whispered, from when they sacked Paris. She remembered her awe, tinged by the fear that it might roar to life. How the air itself seemed to change, as if the boat had brought with it a breath from a thousand years ago.
Sometimes, under the surface, there was treasure.
She could not turn away from it now.
“On that note,” Chandon said as he uncorked a bottle of ancient, amber-colored wine and filled five glasses. He raised his goblet high, a determined smile on his face. “To the tears of magicians—may we find a way to survive this coming world.”
THE LOST GIRLS SPEAK
THE FRUIT SELLER
I CAME WITH MY MOTHER AND MY BROTHER TO PARIS ON A BARGE
Before that, it was a clipper across the gray A T L A N T I C. We left our island of Saint-Domingue, where the sun danced on the waves and touched my skin like a kiss, to come here, all three of us. A better education for my brother was the reason. But Jean-Pierre wished to start a revolution in Saint-Domingue, not go to school in Paris. And when we arrived here, there was already one underway.
A revolution, but not for us.
People who see me—brown skinned, curly haired—assume I am a slave.
But I have always been free, in body and heart. People do not understand that there is no freedom they can give me through the laws they plan to make. It already belongs to me.
By saying they can give it, as if it belongs to them, they try to take it away.
Why then, you ask, do I sell oranges and strawberries on the streets?
When we came to France, I believed I would, like my brother, have something more. I believed my mother would let me step into this new way of life easily. New ideas, new hopes. But she only saw fears and danger in this cold foreign place. And when I came home with a new friend, he was nothing but a threat.
I WAS GIVEN A CHOICE:
HER AND THE OLD WAYS & COMFORTS
OR
HIM AND THE NEW
I chose
FREEDOM
BUT
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE
IT
HAS
A
COST
20
In a precise line on a grassy field, five tethered balloons trembled in the wind.
For the last few days, while Camille had been printing Margot’s story and trying not to hope for too much from the magicians’ visit to the Hôtel Séguin—for wasn’t it possible Blaise might find what she’d searched for in vain in the library?—Lazare had been busy with preparations for the launch.
Though they’d made plans to see the first public performance of Les Merveilleux at the Palais-Royal, Camille hadn’t seen Lazare except for one late dinner at a restaurant on the fashionable Left Bank. In the room, candles had glowed among pools of dark. Lazare had proposed champagne—we must celebrate being together, when the world conspires to keep us apart—and between courses they held hands across the tablecloth, her small pale one clasped in his long-fingered brown one as they dreamed about what they might do, together. After his work with the balloon corps was finished, after she’d made sure the girls were free to stay in their home. They might take a balloon voyage over the Alps, combining pleasure with cloud studies. Talking and laughing late into the night, they had a thousand ideas, each one more entrancing than the next. As their faces flushed with the restaurant’s warmth and their own excitement, the possibilities seemed endless.
Over dessert, surrounded by the wealthy of Paris in their costly silks, both of them had wondered how the diners could live as if nothing had changed. They wore fur stoles and ate the choicest meat, their wineglasses never empty, gossiping about parties and card games and masquerades—in sharp contrast, Camille said, to the girls’ plight. For while Lasalle was selling subscriptions, and the people of Paris were voicing their support, the mayor’s office had not yet revoked the eviction. Yesterday Camille had gone back to Flotsam House to show the girls the latest pamphlets.
As she’d written and printed them, she’d had the blur’s dangerous magic at the back of her mind and she had wondered: What would happen if, instead of holding back, she let the magic race through her? An experiment, she’d told herself. Giving in had felt dangerously good, though, the fever running hot and wild along her skin.
But here on the Champ de Mars, the early morning wind was cool on her cheeks.
Each balloon was tied to the ground with stakes, ropes radiating star-like from them. Inside the wicker gondolas, fires