Bread, Wine, and a Portrait

Paris, scarred but surviving after the French Revolution, is a city caught between ashes and new beginnings. Claire, a widowed painter, resolves to pick up her brushes again after years of silence. By the Seine she meets Étienne, a wounded former soldier who has lost faith in causes, hope, and himself.

She offers him bread, wine, and-most unwillingly on his part-a place as her model. He hates sitting still, she teases him into doing it anyway, and soon her sketchbooks are filled not only with his face but with his grumbling.

As lanterns glow across the river, their banter deepens into something gentler: Claire paints not just scars but resilience, and Étienne begins to see himself anew through her eyes. Yet old ties to the Revolution threaten to drag him back into danger, forcing them to stand together-with wit, courage, and love-against a city still restless with shadows.

Bread, Wine, and a Portrait is a historical romance of humor and tenderness, where healing is drawn stroke by stroke and love grows in the light of lanterns on the Seine.