Requiem For Paris

Paris, 1800. The hunger has eased. The bells are still silent.
The Charbonneau family is surviving — which is not the same as whole. Marguerite sells violets on the Rue de Rivoli with twelve-year-old Alain, who has always drawn the same cracked bell on every wall without knowing why. Mathis counts bread in the palace kitchen of Napoleon Bonaparte, pressing a pewter button against his chest each morning like a prayer. Bastien has disappeared into the underground church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, going deeper each night into passages that predate the city above them — passages that are warm when they should be cold, and hum with something that has no name.
Somewhere below Paris, in the limestone that has been carrying the city's dead for longer than anyone currently living has been alive, a bell is carved into the ancient stone. The same bell Alain draws on walls. The same bell on the token Marguerite keeps outside its box now, where it can be seen.
The same bell on the token carried by the masked figure who moves through the underground network of the Companions of Jehu — the man who built these passages, who has been watching over the Charbonneau family from the dark for seven years.
A gothic historical novel about a family separated by revolution and survival, a resistance network hidden beneath Napoleonic Paris, and the ancient limestone that has been keeping the city's secrets since before anyone thought to ask what the city was built on.
Some things persist below the level at which the world above makes its decisions. The stone remembers everything.
A companion novel to The Bells of Hunger, continuing the Requiem for Paris series.