1910 - What Is Not Done - 1910, #1

In 1910, Paris offers Antoinette and Marie everything it promises young women of their world: salons, the Opéra, glances, and pleasures allowed so long as they remain in their proper place. Yet one night, on the way back from a performance, something shifts between them. An old, unspoken trouble finally finds its shape.

What was meant to remain unexpressed becomes experience, then desire. In Marie's bedroom, the two friends cross the threshold of what they had never dared to name. Gestures change, certainties begin to crack, and another life seems possible — more secret, freer, perhaps more exact.

But their trouble is not an exception. It is a door.

Soon, a woman appears: self-possessed, playful, already familiar with certain codes they have yet to learn. Through her, Antoinette and Marie glimpse a wider territory: discreet salons, franker gazes, subtler rules, and above all L'Entrechattes, a hushed circle where women learn to choose without asking permission.

With What Is Not Done, Alexandra & Ysis open the first volume of 1910: a sapphic historical novel of initiation and threshold, where love, the body, and transgression enter the Belle Époque together.

Translated from French by Ysis