She is shy of these volumes. At first, she touches only the chains attached to the books, as if she were inspecting pieces of jewelry. “Which one interests you most?” he asks. “Because to hold a book, even to open it, is an experience in itself. If I showed you a beautiful tapestry, such as the ones that hang in your rooms, wouldn’t you want to run your fingers up and down the cloth? Wouldn’t you marvel at the level of detail, the head of a deer peeping out over a hedge, each hound’s tooth perfectly threaded? It is no different with books. They are works of art.”

She hesitates, so he chooses for her. He produces a key and unlocks the Bible, and she offers her hands to receive the volume as she did Radegonde. It is large and heavy as an anvil of iron. Like a supplicant, she carries the book to a desk and opens it. The frontispiece, a sky of stars, greets her. The sky is the blue of crushed lapis lazuli. The stars are gold leaf.

Le Maçon tells her it was another Charles, the Dauphin’s grandfather, who built a library in a tower that had once housed falcons in the Louvre in Paris. Those who forget what he did for the war say it is his greatest legacy. The library contained nearly a thousand manuscripts, including the works of Aristotle, his Ethics, Politics, and Economics. Saint Louis’s Bible was housed in that same library and the French translations of the work of the Italian scholar Giovanni Boccaccio and Le Roman de la Rose. Across the tower’s three floors, there were books on every subject one could think of, all impeccably ordered and categorized. The significance of this library wasn’t only the number of manuscripts it contained; it was that it featured so many works in French, not Latin or Greek. The King had ordered these translations and tasked the finest scholars in the realm with executing them.

But that library is no more, he says. We can no longer call it ours.

“The English have burned it?” Joan asks. But he shakes his head. It was sold to John, Duke of Bedford. The contents of that library now rest in Rouen, capital of Normandy, deep in English territory. The Duke of Bedford bought it for a price that would be disgraceful to tell, and it will be years before we see another collection of its kind, if ever again, in this kingdom.