Armand Chauvelin (citoyen) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-09-22 15:26:00 |
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No one but the most blindly zealous or shamelessly disingenuous had ever seized onto the reformed calendar with any force - not that he'd known. Chauvelin fit neither of those categories; and, like most men of his era (and eras previous and subsequent), he had always been liable to think of time with reference to the more usual Christian schema. When the new edicts had come down, of course, he'd been just as careful to translate his Junes into Messidors as he was his madames into citoyennes - the principle behind both was sound, even if one was tragically silly and mathematically indefensible. And while he'd never got used to it at all, having had less than a month to acclimatize himself to d'Églantine's nonsense before being swept over into 2013 (221), still its peculiarities had stuck with him. The end of summer, the beginning of the year; the consecrated week leading up to it. Virtue, Talent, Labor, Conviction, Honors. Revolution. He sucked down the last drag his cigarette was willing to give up - his preferred vice had fallen out of fashion, it seemed, but thankfully he'd never been particularly fussy when it came to stimulants - and cast the butt over the railing, into the river, before lighting another. Today, if he'd calculated correctly (and there was no reason to feel very strongly that he had) was Honors. Récompenses. A bitter feast for him - for any man whose cause and legacy had been so thoroughly blackened by the writers of history. He himself was nothing more than a joke, when anyone bothered to recall that the Scarlet Pimpernel had had an enemy. Whether that was better or worse than being utterly demonized and remembered only as a bloodthirsty child-murderer (Robespierre, bloodthirsty! As though he wouldn't faint at the very sight of it!), he wasn't sure. It hardly mattered. Stripped entirely of honor, his life's work was relegated to an historical abomination sitting between a king and an emperor. The day of récompenses was rendered for good and all at best ironic, at worst a slur. Another cigarette spent, another fragment tossed away. He drew out his third. Never had he conceived of a place as foreign as this - he could think of nothing he had done since birth that anyone in this city would applaud him for. Having a child, perhaps: base biological perpetuation was practically heroism here, worse even than back home. What else? Nothing. He felt, as he blew smoke out away from this damn island, that it was probably his fault as much as anyone else's. Fight a bourgeois revolution, a war that even in its most histrionically exaggerated phases never made more than vague promises to hand power to the masses, and what could you possibly achieve but a world in which Comfort was the new King? In his time he had been a radical; now, the word for him would no doubt be something else, something so different as to be prohibited from any political category whatsoever. He turned to face the skyline (blotted out by its own sheer size from his vantage point here, with his neck craning, the rails biting into his waist) and saw the machinery of wealth as entrenched, as immovable as mountains. He didn't believe the fantastic fairytale story about the day two of the tallest had miraculously vanished, no more than he believed in the loaves and the fishes. It was all eternal, and - true mark of that which is here to stay - seemed to make no impression whatsoever on the people walking in its shadow, who looked not up but forward and slightly down, trading for their little dose of comfort the freedom that came with the willingness to endure earthquakes. No damned récompenses for anyone. Not this year, not last year, not in the Year Two. Who had earned it? Grinding his cigarette out under his shoe, he took another, mechanically and without any real pleasure or anticipation. He was deeply unhappy here, but until today had failed to realize that his unhappiness resulted from being faced constantly with his own failure not only of achievement but of purpose. And the knowledge that tomorrow (or today, or perhaps yesterday) would mark a new year in some idiotic cuckoo clock of a system dreamed up by a bunch of bankers' sons playing at priesthood couldn't possibly comfort him. Time's signature, as far as he could tell, was 1/1. A day was a day was a day. A building was a building was a building. They regenerated constantly to no purpose other than regeneration, and wouldn't start anew, not truly, until someone found it in themselves to raze it all. |