“Don’t know nothing about prizes,” the doorman stated, rocking his folding chair back and forth in front of the ballroom entrance. “Anything important, they don’t tell me.” He tilted his cocked hat forward over his eyes and stared bitterly into space, as if reflecting that with just a little more advance information from Paris the day might indeed have gone quite differently on the Plains of Abraham. “Why’n’t you ask around down in the bar? All the big wheels are down in the bar.”

There must, Alfred reflected, be a good many big wheels, as he apologized his way through the crowded room downstairs. The hoop-skirts and rearing, extravagant hairdo’s, the knobby-kneed hose, swinging swords, and powdered wigs jam-packed The February Revolution Was the Only Real Revolution Bar Grill so that the half-dozen or so regular customers in shabby suits and worn windbreakers seemed to be the ones actually in costume, poverty-stricken, resentful anachronisms from the future who had stumbled somehow into imperial Versailles and the swaggering intrigue of the Tuileries.

At the bar, Bushke Horowitz, his iron mask wide open despite the sternest decrees of King and Cardinal, accepted dues money, dispensed opinions on the future of standpipes and stall showers to the mob in heavy brocade and shot silk around him, and periodically threw a handful of largesse to the bartender, a chunky, angry-looking man with a spade beard and a white apron, along with the injunction to “set ’em up again.”

There was no way to get through to him, Alfred realized. He asked several times about “prizes,” was ignored, and gave up. He had to find a wheel of somewhat smaller diameter.

A tug at the sleeve of his clerical gown. He stared down at the rather thinnish Mme. Du Barry sitting in the empty booth. She gave him a smile from underneath her black vizard. “Drinkie?” she suggested. Then, seeing his blank look, she amplified: “Yousie and mesie. Just us twosie.”