they have come to create Trouble in Paris. Camped in Alleyways, Cemeteries, and under our Bridges, these Vagrants seek to Destroy the Rights of Parisians.
“Vagrants?” fumed Odette. “Are we not all Parisians here?”
Therefore, under this Most Recent Decree, the dwellings of such Vagrants will be Removed, beginning with those under the Bridges, but especially those Defiling the Pont Neuf.
Stunned, Camille said, “They’re going to take your house away? But why?”
Odette’s eyes blazed. “They think we’re no better than rats! Les misérables, outcast and reviled. They’d like it better if we Lost Girls didn’t exist. They’d rather have a fake city where everything is shiny and grand, rather than a real city with real people in it living their lives. They have got the idea of revolution all wrong,” she added bitterly.
Margot nodded. “Yesterday a policeman hammered a notice to the house saying we’re to be evicted in ten days’ time.”
So soon? “They cannot do this—”
“Ah, but they will,” Odette said. “They have the power, and those with power do as they like. They bend everything to their desire.”
“I won’t be bent by them,” said the pickpocket, Héloïse, as she drew her shawl close around her daringly cut dress. “We must find a way, if only for Céline.”
“Our littlest,” explained Giselle with a fond smile. “She’s playing outside.”
Eagerly the girls told her how they’d found Céline when she was tiny, climbing a pile of rubbish. And how, when she saw Héloïse in her fancy dress, she held out her arms and cried, “La Belle! Pick me up, Beauty!” They hadn’t been able to resist her and had taken her home with them.
“She reads better than most girls of six,” Henriette said proudly. “And she’s been safe with us, until now.”
“She’s our heart and our hope.” Anxiously, Giselle said, “But without a place to live…”
Anger flared through Camille. The newspapers were full of articles about changes that were coming, all the problems that the National Assembly would address. Thousands upon thousands of words, but not a single one about these girls. But surely anyone who might read about their lives—for Camille was certain that every girl there had a story to tell that would harrow readers’ bones and wring their hearts—would be able to see that something must be done to save their house?
As she thought of their stories, she felt a sudden flicker of hope. “I know of something that might help—”
“Tell us, because if we have to live in the streets,” Giselle said, “it will be terrible. People in Paris are hanging tinkers, beating up vagrants. Why, they would have killed me for refusing to sell my body to that nobleman if I hadn’t escaped! And then there are magicians setting traps for children—”
Even these girls believed that?
“Those magicians are naught but rumor,” Margot said airily. “I know what a sorcerer looks like, and I haven’t seen one in Paris yet.”
Camille exhaled. “But if you told your stories in a newspaper, people would see that you aren’t vagrants and that you should stay in the home you’ve made.” Wasn’t that what she’d wanted herself, when her brother had taken everything and their landlady had threatened them with eviction? A place of safety that was her own.
Claudine crossed her arms. “How?”
“You’d tell your stories, people would read them—”
“Who’d we tell our stories to?” Héloïse asked. “Who’s going to listen to us?”
“A newspaperman—”
Adamant, Giselle shook her head. “I’ve had enough of men to last me quite a while.”
“Just listen,” she pleaded. “There are newspapers that print three thousand copies—Le Père Duchesne prints eighty thousand. Imagine if fifty thousand people could read what was happening to you—”
Giselle’s face pinched with doubt. “What if those fifty thousand decided we don’t deserve anything? We aren’t saints. Then we’d be worse off than before.”
Perhaps. It would depend on how the stories were told. But she didn’t have time to say that before Odette spoke up. “I know how these people are. It’s too dangerous to reveal ourselves like that. They might arrest us all. And that would be worse by far than losing the house.”
Camille’s heart constricted. How would she convince them now? Odette had given voice to their fears, and murmurs of assent filled the room.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Giselle said. “It was nice of you to try to help.”
She understood their fear that whatever they had was better than what was coming, because in their lives things never got better, only worse. Why ever would they trust her, a stranger? As she knew