"Indeed!" Jehan makes a dramatic gesture with his arms, and just misses hitting Bahorel in the nose. "And maybe we argued with him even while we were living--maybe our souls reached out to his, without our knowing, and communed with him, and that helped lay the foundations for what he wrote later. We just don't know. Either way, it's an enthralling idea." He pauses.

Jehan pulls his arms back in, huddling. "Of course, the greatest arguments are within the self. Do you know, I once spent a whole day and a whole night wrestling with myself, because two characters in my epic poem were at cross purposes? It was a glorious thing. My soul was a battleground." He smiles at the memory, then returns to the present moment. "And that's Bossuet's theory, you say? We're 'fictional', as you call it--except we can't be, we're real because we feel ourselves to be--but it's possible, so this theory says, that we're created by Hugo, that we and others in this book people the terrain of his mind."

Bossuet might have been shaken by this. Jehan is enchanted. He sighs. "What an exquisite thought."