“If Valjean thinks he’s been discovered, he’ll disappear.” I turn in frustration to Javert. “Tell him!”

Javert eyes me coldly. She has no idea who I am or if she can trust me, but from her reaction to le Maire on the Pont Neuf and the conversations I’ve overheard among the officers at the Sûreté, she does know Valjean.

“This girl is correct,” she says now. “Valjean is an expert at evading capture. It’s best to leave him be until the moment we plan to arrest him.”

“Well, then you’ll lead a division of the army to arrest him as soon as we’ve squashed the rebels.”

I can’t let them proceed with their plans. They will wipe out all of the revolutionaries. St. Juste, Grantaire, and all the boys will be gone—and with them, all my plans.

“But Ettie’s in danger now!” I say with real desperation.

“So is France!” the prince barks back at me. “If this city falls to revolutionaries, the whole country falls, and every ruling house in the land will be put to the guillotine. So you’ll forgive me if I place the fate of France and the stability of our people before the safety of one girl.”

“One friend,” I say quietly.

“What?”

“You said we were your only friends.”

The prince looks furious.

“Everything is weighing on my shoulders,” he growls. “Father is abroad with Général Bonaparte, and he’s trusted me with keeping the peace in his absence.”

“Peace?” I march over to the table and wave a hand over the soldiers and streets, using precious seconds to familiarize myself with each position so I can report back to St. Juste. “Since when is this peace?”

“Since a hundred noble children died of poisoning in one month.”

When the children of the nobility fell, their numbers were so great that mass funerals were organized. I watched the processions from the rooftops, hidden in the shadows. I saw the prince seated beside his mother and father. And my heart, which had been sick with fear that somehow he, too, would have been poisoned, felt a pang of relief. All around him the nobles wailed and wept. And when he raised his head and turned, I could see the sharp shine of tears in his eyes. Their grief was his; he was one of them, after all. But had he wept when starvation and poison sent a quarter of the city’s poor to their graves? There had been no funeral processions then.

After the funerals came the news that doctors had found poison in the stomachs of the dead children. The nobility did not understand how it had been done. But the servants knew; they had seen their masters bid their children to drink from crystal bottles. And so the whispers grew and spread, and although the nobles had no memory of the deed, they somehow came to realize that they had done this unforgivable thing, that they had killed their own children.

The prince’s voice is like stone. “Since countless of my peers and family have been struck with the terrible impulse to plunge their hands into fire.” His eyes are glittering with rage. His voice breaks. “Since we found ourselves under attack. And no one could say how it came to be. So it was decided that we should root out our enemies by creating the Société.”