Bullfights 

In 1794, Thunderbolt reports on bullfights in the Camargue. He belongs to the entourage of a mediatised prince who takes his own decline far less to heart than his retainers do—those who haggle with the flunkeys of other losers over gains in distinction measured in millimetres. Impoverished aristocrats now live as professional gamblers and stunt riders among horses and bulls, forming a very particular breed in the Provençal floodplains, akin in spirit to buccaneers.

“Of the French grandee only a semblance of standing remains. The common man still bows to him nonetheless, out of sheer habit.”

Thunderbolt notes natural amphitheatres, played upon by lizards as if in remembrance of their gigantic predecessors:“the suppliers of motifs for humanity’s nightmares.”No government ever gains a foothold in this region. Family men present themselves innocently as fishermen and breeders. Their true profession consists in resisting whatever is foreign—unless it happens to suit them, like these counts and their petty states in the manner of travelling circuses. Wherever the expelled settle, a gaming operation is set up.

“Either you lose everything at the tables, or a girl links arms with you—which amounts to the same thing.”

Thunderbolt is a man of encyclopaedic momentum. He considers himself pledged to progress and holds the deciphering of the world to be as inevitable as a sectarian regards the imminent arrival of the Last Judgment. Meanwhile, the first Robespierrists are fleeing their own terror. In the Camargue they encounter submerged Indulgents, forewarned by Danton’s death on April 5. Everyone knows about disastrous voter turnouts. A few thousand activists conduct the business of democracy on behalf of the citizens, amid an absolute lack of respect. The people are, in revolutionary doctrine, pure but unenlightened, while formerly exalted figures, bored by the course of history, suck languidly at straws.

The republican Thunderbolt accompanies members of the executed Louis’s family to Calais. He travels astonished by the nonchalance of those emigrants in disguise. No one had expected the Revolution to drag on like this. Everyone anticipates a diversion in his own case, despite the bloody ill will of Jacobin politics.

Where do people draw their courage from? Is it in their blood to blithely assume the best, even after such assumptions have been refuted by reality? Thunderbolt expatiates on this in articles. He arrives at the conclusion that the nobility is relaxed by experience. The nobility does not believe in the power of the people, no matter how much noise it makes. It waits for the next Caesar, who will find it practical to reactivate the old elites.

Thunderbolt tells the story of the flight as a pilgrimage of invalids, scarcely able to stand, let alone walk or ride. They lie more than they sit in the carriage, expecting everything at the merest gesture. More interesting still to the American is the fact that they receive it—from a servant class proud to have obeyed a peregrinating lordship for decades.