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I wanted it to lead me to another lesson. “For instance, can you see the river?”
    “No.”
    “It has disappeared, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Is knowledge through the senses the only knowledge we go by? In this case, which is true: the senses that tell you the river isn’t there, or your intellect that remembers that it is?”
    “The intellect.”
    “According to what I see, the sun travels in his golden chariot across the sky every day. Is that true?”
    “No, the sun never moves.”
    “Precisely. So sometimes if we go only by what the senses perceive, we can be misled. We hold by what the intellect knows to be true. You’ll find that in the quotidian, the world of the senses, especially in these days, people will make up excuses and justifications for hurting someone, but Rousseau said his lesson was for every time of life, so the intellect holds on to that truth.”
    “I will test the senses now,” she said. “Maybe I can see the river from the terrace.”
    I followed her out. We were both hatless and without our shawls, and I could feel the cold fog piercing my linen dress. I could see it swirling in front of the chestnut tree, veiling half of its limbs.
    “What is that?”
    Marie pointed to a dead bird amid yellow leaves beneath the tree. I could not tell whether the bird had died of cold or from the attentions of one of Marguerite’s cats or both. “It’s a dead bird.”
    Marie walked slowly up to it and looked at it closely.
    “Let’s go back in the house.”
    “It’s beautiful,” she said, and lingered, then followed me. Then she went back to the bird, and I followed her. You could see the spine of each blue-black feather, and the short ribs that arched off to either side, whitish against the dark feathers. You could look at all the things you could not see when it was moving so fast in the sky or skittishly in the branches. The little body in the middle was lost in the wide fan of dark feathers, and Marie was squatting by it.
    “May I bring the bird inside?”
    “Just remember how it looks, and we ’ll draw a picture of it, as if it’s still flying in the sky.”
    We sat near the fire and held our palms out to it until they were as hot as we could stand it, then Marie spread her paper out on the floor, where she liked to lie on her stomach on the Savonnerie rug by the fire and draw. Once when my parents visited, my mother took this opportunity to explain to little Marie that this was not a very ladylike position, to which my father immediately replied, “Look at her fine drawing. This is the position in which inspiration strikes her. I would not sacrifice art for vanity.” Marie kept working on the floor by the fire, and it became her regular place.
    At the noon meal the chestnut tree outside the windows had now completely disappeared in the fog. “Why is the fog like a magician?”
    Marie asked her mother. She never received an answer because Françoise, Marguerite’s maidservant, announced that someone was at the front door. Marguerite got up to answer the call: muffled voices, then her piercing scream. I told Marie to stay at the table and ran to my sister.
    “Papa,” she sobbed. “Papa’s been killed. A riot, a grain riot, on the embankment,” she got out. I looked at the boy from the préfecture , as if Marguerite had got it wrong. I didn’t break down at the time, like my sister, because I didn’t believe the messenger. Papa could handle himself. He had gone through riots before this summer. He just stayed calm when everyone else was insane. He had even administered to fallen rioters. He was known in the town. There was some mistake.
    “There is some mistake,” I said to the boy, uncomfortable in the doorway with all the crying.
    “A mob was looting a grain barge, Mademoiselle,” he said to me.
    When I didn’t answer, he added pleadingly, as if it would help me believe him, “You know what the bread prices have been, Mademoiselle. People were hurt. Some