The American Revolution was uniquely gifted in the number of its leaders who were not hideously deformed. The French Revolution less so. Marat's skin disease, compounded with his reluctance to change clothes. Mirabeau's portliness and (don't let his wikipedia portrait fool you) gargoyle-like features. Robespierre's skeletal creepiness. And then our friend Danton - immense, face ravaged by pox marks. When he was an infant, his mother couldn't nurse him, so they used a cow instead. A bull wandered by, somehow became incensed by the scene, and trampled him, splitting his lip. Nose broken six years later by another, presumably different, bull. Nonetheless, he was a spell-binding orator and one of the key figures in the French Revolution as long as he kept one step ahead of its logic, one of its greatest sacrifices when finally he could not.

Beethoven similarly suffered from small pox. Recent studies of a hair sample that had been preserved in a locket revealed that he had literally HUNDREDS of times more lead in his body than an average human, meaning that he was either that bad-ass and ate it like corn flakes or that it is in the forefront of Things That Killed/Encrazied Him.

The film I'm thinking of is the one where Depardieu played Danton - I haven't watched it since high school, when I checked it out of the library (a VHS tape, by jove!) after reading Buechner's play. I thought it pretty awesome at the time.

- Count Dolby von Luckner