Read Chapter 30: Aftermath of Fame

The invitation arrived on a scrap of cheap paper, folded once and sealed with a blot of red wax that bore no crest. Élise read it three times before she believed it.

*The Republican Committee of the Sixth Arrondissement requests the honor of Mademoiselle Moreau’s presence at their evening session, this Tuesday, at the Café de la Rotonde.*

“They want me to speak,” she said aloud, though the shop was empty save for Gabriel, who dozed in the back room, and the rats in the walls. Antoine had gone out an hour ago to buy ink. Jean-Luc had not yet returned from whatever errand had taken him into the streets at dawn.

She should not go. She was a printer, not an orator. Her father had always said the ink did the talking, and the press was a louder voice than any pair of lungs.

But she remembered the cold room at the Hôtel de Ville, the men who had looked through her as though she were furniture. She remembered how her own words had died in her throat when she tried to speak of women, of workers, of anyone who did not own a coat with brass buttons.

She tucked the invitation into her apron pocket.

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The Café de la Rotonde was not a café at all, not in any way Élise understood the word. There was no steam rising from coffee urns, no smell of bread and chicory. The tables had been shoved against the walls, and chairs were arranged in a ragged semicircle around a raised platform where a single oil lamp struggled against the tobacco smoke.

Forty men stood or sat in clusters, their voices a low rumble that faltered as Élise stepped through the door. Antoine was at her elbow—he had insisted on accompanying her when she told him of the invitation, and she had been too grateful to argue.

A man with a cavalry officer’s mustache and a civilian’s frock coat broke from the nearest cluster and approached. He looked at Élise with the frank appraisal of a horse trader.

“Mademoiselle Moreau. I am Citizen Renard. We corresponded—my secretary wrote to you.”

“Your secretary wrote to me,” Élise said, keeping her voice even. “I received the invitation.”

“Yes, well.” Renard’s eyes flicked to Antoine, then back to her. “We were curious. The woman who prints the *Voix du Peuple*—that is you? You are the editor? Truly?”

“I am the editor,” Élise said. “Truly.”

Renard laughed, a short bark without humor. “Remarkable. Truly remarkable. We have arranged a chair for you at the front—you will speak after Citizen Duval on the matter of the national workshops.” He lowered his voice. “I should warn you, some of the men are… uncertain. About a woman addressing the committee. You understand.”

“I understand,” Élise said, “that you invited me.”

“Because you are a curiosity!” Renard said, spreading his hands. “And because your paper is read. The men who read it cannot vote, cannot fight, cannot do much of anything except read. But they read. That is something.”

Antoine made a sound low in his throat, but Élise touched his sleeve before he could speak. “I will speak,” she said. “Where is the podium?”

---

The podium was a wine crate draped with a tricolor flag, and standing behind it, Élise felt the weight of forty pairs of eyes like stones thrown at her back. Citizen Duval had just finished a speech on the national workshops—a speech about funding, about organization, about the proper channels through which working men might petition the government for relief.

Working men.

The phrase had lodged in Élise’s chest like a splinter, and now, with the smoke thick in her throat and the faces hostile before her, she pulled it out.

“Citizens,” she began. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted. She cleared her throat and tried again, louder. “Citizens. Citizen Duval has spoken of the national workshops as a solution for the unemployed. He has spoken of funding, of oversight, of the machinery of relief. I ask you a simpler question: who among you has ever stood in a bread line?”

A murmur. The men shifted in their chairs.

“I have,” Élise continued. “I have stood in a bread line with my father, when the price of flour rose and our presses sat idle. I have watched a woman with four children fainted from hunger before the baker opened his door, and I have seen the men of the National Guard walk past her without a second glance. Now you ask me to speak of workshops, of committees, of the proper means of distributing charity—and I tell you, citizens, that charity is not justice. A workshop is not a wage. A committee is not a voice.”

“You are a voice!” someone shouted from the back. “You print a newspaper!”

“I print a newspaper,” Élise agreed, “and I am fortunate. But there are women in Paris who work sixteen hours a day in the print shops, in the sewing rooms, in the laundries—women who cannot read the words I set in type because no one taught them their letters. Will the national workshops teach them? Will the republic give them bread for their children?”

“The republic cannot do everything at once,” Duval cut in. He was a heavyset man with a printer’s forearms and a merchant’s waistcoat, and he spoke with the patience of a schoolmaster correcting a child. “We must first secure the government. Then we may consider the question of women.”

“Then you will wait forever,” Élise said. “Because the question of women will not wait. We are half of Paris. We are half of France. We have starved beside you, we have fought beside you on the barricades, and we will not be asked to stand behind you in the bread lines of the new republic.”

A man in the second row stood up. He was young, with a student’s thin face and an orator’s high forehead. “Mademoiselle Moreau,” he said, with exaggerated courtesy, “you speak of women as though they were men. You would have us give them the vote? The right to sit in chambers and make laws?”

“I would have you not make laws about them without them,” Élise said. The words came easier now, burning like good brandy. “I would have you ask a laundress what she needs before you decide what is good for her. I would have you read the words of women before you dismiss them as sentiment.”

“And what have women written?” the student asked, with a smile that was meant to be charming. “Love letters? Diaries?”

Élise reached into her pocket and pulled out the proof sheet of the morning’s edition. She unfolded it and held it up, so that the lamplight caught the black ink, the heavy type, the headline she had set herself.

“I have written,” she said. “I am writing. And I am not the only one. There are women in the clubs, in the societies, in the shops and the markets and the convents—women who have read the *Voix du Peuple*, who have written to me with their own stories, their own demands. I will print them. I will print every one of them, until you cannot pretend we do not exist. You may call us a curiosity. You may call us a novelty. But you will read us.”

Silence. The smoke curled toward the ceiling.

Then Renard clapped, slowly, twice. A few others joined him. The student sat down, his smile gone.

Élise stepped back from the crate, her heart hammering against her ribs. She had said what she came to say. She had said more than she meant to say.

Antoine was standing at the back, near the door, and as she descended from the podium, he met her eyes. He did not smile, but something in his face softened—a loosening of the tension she had not noticed until it was gone.

“Well,” he said, as she reached him. “That was not what they expected.”

“They expected a novelty,” Élise said. Her hands were trembling. She pressed them together. “I showed them a printer.”

“You showed them a force of nature,” Antoine said. He reached into his coat pocket—and paused. His expression flickered. He drew out his hand.

In his palm lay the locket.

Élise’s breath caught. She had given it to him in the cemetery, had let him carry it while she wept at his father’s grave, and in the whirlwind of the past days she had forgotten where it had gone.

“I have been carrying it,” Antoine said quietly. “I thought—I do not know what I thought. I thought perhaps you would want it back when you were ready.” He held it out to her. “You are ready now, I think.”

Élise took the locket. The gold was warm from his pocket. She turned it over in her fingers, felt the faint engraving of her mother’s initials, and did not open it. Not here. Not among the men who were still talking behind her, their voices rising again as they argued over what she had said.

She looked at Antoine. “My mother. You once said you might find records of her. In the newspapers from before I was born.”

“I have not looked,” Antoine admitted. “There has been no time.”

“There will never be time,” Élise said. “There will always be a revolution, always a deadline, always another edition to set. If I wait until the world is still, I will wait forever.”

Antoine was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I will look. When this is over—when Jean-Luc is found, when the republic is declared—I will go to the archives and I will find her. I will find the records of your mother.”

Élise closed her fist around the locket. It was not hope, exactly. It was too worn for hope. But it was something.

They stepped out of the café into the cold April night. The streets were quiet, the lamplight painting pools of yellow on the wet cobbles. Paris was holding its breath, waiting for the republic to be declared, waiting for the next blow to fall.

“They will never accept a woman,” Élise said. She did not mean the men in the café. She meant the men who would write the constitution, who would declare the republic, who would decide who had the right to speak.

“No,” Antoine said. “They will not accept one.” He looked at her. “But they will have to accept you.”

Élise laughed, a broken sound. “And how many editions will that take?”

“As many as it takes,” Antoine said. “We have type enough for a thousand.”

She put the locket in her own pocket now, close against her heart, and began to walk. The print shop was a mile away, and the morning’s edition would not set itself.

The fight was not over. It would never be over, not in her lifetime, perhaps not in her children’s lifetime. But she had learned tonight that she could stand before forty hostile men and make her voice heard.

She had learned that she could be a curiosity—and still burn.