The Blue (Genevieve Planché #1)

by Nancy Bilyeau

I’ve never attended a party among London society in my life. I cannot help but catch my breath and blink, rapidly, as I walk from the entranceway to a large room, high-ceilinged and brightly lit, yet hazy.

After a minute or so, I perceive that every single person in the room is a man.

From the tempo of this room, no one would know that England is presently at war with France and that young men are dying,

But Billiou is a Huguenot, living among his people, the silk weavers in Spitalfields, if memory serves. I can’t believe a French Protestant would send his own granddaughter here alone, disastrously dressed.”

Grandfather adores his cassoulet — it reminds him of childhood, savoring the Languedoc cooking of his mother.

My grandfather’s family, the Billious, came with the first wave of Protestants seeking refuge in England. That diaspora began some seventy years ago, after King Louis XIV issued the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, outlawing our religion.

I have a knife to my throat. Fear and rage fight for uppermost emotion, with fear winning out. I do not move a muscle.

“Genevieve, listen,” he says, showing me as much patience as he did Harry. “I’m no rake. I am interested in your welfare because I wish to offer you employment. The kind of employment that would change your life.” “What are you talking about?” I sputter. “I should work for you?” “Correct. I was intending to build up to this proposal over a series of social engagements — the Art Society, the opera — but your nocturnal escapade has rather forced the issue.”

“They’ve secured a young chemist who created an entirely new shade of blue somewhere, somehow,” Sir Gabriel says. “More than a shade.

He says, “You must never underestimate King Louis. And should France defeat England in this war and gain any sort of control, you know who would be the first to suffer?” “The Huguenots.”

My next thought was, What if I could develop a new, richer color blue from Brandt’s pure cobalt? I’d be admitted to the Royal Society, write books, be invited to give lectures. I’d be famous.”

For the first time, I am seeing a representation of the color blue that tells the truth of the sky and the water:

Louis is spending too much time with Madame de Pompadour, not enough with his ministers.” “They do call him Louis the Beloved,” snickers Mr. Lawson.

“What?” “It’s the color of France, Genevieve. Blue has been the color of the French monarchy, the sacred symbol of France, for six hundred years. King Louis must want the color desperately, for once he gets the formula for this extraordinary shade — whether it’s for his porcelain, his art, his palaces, the uniforms of his soldiers — it will give France a crucial advantage.

Everything is beautiful: the rows of flowers, the spreading trees, the vivid green hedges. To me, though, the garden is not truly alive. I’m looking at nature whipped into submission. The hedges are sculpted so precisely it is as if every leaf and twig were trimmed with individual shears. Though I see no streams or other sources, the air bursts with the noisy white spray of many fountains, as if to proclaim Versailles’ superiority to nature: we control the water itself.

“Madame de Pompadour lives at Versailles?” I ask. “She has her own permanent apartments within the palace, as well as a house in the garden,”

As the sun lowers in the sky on the tenth of July, 1759, I step into the light carriage bound for Sèvres Porcelain. I’ve no idea what will unfold there, still less why my presence is desired.