Marie-Laure keeps broadcasting and lures the German upstairs

Marie-Laure LeBlanc’s continued broadcast becomes both an act of endurance and a trap: after reading from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea into the microphone, she uses Etienne LeBlanc’s record player and transmitter to make music carry through the house and guide the German searching for her toward the attic. With the Sea of Flames still inside the model house in her pocket and a knife in her hand, she chooses to make herself heard rather than remain only a hidden presence.

Broadcasting Against the Siege

By noon on August 12, Marie-Laure has read seven of the final nine chapters of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea into the microphone. The novel’s adventure continues amid the siege: Captain Nemo has escaped the giant squid, faced a hurricane, and rammed a warship; now his ship rests in the sea’s wastelands while he plays a mournful dirge on the organ. Marie-Laure is close to finishing, but cannot know who has heard her voice. She wonders whether the broadcast has comforted anyone, including Etienne, crouched with a hundred men in a cellar, or American soldiers listening as they clean their weapons. The transmission reaches outward, but its reception remains unknown to her.

That uncertainty matters. The broadcast is not presented as a confirmed rescue signal or as proof that anyone is listening. Marie-Laure can only continue the story and hope it has offered comfort somewhere beyond the house. As the battle destroys the city around her, reading gives the hours a sequence and an end: the novel has three pages left, and she is glad to be so near its conclusion. The measured progress through its chapters contrasts with the siege’s apparent lack of an ending.

From Reading to Decision

Downstairs, the German has shouted twice in frustration and then fallen silent. Marie-Laure considers the possibility of leaving the wardrobe and handing him the little house, hoping to learn whether he would spare her. She does not act on that impulse immediately. First she will finish reading; afterward, she will decide. Her choice is thus held open while she completes the broadcast, with the German’s presence pressing against the ordinary task of turning pages and speaking into a microphone.

The model house and the stone keep that decision tied to the danger in the room. Marie-Laure opens the house again and tips the Sea of Flames into her palm. She wonders whether the curse could be removed, whether the fires might go out and the earth heal, whether doves might return to the windowsills, and whether her father might come back. These wishes are not answers to the immediate threat; they reveal what the stone’s supposed power cannot give her. Her father remains absent, and she must decide for herself what to do with the object that has accompanied so much loss.

The Record Becomes a Lure

Sometime after midnight on August 13, after five days in Etienne’s attic, Marie-Laure shifts from reading aloud to preparing music. She feels the grooves of a record with her right hand while holding it in her left, reconstructing the song in her head before placing it on Etienne’s electrophone. She has had no water for a day and a half and no food for two days. The attic smells of heat, dust, confinement, and her urine in a shaving bowl. These conditions make the careful work of setting up the record and transmitter a physical task carried out in exhaustion, not a detached plan.

She puts a can and a brick beneath the piano bench, where she knows she can find them again, then checks the record on the spindle. She lowers the arm, places the needle at the outer edge, and finds the microphone switch with her left hand and the transmitter switch with her right. She intends to turn the volume as high as it will go. If the German is still in the house, the piano will travel down through the upper stories; hearing it, he may search the sixth floor and eventually listen at the wardrobe doors, where the sound will be louder still. Music, first a means of sharing a story across distance, becomes a means of directing the pursuer through the house.

The Threshold of Confrontation

Marie-Laure places the microphone in the electrophone’s bell-shaped speaker and switches on the record player. As the plate begins to spin and the attic crackles, she imagines walking in the Jardin des Plantes toward her father, who extends a hand. The remembered path offers a counter-image to the attic’s confinement: an imagined open space and a reunion that the scene itself cannot provide. Then the piano begins to play, turning that inward image into a sound intended for the German to follow.

She reaches beneath the bench for the knife and crawls to the top of the seven-rung ladder. There she sits with her feet dangling, the diamond inside the little house in her pocket, and the knife in her fist. Her position is precise: she is neither safely concealed nor yet face to face with the man below. The invitation, “Come and get me,” makes the danger explicit. She has not surrendered the stone or laid down the knife; instead, she uses the broadcast to bring the pursuer toward the place where she waits.

The scene places that private confrontation inside a sleeping city. Gunners, nuns, children, a doctor, wounded Germans, and Etienne behind the walls of Fort National are all described as asleep, while snails climb the rocks and rats move through the piles. The stillness around the house does not end the siege; it sharpens the contrast between the quiet city and the sound Marie-Laure deliberately sets in motion. Her broadcast cannot guarantee that anyone beyond the house will hear or help. Its immediate purpose is narrower and more dangerous: to make the German come upstairs, while she waits at the ladder with the stone and the knife.