“That girl? You mean Vinca?”

Zélie nodded. “Over the past three or four years, we’ve noticed that Pianelli’s book has been constantly out on loan. We did have a number of copies, but there was a waiting list as long as your arm. Vinca often cropped up in conversations with the students. The Heterodites even put on a show about her last year.”

“The Heterodites?”

“A group of rather brilliant young women, radical feminists. A sort of sorority that follows the precepts of an early-twentieth-century New York feminist group. Many of them have rooms in the Nicolas de Staël building, and they wear the tattoo that Vinca used to have on her ankle.”

I remembered the tattoo. The letters GRL PWR discreetly inked onto her skin—girl power. As she was talking, Zélie double-clicked a file on her computer. It was a poster for a musical, The Last Days of Vinca Rockwell. The poster reminded me of a Belle and Sebastian album cover, a black-and-white photo with a pink overlay and artsy typography.

“That’s not all. There were nighttime vigils in the room where Vinca used to stay, a morbid cult devoted to certain relics, and a commemoration of the day of her disappearance.”

“Why on earth would millennials be so obsessed by Vinca?”

Zélie rolled her eyes. “I imagine that a number of girls identify with her, with her storybook love affair with Clément. To them, she embodies a sort of illusory ideal of freedom. And when she disappeared at the age of nineteen, she was frozen in the amber of eternity.”

Zélie got up from her chair and looked through the metal bookshelves behind the reception desk. Eventually, she came back with a copy of Pianelli’s book.

“I kept one. If you want to flip through it.” She sighed.

I ran my hand over the cover. “I can’t believe you’re censoring books in 2017.”

“It’s in the best interests of the students.”

“Yeah, sure. Censorship in Saint-Exupéry—you would never have seen that in my parents’ time.”

Zélie stared at me very calmly for a moment. “As I recall, your parents’ time didn’t end very well…”

I felt rage course through my veins, but I managed to control myself. “What exactly are you referring to?”

“Nothing,” she said prudently.

I knew precisely what she was talking about. In 1998, my parents’ roles at the lycée came to an abrupt, and very unjust, end when they were formally charged with some obscure breach of the regulations relating to granting public contracts.