II. PARIS, 7 YEARS LATER

The streets of the city, usually crowded with vendors' stalls, customers, and the merchants and such that gravitate into and about a city, were always positively packed at noon. Children, most of them boys and all of them hungry, swarmed the marketplace, some remaining to buy their noon meal, others going farther on their way home to eat.

One boy bade his friends farewell and all but ran down the street, which should not have been a difficult feat. He was small for his age—which was about twelve or thirteen—but his shirt bulged oddly at the front, giving his stomach a rigidly rectangular appearance, and bouncing around as he went.

He slowed with relief (and a big whoosh of breath) after perhaps five minutes, slumping in a doorway, and breathing so hard he could hardly knock loudly enough on the door. Fortunately, it flew open almost immediately, as though the girl who dragged him inside had been waiting for him.

"Lucien! Sit down. I tried making onion soup for the first time today. Tell me what you think." Belle, at the same age as Lucien, was a little taller than him; but there was no need for her to intimidate. The underfed boy gratefully sat down at the small, rickety kitchen table, barely remembering to remove the smuggled books from his blouse before he attacked the steaming bowl Belle pushed in front of him.

Belle hadn't had any soup herself yet, but her hunger was not for food. Ravenously she flipped through the first book, her eyes moving quickly over each page. "Division? Lucien, what is it?"

Her companion swallowed a mouthful of hot, tasty soup and leaned across the table to look at the page. "It's the opposite of multiplication. You sort of split one number into several groups and see how many are in each group. Like if you made four bowls of soup—" his grubby, thin face brightened at the prospect "—and separated them into two groups—say, one group for me and one group for you—we would both have two helpings." As if to illustrate, he wordlessly pushed his empty bowl across the table to Belle, who leapt up to refill it (because the sooner she did so, the sooner Lucien would keep talking, albeit often with his mouth full). "Only that's too easy for one lesson, M Leclerc says," Lucien continued when she returned, "so we have to use bigger numbers. Today we re-studied the multiplication tables to make it easier."

"How does that make it easier?" Belle asked bemusedly, studying the long-division diagram a moment longer before she flipped back to the multiplication tables.

"We-ell," Lucien hesitated, wondering how to phrase his little lesson, "what's seven times nine?"

"Sixty-three," Belle replied promptly.

"Right, so, if you divided sixty-three by nine, you would get seven."

For a moment Belle's face was blank; then comprehension dawned. "Oh! And if four times five is twenty, then…then twenty divided by five is four?"

"Yes," Lucien approved, smiling into his intelligent friend's pretty face. "I'm just glad you got it so quickly, Belle, because this book I definitely have to sneak back to the schoolhouse before M Leclerc misses it."

"I hope you don't get in trouble because of me!" Belle's hazel eyes were large with concern.

Lucien grinned mischievously. "I haven't yet. And I won't, ever. None of us like M Leclerc, you know, so I'm just glad that if I'm pulling a prank on him, it's to help you." Lucien's smile faltered just a little as his eyes met hers. "But Belle, why don't you come to school? There are so few girls there, that M Leclerc doesn't make them sit to one side like most schools, and you could sit next to me…"

"You know I would love to go to school and sit next to you," Belle sighed. "Only I have to take care of the house while Papa is working."

Lucien knew that this was because Belle's mama was dead. He thought briefly about his own mama, who, like Belle, did the family chores and cooking while everyone was at school or at work. If his mama died, would Lucien have to take her place? He hated cleaning. And cooking looked like it was hot and messy work.

The fact that Belle was put in this position made Lucien uncomfortable—for Belle's sake, but uncomfortable nevertheless.

Fortunately, Belle's brow suddenly furrowed for a different reason. "Wasn't there a book of science before? The one with pictures of constellations and planets?"

"Um." Relieved at the subject change, Lucien tried to remember what his father had said about the recently-banned book. "Remember what it said about the sun? How all of the planets, including Earth, spin around it?"

"I remember," Belle mused. "And I remember my papa said that it's in the Bible that all of the planets go around the Earth, instead."

"So did my dad. Anyways, the man who wrote the book we were reading wasn't supposed to, or something, and he was punished—"

"Punished?" Belle, who had crossed the room to get some soup for herself, stopped, ladle suspended in midair. "Why? Just because he was wrong?"

"I suppose so," shrugged Lucien, to whom theology, science, and the clash thereof were really of little concern. "Well, anyways, that's why I don't have a science book this week. Besides, Belle, I know you don't care too much for math or science!"

"That's true," Belle admitted, blowing on her bowl of soup. "But Papa says that it's important to have at least a basic knowledge of everything—everything taught in school. So I try to understand those things as well. It's a little interesting, but not as interesting as a book of stories."

"What a coincidence!" Lucien cried dramatically. "Because this book…" he pushed the second, larger tome towards her "…should interest you."

Swallowing a mouthful of soup, Belle opened the unlabeled leather volume and her eyes lit up. "A book of fairy tales! Lucien! I thought you said M Leclerc said they were nonsense!"

"He did," Lucien eagerly assured her, "but finally all of the mothers told him that we didn't like the stories he was making us read, you know, those horrible ones with morals at the end—"

"Those weren't morals!" cried Belle indignantly, shuddering at the memory. "Morals in stories should be things such as, be nice to people and they'll be nice to you, or—" her voice faltered as she thought about the mother she barely remembered "—or how love is more important than anything because home is with the people you love. Those horrible old stories were about children who were naughty and got eaten by bears, or fell down wells and drowned!"

Most of this little speech had gone over Lucien's fair head, but he seized on the last part with a schoolboy's fervor. "At any rate, we've been learning to read better, using books full of the tales our mamas told us. The books use bigger words than we're used to, but it's not so hard, because after all we know what happens."

Belle's face fell. "My mama used to read me these kinds of stories," she said softly, running a finger along the book's spine. "She would point to each word with her finger. That was how I learned to read." Her face brightened again; the cloud was gone and she turned the pages until she found the table of contents. "Lucien, will you read me this one? I've never heard of it before."

Lucien leaned over Belle's shoulder. "'Aladdin, or his Magic Lamp.' Belle? You've never heard this one before? My mama used to tell me this one every night. I think you'd like it." Using his vacated seat as a stool, he clambered up on the table and opened the book to the first page of the story. "Il était une fois," he winked, beginning with the French equivalent of Once upon a time, "There was a poor boy, a 'street rat,' who lived in the streets of Agrabah, a beautiful and op-u-lent city. His name—"

"A what city?" Belle put her spoon down again.

Lucien, who had had to sound the word out the first time, pronounced it fairly better now. "Opulent."

"I don't know what that word means." Belle wrinkled her nose. "But it sounds like something smelly, don't you think?"

Lucien didn't know what he thought it sounded like, but it didn't matter because Belle was still talking. "Papa says there's a kind of book that has pages full of words and what they mean, instead of stories. It's called a 'dictionary.' To improve your diction." Belle giggled. "Can you imagine having a book like that? Then we'd know what 'opulent' means."

"I'd look for 'opulent,' myself," grinned Lucien, sliding a third, small green book from his pocket, "but this dictionary has your name on it."

"Oh!" Belle took the proffered dictionary and opened it to the inside cover, where an untidy hand had scrawled, "To Belle, from Lucien."

"…you're not angry that I wrote in a book, again, are you?" Lucien ventured at last, unnerved by Belle's silence.

He was even further unnerved, but also rather happy, when Belle flung herself at Lucien, hugging him tightly. "Thank you, thank you, thank you! I know usually I would be," she laughed, "but I'm not, because this is the most wonderful gift in the world, and now I will always remember that my friend gave it to me, even when I'm old and gray." Belle cocked her head. "Does that saying mean my hair will be gray, or my skin?"

"Uh," Lucien said intelligently. "I doubt that's a question the dictionary can answer, but you can see what 'opulent' means now."

For answer, Belle turned the pages of the dictionary reverently, until she got to the end of the Os, and read. "Oh!" she said, soon. "It doesn't have anything to do with smell, at all. Opulent means 'rich, luxurious or plentiful.' It doesn't sound very rich, does it?"

"Not really."

"That's so sad. The boy in the story is poor, but he lives in a very rich city. I suppose the mayor of the city is a very rich and cruel man."

Lucien smiled at this prediction. "There is no mayor. Agrabah is the capital city of…um, I don't think the story says. But the sultan, the ruler of the country, lives in Agrabah, and he's not evil at all." Picking up the book of tales again, he read to his rapt listener, "His name was Aladdin. Aladdin was a clever and witty young man, though he never went to school, and he had to steal his food under the noses of royal guards—with the help of his best friend, a monkey called Abu. But Aladdin felt that he had been destined for much more than the life he was living…"