Read Chapter 19: The Festival Opens

Paris Between Pages opened under perfect weather, which Clara distrusted immediately.

At eight on Saturday morning, the street was washed in pale May sunlight. Volunteers carried chairs. Publishers unloaded boxes. Anaïs directed the construction of temporary display walls with terrifying efficiency. Sabine's staff rolled wine crates toward the evening venue. Children began arriving before the official start.

Clara stood in the doorway holding a clipboard.

"You are vibrating," Luc said.

"I am managing."

"You are vibrating administratively."

"The Spanish bookshop is missing two tables."

"They have tables."

"How?"

"I gave them ours."

"Then we are missing two tables."

"Correct."

Clara stared at him.

Luc kissed her forehead and walked away before she could object.

By ten, every room was full.

A translation workshop overflowed into the courtyard. Mireille read poems to seventy people in Sabine's wine bar. Camille taught children to build accordion books. Nassim hosted a discussion on political drawing that became an argument involving a retired diplomat and two teenagers. A walking tour traced fictional Paris from Hemingway to Leïla Slimani, passing through streets where residents looked out of windows at the procession below.

The bookshop till never stopped.

At noon, Clara realised they had already exceeded the previous Saturday's sales record.

At three, the card terminal crashed.

At three ten, it recovered.

At four, a speaker failed to arrive.

At four five, Anaïs took his place on a panel about cities and stories and was better than he would have been.

At six, rain appeared despite the blue sky, lasted eleven minutes, and vanished.

At eight, the evening programme began.

Clara stood at the back of Sabine's bar while Luc spoke with Mireille about the relationship between image, language, and memory. He hated panels, but he was good on this one. He spoke without performance, hands moving when the subject mattered.

"A drawing is not an illustration of a sentence," he said. "It creates a second sentence that cannot be translated into words. The reader lives in the gap."

Clara watched him and felt that dangerous expansion in her chest again.

Love, apparently, did not become less alarming after being named.

At ten thirty, they moved the final event onto the pavement.

The mairie permit allowed amplified sound until eleven. Neighbours leaned from windows. People sat on folding chairs, doorsteps, and the kerb. Someone projected illustrations onto the pale stone façade above the shop.

Luc's drawing of Clara as an imperial administrator appeared three storeys high.

The crowd cheered.

"I will kill you," Clara said.

"Historic archive."

"Defamation."

"Art."

At eleven, the microphone switched off.

Nobody left.

People kept talking, buying books, sharing wine, introducing strangers. The festival had become exactly what Luc described months earlier: a reason to come somewhere.

At midnight, Clara finally locked the till.

The day's sales were more than a normal month had once produced.

She sat down hard on the stairs.

Luc found her there.

"How bad?"

She turned the screen toward him.

He stared.

"Ah."

"That's your expert financial analysis?"

He looked at her and smiled.

"Not bad, imperial administrator."

Clara laughed.

Then she began crying again.

"Oh no," Luc said. "You are becoming French. Too much public emotion."

She hit him with the clipboard.

He took it away and pulled her to her feet.

Around them, volunteers were cleaning. Sabine was singing badly. Nassim had fallen asleep in a chair. Anaïs was dismantling nothing because, she announced, everyone deserved one night without useful behaviour.

Luc put both hands around Clara's face.

"You did this."

"We did."

"Yes."

This time the word held everyone: artists, customers, neighbours, readers, Marianne, the people who had carried wet books at dawn.

Clara looked through the shop window at the pavement still crowded with people.

"Tomorrow again," she said.

Luc groaned.

"Capitalism."

"Community."

"Do not ruin the moment."

She kissed him anyway.