...of a secret

Lulu looked into the eyes of the baby and tried to decide whether this was Maurice or Adolphe. She called him one or the other, to see which got a reaction; this went on over a year, the women calling the child Maurice or Adolphe depending on their own preference or whichever came most quickly to mind. During this time, they raised the child in the secret room. Number Seventeen had been built some hundred and thirty years before, when unrest in France and particularly Paris was rampant; a room had been added behind what was the study. Revolutionaries hid their from the troops of Louis XVI; later, after Louis' decapitation, when the revolution was devouring itself with frequency, revolutionaries hid there from other revolutionaries. It was a wonder everyone in Paris didn't know about this room. But in fact the room had been forgotten, so that even Monsieur Monsieur didn't know about it when he bought the house; one of the women discovered it on her own. In a moment of truth, the madam of the house had to decide whether to tell Monsieur Monsieur about the room or enter into a conspiracy with the other women; she decided it made sense to have one secret that the master of the house did not share. So the room belonged to the women, and its silence and invisibility belonged to them as well. That was where they kept the child, hurrying him behind the panels in the study when Monsieur Monsieur arrived in the evening with his guests. The child, as though intuitive of secrets in a way deeper and wiser than his young life, almost never cried when in the sanctuary.

[Days Between Stations, Erickson, S.]