Half past eight in the morning, on the twenty-second of October, 1895, in Granville, on the Normandy coast. Stocky, plain, and twenty-one, in her collar, tie, and boxy skirt, Mado Pelletier stands across the street from the little railway station holding her lidded metal lunch bucket, watching.
The down train, as they call any service from the capital, deposited Mado here yesterday afternoon, sooty and bone-jarred. Only now does it occur to her that she could have waited until this morning to leave Paris, disembarked early at Dreux, Surdon, or Flers, bought what she needed, and caught the next express back. All that really matters is that she be on a fast train to Paris by lunchtime on the twenty-second.
She supposes she came all the way to Granville because it’s the end of the line. The Company of the West’s posters call this wind-raked town the Monaco of the North. In the hours Mado’s been here, she hasn’t sought out the lighthouse or the casino or any of the so-called sights of this resort, off-season. Except one—she had a hankering to, for once in her life, set eyes on the sea.
It wasn’t pretty like everyone said. Wonderfully fierce, in fact—those waves biting into the stones of the beach yesterday evening as the sun went down behind the empty Lady Bathers’ hall. Hard to believe in October that invalids flocked here every summer to be wheeled out in bathing machines and half drowned for their health. Mado found a sandy patch and even made an attempt at a castle.
She’s always loved being outside, staying out late, spending as little time as possible in the room that has a tang of rot at the back of the Pelletiers’ greengrocery in Paris. (It had to hold all four of them when Mado was growing up, but it’s just her and her long-faced mother now.) Mado’s best memory is of setting off firecrackers in the street one Bastille Day. So this trip to Granville is the kind of thing she’d have enjoyed hugely when she was younger. Not that her parents would ever have been able to spare the money. Like much of the population of the famously wealthy City of Light, even before she was widowed, Madame Pelletier lived by the skin of her teeth.
Her daughter’s been planning this trip since she turned twenty-one. Mado spent last night in a room on the unfashionable inland side of the Granville train station, picked at random and paid for with the few coins she hadn’t set aside for buying supplies. She blew out the lantern and squeezed her eyes shut for hours at a time, but her mind would never stop buzzing long enough to let her fall asleep.
Up at dawn this Tuesday morning, like a good housewife she did her shopping as soon as the shutters opened. Back in the shabby room, she made her meticulous preparations before leaving in plenty of time to catch the up train to Paris.
So what’s preventing Mado from walking into Granville Station now and taking her seat in a Third-Class carriage? What’s keeping her feet—still stubby, child-size, in second-hand boots—rooted to the pavement?
Motionless at her side, a small boy with a schoolbag over his shoulders stares at the station entrance as if imitating Mado. She gives him a glare, but his round eyes don’t even blink.
Come on, in you go, she tells herself. The strap of her satchel cuts uncomfortably between her breasts.
A fellow glides by on a bicycle, smirking and waggling his eyebrows at her. Mado’s been getting this a lot in Granville. That’s the price of wearing a tailored jacket with short, oiled-down hair. Even back in Paris, where quite a few young women go about à landrogyne, sneers and jeers have come Mado’s way ever since she scraped together the cash to buy this outfit at a flea market last year. Her hair she cuts herself with the razor that was one of the few possessions her father had when he died.