“Mademoiselle!” they begged. She kneeled beside them and emptied her purse into their hands. “Buy something for yourself first,” she told them. In a moment, they had vanished, as if they’d never been. As Camille stood, she heard the woman shouting out the poster’s words: Bread. Aristocrats. Death.
On the Quai des Morfondus, she passed a weary farmer in his wagon, heading home. Unlike last year, there was grain to be had this summer, but drought had dried up the rivers and there was no way to mill it into flour. In the countryside, hungry people were leaving their villages to search for food and work, and it made others suspicious.
All of Paris was a mass of kindling, piled perilously high.
It would only take a spark to leap into flame.
Having traversed the narrow island, she had come to the river Seine, flowing dark beneath her. Across the river lay the Right Bank, where she lived, and the infamous Place de Grève. It was in that great square, Papa had told her, that King Louis IX had burned twelve thousand copies of a religious book in an act of censorship and hate. Worse were the executions. Legend said the Place de Grève was haunted by those who’d been tortured there, their malevolent ghosts waiting to drown passersby in the river.
Despite the heat, Camille shivered.
Ahead of her lay the island’s tip and the ancient oak, its limbs spreading wide. It was only August, but the dry heat had tinged its leaves with bronze. Under its shady canopy, people stood talking with their neighbors.
But the flower seller was nowhere to be seen.
Camille could only wait a few minutes. As she rested the tray against the old oak, she remembered the pamphlets tucked under her arm. Across the top of them was sedately written: On the Education of Girls by Jean-Nicolas Durbonne. The sight of those words made her want to scream. If only she could toss them into one of the bonfires that burned at night on the Seine and incinerate them into ash.
Her visit to the bookshop of one Henri Lasalle had not gone well.
She’d passed the store several times, working up the courage to enter. In its window hung posters announcing the latest actions of the General Assembly, which was meeting in Versailles to create a constitution and rights for the citizens of France. Through the bookstore’s open door came the buzz of enthusiastic arguments. Promising, but also intimidating. Standing on the threshold, she suddenly longed for Lazare—his hand at her elbow and encouragement in his deep brown eyes.
But Lazare was elsewhere.
Taking a deep breath, she went in. The shop was not large, but clean and well organized, its patrons browsing the bookshelves or paging through newspapers. One of the men, a baker’s apron tied over his long pants and clogs, was waving a pamphlet at a plain-clothed priest. From behind the counter, the man she took to be the bookseller joined in with a few choice words.
“Monsieur,” he said, “how can you argue for all men to be equal under the new constitution?”
The priest looked surprised. “Are not all men equal before God?”
“Aha!” said the bookseller, as if he’d caught his friend in a trap. “Tell me then, why is the Church itself so rich? Are they so much more equal?”
“Touché!” cried the baker. “Come, Father Aubain, you must admit there’s a hole in your argument.”
“Not so fast,” he warned. “Let me explain what the Church does with its money.”
“Explain the amount of land you own while you’re at it,” the bookseller said good-naturedly.
As Camille listened to them debate, a smile crept across her lips. At last she had found the right bookseller. The previous three had said no, but they’d clearly been out of step with the times. Here was the debate she’d been searching for. Here was the place where she might step in and make a difference.
She cleared her throat. “Monsieur?”
“Ah, mademoiselle!” He smoothed the front of his coat. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“Not today. Instead, I have something you might be looking for. A new pamphlet.”
Behind her, the conversation paused.
Camille held out a copy to the bookseller and was mortified to see that it had somehow become creased.
He barely glanced at it. “What is it called?”
“On the Education of Girls. By my father, Jean-Nicolas Durbonne.”
“Ah!” The bookseller’s attention sharpened. “What kind of education do you mean?”
“History, philosophy, Latin. Everything that boys—”
“Non!” He threw up his hands. “Won’t work.”
“Why not?” Camille said, flustered.
“If you’d said, ‘The Education of a Girl of the Streets’? People would buy that faster than you could tell them the title.”
“Scandalous!” scolded the priest.
“But it sells, Father. ‘The King’s Mistress’? They’d be shaking their purses upside down over the counter.” The bookseller warmed to his subject. “‘Murders in the rue Trianon’? They’d wait outside the shop before it opened, perspiring with anticipation! Accounts of the storming of the Bastille are still popular if they’re grisly enough. Blood filling the moat, innocent citizens tortured. A head cut off with a paring knife. That did happen, you know.” He leaned an elbow on the counter. “Got anything like that, mademoiselle?”
She had only Papa’s words and what he’d taught her. In their printing shop, he’d shown her how to pull the lever on the press, saying: With one stroke, ma petite, you can change the world. She’d insisted she was just a child and what could she do, being so small? Papa had given her a melancholy smile, as if thinking of something that had happened long ago, and replied: You will do what needs to be done.
What this bookseller wanted was not what Papa had had in mind.
“Shouldn’t people be inspired to do better?” Camille demanded. “To change the world?”
“Your pamphlet’s not going to do it,” laughed the baker.
“If you read it, you’d find it’s well argued. Convincing.”
The bookseller shrugged. “I read the first few lines. It won’t sell. It is not au courant. It is not now.”
Frustrated, Camille said, “But it’s about equality! You were just speaking of it.”
“Girls—women—will, I’m afraid to say, never become true citizens. Therefore, your pamphlet is not a part of the debate. How else can I say it? It’s irrelevant and dull!”
“Do we then not matter?” Her words came out choked, humiliating.
The bookseller must have seen the hurt in Camille’s face, for he added, a bit more kindly, “You’re welcome to leave a few of your pamphlets here, and I will try. Still, I cannot make people buy something they don’t wish to read.”
She laid the papers on the counter. In that ink was so much work and hope. With a curt nod to the men, she left the shop as quickly as she could, but not before she’d heard one of them laugh, “You can always use the pamphlets to light your candles, Lasalle!”
Around the corner, alone under the shade of an awning, traitorous tears pooled in her eyes. What was wrong with the pamphlets? What was wrong with her? Those long afternoons printing with Papa, she’d believed those black letters could launch ideas into the world and change things for the better. A good kind of magic.