Friendship between Letitia Price and Victoire Desgraves

The friendship between Letitia Price and Victoire Desgraves is one of the central bonds within the Babel cohort, first offering both women a rare space of recognition and later becoming the emotional measure of betrayal. Their relationship grows from the shared estrangement of students placed inside a powerful institution that treats their languages and identities as instruments, but it cannot survive unchanged once Letitia chooses a course that places her friends in immediate danger.

Formation in Shared Estrangement

Letitia Price and Victoire Desgraves become close within the group of students who discover that they can speak openly about the humiliations and unease of life at Babel. The friends exchange experiences that had previously seemed too singular or baffling to explain to anyone else. Their intimacy is therefore founded less on similarity of background than on a common condition: each has been selected, trained, and brought into a place where belonging remains uncertain. Within the group, personal disclosure becomes a form of protection, and friendship supplies the trust that the institution itself does not provide.

Letitia’s background gives this bond a particular social and gendered pressure. She comes from Brighton and was recognized for her prodigious memory from childhood, then trained in French, German, Latin, and Greek by tutors connected to Oxford. Her path to Oxford was nevertheless precarious: her father refused to pay for a woman’s education, so she relied on a scholarship and sold a set of bracelets to pay for the coach fare. Victoire’s friendship with her thus exists alongside an awareness that Letitia has had to purchase access to learning through sacrifice, ingenuity, and resistance to familial limits.

Intellectual Solidarity and Disagreement

The friendship allows Victoire to voice frustrations that reach beyond ordinary academic difficulty. She works with Professor Hugo Leblanc, having previously studied French with him for two years without trouble, but his supervision becomes a source of ceaseless frustration. Victoire wants to work on Kreyòl, while Leblanc is chiefly interested in Vodou and regards Kreyòl as a degenerate language. Her complaint exposes the colonial hierarchy within which Babel’s scholarship operates: a language connected to the lived heritage of a people is devalued, while its religious traditions are treated as material for an outsider’s investigation.

Victoire’s resistance becomes explicit when she objects to the extraction of sacred knowledge for silver-working. She rejects the idea that Vodou beliefs should be explained to a white scholar so that he can search through every metaphor and divine name for a language match-pair capable of making a silver bar glow. Letitia does not immediately share this understanding; she questions whether the beliefs are real, and Victoire answers with certainty. The disagreement does not dissolve the friendship, but it shows that their intimacy is not based on effortless agreement. Victoire’s position insists that cultural knowledge cannot be separated from the people whose heritage it is, while Letitia’s skepticism reveals how thoroughly Babel’s instrumental logic has shaped what counts as knowledge.

Trust, Secrecy, and Political Choice

The relationship becomes more consequential when Victoire and the others decide to take their discoveries to the Hermes Society. Victoire tells Letitia that their minds are made up and that they will approach Hermes as soon as they reach Oxford. She does not demand Letitia’s participation: because Letitia has already suffered so much, the friends acknowledge that she cannot be forced to accept the danger. Their request is instead that she keep their secrets if she chooses not to join them.

Letitia responds by declaring that she is with them until the end. She embraces Victoire and begins to weep, while Victoire initially stiffens in bafflement before cautiously returning the embrace. The scene makes their friendship physical and reciprocal, but it also establishes the moral promise later placed under strain. Letitia’s declaration is not merely an expression of affection; it is a commitment to accompany her friends into danger. Victoire’s careful response suggests both genuine feeling and the difficulty of knowing how to receive such overwhelming reassurance at a moment when trust has become a political obligation.

The Armed Reversal

During the attack on the Reading Room, Letitia appears in the doorway holding a revolver. The room is a dead end, with no other doors or windows, and the others have been forced to huddle behind a table while gunshots sound outside. When Letitia enters, Victoire asks what she is doing in disbelief. Letitia does not arrive as a rescuer. She raises the weapon and aims at each of them in turn, handling it with practiced calm and without a trembling arm.

The shock of the moment lies in the collision between the remembered friend and the figure now standing before them. Letitia has been associated with a prim, vulnerable, and intellectually gifted identity, yet the revolver reveals a capacity for controlled violence that the others had not recognized. The weapon makes the hidden political dimension of their relationship visible: friendship has offered intimacy, but intimacy has not guaranteed shared allegiance. Victoire’s disbelief records the instant in which the friend becomes an armed threat without ceasing to be emotionally recognizable as the same person.

After Ramiz Rafi Mirza’s Death

The final confrontation takes place after the loss of Ramiz Rafi Mirza. When Letitia enters the lobby, she joins Robin Swift and Victoire Desgraves in a group altered by his absence. The four-person cohort has become an uneven remnant; without Ramiz’s laughter, quick wit, and sudden changes of conversation, the survivors no longer feel like the same group. They are described not as a cohort but as a wake, so Letitia’s presence is inseparable from grief and from the collapse of the structure that had sustained their friendship.

Victoire asks Letitia why she acted. The question is flat and toneless, stripped of the warmth that had once made their exchanges possible. Letitia flinches only slightly, keeps her chin high, and says that she had to do it and that it was all she could have done. Victoire rejects this explanation, answering that she does not understand. Their exchange leaves the relationship suspended between affection and judgment. The friendship’s history remains present, but it can no longer settle the question of responsibility; declarations of eternal friendship have been overtaken by the practical demand to decide which side each person will take.