The perfumer's shop on Rue du Bac had been in Marguerite's family for three generations. She had grown up in the back rooms, in the particular atmosphere of a place that smells of everything and nothing, where individual notes collapse into each other and become a kind of neutral complex air that Marguerite had breathed so long she could no longer smell it unless she left the city for a week and came back. The shop had survived one war already. She had not, in 1940, believed it would survive another. She had been wrong, though wrong in ways she had not anticipated.
The family who came to her in October were a mother, a grandmother, and two children under eight. They came through the door in the ordinary way, with the particular composure of people who have learned to make themselves unremarkable in public. The mother asked about jasmine extract, which was not a question about jasmine extract. Marguerite had been waiting for this question since June, since the afternoon a man she trusted had explained to her what he needed from her shop and what it would cost if she said no, and what it might cost regardless. She said yes before he finished speaking.
The rooms under the shop were not large, but they were dry, and they did not connect to anything the authorities had maps of. Marguerite brought food and news and, because she was a woman who believed in small dignities, fresh flowers when she could get them. The grandmother was a botanist. The elder child was teaching herself to read from a book of fables Marguerite had found in the storeroom. The younger one had discovered that the amber bottles on the lowest shelf, when light came through the small window at the right angle, cast a pattern on the wall that looked, if you were imaginative and eight years old, like a garden. They called it their garden. Marguerite did not tell them there were seventeen of these gardens, hidden in seventeen similar rooms in other parts of the city. She kept her accounts, as always, private.
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