The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Paris, France. August 9, 1714. It’s a hot summer day in Paris. The city smells of rotting food and human waste, and the city’s poor lie in heaps along the sides of roads while the rich luxuriate in their private gardens. Addie is overwhelmed. All she has to her name are four copper sols. It’s getting late, and it will rain soon. She approaches a lodging house, but the owner thinks she’s a sex worker and turns her away. At a second, shabbier lodging house, the owner demands a week’s pay in advance. Addie reluctantly hands the woman three copper coins. She asks the owner for a receipt, but the owner refuses, insulted. In the decades she’s run this place, she promises Addie, she’s never forgotten a customer.

But Addie has barely managed to fall asleep inside her room when a man unlocks her door, the owner beside him, and demands to know how Addie got inside. Addie insists that she has paid, but the owner has already forgotten Addie and accuses her of lying. Addie has no choice but to leave. It’s late now, and the sky is cloudy and dark. Addie finds shelter underneath a wooden awning on the side of the street.

When Addie wakes, the rain has stopped, but the streets are still wet and filthy. Then Addie smells something sweet. She follows the scent to a bustling market. Addie hasn’t eaten in days, but she has only one coin left in her pocket, and the merchants keep close watch over their goods. Addie has yet to master the art of thievery, and when she tries to swipe a roll from a baker’s cart, the baker grabs her wrist and shouts, “Thief!” Fearing that she’ll be locked up, she frantically hands the baker her last coin.

Addie flees the market and roams the unfamiliar streets. Someone pitches a bucket of dirty water from a balcony above Addie, and Addie retreats onto a nearby step to seek shelter. A woman yells at Addie to “sell [her] wares” by the docks. Addie insists she’s not a sex worker, and the woman mocks her pride. Addie tries Notre-Dame next. She’s never been religious, but she figures if she has been cursed by the old gods, she might as well try to seek help from the new ones. It’s not long before a priest approaches Addie to say that she must leave, though: the cathedral is full for the night. The priest leads Addie outside and locks the door behind her.

Finally, Addie goes to the docks. A man approaches her. She tells him she costs 10 sols. When the man mocks her high price, she explains that she’s a virgin. Addie recalls nights back home when she would imagine herself and the stranger having sex. Her mother always said that a woman’s pleasure was sinful, but Addie relished her own desire and pleasure. The sex she has with this strange man now is nothing like her youthful fantasies. The man’s grunts are gross and animalistic, and Addie feels pain, not pleasure.

When Addie thinks back to her early days in Paris, she will describe them as “a season of grief blurred into a fog.” It’s not long before summer and autumn give way to the bitterly cold winter. The city freezes over, and a sickness sweeps through the city, infecting much of the population. Carts drive through the streets carrying bodies. It’s so cold that Addie thinks she’ll never be warm again. One freezing day, Addie feels so exhausted and beaten down that she can’t keep her eyes open. She collapses at the side of a narrow street. 

When Addie comes to, it’s dark, she can’t move, and everything smells of rotting flesh. At first, she thinks she has finally died, but then she realizes that her limbs aren’t lifeless—they’re being weighed down by corpses. One of the carts must have mistaken her for a corpse and picked her up with the other dead. Addie frantically claws her way to the top of the cart and emerges from the pile of corpses. The man driving the cart cracks his whip, and the cart jerks forward. It’s only then that Addie reaches inside her pocket and realizes that the wooden bird is gone. Addie grieves this loss for many months. Later she is glad, though: it means she’s no longer tied to her old life.