as outsiders, disrespected and imprisoned and murdered. One didn’t forget such mistreatment; it was in the blood, as much as these mountains were, for these mountains, impassable in winter, had saved their lives.
When Marianne was eighteen, she went to the market to sell eggs and a shock wave went through her. It happened for no reason and every reason. She looked at the road she had never taken any farther than town. She thought of all the things she would never see or do. Marianne was still young but life already seemed ordinary. It was the time of year when the chirping cri-cri bugs called and Osiris blue butterflies flitted along the hedges. Instead of going home that day, Marianne walked in the other direction. She trekked on until she came to a small town she had never been to before. She went to have a coffee at a café, and since she had her egg money she ordered a small cake as well. It was the first time she had eaten a cake that she herself hadn’t baked. It was made with apricots and sweet cheese and it was delicious.
Marianne still thought she was going home and had simply taken a detour. She would be back to look for the cows in the gloaming dark, and close the goats into their pens, and check her father’s beehives to see if there were enough honeycombs to sell. But instead she lingered until the proprietor asked if she was waiting for someone. And then quite suddenly she realized that she was and that she wanted something larger than the world that she knew. When she asked if there was any work she was told there was an organization in Lyon that found work in Paris for farm girls such as herself.
Marianne caught a ride to Lyon and sat in an office filling out a questionnaire. She didn’t think she did a very good job; she didn’t have much to say about herself, after all. It was too late to return and collect the cows, and she assumed her father was furious as he stumbled through the dark. She slept on a cot in a shabby room of the office, where country girls like herself came to search for work. Soon enough Professor Lévi sent her a train ticket and a cash payment for the organization’s fee. Before she knew it there she was, in the professor’s house. She couldn’t tell which was the dream, her life before Paris or this other life, wherein she planted the garden and watered the rosebushes. She pretended everything that bloomed was hers, every rose and peony, flowers she wouldn’t have had time to bother with had she been on the farm, for her father expected everything they did to serve a purpose and a rose had no purpose other than its own beauty.
She appreciated her life with the Lévis, her lovely pressed uniforms, her new coat and boots, a bureau filled with undergarments and scarves the lady of the house had offered when she’d grown tired of them. A girl who had had only cows for company had come to reside in the most beautiful city in the world. She spent hours walking in the Jardin des Tuileries and along the boulevards with their heavenly shops, buying ice cream on summer evenings and eating all manner of cakes, all more delicious than any of the ones she had ever baked. Sometimes she forgot that the house where she worked was not her own. Nothing was, really, not the kitchen, or her clothes, or the boys she had come to care for, perhaps, in Victor’s case, too much. In the last year, when she’d realized he’d become a man, it was awkward to be with him, especially when she noticed the way he looked at her. Perhaps her thoughts of leaving began then.
Or perhaps it was on the day she heard the professor’s wife speaking about her. Madame had called Marianne la fille, the girl, as if she had no name, and all at once she realized that, indeed, she had nothing of her own. Hadn’t that been why she’d left her father’s farm in the first place? To find something that belonged to her and her alone? That hadn’t happened here, and what was worse, the city had gone dark, all of the initial light she had been so amazed by disappearing day by day.
The Lévis did not understand their slow disenfranchisement and the erosion