The Paris Express

4. 1004 a.m. Depart Vire

10:04 a.m. DEPART VIRE

The arteries of iron

run through and renew

every part of the body

of this land, bearing life.

PIERRE LACHAMBEAUDIE,

“STEAM” (1846)

Blonska’s knitting a sock, turning the toes as sharply as a driver steers a coach. She should finish this one before Flers and its mate by Surdon.

Her Third-Class carriage is crammed now; a North African with the most bizarre tank on his back, a soldier, a woman with the look of a domestic, a short-haired girl with a lunch bucket, and the moustachioed guard have all pressed in.

“ Quhwah , ten centimes, only ten centimes.”

“Not coffee?” the young woman asks the tank man, frowning.

“What we call it, yes, quhwah . Much stronger than your French coffee,” he says with mild scorn. “ Quhwah keeps awake; fixes bad stomach, headache, slow brain—”

“All right, all right,” she says, “I’ll take a cup.”

“I’ve seen your discount pass before, Hakim,” the guard remarks benignly, “no need to show me today.”

Blonska doesn’t see the need for him to expose the coffee man’s poverty either.

Unable to bow due to his apparatus, Hakim dips his head and hastens to fill a cup for the guard; he gulps it and smacks his lips.

“I already ordered.” The young woman sets her lunch bucket down between her feet with a tiny clang and puts out her hand.

“With milk? You want milk?”

“Only if it’s still hot. Don’t say it’s hot if it’s only lukewarm,” she warns the coffee seller.

Hakim hesitates. “Milk is warm but maybe a little sour now?”

She curls her lip. “The coffee’s still hot, though?”

“Yes, yes.” He gives one of his chained cups a wipe with his sleeve and fills it for her. “Sugar, dates?”

The young woman shakes her head.

The smell is so rich and flavourful, it’s making Blonska a little dizzy. But she hates to spend ten centimes for no good reason.

The guard wipes his moustache and asks for the short-haired girl’s ticket. It seems the cardboard’s not nipped as it should be.

“That’s not my fault! They didn’t touch it at Granville.”

“True, their inspector’s very slack. I saw you leg it in here at Vire,” he teases. “What was wrong with Rear Third—someone let one rip and stank up the place?”

A couple of passengers grunt at his coarse humour. But Blonska’s never minded frankness about bodily matters; the delicate proprieties of her patrons in Paris only amuse her.

“Too many priests in Rear Third,” the young woman mutters.

“Ah, you have a point. Fleas on our backs, and why they still get a rail discount, I do not know.” That bit the guard delivers under his breath—to avoid giving offence, Blonska supposes, as so many rural folk still cling to their beads.

Funnily enough, her patrons tend to assume she’s pious—her bare-bones ways make no sense to them except as an imitation of the saints. Blonska lets them believe it, since belief consoles the believers.

Lacking such false comforts, she gets only the grim satisfaction of doing her best. She has a taste for helping, simple as that; it’s meat and drink to her. For the rich ladies of her acquaintance, this Russian émigrée is an invaluable agent, a broker of their largesse. (They find her knowledge of literature impressive, her accent picturesque, her skewed frame poignant.) Blonska has no embarrassment about climbing staircases to mould-stained apartments where people need her and the linens and provisions she carries. She relishes dealing with intractable problems, calming drunken husbands, arguing with harsh landlords, even assisting with the occasional birth if the midwife’s delayed. Above all, she never tries to cheat the poor with the spurious consolation of a better life to come . Without attempting to improve or uplift, Blonska doles out practical advice sparingly and francs by the fistful. She may be doing no good, of course; she knows the needy can sometimes be bewildered by too much hard cash. They get robbed or drink it and a week later are no better off or even worse. Still, it relieves her to give away that filthy lucre; she seems to step more lightly, breathe more easily, afterwards.

Hakim is leaning back now, resting his weight on a stick at the rear of his tank. Oh, that gorgeous aroma. After Blonska’s long night on the cold platform, she’s feeling ragged; she may be in no state to walk to her room when she reaches Montparnasse late this afternoon. So she raises one finger in his direction and fumbles out a coin. She tucks her knitting back into her bag in case of a spill, and while she’s at it, she gets out her brown ticket to show the guard. Sipping the lovely stuff, she reminds herself to make it last.

The woman at her left elbow, the one with the look of a maid, wants to know, “What brought you to France, then, Monsieur Hakim?”

Blonska bristles slightly on his behalf because although the woman’s addressed the man politely, such a question is often a prelude to a rant about foreigners feeding like rats in our larder. At the very least it’s a pointless query, because who can tell what brings anyone anywhere? What brought Blonska this far west? Paris is the centre of the literary world, but was that why? She has trouble remembering. Life has tides and currents that can wash a person up anywhere.

Hakim must be used to delivering his story along with the coffee. “I came from Algiers for six months only, to work in the souk in the Tunisian Pavilion.”

The maid’s face brightens. “Oh, the Expo! What fun.”

Six years ago, Blonska remembers. She very much doubts Hakim found that job fun . “Why Tunisian, may I ask, if you’re Algerian?”

“That was the name,” Hakim says, “the Tunisian Pavilion in the Village des Noirs. Before, I sold carpets, but in Paris I was paid to sit on the floor.”

“You weren’t allowed a stool?” the young woman with the lunch bucket demands.

Blonska understands her anger. “They wanted you to squat so you would look more like an Arab?”

Hakim’s eyebrows move as if he would shrug if his cumbersome apparatus allowed him.

“Why’d you switch from carpets to coffee?” the guard wants to know.

“More easy to carry than carpets.”

It doesn’t look easy to Blonska.

The maid takes out a book now. The title on the worn yellow jacket is The She Devils .

“A good read?” Blonska asks.

A pleasurable shudder. “Wonderful. This lady actually eats her lover’s heart.”

“My, my.” The Russian’s tastes run more in the direction of political history.

The woman introduces herself—Madame Baudin, a live-in on the rue de Rennes just a few minutes from the station in Montparnasse.

Blonska’s lady patrons all share the fixed idea that Bretons make the most wholesome domestics; they’d never picture their maids reading stories of cannibals. Blonska gives her own name and origins in return. “But no one calls me Mademoiselle Blonska—I go by plain Blonska.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a Russian,” Madame Baudin admits.

“Having a holiday in Vire?”

Madame Baudin shakes her head. “Connecting from Saint-Malo, where I was seeing my daughter yesterday evening.”

“Just overnight?”

“My husband’s valet to a gentleman off the Champs-élysées. Till he and I can find jobs where we’re allowed to live together, his mother’s raising our Bleuenn. Such a size the girl is now!” A hitch in her voice.

Blonska flinches in sympathy. She wonders whether the child even knows her mother.

Across the carriage, the short-haired young woman keeps her eyes shut as if she’s in pain.

Blonska murmurs, “He couldn’t make the visit with you?”

“Our days off hardly ever fall together.” Madame Baudin’s tone is fatalistic, as if that’s as much of a fact as the weather.

The short-haired girl tugs at her stiff collar and mutters, “How they stamp on our necks.”

Madame Baudin grins at Blonska. “So angry, this young one!”

The girl objects: “I’m twenty-one.”

Blonska can’t disagree with her; the underclass are at the mercy of employers who won’t let them choose when to take the little time that’s their own.

The soldier’s halfway down a bottle of marc; he crosses his legs now, his boot almost knocking over Mado’s lunch bucket.

She snatches it up, glaring.

“What’s your name, dear?” Madame Baudin asks.

Mado hesitates, frowning. But it can do no harm to give it at this point. “Mado Pelletier.”

“Hmm, I don’t think I know any Pelletiers, but then, Paris is so vast, isn’t it?”

Mado ignores the maid and tries to concentrate her mind on the First-Class carriage that’s just behind this much-varnished wooden wall. First Class is always cushioned halfway along the string of carriages, since in the event of a crash, compensating even one wealthy family for injuries or death could well bankrupt the Company. This train is a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life. But Mado is sitting so close to those important personages in First Class that if there were a knothole, she could peep through and catch a glimpse of black top hats and peacock silks. If only she knew exactly who’s in there today.

She saw today’s date on a poster about the opening of the new session of the National Assembly; she pictured them gathered in their half-domed chamber, the five-hundred-odd rich men who recently passed the brutal laws that locked people up for writing or shouting or even thinking Long live anarchy . These parasitical parliamentarians notorious for accepting bribes. And then a week ago, it occurred to her that on October 22, when the deputies converged on the capital from their country chateaux, most of them would take the train, faster and smoother than their coach-and-fours, if more public. Some of them might travel in before the opening, of course, but if Mado picked a morning express to Paris from any northern town on the twenty-second itself, surely there’d be a good chance of finding at least one of those cursed deputies on it?

She pictures an imaginary politician mere centimetres away behind the wall, unknowing. The face of a fop in a cartoon, with ostentatious whiskers. Oblivious to Mado and her astonishing lunch bucket.

Why has no one else in France thought of copying the Irish in London and setting off a bomb on a train? The six companies are owned by the state but privately operated, so every steam train roaring past represents government hand in glove with industry, turning the nation into one nightmarishly efficient factory to transport materials and workers and finished goods, thus maximising profits at the expense of the common people. What more obvious target could there be than an express, a symbol of so-called progress at its most ruthless?

When Mado hurried on at Granville, she was flustered enough to jump into the rearmost of the three Third-Class carriages, not remembering the importance of proximity to First Class. Also, it turned out to be full of children. (She puts their faces out of her mind.) This one, Front Third, is much better—and right beside the rear First-Class carriage so that any explosion here will surely rip that one apart too.

There’s a game of dominoes going on in the corner now, on the back of someone’s suitcase. A pack of cards is being shuffled for piquet. The soldier’s filling his pipe. (Mado tells herself that he’s probably fresh from firing on striking glassmakers or massacring the peasants of Madagascar.) He pulls out a little box that reads Double-Ended Safety Matches , breaks one in half, and grates the two ends together to make a flame.

She allows herself a tiny smile. She put her device together only yesterday, working meticulously but fast. The recipe’s her own but based on tips from several dozen newspaper reports that she’s gathered over the past year. She started with saltpetre and sugar. ( Enough to cure fifty kilos of ham , she told the grocer in Granville.) A vial of sulfuric acid ( To take off obstinate corns , Mado claimed) at one pharmacy; another of picric acid ( For burns ) at the rival pharmacy. One bag of nails, one of charcoal, and five boxes of the same matches as the soldier’s, bought at three different hardware shops to avoid suspicion.

Back in her hotel room, Mado lined the base of her tin lunch bucket with the nails, the simplest of projectiles. She snapped the flammable ends off the matches and ground them to grit with the heel of her shoe, then used the handle of her hairbrush to stir the grit carefully into the charcoal, saltpetre, and sugar. (Her breath coming loud and fast, as if she were running.) From each of the tiny vials, she poured off the acid’s protective topping of water, then plugged it with cotton ripped off her hem and set it into the streaky mixture. Her lidded lunch bucket is now a reversal device, as foolproof as an hourglass. As soon as it’s turned upside down, the acids will eat away at the cotton plugs, then drip into the dry mixture and set it alight. According to her research, her bomb should flare purple before it explodes.

Mado can’t be sure how fast it will happen or how huge a blast it will make, but she knows it will be big. She’ll embrace her clever creation, making an offering of herself.

An offering of all of them in this carriage, rather. This one will be the centre, the first blown to bits, and First Class and its fat cats will be next. Of course, most of these Third-Class passengers, considered as individuals, have done nothing to deserve their fate—the fisherwoman lugging her oysters, the Russian with her twisted back, the maid who’s missing her daughter, the Algerian staggering under the weight of his coffee tank…

But think of all the others. The ones not on the train because they can’t afford a nine-franc ticket—the silent majority. Men and women and children sowing, reaping, threshing, sawing, and fetching water, never going anywhere, never at rest. Not to mention the half-size, the hunchbacks, the clubfooted, sufferers from goitre or scrofula, herniated woodsmen and blinded stonebreakers, the people racked with dysentery or coughing up bits of lung. Crews of children sent off after harvest to trudge ten days to the capital and somehow scrape out a living there. Sweeps, bootblacks, organ-grinders, rouged boys euphemistically called Little Jesuses standing on corners. (Mado once met a child whose parents had sold him into the trade on the promise of fifty francs for the year; he’d caught syphilis by Christmas.) I’m doing this for all of them , she reminds herself furiously. Because there’s no cure but revolution. Because what else can I do?

She’s oddly breathless. Time—her final stretch of hours and minutes—is speeding up. For years her dull, arduous youth has dragged past, but today it surges like a river in spate. She doesn’t know exactly when she’s going to turn her lunch bucket upside down, but she’d like to wait for the train to fill up in hopes of taking a member of that damnable parliament with her. In any case, the perfect moment will be sometime in the next six hours, between now and 3:55, when the Express is due at Paris-Montparnasse. Each minute feels large and vivid, illuminated by a spotlight but rocketing past, impossible to catch.

Mado did think of leaving a note in her hotel room this morning justifying herself. She’d have rather liked to write a manifesto eloquent enough to change the hearts of everyone who read it. The way émile Henry’s burning eyes had changed her last year.

Even before the young dynamitard threw that bomb into the café at Saint-Lazare Station, Mado was in sympathy with the cause. That came of her eating up everything she could find in the library but also posters, graffiti, reading Paris itself like a great stained volume of exploited lives. She hovered at the back of meetings, picked up songs in smoky cabarets:

Long ring the explosion’s blast—

Let everything smash!

That’s what made Mado get up at half past three in the morning to attend émile Henry’s execution outside the Grande Roquette prison, where four hundred troops held back the crowd with bayonets. The bomber was only twenty-one, and when he shouted Vive l’anarchie! across a hundred metres his beautiful dark eyes locked onto Mado’s. As the guillotine’s blade dropped, some spark leapt between them—that’s the only way she can explain it. As if a torch dropped from his hand and it was she who snatched it up.

But no, Mado’s no good at writing manifestos, and she’s decided it’ll create more widespread terror if her great gesture speaks mutely, anonymously. Which means her name will likely be left out of the reports of the disaster that will wing their way around the earth tonight. Very well; there’s nothing particularly special about Mado Pelletier’s story of growing up poor and raging. All she can hope is that the flames she’s going to ignite will join with others being lit all over the world to bring the whole crumbling edifice down.

From each according to his ability —that’s what Marx teaches, and this is Mado’s ability: She’s a realist who can see through the lies. Including the lies that revolutionaries tell themselves. There’ve been many thrilling attacks in France in recent years, but to Mado’s mind, not one of them has been big enough. Young émile Henry was the bravest; still, his bombs killed only one in the railway café and five at the mining company. Caserio’s knifing of the president, though a great coup, still took down only one man. Neither the famous Ravachol’s little devices nor Vaillant’s nail bomb in the Chamber of Deputies managed to do more than injure a few people. No, the way Mado sees it, what’s needed is one act of violence too spectacular to ignore. Hundreds must die at one go, and they must include someone deemed important so the attack will hit the headlines all across the world.

She’s plotted alone, as anarchists generally do; telling no one is the only sure way to keep a secret. Anyway, the other self-proclaimed diehards would likely only scoff at the plans of a girl .

After Mado blows up this train, two things should follow. She corrects herself— will follow. The powers that be will know that nowhere is safe. The ministers of state, the generals, the factory-owners, the landlords, the speculators—let them shiver. The smug bourgeoisie, the idle boulevardiers who stroll along their horse-chestnut-lined avenues from one gleaming café to the next—they’ll be put on notice that as long as they oppress the poor, vengeance will stalk them. And even more crucially, the downtrodden will glimpse the weakness of those who’ve kept them underfoot for so long and feel their own force so that maybe not tomorrow or the next day but sooner or later, they’ll rise up and topple this regime, clearing the way for a better one.

“Coffee makes my hands tremble,” murmurs the Russian, shaking them like wet rags. “Still, I do feel stronger.” She passes her chained cup back to Hakim, and he cleans out the grounds with a rag.

Mado lets out a long breath. Maybe she should have detonated her device the minute she got on the train at Granville, even without any guarantee that a deputy or another important man is on the Express. Because the one flaw in her plan is that riding for hours in Third Class means getting familiar with these people before she has to kill them. Of course Mado has qualms; only the icy-hearted would have none.

The Paris Express rushes into fog. A signal lamp in the safe position—tilted diagonally—glows green through the translucent grey of the woods. A nearby village is ringing its bells to guide any travellers who might have lost their way. Guillaume Pellerin’s grateful for the headlamp burning at his engine’s nose. Even if its white light, multiplied by reflectors, is not enough to illuminate what’s ahead in time for him to stop, at least it could warn a child or a cow of the train’s approach, surely?

Guillaume has no memory of choosing this trade, which was his father’s. But having given the Company half his thirty-five years so far, he has no particular complaints. It’s a hard job, and only hard men can do it, which is why drivers get such respect. He’s holding up all right, just a touch of rheumatics in the legs and occasional numbness in the right foot. His heart ricochets under stress, which he’s mentioned to no one, not even his wife, Francoise, or Victor Garnier here by his side; Guillaume just stays quiet till the sensation wears off.

For a while now he’s been qualified to apply for promotion to under-chief of a station workshop, but the truth is, without Engine 721 thrumming below his boots, he’d be as clumsy and restless as a sailor on dry land. Even now, on Guillaume’s days off, when he leaves his watch on his dresser and drifts through the day waiting for Francoise to ask him for favours or call him to meals—what he could never tell her is that he misses being on the rails.

He remembers dandling baby Guillaume for hours, swimming in that bubble of timelessness in which infants float. But at ten, the boy is chafing, saying he wants to be a driver now . The Company might give him a scholarship, then take him as an apprentice as early as twelve. That way, three Guillaume Pellerins (grandfather, father, and son) will form a chain of generations in the service before they all lie down in the same plot in the cemetery, just a stone’s throw from Montparnasse Station.

Through his goggles Guillaume catches sight of a dark print of pine on the brow of a distant hill. So many different trees whipping by. October gold showing amid the emerald and rust where a beech hedge is beginning to turn. A double row of poplars already stripped bare by autumn, huge balls of mistletoe standing out in their narrow crowns. A lone leaf gatherer hurries out of the woods with two sacks, illicitly harvested.

Guillaume returns his gaze to his controls, fingering them delicately. A driver intimate with his route will lengthen the pistons’ travel to boost the torque before an upgrade, then shorten them to put on a burst of power. He’s been trained to keep his hands off both the powerful air brake and the weaker shoe brake because having to brake is an admission of failure and means you’re going too fast. The best way to control speed is with the reverser. Keep the regulator open but move the reverser closer to its midpoint between forward and back, which will reduce the cutoff, the moment in each stroke when no more steam is let into the cylinders, thus leaving room for the steam to expand. The Company notch, rollers call that magic midpoint at which the train runs with enough power but burns the minimum of coal. Guillaume clings to that notch in hopes of making the maximum bonus for savings on fuel and lubricants. Not that he or Victor can predict exactly how the sum will work out once the clerks in HQ scrutinize the logs and pass judgement, but surely one of these months Engine 721’s rollers will get their full bonus of forty percent?

Oh, but she’s a good beast, leaning into the curves and racing along each downgrade. Guillaume feels her power thrilling in his own limbs, her sleek precision. As if she and he and Victor are one hybrid creation, a mixture of human and machine, like an iron spear hurtling across Normandy.

To a trackman in the ditch, one of his trouser legs ending in a peg, Guillaume lifts a chilly hand in greeting. The trackman was probably train crew till an accident maimed him. Such a quiet job that must be, inching along the rails, giving a hammer tap to every oaken sleeper that holds them up, and listening for any sound of hollowness or rot. Guillaume’s glad he himself never has to work alone.

Coming into Orne Department now, and the line’s slanting southwest. In front of a guardhouse, a broad-shouldered gatekeeper in her flat hat and red-and-white-striped skirt brandishes a red flag at the impatient farmers with the carts behind the barrier. As good a moment as any for Guillaume to test the air brake by nudging the valve handle a little open, which he likes to do early in each journey, even though the Westinghouse system is infallible. A driver or a stoker can apply the brake up here, but so can the guards in front of and behind the passenger carriages. The Westinghouse fail-safe design guarantees that if anything cuts the air line—if a great tree suddenly falls across the train, say—the brake automatically comes on.

Once the engine is past the crossing, running hard again with regulator open to the full 180 degrees, Guillaume allows plenty of steam into the cylinders. Every minute or so he grabs the rail on his right with his left hand and swings out far enough to check if the side rods are still going up and down, because if they look stationary, that’s a sign of moving too fast. For want of any measuring device that shows the train’s speed, this is the trick every driver knows, and it takes far less time than counting telegraph poles. Guillaume also keeps an ear out for any change in the cadence of the rail joints clicking under the wheels or in Engine 721 herself, her whistling breath.

As Guillaume straightens up, Victor catches his eye and nods: All right. Like sailors in a perpetual hurricane, they inch around each other in a pas de deux.

Jeanne Sarazin-Levassor has settled back against her mother’s right shoulder and fallen into a doze. Louise leans into her, sets her cheek against her daughter’s, too softly to rouse her. She particularly loves the girl’s right ear, which sticks out a bit more than the left, turning flame red when the sun shines through it.

This child of seventeen is spun from Louise’s silk, baked in her oven. The eldest of her babies but the only one close at hand, since she’s had to let René (just seven!) go off to school with Auguste-Henri, meaning Jeanne is in some sense her last baby as well as her first. Jeanne’s the best for cuddling: tactful of limb, always tucking in just so, never flailing or twitching or awkwardly elbowing. Almost grown up, she still loves to be held and patted and kissed, especially recently.

A secret of mothers: We enjoy it when our offspring are under the weather because it draws them back to us again, reverses time a bit, spins the hands anticlockwise. For a little while they need us as they once did every minute of the day, and we surrender reminiscently to that sweet rush.

Jeanne wasn’t always easy in her younger years, squabbling with Auguste-Henri… but these days she’s always saying thank you in her soft breathy voice. Always resting her head on whatever piece of Louise she can reach. What Louise would never say to émile—and never said to her first husband, édouard—is that the caress of a lover can’t compare to the touch of your child.

One of these years Jeanne will get married, Louise lectures herself. You must let your young grow up, move away from you, settle perhaps a great distance from Paris. Some greedy mothers do keep one girl home to help , but Louise wouldn’t do that. The Sarazin-Levassor family head out into the world at cracking speed.

The one-armed engineer is waxing lyrical about public transport now; he calls it the greatest gift of modernity. “A train line to an isolated hamlet such as the one in Brittany where I grew up—it’s like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.”

The foreign-looking student in the sober blue outfit, Mademoiselle de Heredia, says, “But, monsieur, when you consider how many can’t afford a ticket…”

Bienvenüe nods soberly. “My hope is that the price can be brought down in time, as has happened with other innovations such as the post and the telegraph. We all benefit if goods and citizens are permitted to circulate like warm air passing through a room.”

Which reminds Louise to wonder about the heater under her daughter’s feet. She can’t move without disturbing Jeanne on her shoulder, so she gestures to her husband. émile bends, feels it, and makes a face, which means it’s barely lukewarm, for all the guard’s promises. Louise points to the travel rug, and émile hurries to unfold it over the girl’s knees.

He’s telling the engineer how they met—how Louise, carrying on her late husband’s business of representing Daimler automobiles in France, licensed émile a twin-cylinder engine, “and the next thing I knew, she was including herself in the contract!”

He’s fond of that line. Louise gives him the indulgent smile he’s expecting.

Bienvenüe is very curious about the car’s design, so émile gets out his portfolio, switches to the scarlet banquette beside the engineer, and spreads out the blueprint on his lap.

Mademoiselle de Heredia asks Louise if she might take émile’s seat beside her to admire the countryside to the north.

“Certainly.” Making conversation, Louise tells her about a cooking demonstration put on last week by a lady who publishes a magazine called La Cuisinière Cordon Bleu . “ Cuisinière as in ‘woman chef’—a new notion to me! But she had a real chef there plying his skills, on an electric-powered stove, no less.”

Mademoiselle de Heredia nods; she seems uninterested in gastronomy. Or in making the most of her looks, which are rather good, with a distinctly Mediterranean tint. “A lovely girl, your Jeanne.”

“You’re very kind.” Louise rests her cheek again on the soft haze of her sleeping daughter’s hair.

“I believe she hasn’t been very well?”

“Oh, she’s rather worn out from growing so fast. I tell her she wouldn’t get so chilled if she’d eat more and put some padding on her bones!”

“No doubt.”

But there is doubt in Mademoiselle de Heredia’s voice; Louise can hear it.

“I do wonder…” The young woman is frowning a little now. “Has your doctor considered—has he mentioned anything about perhaps testing her blood?”

Testing for what? Louise pulls back—as much as she can, sitting practically pressed against this stranger, with Jeanne’s sleeping weight on her other side. But she answers courteously. “Oh, I was rather anaemic too at her age, but I shook it off.” Not spelling out what’s understood, that a girl’s monthlies can sap her powers.

“Mm.”

“Greensickness, my mother used to call it. She always said the best cure was a husband, and I’ve had two, which may explain my excellent health!”

A nod from Mademoiselle de Heredia, as if she’s reserving judgement.

Louise is nettled. Is this scientific young female one of the up-to-date kind who rail against marriage?

“It was actually a different test I was thinking of,” the student says.

“Oh, yes?” Louise responds, just to be polite.

“For milkiness.”

“My daughter hardly drinks milk at all. It turns her stomach. I can barely persuade her to take a little cheese after dinner.”

“No, I didn’t mean… I’m referring to a special test of the blood. If it turns out to have a milky quality…”

Louise’s pulse is speeding up. She may not understand exactly what Mademoiselle de Heredia is getting at, but the implication is clear: that Jeanne may be suffering from something serious, a mysterious disorder revealed by a special test . What a thing to suggest to a stranger on a train! On Louise’s shoulder, the sleeping head is suddenly painfully heavy. Lowering her voice so the men won’t hear, speaking almost into the young lady’s ear: “My dear mademoiselle, you’re not a physician?”

The dark eyes dull; the lovely face falls. “No, no.”

“Are you advanced in training to become one?”

“Not really. My course of study—”

Louise cuts her off. “You have no qualifications to entitle you to make a diagnosis, then? Nor to speculate, nor interrogate me and my child in what I must say is a remarkably intrusive manner—”

“Madame, let me apologize.” Which comes out high-pitched, and both men look up from their papers. Flushed, Mademoiselle de Heredia whispers: “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Louise’s rage, not easy to rouse, is not easy to soothe either. How dare this nobody try to fill her with obscure, nonsensical fears? “You’re a stupid girl with notions, then. Showing off your brains,” she says too quietly for the gentlemen to hear.

Without another word, the young woman goes back to her own seat, on the other side of Jeanne.

Her pulse loud in her throat, Louise fumbles for the Cordon Bleu magazine in her bag so she can pretend to read it.

To pass the time, Alice Guy is luring the reserved American out of his shell. It turns out Henry Tanner is not only a painter but an amateur photographer who always travels with a little camera of the “detective” kind.

“Disguised as a brown-paper parcel, is it?” Gaumont looks up at the baggage net.

“Disguised as a watch,” Mr. Tanner corrects him in his stiff French. He pulls his watch out of his pocket and flips it open, which lets the hidden lens telescope out.

“Ingenious!” Alice leans in for a closer look. “So you can take pictures without attracting attention or alarming the subjects.”

“Yes. Just to remind myself of the details of something I may want to paint later.”

Alice sees an opening. “Monsieur Gaumont and I saw a terribly interesting demonstration at an industrial conference recently,” she says. “These two brothers, they showed a film—” She breaks off, seeing in the American’s eyes that he doesn’t understand film in this new sense. “A series of photographs on a transparent strip of celluloid that are lit up and shown in rapid succession, you see, to form a scene?” She’ll never forget the surprise of it. In that room full of scientists and moneymen, after a long morning of suppressing her yawns, she woke from her torpor with a jerk.

“The Lumière brothers are married to a pair of sisters,” Gaumont mentions, “and the sisters’ brother has married the Lumières’ sister, would you believe.”

Alice tries to keep on topic. “A moving picture, you follow, Monsieur Tanner? If a string of images is projected one after another fast enough, more than ten of them per second—”

“An illusion of motion is created?”

“Exactly! The eye is tricked. I should have known an artist would grasp it,” she murmurs.

“Like a zoetrope. Or a… in English we say flip-book .” Mr. Tanner mimes flipping pages with his thumb.

“ Folioscope , in French,” Gaumont supplies. “But quicker, smoother.”

“And what was the scene these Messieurs Lumière showed you?”

“That’s an excellent question,” Alice says, “because—”

But Gaumont cuts in. “Oh, it could have been anything, really. The technological innovation is the thing.”

She sets her teeth. Any woman who works with men learns ways to avoid disagreeing head-on. “All the brothers did was set up their camera outside their own factory as the girls filed out after work. There was no art to it.”

Gaumont shrugs. “I suppose the process could be used to record the movements of animals, wind, machines—anything scientific.”

“But why scientific?” Alice hears her voice, lowers and sweetens it. “I don’t understand why a film necessarily needs to be a document of reality.”

Her boss gives her one of his squints.

She adds, “Why limit it to a dull scene of tired workers walking by?”

“They’ve made other films. Apparently their next one’s going to show a train coming into a station.”

Alice spots an opening: “So could we! Make other films, I mean.”

Gaumont frowns and turns back to the American. “Our firm’s in the business of selling photographic equipment and supplies.” As if he’s enlisting this stranger’s support against the silly secretary.

Alice smiles to soften her words. “We have those chronophotographic cameras you bought off poor bankrupt Demen?…” That was indiscreet; she shouldn’t have said bankrupt in front of someone who—it occurs to her—may be a potential customer. “We actually brought one with us to Vire, Mr. Tanner, as our lens supplier was curious to see it.”

The American picks up the hint, follows her eyes to the polished wooden case in the overhead net. “Really? Might I…”

“Of course.”

She starts to get up, which obliges Gaumont to leap up and lift the camera down with both hands. “Our engineers are still tinkering with the design,” he warns, sheepish about the cumbersomeness of the device with its capped, protruding lens and crank lever.

Alice unlatches each compartment at the back in turn and shows Mr. Tanner the cunning brass workings. “See, I load the film on this bobbin—” She takes a fresh roll out of its box.

“Shouldn’t this be done in the dark?”

“Don’t worry, that problem’s been solved—there’s a black paper trailer at each end to shield it from daylight. Then this other spool here will take up the film—”

“Does that”—Mr. Tanner fumbles for the word in French—“is that what moves it along?”

“This crank, exactly, at top speed—the movement is like an eggbeater.” But that sounds too housewifely; Alice wishes she’d found another way of putting it. “It takes over a dozen photographs per second.”

“How marvellous.”

She doesn’t want to push too hard for a sale this early in the journey, and, after all, the American can’t be so very flush if he’s travelling in Second like them. So she finishes preparing Demen?’s camera for use—“Voilà”—then fastens all the compartments again.

As she sets the case down at her feet, she remembers why she brought up moving pictures in the first place. “When your improved model is ready to go on the market, Monsieur Gaumont, don’t you think making our own demonstration films for illustrative purposes might help us sell more?”

Her boss makes a face at that. “We’d have to persuade people to sit in the dark and watch them.”

“But we could furnish a comfortable little showroom at the office. If we offered something more interesting than the Lumières—”

“Each strip lasts only ten seconds,” he reminds her. “Hardly time for anything very interesting.”

“It should be possible to compose a sequence from several strips,” Alice suggests. “Dozens of strips!”

“A sequence of what?” Gaumont looks at least mildly intrigued now, or maybe it’s irritation. “The kind of souvenir a gentleman might try to capture at home—a meal, perhaps?”

Alice can’t imagine anything more tedious than a film of a meal.

“Or a baby crawling in the garden?” he adds.

“I was thinking of something really captivating. Beautiful, even.”

“A tree?” Gaumont suggests, quizzical. “But a tree doesn’t move, of course, except in a high wind.”

Mr. Tanner is shaking his head. “Beautiful? For that, we must turn to painting or sculpture.”

Is he taking her boss’s side against her?

Before Alice can find an answer, Gaumont asks him what he thought of the most recent Salon, and Mr. Tanner confesses that he showed three of his own canvases there, though, he acknowledges, to little acclaim.

And the conversation has wandered away and Alice has completely failed to explain what she wants, blast it. She puts her hand down and touches the camera’s lid, which is vibrating along with the train.