The flower seller and the starving children of Paris needed a better life now.
She carried the pamphlets—including the hateful one she’d found stuck to the gate—to the back of the room and dropped them into the fire. Instantly long tongues of flame leaped up to devour the pages. Soon they would be coal black, their edges gone to ashy lace, drifting up into the chimney’s blackened mouth. She’d thought printing would be her future. She’d vowed it to herself at the tennis court in Versailles, when she committed to doing what Papa hadn’t been able to.
She had tried, but it hadn’t been good enough. Not even close. She needed to do more.
But what?
The breeze slithered through the room, whispering, but it said nothing she could understand. She was about to blow out the candles when she remembered the invitation.
It lay on the table, folded into the shape of a star. Sophie’s and her names were spelled out in extravagant purple ink and sky-high capital letters. In her hand, it felt like hope, the perfect antidote to her failed pamphlets, violence in the streets, and troubled magic.
Camille unfolded it and pressed it flat. Inside was written:
Mes Amis!
Please join me for the launch of a marvelous adventure!
Wednesday, 2 o’clock sharp-ish
At the workshop
Just below, scrawled so boldly that the final “r” ran right off the page:
Charles Rosier
And at the bottom, a final note:
P.S. Lazare has promised to attend!
Camille laughed out loud. Of course she would go.
Knowing Lazare had returned to Paris, she could never stay away.
5
From her dressing room Camille heard Sophie’s light step in the hall. “You’re home already? Come quickly—we’re to meet Lazare and Rosier in an hour and I need help!”
“I closed the shop early.” Sophie was smartly dressed in a gray-and-blue flowered cotton dress and a straw hat festooned with silk periwinkles. In one arm, she was carrying her black cat, Fantôme, who was purring loudly.
Camille lifted the lids of several enormous hat boxes. “Tired from your adventures with d’Auvernay?”
“Cake and boys are never tiring. It’s my customers’ choices that are exhausting,” she said, giving Fantôme a kiss. “Why does no one want a hat trimmed in sky blue? Or a rich green, like you’re wearing?” She sighed. “Revolutionary ribbons are not why I opened Le Sucre.”
At least, Camille thought with a twinge of envy, Sophie made hats and ornaments people wanted. But the sad set of her shoulders made Camille instantly regret it. “I wish you could sell only your fantastical hats, ma chèrie. I hate that your original ideas are going to waste.”
Mollified somewhat, she asked, “What hat will you wear?”
Camille looked despairingly around her chaotic dressing room. “I don’t know!”
“I do believe you’re nervous,” Sophie observed.
“I’m not!”
Her gaze went to the tiny balloon-shaped music box Lazare had given her. It was a souvenir of the two times she’d gone up with him in the balloon—and that gossamer night he’d taken her in his arms at the top of Notre-Dame, the city’s rooftops far below.
But last week he’d left Paris abruptly to visit his parents at their estate of Sablebois. And though he’d been away only a handful of days, his sudden absence had left her feeling unmoored. Unsure. For so long she had tried to hold on to the things she loved only to have them slip like water through her fingers. What was to say it could not happen again?
Lazare was true, she knew. He did not willingly keep secrets. Still, it rubbed at her, like a seam sewn wrong.
“Ne t’inquiète pas! I’ll find the perfect hat,” Sophie said, setting the cat on the floor. He disappeared immediately under the bed. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”
Casting a critical eye at the mirror, Camille examined her emerald-green dress, embroidered with ribbon roses in various shades of pink. Over it she would wear a pistachio cloak with a wide ruffle and shoes that matched. As she smoothed her skirts flat, she thought for a moment of the other dress, the enchanted one that always made her look beautiful and compelling, hanging quiet and alone in a wardrobe in the attic—
“You should wear this.” Sophie handed her a hat she’d unearthed from a pile of Kashmiri shawls. “The dotted ribbon will go nicely with your cloak.”
Just as Camille was settling it over her hair, Adèle appeared in the hall, her cheeks very pink. “Monsieur Mellais has arrived in his carriage! He wishes to offer you a ride to the workshop.”