"Follower XII"

After leaving the Secretary-General's office, Severus and Gianluca went looking for Alessandro, but after searching all of St. Mark's Basilica, they found no sign of him.

They stood together at the main entrance, overlooking Europe's most beautiful drawing room. It had welcomed many "guests," including two particularly remarkable Frenchmen. One of them had originally been merely one of the city's countless passersby, and few associated him with the one who came later.

The two men were named Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Napoleon. Both had an enormous influence on France, Venice, and even all of Europe.

"You know Rousseau well," Gianluca said.

"Every poor bastard likes Rousseau," Snape shot back acidly. "His writings were a merciless critique of the aristocracy's extravagance at the time. You have no idea how much poor people hate the rich."

"But I heard his ending wasn't very good," Gianluca said.

"The French aristocrats didn't fare any better. A great many of them were sent to the guillotine," Snape said. "After he published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau lost his right to free admission to the opera. For someone with a meager income, that was equivalent to being driven out of society. At forty-two, he began drafting The Social Contract, which later became the theoretical manifesto of the French Revolution. In Chapter Ten of Book Two of The Social Contract, he predicted that Corsica would shake all of Europe. He was almost as prophetic as a village fortune-teller."

"It wasn't just the guillotine," Gianluca said. "They were controlled by a warped sense of justice. The executioners at La Force Prison arranged the ladies in the front row to watch them dismember aristocrats. They stripped the nobles naked and tortured the victims for more than half an hour using a Chinese method called 'death by a thousand