“Of course I do. Sister Bernadette had us learn one by heart, about Jesus. But why would you write one about a bird? What is an albatross, anyway?”

“It’s a kind of big seagull,” said Édmonde. “Thank you, Mathilde, you did very well. Why don’t you go wait for us outside and we’ll call you in again very soon.”

You nodded, curtsied again, and shuffled off toward the church’s main entrance. You had barely left when I erupted. “Impossible! Simply impossible! Charmless, witless, allergic to poetry, and she can barely string a sentence together. That accent is dreadful, not to mention the profanity. Crénom, crénom! She’s insufferable.”

“It’s a truncation of sacré nom. Surely, being a poet, you appreciate the sentiment. ‘Holy word.’”

My entire body was quivering like a violin. “I know perfectly well what it means. It’s not the point. The point is that not only is the girl hideous to contemplate, she doesn’t even have a sense of beauty. And what is a woman without beauty?” As soon as I had uttered the phrase, I realized I had committed a cruelty.

Édmonde sat beside me and took my hands. “My dear Charles, do you think I have never asked myself the same question?” I looked up at her. She had lifted her veil. The ugliness of her face was once again on full display, mocking my suffering and the anger it had spawned. “All I am asking you to do is live. And all she wants to do is die. She has told me herself.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s pregnant—and not for the first time. She had to give the first child away to the nuns, which is where I found her—imprisoned in a convent laundry. She didn’t even get a chance to hold her child before it was taken away. Since then, she has been riven with despair, and tried to kill herself more than once. The same thing will happen this time. But since it is her second time she will now be sent to a workhouse. Her child will grow up in an orphanage. She doesn’t want that. She wants her child to grow up lacking for nothing.”

“How did you get her out of the convent?”

“I told the prioress that I was seeking to raise up in society a fallen girl, that I would train her and educate her to eventually become my personal secretary. The prioress believes Mathilde is a lost cause, to which I replied that a lost cause is exactly what I’m seeking.”

“And what have you told her about the nature of the crossing?”

“Everything.”