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1) "'Fathom' is an Old English word that meant outstretched arms and an embrace by those arms. It came to mean a measurement of about 6 feet, the width a man's arms could reach, as well as the embrace of an idea. To fathom is to understand. Sailors kept the word in circulation as a measurement of depth, and it survives into the present day mostly as a negative, as unfathomable, the water so deep its depths cannot be plumbed, the phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped. New Orleans is all kinds of unfathomable, a city of amorphous boundaries, where land is forever turning into water, water devours land, and a thousand degrees of marshy, muddy, oozing in-between exist; where lines that elsewhere seem firmly drawn are blurry; where whatever you say requires more elaboration; where most rules are full of exceptions the way most land here is full of water. A fathom was an embrace, but you can put your arms around a mystery, and maybe you truly love something only by granting it its full complexity, its unknowability. And maybe love is always an attempt to embrace what cannot be fathomed and to embrace the mystery of it, too. In a sense, every place is unfathomable, infinite, impossible to describe, because it exists in innumerable versions, because no two people live in quite the same city but live side by side in parallel universes that may or may not intersect, because the minute you map it the map becomes obsolete, because the place is constantly arising and decaying. Cincinnati has its enigmas and Albuquerque its contradictions, but New Orleans is particularly rich in these things. We have mapped New Orleans and its surroundings twenty-two times, sometimes with two or more subjects per map, but we have not drained the well with these few bucketloads."

2) "So much of the richness of this place is fleeting and forever being renewed: the pleasures of sociability, of festivals and Carnival, of dancing and music, of smiles and greetings and contact, of improvisations that sail out on the night air never to be recaptured but always to be renewed and succeeded. This is not the immortality of dry endless life but of continual regeneration and reincarnation. The measure of time here is not years or centuries, but the annual cycle that repeats: the old Catholic calendar with Jazz Fest and some other secular occasions thrown in. Not just the Christian holidays celebrated elsewhere in the United States, but the older, richer, wilder calendar, in which Christmas leads to Twelfth Night, and Twelfth Night is the launch of the Carnival season, which runs for many weeks, up until Fat Tuesday. Then the forty days of Lent begin with Ash Wednesday, marching soberly along to Easter—except that few are sober on St. Patrick's Day, and St. Joseph's Day is pleasure galore, with Italians sharing altars of baked goods and Mardi Gras Indians donning their hand-sewn suits that night and one last time the following Sunday—Super Sunday—before they draw a sketch of next year's outfits. The calendar also includes hurricane season, the season when the city's mortality is on everyone's mind."

3) "There are no straight lines in nature. Nor are there any right angles. Rather, intricate tangles and irregular arcs merge and bifurcate recurrently. Look at any plant leaf, or spider web, or the veins of your arm for evidence. Nowhere is this sinuous geometry more apparent than in river deltas, where flowing waters, lacking the discipline that topography imposes, lazily meander in hairpin crescents, ever shifting, eroding, and depositing sediment—until they lunge into an adjacent channel and replicate the process nearby, all the while turning sea into land. So formed the Mississippi Delta, over the span of a mere seven thousand years, producing what Mark Twain called 'the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.' Dynamic, fluid, soft, warm, humid, tempestuous: flora and fauna flourish in such conditions, but humans resist them and endeavor to impose rigidity and rectitude upon them, so as to exploit the delta's resources and nodalities. The urban developmental history of New Orleans is essentially the story of overlaying orderly orthogonality on unruly curvaceousness."

4) "At the base of the world's seventh largest river delta, antebellum plantations and petrochemical industries occupy lands where the First Nations of the Mississippi River Delta once lived. The ancient bottomland hardwood and cypress forests exist no more. Where villages once stood, suburbs and cities now sprawl. The federal government has refused to recognize the Houma for over two hundred years, denying us the fulfillment of the promise of colonial treaties. Now, our ancestors' refuge, Rosalie's land, is disappearing before our eyes. For the first time in our history, in the shadows of the BP drilling disaster, we are facing the threat of losing our food sovereignty as we bear witness to the realities of a delta ecosystem under stress. One day, we Houma may be forced to forever evacuate the wetlands of coastal Louisiana that we call home. Until that time, we will continue to make our last stand on sinking land."

5) "In most parts of New Orleans, if you plunge your arm into the ground to the depth of your elbow, your fingertips will touch water. Your fingertips might also touch other fingertips. It took more than a century for the city's early settlers to realize that the ground beneath New Orleans is too low, and the water table too high, to allow traditional Christian burial. As a body decomposes, it fills with gases—cadaverine and putrescine—that cause it to bloat. A coffin containing a bloated corpse will rise through mud like a bubble in a carbonated drink. The only thing holding it back is the hard topsoil. But after a storm, once the topsoil is agitated and diluted, the coffin will pop out of the ground, like a buoy pushed under water and then released. This is what happened for more than a hundred years after New Orleans was founded: every time it rained, bodies popped out of the ground. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the city was known throughout the United States as the 'Wet Grave.'"

6) "It is these logics of confinement and containment that have shaped New Orleans's approach to public safety for centuries. While it has been forcefully argued that the policies of levees-only and mass incarceration have made southern Louisiana more secure, what these policies have actually done is illuminate whose lives are deemed valuable and who has been rendered disposable time and time again. Yet, regardless of how many policies are enacted, neither human beings nor the river have been easily contained. The urge for freedom is too strong to be put down, no matter how high the walls."

7) "Congo Square, in Treme on the edge of the French Quarter, itself came up in the conversation as the pivotal site for American and perhaps world music. You can imagine the rich musical traditions enslaved Africans brought with them squeezed through the narrow waist of an hourglass—a narrow waist called Congo Square—before broadening out again and mixing and mingling with other sources to become jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, and so much more, including, eventually, hip-hop. And hip-hop is now the global sound of resistance: just as rock and roll played by the Plastic People of the Universe assumed a crucial role in Czechoslovakia's path to liberation, so hip-hop played a meaningful role in the Arab Spring of 2011, which might have as accurately been called the North African Spring. This was only one of the many ways that what began in Africa, survived uniquely in Congo Square, and grew and changed and bloomed in the United States went back to that continent as liberation and power."

8) "Many people fell in love with the city and stayed. In the first few years after Katrina, I met many who told me they came for a week and stayed months or went back and packed up and moved to New Orleans. Newcomers arrived, and many natives discovered a newly fierce affection for their city. Post-Katrina, some racial lines were crossed, some corruption was rooted out, some environmentally strong and hurricane-resistant buildings went in, and some important conversations were launched. The nation learned from it, too, which became evident when Hurricane Sandy struck seven years later and several hundred miles northeast. New Orleans is built on the instability of mud and lowlands, and it is a place of many kinds of violence; but it is also built on love, pleasure, public joy and affection, memory, and faithful attachment. By some estimates, in the wake of the disaster more than a million volunteers visited the city for periods ranging from a few days to years to provide medical care, demolition and construction, community kitchens, advocacy, and more. New Orleans was nearly destroyed by hate, but it was saved and restored by love."

1) "Writing is not narrative design, and narrative design is not writing. One of the common misconceptions in videogames around storytelling is that narrative designers can write and vice versa. Sometimes you get people who do both (often you will be expected to be a dual narrative designer/writer in a small indie development team), but this problem is endemic and often means that the actual brief or recruitment copy for a piece of work isn't clear about what's wanted. And it's even possible the people writing the job description don't know what they need. So, let's set this out as clearly as possible: Narrative design is the practice of game design with story at its heart. You are the advocate for the story in the design of the game. Narrative is (and we will dig down more into this in the next chapter) the design of the telling of a story. Not just a plot in a world with characters, but also the decisions around in what order the plot is communicated, how characters and the environment build together, structure, pacing, choice design, voice, perspective, role-play relationships, UI, the key decisions around tools, player agency, and much else. It is storytelling through design. Writing is the building of characters, worlds, plot, structure pacing, cadence, dialogue, UI text, choice text, exposition, characterisation, character journeys, format, genre, and medial expressivity (i.e. What is this sentence to be read as? Is it a line of dialogue like in a script, a book, for speaking, a comic?). It is storytelling through words."

2) "You will often need to find ways of making broken tools sufficient and will often be dealing with systems for writing which have none of the word processing features you're used to. I wrote much of Mutazione without an undo button, with manual save only, and, until the final year, no copy and paste. There were also bugs in the tool I worked in, which sometimes meant saves didn't take, and workflows which might have made sense to a programmer in setting it up, but when I had to select a character from a dropdown box for every single line I wrote, I quickly knew I would need to request being able to search the box by pressing a letter, or get a severe repetitive strain injury (RSI)."

3) "One thing about writing in games is defining and understanding scope, and how it can balloon. If someone asks you to add something into your writing which they think seems simple, it's useful to be able to respond carefully about how many hours of work that would add. One of the most useful phrases I've learned to use is 'that's not a small change.'"

4) "Here's the piece of advice I think is the most universally useful thing I say to early-stage practitioners: Your practice is not your career. That is, your practice and development as a storyteller is in your hands. The people who hire you, on the other hand, are in control of your career."

5) "Here are some discussion prompts for a crit club: · How did the game make you feel? · How did it achieve this? · Was there a central character? How was the player supposed to relate to them? · How did you feel about the character voices and journey? · How did the writing and story interact with gameplay? · What did you think about structure, pacing, and formal constraints? · How did the game use choice and agency? · How did it use genre conventions? · What do you feel wasn't so successful? · If you were to change one major aspect of the game/genre/story, how would it change? · What might you have done differently?"

6) "If you have to or want to read reviews, I recommend deciding how, why, and when. Don't read them obsessively every time you get a Google alert. Set aside time, absorb them, gather your pull quotes, note your bug reports, respond to anything you need to, and jot down any reflections for your practice in one of the practice/reflection note-taking systems you will have diligently built after this book's advice. If you might need to respond to reviews on storefronts, you might want to create 'form' responses in a sheet you and colleagues can copy and paste from if there's a known bug. Having such a sheet could also be useful if you need to take a breath before responding. Draft it in the sheet, and take five minutes to come back to it before posting."

1) Samuel de Champlain founded his famous habitation at what's now Quebec City in 1608, but continued to be on the lookout for other places where French settlers could also make their homes in the New World. Late in the spring of 1611, he journeyed up the Saint Lawrence River to where Jacques Cartier, in 1535, had been stopped by the Lachine Rapids. There, from the Iroquoian village of Hochelaga, Cartier had climbed the wooded eminence he called "le mont Royal." It was the name that, a little modified, would eventually be applied to the city it one day would overlook and the island where it stands. During his 1611 expedition, Champlain, like Cartier, would also halt at the fearsome rapids, which he called le Grand Sault Saint Louis. And, two years later, well into the writing of his Voyages, we can imagine him reflecting with satisfaction on the passage where he describes discovering, on that island, point de lieu plus propre for settlement. Here, following John Squair's translation, is how Champlain spent about two weeks near the rapids:

I examined the country very carefully, but after looking everywhere found no place more suitable than a little spot ... which we named Place Royale, at a league's distance from Mount Royal.

2) [The] very day that Cuvillier and Aylwin's advertisement appeared, a major fire struck Notre Dame Street, home to their auction house, and the surrounding neighbourhood. The jail, near today's city hall, the Collège de Montréal, housed in the former Château de Vaudreuil on Saint Paul Street, and many houses were among the structures destroyed. But out of the ashes, some remarkable opportunities arose. We see the results today. The most important was Place Jacques Cartier. As urbanist Jean-Claude Marsan of the Université de Montréal has related, the square owes its existence to "a neat, speculative deal." About six months after the fire, a pair of wheeler-dealer merchants named Joseph Périnault and Jean-Baptiste-Amable Durocher bought the ruins of the Château de Vaudreuil and its extensive grounds for about £3,500. Then, "with calculated generosity" as Marsan has put it, they presented the city with about a third of the land on condition that a public market be established there. The offer was quickly accepted, whereupon Périnault and Durocher immediately subdivided the remainder of the tract into seven building lots. They set the price high, calculating that proximity to the new market would make the lots especially attractive. Sure enough, all seven lots sold within two days. "Périnault and Durocher had made a small fortune," Marsan concludes, "and Montreal had a new public square."

3) He was one of the best known men in Montreal, though not as Charles McKiernan. Throughout the city, indeed elsewhere in Canada and into the United States, he was hailed as Joe Beef, and there was ample reason for his fame. Joe Beef's waterfront saloon was as remarkable a Montreal landmark as, in its own way, Notre Dame Church or the palatial, brand new Windsor Hotel. Booze was served, of course, but so was food, and if a man couldn't pay for what he ate, that was all right with Joe. Those with money might enjoy great lashings of beef, bread and tea; but those without could still count on a bowl of soup. Each day at noon, hundreds of down-and-outers might line up for a handout. There were rooms upstairs where the poor could stay for next to nothing. In winter, Joe would send one of his men through the nearby streets to pick up any drunks trying to sleep it off in the snow.

4) Few things proclaim Montreal so unmistakably as the illuminated cross on Mount Royal. It was erected in 1924 by the Société Saint Jean Baptiste as a "perpetual monument to the faith of Canada." Yet the cross might never have been built had another project for the mountain gone ahead thirty-six years before. In April 1888, city council received a petition from prominent Catholics led by Archbishop Édouard-Charles Fabre. It asked that land be set aside at the summit of Mount Royal for a huge statue of the Virgin Mary. This was not the first time that something monumental had been urged for the mountain. In 1867, French sculptor Louis Rochet proposed that a statue of Jacques Cartier be placed there. City council turned him down. Rochet tried again in 1874 and again was rejected. That same year on June 24, Saint Jean Baptiste Day, Reverend Alexandre Deschamps preached a sermon in Notre Dame Church calling for a cross on the heights of Mount Royal. It would be a deliberate echo of the far more modest cross that Paul de Maisonneuve, Montreal's founder, raised on the mountain early in 1643 to thank God for preserving the infant settlement from a disastrous flood. This proposal, too, came to naught, perhaps an ill omen for Archbishop Fabre.

5) In comedy, timing is everything, and Mrs. John Buckland would surely have appreciated the moment. One of the great comic actors of the Montreal stage, she had pre-empted the Gazette's report of her grave illness by inconveniently dying the day before.

6) Thompson was cashing in on a fad then at full throttle in the United States. The cakewalk itself - high-stepping while bending backward, hands waving, then allowed to fall - had grown out of shows that black slaves had put on for their own amusement in which they parodied the ballroom manners of their white masters, and the prize for the best display was a cake. By the 1890s, in an ironic twist, the cakewalk had crossed over into mainstream white society. Public dances, even into the 1920s, would feature contests in which couples would promenade extravagantly across the stage, each hoping to - well - take the cake.

7) The Gazette was one of seven major newspapers then in Montreal, four English and three French, and none of them disturbed the Lord's Day by publishing. "I am passing a Sabbath in a city where there is no seven-day-a-week paper, and Sunday is the day omitted," Hall noted. "There is a weekly Sunday paper here of very modest proportions, but the clergy certainly have no reason to complain of the Sunday newspapers of Montreal detracting from devotional exercises." The city now boasted a population of perhaps 250,000, of whom about 175,000 were French-speaking. For the doubtless unilingual Hall, however, it was the minority that caught his eye - or rather his ear. Consider this odd linguistic observation: "From the frequency one hears the ejaculation 'Scotch' as a sort of time-of-day greeting, one might almost imagine a considerable portion of the population hailed from the land of The Bonnie Briar Bush." For all his flippancy, Hall was enjoying himself and was sorry to return home. "Montreal is glad I am here," his report concluded, "and so am I. Scotch!"

8) Bitter cold had come early that winter - which, in one way, was a blessing. The low temperatures promised the annual ice harvest would be a good one. Surrounded as we are by electric refrigerators and freezers at home, coolers in our supermarkets and air-conditioning everywhere, it's easy to forget what a challenge it used to be to cool ourselves, our food and anything else. The challenge was met in Montreal by half a dozen or more ice companies whose crews would be dispatched to the frozen Saint Lawrence as soon as conditions were right. That winter of 1903-04, cutting began four days after Christmas and, thanks to slightly milder weather early in January, was proceeding rapidly. Not only did that early cold snap mean ice two feet thick could be on the market a week sooner than usual, the Gazette reported, but in addition light snowfalls and strong winds had kept the frozen surface of the river free of snow. "There is very little snow frozen on the surface of the cubes, which glisten in the sun like emeralds."

9) Millie de Leon was loving it. When a policeman in the audience stood up, marched on stage, and made to arrest her, she planted a kiss on the officer's cheek, "which," the Gazette recorded, "was much envied from the front rows." Millie, also known as The Girl in Blue, was a famous American burlesque queen. Her original stage name had been Mlle. De Leon, but the raucous world of burlesque soon ensured that the fancy French honorific would become the no-airs first name Millie. She knew exactly how risqué she could be, and delighted in going just a little further. Often she'd throw a garter to the audience, even invite a man onstage to remove it himself. She had been known to forget to put on her body stocking before appearing. Late in April 1909 she was packin' 'em in at the Theatre Royal on Côté Street with her dancing, which we described as "a combination of the Salome and the houchee couchee." It was too much for Police Chief Olivier Campeau, though he could not go to the theatre himself to enforce decency. He was too well known and knew that, if he turned up, "the more peppery parts" would be "eliminated out of respect for his feelings." He sent a Constable Lepage in plainclothes instead.

10) By the following weekend, the [zoot suit riots] had generally calmed down, however, though not the search for what had caused it in the first place. Surely part of it was sex. Perhaps one too many zoot-suiter had cut in on a sailor, or vice-versa, in some dance hall or night club. Testosterone was not in short supply, on either side. Consider, too, the servicemen's resentment of boys virtually their own age having it easy in civilian life. Too many in uniform had suffered in real battles already, and with the invasion of Europe just getting under way, vastly more would soon fall in combat. And let's not forget the extravagant zoot suits themselves, surely an affront to those in more sober military attire. "The pants of the zoot suiters flare out at the top," one Montrealer told the Gazette. "Sailors' pants flare out at the bottom. So, it's just natural that they clash."

1) Alex Dumas first came to the army's attention when, still a lowly corporal, he single-handedly captured twelve enemy soldiers and marched them back to his camp. Not long afterward, he led four horsemen in an attack on an enemy post manned by over fifty men—Dumas alone killed six and took sixteen prisoner. As a Parisian society journalist in the early nineteenth century summed up, "Such brilliant conduct, on top of a manly physiognomy and extraordinary strength and stature, secured his quick promotion; it wasn't long before his talents proved he deserved it."

2) "Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and skinny he was," wrote the chief medical officer of the expedition. "The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them more was... the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the expedition." [At] over six feet, with an athletic physique, Alex Dumas cut a dashing figure among the French elite. But how was it that he could enter the elite—and indeed be celebrated as a national hero—at a time when the basis of French wealth was black slavery in the colonies?

3) Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.

4) In those days, most Parisian cafés didn't spill into the street but served their customers in great interior rooms with marble-topped tables, gilt walls, mirrors, and chandeliers. But in the Palais Royal, with its large, protected courtyards, the cafés could set up outdoor tables where customers could read or talk amid the throng. Nearby were open-air billiard tables, musicians playing bawdy songs, magic-lantern shows, displays of electromagnetism, and political satires of all kinds—often distributed by freethinking agents of the Duke d'Orléans—mocking the king. Men and women crowded into these courtyards day and night; at the tables sat groups of men in intense discussion on the matters of the day. Anyone could read what they liked here and argue as loudly as they wished about it. The brilliant thing was that since the Palais Royal belonged to the duke, the entire space was off limits to the Paris police. Only the duke's own guards held sway within these walls, and the family had given strict instructions to allow the public a long leash. Philosophers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, workmen, and aristocrats all bumped up against one another, and many political clubs of the French Revolution began their debates here. (A little over half a century later, Karl Marx would first meet Friedrich Engels at a Palais Royal café, making this birthplace of eighteenth-century revolution that of twentieth-century revolution as well.)

5) Until the Committee's downfall, in 1794, Dumas would be forced to correspond with it on a regular basis about nearly all logistical, tactical, and strategic matters of his command. He received many letters a week signed by Carnot and the other members of the Committee. He must have been aware of the situation when he received his promotion, but Alex Dumas was brave, self-confident, and stubborn. Also, his own zeal gave him the kind of protective faith that true believers have. Dumas had thrown his life and soul fully behind the Revolution, even though he was not inherently a political man. For him, there was no going back. Unlike many others, he couldn't emigrate if pushed too far—where would he go? In a world where men of his color were slaves, revolutionary France was his promised land, even if he had to share it with some unsavory characters.

6) In mid-August, the Committee decided to send "the hero of Mont Cenis" to lead the Army of the West, whose mission was to combat a bloody royalist rebellion—some called it a civil war—in the Vendée, in western France. While the majority of the revolutionary armies fought external enemies, a few targeted internal rebellion and counterrevolution. The Army of the West was particularly notorious in this respect: its task was to suppress the motley collection of aristocrats and peasants who called themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. Many factors had made the Vendéeans rebels: many of them opposed the Revolution from the beginning or were alienated by the persecution of priests and the confiscation of Church property or by the 1793 execution of the king. But the biggest cause of the rebellion seems to have been Carnot's implementation of the levée en masse.

7) A decent man could not last long in the Vendée without becoming either a bloodthirsty killer or a victim. This was the case for Dumas's old commander General Biron. Biron had been sent to the Vendée in May 1793 to fight the insurgency. He had achieved immediate military successes, but the insubordination and continued violence toward civilians on the part of his troops caused him to resign. Another general then accused him of incivisme because he had been too lenient with the insurgents. This was enough to land Biron on the guillotine in December 1793, the very month that the Army of the West declared provisional victory over the insurgency.

8) The current Committee members' lack of extreme ideological convictions also made it a target for all sides, and Paris was rife with plots against the middle-of-the-road government. In spring hyperinflation and bread riots had sparked a rise in what was called "neo-Jacobinism," and in May these far-left radicals staged an uprising; it was brutally suppressed. But the repression of the neo-Jacobins on the far left created an opening for the neo-royalists on the far right. On October 5, 1795, the royalist-leaning sections of the city erupted in insurrection against the central government. Thirty thousand insurgents marched on the government, which had at most six thousand troops to defend it. The government called on a man of influence, a provincial noble named Paul Barras—Viscount Paul de Barras—who was promoted overnight to command the Army of the Interior. Barras looked to the army and specifically to an up-and-coming general living in Paris. Napoleon Bonaparte did not disappoint him.

9) In January 1797, Napoleon reorganized the French Army of Italy into three main columns, with the goal of driving the Austrians up into the Alps and out of Italy. If the French columns succeeded in this, they might even follow their enemy and burst down into the heartland of Austria itself, from which the enemy's capital, Vienna, would be just a day's ride away. For the first two weeks of February 1797, Dumas and a small band of dragoons under the command of General André Masséna advanced relentlessly, driving the Austrian army ever farther north toward their own border. "[Dumas] flies from one city to another, from one village to another, hacking everything to pieces," runs one account, "capturing two thousand prisoners here, one thousand there, he performs truly fantastic charges." The Austrians came up with a name for the relentless French general who stalked them through the snow: die schwarze Teufel, the "Black Devil."

10) Napoleon, who styled himself an intellectual and was proud of his membership in the French Academy in Paris, showered the Institute with problems both great and small: How do we purify Nile water? Which would be more practical in Cairo, windmills or watermills? What is the civil and criminal law in Egypt and what elements should we keep or throw out? Is there a way of brewing beer without hops?

11) That night a group of allied deputies stayed up late with the plotters, working by candlelight, taking votes and drafting papers, to make it all legal. By 3 a.m. it was finished. France had a new government, with Napoleon appointed first consul at the head of a ruling body of three consuls. Naturally, the other two would do his bidding. "Consul" was an evocation of Rome, and everyone could see that, as in Rome, one Caesar had emerged supreme. The fate of everything and everyone in Europe would soon hang on the whim of this dictator in a tricolor sash. The decade of French republicanism and democracy—the age of seemingly infinite emancipation, with all its expansive horrors and hopes—was over.

12) Dumas attributed his own salvation to the "forty enemas in three hours."

13) By the time he returned to France, in June of 1801, the Revolution and the nation Alex Dumas loved had declined almost as precipitously as he had. He must have felt like Rip Van Winkle returning from the hills—only Rip Van Winkle had found a king replaced by a revolution, while Dumas found a revolution replaced by a king, of sorts. And it was the same king he had left Egypt to escape. When Dumas arrived on French shores, Napoleon had had over a year to remake France in his image and to turn the gains of the Revolution to his own purposes.

14) During the 1790s, the National Colonial Institute in Paris had taken the revolutionary step of educating black, mixed-race, and white children together. Now Napoleon's government cut the Institute's funding and ended its experiment in color-blind education.

1) The new century was a new opportunity, he'd decided. If they survived Y2K, if the world didn't end, he was going to be a better man. Also if they survived Y2K he hoped never to hear the term Y2K again.

2) There were aspects of the fairy tale that Vincent was careful not to think about too much at the time, and later her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she'd stepped temporarily outside of herself.

3) Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she'd quit working at the Hotel Caiette and returned to her old job at the Hotel Vancouver before Jonathan arrived, for example, or where he decided to get room service that morning instead of sitting at the bar and ordering breakfast, or where he did sit at the bar and order breakfast but he didn't like Vincent; an alternate reality where she still lived in the staff quarters of the Hotel Caiette, serving drinks to wealthy tourists all night, years passing. None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she'd landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events. [...] Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War, for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been swiftly contained; an alternate world where the Georgia flu blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed.

4) An unsettling thought while standing in line for the commissary: when he dies in prison, will he die in the counterlife too?

5) [The] line, for Oskar, had been crossed eleven years earlier, when he'd first been asked to backdate a transaction. "It's possible to both know and not know something," he said later, under cross-examination, and the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who'd been thinking a great deal about that doubleness, that knowing and not knowing, being honourable and not being honourable, knowing you're not a good person but trying to be a good person regardless around the margins of the bad.

6) "I know what you mean," Leon said. "It's the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry." "Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I'm not naming names, and he said, 'I just can't believe what's happening to our industry, can you?' And I'm trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let's break this down. What is it you can't believe, exactly? That people don't want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don't want to ship goods that nobody's buying?"

7) Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they'd all been cut loose, they'd slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.