Du Côté de Chez Madame Defarge

Paris

"This is France, not North Korea," snarled a bland-looking Frenchman after I'd pointed out that we were in the rather dingy non-smoking section of Le Sancerre, a modest little brasserie in the Marais. Still, he put down his lighter and Marlboros. Since I was a three-pack-a-day man until I went cold turkey on my fortieth birthday, I could feel his rage. An hour later I was in the Conciergerie and transported back to the heyday of the Committee of Public Safety, when the status of France, in the eyes of its enemies across the Channel and the Rhine, made the land of Kim Jong Il look as tame as the Democrats in Congress in Year Seven of Bush time.

The Conciergerie is at the west end of the Île de la Cité, where the cathedral of Notre Dame stands. Part of the Palais de Justice, it is most famously where suspects were taken during the French Revolution. In the early years following the fall of the Bastille in 1789, you had a sporting chance of walking out of the Conciergerie with head and shoulders still connected. A notice on the stone wall next to a bust of Robespierre said that in the Revolution's first year only a third of the accused were found guilty. The place really picked up after the establishment in the spring of 1793 of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the installation of public prosecutor Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, who bustled well over a thousand into eternal sleep ("Death is nothing but eternal sleep" was posted in all cemeteries in the Revolutionary period), including Marie Antoinette, Danton, Hébert and Robespierre, before the blade fell on his own neck in May 1795.

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