Skylark

The novel opens in 2019, as the Notre-Dame cathedral fire peels back centuries of hidden history. Among the ruins, a conservator discovers a shard of blue glass bearing a tiny hand-drawn bird in flight, its origin a mystery. The shard connects to a much older story, one the novel unfolds across two interwoven timelines set in 17th-century and World War II-era Paris, linked by the city's underground tunnels and the enduring impulse to resist, create, and survive.

In 1664, 18-year-old Alouette Voland works as a washerwoman at the Gobelin dyeworks in Saint-Marcel, a faubourg, or suburb, along the polluted Bièvre River. France's sumptuary laws restrict vivid colors to the nobility and clergy, and the Gobelin guild controls who may create dyes. Though her father, René Voland, is a master dyer, Alouette is barred by her sex from apprenticeship. Secretly, she cultivates dye plants and keeps a notebook of experimental recipes. Her mother, Henriette, a healer who vanished 12 years earlier, taught her plant knowledge; her father taught her to read and write. Observing a tanner's chemical process, Alouette adds arsenic to her woad dye and produces a luminous blue rivaling the finest indigo. René warns that the guild would destroy them but refuses to flee, insisting on perfecting the formula; Alouette discovers he has been secretly replicating her method, his hands already trembling from arsenic exposure.

Étienne Duchamp, a 20-year-old stonecutter from Rouen, supports his elderly grandmother and his late cousin's orphaned children on meager quarry wages. He and Alouette meet at the quarry's edge, drawn together by a shared hunger for more than their stations allow. At the Feast of St. John, Henriette reappears to warn that the guild suspects René, but Alouette's fury at her mother's absence prevents her from heeding the warning. She and Étienne grow closer and spend the night together. She returns home to find that guild constables have arrested René for allegedly trading secrets with Venetian dyers. She breaks into the Gobelin factory seeking evidence to exonerate him but is caught, beaten, and arrested.

At her trial, Alouette claims the blue formula as her own creation. The guild masters mock her, the surgeon-apothecary diagnoses her with hysteria, and the court sentences her to three years at the Salpêtrière asylum, a vast walled compound housing thousands of women deemed mad, immoral, or simply inconvenient. The sentence is designed to pressure René into surrendering his formula. Étienne watches helplessly as she is carted away.

At Salpêtrière, Alouette endures forced prayer, bloodletting, and purgatives. Assigned to the physic garden, the asylum's medicinal herb garden, she finds solace among familiar plants. She befriends Sylvine, imprisoned for adultery and convinced her newborn was taken rather than stillborn, and Marguerite, an infirmary worker secretly documenting abuses. She mentors Christiane, a frail 11-year-old orphan. A carved stone lark smuggled to her proves Étienne has not forgotten her. Flooding exposes infant remains, confirming Sylvine's fears. After Christiane is assaulted by a guard and dies by suicide using foxglove Alouette taught her to identify, the women's resolve hardens. Alouette, now pregnant, spots a broken culvert leading to the Seine and plans an escape with Marguerite and Sylvine, taking the damning ledger as evidence.

The escape is harrowing: The women drug the guards, navigate flooded sewer tunnels, and plunge into the freezing Seine before reaching the convent of the Sisters of Saint Catherine. Alouette's premature labor results in a miscarriage; she names her lost son René. The Mother Superior reveals that Henriette once found refuge here and vows to expose Salpêtrière's abuses.

In the parallel timeline, Kristof Larsen, a Dutch psychiatry resident at Hôpital Sainte-Anne, forms two defining connections in late 1939. At a jazz club, he meets Alesander Extebarria, a Basque architecture student who introduces him to the vast quarry tunnels beneath Paris. In his building, he befriends the Brodsky family: Felix, a Polish-born Jewish watchmaker; his wife, Rachel; their precocious 12-year-old daughter, Sasha; and 7-year-old son, Rald. Kristof is shaped by the loss of his sister Annelies, who had depression and died by suicide in 1935; her death redirected him from surgery to psychiatry.

As Germany conquers the Netherlands and Paris falls in June 1940, Kristof watches his world disintegrate. At Sainte-Anne's, Dr. Blaise Claudel, a senior physician, pushes electroconvulsive therapy on traumatized soldiers. During the first German bombing, Kristof delivers Rachel's premature baby, Klara, in the building's cellar. After the armistice, Felix asks Kristof to protect his family if anything happens.

Under occupation, anti-Jewish measures escalate. The 1942 ordinance requiring Jews to wear a yellow star devastates Sasha: Former friends walk away from her at school without a word. She meets Gérard Nordmann, a 16-year-old Jewish violinist, at the library, and they bond over Ovid and shared fear. When Felix is arrested, Rachel calculates how to survive on savings. Alesander, who vanished after the occupation, resurfaces in the uniform of the collaborationist Vichy regime, then reveals himself as a resistance operative with evidence that the Nazis are implementing Aktion T4, the systematic extermination of psychiatric patients. Kristof joins Ursula, a courageous Austrian nurse, and fellow resident Julian Broussard in altering patient records to save those marked for transport. When the network is betrayed, Julian is arrested, and SS agents watch Kristof's apartment.

On July 14, 1942, gendarmes arrest the Brodskys and about a hundred other Jews from the neighborhood, holding them in a drained public swimming pool. When an order releases older children who are French citizens, Rachel pushes Sasha toward freedom. Sasha connects with Gérard, classmate Maurice Brocheton, and Annette Gaston, another teenager separated from her family, and Kristof leads all four into the tunnels. Alesander proposes using the souterrain, the underground tunnel network, as an escape corridor to Spain. The group navigates flooded passages and a massive sinkhole where Alesander falls and is fatally injured. Sasha inscribes a memorial and a liberty bird on the tunnel wall. They surface and move south; nearly three months later, they approach the Pyrenees, their numbers swelled by refugees joining what people call "a corridor," the realization of Alesander's vision.

Étienne reunites with Alouette at an inn in Brittany, bringing news that René died in prison. They settle in a clifftop cottage in Camaret-sur-Mer with Sylvine and Marguerite. Seeing the ocean for the first time, Alouette begins creating a "map of blue," a color bible documenting every shade she encounters. In 1666, she gives birth to a daughter she names Christiane, after her lost apprentice, but hemorrhages and cannot be saved. In her final moments, Étienne carries her to the window, where the dawn sky displays the perfect blue she has chased her entire life. He will carry her color bible to the Sisters of Saint Catherine, ensuring her legacy endures.

In an epilogue set in 1857, a woman in a small atelier, or workshop, on the Île de la Cité crafts a stained-glass panel during the restoration of Notre-Dame. The blue she uses has been passed from mother to daughter across generations, originating with a great-great-grandmother who worked among dyers in Saint-Marcel. She inscribes a small skylark in one corner of the panel, visible only when light shines through at the right angle, connecting to the shard discovered in the 2019 fire and completing the novel's circle.