大卫 Part03

Accidents like this happened every day.

Walk down any Paris street or into any salon, and you would have seen a rich gallery of the deformed and the disfigured.

Terrible smallpox scars, club feet, harelips, the lot.

But some accidents matter to people and some don't. This one did.

. . . . . .

David's disfigurement meant he couldn't talk properly.

Few people could understand what he was saying, so he ended up not saying very much.

When he did talk, he was painfully conscious of being a stammerer.

. . . . . .

If there was ever a moment in history when wit and banter really mattered, it was surely in 18th-century France.