The weather was still fine, and Julien could camp in the woods outside the city, like so many other boys and young men who were in hiding. He ran into them sometimes, groups from La Sixième and the French Resistance who were loyal to de Gaulle, the true leader of France, though he was in exile. One evening, Julien came upon two sisters, feral creatures of eight and ten years old who had been lost for weeks after their parents were arrested. Actually, the sisters had found him. He’d made a campsite and was eating the last of Monsieur Bisset’s food, which he’d been doling out to himself in small portions. When he looked up he saw the girls staring, their eyes on his food. They had dark hair and big, glassy eyes, and they appeared to be starving. Their parents had been sent to the terrifying Montluc Prison, where more than two thousand five hundred Jews were imprisoned by the Germans, with thousands deported and eight hundred murdered, dying from torture and neglect. Through a crack in the cupboard door they had seen the soldiers beat their father and do something to their mother that had made her scream. After their parents’ arrest, the girls had hidden in their house with nothing to eat but the peeling paint on the walls. At last, they had climbed out the window and fled into the woods. They trusted no one, but they were starving, so there they were, watching him, not saying a word.

Julien shared his food with them as the girls crouched close by, but not too near. They wolfed down the bread. Julien had saved a crumb, which he kept in his hand. A sparrow swooped down from the tree, then lit in the palm of his hand to take the bread, eating it, unafraid. The girls laughed, shocked that they could do anything other than cry.

Julien brought them to the Bissets’ late that night. Monsieur stared at him when he came to the back door, but when he saw the girls he understood. He summoned his wife from her bed, and when she saw how ragged and underfed the children were, she quickly gestured, willing to take them in. She let them bathe in the big old tub and had them wear her son’s childhood clothing until she could find something more suitable. It was the first time in weeks that Madame had left her bed.

“She needed children,” Monsieur said, to explain why the girls could stay while Julien had been made to leave. They had gone out to have a smoke in the garden. It was a habit Julien had picked up from Victor. “We can take them. We’ll say they’re our own, and after a while they will be.”