<blockquote>Let us take a moment to discuss French magic. For several centuries it was thought such a thing did not exist, but that was only because it is nearly invisible. French magic is in essence Parisian magic. Parisian magic is panache. What turns a gamin’s crust of bread into a feast? What makes the flower in a seamstress’s hair more radiant than the diamonds on a queen’s neck? What opens the locked door of a lady’s chamber to the gentleman thief? Magic, only, no one notices it. Paris looks at the exceptional, the superlative, the truly unusual and the genuinely supernatural, shrugs her shoulders and says “Yes – that’s me!” Only when the English magicians you have heard of became notorious did France lift its head to pay attention; and Bonaparte, though in every other way a genius, did not have any sense of magic. He had no use for anything that could not be known, and French magic is most of all in those four words: je ne sais quoi. That was in 1815. In 1831 France was in a prosaic mood with a prosaic king, and magic was being studied at the Ecole Polytechnique, which is to say, leaking out of the city. These are the circumstances in which Courfeyrac and Marius went to see Combeferre.</blockquote>
➤ somewhat uneven but on the whole delightful
