“How odd,” André said, wondering why the gentleman would appear so hurried, in such an agitated state this late in the evening. He glanced down at the card:
Jean-Luc St. Clair
Legal Advocate of the French Republic
André tapped the bridge railing, putting the man’s odd behavior out of his mind as he tucked the card into his pocket. He turned back to the lovely companion beside him. He and Sophie stood alone on the footbridge. Below them, the waters of the Seine lapped the stony quay walls. All of Paris stood before them, the city covered in a blanket of velvety evening, pierced by just the tiniest bursts of light that flickered from streetlamps, apartments, and restaurant windows.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Sophie said, looking out over the river. “I still remember the first time I saw this city.”
“As do I,” André said, recalling his own initial impression of Paris. The noise was what had struck him most: sounds so different than those of his rural lands to the north. The city had seen so much since that time—the Bastille torn down, the poverty and the bread shortages, the lootings and killings. He sighed. “Despite it all, she is still beautiful.”
Sophie flashed a sad smile, her features reflecting the glimmering surface of the Seine, and André realized in that moment that he might just as well have been speaking about her. “But let’s not think about that now,” he said, straightening his posture. “We can at least try to feel happy once in a while.”
She nodded, leaning her hands on the bridge’s railing as she spoke. “I remember how, when I first arrived in Paris, I wondered how I was supposed to sleep at night. I heard people below my window at all hours—students laughing, drunkards fighting, lovers returning from dances. I remember hating my uncle. Wishing he’d allow me out, like everyone else my age.”
“If you’d like to dance…” André took Sophie’s hands in his own and began to sway, a slow, languid dance to match the rhythm of the river’s current beneath them. He began to sing. It was a song about another bridge, a song his mother had loved to sing to him and Remy when they were young. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse…”
Sophie looked up at him and smiled, a twinkle of recognition in her eyes. “The Avignon Bridge song. I know this one.”
He nodded. “My mother always loved to sing that song.”
“Is your mother…gone?”
“Yes,” he said, realizing that he wasn’t exactly lying. His mother was gone. To England, last he knew, even if he hadn’t had word from her in over a year. But to tell Sophie the full story right now would be to spoil the beauty of this perfect moment.
“I am sorry to hear it.” Sophie rested her head on his shoulder, and he was certain that she could hear the racing of his heart.
“Sophie?”
“Yes?”
André swallowed, unsure for a moment—wondering if perhaps he was too brazen—before deciding to pose his question. “What is it that you want?”
She angled her face upward, looking into his eyes with a curious expression. “What do you mean?”
André raised his hands, fanning them out over the city. “From all of this—this city, this nation. This life. What is it that you want?”
She tilted her head to the side, wordlessly weighing the question a moment. “You know something?”
“What?” he asked.
“You are the first person who has ever asked me that.”
André nodded.
“I think you’re probably the first person who has ever even thought I had a right to answer such a question,” she added. “What I want…” She paused. “I suppose I want what so many of us want. To live free. Free from fear. Free from the oppression of my uncle or anyone else. I suppose that someday I’d like to live in a free country. That I’d like to direct my own destiny, raise my own family. That, should I ever have a girl of my own, I will be able to love her and raise her in a manner so entirely unlike the manner in which I was raised. That she’ll never be given away at the age of fourteen, sold as chattel into a loveless and abusive marriage. I suppose I will know that I’ve succeeded in this life if…someday…my grown daughter may be allowed to marry for love.”
André absorbed these words, his mind spinning with the weight of her confessions. After a long pause, leaning toward her, he said: “A life free from fear, and a life filled with love.”
She broke his eye contact. “I suppose it sounds silly.”