Paris, 1878. After the death of their father, the three Van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. With few options available for income, bookish fourteen-year-old Marie and her younger sister Charlotte are dispatched to the Paris Opera, where they will be trained to enter its famous ballet, while insolent seventeen-year-old Antoinette finds herself launched into the orbit of mile Zolaand into the arms of a young man who may be a murderer.