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breathtaking and undeniable: she longed to be released from the mundane burdens of Castle Shannon, from working and shopping and cooking and cleaning and everything else that seemed to leave so little time for anything fun or different. She wanted to be young again, but this time confident and talented and pretty, so that like Callas she could travel the world to perform on ornate stages framed by velvet curtains and then go to parties on silver yachts. She wanted to drink champagne, to smoke long cigarettes, and to laugh outrageously with her head back before making love to ten different men, each one more handsome than the last. She wanted a private banker to bring her a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills at the beginning of each month, to spend on white pearls or fur coats or to give to the poor if she were so inclined.
    Then she remembered the other Maria
—her
Maria—andimagined her daughter waking up without her, and knew she was not prepared to leave, not ever, not even in her wildest fantasies. Her cheeks were wet as she walked to the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror and smiled at her folly—Maria would be up in less than five hours—and rapped a knuckle against her head the way her father used to do playfully. She tiptoed into her sleeping daughter’s room and kissed her, vowing that she would help Maria not only to vanquish such feelings of remorse and dissatisfaction—however vague—but also to harness them, to take flight and never look back.

6
The Apology of Socrates
    PARIS, 1846. Lucien Marchand, nine years old, was already dizzy with excitement when his father covered his eyes and gently led him down the hallway.
    “Can I look yet?” he could not resist asking.
    “No—and don’t squirm,” Guillaume said. “Just a few more feet.”
    Lucien could not imagine what his father was about to unveil, given what he had already seen in the last hour, their first in a new apartment on the Île St.-Louis. Though he had known about the move for months—ever since Guillaume was awarded a life tenancy for providing the beleaguered emperor with a cure for what in polite society was called
la condition infernale
(or in medical terms,
impotentia coeundi
)—he still couldn’t quite believe he was going to live on the Île. He didn’t doubt his father—who was, after all, a botany professor at the École normale supérieure—but it was the kind of disbelief he associated with certain animals at the zoo (especially zebrasand giraffes), the steaming engine of a train, the glass-covered arcade on the Rue Des Esseintes, or really anything else that was amazing to behold but that it would never occur to him to possess. The way the Île floated in the middle of the Seine, with its stately façades quietly peeking out from behind the trees at the rest of the city, made it seem like more of a magical ship than a place where people actually lived, and one that would surely sail away before he could board.
    They were not in the main residence of the Hôtel Georges—which like most mansions on the Île was occupied by high nobility, in this case, Prince and Princess Milhelescou of Romania—but in a previously unused apartment next to the servant quarters. This was still a big improvement over their old lodgings, as Lucien had confirmed a few minutes earlier, running wildly through the space as if to capture it and then giddy and breathless as he turned in circles, trying to count all the doorways. The library was already filled with shelves and shelves of his father’s books and treatises, and a window in his new bedroom looked out onto the courtyard, where he had just seen the gilded carriage of the princess pull out to the street. Downstairs was a basement filled with brick archways—this was where Guillaume planned to set up his laboratory—and a secret passageway that led to a triangular plot of land at the tip of the Île, with enough room for a greenhouse and a garden, and where Lucien—lying on his