Marianne – Student
“There’s a lot out here you won’t learn about in school.”
Marianne is in her final year at the Beaux-Arts. Her thesis piece was a live restaging of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with herself as Liberty and thirty classmates as the crowd. It got twelve out of twenty. She was carrying the flag from that performance through the Bastille Day crowds when the screaming started, and people did what the people in the painting do: they followed her. Now she charges in first, flag in one hand and her set square in the other, its edge filed down to a blade. Her professor would have hated the composition.
