“Oh.” Olivier would be worried if she didn’t return to the apartment soon. She had already stayed out longer than she’d intended. “That’s very kind but no, thank you. I need to get home, you see.”
Madame Foulon took a step back, and it was only then that Elise noticed the bulge in the other woman’s belly, slightly bigger than her own. She was expecting a child, too. “We can call you a car after we’ve called a doctor,” she said calmly. “But…” Something flickered in the woman’s eyes. “Well, I couldn’t live with myself if I let something happen to you. When is your baby due to arrive?”
Elise hesitated. “January, the doctor says. Yours?”
Madame Foulon’s eyes lit up. “January, as well! I think it will be a girl this time; I can feel it. Who knows, perhaps they will even be friends, your child and mine. Come now, my shop is very near the park. You can lean on the carriage if you need support.” She was already herding Elise away from the bench, and to her surprise, Elise found she was relieved to be led.
“If you’re certain,” Elise said. “I don’t want to be an inconvenience.”
“No inconvenience at all. In fact, I insist. Now come, boys,” Madame Foulon said to her children. The older one trotted after his mother; the younger one craned his neck to look back at Elise from his carriage, his eyes daring her to disobey. “We’re taking Madame LeClair home with us.”
CHAPTER TWO
Juliette could tell, even before the woman collapsed, that something was wrong. Juliette’s pregnancies had come in rapid succession, enough to make her an expert in such things. Claude, who was now four, had arrived first, followed quickly by Antoinette, who had died just thirteen days later and who now lay beneath the cold dirt of a cemetery just south of the park. Alphonse, who was two now, had arrived next, a surprise borne of grief, and now Juliette was pregnant once again with a child she knew was a girl, a child she was terrified of losing just as she’d lost Antoinette. She couldn’t bear that kind of pain again, and so she prayed each night for the gaping hole in her heart to one day be filled.
The other woman—Elise LeClair—had reminded Juliette of a nervous colt, her motions jerky, her muscles tensed to run. But Juliette had plenty of practice in coaxing Claude and Alphonse to do what she needed them to, so it was not difficult to cheerfully nudge the woman toward the path that led to the southern edge of the park while keeping up a steady stream of chatter.
Madame LeClair had likely thought it was merely an expression when Juliette had said she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she let something bad happen. But it was quite true. Even before she’d had children of her own, Juliette had always been drawn to lost children, maimed birds, stray cats, anyone who might need her help. It was one of the things her husband, Paul, said he loved about her. In fact, they had first met in this very park, the sprawling Bois de Boulogne, five years earlier when Juliette was spending the summer with her elderly grand-tante Marie, her mother’s aunt, who lived in the seizième, just east of the park. She’d been strolling down a wooded path that day when she’d come across a tiny, injured sparrow. She’d scooped it up with tears in her eyes and looked around quickly for help, her gaze landing on a tall, broad-shouldered man walking toward her. His hair was sandy with flecks of gray.
“Excuse me,” she’d said in her very best French. Her mother, who had died a few years earlier, had insisted she learn the language of her ancestors, though her family had been in the States for two generations. “Do you know whether there might be someone who could help me save this bird?”
The man had stopped and stared at her before breaking into a kind smile. “Américaine?”
Evidently her French hadn’t been as flawless as she’d hoped. “Oui, monsieur. I am just visiting, but this poor bird…”
“Come with me,” the man had answered, his English slow and deliberate. “I will take you and your bird to Docteur Babin.”
Docteur Babin, it had turned out, was not a veterinarian, but rather a general physician and a frequent customer of the small bookshop the handsome man—who introduced himself as Paul Foulon—had taken over just the year before, following the death of his parents. Juliette’s parents had died, too, she told him, and he’d given her a tender smile before saying, “I’m sorry,” in English, and, gesturing back and forth between the two of them, “Deux orphelins.” Two orphans. In French, it didn’t sound quite as pitiful.
By the time Grand-tante Marie died of pneumonia two months later, Paul, fifteen years Juliette’s senior, had already proposed, and by the end of 1934, they were married and Juliette had reorganized the bookshop into one that carried both French books and English-language classics, a destination for local residents of Boulogne-Billancourt and western Paris’s thriving expatriate community.
Later, Docteur Babin had delivered her two boys—Claude in 1935 and Alphonse in 1937, but between their two births had been the tragedy of Antoinette, who had simply ceased breathing in her sleep. Juliette had never forgiven herself, although Docteur Babin had assured her it wasn’t her fault. “Sometimes, Madame Foulon, these things simply happen,” he had said, but she had known the words were a lie. Juliette was Antoinette’s mother, and she had failed to keep her child alive.
So no, she could not bear the thought of leaving another pregnant woman alone if her baby was in peril. What if something went wrong? Perhaps this was a test from God. She would not fail, not this time.
“Come, then,” she said, slowing slightly so that Madame LeClair, who had paused with a gasp to clutch her belly again, could keep up. “We’re nearly there, and I’ll send my husband to fetch Docteur Babin right away. Hurry along now, Claude!”
Claude looked up at her, his big gray eyes, which matched hers exactly, wide with concern. “Is the lady going to be okay?” he asked in a loud whisper.
“She’ll be just fine, dear,” she reassured him cheerfully, glancing over his head at Elise. “Nearly to the shop!”
“What kind of shop?” Madame LeClair asked, putting a hand on the carriage to steady herself as she kept pace.
“It’s a bookshop!” Juliette kept her voice deliberately bright, for she had always felt that sunny chatter had the power to distract. It was what she employed each time one of the boys came to her with a skinned knee or a bruise. She simply pretended until things were all right. “It belonged to my husband’s parents, and we’ve worked so hard to make something of it. We’ve even put in a children’s section, because children need to fall in love with words, don’t they? If you give a person a book, you give him the world. And children deserve the world, don’t you think?”
Madame LeClair was staring at her, and Juliette wondered if her attempts at sunny chatter had instead made her sound like a raving lunatic.
“I must apologize,” Juliette said. “I tend to warble on sometimes.”
“No, it’s not that. It is just—am I mistaken?—your accent sounds American.”
Juliette groaned. “Is it that obvious?”
“No.” Madame LeClair smiled and switched to English. “It is just that I am American, too.”
“Well, what are the odds?” Actually, come to think of it, the chances were decent. Juliette had read in the newspaper that there were now nearly thirty thousand Americans living in or near Paris. It was why it had seemed so important to include English-language books; for Americans and Brits on the western side of Paris, it was more convenient to come to her store than to trek to the more well-known Shakespeare and Company on rue de l’Odéon near the Jardin du Luxembourg, more than an hour’s walk away.
They emerged from the edge of the park near the Stade Roland Garros and hurried down the avenue Jean-Baptiste-Clément. “Almost there!” Juliette declared brightly, hurrying Claude along. “La Librairie des Rêves, here we come!”
“La Librairie des Rêves?” Madame LeClair repeated, panting.
“Oh yes. The Bookshop of Dreams. It was my idea; we renamed the store the year after we married, when we were living the kind of life we always imagined. I’ve always believed that books are simply dreams on paper, taking us where we most need to go.”
They turned left on the small rue Goblet, and the bookshop loomed ahead of them on the left. Juliette breathed a sigh of relief. “Here we are!” She pushed the carriage through the door and held it open for Claude, and then for Madame LeClair, who entered tentatively. Madame LeClair stared around, taking it in, and Juliette wondered what the other woman was seeing. She knew the store was a tangle of shelves, but she loved them all deeply; they carried new books and used books alike, for the age of a book was of no importance; all that mattered was that stories could belong to each of us in individual ways. Still, some might call it cluttered or chaotic. She hoped Madame LeClair was not that sort of a person.