Free Finding Emilie by Laurel Corona Page A

“Oops,” she said, collapsing into a chair. “I guess maybe a wand really is better.”
    JULIE SET OFF with Lili the following morning in Hôtel Bercy’s double-seated sedan chair, carried by four servants in livery. She would leave Lili at Hôtel Lomont before continuing on to the home of one of her friends, then return to cut short Lili’s torment by whisking her home for dinner at midday.
    Lili splayed her fingers in front of her as if she were counting something in her head. “I’m twelve years old,” she said. “And I’ve been going to Baronne Lomont’s since I was six. Once a week for six years, minus the weeks I was at the abbey, I must have visited her more than two hundred times.”
    “You seem oddly cheerful about it,” Julie said, giving Lili a quizzical look.
    Lili grinned. “Meadowlark has to defeat the Evil Queen in my new story, and Delphine gave me an idea. I’m going to disappoint Baronne Lomont by giving her nothing to criticize—even though she’ll probably find something anyway.” She thought for a moment. “I’ve always thought visiting her was like going into battle, but now I think if I curtsey well enough and manage myself just so, maybe she’ll leave me alone. And that’s what I really want. To be able to be myself—at least inside me where no one else sees—with-out having to spend all my time thinking about how I’m supposed to be.”
    “You are a very wise girl, ma chérie.” Julie patted Lili’s knee. “When you don’t shock her anymore, just watch how quickly she’ll lose interest. But still, being gracious to people you don’t enjoy is oneof the most important things you can learn.” She winked. “Besides sipping consommé without making any noise.”
    Julie’s face grew solemn, and she turned to look out the window of the coach. “Things are changing, Lili. When Baronne Lomont was young, a girl’s independence of mind was seen as an affront. It’s too late for someone her age to change, but people coming along now see things a little differently. At least some do.”
    She turned back toward Lili. “Monsieur Rousseau says that the restraints put on children deform their natural character, and they grow up being comfortable only in a society that’s been deformed to match. He says we’re suffering the consequences of that now, and I think he’s probably right.”
    The carriage pulled up in front of an austere gray building untouched by the morning sun yet to penetrate the densely packed buildings of the Île Saint-Louis. “We’re here,” Maman said, pulling Lili to her in a quick embrace. “I love you, ma petite,” she said. “Now go wield your new sword.”
    1764
    “ CORPUS OMNE PERSEVERARE in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum.” Fourteen-year-old Lili traced her fingers over the words as her tutor, Louis Nohant, looked on. Firelight danced off the glass of the book cabinets in the wood-paneled library of Hôtel Bercy on the dreary winter afternoon. “I can’t understand this,” she said. “The Latin is so—odd.”
    Delphine put down her pencil on the rail of the portable easel she had moved near the fireplace. “Lili! I can’t draw you with your mouth all grumpy like that!”
    Lili looked across the room at her. “Sorry,” she said. “I forgot you were sketching, with this Newton driving me so crazy.”
    “Well, why do you care so much?” Delphine whined. “It makesme cross when you get so involved neither of you wants to say anything to me.”
    Lili put her finger in the fold of Newton’s Principia. “I just want answers, that’s all. Don’t you think we ought to care about how things really are?”
    “If you mean the ‘we’ that’s somebody else, yes. But if it’s the kind of ‘we’ that means I have to go over there and study physics rather than sketch or play the piano, that’s different.”
    Monsieur Nohant, a thin and nervous young man of twenty-two, rapped his knuckles on the desk.