Read Chapter 7: The Pasteur of the Rue de Sèvres

The clinic on the Rue de Sèvres smelled of carbolic soap and old blood. Élise had expected chaos—the building had been a pharmacy before the war, and the Communard medical committee had requisitioned it for the overflow of wounded. But the woman who met her at the door was calm, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hair pinned tight beneath a white cap.

“You’re the schoolteacher,” the woman said. “Camille’s friend.”

Élise nodded, surprised. “You know Camille?”

“Everyone knows Camille.” The woman—her name was Solange, she said—led Élise past a row of cots where men dozed, their bandages fresh, their faces grey with exhaustion. “She’s the one who keeps us organized. Says she learned it from her father. A doctor, wasn’t he?”

Élise’s hand went to the letter folded inside her coat. She had read it twice since Henri had given it to her on the Tuileries roof, the paper worn at the creases from her anxious fingers. She had not opened the seal—it was not hers to read—but she knew what it was. A father’s last words. And Camille did not know her father was dead.

“Is she here?” Élise asked.

Solange shook her head. “Out on the barricades near the Palais-Royal. Came through last night with a stretcher party. Said she’d be back by evening.”

Evening. Élise had two hours before she needed to be at the school for the children’s lessons, and the streets between here and there were growing more dangerous by the day. But the letter burned against her ribs. She had to give it to Camille. She could not carry this weight alone.

“Then I’ll wait.”

---

She did not wait. The concierge at the clinic’s front desk had a copy of *Le Père Duchêne* open on the counter, and Élise’s eye caught a familiar name on the page. Not in the article—journalists had little interest in the quiet work of civil servants—but in a list of government officials who had fled Paris before the siege, their properties now confiscated by the Commune.

Her father’s name.

Élise read the paragraph twice, her breath shallow. *Moreau, Adolphe—former Deputy Minister of Finance, Versailles.* The address listed was the family home in the 7th arrondissement, the house where she had grown up, where her mother’s portrait still hung in the hallway. The house she had left in March when the Commune had declared itself.

She knew her father had been a government man. He had worked for the Ministry of Finance for thirty years, rising through the ranks. But Deputy Minister? Versailles?

The paper trembled in her hands. She folded it and returned it to the counter, her movements slow, as though she were underwater.

“I need to go,” she said to Solange. “Tell Camille I’ll find her tomorrow. It’s urgent.”

---

The school on the Rue des Archives was quiet when she arrived. The children had been dismissed for the afternoon, and the building’s makeshift infirmary was empty except for Marguerite, who lay on a cot by the window, her fever stubborn but not rising. Élise checked her pulse, smoothed her hair back from her forehead, and left her with a young volunteer before slipping out the back.

Jules would be at the café on the Rue de Bretagne. He always was, mid-afternoon, nursing a single coffee for hours while he watched the street. Élise had never questioned it. Her brother had always been restless, always watching, as though the world were a chessboard and he was calculating moves.

She found him at his usual table, a newspaper propped in front of his face. He looked up as she slid into the chair opposite him, and for a moment, his expression flickered—surprise, then something harder.

“Élise,” he said. “You should be at the school.”

“I read the paper,” she said. “Le Père Duchêne.”

Jules’s jaw tightened. “That rag wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them.”

“They listed father’s name. Deputy Minister. Versailles.” Élise’s voice was steady, but her heart was pounding. “Is it true?”

For a long moment, Jules said nothing. He folded his paper, set it aside, and met her eyes. “Yes.”

“And you?” she asked. The word came out barely a whisper. “Are you his messenger?”

Jules leaned forward, his voice dropping low. “I am a servant of France, Élise. The real France—the one that will survive this madness. Versailles is the legitimate government. The Commune is a fever, and fevers break.”

“People are dying, Jules. Children are starving. The National Guard shells their own city.”

“And whose fault is that?” His hand was flat on the table, the fingers white with tension. “The Commune chose to rise. The Commune chose to stand against the law. You sound like you’ve forgotten what side our family is on.”

“Our family.” Élise laughed, a sound without warmth. “Our family is on the side that sent me to teach children how to read. Our family is on the side that gave me a locket with Mother’s portrait inside, and taught me that mercy was a virtue. And now I find out our family is on the side that starves Paris into submission.”

Jules’s face went pale. “Careful.”

“Or what? You’ll report me to Versailles?” She stood, her chair scraping against the floor. The few other patrons looked up, then quickly away. “You’ve already reported my neighbors, haven’t you? The baker who feeds the National Guard? The woman who sews red flags in her cellar?”

Jules said nothing, and his silence was confession.

“You came to me at the barricade,” Élise said, her voice breaking. “You wrote me a note telling me to flee, to save myself. Was that affection, Jules? Or was it calculated—keep the family’s name safe from suspicion?”

“Both.” He said it without shame. “You are my sister, Élise. I don’t want you to die in a ditch with the other fools. But I won’t let you drag our name through the mud either. The Commune will fall—it’s a matter of weeks, perhaps days. When it does, Versailles will purge. And everyone who wore the red sash, everyone who nursed the wounded, everyone who stood with the insurrectionists—they will pay.”

Élise stared at him. Her brother. The boy who had taught her to ride a bicycle, who had stood beside her at their mother’s funeral, who had promised to protect her always.

“I am a nurse,” she said quietly. “I teach children. I am not a soldier. I am not an insurrectionist.”

“No,” Jules agreed. “But you are known to them. You are seen in their company. And when the list is made, a schoolteacher who tends Communard wounded while her brother serves Versailles? That is the kind of inconsistency that gets a family investigated.”

The threat hung in the air. Élise felt the room tilt around her.

“You would have me escape,” she said. “You would have me abandon them—the wounded, the children, my friends—so that our father’s reputation remains unsullied.”

“I would have you live.”

“Then you do not know me at all.”

She turned and walked out of the café, out of the warmth into the cold afternoon air. The streets were quiet; a distant boom marked another shell landing in the northeast. She did not look back. She could not.

---

An hour later, Élise sat on the edge of a cot in the Rue de Sèvres clinic. Solange had given her a cup of weak tea, which she held without drinking. The letter from Dr. Roux was still in her coat, and now it felt heavier than ever.

Her brother was a spy for Versailles. Her father was a minister in the government that was methodically destroying her city. Her family was on the other side of the barricades—not just politically, but morally, in every way that mattered.

And she was still here.

She thought of Henri, of his hands on hers as he bandaged her palm on the Tuileries roof. A government doctor with kind eyes and a locket that matched her own, that strange mirror of a mystery she hadn’t untangled. He had asked her to leave the Commune. He had offered her a way out.

She had refused. And now she knew why she had to.

Her family had given her a name, a locket, a set of beliefs. But the Commune had given her purpose. And purpose, she was discovering, mattered more than blood.

“Solange,” she called. “Do you know how to find Camille Roux?”

Solange appeared in the doorway, drying her hands on a cloth. “She was heading to the barricade on the Rue de Rivoli. Should be back by dusk.”

“Then I’ll wait.” Élise set down the tea. “I have something for her. From her father.”

She did not say what it was. She did not have to. Solange nodded and disappeared, and Élise sat alone with the letter and the weight of what she now knew, her family’s name and her own loyalty at war within her chest.