Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  “She’s a miracle,” Joseph whispered.

  Marie-Laure nodded. “And she’s given you her answer.”

  “Yes, but what’s your answer, Marie-Laure? Do you want to be…Meessus Raimond?”

  “Missus Raimond,” she corrected him, partly out of the delight of saying it.

  “I’ll have to help you with your pronunciation,” she murmured. “Yes, yes I do, of course I want to be Missus Raimond, but…”

  Without warning, it welled up within her: the nightmare fear and horror she’d vowed never to reveal, choking her with sudden bitter tears.

  “Here,” she sobbed, “take the baby while I try to compose myself. It’s…it’s not going to be easy to tell you this.”

  He held Sophie carefully, cradling her head as though he’d been doing it all his life.

  The story emerged slowly, in fragments, as they walked along the Seine. His brother’s desire for her. His sister-in-law’s vindictiveness. Their plans to use her for their own indecent ends. She watched a tiny muscle tremble in his jaw.

  “I’ll kill him,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I’ll kill both of them.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” she said. “Hasn’t Arsène taught us anything?”

  He nodded soberly. “You’re right, but I’m glad I’d already resolved to give up my title.”

  “And after all,” she concluded, “not much actually happened to me. Except that I felt so guilty; you know, and so frightened and powerless, and not like a human person entitled to…”

  “…the pursuit of happiness,” he concluded.

  She smiled a wobbly smile and dried her eyes. The world looked newly washed; the spires of Notre Dame glittered.

  Joseph had once called Paris the center of the world. He’d told her she’d adore it. She did adore it; it was a lot to give up. But she’d happily give it up for a world that wasn’t divided into nobles and commoners. All of Paris wasn’t too much to exchange for a chance at the pursuit of happiness.

  And while she was thinking of exchanges, while she was thinking of business…

  “The necklace,” she asked. “Is it really mine?”

  “Of course. Here it is.” He nodded and patted his coat pocket. He stood still, his eyes clouding.

  “Here, take Sophie for a moment.” He frowned, shrugged, fumbled in each pocket in turn.

  “Oh dear, was your pocket picked?”

  He winked, producing the necklace from somewhere behind her left ear.

  Well, every love affair could use some magic. And in a moment she’d see if theirs was magical enough to survive what she was going to tell him.

  “I’m going to sell this necklace,” she announced. “It should bring enough, don’t you think, to finance a little business in Philadelphia?”

  He grinned. “A bookshop. Doctor Franklin wondered how you’d decide to finance it. He offered to help, though, if you’d rather keep the necklace.”

  “I’d rather pay my own way.”

  She turned to embrace him. The busy crowds along the quay would simply have to make their way around their entwined figures, she thought.

  But instead she yawned and so did he. Enormous, gaping, ungraceful yawns that released an eternity of tension, fear, and suspicion in their wakes. She laughed.

  Neither of them had gotten much sleep last night. How nice though—and what a rare new pleasure—simply to be tired together, to want to lie down together just to get some rest. Well, maybe not just to rest…

  “I wish,” he said, “that I could say, ‘let’s go home,’ but we don’t have a home yet.”

  It was true. A home still lay in the future and beyond a wide ocean.

  “But we could take a rest, and a bath. The two of us, I mean.” She peered up at him from beneath her eyelashes. “Well, the bathtubs in the Hôtel Mélicourt are rather large, you know, and…”

  He laughed. “Ah oui, the Hôtel Mélicourt in all its splendor. Well, I suppose it will have to do for now.”

  And so they walked back together, slowly, across the Seine, and through the busy Paris streets, taking turns carrying the book and the baby.

  Epilogue

  Philadelphia

  1789

  The autumn days were still warm, but it grew dark early. Too dark, Marie-Laure thought, to let the children play outside after supper. But she shouldn’t have brought them down to the bookshop at dusk if she’d truly expected to get any work done. Or perhaps she should only have brought Sophie, who was quietly teaching her dolls to read. The glamorous Venetian, the flaxen-haired German, and the Russian—a newcomer in her fur coat and boots—smiled politely as Sophie explained about putting a T before an H and getting an entirely different sound, as in “Thank you.” Sophie had begun a letter just this morning thanking her aunts Jeanne and Ariane for the Russian doll; she was extremely proud of having constructed that fascinating Th combination.

  But the dolls were a bit too polite to hold Sophie’s attention, especially when she was missing an exciting sword fight between her brother Benjamin and cousin Alphonse. Any minute now, Marie-Laure thought, Sophie would grab her own sword and leap into the fray. And with all three of them darting about, it was only a matter of time before one of them knocked over the new display.

  Marie-Laure had worked hard to assemble it: the few available children’s books that addressed young readers as reasoning, imagining beings and not vessels for moral instruction.

  “En garde, Alphonse.” The graceful arc of Sophie’s arm was an unconscious miniature of her father’s.

  Deftly, her cousin parried in turn. They were well matched. The green-eyed boy had inherited his height and bearing from his mother. He’d grown so tall this year that it was hard to connect him with the tiny terrified child Joseph had brought back, wrapped in his cloak, from France three years ago.

  “It’s the little Duc de Carency Auvers-Raimond,” Joseph had whispered. He’d found him half-starved in a wet nurse’s shabby cottage after he’d attended Hubert’s funeral. A hunting accident, near Versailles. People suspected the Duchesse’s lover, a foppish courtier, but the King had refused to investigate.

  “We don’t have Ducs in America.” Sophie had had sharp ears, even at two and a half.

  “Sophie’s right,” Marie-Laure had said. Softly, she’d told the little boy that they wouldn’t be calling him “Monsieur le Duc.” But, she’d added, they were very happy to have him with them; perhaps he’d like to come down to the kitchen with her and Uncle Joseph (he was clinging to Joseph desperately) and choose what he wanted to eat for dinner. And so she’d wound up caring for the Duchesse’s son after all, while the Duchesse flitted about the gardens of Versailles, a rising favorite of the Queen herself.

  Three-year-old Benjamin had flung away his sword and was shouting encouragement to Alphonse from midway up the bookshop ladder.

  “Not any higher, Ben. If you climb any higher, I’ll lift you down entirely, do you hear me?”

  Normally she would have left the children with Tabitha, who’d been helping with the housework since Joseph, Marie-Laure, and baby Sophie had arrived on this continent. But Tabby had gone, at Marie-Laure’s urging, to apprentice to a local midwife. Even if it meant losing cherished household help, Marie-Laure was determined that Tabby, the intelligent and hardworking daughter of former slaves, become an independent woman with as much of a profession as she was allowed to have. Her little sister Sarah would be taking her place in Marie-Laure’s house, starting tomorrow.

  She comforted herself that the shop wasn’t really in bad shape. Business was steady and growing; she hoped she would soon be able to hire an assistant to help her catch up on her inventory. And to rearrange the shelves: she didn’t like the way the pious books were creeping into the Shakespeare collection.

  But she’d have to find time to write to the supplier who’d sent the hopelessly garbled order she’d received yesterday. Amazing, she thought, how many details there were to a business most people thought was a simple
matter of sitting magisterially behind the counter among neat rows of books.

  She’d wanted to get a head start on at least one of her chores before Joseph returned from France. His impending arrival was the real source of the children’s wild exuberance. And perhaps why she was finding it difficult to keep her mind on her work as well.

  He’d be bringing important news. For in July the common people of Paris had taken history into their own hands and stormed the Bastille, freeing the few prisoners still locked up in the hated fortress. In some ways the act was only symbolic, but its audacity and ferocity had made it clear that France would never be the same.

  And one of the newly freed prisoners was Arsène.

  Monsieur du Plessix had used an ancient legal ploy in his defense. Even though he was a commoner, Arsène had escaped hanging for the Baron’s murder because Monsieur du Plessix convinced the judges that he’d been “maddened by the mistral.” But Marie-Laure suspected that Arsène’s own simple testimony of his sister’s sufferings had swayed the judges as well. Joseph had visited him several times in prison; it hadn’t been easy, but they’d managed to forge a wary relationship over the last few years.

  Of course, Joseph would have a lot to say about the current political scene in Paris. Marie-Laure had read everything she could in the newspapers: everyone agreed that change was inevitable, but nobody agreed on the form change would take. As an intimate of the present American ambassador, Mr. Jefferson, Joseph would know as much as anybody could about the situation.

  He’d been successful in his work at the consulate. He’d brought his native impetuosity to the position, approaching it with the pent-up enthusiasm of a talented late starter. Just as he’d promised himself that morning on the bank of the Seine, he’d “become good at details.” He’d become such a meticulous administrator that Mr. Jefferson had come to rely on him, demanding that he work with him in France from time to time. Marie-Laure wasn’t fond of these periodic absences, but she’d never forgotten Doctor Franklin’s appraisal of her husband: he thrived in the clash of old and new worlds, negotiating their differences and trying to help each side understand the other.

  He was a good enough diplomat even to have made friends with Gilles. Marie-Laure was looking forward to his latest reports of Gilles, Sylvie, and their household full of tiny children as much as to the news of the political situation in Paris.

  And so she’d reconciled herself to the separations. When your happiness spanned two continents and encompassed three clamorous, demanding, and highly individual children (but were there any other kind?) you learned to make the best of life’s imperfections.

  She’d come to terms with other imperfections as well—like the differences between her and Joseph that simply wouldn’t go away. Try as she might, Marie-Laure would inevitably become befuddled by Joseph’s accounts of the diplomatic intrigues that so captivated him.

  “But why do grown men act so foolishly?” she’d ask. “Can’t they just compromise and make peace, as I insist the children do?”

  While for his part, Joseph would yawn discreetly when Marie-Laure launched into a disquisition on typefaces and bindings—the relative virtues of morocco leather and tooled calf; the inferior new thread some of the bookbinders were using lately.

  It was the price you paid, she thought, for loving someone so different from yourself. But a small price: when each of you woke up in the morning eager to get to the work you loved—and when only the other’s touch was enough reason to stay in bed…

  But if she thought too hard about that she wouldn’t get any work done at all. She smiled to think of how often her mind had strayed in that direction this week. At least as often as she’d thought of Gilles or Sylvie or the street riots in Paris.

  The crash had finally come. She turned back to the miniature riot raging round her feet.

  “Sophie, Alphonse, pick up those books immediately! Yes, I can see they’re not creased, but you knocked the stand over, didn’t you? And Benjamin—Benjamin Alexandre Joseph—didn’t I tell you…”

  The shop suddenly grew dark. Someone standing in the doorway had blown out the candles. Perhaps he’d done it on purpose, as a reminder of how far they’d come since Montpellier. Or perhaps he’d simply blown them out by his hearty laughter at the domestic disorder that meant home.

  “Joseph!”

  “Papa, Papa!”

  “Hooray, it’s Uncle Joseph!”

  He swept Benjamin off his ladder as Sophie and Alphonse flung themselves at him. His skin was deep olive from his weeks on board ship, and he looked just a little more French than when he’d gone away, for he’d visited his tailor in the rue Saint-Honoré.

  His hair had a few more streaks of silver. But his grin was as crooked and infectious as ever. He looked worldly, substantial, competent. And as lithe and mischievous as the night he’d pounded on the door of her attic room in the chateau.

  He’d grown up. He hadn’t changed in the slightest.

  “Papa, I can read now!”

  “I have a new kite, Uncle Joseph. Will you fly it with me?”

  And inevitably, “What did you bring me?”

  She lit the lamp while he untangled himself from the laughing, chattering knot of children. He stroked Benjamin’s red hair as he set him onto the floor.

  She gazed at him, for the moment or the heartbeat or the eternity before his eyes met hers. Before he was beside her, gathering her into his arms and pressing his mouth to hers.

  And the news, and the children—even America and France—would all have to wait. Now that Joseph was home and Marie-Laure was at the center of the world.

  Afterword and acknowledgments 2003

  I like to include real historical personages in my romances. In The Bookseller’s Daughter you met notable figures like Benjamin Franklin and heard about notorious ones like Joseph’s prison dinner partner, the Marquis de Sade. But the book’s central historical figure is one you probably took for my own invention: the predatory bookseller Monsieur Rigaud of Montpellier, who slyly remains off stage but who had a good deal to do with this book’s creation.

  The actual historical Isaac-Pierre Rigaud made a good living selling books (smuggled and not) during the second half of the eighteenth century. His business correspondence survives in the archives of his Swiss suppliers, and these archives constitute the core of Robert Darnton’s wonderful historical study, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France.

  Darnton tells us that in the decades preceding the French Revolution, a remarkable selection of literature was smuggled over the French borders and past the censors—to be sold “under the cloak” by booksellers bold and shrewd enough to do so. Rousseau’s Confessions made its way into France this way, among other famous titles we credit with creating the intellectual ferment of the time. But so did many lesser, smuttier works, especially erotic (or “libertine”) fiction. Eighteenth-century French booksellers didn’t distinguish between different orders of subversive literature: they called them all “philosophical books.”

  Darnton doesn’t draw easy conclusions about the political effects of reading. His arguments and speculations are subtler, and I recommend his book to anyone interested in how history works and ideas change, day by day and on the ground. I especially recommend his explanations of the mechanics of book smuggling—since I’ll confess (with some embarrassment) that my own account is tailored to the requirements of my plot and highly simplified.

  I’m not embarrassed, however, by my simple emotional response to The Forbidden Best-Sellers, which my husband and I both read when it came out in 1994. My husband’s interest was as an independent bookseller, mine as an erotic writer. But I’d spent some time in the book trade myself, and the early ’90s were a time of energetic and baleful concentration in our industry, as large chains began forcing smaller independents out of business.

  As I followed Rigaud’s cutthroat strategies and watched him buy up his competitors, I started to resent him—and to imagine another co
mpetitor, someone poor but honest, with a fetching bookish daughter. And once I’d caught an imaginary glimpse of Marie-Laure’s ink-stained fingers, it was easy to see Joseph’s crooked grin.

  And what (I asked myself) if the smuggler with that captivating grin were actually a libertine writer himself? What if he were the son (the second son, naturellement) of the meanest duke in the Provence? And so I what-if’d myself into The Bookseller’s Daughter. I’m sure I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t been so personally ticked off at Rigaud—so you can thank or blame him as you please while I do my own thanking and blaming.

  Well, not a real blame, but I do have one long-cherished comment: to an early reader (and contest judge) who thought Marie-Laure made an undue fuss when Joseph shorted her order: Honey, you should hang out with some booksellers when they get short-shipped.

  There, I feel better now.

  Otherwise I have only my most grateful thanks. To my best and toughest critics, Ellie Ely and Michael Rosenthal, for forcing me to fix gaffes and problems I would have preferred to ignore. To my agent, Helen Breitwieser, for never losing her resolve that we’d see an ISBN on this thing someday. To the folks who insisted on this book’s virtues: Ellen Jacobson, Robin Levine-Ritterman, Jesse Rosenthal, and Jeff Weinstein. To my brothers, Doctors Jeff and Ricky Ritterman, for their respective advice about wounds and preeclampsia.

  Thanks also to the whole, supportive Ritterman-Bard-Krasner clan. And to the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Romance Writers of America; the Unreadables (thanks especially to William de Soria); my colleagues at the San Francisco Fed who came to my booksigning and bought up every copy of my book; my fellow Welloids; Michael’s colleagues in the San Francisco independent bookselling community who buzzed Almost a Gentleman so enthusiastically; and my talented web designer, Emily Cotler at Waxcreative. Come visit me at www.pamrosenthal.com and see Emily’s gorgeous handiwork.