to blame for it. Enjolras could not feel guilty–Combeferre would do as he believed was right, and he would reconcile his warring moral impulses in the end. Even so, it disrupted the steady metronome of his heart to see Combeferre smile like this.
“A chimera?” Enjolras asked. “Where?”
–
“If one were to take that thick-pelted, paddle-tailed curiosity, the beaver,” Combeferre said, “whom we city dwellers know, alas, more as a hat than in his own person, and combine him with that patent absurdity, the duck…”
The last dry leaves rattled in the trees, and the sun slanted low and gold into their eyes as they walked. The freezing air was thick with scents of burning fuel: wood among the rich, charcoal among the poor, bits of refuse among the poorer still. Enjolras had no idea where they were going or what Combeferre was describing. He weighed the possibility that it was Louis-Philippe.
Combeferre was prone to a peculiar succinctness, occasionally difficult to follow. Enjolras supposed ducks referred to the newspapers; as to beavers, his suspicions were hazier. Combeferre may have meant entrenched wealth, in a reference to the use of beaver pelts in fashion. Or perhaps he was invoking Castor and Pollux–though who might be one twin and who the other Enjolras could not guess.
“It has been argued by some that he is born from an egg,” Combeferre said, “an absurdity based upon the presence of the anatomically baffling cloaca. But it is generally agreed he is a kind of aquatic mole.”
They had reached the Boulevard du Temple where laughing, red-cheeked crowds were massing for the evening. Combeferre paused amid the stands and jugglers and jostling pleasure-seekers, looking around with serious intentness. Barkers shouted over each other in an effort to draw passersby into their theaters.
“If this is a political metaphor,” Enjolras said slowly, “I fear I’ve lost the thread of it.”
“A what?” Combeferre asked. “No, no. I know he was around here somewhere–ah! Here he is.”
He drew Enjolras towards a brightly painted booth. Shelves in the dark interior glittered with bottles purporting to cure everything from indigestion to the plague. From its roof hung exotic curios and dried objects of questionable salubriousness.
In pride of place on the counter stood a small taxidermy animal. Enjolras took it at first for some dark-furred species of marmot, until he saw the duck bill and the beaver tail.
Combeferre gazed enraptured. “Is nature not a wondrous thing? To harbor such chimeras! To combine impossibilities into a coherent organism! If only man could bear his own contradictions with such grace.”
He fell silent. In the light of the street lamps, snow was beginning to fall.
Enjolras took his hand and settled quietly at his side, contemplating the platypus.
