In turn, Madame Carême was ecstatic. In Charlotte she saw a young lady with an exquisite figure and perfect bones. Her dresses would dance out of the shop after this particular duke’s daughter appeared at a few balls wearing her creations. Adelaide’s eyes twinkled when she heard the price of a particularly elegant gown that Charlotte was considering. She estimated the price to be rather less than half the going rate, but madame was shrewdly correct to reduce the price, she thought. Without a corset, her daughter’s body was revealed to have developed natural, luxurious curves. Men would swoon when they saw the way her breasts smoothly rose out of Madame Carême’s tiny bodices, looking perfectly shaped and utterly unrestrained. Women would order the same gown, hoping to duplicate the effect.

“She won’t lose the top of that dress, will she?” Adelaide asked with some anxiety.

Charlotte was standing in front of a three-sided mirror, wearing a startling gown. It was stark white and its only ornamentation were six or seven narrow black ribbons falling straight down the skirt, which seemed endless as it began just under Charlotte’s breasts. And there was practically no top at all, Adelaide thought, wondering what Marcel would think when he saw the gown. It was the most starkly fashionable dress Adelaide had ever seen.

She cleared her throat. “Charlotte,” she said. “You must have it. You will start a new fashion.”

Charlotte turned around. “Oh, yes,” she said happily. “I shall have it, thank you, madame.” And madame smiled, and ferociously beckoned to a girl hovering in the corner with another creation reverently laid over her arms.

At forty-one, Adelaide considered herself far too old for the new fashions, but even she was talked into buying just a few morning dresses: pale, delicate gowns with the so-fashionable Greek key pattern embroidered at the hem. They are constructed, madame whispered confidentially, so that one might wear a light waist corset with them, should one desire. And Adelaide did so desire. Not for her, this naked look that Charlotte was taking up so quickly!

Still … Adelaide smiled, thinking with satisfaction of the cattish remarks that some dowagers had made to her recently about her youngest daughter being likely to “stay on her hands,” and “never fall off the shelf.” Nonsense. No one, she thought, looking at Charlotte’s long slender legs and lily-white skin, would ever murmur to her again about Charlotte being long in the tooth. Not in these clothes!

That afternoon Monsieur Pamplemousse arrived and before Charlotte had time to think about it, her long hair was lying in little sheaves around her dressing-room chair.

“Regardez,” said Monsieur Pamplemousse excitedly. “You are an Incomparable!” He kissed his fingers. “Ah, my scissors are made of gold!”