Enchantée(41)

“Everything here was intended to make the balloon better, somehow?” she asked, hoping to turn the conversation.

Lazare nodded at the pile of balloon parts. “Sometimes it seems rather hopeless.”

It was a familiar thought. The constant effort, and then, when it was finished, the realization that she was no further along than she’d been before. “Why, then? I understand why you need to add a release valve and learn how to steer the balloon. But after that—what will you do with a better balloon?”

“People asked the American, Benjamin Franklin, the same question,” he said, thoughtfully.

Papa had told her about America’s former ambassador to France, who’d been a printer like they were. “And Monsieur Franklin said?”

“It doesn’t matter what it’s used for. It can just exist. I like that, don’t you? Not having to be something?” A dreamy smile tugged at his lips. “I’d fly away, of course.”

It was as though a hand squeezed her heart. “Where would you go?”

“Over the Alps,” Lazare said, watching her expression. “Can you imagine? To fly above Mont Blanc? To be so high?”

Camille thought of the view of Paris from the much lower roof of 11 rue Charlot, laid out below her like a map, like something that might finally be known. “How much you would see! Or perhaps,” she teased, “it would be only snow and ice.”

“It wouldn’t matter. For me, at least, it’s about the flying.” He nodded at the pigeons roosting in the rafters. “As it is for my friends up there, who are born knowing what I’m desperate to learn.”

“They can fly,” Camille said, “and yet—”

Rosier cleared his throat. “They just sit here cooing and crapping.”

“But they could fly away, if they wished,” Camille said.

“Perhaps.” Lazare fiddled with a loose button on his coat.

“There’s one thing you’ve missed,” Rosier said, as the birds murmured above. “Pigeons don’t need money to fly. Aeronauts do.”

“But you have the balloon already,” Camille said. “What else do you need?”

“I’ll tell you.” From his pocket, Rosier produced a notebook and flipped through it until he found the page he wanted. “Et voilà! A new balloon means—everything new. A bigger balloon, sewn by the ladies. Bigger basket. Maybe even a new kind of air, Armand tells me, such as hydrogen? Who knows what it will take to Ascend the Immeasurable?” He snapped the notebook closed. “The point is, it is going to take a lot of louis and livres that we do not have.”

A familiar problem. “And how will you get them?”

Lazare looked sternly at Rosier.

“Sell tickets! Let the public watch!” Rosier jabbed the bowl of his pipe at Lazare, then waved it angrily in the direction of the table where Armand sat. “But no one listens.”

“Ah, poor Rosier,” Lazare said, gently. To Camille he said, “We can’t seem to agree on this—yet. But we’re not a circus, are we? Astley’s Marvelous Aeronauts? We’re natural philosophers. Explorers.”

Papa had believed in a kind of honor in only printing what he liked. “My papa was the same way.”

He would have loved to see the aeronauts’ workshop, she knew. The gleaming measuring instruments in their cases, the scribbled papers and plans, the failed experiments on their way to becoming successes, the oddities, the seamstresses’ hands like determined birds swooping over the silk.

With a sudden pang, she realized: she missed all this. Time working together in the print shop with her father. And at home: her father sitting by the fire in winter or by the open window in summer, after supper, folding the paper bagatelles. I am testing a thought, he’d say and invite her to come and watch, or to help him crease a fold with her little fingers. It was a kind of companionable work that was nothing like working la magie.

Camille saw from their somber faces they’d figured out that Papa was dead. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Not to worry, mademoiselle; fathers are always problematic. Lazare here, for example, wishes his father—”

“Enough, Rosier, or I’ll ban you from the premises.” Lazare gave Rosier’s shoulder a shove. “Come, I’ll show you what Armand’s doing.”

“Wait, I also have something I’d like Mademoiselle’s ideas on,” Rosier said, but he stayed where he was. Apparently his feud with Armand continued.

On the other side of the workshop, Armand sat at a long table. He half-lay across it as he scribbled rows of numbers next to a complicated diagram.

“What are you calculating?” Camille asked.

Armand didn’t look up, just crooked his shoulder so it hid the drawing from her. “A better balloon.”

“The Next Best Thing,” Rosier called from the other side of the room.

“I won’t steal your idea, you know.” Camille desperately wanted to see the drawing but there was no way she was going to give know-it-all Armand the satisfaction of asking.

“Show her,” Lazare said, tugging at the sheet of paper. Armand kept his elbow planted on it but let Camille see.

The paper was covered with numbers written so rapidly the ink had blurred as he had calculated the figures, changed a variable, and then recalculated, over and over again. Arrows pointed from the clusters of figures across the page to drawings of two balloons: one that, with its stripes, resembled the balloon Camille had seen; the other one was slightly smaller, with a more rounded top.