The French Revolution

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Matt Stewart
made headlines worldwide when he released
The French Revolution
via Twitter on Bastille Day 2009. (Rest assured, the version in your hand is significantly easier to read.) His short stories have appeared in
Instant City
,
McSweeney’s
, and
Opium Magazine
, among other venues, and, when the moonlight strikes just right across the alpine lake in his mind, he’s been known to blog for
The Huffington Post
.
The French Revolution
is his first novel. For more on Matt’s adventures, visit
www.matt-stewart.com
.

DEAR READER:

 

 

• THE FRENCH REVOLUTION •

 

Seriously.

While this may seem like a standard-issue book format, much more chortles beneath the surface.

Via the French Rev iPhone app, zapping any page in the book with your iPhone’s camera will whisk you away to a magical wonderland of bonus videos, secret chapters, author interviews, mouthwatering recipes, and oodles more.

Where any single zap will take you is ever-changing and anyone’s guess, but if you were partial to a good Choose Your Own Adventure book as a kid, you’re gonna love this.

The troops with few exceptions abandoned the King; and when, with scarcely any serious resistance, the Bastille was captured on the 14th, and the head of its murdered governor carried by a triumphant procession through the streets, the Revolution may be said to have definitely triumphed. Power had now passed both from the King and from the Assembly into the hands of a mob.

—WILLIAM LECKEY,
A History of England in the Eighteenth Century

Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.

—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

 

 

On any given day
in 1989, Esmerelda Van Twinkle was far and away the heaviest person to pass through the doors of the CopySmart flagship store on Market Street. Her arrival was announced to fellow CopySmart personnel by caustic electronic beeps generated by the special services van that ferried Esmerelda to work, followed by crunches from the van’s hydraulic lift and Esmerelda’s squeezed-up voice cursing at the driver, complaining that she was descending too fast, or too slow, or too unevenly, until the lift smacked against the curb with a screeching
thomp
. Esmerelda was on her own for the hike across the sidewalk, and she advanced in an uneasy shamble, the permanent bun containing her once-silky chestnut hair bobbing like a buoy in a tsunami, her balance disrupted by a quarter ton of flesh and thirty pounds of clothing and a cavernous wool bag over her shoulder
stocked with emergency ham, distilled water, beef jerky, hard candy, cheese, ginger cookies, leftover pasta, pizza crusts, chocolate bars, a six-pack of apple juice, jewel-encrusted scissors, newspaper clippings, disposable handiwipes, an icing knife, breath mints, flip-flops, an industrial-strength hairbrush, deodorizing spray, herbal antinausea pills, coupons, and other assorted goodies that might be required at a moment’s notice. Her double-shafted walker lurched forward in gulps as she plowed through the morning urban bustle, her gumdrop-shaped body quivering like a landed bass.

Any sign of weakness was an illusion, however, for years on the walker had built up considerable muscle tissue closer to the bone, a lining which would remain unseen until revolutionary weight-loss forces stormed her ramparts in the decades to come. In the meantime, Esmerelda considered the slog to and from the special services van to be her daily workout regimen, and she maximized her exercise quotient by performing dips on her walker: letting her mass fall perilously close to the sidewalk, then clenching her triceps, halting her body, tucking up her legs, and swinging forward in a herky-jerk motion that was marginally under control. Back when the City of San Francisco had been willing to provide her only a single-shafted walker, this make-shift exercise routine had resulted in several slow-mo tumbles, torn muumuus, bruised body parts, and shattered walkers, which Esmerelda had documented through driver affidavits and studio photography and statistical analysis and presented to the director of special services and his immediate superior in bound biweekly reports. These strongly worded digests cultivated rabid support among the City Hall rank and file and swiftly goaded the department into providing Esmerelda the pricier yet sturdier double-shafted walker she was using in the fall of 1989.

Esmerelda’s self-propelled voyage ended twelve feet, or eight dips, later, at the CopySmart entrance, an automatic doubledoored gateway installed back when Esmerelda pole-vaulted over the 350-pound mark and threatened Slippy Sanders with a
strike unless he put in doors she could fit through without catching on the frame. But even with room to operate, as well as four high-friction rubber leg cappers that were replaced on a monthly basis, Esmerelda never took her walker into the store, as she was convinced that slipping on the freshly waxed tile floor was only a matter of time. Her face, seven chinned and shaped like a lima bean, reset; her minute eyeballs, pinprick nose, and paperclip mouth contorted for her first words of the working day.

“Chair!” she called, ringing the bell affixed to her walker with gusto. “Chair! Chair!”

Lakshmi appeared with the Gargantuan. A bandana was tied around her face, but it was doing a poor job of muffling her labored breathing.

“Turning!” Esmerelda announced. She shuffled clockwise, swiveling the walker across the entrance as Lakshmi wheeled the Gargantuan into position. When Lakshmi grunted her readiness, Esmerelda thrust out her pumpkin-shaped hindquarters and slowly bent at the knees. It was a real balancing act: gravity demanded a rapid descent, but if she let her rear down without careful aim she could very well miss the seat and crash to the floor, absorbing multiple injuries and adding another millimeter of give to the building’s sagging foundation. Yet drawing out the sitting process dropped a veil of fatigue that disrupted operations in her pachyderm legs, causing her to miss the Gargantuan entirely, with similar unpleasant floor-smacking and structural consequences, or to hit the seat spot-on at a force capable of slamming the motorized wheelchair into Lakshmi’s kneecaps and doling out a nasty case of whiplash. Compounding problems, the stench of her muumuu, rarely washed and thoroughly soiled by perspiration, spilled sauces, creams, and a variety of unknown secretions, was enough to knock Lakshmi out cold without some kind of respiratory filter.

But most of the time things went off without a hitch, and in a matter of minutes Esmerelda was settling into the Gargantuan while Lakshmi dry-heaved in the restroom. The Gargantuan was
an impressive machine, with automated steering and a mechanical lift for moving up and down, a hard plastic tray that could be folded and stowed in a hollow arm support, a collapsible cup holder, a footrest, and a brass hook for her wool bag. The seat was double wide and triple reinforced, topped with a quartet of paisley cushions from which Esmerelda’s mother could not eradicate the smell of boiled turnip using any commercially available cleaning solution. Lakshmi never understood why Esmerelda’s hide was so sensitive to the tiniest poke or prod, but she knew that even one pillow short of four would result in haranguing of professional caliber, so she kept her mouth shut and made sure the cushions were there.

While successfully designed for comfort, the Gargantuan did not facilitate the task of urination. For a woman of Esmerelda’s girth, using the facilities was not a minor task and required at least an hour for disrobement and manipulations, with a shower to clean off afterward, a towel-intensive dry-down, and a repeat of the morning’s torturous dressing process. Slippy had put his foot down on her demand for an industrial-sized bathtub, and even Esmerelda had to admit that in an establishment the size of a three-bedroom apartment, her request might not have been feasible. This left her limited options for her personal toilet, none of them attractive. The first, the attachment of a bedpan to the Gargantuan’s seat, had been nixed after a day of use; not only was the smell rancid and inescapable, the sound of Esmerelda’s urine dribbling against the tin bedpan, followed by a string of stomach gurgles and a pronounced flushing of the face, never failed to bring commerce to a halt. The second option was much more extreme, requiring coaches, hypnotists, and a severe decrease in hydration. But in the end it proved effective, and an initial glut of accidents and hefty laundry bills was forgotten after a year of training, when Esmerelda became the master of her bladder and trained herself to pee only once a day, before bed, after which she hosed herself down and rolled into her double-king bed for ice cream and Letterman. This meant that when she
got into the Gargantuan, she was there for the rest of the working day, which was fine with her, as she was fully acclimated to her own smell and volume and vicious sense of humor and much preferred staying parked in her mobile command center to tracking down Lakshmi and repeating the up-and-down rigmarole five or six times a day.