The Smile of the Guillotine

Thunderbolt observes the Revolution in Paris for the Virginia Gazette. He has been many things already; now he is a journalist. He resides at the Place de la Révolution (today’s Place de la Concorde), in the confiscated palace of the Duke of Crillon. On the very day he writes this, the king is beheaded right outside his door, on the largest square in the city. Thunderbolt makes a fortune by renting out his balconies and terraces to onlookers, who heighten the spectacle of execution with a dose of aristopunk.

As a veteran of the American War of Independence, Thunderbolt is anything but squeamish—and certainly not a royalist. Caricatures depict him beneath caustic headlines as a mounted courier of the world revolution, often rendered as a spreading fire. Notes toward a poem never completed bear the title The Smile of the Guillotine. Thunderbolt greets the moment of Louis’s decapitation with a pen in hand, a cigar tucked behind his ear, and a sycophant at his feet. To him, tobacco is “America’s gift to Europe.” He also suspects, however, a reduction in the permanent readiness for upheaval “within the alkaloid sphere.”

Thunderbolt devotes an essay to the executioner. Charles-Henri Sanson ranks among the most famous men in France. He performs his office without pleasure, but with diligence. In Paris he has no colleague. In the 1790s he executes by the piecework method, dispatching enemies and supporters of the Revolution alike, without regard to rank. The office came to him by inheritance and will continue that way.

Thunderbolt calls Paris the largest favela in Europe. He addresses his readers from on high. Only those who wish to be instructed will find happiness in Thunderbolt’s prose; everyone else is bound to recoil from the author’s arrogance.

Until the Revolution, only courtiers were granted the royal privilege of operating a casino or brothel. That is over now—yet in 1793 the same people still run and frequent these places as before. Thunderbolt lingers there for weeks. He tramps through the academies of licentiousness and reports on cutpurses with disgracefully concealed weapons on their bodies, and on various companies of dubious character. Members of the fallen, deranged upper class make his work easy. For a louis d’or, one can dance the night away. Slogans and coded knocks seal the proceedings off from the guards of the Revolution. In the dungeons of pleasure, the titles of the Ancien Régime still circulate. Countesses pursue the trade of matchmaking so far that they offer up their daughters.

Thunderbolt finds the disempowered aristocracy empty and insignificant. That this limp and debased class would simply survive the Revolution, only to rise again almost triumphantly with the next restoration, is unimaginable to this precursor of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway—as Americans in Paris.