331. All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel By Anthony Doerr … Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a tall and freckled six-year-old in Paris with rapidly deteriorating eyesight when her father sends her on a children’s tour of the museum where he works. The guide is a hunchbacked old warder hardly taller than a child himself. He raps the tip of his cane against the floor for attention, then leads his dozen charges across the gardens to the galleries.  The children watch engineers use pulleys to lift a fossilized dinosaur femur. They see a stuffed giraffe in a closet, patches of hide wearing off its back. They peer into taxidermists’ drawers full of feathers and talons and glass eyeballs; they flip through two-hundred-year-old herbarium sheets bedecked with orchids and daisies and herbs.  Eventually they climb sixteen steps into the Gallery of Mineralogy. The guide shows them agate from Brazil and violet amethysts and a meteorite on a pedestal that he claims is as ancient as the solar system itself. Then he leads them single file down two twisting staircases and along several corridors and stops outside an iron door with a single keyhole. “End of tour,” he says.  A girl says, “But what’s through there?”  “Behind this door is another locked door, slightly smaller.”  “And what’s behind that?”  “A third locked door, smaller yet.”  “What’s behind that?”  “A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.”  The children lean forward. “And then?”  “Behind the thirteenth door”— the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—“ is the Sea of Flames.”  Puzzlement. Fidgeting.  “Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?” The children shake their heads. Marie-Laure squints up at the naked bulbs strung in three-yard intervals along the ceiling; each sets a rainbow-colored halo rotating in her vision.  The guide hangs his cane on his wrist and rubs his hands together. “It’s a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?”  They nod.