Concerned for his friend, Alesander Extebarria, Kristof goes to his apartment. The concierge informs him that Alesander left suddenly after the Germans arrived, describing him as a peculiar man with suspicious visitors and secret papers. In Alesander’s empty apartment, Kristof finds a small card with a code-like series of numbers, which he keeps.

Later, the Brodsky family joins Kristof to listen to Marshal Pétain’s radio address announcing France’s surrender. Felix and Kristof sit up drinking brandy. Felix calls Kristof “family,” promising his unwavering support and expressing his belief that Kristof would protect Rachel and the children if anything happened to him.

Paris is significantly altered under German occupation. The country is split, with the north, including Paris, under direct German control and the south governed by the collaborationist French Vichy regime. German signs and commands become ubiquitous. After a brief visit, Hitler leaves his forces to systematically plunder the city’s art and commandeer the finest homes, often with the assistance of Vichy authorities.

One night after curfew, Kristof walks through the city. He hears the famous musician Django Reinhardt playing at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and observes Germans and a French woman dancing there, speculating on what it means for Django—a Romani musician—to still be in Paris. The sound of carefree laughter leaves him with a sense of dissonance and anger.

An official notice dated July 8, 1940, from the German Military Command orders all residents of Paris to surrender their wireless radio sets to the police by July 15. The notice warns that anyone found with a radio after this date will face severe punishment.

An ordinance dated September 27, 1940, establishes the legal definition of a Jew in occupied territory. It mandates that all Jews must register with their local police by October 20 and that all Jewish-owned businesses must be identified with a yellow sign reading “ENTREPRISE JUIVE” in both French and German.

Life in occupied Paris grows harder as rations are implemented and discrimination intensifies. The Germans and their collaborators target Jews, Slavs, Roma, political opponents, and other groups deemed “asocial.” After synagogues are bombed, a series of decrees increasingly strips Jewish citizens of their rights. Kristof is sickened by the growing antisemitism, even hearing it from his concierge, Madame Gagnon.

During a brutal winter, Kristof sees the Brodsky family, where Sasha tells him about segregation and censorship at her school. At the hospital, a nurse named Ursula, an Austrian, discreetly shows Kristof how to tune in to forbidden BBC broadcasts. When she is abruptly transferred, her worries for her safety. Kristof perceives that small acts of defiance, like sharing a subversive joke with a café owner, are a form of resistance.

Sasha Brodsky notices that her Jewish neighbors, the Bernsteins, have vanished from their apartment one morning. Soon after, a French gendarme and collaborator, Robert Mercier, moves in. Sasha is unsettled by his presence; he lets the Bernsteins’ window-box flowers die and plays pro-Vichy Radio Paris broadcasts loudly. She observes him snooping near her family’s door and overhears him speaking with the concierge about the “efficient” new system for registering Jews. Sasha feels a growing sense of dread.

In a Paris jail cell in 1664, Alouette is visited by her mother, Henriette. Henriette informs her that her father, René, refused to reveal his secret dye formula to the guild and has been sentenced to the notorious Bicêtre prison. She also reports that René collapsed after the trial and raises the possibility that the letters used to incriminate him were planted by the guild. Henriette recounts her own past suicidal despair and how she found sanctuary with a group of nuns, urging Alouette to find her own strength and fight for her survival.

Alouette is brought before the dyers’ guild for her sentencing. When she claims that she, not her father, created the new dye formula, the guild masters mock her and attribute her assertion to female “hysteria.” Claude Gobelin, the head of the guild, and Maître Bernard, a surgeon-apothecary, formally declare her mentally unstable and sentence her to three years in the Salpêtrière hospital. Alouette realizes this is a ploy to break her father’s will. She perceives that, as a woman, her genius will always be dismissed as falsehood or mental illness, trapping her in a system designed to silence her.

Étienne rushes to Alouette’s sentencing but arrives too late to intervene in proceedings. He watches in anguish as she is taken out of the court. Torn between the urge to rescue her and the knowledge that an attempt would be futile, he remains frozen in the crowd. Lucienne appears and stops him from acting rashly. As Alouette is taken in a cart to the Salpêtrière hospital, she and Étienne exchange a silent look of farewell.

In Paris, 1942, a new ordinance requires all Jews to wear a yellow star inscribed with the word “Juif.” Kristof visits the Brodsky family and watches Rachel sew the mandatory badges onto her family’s coats. Felix observes that their children have no idea what any of this means.

Wearing the yellow star for the first time, Sasha Brodsky is ostracized at school. Her close friends, Odile and Sabrine, shun her, and most teachers treat her with disdain or ignore her completely. Only her elderly German teacher, Professor Reinhardt, offers a small gesture of kindness. At lunch, she sits with the only other Jewish student in her class, Maurice Brocheton. Later, in the library, Sasha reflects on the story of Echo and Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, seeing both characters being reduced to a single aspect, and drawing strength from the story’s theme of survival through transformation.

The Germans requisition the school across from Hôpital Sainte-Anne. Soon after, two Jewish professors vanish and a resident doctor named Paul Tillion is arrested. In the hospital’s patient-created art gallery, Kristof learns from Dr. Claudel that the artwork is being removed. Claudel defends his aggressive treatment methods as necessary, citing his brother’s decades-long institutionalization after WWI as justification for intervention over acceptance.

In the following weeks, the hospital systematically discharges most of its psychiatric patients to conserve resources for the Germans, a policy Kristof and Julian secretly view as a form of murder. The city’s atmosphere grows more oppressive with strict curfews and severe rationing. Kristof observes Rachel Brodsky’s ingenuity in creating meals from scraps.

In 1664, Alouette arrives at the Salpêtrière hospital. After being processed—stripped, scrubbed, and shorn of her hair—she is given a coarse uniform and taken to her cell in the Saint-Lazare ward, which houses women deemed “troublesome” for thinking and questioning too much. A fellow inmate named Sylvine coldly advises her to learn the rules of the institution quickly if she wants to survive.

Alouette’s first day at Salpêtrière is governed by a rigid schedule of bells and prayers. At mass, she observes the hospital’s strict hierarchy, from the well-fed superioress to the segregated groups of inmates. In the dining hall, she witnesses an inmate having a seizure. She is told by Sylvine that their mute cellmate, Simone, had her tongue cut out for refusing to pray. Alouette begins to grasp that emotional detachment is essential for survival in this brutal environment.

Alouette is assigned to work in the hospital’s physic garden under the supervision of Sister Geneviève. She finds solace and a sense of purpose while tending the herbs. Alouette realizes that many of the medicinal plants are also sources for valuable dyes, a secret knowledge that she alone possesses. This discovery rekindles her sense of inner power. Later, she finds a small pouch containing five mysterious seeds, which she hides in her cell as a secret symbol of a new beginning. That night, she dreams of Étienne and her father, holding on to hope.