distance between them. But he was tall enough to reach over it, and behind her was the high stone wall of Sainte-Chapelle.
Once more, Giselle glanced toward the girl in the hat standing behind him. It was too much to hope she might intervene. Wasn’t she but a girl, just as Giselle was? Giselle knew there was beauty in her smile, the cocoa-brown gloss of her hair, her flowers’ sweetness. But after that? She was only a poor girl trying to stay alive. If their places were reversed, she knew in her heart she would never do for a stranger what she was hoping the girl in the cartwheel hat would do for her.
“I’m naught but a flower seller, m’sieur.”
“Come, come!” he cajoled. “Are you certain?” And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he grasped her hand. In his palm, pressed hard against hers, was a louis d’or. She recognized its size, the shape it made against her flesh. A gold louis was more than she could earn in weeks. Enough to take her friends to a café in the Palais-Royal, where they’d dine like queens. It’d be late, the sky deepest midnight, but inside the candles would burn bright as stars. They’d order champagne and roasted chicken. There would be a rich sauce, slices of bread to mop it up. And after, stewed apples swimming in cream. She imagined what it’d be like to sit at a table with white linens and clean plates while someone waited on them, where they could laugh and talk and dream. For once, not to be striving to keep fear and hunger at arm’s length. For once, to belong.
That was what a gold louis was.
But she wouldn’t take it. She was afraid of what he wanted in return.
Tugging hard, she freed her hand and held the glinting coin out to him. Across her palm curved a red line where the louis had bitten into her flesh. “M’sieur, you’ve already paid for the flowers. This is too much.”
Frowning, he asked, “Too much for what?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, obstinate. What made him think he had any rights over her? “Take it, m’sieur.”
He came nearer, mouth twisted, face purpling. As he pushed against her tray, her last bouquet tumbled into the dirt. Gone. She didn’t dare pick it up. Instead, she took a step backward, then another. “Please!”
“You are a nothing,” he hissed. “You are a girl on the street, fresh one day and spoiled the next—how dare you? It’s not for the likes of you to tell me what is too much.” He spun, theatrically, to address the passersby. Sunlight danced on his silver-topped cane as he raised it high. “Is this what revolution has brought us? Flower sellers who think they’re the equals of men?”
From behind him, someone scoffed. Was it the girl in the hat?
Giselle took another step back, and found the church wall unyielding against her back. “I don’t think that!”
Though of course she did.
He must have seen the defiant spark in her eyes, because he thundered, “See what she has in her hand! She stole that gold louis out of my pocket!”
“That’s not true!” Giselle threw the coin at him as if it scorched. Surprised, he caught it. “Now leave me be! I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Can we let this impudence stand?” the man bellowed, and in the crowded street, several hatless men, their brick maker’s aprons red with clay, stopped to stare. “Shouldn’t she be punished?” the aristocrat asked as the crowd eddied around him.
No one asked a question of him. No one said: What is the truth?
She’d seen it before. People didn’t care to know who was right and who was wrong before they joined in. No matter what was happening on the street—a circus or a hanging—it was as exciting as the theater. Better, even, because you never knew how it would end.
Then someone screamed: “À la lanterne!” To the lamppost! String up the thief! A dozen voices took up the blood-chilling cry. Giselle shrank back, as if she could somehow disappear. Where to go? If she slipped through the church’s shadow, raced to the river and across the bridge, perhaps she could vanish in the tangle of crooked alleys and lanes she knew so well. But if by some miracle she escaped the mob, there was still the police. His word against hers. There was no question whom the court would believe.