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Papa with all her heart, a heart he cleaved in two. “Those trollops,” she said. “All those trollops up in the place Pigalle, he preferred them to what he got at home for free.”
    From my pocket I count out enough that she will not have to choose between a roasted chicken and a bottle of absinthe, and hold it out to her. Antoinette will shake her head that yet again I succumbed to Maman’s tricks. But Maman looks at me with bewilderment on her face and then closes my fingers over the coins. “Already you’re giving up most of what you earn,” she says. “I got a few sous stashed away.”
    “Oh.”
    “You got an angel in your heart, Marie.” She puts her hands on my shoulders and then hauls me into her arms, which are stronger and softer and warmer than Antoinette would guess. “It’s that poor dead sister of yours, my dearest dear.”
    What I know about angels, all clearly put down in Sister Evangeline’s catechism, is that they are numberless and good and happy and endowed with tremendous gifts, that they love us and protect us in body and soul. But some of those angels sin. They are drawn down by infernal ropes to the lower reaches of hell. And those wicked angels, they come back, laying snares, awaiting a moment of hatred or envy or despair, a chance to plunge a girl into the torment of eternal flame.
    I wonder, sometimes, if Maman is right that Marie the First lives in my heart. I was trembling in Monsieur Pluque’s office. He had said to dance, and I could not think and then suddenly, like a clap of thunder, I knew to be a drifting leaf. Was it Marie the First putting such an idea in my head, an idea I never before thought? Was the idea of becoming a leaf one of her tremendous gifts? Other times, though, I switch over to thinking Marie the First clings with blistering fingers to that descending infernal rope. If she is a good angel and in my heart, like Maman says, she watched Papa cough until it kept him from the porcelain factory and Maman grow weary when there was no bread and then Papa take his last breath. Why did she not send one of her tremendous gifts? And where is she now that Monsieur LeBlanc pounds at the door? I am not so sure I want the angel of my tiny, dead sister dwelling in my heart.
    “Tonight, roasted chicken in your belly,” Maman says, loosening her arms, stepping back from me. “And always, an angel in your heart.”
    T he practice room is large and square with a barre affixed to the wall. The floor is slanted, they say, to get us ready for the stage, an explanation that curls my fingers into tight fists. There is an earthen stove in the corner; chairs—one for the dance mistress, another for the violinist accompanying us; and benches along one wall for the knitting, reading, snoozing mothers too watchful to set their darlings loose in the Opéra. Maman does not come, but Antoinette climbs the hundred flights of stairs just to stick her head around the door and give a little wave before rushing off to see Monsieur Leroy.
    For a month I have been moved up to Madame Dominique’s class and girls my own age. By a stroke of luck she had come to Madame Théodore’s class to speak to the violinist, but she lingered, her watchfulness causing even the wickedest of the petits rats to keep her toes away from the backside of the girl next in line at the barre. When it was time for limbering—bending forward and arching backward and laying a chest flat on the floor with legs spread out wide to the sides—Madame Dominique’s eyes stayed put on me. Then she walked over and gave me the same exercises Monsieur Pluque had back in the spring, and I felt so full of hope but afraid, too, because hope is something that usually gets snatched away. A week later just as Madame Théodore was about to begin class, Madame Dominique showed up and said I should go to her practice room the next morning, that from then on it would be her calling out the steps and correcting me. I could have split in two