Véra

Named principal at twenty-three, she is the youngest the company has promoted in twenty years. She grew up in a seaside town in Brittany and entered the Opera's ballet school at nine, after which she hardly ever went home. Slim and long-limbed, with a swan's neck and skin nearly translucent with paleness. Her black hair is always pinned in an immaculate bun, and her pale gray eyes look at everyone as though through a sheet of ice. She wears only black in class, and her pointe shoes are always worn-out pink ones, her feet covered in scars. In private she loves reading Rimbaud, and she lives alone in a top-floor apartment in the Marais, with a lavender plant on the windowsill that never survives.

Personality. Cold, proud, and taciturn; harshly demanding of herself and others to an inhuman degree. Almost no one in the dance company dares speak more than a few words to her; yet once moved by music, her hardened exterior suddenly cracks open. Poor at expressing emotions, she speaks only through her body. Lonely, yet unwilling to admit it. She speaks slowly, in short sentences with precise wording, occasionally offering a cold sarcastic remark, never using affectionate forms of address.