"Arrogance! What cursed arrogance." Apparently, Armand understood Joseph's words.
"Maybe it's not arrogance." Joseph thought for a moment and said, "And it's just isolation - the isolation of the upper and the lower levels. The people of France are full of anger towards the upper classes, but the upper classes do not necessarily perceive it, if at all. The king and queen are surrounded by flatterers and favorites, living where they can't see the bottom at all, and any other voices don't reach their ears, so they do what they do. This is bad because it can lead to explosive consequences. Accumulated anger, if not channeled, is bound to have devastating consequences when it erupts. It's like a flood breaking a levee. Art should really serve two purposes at this point: one is to warn the hierarchy about the danger because art is one of the few ways to get the upper class to notice the lower class. The other is to appease the lower classes. For example, something like Mr. Beaumarchais' "The Marriage of Figaro" struggles to accomplish such a task. His satire of Count Almaviva is a warning to the upper classes, and his making Figaro happy in the play is, in a sense, a pacification of the lower classes. Today, though, it seems that his warnings don't carry enough weight and don't seem to have really alerted the upper classes, and it's hard to say how well the appeasement will work. So the comedians then increased the power of satire even further, but from the looks of it, it's been months since the play was performed and nothing has happened at the comedy troupe, so I guess it's still not very effective."
Everyone nodded as they listened. Only Fanny didn't seem to understand and asked:
"So, Mr. Bonaparte, what, if anything, happens to the comedy troupe to indicate that it's working?"
"Whatever happens, even if it means that all the comedians are arrested in one fell swoop, stuffed under a barn and fed to rats, or even have their heads chopped off one by one, that would at least show that the hierarchy cares about these things. And now, after all this time, nothing has happened, which can only mean that the higher-ups don't care at all." Joseph replied.
"So, The Marriage of Figaro still isn't snarky enough." Samuel said.
"Joseph, maybe we should write a script that's a little more provocative, let's see, what should we write ...," Armand pondered.
"How about writing about Charles I? The English king who got his head chopped off." Joseph said. He knew that if history didn't change drastically, King Louis XVI of France, like Charles I, ended up having his head cut off for treason.
"This one is too revealing." Samuel shook his head, "If you write this, you and Armand could literally be thrown into the Bastille and fed to the rats. And there aren't many theater troupes that would dare to perform something as poignant as this. I think, really, it's better to write about American independence. That's also rebelling against a tyrant."
"This seems good," Armand said, "Samuel, you've had personal experience with this, just so you can help us."
"But America sits alone overseas. And considering the role that France played in the independence of America, if we write this, maybe, the king will think we are singing our praises." Joseph said.
"How is this possible? The king isn't a fool." Samuel said.
"There's nothing impossible, the King isn't, but some fellows around him will confuse and mislead him. Even the scripts that His Majesty sees, the performances that he sees, are not always normal." Joseph shook his head. In his opinion, this similar tactic of fooling the higher-ups was too easy.
"Jesus, how did you come up with this? Joseph, there was a chance you could have been a traitor." Armand looked at Joseph and kept shaking his head.
"You can't insult me like that." Joseph's eyes widened, and he put on an angry face and retorted, "You must know how a man like me can be a traitor. At least it should be a big traitor."
Everyone laughed at that statement. Even Fanny, who had been a little worried at first because of Joseph's harsh tone, laughed out loud despite herself.
Armand pressed his hand against his stomach while pounding his hand on the arm of the chair for a while before he said: "Joseph, I apologize, you won't be a traitor, you'll be a great big clown ... hahahahaha!"
Everyone laughed for a while before Armand added, "Stop laughing, seriously, do you guys have any more suggestions? I mean about my new play."
"How about Spartacus?" Fanny suddenly spoke up, "Well, Spartacus was the bottom of the resistance, that can't be changed, and ... and the historical accounts of him are sketchy, which leaves very ample room for creative liberties, it should be a good one!"
Since Fanny opened her mouth, Armand immediately showed his support: "I think it's good. I came up with a series of great plots almost immediately. Well, like how Spartacus fought a tiger in a gladiator arena, and then ..."
"And then, for example, we could have Spartacus, through his victory in the gladiatorial arena, have already qualified as a free man, but he decides that all men should be born free. It is considered the duty of every good man to overthrow the system of slavery in which man oppresses man and man exploits man. Thus though he had won freedom for himself, he was not satisfied with it, but threw himself into the struggle for the emancipation of all slaves!" Joseph, in the spirit of watching what was going on, added.
"Right, right, right! We can also say, through the mouth of Spartacus, 'All men are created equal, and the pursuit of liberty and happiness and resistance to oppression is a sacred and inalienable right'." Samuel rushed to interject as well.
"Are you going to have Spartacus recite the American Declaration of Independence from thousands of years ago? This is too much." Fanny spoke up.
"What else could it be? Did it make him open his mouth and recite the Gospels?" Samuel said, "Although Spartacus was thousands of years ago, we wrote him in order to give him the voice that we need to give in modern times."
"Mr. Fermat is right." Joseph agreed, "All history is contemporary history. The interpretation of history has never been in the service of reality. If you ask me, maybe we could be a little bolder, after the Battle of Apulia, Crassus crucified all 6,000 or so captured slaves. We could well stage this scene, posing the crucified slave in the same manner as Christ on the cross, and even prepare a choir to sing a hymn of the rebels at this very moment."
"This ... Joseph ... I remember that your godfather was a bishop." Armand was quite a bit dumbfounded.
"The bishop agrees that the Church today has departed from the spirit of Christ in many places." Joseph said without changing his face.
"I rather think that Mr. Bonaparte's idea is very original, and I think that if Mr. Voltaire were still alive, he would like it very much. Well, Mr. Bonaparte, are you good at music?" Fanny asked with a sparkle in her eye.
Joseph listened and laughed, "I'm practically illiterate when it comes to music."
"That's right." Fanny said with a bit of disappointment, "We're all a bunch of musical illiterates here, too, so who can we get to write this anthem for the rebels?"
"Fanny, this isn't that hard, we just have to write the lyrics and get a musician to put a tune to it." Armand said, "Of course, good lyrics, as well as good tunes are not easy to come by. Well, I'm filled with the desire to create now."
"Brother, your desire to create won't last even a week." Fanny smiled.
"You're right, Fanny. If I didn't have this problem, I'd be the new Sophocles. But I'll try to keep myself in check. Also, Joseph, you have to help me." Armand said.
"If I'm free, I'll do my best." Joseph said, "But I'm afraid I can't be of much help, at least lately. You know, I've been rather busy lately."
"What have you been up to lately, Mr. Bonaparte?" Samuel asked.
"Joseph had an important experiment to do recently." Armand said, "It seems to be about how to measure the speed of light. My uncle praised the ingenious design of the experiment. In addition, he also had to make some preparations to enter the École Militaire in Paris as a math teacher. Well, Joseph, your brother is at the École Militaire in Paris, isn't he? Did he have any reaction when he found out you were going to be his teacher?"
"I haven't told him yet." Joseph said, "Because I want to see how he reacts in class when he suddenly realizes that the math teacher is me."
"I can imagine how much fun that must be." Fanny laughed.
The conversation then turned back to how to catch one's brother. Fanny was quite literally offering advice, much of which, according to her, was what his brother had used to tease her in the first place.
Everyone also came on board and offered Joseph advice on how to catch his brother in the act. If the butler hadn't come over and reminded them that dinner was ready, there was no telling how many bad ideas the guys were going to come up with.
"Okay, let's go to the dining room." Viscount Lavoisier stood up and said, "I just got a couple of nice bottles of wine ..."
The rules for dinner at Amand's house are nothing like those at Joseph's house. There were no stereotypical rules at all, and everyone could still talk and laugh, even at dinner. Everyone went back to Viscount Lavoisier's red wine and messed around all the way to Ceylon's black tea, then to Mediterranean mackerel, then somehow to the Nile's crocodiles and hippos. But the French deserve to be the culinary masterminds of Europe, and after riffing and rattling on so many things, the topic is always the same: Is it edible? Is it good? How to eat? It must be said that in this respect, the French are very much like the Chinese.