In the maddening, sickening, breathless silence before the barricade fell, it was not the thunder of cannonballs, nor the chatter of gunshots that broke the feverish sweat that covered Paris; it was the uncontrollable, body-racking cough of a thin, half-dead, nearly naked human being, a girl no more than fifteen, with the most rampant case of pneumonia ever to hit the city.

Curled in the darkness, she coughed until it rose to a breaking, high-pitched squeal, a blade-sharp outburst of air and sickness into the night.

Pressed against the frozen walls of the Café, she screamed from the inside out, pleading for deliverance, begging for help, from anyone, anything, any God who would pity her.

Shattered into a thousand tiny pieces she lay in tattered rags, shriveled up leaves and shells and thin shadows of her former self. But now, of course, she had become a shadow, and the contradiction was clear.

She couldn't stop, the disease was too great a power with too much advantage over her near-nonexistant immune system.

She died that night, alone, cold, dark, and innocent. A frozen angel, whose final breath of disease still hung pallid in the air above her.

There was silence at last.

But then a dank, foul smell came over the city. The smell took the form of a man, a crouching, sniveling man, a beggar, a con. He stood over the pale, frozen, deathly creature, and took her in his ragged, snatching arms.

The foul creature brought her home. She lived, and breathed again.

The cough never left.

The pale color never left.

The deathly gaze never left.

Many men died that night. Many souls were tortured, many hearts broken.

Above all of this, she was not the same. No, she was never the same.

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