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stomach—had managed to dip his fingers into the frigid March waters of the Seine.
    “Now?” Lucien begged as his father steered him around a corner.
    “Now.” Guillaume laughed as he removed his fingers.
    Opening his eyes, Lucien was knocked a step back by what he saw, so that Guillaume had to prop him up. He was confronted by a massive piano—a true grand, an Érard—which occupied the room with the quiet majesty of a mountain. Stunned, Lucien slowly walked around it once, and then again, tentatively caressing the dark curves of the body and the gigantic wooden legs until he arrived at the front,where he counted more than seven octaves of keys, or two more than on the piano he regularly played.
    He reached out and played a low C that rattled the windows as he turned to his father with wide eyes. “Is this ours?”
    “It belongs to the princess,” Guillaume said, “but she already has one, if not more. When I told her you were a young musician, she agreed to let us keep it here.” He helped Lucien pull out the bench. “Go ahead—it’s okay, try it. You only live once.”
    Lucien stared for a few more seconds before he decided to start off with a chromatic scale that, while not particularly difficult or useful, was one of his favorite exercises. His fingers nimbly flitted up the keyboard, from the groaning bass to the chirping high keys, a hundred miles away at the other end, and as he listened to the notes reverberate off the walls, he felt like he had wandered into a house full of butterflies. He next played a few thundering chords that made his father cover his ears before he turned to something more delicate, if not quite as pleasing, a popular French piece—“Dans le ciel” by Albert Delève—he had been working on with his music teacher.
    He was about to begin another when he glanced up and was surprised to see his father’s eyes red and teary. “Is it Maman?” he asked, referring to his mother, who had died during a cholera epidemic almost seven years earlier. She, too, had been a singer, but because Lucien had been only a toddler at the time, he never remembered her in more than a wisp or a fragment.
    “Yes.” Guillaume nodded. “But please, don’t stop—that’s why it’s here.”
    “Do I sound like her?” Lucien asked, knowing that his father often described her voice as a beautiful coloratura, capable of projecting ten shades of love or hate in a single note.
    “Very much.” Guillaume smiled sadly as Lucien returned his attention to the keyboard and began a new song.
    …
    T HIS WAS THE first of many hours Lucien spent with the piano after they moved in, though as the weather improved and summer beckoned, he also liked to join his father outside. The triangular tip of the Île offered the illusion that the city was flowing by on either side of the river, particularly since the garden possessed an implausible stillness, interrupted only by the birds and the insects, rustling leaves, and lapping water. While it was the best summer Lucien could remember—or imagine—as July gave way to August, he could not ignore a familiar dread as he envisioned the start of school, which led him to dream about stowing away on one of the barges that regularly passed by on the Seine.
    He had always hated school, not so much because he was a terrible student but because of an overwhelming tedium he associated with almost every subject. He enjoyed learning things from his father but found his teachers—and the books they relied on—uniformly uninspiring and couldn’t imagine why he should care so much about math or grammar or history, when all he wanted to think about was music and the opera. His incorrigible tendency to daydream and to hum—and to play an imaginary piano on his desk or sometimes on his knees—made him an object of scorn among students and teachers alike, the latter of whom were even more mystified given Guillaume’s affiliation with the country’s most elite university.
    Lucien