The French Revolution Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR iPHONE

  BASTILLE DAY

  SANS-CULOTTES

  THE TENNIS COURT OATH

  COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY

  LET THEM EAT CAKE

  REIGN OF TERROR

  THERMIDORIAN REACTION

  FOREIGN WARS

  NAPOLEON

  WATERLOO

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Matt Stewart made headlines worldwide when he released The French Revolution via Twitter on Bastille Day 2009. (Rest assured, the version in your hand is significantly easier to read.) His short stories have appeared in Instant City, McSweeney’s, and Opium Magazine, among other venues, and, when the moonlight strikes just right across the alpine lake in his mind, he’s been known to blog for The Huffington Post. The French Revolution is his first novel. For more on Matt’s adventures, visit www.matt-stewart.com.

  For Karla

  REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR iPHONE

  DEAR READER:

  You hold in your hands the enhanced electronic edition of

  • THE FRENCH REVOLUTION •

  Seriously.

  While this may seem like a standard-issue book format, much more chortles beneath the surface.

  Via the French Rev iPhone app, zapping any page in the book with your iPhone’s camera will whisk you away to a magical wonderland of bonus videos, secret chapters, author interviews, mouthwatering recipes, and oodles more.

  Where any single zap will take you is ever-changing and anyone’s guess, but if you were partial to a good Choose Your Own Adventure book as a kid, you’re gonna love this.

  If you decide to take the bait, go to www.matt-stewart.com or search for the French Rev app in the App Store—then zap this page to get started.

  If you decide to continue reading, turn to page 1.

  BASTILLE DAY

  The troops with few exceptions abandoned the King; and when, with scarcely any serious resistance, the Bastille was captured on the 14th, and the head of its murdered governor carried by a triumphant procession through the streets, the Revolution may be said to have definitely triumphed. Power had now passed both from the King and from the Assembly into the hands of a mob.

  —WILLIAM LECKEY,

  A History of England in the Eighteenth Century

  Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.

  —NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  On any given day in 1989, Esmerelda Van Twinkle was far and away the heaviest person to pass through the doors of the CopySmart flagship store on Market Street. Her arrival was announced to fellow CopySmart personnel by caustic electronic beeps generated by the special services van that ferried Esmerelda to work, followed by crunches from the van’s hydraulic lift and Esmerelda’s squeezed-up voice cursing at the driver, complaining that she was descending too fast, or too slow, or too unevenly, until the lift smacked against the curb with a screeching thomp. Esmerelda was on her own for the hike across the sidewalk, and she advanced in an uneasy shamble, the permanent bun containing her once-silky chestnut hair bobbing like a buoy in a tsunami, her balance disrupted by a quarter ton of flesh and thirty pounds of clothing and a cavernous wool bag over her shoulder stocked with emergency ham, distilled water, beef jerky, hard candy, cheese, ginger cookies, leftover pasta, pizza crusts, chocolate bars, a six-pack of apple juice, jewel-encrusted scissors, newspaper clippings, disposable handiwipes, an icing knife, breath mints, flip-flops, an industrial-strength hairbrush, deodorizing spray, herbal antinausea pills, coupons, and other assorted goodies that might be required at a moment’s notice. Her double-shafted walker lurched forward in gulps as she plowed through the morning urban bustle, her gumdrop-shaped body quivering like a landed bass.

  Any sign of weakness was an illusion, however, for years on the walker had built up considerable muscle tissue closer to the bone, a lining which would remain unseen until revolutionary weight-loss forces stormed her ramparts in the decades to come. In the meantime, Esmerelda considered the slog to and from the special services van to be her daily workout regimen, and she maximized her exercise quotient by performing dips on her walker: letting her mass fall perilously close to the sidewalk, then clenching her triceps, halting her body, tucking up her legs, and swinging forward in a herky-jerk motion that was marginally under control. Back when the City of San Francisco had been willing to provide her only a single-shafted walker, this make-shift exercise routine had resulted in several slow-mo tumbles, torn muumuus, bruised body parts, and shattered walkers, which Esmerelda had documented through driver affidavits and studio photography and statistical analysis and presented to the director of special services and his immediate superior in bound biweekly reports. These strongly worded digests cultivated rabid support among the City Hall rank and file and swiftly goaded the department into providing Esmerelda the pricier yet sturdier double-shafted walker she was using in the fall of 1989.

  Esmerelda’s self-propelled voyage ended twelve feet, or eight dips, later, at the CopySmart entrance, an automatic doubledoored gateway installed back when Esmerelda pole-vaulted over the 350-pound mark and threatened Slippy Sanders with a strike unless he put in doors she could fit through without catching on the frame. But even with room to operate, as well as four high-friction rubber leg cappers that were replaced on a monthly basis, Esmerelda never took her walker into the store, as she was convinced that slipping on the freshly waxed tile floor was only a matter of time. Her face, seven chinned and shaped like a lima bean, reset; her minute eyeballs, pinprick nose, and paperclip mouth contorted for her first words of the working day.

  “Chair!” she called, ringing the bell affixed to her walker with gusto. “Chair! Chair!”

  Lakshmi appeared with the Gargantuan. A bandana was tied around her face, but it was doing a poor job of muffling her labored breathing.

  “Turning!” Esmerelda announced. She shuffled clockwise, swiveling the walker across the entrance as Lakshmi wheeled the Gargantuan into position. When Lakshmi grunted her readiness, Esmerelda thrust out her pumpkin-shaped hindquarters and slowly bent at the knees. It was a real balancing act: gravity demanded a rapid descent, but if she let her rear down without careful aim she could very well miss the seat and crash to the floor, absorbing multiple injuries and adding another millimeter of give to the building’s sagging foundation. Yet drawing out the sitting process dropped a veil of fatigue that disrupted operations in her pachyderm legs, causing her to miss the Gargantuan entirely, with similar unpleasant floor-smacking and structural consequences, or to hit the seat spot-on at a force capable of slamming the motorized wheelchair into Lakshmi’s kneecaps and doling out a nasty case of whiplash. Compounding problems, the stench of her muumuu, rarely washed and thoroughly soiled by perspiration, spilled sauces, creams, and a variety of unknown secretions, was enough to knock Lakshmi out cold without some kind of respiratory filter.

  But most of the time things went off without a hitch, and in a matter of minutes Esmerelda was settling into the Gargantuan while Lakshmi dry-heaved in the restroom. The Gargantuan was an impressive machine, with automated steering and a mechanical lift for moving up and down, a hard plastic tray that could be folded and stowed in a hollow arm support, a collapsible cup holder, a footrest, and a brass hook for her wool bag. The seat was double wide and triple reinforced, topped with a quartet of paisley cushions from which Esmerelda’s mother could not eradicate the smell of boiled turnip using any commercially available cleaning solution. Lakshmi never understood why Esmerelda’s hide was so sensitive to the tiniest poke or prod, but she knew that even one pillow short of four would result in haranguing of professional caliber, so she ke
pt her mouth shut and made sure the cushions were there.

  While successfully designed for comfort, the Gargantuan did not facilitate the task of urination. For a woman of Esmerelda’s girth, using the facilities was not a minor task and required at least an hour for disrobement and manipulations, with a shower to clean off afterward, a towel-intensive dry-down, and a repeat of the morning’s torturous dressing process. Slippy had put his foot down on her demand for an industrial-sized bathtub, and even Esmerelda had to admit that in an establishment the size of a three-bedroom apartment, her request might not have been feasible. This left her limited options for her personal toilet, none of them attractive. The first, the attachment of a bedpan to the Gargantuan’s seat, had been nixed after a day of use; not only was the smell rancid and inescapable, the sound of Esmerelda’s urine dribbling against the tin bedpan, followed by a string of stomach gurgles and a pronounced flushing of the face, never failed to bring commerce to a halt. The second option was much more extreme, requiring coaches, hypnotists, and a severe decrease in hydration. But in the end it proved effective, and an initial glut of accidents and hefty laundry bills was forgotten after a year of training, when Esmerelda became the master of her bladder and trained herself to pee only once a day, before bed, after which she hosed herself down and rolled into her double-king bed for ice cream and Letterman. This meant that when she got into the Gargantuan, she was there for the rest of the working day, which was fine with her, as she was fully acclimated to her own smell and volume and vicious sense of humor and much preferred staying parked in her mobile command center to tracking down Lakshmi and repeating the up-and-down rigmarole five or six times a day.

  Once seated, Esmerelda drove the short distance to the cash register, put on her headset, and plugged into the telephone system. Next she counted and tabulated Slippy’s money from the bank, filed the bills in the cash register, reviewed inventory, and consumed a small snack: a half-dozen donuts. She often used her last minutes of quiet to take care of some company bookkeeping, calculating tax withholdings and overtime pay and looking for suspiciously long lunch breaks and late punch-outs that didn’t jibe with her dead-on memory of who was working when.

  Seven o’clock. Lakshmi sprayed air freshener over Esmerelda’s station, plugged in the buzzing neon OPEN sign, and turned over the lock. There was usually a burst of door-busters first thing: rip-snorting executives dropping off financial reports to be copied ASAP, teachers running off the day’s worksheets, haggard college students putting the finishing touches on term papers, insomniacs of all stripes. A number of early-morning regulars combined their trip to CopySmart with a workout at the gym next door, depositing their projects with Esmerelda in shorts and T-shirts and returning to pick up the finished products in suits and wet hair, their sweet-smelling body products papering over Esmerelda’s rising odor just as the air freshener started to fade.

  But even with the executive, academic, student, and gym traffic, Esmerelda’s fingers didn’t really start dancing until after nine, when the secretaries arrived. Even after five years, the sheer volume of secretarial traffic continued to astound her, flooding the store with shoulder-padded blouses and the aroma of cheap coffee. Esmerelda’s question: where did they come from? If one took a stroll around the neighborhood, even a long one—as Jasper did every day and reported back on in detail— stumbling upon any sort of obvious office that employed secretaries was close to impossible. On her own commute through the area in the special services van, Esmerelda noted only typical San Francisco restaurants, bars, gyms, newsstands, laundromats, fashion boutiques, head shops, and many traditional Victorian-style homes—some of which, Esmerelda realized, may have been converted into commercial operations that required administrative support, but nothing resembling the façade of an assistant-intensive office building. Still, from the ornately painted Edwardian woodwork they came, smiling politely and enduring the inevitable copy machine meltdowns with deep patience, because at least someone else was dealing with the technical problems for once.

  On a Tuesday morning in the fall of George Bush the First’s inaugural year in office, Jasper Winslow walked into the CopySmart flagship store as the initial tide of secretaries began to ebb, whistling a butt-kicking rock song he’d just heard on the radio and twirling a box wrapped in tissue paper and knotted with twine. He waited by the greeting card rack as Esmerelda finished up with a customer, then trotted over and set the box on the counter.

  “Happy Birthday, Ezzie!” he cried. As usual, Jasper’s radio-whine voice projected too far, attracting fearful glances from a band of beggars edging into the store.

  “Quiet, Jasper! This is a business.”

  “Nonsense, Ezzie, it’s your big day. Loud and proud, I’ll let the whole world know!” Jasper ran out to the sidewalk and delivered the squeaky observation that it was the birthday of his greatest friend in the world and everybody better celebrate hard if they knew what was good for them. He jogged back to the counter with the ruddy remnants of thrill on his face.

  “Are you done?”

  “Open your present.”

  “Not now, dummy. I’m working.” Esmerelda took her work very seriously, Jasper knew, and her slit-eyed glare indicated she had reclassified their conversation at a few pegs below friendly.

  He lowered his voice to a breathy fizz: “Come on, it’s from Zoogman’s. Now open it quick and see for yourself.”

  Zoogman’s was firmly at the top in the pantheon of San Francisco bakeries, with an unmatched tradition of lights-out delicious baked goods and pastries that still outweighed Esmerelda’s largely repressed bad memories concerning the institution. Seeing as it was her birthday after all, Ezzie dug out her sapphire-encrusted scissors from the giant wool bag and snipped the twine and tissue paper and scotch tape locking down the lid to find her favorite dessert in the whole wide universe inside: triple chocolate truffle swirl cheesecake, with Heath bar crumbs and caramel roses on top.

  “Holy heck!” She drew a quick anxious breath; her pulse sprinted and stopped; her eyes dilated a quarter inch; a coat of perspiration gelled to her face like bubble wrap. She’d never told Jasper of her lust for Zoogman’s masterpiece, a recipe so dangerously addictive it was kept under lock and key and unavailable to the public unless you could talk a chef out of retirement and had five hundred bucks to pay for ingredients.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Why, I bought it at Bruce Zoogman’s bakery. I know a guy, and I saved up some money. It’s not every day that my babycakes turns twenty-nine.” Jasper lifted a slice from the box and placed it on her tray. “Here, have some.”

  “Oh . . . what about the customers?”

  “Don’t worry bout that, Ezzie. There’s nobody here.”

  Esmerelda consulted her surveillance cameras. Aside from the team of filthy street dwellers copying food stamps and cash on the self-service machine by the door, the store was empty.

  “Just a taste. It looks real, real good.”

  “I hope so. Bruce told me it was one of his best ever.”

  Esmerelda reacted instantly, scooping huge handfuls of cake with her bare hands and shoveling it into her mouth, swallowing without chewing, sucking frosting off her fingertips, ten fingers crammed in at once. Her blood shot off on a roller-coaster ride through her coronary system, loop-de-looping through her legs and corkscrewing through her heart while the outside world turned colorless, her heart beat in her pupils. After another three bites, her blood was pumping so hard that even the cobwebbed capillaries of Esmerelda’s pelvis were penetrated, her supercharged plasma shooting through mounds of fat and overdeveloped muscle tissue, snaking around fragile tendons and between aching bones and down into a dime-sized spot in a bodily zone she was professionally conditioned to ignore until just before bedtime: BOOM—it was ambushed, floored, decapitated. Esmerelda dropped her fork and her training, urinating on the Gargantuan and collapsing into glorious postorgasmic sleep.

  She awoke covered in chlorinated water,
propped up against a concrete step.

  “Hello, Ezzie.”

  Jasper stood next to her in a large municipal pool. Esmerelda had never seen him naked before, and even drowsy and discombobulated she found a way to laugh at his penis.

  “Forget pencil dick—you’ve got eraser dick, Jasper.”

  “Just wait,” he said. “Even eraser-sized, I can shoot lead.”

  He parted her underwater legs, shimmied between them, and began to convulse like a bad salsa dancer. Esmerelda was cackling too hard to react at first, but after a time she recognized the lengths Jasper had gone to acquire the cake and hijack her out of work and transport her over and into the pool, not to mention his consistently friendly disposition and thoughtfulness, his smiley profile waving both hands at her through the CopySmart plateglass window, his daily observation that she was looking better than a pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner; hardly the worst man in the world and not bad looking either. Also it was her birthday, and she hadn’t gotten a piece in years. Gently she led him out of the flab fold he’d been screwing and down into her rarely seen nether regions.

  Even in the right hole, the lovemaking didn’t do much for Esmerelda, as she had difficulty distinguishing between Jasper’s pelvic thrusts, stabbing fingers, knee bumps, and kicks. Instead she focused on dislodging a chunk of Zoog she discovered jammed between her teeth, which turned the encounter into more of a race, for her at least—her tongue versus Jasper’s palsied spasms. As Jasper churned a frothy whirlpool in the shallow end, Esmerelda’s oral swashbuckling grew more furious in parallel, her wide tongue lashing and digging at dental crevasses to free the stuck cake. They were both sweating freely when loudspeakers announced they had five minutes left on the private pool party, with Jasper issuing louder and more profanity-intensive exclamations, Esmerelda rumbling her assent, the slip-slap of colliding wet limbs, Jasper’s face puckering, his back straight as a flagpole, the hard splash of pool water onto the deck, rolling motion beneath Esmerelda’s cheeks, her teeth clicking, steam rising off the water and turning the air hot and dangerous, until a tortured shriek burst from Jasper’s lungs and he collapsed into Esmerelda’s pillowy chest. In the same instant, Esmerelda’s tongue ripped the Zoogman’s debris from her molars and cast it down her pulsating throat, bringing back that heavenly, urination-inducing feeling—not all the way to incontinence, but enough to turn her face the color of a radish, send a series of long gleeful shivers across her titanic figure, and reorganize her mouth into the faintest hint of a smile. This sudden decompression was so closely synchronized with Jasper’s ejaculation, in terms of timing, that afterward they both released earnest, melodious sighs in appreciation of their seemingly perfect pool fuck.