She smiled. “I turned sixteen three months ago.”

“You know how forgetful I am. It’s my favorite camera, and it would be a shame to think of it sitting unused in its box. Sadly, I can no longer use it.” Dr. Toselli, an expert photographer with many years of experience, was slowly going blind. A veterinarian by profession, he had planned to spend his retirement taking photos and printing the images in his darkroom. Now, sadly, he would spend it in the dark.

“It is too fine,” she said. “I can’t accept it.” Ah, but she yearned to. For the past two years, she had been keeping house and tending the garden for a small wage. When he’d noticed her interest in photography, he’d given her lessons, which she had absorbed like one of the sea sponges sold at the Bandol docks.

“Lisette, it would please me so much to know my favorite camera is in your talented hands, capturing images the way I taught you. The moments of life are ephemeral and unpredictable. We must capture the best ones and keep them safe in our hearts. If you have learned nothing else from me, you must learn this.”

His words brought a burn of tears to her eyes. Lisette’s two older brothers had both been killed early on in the Battle of France. Étienne had served as a chasseur alpin, attached to a mountain regiment of foot soldiers. He had been shot while defending a strategic position along the Maginot Line in the northeast. Roland, perhaps even more tragically, died after a fistfight with fellow soldiers in his unit who had accused him of a shameful vice she scarcely understood. She had made a few portraits of them before they’d gone off to join the fighting, and now she cherished these images with all her heart.

She bit her lip. “You’re far too kind.”

“On the contrary, I am a selfish old man. I am greedy for the pleasure it gives me to help you learn to do something I have loved all my life. And also, I do not trust the Italian soldiers. Ever since they took over our little village, certain things have been disappearing. I know you will keep my camera safe.”

She shuddered, remembering how the Italians had rampaged through the streets, claiming revenge for their comrades who had been killed during the invasion. The soldiers had raided the summer villas of rich English and Parisian aristocrats, but they were not above robbing the common folk as well. A tenuous order had been recently restored, thanks to a truce struck between the Italian Armistice Commission and local officials. But no one in Bellerive trusted the soldiers.

The Italian invasion was a horrible blow to France, which had already fought for—and lost—its northern region to Germany. Last June, Paris had been bombed in broad daylight and then declared “ville ouverte” to the Germans, and the new leader, Maréchal Pétain, had signed an armistice. While reading the news to Dr. Toselli, she’d discovered that all the world condemned the action. The president of America, Monsieur Roosevelt, declared that “the hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor.” France had been cut in two—the occupied zone to the north, and the so-called free zone here in the south. But there was no freedom here, merely a different foreign authority to answer to.