You might think there was a great deal to discuss, but we quickly agreed we were honor-bound to defend the king however wrongheaded we thought his actions. What an awful day. We wished it had not come. We therefore amused ourselves as the circumstances demanded: That is, we drank champagne. The bower was shortly full, and Blacqueville was occupied with a very pretty young Bourbon princess whom I will not name but who was soon the occasion of my friend bidding me good night. We agreed we would both present ourselves at the Versailles law courts on the morrow.

It was then, as my eyes followed the graceful couple's passage through the golden light, that I saw Monsieur's servant sitting not two tables away. So it is: We have never seen a person in our life and then they are everywhere we go. Although, let me confess, it was his companion who first took my eye, an actress with a glory of black hair, creamy white skin, and a generous bosom. I heard her laugh, a kind of throaty call, and I was doing my damnedest to catch her eye when the identity of her companion forced itself upon me. M. Perroquet was changed, not physically, but by his situation, and his green eyes were bold and alight and his nose now seemed hawkish, wild, exhibiting a dreadful kind of confidence, attractive yet repellent at the same time.

Was he the spy who had observed me in Guizot's earlier lectures? How could he be? Did he steal his master's silk waistcoat? No, no. He would have swum in it. He whispered in the actress's tiny perfect ear. She bowed her neck to let him kiss her. I had a fresh champagne, perhaps two; in any case I had not finished when my lovers stood to leave. I found myself on my feet, quite steady. I did not think to bid my friends good night. I am not sure that I even meant to leave. I made no definite decision, merely put one foot in front of the other, and by this innocent procedure, following them down whatever lane they turned into, soon enough found myself in a disgusting part of Paris. There was no lamp boy, only darkness. A flint was struck but nothing followed it. I heard the actress laugh once, then a silence, as long as that which follows the last notes of Mozart's Requiem.

"Monsieur Perroquet?" I called.

I was a noble, alone in darkness, held in my place by ten centimeters of stinking mud, and having paid little attention to the details of my chase, I had only the most approximate notion of how to reach the rue Saint-Dominique.

What streets I walked along I cannot say, except I breathed the miasma of the cesspools, the copperas of the factories, the air the Revolution had left for those it claimed to love. The dark was horrid, suffocating, cloacal, dead, but when I finally emerged on a long well-lit boulevard I had reason to wish I had kept myself well hidden. For soon I was at the place de Greve, and all around me, hollow-eyed emaciated children who seemed to hold my embroidered coat responsible for their present condition.

I threw what few coins I still possessed and walked southward, swinging my stick, walking boldly right across the open ground where the guillotine had once stood, and I thought, even in the middle of my fear, Is this why you murdered my grandparents and cousins, so you could have this, so you could gather in your beastly warrens and prisons and spread your vile calumnies and wish me dead while all these years no one has done a damn thing for you, and if you wish to see what has been done, why then, do not shout at me, a Garmont, sworn to protect and care for you with his last breath, but look instead at the new bourgeois houses along l'avenue de Neuilly. For this you spilled your blood and our blood-the bourgeois who turns his back upon the street, who eats your bread and drinks your blood while his fat arse blocks your way.

Oh monumental figures of the Revolution, great figures of our past. Oh mammoth fools, mighty sansculottes, elephantine dupes.

That night I dreamed of M. Perroquet, an annunciating angel fluttering around me like a moth. "Hail full of grace," he said, ascending. I woke in sudden darkness, disgusted by the blasphemy.

IT WAS BAD ENOUGH being a servant to the dreadful Tilbot, paid to blow his nose and pour his wine. But I must then become a spy, required to write up every word of certain conversations which were later delivered to the Comtesse de Garmont, by which I mean Lord Migraine's mummy, who would not rely on Monsieur's recollection of conversations with her son. She told him frankly that his cranium lacked the second bump and he therefore had no interest in her child.

Monsieur then reminded her that his mind had been created by God and all this phrenology was anathema.

"Never mind that Marie-Jean," she said. "I must know what Olivier says."

I know this because I was in the room. I watched Monsieur's brows descend. For a soldier he had a very touchy equilibrium. On the right tray of his scales you had his infatuation with the Comtesse de Garmont. On the left, there was his mad impatience. I have seen him break a man's neck, in an instant, and now would you like a cup of tea, Monsieur? But with Lord Migraine's maman he was like a boy in love, not that he threw pebbles at her window or climbed a ladder like the Sorel fellow, only that he was a fool before her translucent skin, her long swan's neck, the ancient fire still glowing beneath the quartz. I never saw the like before or since, the way they blushed and whispered, traveling in closed coaches, and me up on the box seat in the dark with nothing but a whip to save me from the pistol men in the Bois.

Monsieur told Lord Migraine, "A gentleman who travels cannot be at the mercy of servants."

And me, Parrot, pretending to draw a portrait, wrote this down, thinking all the time-but what compositor would ever set such language?

Monsieur had held me in this trap so many years I had come to accept it as my rightful place. I had food and shelter of a type my da could never have imagined. I handled prints and folios the most cultivated men in Europe wished to own, and there were not a few occasions when I gazed at myself in admiration. A fly on the wall, I thought, might mistake me for Monsieur's junior officer, or his disinherited brother, or his bastard son sired when he was twenty, but then hey-ho, enough of that my lad, and off along the frigging Paris road in the wind and rain, and Chevalier-it amused him to call me Chevalier-Chevalier, do take us to the bishop. Then hell's gate for the bishop. I hope he dies.

Where was I?

In July 1830 the Frogs had once again become maddened by their king and went around the capital smashing anything that reminded them of their own stupidity. As far as I could see, this so-called July Revolution was not my business. I ignored it in favor of visiting some English printer mates at their rooming house on the rue Saint-Honore. I was expecting some ale and beef, but my old friends had come out for the Revolution. They were set upon assembling a body of our countrymen who they reckoned might signalize themselves, as they put it, in the cause of freedom. So there they were-pressmen, compositors, tramping up and down the stairs in such excitement that one of them was bitten by the dog. This was sufficient warning. Saying I would signalize myself immediately, I left them to their madness.

Soon I was obstructed by a fat old bourgeois with a rifle. He advised me to make my route in another direction-une barricade was forming, so he said. That was the first time I ever heard of une barricade. On reaching the Pont Neuf I had some difficulty. There was a fracas with the populace at the Tuileries-soldiers advancing slowly with level bayonets turned the mob away.

During all of this it was still my job to be the secret nurse of the son of the Comtesse de Garmont. He would not have been the only aristocrat to join the mob so I kept my eyes out for him everywhere I went, and I say this only to illustrate my own ignorance of the ways of the noble class. Olivier de Garmont was unhappy with the king, but what I did not understand was that he was, so to speak, on the same team. So no matter what a nutter the king was, Olivier de Garmont was a noble, duty-bound to protect him from the mob.