Every July 14 was both France's National Day and Bastille Day. A military parade was held on the Champs-Élysées and Place de la Concorde, and naturally, the soldiers hoped to march past looking handsome, smart, and full of spirit.
To achieve that, they took their uniforms to dry cleaners to be washed and pressed. Cleaning and ironing an entire regiment's worth of clothes was no quick task, so they sent them in early, then carefully stored them away until they could be worn on National Day.
When Alessandro put on a French Army uniform and looked at himself in the mirror, an emergency assembly broadcast was already sounding from the neighboring barracks.
At the same time, gunfire rang out, but the bullets had no effect on the Giant's skin. He did not attack. The people's terror was less a fear that he would chase them than a kind of memory. Like the sleeper effect, even after time had passed and everything had changed, as though waking from a great dream, they had forgotten many things, yet one feeling remained—their memories of these gluttons who ate everything. If they did not want to be eaten, they had to run. For a time, the bustling city of Paris became like a remote village in the Alps.
The Junker nobles would not let off the villagers who had guided Napoleon's army. Look at the losses the French Army had inflicted on the Holy Roman Empire. Even if the person involved ran away, the people from his village would not, and the news could not possibly remain completely sealed. It was the same reason Napoleon had risked becoming a laughingstock by reviewing a "military force" in Dijon made up of the old, weak, sick, and disabled in order to deceive the spies.
The army