The Devil's Laughter — Frank Yerby

Down the street came a parade of children; they were beating a small keg for a drum and playing homemade flutes. And on the ends of improvised pikes, they bore the heads of three cats, still dripping blood. After witnessing the continuing spectacle of human heads being daily paraded through Parisian streets, the French children had become little monsters. Paris was so filled with hatred for everyone and everything that reason, itself, stood decapitated. So during the French Revolution, Parisians and their society sank into abject depravity.

This was the society that Jean Paul Marin, who at the age of twenty, was beaten and imprisoned by the noble class and by the age of twenty five helped create the inhumane society required for the great bloodletting of the Napoleonic wars. The four years in the Comte de Gravereau's private prison have left a scar on his forehead and a deeper invisible one in his heart. Indeed the Comte is to be the baleful genius of Jean Paul's life.

Three women, so utterly different, are caught up in Jean Paul's passionate career- glamorous, tawny-haired, treacherous Lucienne; Nicole, the Comte's sister, delicate and blonde, whom Jean loves as much as he hates her brother, and Fleurette. more beautiful than either - beautiful with great calm and sweetness, but blind. Jean Paul, the public figure who rode high on the tide of a revolution is as turbulent and unpredictable, as strange a mixture of idealism and hatred, as the French Revolution itself, in the thick of which he lives and loves and pursues his feuds.