Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey Page B

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