All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

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The Rounds
A
lthough Etienne continues to offer objections, Madame Manec walks Marie-Laure to the beach
every morning. The girl knots her shoes herself, feels her way down the stairwell, and waits in the
foyer with her cane in her fist while Madame Manec finishes up in the kitchen.
“I can find my own way,” Marie-Laure says the fifth time they step out. “You don’t have to
lead.”
Twenty-two paces to the intersection with the rue d’Estrées. Forty more to the little gate. Nine
steps down and she’s on the sand and the twenty thousand sounds of the ocean engulf her.
She collects pinecones dropped by trees who knows how far away. Thick hanks of rope. Slick
globules of stranded polyps. Once a drowned sparrow. Her greatest pleasure is to walk to the
north end of the beach at low tide and squat below an island that Madame Manec calls Le Grand
Bé and let her fingers whisk around in the tidepools. Only then, with her toes and fingers in the
cold sea, does her mind seem to fully leave her father; only then does she stop wondering how
much of his letter was true, when he’ll write again, why he has been imprisoned. She simply
listens, hears, breathes.
Her bedroom fills with pebbles, seaglass, shells: forty scallops along the windowsill, sixty-one
whelks along the top of the armoire. She arranges them by species whenever she can, then by size.
Smallest on the left, largest on the right. She fills jars, pails, trays; the room assumes the smell of
the sea.
Most mornings, after the beach, she makes the rounds with Madame Manec, going to the
vegetable market, occasionally to the butcher’s, then delivering food to whichever neighbors
Madame Manec decides are most in need. They climb an echoing stairwell, rap on a door; an old
woman invites them in, asks for news, insists all three of them drink a thimbleful of sherry.
Madame Manec’s energy, Marie-Laure is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off
stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts bisques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a
cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of
Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like
a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.
Still-warm bread to an ancient widow named Madame Blanchard. Soup to Monsieur Saget.
Slowly Marie-Laure’s brain becomes a three-dimensional map in which exist glowing landmarks:
a thick plane tree in the Place aux Herbes; nine potted topiaries outside the Hôtel Continental; six
stairs up a passageway called the rue du Connétable.
Several days a week, Madame brings food to Crazy Harold Bazin, a veteran of the Great War
who sleeps in an alcove behind the library in sun or snow. Who lost his nose, left ear, and eye to
shellfire. Who wears an enameled copper mask over half his face.
Harold Bazin loves to talk about the walls and warlocks and pirates of Saint-Malo. Over the
centuries, he tells Marie-Laure, the city ramparts have kept out bloodthirsty marauders, Romans,
Celts, Norsemen. Some say sea monsters. For thirteen hundred years, he says, the walls kept out
bloodthirsty English sailors who would park their ships offshore and launch flaming projectiles at
the houses, who would try to burn everything and starve everybody, who would stop at nothing to
kill them all.
“The mothers of Saint-Malo,” he says, “used to tell their children: Sit up straight. Mind your

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manners. Or an Englishman will come in the night to cut your throat.”
“Harold, please,” says Madame Manec. “You’ll frighten her.”
In March, Etienne turns sixty and Madame Manec stews little clams—