to pass the time.”
He laughs again at that, lifts his cup, but then, between one sip and the next, Remy’s attention wanders across the room, and he lands on something that startles him. He chokes on his coffee, color rushing into his cheeks.
“What is it?” she asks. “Are you well?”
Remy coughs, nearly dropping the cup as he gestures to the doorway, where a man has just walked in.
“Do you know him?” she asks, and Remy sputters, “Don’t you? That man there is Monsieur Voltaire.”
She shakes her head a little. The name means nothing.
Remy draws a parcel from his coat. A booklet, thin, with something printed on the cover. She frowns at the cursive title, has only managed half the letters when Remy flips the booklet open to show a wall of words, printed in elegant black ink. It has been too long since her father tried to teach her, and those were simple letters; loose, handwritten script.
Remy sees her studying the page. “Can you read it?”
“I know the letters,” she admits, “but I haven’t the learning to make much sense of them. And by the time I manage a line, I fear I’ve lost its meaning.”
Remy shakes his head. “It is a crime,” he says, “that women are not taught the same as men. Why, a world without reading, I cannot fathom it. A whole long life without poems, or plays, or philosophers. Shakespeare, Socrates, to say nothing of Descartes!”
“Is that all?” she teases.
“And Voltaire,” he goes on. “Of course, Voltaire. And essays, and novels.”
She does not know the word.
“A single long story,” he explains, “something of pure invention. Filled with romance, or comedy, or adventure.”
She thinks of the fairy tales her father told her, growing up, the stories Estele spun of old gods. But this novel that Remy speaks of sounds like it encompasses so much more. She runs her fingers over the page of the proffered booklet, but her attention is on Remy, and his, for the moment, is on Voltaire. “Are you going to introduce yourself?”
Remy’s gaze snaps back, horrified. “No, no, not tonight. It is better this way; think of the story.” He sits back in his seat, glowing with joy. “See? This is what I love about Paris.”
“You are not from here, then.”
“Is anyone?” He has come back to her now. “No, I’m from Rennes. A printer’s family. But I am the youngest son, and my father made the grave mistake of sending me away to school, and the more I read, the more I thought, and the more I thought, the more I knew I had to be in Paris.”
“Your family didn’t mind?”
“Of course they did. But I had to come. This is where the thinkers are. This is where the dreamers live. This is the heart of the world, and the head, and it is changing.” His eyes dance with light. “Life is so brief, and every night in Rennes I’d go to bed, and lie awake, and think, there is another day behind me, and who knows how few ahead.”
It is the same fear that forced her into the woods that night, the same need that drove her to her fate.
“So here I am,” he says brightly. “I would not be anywhere else. Isn’t it marvelous?”
Addie thinks of the stained glass and the locked doors, the gardens, and the gates around them.
“It can be,” she says.
“Ah, you think me an idealist.”
Addie lifts the coffee to her lips. “I think it comes more easily to men.”
“It does,” he admits, before nodding at her attire. “And yet,” he says with an impish grin, “you strike me as someone not easily restrained. Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.”
She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning.
To find a way, or make your own.
And she will smile, then, a ghost of the smile he has managed to win from her tonight.
He blushes. “I must be boring you.”
“Not at all,” she says. “Tell me, does it pay, to be a thinker?”
Laughter bubbles out of him. “No, not very well. But I am still my father’s son.” He holds out his hands, palms up, and she notices the echo of ink along the lines of his palms, staining the whorls of his fingers, the way charcoal used to stain her own. “It is good work,” he says.
But under his words, a softer sound, the rumble of his