Taking a deep breath, she went in. The shop was not large, but clean and well organized, its patrons browsing the bookshelves or paging through newspapers. One of the men, a baker’s apron tied over his long pants and clogs, was waving a pamphlet at a plain-clothed priest. From behind the counter, the man she took to be the bookseller joined in with a few choice words.
“Monsieur,” he said, “how can you argue for all men to be equal under the new constitution?”
The priest looked surprised. “Are not all men equal before God?”
“Aha!” said the bookseller, as if he’d caught his friend in a trap. “Tell me then, why is the Church itself so rich? Are they so much more equal?”
“Touché!” cried the baker. “Come, Father Aubain, you must admit there’s a hole in your argument.”
“Not so fast,” he warned. “Let me explain what the Church does with its money.”
“Explain the amount of land you own while you’re at it,” the bookseller said good-naturedly.
As Camille listened to them debate, a smile crept across her lips. At last she had found the right bookseller. The previous three had said no, but they’d clearly been out of step with the times. Here was the debate she’d been searching for. Here was the place where she might step in and make a difference.
She cleared her throat. “Monsieur?”
“Ah, mademoiselle!” He smoothed the front of his coat. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“Not today. Instead, I have something you might be looking for. A new pamphlet.”
Behind her, the conversation paused.
Camille held out a copy to the bookseller and was mortified to see that it had somehow become creased.
He barely glanced at it. “What is it called?”
“On the Education of Girls. By my father, Jean-Nicolas Durbonne.”
“Ah!” The bookseller’s attention sharpened. “What kind of education do you mean?”
“History, philosophy, Latin. Everything that boys—”
“Non!” He threw up his hands. “Won’t work.”
“Why not?” Camille said, flustered.
“If you’d said, ‘The Education of a Girl of the Streets’? People would buy that faster than you could tell them the title.”
“Scandalous!” scolded the priest.
“But it sells, Father. ‘The King’s Mistress’? They’d be shaking their purses upside down over the counter.” The bookseller warmed to his subject. “‘Murders in the rue Trianon’? They’d wait outside the shop before it opened, perspiring with anticipation! Accounts of the storming of the Bastille are still popular if they’re grisly enough. Blood filling the moat, innocent citizens tortured. A head cut off with a paring knife. That did happen, you know.” He leaned an elbow on the counter. “Got anything like that, mademoiselle?”
She had only Papa’s words and what he’d taught her. In their printing shop, he’d shown her how to pull the lever on the press, saying: With one stroke, ma petite, you can change the world. She’d insisted she was just a child and what could she do, being so small? Papa had given her a melancholy smile, as if thinking of something that had happened long ago, and replied: You will do what needs to be done.
What this bookseller wanted was not what Papa had had in mind.
“Shouldn’t people be inspired to do better?” Camille demanded. “To change the world?”
“Your pamphlet’s not going to do it,” laughed the baker.
“If you read it, you’d find it’s well argued. Convincing.”
The bookseller shrugged. “I read the first few lines. It won’t sell. It is not au courant. It is not now.”
Frustrated, Camille said, “But it’s about equality! You were just speaking of it.”
“Girls—women—will, I’m afraid to say, never become true citizens. Therefore, your pamphlet is not a part of the debate. How else can I say it? It’s irrelevant and dull!”
“Do we then not matter?” Her words came out choked, humiliating.
The bookseller must have seen the hurt in Camille’s face, for he added, a bit more kindly, “You’re welcome to leave a few of your pamphlets here, and I will try. Still, I cannot make people buy something they don’t wish to read.”
She laid the papers on the counter. In that ink was so much work and hope. With a curt nod to the men, she left the shop as quickly as she could, but not before she’d heard one of them laugh, “You can always use the pamphlets to light your candles, Lasalle!”
Around the corner, alone under the shade of an awning, traitorous tears pooled in her eyes. What was wrong with the pamphlets? What was wrong with her? Those long afternoons printing with Papa, she’d