The Taking Down

Eight stained-glass windows set in 1903. One restorer who knows exactly what she is looking for, and will not say why.

Paris, March 2026. Adrien Kerkhove, chairman of the management board of the Kerkhove Glass group, has bought the Hôtel de Sarrelonge in the Marais, the house where his great-grandfather installed the windows known as the Eight. Twenty-two panels, thirty-one square metres and twenty-six months of work under state supervision. Five workshops are invited to tender, and the smallest of them, Atelier Vannier in Pantin, is two women and one kiln.

Iris Vannier wins for a reason she had not foreseen: she is the only one to write that panel VII was opened after 1903, and to explain how she can tell.

Adrien has never obtained anything without a document, and he has no idea what the name Vannier meant to his family in 1994. Iris knows. She measures, she records, she never shows what she has not established, and she walked through that carriage door for a reason she has told nobody.

Book One of The Glass and the Lead, a French saga in ten books told in two voices, at the bench and on the scaffold: a craft described to the millimetre, an investigation that moves one piece and one document at a time, and two people with every reason to keep their distance.