Enchantée(87)

Her thoughts ran on, shaky and unstoppable. If he suspected, what exactly did he suspect—that she was in disguise? For that might be explained, though it wouldn’t be exactly comfortable. Still, it would only be as bad as what Lazare himself was doing by not telling her he was an aristocrat.

But if he suspected she was working magic? She thought again of Sophie’s horrified face when Camille had first worked the glamoire. She’d looked at Camille as if she were a monster.

If Lazare knew what she was doing, would he feel the same?

She wanted more than anything to push her way out of the box and disappear.

At that moment, he shifted in his seat and the side of his hand touched hers. He did not move it closer nor move it away. Their two hands, each one on its own armrest: one white, one brown. Camille tried to breathe as if everything were ordinary. But it wasn’t. It was as though the infinitesimally small place where their bodies touched was the only thing that existed, as if all the candles in the opera house had been blown out except one that flickered between them.

“The countess is desperate and angry,” Lazare said quietly. “She’s wondering what happened to the count’s love.”

Camille pressed on, reckless, as if she felt nothing. “Oh? What is she saying?”

Lazare’s breath was electric in her ear. “She says, ‘What happened to the promises that came from those lying lips?’”

Did he mean she was lying? Or that he was? But all she managed to stammer was, “Lips?”

Instead of replying, he leaned in and kissed her.

His mouth was soft against hers, honey sweet, searching. Before she understood what was happening, she was kissing him back, her neck curving to bring him closer.

Lazare inhaled—then pulled abruptly away, as if he could not believe what he had done. “Pardon, Baroness! It must have been the music—I don’t know what came over me—I would never—”

Stunned, Camille pulled her hand from his. What a fool she was to have kissed him back!

He knew. He must. Or worse, he didn’t know. Utterly bewildered, she said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Lazare’s voice shook. “I’m terribly sorry. I—I don’t know what happened—How—”

From the stage, the singer’s voice soared to an aching crescendo, but all Camille could think of was Lazare. Being with him was like standing in the Hall of Mirrors—between the two of them there were so many selves that she didn’t know which one was real, and which one a reflection. At the end of the aria, everyone in their box stood, clapping, except Chandon. He was coughing and shaking. Before she could say or do anything, Lazare squeezed past Camille, put his arm around Chandon’s shoulders, and led him out of the box.

When Camille had finally elbowed her way into the crowded lobby, Lazare and Chandon were nowhere to be seen.





44


Late June grew hot, the river stank. The city held its breath.

A restless week had passed since the opera. Camille had tried to occupy herself with reading, or shopping, but those pleasures felt hollow. Following Sophie’s lead, she considered buildings where she might set up a printing shop, but her heart was not in it. The king had not granted true freedom of the press. And she was tired of striving.

Wandering the streets, she hoped to see Lazare.

She’d even walked past the workshop, but its high windows were dark. Disappointing. Of course, she’d seen him at the opera. And before that, playing paille maille. She’d stood with him and cheered as the members of the National Assembly took their oaths. But she hadn’t really seen him, had she? Since that time when Rosier had sketched her and Lazare at the workshop, she’d only been with him as Cécile.

And the more she saw him as Cécile, the more desperately she longed to see him as Camille. To talk with him about ideas, to share her concerns about buying a press, to look into his eyes and see reflected there only herself. She was so tired of her own questions, of not knowing, of being double.

When she returned to the H?tel Théron, she played the music box balloon he’d given her and watched the balloon spin. She waited until it wound down, then put it away. Its tune was too mournful.

Perhaps the kiss at the opera house was nothing, she told herself. But it could not be nothing. Either he had kissed her as the baroness, in which case he did not love her, that is, Camille—or he had kissed her as Camille, which meant he had seen through her glamoire and she was found out. Trying to work it through made her grind her teeth.

Except for the kiss itself, there was nothing good about it.

Perhaps he was not in Paris at all, but at Versailles. Expecting to see her—or not. She’d stayed away, apprehensive of Séguin.

Since witnessing the oath in the tennis court, she waited eagerly for the news that France was changing. The king had agreed to some of the National Assembly’s requests, but his concessions were so full of exceptions they meant nothing. That wave she’d imagined at the tennis court, the one that would sweep away all injustices? The one she’d pledged to support, that would vindicate Papa and give purpose to her own life? It now felt like one of her false coins, dissolving back to scraps.

But the people of France did not give in. In the newspaper she read of angry demonstrators by the Tuileries palace who’d thrown garden chairs at a troop of foreign soldiers. Two companies of soldiers who’d pledged to protect the people had been imprisoned, only to be released by a Parisian mob. Unrest in the countryside grew worse as the price of bread doubled; any landowner suspected of hoarding grain might find his house on fire or his family dead.