Al elbowed his way through the crowd and Ada followed in his wake. Around them students mingled with fishmongers still smelling of the catch brought upriver from Le Havre; gentry, wigless in simple dresses, rubbed shoulders with tailors and shopkeepers.

‘Camille always knows what she’s doing,’ Ada said with more confidence than she felt.

Al snorted. ‘Our glorious infallible leader.’

‘Why do you always have to be so hostile?’ she snapped. ‘If you don’t like how we do things then you don’t have to stay in the battalion.’

‘My dear, the right of any worker is to complain about their employer. Isn’t that what this revolution’s all about? Rights for the proles?’

Ada rolled her eyes. ‘Al, darling, I don’t think you could manage to pass as proletarian for five seconds.’

Even in scruffy clothes, with a cockade hastily pinned to his lapel, Al struggled to look anything other than well-bred. Ada wasn’t sure if it was his sneer or the tilt of his jaw or the arrogant look in his eye, but he made it unnecessarily easy to be disliked. He might have been disowned by his rich family, left behind when they fled their arrest warrant, but that didn’t make a difference to the people around them. One aristocrat was as bad as the next.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I’m quite a man of the people. Look, I eat street food.’

He stopped by a girl selling herring and nuts from a tray slung around her neck and bought a bag of chestnuts. As the orchestra tuned up, he leaned against the wall picking off the shells.

He caught Ada’s eye. ‘What?’

‘We’re on the run from a monster with a knife and you’re stopping for a snack?’

‘Absolutely. This is my version of Camille’s great plan. Lie low. Blend in. Wait till the interval and then get Léon to let us out through the stage door.’

She joined him against the wall and scooped chestnuts out of the paper bag.

‘You know, my mother always loved the theatre,’ he said. ‘She’d be in a box, of course. Decked to the nines in half the silk output of Lyon, skirts so wide she’d have to go through doors sideways so every dull socialite in Paris could see how rich and important she was. She would stage little scenes at home with her friends, sometimes even a slice or two of opera. She had a lovely singing voice. She would sing us to sleep as children. No one sings to you when you grow up, do they? But my point is getting away from me – the point is, this,’ he gestured around them, ‘was the one thing we had in common. The lights, the costumes, the drama. The fiction onstage always felt far more appealing than whatever was happening in real life.’