"Run," my father cried. "Parrot, run."

I heard the shot go past my ear and Devon screaming. I ran like a rabbit, through the smoke and haze, through the gloom, through the field of broken wheels. The men were cheering me, a pistol roared. I ran, shirtless, into the open woods, through the broken bracken, into dark, so many years ago.

"IT'S OVER," cried my mother, rushing along the hallways of the Chateau de Barfleur in 1814. "It is finished. It is done."

And yet, madame, monsieur, it was not over, not in the least. Or, if it was over, it was only for as long as it took Napoleon to be defeated at Waterloo. One hundred days later he was finished, packed off to exile, and Louis XVIII returned as planned. My mother could dash off to Paris any day she wished.

Vive la Roi, you might suppose. How happy we Garmonts must be.

To which I answer, not at all. First, my father was treated unfairly. Once the monarchy was restored he should have been a power in the land, but he had failed to flee from the revolution so he was not of the party of emigres who returned beside the king.

Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out?

My father was made a prefect of a department in the provinces. He accepted this insult with good grace, although his own wife would not leave Paris to share his bed.

You might reckon my mother in heaven to live so near the king, but no-she now judged him too weak and modern. In the house she had once planned to receive His Majesty she now formed a salon for ultraroyalist priests who feared democracy would be the death of religion.

My father did not argue against her, except to mention to me, en passant, that His Majesty felt the merest wisps of democracy as a physical assault on his royal person.

As for my own beliefs, they were changing. Thomas and I decided we had finished with the Holy Catholic Church. We became deists. If my mother had prayed a little less she may have noticed. Instead she observed that Thomas and I were "good scholars with our books." Indeed we were-a sixteen-year-old boy could see that France was a house of cards. The king died. Another king was crowned. You would think these changes calamitous, but it seemed to us that all the kings had a natural inclination to wish things to be as they had been before the revolution. Louise XVIII was more placatory. Charles X was most pigheaded. He did not understand that if he removed more rights from the people the edifice would collapse.

Blacqueville and I grew up aboard this teetering structure built between the old and new. Years and years went by in this same unstable state. By the time I arrived at the law courts in Versailles I was ten centimeters taller, but the monarch and his ministers were still intent on turning back the clock.

I was now twenty-six years old, a salaried lawyer. I had imagined I would be fairly good at my new profession, but I had deceived myself. Public speaking was a horror to me. I groped for words and cut my arguments too short. Beside me were men who reasoned ill and spoke well. The exception my constant friend Thomas, with whom I shared a small gray house on the rue d'Anjou.

In Normandy, Thomas had taught me the art of racquets, rescued me from the chestnut tree in which I had wedged myself, and introduced me to his extraordinary cousin, Louise. Now, all these years later in Versailles he was again my tutor, and I do not mean he coached me in matters of oratory, or English wives or the d'Aumont sisters but, rather, set the example of a noble who every day refused to be trapped inside his history. Thus it was history itself that became our subject, our enemy, our ambition. Together we hammered at its pages, windows, doors. And why? Because Blacqueville's family was as ancient as mine. Because, in our home districts we were surrounded by men whose names appear in the roll of Norman conquerors. Because it was impossible that we become nonentities.

Yet the curtain had fallen on gore and glory, and we found ourselves in a theater where we were revealed as poor pale creatures, blinking in the artless light. Monstrosities and giants no longer walked the bloody streets. Malesherbes, Diderot, Rousseau. The great men were dead. Danton even, Robespierre. Do not take my word. Look at the works of our painters-the people were dwarfed by nature. As for the novels, the characters were blown like fallen leaves, without volition, not worth reading. Worse, we were overshadowed by our own family trees. I was a Garmont, but a lowly judge advocate. My colleagues saw that I was slight and myopic. They could not imagine the secret life of my body or my mind. I was thought reticent, even cold, but I was ablaze with violent contradiction.

Blacqueville and I were stallions bred for racing, now condemned to pull a cart of night soil.

But what would we do in this present age? What sort of nobles might society still permit? Would we stamp on wasps' nests? Would we drown swimming against the tide of history? Would we break open the door we could not yet locate, and enter the salons of a glorious time as yet unborn? Or would we spend our lives between the thighs of actresses?

Dear Blacqueville was the more handsome but at heart we were no different. I said we read like schoolboys? We read like warriors. We attacked all ten volumes of Adolphe Thiers' Histoire de la Revolution francaise. We deemed ourselves liberal modern men but we were nobles still. So we felt a violent hatred of the author who blamed the aristocrats for the sins of the Revolution.

That was our paradox, our impossible position.

For while the king's advisers tried to push back against the Revolution and the bourgeoisie tried to push forward, we occupied a category of our own, trusted neither by our own side nor the other, living in a constant state of contradiction and confusion, unable to imagine what our futures held.

It was in this thirst and fury that we were drawn to the lectures of a certain Protestant from Nimes named Guizot. It was this severe man, with a black stock around his neck like a clergyman, who forced us to understand that democracy could not be turned back.

Thus Blacqueville and I attended a great many of these lectures, side by side with citizens of all descriptions, very few of them with friends at court. We were diligent and earnest. We made notes. We had no idea of the dangerous nature of the game that we were playing.

ADREARY MONDAY in Versailles. Our servant having been dismissed on an embarrassing matter, and Blacqueville having taken the coach to Paris, I returned to an empty house where I immediately began to change my clothes so that I might go into society. And then, when I was in my shirtsleeves-what was the point of this?-I crawled into my bed.

It was in this depressed condition I was awakened by a footman bearing an invitation from the Marquis de Tilbot. The reader will recall Monsieur for no other reason than that he had his arm hacked off. My own recollection was pretty much the same, except I had not liked him as a child when he was first my mother's friend. This evening, it seemed, Monsieur was visiting Versailles and in urgent need of company.

Monsieur was, as they say, eccentric. In England, where the aristocrats lounge in the House of Lords like farmers exhausted by the hunt, he may not have appeared so alarming, but in my France, his France, we insist on the uniform, and he could not be bothered to accommodate us. As if to underscore the point, he now provoked me with a timeworn servant of an unsettling democratic grammar, a liveliness in the eyes, a broadness of speech, an open curiosity which would certainly have excluded him from my mother's household. Monsieur had spent many nights sleeping next to peasants in the hedgerows of the Vendee, so perhaps this fellow amused him.