She appreciated her life with the Lévis, her lovely pressed uniforms, her new coat and boots, a bureau filled with undergarments and scarves the lady of the house had offered when she’d grown tired of them. A girl who had had only cows for company had come to reside in the most beautiful city in the world. She spent hours walking in the Jardin des Tuileries and along the boulevards with their heavenly shops, buying ice cream on summer evenings and eating all manner of cakes, all more delicious than any of the ones she had ever baked. Sometimes she forgot that the house where she worked was not her own. Nothing was, really, not the kitchen, or her clothes, or the boys she had come to care for, perhaps, in Victor’s case, too much. In the last year, when she’d realized he’d become a man, it was awkward to be with him, especially when she noticed the way he looked at her. Perhaps her thoughts of leaving began then.

Or perhaps it was on the day she heard the professor’s wife speaking about her. Madame had called Marianne la fille, the girl, as if she had no name, and all at once she realized that, indeed, she had nothing of her own. Hadn’t that been why she’d left her father’s farm in the first place? To find something that belonged to her and her alone? That hadn’t happened here, and what was worse, the city had gone dark, all of the initial light she had been so amazed by disappearing day by day.

The Lévis did not understand their slow disenfranchisement and the erosion of their rights, but Marianne came from a line of people who had been persecuted by the Catholic majority; she’d grown up sitting in the town hall, hearing stories of mistreatments and murders. The residents of this region knew that people must seek protection before it was too late, and Marianne began to sense it was too late for the Jews. She heard what people were saying in the markets and was privy to displays of hatred that would have stunned the Lévis. All Jews were refugees, people said, even those whose parents and grandparents considered themselves French and had fought in the Great War. None were truly French, and all should be deported to Germany and Poland. Jews weren’t really people, they baked blood into their loaves of bread; their children were brought up to be thieves. No one wanted the Germans in Paris, but surely they would not be marching on France if not for the Jews.