the Mother-of-Pearl Button: a Novel — Paris 18481871, from Commune to Love Long Delayed

Paris, 1848. Victor Lefèvre is born in a tool shed in the faubourg Saint-Germain-not the elegant part, he would have been quick to clarify. He has nothing: no name worth anything, no fortune, no mapped-out future. What he has is a girl with hazel eyes who places a pebble exactly right in a makeshift fortress, and who gives him, on the morning she leaves for Rouen, a mother-of-pearl button. So you'll remember that some things shine. Even when you can't see them. Ninon Vasseur grew up in the same building, in the concierge's lodge. She left at ten, married at twenty, did what needed to be done. Victor became a typesetter, crossed paths with Jules Vallès in a print shop of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, learned that words can be weapons for people who have nothing else. The button stayed in his pocket for thirteen years. They find each other again in 1871, in a Paris in revolution. The Commune is burning. The Versailles troops are advancing block by block. They have little time left-less, perhaps, than they think. The Mother-of-Pearl Button is a novel of love and class, of mute faithfulness and tragic delay. A story in which ordinary people move through History without quite losing themselves in it, because they carry something small and bright in their pocket. Written in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century French novel-the social precision of Balzac, the sweep of Hugo, the quiet tenderness of Flaubert for his minor characters-this is an intimate chronicle of an era when Paris was inventing modernity on the barricades. For readers who understand that the most heartbreaking love story isn't the one that ends badly, but the one that takes too long to begin.

Pagina's: 146, Paperback, Independently published