Read Chapter 4: The Schoolroom Barricade

The schoolroom smelled of chalk dust and solder. Élise had not been inside the École de la Rue des Francs-Bourgeois since the Brothers had locked its doors in March, but the Communards had found other keys. Now the long oak desks sat pushed against the windows, stacked two and three high, their tops scarred with generations of inkwells and the new, raw gouges of bayonet practice. In the corner, where the crucifix used to hang above the master’s desk, someone had nailed a red flag. The cloth was rough, homespun, and it had not been hemmed properly. It was beginning to fray.

Élise carried a bucket of water from the cistern in the courtyard, stepping over a length of rope and a coil of fuse that had no business being near the children. The man who had requisitioned the building, a printer named Bastien with a beard like a hedge, had assured her that the school would serve as a rallying point, a supply depot, a place of safety.

“The people’s children will not be forgotten, Mademoiselle Moreau,” he had said, with the kind of earnestness that made her want to believe him, despite the ammunition crates stacked beside the piano.

There were twelve children now, clustered at the back of the room away from the barricaded windows. They were the leftovers of the Commune’s promise of free, universal schooling—a promise that had evaporated when the shells began to fall. Their parents were at the barricades, or dead, or simply gone. Élise was trying to teach them to sing.

“No more princes, no more lords,” she led, her voice cracking from dust and disuse. She tapped her hand on her thigh to keep the rhythm. “The people rule, the people rise.”

The children mumbled. A boy named Lucien, no older than eight, was picking at a scab on his knee with fierce concentration. A girl beside him, pale and thin, was watching the window, not the flag.

“Let us try it with more vigor,” Élise said, forcing brightness into her tone. “Imagine you are on a march. Your boots are striking the cobbles. The people are watching from their windows, and they are cheering for you.”

Lucien looked up, his small face pinched. “Was it like that on the Rue de Rivoli, Mademoiselle?”

Élise’s arm throbbed beneath her sleeve. The graze had healed to a pink line, but the memory of the rifle shot—the mysterious crack from Henri’s building, the way she had not known whether to run to him or from him—had not. She had told the children nothing of it. Marguerite lay in the church hospital, still feverish, still breathing. Élise had gone to find a doctor, as she had resolved, and had found instead this: a requisitioned classroom, a rusty bucket, and a song she did not fully believe in.

“It was not singing,” she said quietly. Then, louder: “But that is why we sing now. To prepare our hearts for what is to come.”

From the courtyard, a bugle call. Not a military call she recognized—more of a warning, a bleating alarm. Bastien appeared at the door, his face grim.

“Versailles scouts on the Rue des Archives. They’re mapping our positions,” he said. “Comrades are going to the rooftops. Mademoiselle, keep the children away from the windows.”

He was gone before she could respond. Élise turned to the children. Her heart was a drum, but her face was stone.

“Game,” she said. “We are going to play a game. It is called The Mice and the Hawk. When the hawk is near, the mice must go underground. You must crawl under the desks. You must be so quiet that the hawk would think the room is empty.”

Lucien’s eyes widened. “Will there be shooting?”

“There will always be shooting,” Élise said, before she could stop herself. She softened her voice. “But the mice are clever. The mice will be safe. Go now, under the desks. Hold hands if you are frightened.”

They moved. The children knew this game already. They knew the sound of shell fire, the crack of rifles, the heavy silence after a salvo. They crawled on their bellies, taking their stations with a practiced precision that broke Élise’s heart. She herself knelt by the window, not looking out, but watching the sliver of light between two barricaded desks. She could see the Rue des Archives beyond the courtyard gate, and on the far corner, a cluster of dark uniforms.

Henri had seen the school from two hundred yards away. It stood at the end of the Rue des Archives like a squat brick bastion, its windows a patchwork of furniture and boarding. His orders were simple: observe, map, report. The Trocadéro post was a lunatic’s assignment, a forward position so exposed that the Commune cannon on Montmartre could plum it at their leisure, but this was his first duty of the day—to note which buildings along the Rue des Archives were fortified, which were occupied, which could be taken in the first push.

He lifted his field glasses. The lenses were smudged with rain and dust, and he wiped them with his sleeve, bringing the school into sharp focus. The barricade in the courtyard was amateur—a few overturned carts, a heap of sandbags, a piano, for God’s sake, dragged out and turned on its side. The roof line was unguarded. A child could take this position with a single determined assault.

Then he saw her.

Through the slit between the desks on the lower floor, a flash of movement. A woman in a gray dress, kneeling. Her hair was coming loose from its pins, dark and escaping. She was not holding a rifle. She was not stacking ammunition. She had her hands pressed together, as if in prayer, and her head was bowed low, as if she were listening to something on the floor beneath her.

The schoolmistress.

The woman from the barricade.

Henri lowered his glasses. His heart had taken up a rhythm he did not like, a fast and scrambling beat. He raised the glasses again. She shifted, and he saw the profile—the straight nose, the determined set of her jaw. She was speaking to the floor. Speaking to children, he realized. She had gathered them beneath the desks, and she was telling them something, some story, some comfort.

Behind her, on the wall, a red flag. A flag of revolution. A flag of his enemy.

A voice at his shoulder. “Lieutenant. What do you see?”

Henri turned. Private Garnier, a young man from the provinces with a face like a ploughed field, was squinting at the school with his own un-aspected gaze. Garnier had been assigned to him as a runner, but Henri suspected the man was here to watch him, to measure his enthusiasm for the cause.

“A building,” Henri said flatly. “Backed with furniture. Light fortification, unguarded roof. Two men in the courtyard, likely carrying messages, not rifles. A school, by its shape. We should note it for the infantry. It will not hold for more than ten minutes.”

He closed his glasses with a click. He did not look at Garnier.

“But Lieutenant,” Garnier said, “you were staring at it a long while. I thought you saw a gun emplacement.”

Henri forced a laugh. It came out dry, unconvincing. “I was staring because it is our task to stare, Private. That is what scouting is. You look at an empty school and you see a school. I look at it and I see a stack of kindling that a single shell will set ablaze. Do you understand the difference?”

He heard Garnier shift his weight. The silence stretched, and Henri knew that the younger man was weighing his own suspicion against the etiquette of rank. Finally, Garnier said: “Of course, Lieutenant. I’ll make the note.”

“You will write nothing,” Henri said, sharper than he intended. He softened his voice. “I will file the report this evening. You are to wait here and watch the intersection for movement. When you see the bread cart from the Rue Saint-Antoine, you will signal me.”

Garnier saluted, but the hesitation in his movement was precise, deliberate—a crack in the veneer of discipline that Henri had seen before and had never learned to ignore. He walked away, his boots crunching on gravel, and he did not look back at the schoolroom.

But he knew Garnier had looked.

He knew Garnier had seen his face when he looked through the glasses. He knew he had revealed too much.

Henri walked to the end of the street, his report already forming in his mind. The school was nothing—a post, a depot, a flag on a wall. He would tell his captain it was empty, that the choir had fled, that there was nothing there worth a shell. He would tell this lie, and he would do it cleanly, because the alternative was to tell the truth: that his aim was true, but his heart was not, and he could not bring himself to give the order that would burn down the room where she knelt with the children.

Behind him, he heard Garnier’s low voice, speaking to another soldier. He could not make out the words, but he heard the tone—the speculative, insinuating murmur of a man filing away the faults of his betters.

Henri walked into the street and did not turn around.