Enchantée(78)

Slowly, Camille raised her arm.

One of the representatives on the floor saw her and pointed, and those around him applauded. Lazare nodded at Camille, and his hand went up, then Foudriard joined them. And then, a bit shamefacedly, Aurélie and Chandon raised theirs, too.

Lazare hadn’t sided with the aristocrats at all. He was with her, with the people.

“Et tu, Brute?” Chandon frowned at Foudriard. “Supporting the rebellion only means a mob will come, divide my father’s estate—which will be mine someday—into tiny pieces, and give it away to the farmers. I will inherit nothing, we will be ruined.”

Foudriard clapped a hand on Chandon’s shoulder. “You and your father treat your farmers so well they’d have nothing to gain by it. But for the others? The ones who demand so many taxes—the cens, the champart, the banalités—even in years of drought and killing frosts?” Foudriard’s voice was raw, angry. “The people who speculate in grain and hoard it? They deserve what they get.”

“That’s what I tell my father—treat everyone well and you won’t have any problems.” Lazare shook his head. “Not that he listens to me.”

She didn’t wonder at that. It had been Lazare’s father who’d docked his tutor’s pay for daring to think differently. The father who thought money could control everything. The father Lazare was always trying to please, who wanted him to be more French, whatever that was.

Camille said to Foudriard, “But you’re in the king’s cavalry. Don’t you support the monarch?”

“Bien s?r, if he serves the people. If he’s only out for himself? Never.”

Next to her, Lazare leaned over the balcony. “See, Baroness, the people getting what they want? It’s possible all of us will be thrown from our gilded perches.”

Thunder rolled outside; the long curtains in the windows billowed. A cool wind swept into the room, catching at the lace on her dress, lifting a few strands of Lazare’s glossy dark hair. When he turned to her there was a question in his eyes. “Will it be a struggle, do you think?”

“I wouldn’t mind if it were,” she said.

His eyes gleamed. “To tell the truth, neither would I.”

In that moment, everything seemed possible.

Down on the floor below, the representatives lined up to put their names to the document. There were nearly six hundred of them; it would take time. Outside, the crowd cheered as the rain poured down. As she filed out with her friends and the boisterous crowd of onlookers, Camille felt something had changed. Shifted. Without bloodshed, the people had spoken back to their king, a king so worried about losing his absolute power he’d filled the streets of Paris with foreign mercenaries. If the National Assembly could make sure the people’s demands were met, so much would be possible.

If things in France were going to change, it would happen like this. People talking to one another. People arguing with one another, convincing one another. Camille had seen it at the Palais-Royal, men and women, up on tables, giving the royals hell. And if the press were free?

Paris would need all the printers it could get. Printers who would tell the truth, reveal the injustices, so the king and the nobles and all those in power could no longer ignore it. Printers who could change France for the good.

Camille planned to be one of them.





39


The warm air in the small rose-and-cream-striped shop tasted like sweets.

It had previously been a confectioner’s shop, and as Camille and Sophie walked through the echoing, empty space, assessing its possibilities, their shoes kicked up a fine layer of powdered sugar, which drifted in the air like sparkling dust. While Sophie peered into storerooms and display cases, asking the landlord if they could be refashioned to show off a line of staggeringly beautiful hats, Camille watched with quiet pleasure at Sophie taking charge. Camille stayed silent and only offered her opinion when it was asked for.

Standing at the sugar-coated windows, she absently traced a spade, then a diamond, in one of the windowpanes. Rent for this shop was fifteen louis a month, and they almost had that to spare.

Camille exhaled. It felt as if she were shaking off a shadow that had followed her too long.

Alain was wherever he was, and to Camille it didn’t really matter where he was, so long as he was not here. Paris was endless crooked streets, mansions and cramped attic spaces—and more than six hundred thousand people. Alain might well try, but he would never find them.

Where that shadow had once been, there was now a tiny spot of light. She might dream again. Not the dreams that had fueled her for so long, the desperate need for a full belly and shoes without holes and safety, but dreams of things that might be. After the meeting of the National Assembly at the tennis court, she saw how she might have a role to play in the changes that were coming. She dreamed of a printing press with which she could publish people’s thoughts, tell the truth of what was happening.

And she dreamed of the balloon. She could write about their preparations, their hopes and their disappointments, their final triumph when they sailed over the Alps as no one had ever done. In secret, she let herself imagine such a life: each day something new, another adventure, she and Lazare together.

In the dream, the secrets they were keeping from each other did not exist.

In her waking life, she couldn’t reconcile them. But perhaps it was possible. A balloon might be big enough to carry all their hopes.