PARIS, FRANCE
WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 1940

As long as she kept dancing, Lucille Girard could pretend the world wasn’t falling apart.

In the practice room at the Palais Garnier, Lucie and the others in the corps de ballet curtsied to Serge Lifar, the ballet master, as the piano played the tune for the grande révérance.

Lifar dismissed the ballerinas, and they headed to the dressing room, their pointe shoes softly thudding on the polished wood floor, but more softly than ever. Since Germany had invaded the Netherlands and Belgium and France earlier in the month, dancers were fleeing Paris.

“Mademoiselle Girard?” the ballet master called in his Ukrainian-accented French.

Lucie’s breath caught. He rarely singled her out, and she turned back with a light smile full of expectation and a tight chest full of dread. “Oui, monsieur?”

Serge Lifar stood with the erect bearing of a dancer in his prime and the casual authority of the innovative choreographer who had returned the Paris Opéra Ballet to glory. “I am surprised you are still in Paris. You are an American. You should go home.”

Lucie had read the notice from US Ambassador William Bullitt in Le Matin that morning. Yes, she could sail with the other expatriates on the SS Washington from Bordeaux on June 4, but she wouldn’t. “This is my home. I won’t let German soldiers or bombs scare me.”

He glanced away, and a muscle twitched in his sharp-angled cheek. “The French girls would gladly take your place.”

“Oui, monsieur. Thank you for your concern for my safety.” Lucie dropped a small révérance and scurried off, over boards graced by ballerinas for over sixty years, by the dancers in Edgar Degas’s paintings, and for the past sixteen years, by little Lucie Girard.

In the dressing room for the quadrille, the fifth and lowest rank of dancers, she squeezed onto a bench with all the young girls. After she untied the ribbons of her pointe shoes, she eased the shoes off, folded in the sides, and wound the ribbons around the insteps as she inspected the toes for spots that needed darning.

Somber faces and quiet conversations filled the dressing room, so Lucie gave the girls reassuring smiles and words as she shimmied out of her skirted leotard and into her street dress.

Lucie blew the girls a kiss and stepped into the hallway to wait for her friends in the coryphée and the sujet, the fourth and third ranks, where most of the ballerinas Lucie’s age were.

She leaned back against the wall as dancers breezed down the hall. After six years at the Paris Opéra Ballet School, Lucie had been admitted to the corps de ballet at the age of sixteen. For ten years since, she’d felt the sting of not advancing to the next rank, tempered by the joy of continuing to dance in one of the best ballets in the world.

“Lucie!” Véronique Baudin and Marie-Claude Desjardins bussed her on the cheek, and the three roommates made their way out of the building made famous by the novel The Phantom of the Opera.

Out on Avenue de l’Opéra, Lucie inserted herself between her friends on the sidewalk to create a pleasing tableau of Véronique’s golden tresses, Lucie’s light brown waves, and Marie-Claude’s raven curls.

Not that the refugees on the avenue would care about tableaux, and Lucie ached for their plight. A stoop-shouldered man in peasant’s garb pulled a two-wheeled cart loaded with small children, furniture, and baggage, and his wife trudged beside him, leading a dozen goats.

“What beasts the Germans are,” Marie-Claude muttered about the soldiers who had frightened these people out of their homes.

“Did you hear?” Véronique stepped around an abandoned crate on the sidewalk. “The Nazis cut off our boys in Belgium, and now they’re driving north to finish them off.”

Marie-Claude wrinkled her pretty little nose. “British beasts. Running away at Dunkirk and leaving us French to fend for ourselves.”

“Let’s go this way.” Lucie led her friends to a side street too narrow for the refugees. “And it’s such a lovely spring day. Let’s not talk of the war.”

“What else can we talk about?” Véronique frowned up at the blue sky as Parisians did nowadays, watching for Luftwaffe bombers.

At the intersection ahead, a blue-caped policeman carrying a rifle—still a jarring sight—checked a young man’s identity papers.

“Do you suppose he’s a German spy?” Véronique whispered, her green eyes enormous. “I heard a parachutist landed in the Tuileries yesterday.”

Lucie smiled at her friend. “If we believed every reported sighting of a parachutist, the Germans would outnumber the French in Paris. We mustn’t be disheartened by rumors.”

In the next block, a middle-aged couple in expensive suits stood beside a sleek black car and barked orders at servants who were loading the car with boxes.

Marie-Claude brushed past them, forcing the wife to take a little step to the side. “Bourgeois beasts.”

Lucie’s mouth went tight, and she nodded. Typical businessman who lobbied for war so he could get rich and now fled when that war threatened those riches.

The ladies passed the Louvre, crossed the Seine, and entered the Latin Quarter on the Left Bank, home of artists and writers and others of like mind.

The cheery green façade of Green Leaf Books quickened Lucie’s steps.

“We’ll see you upstairs.” Véronique blew Lucie a kiss. “We know you want to visit the Greenblatts.”

Lucie blew a kiss back and entered the English-language bookstore, a home for American and British and French literati since Hal and Erma Greenblatt founded it after the Great War. When Lucie’s parents moved to Paris in 1923, they’d become fast friends with the Greenblatts.

“Hello, Lucie.” Hal peeked out of the back office. “Come join us.”

“Okay.” Lucie flipped back to English. Why was he in the office? Hal liked to greet customers and help them choose books, while Erma did the bookkeeping and other tasks.

After Lucie greeted Bernadette Martel behind the cash register, she made her way through the store, past the delightfully jumbled bookshelves and the tables which fostered conversations about art and theater and the important things in life.

Boxes were piled outside the office door, and inside the office Hal and Erma stood in front of the desk, faces wan.

“What—what’s wrong?” Lucie asked.

Hal set his hand on Lucie’s shoulder, his brown eyes sad. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Leaving? But you can’t.”

“We must.” Erma lifted her thin shoulders as she always did when her decisions were etched in stone. “The Nazis don’t allow Jews to run businesses.”

“They won’t come to Paris, I know it.” Lucie gestured to the north where French soldiers lined the Somme and Aisne Rivers. “Besides, you’re American citizens. They won’t do anything to you. Our country is neutral.”

“We can’t take any chances,” Erma said. “We’re going to Bordeaux and sailing home. You should come too.”

Lucie had already told them she’d never leave. But as a Christian, she could afford to be brave and remain in Paris, come what may. She could never forgive herself if she persuaded the Greenblatts to stay and they ended up impoverished—or worse.

An ache grew in her chest, but she gave them an understanding look. “You’re taking the SS Washington.”

Erma stepped behind the desk and opened a drawer. “If we can.”

“Hush, Erma. Don’t worry the girl.”

“If you can?” Lucie glanced back and forth between the couple.

“We don’t have the money for the passage.” Erma pulled out folders and stacked them on the desk. “It’s all tied up in the store.”

Lucie’s hand rolled tight around the strap of her ballet bag. “You can—you can sell the store, can’t you?”

Hal chuckled and ran his hand through his black hair threaded with silver. “Who would buy it? All the British and American expatriates are fleeing.”

“What will you do?” Lucie’s voice came out small.

“We have friends.” Hal spread his hands wide as if to embrace all those he had welcomed over the years. “We have lots of friends.”

Erma thumped a stack of papers on the desk, her mouth tight. “I refuse to beg.”

Hal dropped Lucie a quick wink. He’d beg his friends.

What if those friends didn’t have the means or the heart to help? What if the Germans did conquer all of France, including Bordeaux?

No. No. A shiver ran through her. Lucie couldn’t let anything happen to them, not when she had both the means and the heart. “I’ll give you the money. I have enough.”

“What?” Erma’s gaze skewered her. “We can’t take your money.”

“Why not?” She entreated Hal with her eyes, as if she were thirteen again and asking him to dip into the allowance from her parents for a new pair of pointe shoes. “I’m practically family. I lived with you for three years. Because of you, I could stay in the ballet school when my parents returned to New York. You’ve always said I’m like the daughter you never had.”

Hal patted her shoulder. “If we took your money, how would you get home?”

“I’m not going home. I told you.”

Erma flipped through a folder. “You’ll change your mind when the bombs start falling. Look what Hitler did to Warsaw and Rotterdam.”

It wouldn’t happen to Paris. It couldn’t. “I’ll be fine. I want you to have my money.”

Hal turned Lucie to the door. “Don’t worry about us. Now, I know you’re hungry after practice. Go. Eat. We’ll talk to you later tonight.”

Out into the warmth of the store, her home, but it was all falling away, falling apart. The Greenblatts—leaving. The store—closing.

Green Leaf Books was their dream, their life, and they were giving it up.

Ballet was Lucie’s dream. Her life. All she knew. Could she give it up? If she did, what would she have? Who would she be?

She rose to demi-pointe and turned slowly, taking in the shelves and tomes and the rich scent, and she knew what she’d have, who she’d be.

Lucie whirled back into the office. “I’ll buy the store.”

Erma looked up from the box she was packing. “Pardon?”

“I’ll buy the store. Not a gift. A business transaction.”

Hal’s chin dropped. “Dear, sweet Lucie. You are so kind. But you—you’re a ballerina.”

“Not anymore.” Although she did stand in fifth position. She breathed a little prayer for forgiveness for lying. “Lifar plans to cut me. I need a job. I’ll run the bookstore.”

After twenty-five years of marriage, Hal and Erma could speak volumes to each other with a glance. And they did. Then Erma sighed and stood up straight. “But Lucie, you’re a ballerina.”

Lucie’s cheeks warmed. True, she wasn’t terribly smart, especially with numbers, and she wasn’t well read. But she kept her chin up. “I’m good with people, with customers. And Bernadette helps you with the business end of things. She knows how it runs. She and I—we can run the store.”

“Lucie . . .” Hal’s voice roughened.

Her eyes stung. Her lashes felt heavy. “And when we kick the Germans back to where they belong, this store will be here, waiting for you. I promise.”

Erma stared at the folder in her hands, her chin wagging back and forth. Wavering.

“I want to do this.” Lucie swiped the moisture from her eyes. “I need to do this. Please. Please trust me with your store.”

Erma set down the folder and came to Lucie, ever the stern one, the practical one, the one to say no. She gripped Lucie’s shoulders and pressed her forehead to Lucie’s. “It’s yours. You dear, dear girl.”

Lucie fumbled for Erma’s beloved hands and tried to say thank you, but she could only nod. Then she broke away and ran out, ran upstairs to her flat.

Now she couldn’t change her mind about leaving Paris, even if the Germans came. Now she had to resign from the ballet. Now she’d have to figure out how to run a bookstore.

But she wouldn’t change a thing.