Once, when she was eight or nine, her father took her to the Panthéon in Paris to describe Foucault’s pendulum. Its bob, he said, was a golden sphere shaped like a child’s top. It swung from a wire that was sixty-seven meters long; because its trajectory changed over time, he explained, it proved beyond all doubt that the earth rotated. But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault’s pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Panthéon, after she had fallen asleep that
...more
