![]() ![]() Her father has been entrusted with the Sea of Flame. Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris in 1940, and take refuge in Saint‑Malo, on the coast of Brittany. ![]() ![]() Doerr's prose needs no embellishment as this section gently probes the question of how ordinary German people could have done what they did. The chapters on Werner's schooling, and the fate of his brutalised friend Frederick, are the best in the book. Werner's talent brings him to the attention of the Nazis, and he is sent to a national school that trains, ferociously, an elite cadre for the Third Reich. She devours Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. Though this is a novel Dickens would read with some interest, it is Jules Verne and Darwin who are the key to Marie-Laure's future. ![]() Ultimately she survives the destruction and desolation of the Occupation through the books she can read in braille. The miniatures teach Marie-Laure, using her fingers as eyes, how to navigate the city. Marie-Laure's father is also the creator of ingenious puzzles and delightful miniatures – of the streets and houses of Paris, for instance. There, hidden in its vaults for the past 200 years, is an accursed gem, a greyish-blue sea diamond with a red hue at its centre: the Sea of Flame. Marie-Laure is six years old when the novel begins in Paris in 1934, where she lives with her beloved Papa, a locksmith and keeper of the keys at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. ![]()
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