Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

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      “Perhaps the women will march on Tsarskoe Selo, just as they marched on Versailles,” he said. “Did you know it’s the same distance between Paris and Versailles as it is between St. Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo? All they wanted was bread, the French women. Their children were starving, just as they are in Petersburg. And because Louis the Sixteenth was hiding in his Hall of Mirrors, the ‘Maenads’—Carlyle calls the women Maenads, isn’t that funny?—anyway, they marched from Paris to Versailles, carrying swords and pulling cannons.” Alyosha smiled. After he’d done with old Gibbon and his Decline and Fall (from which he edified me with epigrammatic pronouncements like The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilized people to an improved country, offered up in a stentorian, lecturing tone), he plunged into Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, which he used like an almanac, predicting storms to come. In defiance of the restrictions imposed on him by Botkin and the others, Alyosha had always been a precocious student. Having spent so many days in bed recovering from one or another mishap, he’d read more widely than most boys his age and liked demonstrating an intelligence that surprised anyone who assumed him to be incapacitated mentally as well as physically.