ABSTRACT
Paris 1792, a Venetian troupe of actors performs on the banks of the Seine, enacting the Fall of the Bastille and other momentous events, thanks to a new technical gadget, the magic lantern. Elsewhere in the city, the notorious publisher, lecher, bon vivant and writer Restif de la Bretonne returns home from the brothel at dawn, to find his assets seized and his books confiscated. But instead of consoling his daughter with the more than fatherly attention she seems accustomed to, he heads for the coach station: Paris is rife with rumors of the King and Marie Antoinette having fled east, in the direction of the German border. Restif’s journalist instinct tells him to follow, but he narrowly misses the coach for Metz, on which the writer Tom Paine, American Revolution participant and here observing the French one, makes his way to Alsace, in search of the steel he needs to build a new type of iron bridge. Also among the travelers are a former magistrate with his Italian opera singer mistress, an Alsace industrialist, an Austrian countess, her black maid and her hairdresser, a widow from Champagne and a student going back to his village.
