Chapter Text
The first thing Élise Amélie de Villiers noticed when she first met Lucien Moreau was that he was not looking at her with the reverence she was accustomed to.
This, more than anything else, intrigued her.
At just seventeen, Élise had already grown accustomed to being looked at. The guests who filled the Château de Villiers’s halls examined her with polite smiles and quiet curiosity, as though trying to determine what place she would occupy in society. Women admired her beauty, some with genuine affection, others with the faintest trace of envy. Young men, meanwhile, regarded her with the hopeful calculation of those who knew precisely what a Villiers dowry might be worth.
She had learned to recognize the different kinds of attention: the lingering glance, the whispered appraisal, the smile that lingered a moment too long. To them, she was not merely Élise. She was a daughter of the Villiers family, a considerable fortune wrapped in seventeen years of youth and beauty—and, for the right man, a very advantageous match.
Élise was also gifted, or perhaps cursed, to be beautiful in a way that made people notice her before they had the chance to know her.
Her complexion was fair and smooth as porcelain, with the faintest colour rising in her cheeks whenever she blushed—something she could not hide precisely because of her fairness. Her hair was a pale, luminous blonde, falling in soft, perfectly shaped curls around her face and down her back. It was remarkably fine and abundant, the sort of hair that seemed almost too beautiful to have occurred by chance.
Her features were finely proportioned: a small, graceful nose, soft lips, a delicate oval face, and large, clear eyes that seemed to hold a perpetual air of wonder. There was something remarkably gentle about her appearance, an innocence in the openness of her expression, that made her seem younger than her seventeen years. It was a quality that drew people to her, though it also invited them to see only the gentleness of her nature and miss the quiet depth that lay beneath her beauty.
Despite this, she had never been particularly aware of her beauty. Beauty was simply something other people spoke about when she entered a room. Élise herself was far more interested in the things that caught her imagination: a story she had been reading, music drifting from another room, the shape of clouds beyond the windows, or some question that had suddenly occurred to her and refused to leave.
She had been raised in a world carefully separated from the uglier realities beyond her family’s estate. The château was beautiful, the gardens extensive, and the library filled with books. There had always been some corner of it where she could lose herself whenever she allowed her imagination to run wild. The servants were trained to anticipate her every need before she thought to ask, and so she had never longed for anything that could be provided by material means.
Perhaps she lived too much inside her own world. But it was not an empty world.
Élise possessed a natural curiosity that her sheltered upbringing had never managed to extinguish. She asked questions simply because she wanted to know the answers, often without understanding why the questions themselves might be dangerous.
She could spend an entire afternoon lost in a novel and then emerge from it with some extraordinary opinion about love, honor, or human nature. She had a tendency to romanticize things she had never experienced and to believe, with the absolute certainty of youth, that people were fundamentally more honest than they appeared.
She was innocent, but she was not foolish.
What Élise lacked was not intelligence, but experience. She knew very little of the world outside the walls of the château, while possessing an almost insatiable desire to understand it.
As the daughter of the Comtesse Éléonore de Villiers, she was accustomed to order around. The servants lowered their eyes when she passed, and every guest of the château bowed before her. Whenever she entered a room, conversation faltered and chairs scraped against the floor as young men rose from their seats to greet her.
The first time Élise was told she was to meet her new tutor, she entered the library expecting to find a profoundly uninteresting old man—one, at least, who would have the courtesy to bow respectfully before her.
In her mind, he had grey hair, spectacles perched precariously upon the end of his nose, and the sort of permanently disappointed expression that suggested he had long ago lost patience with the world. He would, of course, be dressed in dark, respectable clothes, buttoned neatly to the throat, and carry himself with the solemnity of a man who had forgotten that life was meant to be enjoyed.
She imagined him surrounded by books, speaking at tedious length about subjects she could scarcely bring herself to care about. He would pause whenever she made the smallest mistake, look over his spectacles with grave disapproval, and explain—in painstaking detail—exactly where she had gone wrong.
As for wit or playful conversation, she could hardly imagine him capable of either.
Every tutor Élise had known seemed to belong to the same peculiar species of man: serious, scholarly, and determined to turn every hour into a lesson. They did not laugh easily. They had no patience for mischief and regarded daydreaming as an indulgence for children. If she made some playful remark, she expected her tutor to stare at her in silence over the rims of his spectacles before calmly returning to the lesson.
She had never considered the possibility that a lesson might be entertaining.
So when she pushed open the library door and found Lucien Moreau waiting for her, almost nothing about the man before her matched the picture she had carried in her head.
For one thing, he was not old.
He was young—far younger than she had imagined. Twenty-five at most, with dark hair that seemed incapable of remaining properly arranged. A few unruly strands had fallen across his forehead, giving the impression that he had run a hand through it only moments before and thought no more of the matter.
There was an easy carelessness about him that Élise found almost disarming.
His coat was dark and plainly cut, well made but entirely without ornament. No embroidery adorned the cuffs, no silver buttons caught the light, and there was none of the studied elegance she had grown accustomed to seeing in the gentlemen who visited the château. He dressed as though he had considered the matter of his appearance only long enough to ensure that he looked respectable and then promptly forgotten about it. At least where his clothing was concerned, she had not been entirely mistaken.
And there were, of course, no spectacles. Nor was there the stern, perpetually solemn expression she had come to associate with tutors. On the contrary, Lucien Moreau looked like a man who could laugh easily.
Instead, Élise could see his eyes clearly—they were warm, bright eyes, with a small, unmistakable sparkle in them, as though he took a quiet pleasure in being alive. They were not the eyes of a man resigned to solemnity, but of someone who still possessed a taste for laughter, for conversation, for the simple pleasures of living.
He stood in the armchair beneath the library window, a book open in his hands, its leather cover worn pale at the corners from years of use. The afternoon light fell across his shoulder and caught the dust that drifted lazily through the room. He seemed entirely absorbed in what he was reading, one hand resting beneath the spine while the other held the pages open.
She had expected him to be waiting for her. Instead, he appeared not to know she was there at all.
She waited for him to look up.
He did not.
There was something strangely disarming about it. In the château, a young lady did not simply enter a room unnoticed. Servants announced her. Gentlemen rose when she approached. They bowed, offered greetings, and, if she were about to sit, would draw out her chair before she had even reached it. Such courtesies were so habitual that Élise scarcely noticed them anymore.
This man, however, seemed wholly unaware of the fact that she had entered the room.
“Monsieur Moreau,” she said at last.
He looked up.
For the briefest moment, genuine surprise crossed his face, as though he had been pulled abruptly from another world. His gaze settled on her, lingering just long enough for Élise to catch the faintest flicker of something in his expression—curiosity, perhaps, or simple surprise—before his composure returned.
His eyes travelled over her face, taking in the pale fall of her hair and the delicate lines of her features. Then, as though remembering himself, he blinked.
“Mademoiselle de Villiers, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Instead of bowing, Monsieur Moreau briefly stood up, closed his book with one hand and extended the other towards her, as though greeting an equal rather than the daughter of a countess.
Élise stared at the offered hand.
It was not the usual bow, nor was it quite a gentleman’s proper greeting. It was something in between—casual enough to be improper, deliberate enough that she suspected he knew precisely what he was doing.
After the briefest hesitation, she placed her hand in his.
He gave it a light, fleeting shake, then released it and returned to his chair as though nothing unusual had occurred. He opened his book again and settled into the armchair, though not before his eyes lingered on her for the briefest moment.
“S’il vous plaît, take a seat,” he said, gesturing towards the empty armchair opposite him.
Élise stared at him for a moment.
He had not bowed. He had not even bothered to draw out a chair for her.
She found herself looking towards the armchair he had indicated, almost expecting him to realize his omission and correct it.
Yet Monsieur Moreau remained comfortably where he was, one hand resting against the open pages of his book. Apparently, he had no such intention.
With a small measure of disbelief, Élise crossed the room and drew the chair out herself before sitting.
It was the strangest thing.
At first, she found it irritating. A man who seemed entirely unimpressed by her title was either remarkably discourteous or excessively nonchalant. She had not yet decided which.
But as she settled into the chair, she found that she was beginning to suspect something else. Perhaps he simply did not think that being the daughter of a Comtesse made her more important than he was.
The realization ought to have offended her. Instead, to her own surprise, she found it rather refreshing.
Lucien closed his book at last, though he kept one finger between the pages.
“Pray forgive my manners, Mademoiselle de Villiers. I was quite absorbed in my book. To tell you the truth, I have little patience for formalities. I hope you will not take offence—”
“Not at all,” Élise hurried to assure him, a little taken aback by his bluntness.
“Now tell me—what books do you most enjoy reading?”
The question surprised Élise. She had expected to be asked which authors she had read, or which books were considered suitable for a young woman of her position. Try as she might, she could not summon an honest answer. No one had ever thought to ask her before.
“I have read everything that my tutors have given me—Molière, Racine—”
“That tells me what your tutors have chosen for you. I’m asking what you would choose for yourself—what you turn to when no one is telling you what you should enjoy.”
Élise hesitated. The question seemed simple enough, yet she found herself turning it over in her mind as though it were an unfamiliar exercise. She searched her memory, moving from one book to another, not for the titles her tutors had praised or the works she had been expected to admire, but for the ones she had reached for when no one was watching.
It was strangely difficult. She had spent so long being told what she ought to read that she had rarely stopped to consider what she herself preferred.
One by one, little recollections surfaced—books she had lingered over, passages she had read twice, stories she had returned to simply because she wanted to. For the first time, she found herself sorting through them not as a student recalling her lessons, but as someone being asked, quite seriously, what she liked.
“Come now, Mademoiselle. I am not setting you an examination. Very well, I shall go first. I confess to a weakness for Don Quixote. I have read it more times than I care to admit.”
“Is that not rather a strange choice? I had imagined you preferred more serious reading. All my other tutors did. Do you truly read such fanciful tales? ”
“Occasionally.”
“For pleasure?”
“Why not? There is no harm in reading a book for the pleasure it gives you, Mademoiselle.”
A playful smile touched his lips, one that could not escape Élise’s curious eyes. Her new tutor looked nothing like the one she had expected to find behind the library door. Fortunately for her, he was also considerably easier on the eyes.
Élise found herself looking at him for rather longer than was strictly necessary, only to be recalled to the moment by the question she had yet to answer.
“Now it is your turn. If I am to teach you well, I must first know what you actually enjoy reading.”
“Well, I do rather enjoy Shakespeare, though I suspect that is not the most respectable confession for a Frenchwoman to make. And, if I may be honest, I have always found the old tales of Greek mythology particularly entertaining.”
“Ah, but of course. They are among the finest stories ever written. And what should it matter where Shakespeare was born? Anyone who claims not to enjoy him must surely be lying.”
Lucien found himself smiling once again at Élise’s demure composure, which seemed to grow less guarded with every passing second. He had expected a young woman more conscious of her station, perhaps even a little accustomed to it, with the sort of haughty composure that kept everyone else at a proper distance. Instead, he found himself intrigued by the quiet unpretentiousness that accompanied such a beautiful face.
Quite the contrary, Lucien could tell that Élise’s restraint came from innocence rather than pride. She had not been spoiled by the wealth and privilege that surrounded her, nor did she take offence at his indifference to formalities.
“Very well, Mademoiselle de Villiers. Now that I know your tastes, I shall do my utmost not to bore you. Though, for today, I fear you must permit me the cruelty of inflicting upon you the lesson I have already prepared.”
And so Lucien began with the authors Élise was most likely to know already.
He did not begin with philosophy or the great political writers whose names were beginning to circulate in France. For their first lessons, he chose books that required no special preparation, and would be more interesting for a young woman of Élise’s age: Molière’s comedies, La Fontaine’s fables, and a handful of poems and passages from the French classics.
Molière proved the easiest beginning. Élise had seen Tartuffe performed once and remembered very little of it beyond the laughter. Lucien returned to it with her, not asking her to memorize verses or explain the author’s intentions, but simply to notice the people in the play. He wanted her to see how Molière made vanity, hypocrisy, pride, foolishness, and self-deception ridiculous without ever needing to tell his audience what to think.
Élise found that she enjoyed this more than she expected. She particularly enjoyed discovering how often those who considered themselves the wisest were the easiest to make fools of.
From there, they moved through La Fontaine and selected passages from the older French writers. Lucien treated each work less as a lesson to be mastered than as an opportunity to think. He asked what Élise made of a character, whether she agreed with a moral, and what she thought a particular line revealed about the person who spoke it.
She did not always give the answers he expected. Sometimes she disagreed with the moral entirely, arguing that the world did not always reward virtue, nor punish foolishness fairly. Lucien never corrected her simply for the sake of being right. Instead, he seemed almost pleased whenever she had formed an opinion of her own.
Their lessons gradually expanded into the older French writers. They read selected passages from Corneille and Racine, though Lucien did not yet ask her to tackle their longer tragedies in full. He wanted her first to become comfortable with the language of poetry—to hear the rhythm of a verse, notice the difference between a character speaking from reason and one speaking from passion, and understand why a single sentence could reveal more about a person than several pages of description.
At first, Élise thought Lucien’s purpose was simply to make her well read.
She soon discovered that this was not what interested him. He cared less about whether she remembered the names of characters or the dates in which a play had been written than whether she had formed an opinion of them.
He would ask what she thought of a character and listen to her answer without immediately telling her whether she was right.
Sometimes she disagreed with him. Sometimes she changed her mind. And, little by little, she became less hesitant about saying what she thought. That, more than any particular book, seemed to be what Lucien wanted from their lessons.
And sometimes, after they had spent an entire lesson arguing over whether a character was truly foolish or merely unfortunate, Élise would realise that they had completely forgotten to discuss the author they had supposedly been studying.
It was unlike any education she had received before. Her previous tutors had taught her what a cultivated young woman ought to know. Monsieur Moreau seemed intent on discovering what she herself thought was worth knowing.
Élise had expected a teacher who would lecture her. Instead, Lucien asked questions.
She had expected him to correct her sternly. Instead, he often smiled when she was wrong and somehow managed to make her laugh before explaining her mistake.
And when she made some impertinent remark, he did not look offended. Quite the opposite. He answered with such quick wit that Élise was often left searching for a reply of her own.
He seemed to possess none of the dull solemnity she had so confidently attributed to him at first. He loved books, certainly, but he spoke of them with such enthusiasm that even subjects she had once found tedious suddenly seemed worth knowing.
Most surprising of all, Lucien seemed to have a genuine fondness for fun. He laughed easily, and not always at the expense of others. He was quite capable of laughing at himself, too, and never seemed so concerned with dignity that he could not make light of his own mistakes. He was always ready with some witty, playful remark, often delivered with such perfect timing that Élise found herself laughing before she had quite decided whether she ought to.
And, contrary to what she had expected at first, Élise soon found herself looking forward to the lessons.
