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Paris, July 12, 1789.

A crowd comes down the Boulevard du Temple shouting a name. Canvas aprons, wool jackets, sticks wrenched from market stalls. Shopkeepers close their shutters as it passes.

“Necker! Necker!”

Jacques Necker is finance minister to King Louis XVI, and the only man in the government the people trust. The king dismissed him yesterday.

A man shouts from the front of the crowd.

“The king’s troops are coming into Paris!”

The crowd stops at number 20 and hammers on the door. Behind the shop window, a row of life size wax heads looks out into the street, and a bust of Necker stands in the middle of them. It is the only likeness of him in Paris.

“The bust! Give us the bust!”

The door opens. Philippe Curtius, the wax modeler who owns the shop, comes out in his shirtsleeves, lifts the bust out of the window and puts it into the arms of the nearest man.

The bust goes up above their heads, in triumph, and the crowd moves off west.

In the Place Louis XV, a line of cavalry blocks the street. Sabers come out. The riders drive their horses into the crowd.

The man carrying Necker goes down. He does not get up.

The bust rolls across the paving stones, the face laid open by saber cuts.

The Powder

On the morning of July 14, the crowd breaks into the Invalides, the old soldiers’ hospital, and comes out with thousands of muskets.

The muskets are empty. The powder sits in the Bastille, at the other end of the city.

In front of the Bastille, the guns fire down the street. Men on ladders start pulling down the top of the walls. The fortress surrenders in the afternoon.

Launay, the governor of the Bastille, is dragged to the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. Flesselles, who runs the city government, is brought in behind him. Both men are killed there, and their heads are cut off.

The heads go up on pikes and move off through Paris. In the middle of one procession, a young woman is elbowing her way forward.

Marie Grosholtz, 27, smaller than the men around her. Curtius took her in as a child, and she now has the best hand in the workshop.

In Alsace, where the name is from, Grosholtz men have been executioners from father to son for three hundred years.

She slips through, pushes one arm aside, then another, reaches the front. The city guard appears at the end of the street. The men carrying the pikes scatter.

She goes back to the Boulevard du Temple with both heads held against her apron.

She lays them cheek down on the workshop table. Oil with a brush, over the skin, then liquid plaster from forehead to chin.

The plaster hardens. She works it loose at the edge. The hollow holds everything.

Hot wax tinted the color of skin runs into it. It cools, it comes away, it carries the face.

Glass eyes go in from behind. The hair goes in one strand at a time, with a needle.

The Rope

The next morning, Marie sets the two new faces in the shop window.

A line forms on the sidewalk before the shops open. People push to get to the glass.

They have come to see two men the papers have been full of for months, men they hate and have never once seen. No newspaper prints a portrait.

The window costs nothing.

Beside it the shop door stands open. A man stands there all day, calling out over the line.

“Come in, gentlemen! Come and see the royal table! It’s just like Versailles!”

Admission is 2 sous, and a second line forms at that door.

Curtius has turned the back of the house into a large room. The figures stand there in full dress, life size, behind a rope strung across the room.

The king and queen sit at a table laid for dinner, the dauphin, their son, beside them, and farther back Lafayette, Voltaire, Rousseau and Franklin, with du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, asleep on a cushion.

For 12 sous, you step past the rope and walk among them.

The months pass and executions multiply in Paris. Every week another head falls, and the whole city repeats the name.

In the morning the new face is behind the glass and the line is in front of it. In the evening it goes into the large room and takes its place among the others.

Curtius no longer touches the plaster. He works the door and the cash box, and he takes the orders.

Every face that leaves the shop now comes from Marie’s hands. She molds, she pours, she sets the hair.

The Will

In the summer of 1794, Curtius leaves the Boulevard du Temple for his house in Ivry sur Seine. He does not come back to the shop.

Marie runs the door, the room and the workshop.

On August 31 he sends for a notary, and for Marie. He dictates his will in her presence. The house, the figures, the molds, all of it is hers.

“You have been under my roof for twenty years.”

On September 23, three weeks after the notary comes, Curtius dies in the house at Ivry.

Marie is 32. She inherits 28 standing figures, 10 busts, 68 other models, more than 60 paintings and an Egyptian mummy.

The Gambling Tables

In October 1795 she marries François Tussaud, the son of a family of winegrowers from Mâcon. He is younger than she is.

A daughter is born in 1796. She dies at nine months old.

Joseph is born in 1798, Francis in 1800.

Marie Tussaud works the molds in the morning. She feeds the children between coats of plaster. In the evening she takes the money at the door.

Her husband comes down at closing time, lifts the cash box off her lap and walks out with it.

He comes home in the morning from the gambling tables with empty pockets, and signs another note.

The creditors come to the shop with the papers he has signed. They take away one figure, then two.

Seven years, and nothing remains of what Curtius left her.

Nothing but the molds.

The Quay

At the end of 1802, a showman pushes open the shop door. In London he puts on ghost shows, figures thrown onto a sheet.

He offers to take her across with her figures. He will pay for the crossing, and for the posters that will advertise the show.

In return, he takes half of everything she earns in England.

She signs.

The crates go aboard. Inside them, packed in straw, the plaster molds.

She is 41. She has no money left.

Joseph, 4, is already on deck. Francis, 2, stays on the quay, his hand in his grandmother’s.

She crouches down to his level.

“I’ll only be gone a few months.”

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Everyone knows Cleopatra. Queen of Egypt, the greatest beauty of the ancient world, the woman who brought down Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony with nothing but her face.

Two thousand years later, we still picture her as Elizabeth Taylor. Smoky eyes, black bangs, gold at the wrists.

None of it is true.

That face was manufactured after her death, by a man who needed her to be beautiful so he could destroy her.

The story starts three centuries earlier, and not in Egypt.

The Stolen Body

Fall of 332 BC. A 24-year-old boy crosses into Egypt at the head of an army, and not a single arrow is fired.

His name is Alexander. King of Macedon, a mountain kingdom north of Greece, he left home two years earlier to tear the largest empire in the known world away from the Persians. The Persians have occupied Egypt for eleven years, and the Egyptians hate them for it. The gates open for him.

He stays six months.

Long enough to be crowned pharaoh, to travel five days by camel across the desert to have his fortune told by an oracle, and to drive stakes into a strip of sand wedged between the sea and a lake, west of the Nile delta. The city doesn't exist yet. He gives it his name.

Then he heads east again. In June of 323 BC, in Babylon, a fever kills him at 32, with no heir fit to rule.

His generals carve up the empire the following month. Macedonians, childhood friends, former bodyguards. Each man takes his share.

One of them claims Egypt. Ptolemy, in his forties, raised alongside Alexander, at his side on every battlefield since day one.

Two years pass before the body leaves Babylon. A funeral carriage pulled by sixty-four mules carries it toward Macedon, where kings are buried.

Ptolemy intercepts it in Syria with his troops and diverts the convoy to Egypt.

An army is sent to take it back. It never makes it across the Nile.

Alexander's body comes to rest in a mausoleum in the center of Alexandria. People file past it for centuries.

Ptolemy has himself crowned king. A Greek officer, in a country that isn't his, with the corpse of the greatest conqueror in the world resting in his capital.

A Greek Family

Ptolemy's kingdom will last nearly three centuries without ever ceasing to be Greek.

In Alexandria, the court speaks Greek, the administration writes in Greek, legal rulings come down in Greek. The city builds a theater, a gymnasium, a library where scribes churn out copies of Homer, and a lighthouse over three hundred feet tall that the ancient world counts among the Seven Wonders.

Egyptians have no place in any of it. They work the land along the Nile and pay their taxes.

The Ptolemies rule over them without mixing with them. To keep the bloodline intact, they marry their sisters, then their nieces, generation after generation. The coins tell the story of these marriages: the same profile turns up portrait after portrait.

They hold the title of pharaoh. They have themselves carved into temple walls in Egyptian dress, the double crown on their heads. A uniform for the job. Not one of them learns the language of the country.

Cleopatra is born in Alexandria in 69 BC, tenth generation. Her father is named Ptolemy, like every man before him. Her native language is Greek.

History didn't even record her mother's name. Or her paternal grandmother's. Half of her ancestry is missing from the record, and the other half, the half we can trace name by name, is Macedonian, start to finish.

The Language of the Land

Cleopatra takes the throne at 18, in 51 BC.

And she learns Egyptian.

Nine generations of Greek kings settled along the Nile, and not one of them had ever spoken the language of the land they ruled.

Egyptian isn't the only language she learns. From one audience to the next, she slides from Ethiopian to Hebrew, from Arabic to Parthian, never once calling for an interpreter.

She also has herself depicted as an Egyptian.

Roughly three hundred miles south of Alexandria, on a wall of the temple at Dendera, she has herself carved into stone in Egyptian dress, in the style Nile sculptors have practiced for two thousand years. Beside her, the son she had with Julius Caesar.

In the papyri, she signs herself the New Isis, after the country's greatest goddess.

A Greek queen learning to pass herself off as Egyptian. It's a political calculation, and it works. Egypt embraces her as it never embraced a single Ptolemy before her.

The Face on the Silver

In the spring of 36 BC, Cleopatra is 33 years old and some six hundred miles from Alexandria. Antioch, a city in Syria set on a river, the Orontes, with a mountain at its back.

Mark Antony, a Roman general, is headquartered there. A division of power among Rome's strongmen gave him the East, and for four years now he has governed everything stretching from Greece to the Euphrates.

She has spent the winter at his side. They already have two children, twins born four years earlier.

That year, the city's mint strikes a silver coin bearing both their faces. Mark Antony on one side. She on the other, the same size.

Rome doesn't put foreign rulers on its silver. And yet, around Cleopatra's head, in Greek letters, her full name and title: Queen Cleopatra, the Young Goddess.

Her profile is what catches the eye.

The nose, long and sharply hooked, runs straight down from the forehead in a single line. The chin juts forward. The jaw cuts across the lower face. The neck is thick, the forehead low.

It's the Ptolemy nose. The one that belonged to her father, her grandfather, every king in the family for the past two hundred and seventy years.

A coin is the only object that shows a ruler to people who will never lay eyes on him. It passes from hand to hand, city to city, for years. No coin goes into production until the king has seen it.

Cleopatra approved this profile, then let it travel across the entire East.

A king who commissions his own portrait commissions one that flatters him. Engravers know how to soften a nose, pull back a chin, narrow a jaw.

Nobody touched hers.

Cleopatra's beauty was never something Cleopatra chose.

"The most beautiful woman of the ancient world" was shaped by a man who wished her nothing but harm.

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Serpukhov 15, on the night of September 25 to 26, 1983.

A bunker buried under the pines, 70 kilometers southwest of Moscow, on no map.

Stanislav Petrov walks down the concrete stairs, pushes open the door to the watch room, and sits down in the commander's chair.

It's cool inside. The air smells of stale tobacco from the shifts before his.

In front of him, three tiered rows of consoles, an operator behind each one, heads bent under their lamps. The back wall holds a lit up display board as wide as a building front. Tonight, the board stays dark.

Petrov is 44. A lieutenant colonel and an engineer trained at the Kiev military aviation academy, he has worked on this satellite network since it began.

The watch is his, twelve hours straight. A lieutenant brings up a glass of tea and sets it on the console, to the right of the logbook.

Petrov opens the logbook to today's date and uncaps his pen. The war journal. Everything that happens on a watch gets written here, hour by hour.

High above the Earth, Soviet satellites watch American missile bases. Whatever they see arrives here, on this wall.

11 p.m. The tea goes cold. Below him, an operator spins a pencil between his fingers. Another coughs, steps out for a cigarette, comes back.

Petrov writes a line in the logbook. Nothing to report.

Twelve fourteen a.m. The alarm goes off. His hand drops the pen.

On the console, a red button starts pulsing. One word on it. LAUNCH.

Petrov looks up. The back wall repeats the word in capital letters, and a second line lights up beneath it. HIGH RELIABILITY.

A chair scrapes against the concrete. For 15 seconds, no one speaks.

The Boeing

The operator in the front row half rises, one hand on the back of his chair.

“Commander, is it a plane?”

Three weeks earlier, a Korean airliner had drifted over Sakhalin, a Soviet island facing Japan. Ground defense had taken it for an American spy plane and given the order to fire. A fighter shot it down in flight. 269 dead.

“The board doesn't light up for a plane anymore,” Petrov says. “Sit down.” The operator sits back down.

“We have to report it.”

“Not yet.”

In March, in front of the cameras, the American president had called the Soviet Union the evil empire. Since then, both sides have kept each other in their sights.

On the board, a second light comes on. Then a third. The top line changes. MISSILE ATTACK.

A fourth. A fifth. Under each light, the machine repeats its reliability rating.

Petrov picks up the phone. “Get me ground radar.”

Three Rings

Ground radar sits in another building, kilometers from here. Petrov counts three rings.

“What do you see?”

A silence. Voices in the background, the rustle of paper. “Nothing.”

“Five launches, on our end.”

“We have nothing.”

“I'll stay on the line.” “Understood.”

A radar looks up from the ground, and the Earth is round. As long as a missile is far off, it stays below the horizon.

Petrov wedges the receiver against his ear. Those men need a few more minutes, the time it takes a missile to climb above the curve of the Earth.

Moscow Is On Alert

The intercom crackles above the console. The transmission room, two corridors away, where messages leave the bunker for Moscow.

Petrov takes it with his free hand. “Commander. Moscow has the alert.”

“I didn't send anything.”

“It went up on its own. We're waiting on your assessment.”

His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. His right arm is shaking, he braces it against the armrest.

In Ukraine, in the Urals, in Siberia, missiles wait in their silos, warheads bolted on.

An intercontinental missile takes about 30 minutes to travel from an American base to Moscow. Five minutes have just gone by.

Petrov calls the general staff.

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Rome, March 28, 193. Late afternoon.

The imperial guard's camp closes off the northeast corner of the city.

A wall three men high, a walkway running along the top, square towers at the corners.

Behind it, several thousand soldiers. They are called the Praetorians.

They are the only men in Rome who carry weapons, and the emperor sleeps under their guard.

They killed him this morning.

The gates of the camp have stayed barred ever since.

Down below, in the dust, a 60-year-old man tips his head back to see the top of the wall. His hands cupped around his mouth.

“Fifteen thousand a man!”

The shout climbs the stone and fades.

Up top, a Praetorian steps onto the walkway, leans on his elbows, waits. Does not answer. Turns back toward the inside of the camp and calls the number down into the courtyard.

“Fifteen thousand!”

A voice comes back up from the courtyard, muffled by the thickness of the wall.

The Praetorian listens, then leans out over the drop.

“In here they're offering sixteen.”

“Seventeen thousand!”

He leaves, comes back, and another number drops from the top of the rampart.

What is being sold behind this wall is the Roman Empire.

The Man Below

The man pacing at the foot of the rampart is Marcus Didius Julianus. One of the richest men in Rome.

Consul 18 years ago, governor of four provinces, then of Africa.

Since then, nothing. No post, no assignment, ten years of opening his house to men who no longer want anything from him.

He pulls a fold of his toga back over his forearm. Twenty paces one way, twenty the other, head down.

At his back, the stone throws the day's heat back at him.

“Twenty thousand sesterces!”

The Praetorian heads back toward the courtyard. The wait stretches, and Julianus stops mid-stride.

Up top, six or seven of them are leaning out over the drop, watching him mark time in the dust.

When the head reappears between two battlements, no number comes back down.

Down below, Julianus cups his hands again.

“Who is the man bidding against me?”

The Praetorian takes his time.

“Flavius Sulpicianus. Prefect of the city.”

The prefect of the city keeps order in Rome and commands the city cohorts. The second highest office in the empire.

The emperor had sent him to the camp to calm things down. The gates locked behind him, and he has not come back out.

Since then he has been bidding from up on a platform, in the middle of the courtyard.

Julianus stops moving. His eyes travel up the wall, from the ground to the parapet, and the silence holds.

Then he shouts.

“That man married his daughter to the one you killed this morning!”

Nothing moves on the walkway.

“The day he is emperor, he will look for his son-in-law's murderers. And he will know where to find you.”

Up top, heads draw together. A discussion above him, and not one word of it comes down.

A ladder slides down the wall and bangs into the dust at his feet.

He climbs the rungs, toga askew, short of breath, and two pairs of arms catch him at the top and haul him over the parapet.

On the other side, the courtyard opens below. Thousands of faces turned up toward him.

Standing above them, he raises his hand and spreads his five fingers wide, so they can be counted from the back of the courtyard.

“Twenty-five thousand sesterces!”

Arms go up the whole length of the walkway, and the courtyard takes it up below.

“Long live the emperor!”

They walk him down between two rows of men. In the middle of the courtyard, a spear planted in the ground.

He walks past it without slowing.

On the end of the spear, the head of his predecessor.

The Spear in the Courtyard

That head belongs to Publius Helvius Pertinax. 66 years old, son of a man of no family, who climbed to the top of the Roman state over forty years in the army and the provinces.

Eighty-seven days of rule, and the ambition to put the empire back on its feet.

Under him, the pits where the previous reign had thrown its condemned men were opened again, and families finally carried their dead to a tomb.

Before the Senate, he swore that no senator would die while he reigned.

To his wife he refused the title of empress, to his son the title of heir.

From the Praetorians, he took away the right to plunder Rome.

A coin lifted off a stall, a door they went through without anyone opening it for them: for twelve years they had helped themselves without being asked to account for it.

Overnight, they had to pay for what they took.

At first light, two hundred of them climbed the palace stairs, swords in hand.

The doorkeepers let them in. The servants stepped aside in the hallways. Not one door was shut in their faces.

One man struck first, and the rest followed.

They came back down with the head, returned to the camp, and barred the gates behind them.

Pertinax's Dinner

Julianus reaches the palace late that night. In the hallway leading to the dining room, the body of Pertinax is still waiting.

He steps over it.

The lamps have been burning since morning and the oil smells burnt. On the table, the meal prepared for Pertinax at dawn.

Julianus settles in, pulls a lamp toward him, and looks at the dead man's dinner.

Lentils, cabbage, half a cold chicken.

The old man served his guests the cheapest food in Rome, and the great houses laughed about it behind his back.

Julianus laughs and orders the table cleared.

Servants go out into the streets. Merchants get up in the middle of the night, and every expensive thing in Rome makes its way to the palace.

A famous dancer arrives. The meal starts over, the dice come out, and the dice cups keep knocking on the wood for part of the night.

Toward the end, the palace steward leans in toward him.

“The Praetorians are asking when they will get their twenty-five thousand sesterces.”

Cup in hand, Julianus stands and walks the length of the table without answering.

The guests fall silent one after another, and soon nothing is left but the sound of the dice cups.

Twenty-five thousand sesterces, eight years of pay for every man in the camp, and there are several thousand of them.

No private fortune in Rome covers a sum like that. Not his either.

He stops behind the steward.

“At first light. You will take me to the treasury.”

Under the Palace

Day breaks over several thousand Praetorians massed in front of the palace.

The steward goes down first, a lamp in his hand. A hallway, a staircase, a door unlocked, and the air turns cold all at once.

A vaulted room where the light does not reach the corners. Along the walls, chests bound with iron, set on stone bases.

This is where the empire's money sleeps. What the provinces pay in, what pays the legions on the frontiers.

The lids come up, one after another.

They are empty.

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A history newsletter for people who forgot everything school taught them.

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66 Days

You have forgotten the year Rome fell.

But if I tell you that a man bought the Roman Empire at auction and lost it 66 days later, you will still remember it a year from now.

Your memory is not the problem. It is the way it was told to you.

The Same Trick

With art, the method came down to one line. Stop explaining. Tell the story.

A scene, a date, a man alone in a room.

The reader remembers without any effort, and walks away knowing things he did not know that morning.

History was waiting for the same treatment.

You were taught it in chapters and dates. It is made of scenes !

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Two years ago I started Cool Stories About Art, with one simple idea: learning art while having fun.

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