As the evening of the fashion show approached, Maison Valombre ceased to be a workshop and became a nervous organism.

Everything vibrated.

The machines, the voices, the fabrics, the telephones, the doors opening and closing without pause. Garment racks rolled from one room to another like diplomatic convoys. Shoes appeared, disappeared, returned in the wrong sizes. Models passed by in coats, in dresses, in flesh-coloured underwear, hair pulled back, faces still bare, already elsewhere.

Louise, whom everyone now called Lou, moved through the agitation with a concentration she had not known she possessed.

She had kept Louis’s appearance: dark trousers, white shirt, scarf tied low, hair fastened back. But the character was no longer quite a disguise. It was a work zone. A supple armour. A permission.

In that ordered chaos, no one was surprised by her ambiguity anymore. They called her Lou as they would have called a rare colour, a useful tool, a piece of luck that had arrived at the right moment.

— Lou, the pins!

— Lou, passage seventeen is still pulling!

— Lou, Solange wants to review dress twenty-one!

Dress twenty-one.

Little by little, in the workshop, they stopped calling it that.

Baptiste had started it.

— Where is the dress of late decision?

Noé had corrected:

— No. It is no longer a late decision. It is an elegant betrayal.

Camille had settled the matter:

— It is an impossible dress. That is all.

Then Solange, one evening, had observed it for a long time on its mannequin before saying:

— It is fantastic.

The word remained.

The fantastic dress.

It was not the most spectacular dress in the collection. Not at first glance. It did not scream. It did not try to win by excess. Its magic came from an almost painful restraint.

From the front, it seemed simple: a long pale line, almost lunar, held by a bodice of severe precision. But when one moved, an oblique slit revealed itself like a hidden thought. An inner panel, of a deeper radiance, appeared and disappeared according to the step. The left sleeve could slip slightly, letting a shoulder be uncovered not by provocation, but by confession. The dress seemed to have two souls: one that accepted the world, the other that escaped it.

Louise sometimes looked at it as if she had not drawn it.

As if the dress had been waiting for her.

________________________________________

Jean Chauvet’s death, however, continued to accompany her.

It returned at the least expected moments.

While adjusting a hem, she saw again Jean’s hand resting on a restaurant table, calm, impatient, proprietary. While choosing a button, she heard his voice:

— It is not sellable.

While watching Solange pitilessly discard a weak proposal, she caught herself thinking:

Jean would have liked this coldness.

Then immediately:

No. Jean would have wanted to buy it.

Every evening, after the workshop, she called Montréal.

The boutique was holding up.

Not admirably. Not gloriously. But standing.

Élodie spoke faster than before, a sign that she was gaining confidence.

— We sold the blue jacket, Madame Lang! And Claire managed to persuade a customer to try on the green dress.

— Did she buy it?

— No.

— Ah.

— But she cried in it.

— That is not a sale.

— No, but Claire says it is almost a promise.

Claire, when she took the line, was less poetic.

— The customers talk a lot. They want to know whether you are coming back. They want to know whether Paris has found you brilliant. They want to know whether Pascal is still writing for the window.

— And Pascal?

— He is pretending to be discreet.

— So he is not.

— He wears mourning for Jean as though he had lost a rival in a Russian novel.

Louise sighed.

— He did not know Jean.

— Precisely. That gives him more freedom.

Marie-Soleil, for her part, kept the most worrying information for the end.

— William Lee called again.

— Again?

— Yes.

— What does he want?

— To speak to you directly. He says there are arrangements to verify. Papers. Financial commitments.

— Concerning Heart of Fabrics?

— Probably.

Louise closed her eyes.

Even dead, Jean remained a contract.

— I will call him after the show.

— You are postponing.

— I am working.

— Both are true.

A silence often followed.

Then Marie-Soleil added, more gently:

— Are you holding up?

Louise then looked at the hotel room, her thrown clothes, her sketches, her Louis scarf, her tired hands.

— I think so.

— Do you like it there?

Louise always hesitated before answering, as if saying it might make her guilty.

— Yes.

— Then like it.

— Jean is dead.

— Yes.

— And I am in Paris making dresses.

— The dead do not need the living to stop breathing.

— You are becoming a philosopher.

— No. I am practical with an imaginary scarf.

Louise often hung up with tears in her eyes.

Not tears of pure grief. Mixed tears. Jean had been too complicated to leave behind a simple sorrow. She was still angry with him. She still owed him. She sometimes missed him with anger, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with a kind of fatigue.

But when she returned to the workshop, when she touched the fabrics, when she heard Noé laugh, Baptiste grow indignant over a seam that was “morally insufficient”, Camille scold everyone, Solange merely say “better”, she became present again.

She loved her work.

She loved Paris.

And, what frightened her more, she loved what she had become there.

________________________________________

Two days before the show, the question of the model arose.

The fantastic dress had been tried on three girls.

None suited it.

The first was very beautiful, but too conscious of being so. She wore the dress like a personal victory. The second had a perfect walk, but cold. On her, the dress became architecture. The third was too young. The garment devoured her.

Solange lost patience.

— This dress requires someone who has already renounced something.

Noé raised his hand.

— Is that a quality agencies ask for?

— Be quiet.

Baptiste, sitting on the floor with a pincushion, sighed.

— It would need a taller woman. Not only physically. Someone who walks as though she has crossed a room where no one was waiting for her.

The sentence struck Louise.

She immediately thought of a woman.

Not in Paris.

In Montréal.

A customer from Heart of Fabrics. Not truly a customer, either. A periodic apparition. Her name was Adrienne Valcourt. Tall, slender, elegant without visible effort, in her late forties. Former dancer, people said. Perhaps once a model. Perhaps none of that. She sometimes came to the boutique, tried on jackets, asked precise questions, rarely bought, but looked at clothes like someone who knows the weight of an entrance.

Louise had once drawn her from memory.

— I know someone, she said.

Everyone turned toward her.

Solange asked:

— In Paris?

— No. In Montréal.

Camille raised her arms.

— Perfect. We have thirty-six hours. Montréal is very convenient.

— She would be ideal.

— Can she come?

Louise hesitated.

— I do not know.

Solange fixed her gaze on her.

— Call.

Louise called Heart of Fabrics. By chance, Marie-Soleil knew Adrienne. By another piece of luck, Adrienne was in Montréal and answered her telephone. By bad luck, she laughed softly.

— Paris? In two days? My dear Louise, you take me for a woman with no plants, no accounts and no habits.

— Yes.

— You are right, but I refuse all the same.

— Adrienne, this dress is made for a woman like you.

— Like me? Meaning?

Louise looked at the fantastic dress on its mannequin.

— Someone who does not need to be young in order to be dangerous.

A silence.

— That is well said.

— It is true.

— And under what pretext exactly are you in Paris?

Louise closed her eyes.

— It is a long story.

— All the good ones are.

— Can you come?

Adrienne remained silent for a few seconds.

— No. Not so quickly. My passport has expired.

Louise felt hope deflate.

— Ah.

— But send me a photo of the dress. I at least want to suffer properly from not wearing it.

Louise hung up, disappointed.

— She cannot come, she said.

Camille grumbled.

— Obviously.

Noé contemplated the dress.

— Perhaps it wants no one.

— A dress does not decide, said Armand Vidal.

Baptiste replied:

— You say that because dresses still respect you.

Solange was not laughing.

— We need a solution.

The fittings resumed. A fourth model was proposed. Too light. A fifth. Too spectacular. The dress continued to refuse itself.

Louise felt it.

Or rather, she refused to see what the dress was telling her.

________________________________________

On the eve of the show, Paris seemed to contract around Maison Valombre.

The chosen venue was an old private mansion converted into an event space. High ceilings, waxed parquet floors, pale walls, discreet mouldings, cold light. Technicians installed the spotlights. Chairs were aligned with military precision. Guest lists circulated like diplomatic documents. People spoke of journalists, buyers, important clients, an actress, an influencer whom Armand Vidal described as a “digital tragedy”.

The fantastic dress was transported in a white garment bag.

Louise followed the rack as one follows a precious patient.

Solange noticed.

— You look worried.

— I am.

— Why?

— Because it has not yet found its body.

Solange looked at the garment bag.

— Clothes sometimes find it at the last moment.

— That is risky.

— Fashion is an industry that pretends to predict the unpredictable. It is its favourite lie.

That night, Louise slept very little.

Jean returned to her thoughts.

She imagined him sitting in the front row, impeccably dressed, slightly sceptical. He would have looked at the fantastic dress with that controlled expression which always preceded his judgments.

He would have said:

— It is beautiful, Louise. But who is going to wear that?

She would have wanted to answer:

— Me.

The word almost woke her.

Me.

No, she immediately thought.

Impossible.

She was not a model. She had not come to Paris to walk a runway. She was the hidden designer, the disguised assistant, the woman who had found a side door. She was not going to appear before everyone in a Valombre dress.

And yet an image had formed.

Her own silhouette.

Tall, upright, freed from Louis’s costume.

Not the Louise from before.

Not Louis either.

Someone between the two, beyond both.

She got up, drank a glass of water, then looked in the mirror.

Without the scarf, without the hat, her features regained their truth. Tired, yes. But not defeated. She thought of Heart of Fabrics, of Jean, of Pascal, of Marie-Soleil, of all the women who entered her boutique without daring to buy their own audacity.

She murmured:

— A dress that gives the impression a woman might change her mind in the middle of her own entrance.

She had described the dress.

Perhaps she had described herself.

________________________________________

On the evening of the show, chaos became a religion.

The models arrived, disappeared into make-up, returned transformed. People looked for shoes, double-sided tape, a brooch, a pair of gloves, a lost telephone, the girl for passage eight, then passage eight itself. The hairstylists spoke quickly. The make-up artists spoke little. The dressers ran. The dresses hung in their garment bags like aligned secrets.

Louise worked without thinking.

She had resumed her Lou costume: black trousers, white shirt, dark scarf. No one noticed her silence. Everyone was either silent or panicked.

At seven o’clock, Solange asked:

— The model for twenty-one?

No one answered.

— Where is Clara?

Clara was the fifth attempt. Not ideal, but acceptable, they had finally said.

Camille returned a few minutes later, livid.

— She is ill.

— Ill how?

— Truly ill.

— Can she walk?

— She can barely stand.

Solange did not shout.

That was worse.

She became perfectly calm.

— Find someone.

They found someone.

Too short.

Another.

Too broad in the shoulders for the bodice construction.

A third.

Already taken for two passages; change impossible.

Armand Vidal cursed.

Noé ran.

Baptiste held the fantastic dress like a child one feared waking.

— It wants no one, he repeated.

— Be quiet, Baptiste! Camille snapped.

The first part of the show was beginning in twenty minutes.

Solange turned toward Louise.

— Your woman from Montréal has not teleported herself, I suppose?

— No.

— A pity.

Louise looked at the dress.

All around, people were speaking, running, searching for a solution. But for her, the noise moved away.

The garment bag was half-open. The pale fabric appeared in the backstage light. The dress seemed calm. Terribly calm. As if it had always known.

Louise felt her heart beat more slowly.

She thought of Jean.

Of his imaginary question:

— Who is going to wear that?

She thought of Pascal, who would have called it a coup de théâtre.

She thought of Marie-Soleil, who would simply have said:

— Go.

She thought of the Montréal Louise, exhausted behind her counter.

She thought of Louis Lange, who had dared to enter.

Then she heard herself say:

— Me.

Solange looked at her.

— Pardon?

Louise removed her scarf.

— I will wear it.

Camille opened her mouth.

Noé stopped running.

Baptiste brought both hands to his face.

— Obviously.

Armand Vidal observed Louise from head to toe with the most brutal professional eye in the world.

— Size?

— Thirty-eight. Sometimes forty, depending on the cut.

— Height?

— One metre seventy-eight.

Noé whistled.

— Lou is tall. Lou was hiding things from us.

Solange was not joking.

— Have you ever walked a runway?

— No.

— Do you know how to walk?

Louise thought of all the years spent entering banks, offices, meetings where she had to prove she had the right to be there.

— Yes.

— Not like a shopkeeper. Like an apparition.

Louise held her gaze.

— I can.

Solange remained motionless for a second.

Then she said:

— Dress her.

Everything shifted.

They pulled her into a small side room. Camille entered with her, Baptiste with the dress. Noé remained outside, repeating that he was going to pray to all textile divinities.

— Quickly, said Camille. But not sloppily.

Louise removed her jacket, her shirt, her trousers. The character of Louis fell piece by piece onto a chair. She remained standing, almost naked, calmer than she would have believed.

Camille, who never softened, looked at her for a fraction of a second.

— You are beautiful.

Louise did not answer.

She did not know how to receive the sentence.

Baptiste lifted the dress with a kind of devotion.

— Careful with the sleeve.

The dress slipped over her.

Cold at first. Then alive.

The bodice embraced her bust with astonishing precision. The oblique line fell exactly where it should. The inner panel brushed her leg. The left sleeve uncovered her shoulder as if it had recognised her.

Camille stepped back.

— Shit.

In her mouth, it was a tribute.

Baptiste’s eyes were damp.

— It was waiting for you.

— No poetry, said Camille, but her voice had lost its hardness.

They adjusted. They pinned a final tension. They smoothed the fabric. They freed the nape of her neck. Someone came in for make-up. Someone else for hair.

— Not too much, said Louise.

— We know, answered the hairstylist. You are not a girl asking permission.

Her hair was lifted, but not severely. A few strands framed her face. The make-up deepened her gaze, paled her mouth, lengthened her presence still further. When Louise saw herself in the mirror, she thought neither of Louise nor Louis.

She thought:

— Here I am.

Outside, they were still looking for her.

— Where is Lou?

— Where is the dress?

— Passage twenty-one is in three minutes!

— Solange wants everyone in place!

The door opened.

Louise came out.

The corridor seemed to fall silent.

Noé brought a hand to his heart.

— Oh no. It is unfair to the rest of humanity.

Armand Vidal, for his part, said nothing. He checked the line, the fall, the possible walk. Then he nodded.

Solange came closer.

She examined Louise as one judges an irreversible decision.

— Do not play at being a model.

— What should I do?

— Enter as if you had stopped apologising.

Louise closed her eyes for a second.

Jean.

Paris.

Heart of Fabrics.

Louis.

Louise.

The dress.

She opened her eyes.

— All right.

________________________________________

The music changed for passage twenty-one.

First a low note, almost imperceptible. Then a slow, spaced pulse. Like a heart refusing to panic.

Louise waited behind the curtain.

Before her, a model was returning. Behind her, another was preparing. The light from the room drew a white line on the floor. She had to cross it.

Suddenly she felt all her fears return: the fragile boutique, the invoices, Jean’s gaze, Pascal’s brilliant trickery, her own lie, her age, her late audacity, her lack of experience, this dress which perhaps should never have left a sketch.

Then she thought of all the women waiting before a mirror for the right to find themselves beautiful.

And she entered.

The first step was the hardest.

The second belonged to her.

The room was no longer an audience. It became a perspective. Faces, lights, seated silhouettes. Louise moved forward slowly. Not too slowly. Just enough for the dress to breathe. The inner panel appeared with each movement, then withdrew. The uncovered shoulder did not seem offered, but conquered. The line of her body gave the dress what the other models had not known how to give it: a story.

She was not the youngest.

That was her strength.

She was not the most neutral.

That was her truth.

She wore the dress like a woman who had lost something, gained something else, and had not yet decided whether she should thank life or ask it for explanations.

At the end of the path, she stopped.

One second.

No more.

She turned.

The fabric revealed its secret.

In the audience, something changed. Not an ovation. Not yet. A denser attention. A restraint seized. The kind of silence clothes sometimes seek for an entire life.

Louise returned.

When she disappeared behind the curtain, Noé almost caught her.

— You killed everyone.

— She walked, corrected Armand Vidal.

— No, said Baptiste. She survived in public.

Camille came closer to check the dress, but her hands were trembling a little.

— Nothing moved.

Solange was there.

She looked at Louise without smiling.

— There, she said.

One word.

Only one.

But Louise understood.

She had not merely worn the dress.

She had explained it.

With her body.

With her age.

With her mourning.

With that part of herself that had had to become Louis in order to become Louise again differently.

The end of the show unfolded in an almost unreal fever. Louise had to go out again for the final bow, this time among the models. She would have liked to hide, but Solange had decided otherwise.

— You go out with the others.

— I am not a model.

— Tonight, yes.

The applause came like dry rain.

Louise did not try to know whom it was for. The collection, the house, Solange, the models, the dress, the surprise. It did not matter. She stood in that light, upright, tall, elegant, visible.

Visible.

After the bow, backstage exploded.

People spoke too loudly. They laughed. They kissed. They looked for champagne. Someone shouted that two buyers wanted to see “the pale dress”. A journalist was asking who “that sublime woman from passage twenty-one” was. Noé answered:

— An absolutely necessary Canadian catastrophe.

Baptiste corrected:

— A revelation.

Camille snapped:

— An assistant. And now, let her breathe.

Louise took refuge in the small room where she had changed. She closed the door behind her.

Silence fell.

She looked at herself in the mirror.

The fantastic dress was still there. It had not disappeared. It embraced her breath, her fatigue, her beauty. Louise placed a hand on her bare shoulder.

She thought of Jean.

Not the man who controlled. Not the one who judged. The one who, perhaps, somewhere beneath his certainties, had seen in her a strength before she herself had dared inhabit it.

— You see, Jean, she murmured. Someone is going to wear it.

Her eyes finally filled with tears.

They flowed gently, without undoing her face.

This time, she was not crying out of discouragement.

She was crying because she had just understood that a woman may lose herself beneath a name, beneath a role, beneath mourning, beneath a boutique, beneath the gaze of men, and still come out of a room dressed in her own audacity.

Someone knocked.

— Lou? Solange asked behind the door.

Louise wiped her cheeks.

— Yes.

— The buyers want to see you.

Louise looked one last time at the mirror.

Louis had disappeared.

Louise too, perhaps.

In their place stood a woman who no longer needed to ask forgiveness before entering.

She opened the door.

END OF CHAPTER VI