Bokelskere.no

Sir Francis Burdett, British Ambassador, on Paris: 'It is the most ill-contrived, ill-built, dirty stinking town that can possibly be imagined; as for the inhabitants, they are ten times more nasty then the inhabitans of Edinburgh.'

Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.

Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, 'Claude, you are dull.'

The judge's face was dirty, his coat was ripped half off his back. In one hand he had a very fine duelling pistol, one of a valuable pair made for Maurice de Saxe: and in the other a meat-cleaver.

'But the waste, the irresponsibility,' Hérault said. 'They've plundered the Saint-Lazare monestary. All that fine furniture, my God, and the silver. Yes, they've raided the cellars, they're lying in the streets vomiting now. What's that you say? Versailles? Did you say "finish it off" or "finish them off"? If so I'd better get a change of clothes, I'd hate to turn up at the palace looking like this. Oh yes,' he said, and he gripped his cleaver and charged back into the crowds, 'it beats filing writs, doesn't it?'

He had never been so happy: never, never before.

Some semblance of normal life takes hold. The shops re-open.

An old man, shrunken and bony, with a long white beard, is paraded through the city to wave to the crowds who still hang about on every street. His name is Major Whyte - he is perhaps an Englishman, perhaps an Irishman - and no one knows how long he has been locked up in the Bastille. He seems to enjoy the attention he is getting, though when asked about the circumstances of his incarceration he weeps. On a bad day he does not know who he is at all.

On a good day he answers to Julius Caesar.