But I should first, perhaps, usher the Soulavies and Mme. Alexandrovna offstage. Odette seemed quite content to stare at my camera equipment, although she asked no questions. M. Soulavie stood strangely still; he seems to have the aspect of always waiting for something, and he watched his wife with an uncommon interest, although she did nothing out of the ordinary at all: She was politeness itself, and made just the proper kind of smalltalk with me before telling me yet again how pleased she was to have met me and how she hoped to see me at the party.
And then they took their leave, Odette giving me her hand once more, M. Soulavie simply nodding, and his wife smiling winsomely at me as she turned to go.
As I write it to you, my dearest sister, it strikes me as an altogether peculiar encounter. But what do I know of society? We have all heard that the very rich and privileged can be quite another species, and my impression being that Mme. Alexandrovna is titled Russian nobility, it would not be so strange at all that she is odd. As for the Soulavies, I know that you would love the wife and fear the husband. But perhaps he is just protective of his wife, who is, after all, so delicate of feature and aspect that perhaps I do not find it so very odd that she incites a fierce protectiveness in her husband.
But Natalie, I find myself vexed, and sorely so, with an as-now-unanswerable question: What am I to wear? Ah, well, the party is a full two weeks hence, and I think I can count on Richet to help me with any sartorial difficulties.
And I have a feeling, Natalie, that I will be receiving both sartorial and other advice from you, who know so much better, from reading the society pages, how to behave at a fancy-dress ball than I do!
I look forward to your next letter, little sister.
Your affectionate brother,
Edouard
Chapter 32
From the Journal of Augustine Dechelette
I STOPPED, A deer before the hunter’s gun. The attendant tightened his grip on my arm ever so slightly: This was familiar to him. I was staring at the figure of Dr. Charcot in his long black coat, talking to a group of young men. They seem eager and starved, eating him with their eyes as they ate his words. This was the great Dr. Charcot, and they were feasting on his presence.
“Bear well in mind,” he was saying slowly, tasting his own words, “that the word hysteria means nothing.”
The attendant gave my arm a little tug. I could not breathe. Dr. Charcot turned his head, and the heads of the young men followed. If they saw me they might descend upon me like hungry animals, and I would be devoured.
But the doctor saw nothing: another patient, a young woman being led down the hall. He did not even recognize me. I did not exist.
The attendant loosened his grip; I exhaled, and was surprised that my breath did not come out as a gasp, a cry. My awareness of myself was acute. I felt my near-silent feet on the floor, my still-constricted throat, my dingy smock. I could hear Dr. Charcot’s voice murmuring. For an instant everything looked wrong. The light in the hallway was wrong. The walls themselves seemed somehow wrong, as though suddenly set not quite at right angles. The fingers of the attendant, when I looked down, were almost grotesque in their chubby paleness, like coffin worms, and then I was simply Augustine, walking down the hall to my room.
The great and famous Dr. Charcot, who has diagnosed me in front of all Paris as an hysteric, says that the word hysteria means nothing. Nothing. I do not know what to make of it. Perhaps I misheard him; but I know I did not.
I want a mirror. I want to know if Augustine still exists. If Augustine now means nothing. What is this green disease if not desire? What is this hysteria if not the thwarting of desire? If I could have been with Louis, would I have ever have had to come here? I know I am depraved, yet I do not feel it. Am I so in thrall to the basest aspects of my womanly nature that I cannot even see my own rottenness? I am riddled through with moral depravity, yet I feel pure. How did love riddle me with its green poison?
I cannot pray. My mother prays for me even now, I suspect. Perhaps she sits now, fingering solid wooden prayers, whispering ancient words, tears on her cheeks.
The ink in this place is of a terrible quality. (I write this so as not to think of my mother.) It is a brown that looks faded even as it dries on the page, and its thickness clogs the nib of my pen. At home I used brown (although Papa used blue for his official correspondence), but it flowed evenly and shown on the page. And Louis once gave me a vial of the loveliest lavender ink, which I used only for my journal and kept hidden beneath the delicates in my hope chest lest Maman find it.
Perhaps she has discovered it by now. To Maman, lavender ink would surely be tangible evidence of moral depravity! That would hardly trouble me were I not certain she has read my journals by now. She and Papa would not let me take them with me. I buried them with the ink in the hope chest, and it is true that Maman is not the sort to snoop. But she is the sort to sit and go through the things in her daughter’s hope chest and cry for what she feels will never be, now. And maybe she is right.
And yet I do not feel sorry for myself. There is a part of me that cannot believe, against all the logic my father taught me, against all moral teachings I have learned, against all decency, in fact, that I am truly ill. And yet this does not frighten me. I look out my little window and think: Beyond that wall, even though I cannot see it, Paris eats and breathes and sleeps. All Paris moves beyond my wall, out of my vision but seldom out of my thoughts. What should terrify me does not: Perhaps I am insane. Worse still, perhaps I am not, and yet I am trapped in this place. I may be trapped here the rest of my life. Yet as I write those words, I do not believe them. My father would never allow that. I heard him arguing with Maman: All she needs is a change of scene. My mother wept, of course, but resisted his will, I think for the first time in her life. My father does not think me mad, I am convinced of it.
Ah! I hear the key in the lock.
Chapter 33
Charles
“YOU KNOW WHAT this room is for,” V said as I lay spent beside her. I had gotten to know this room well. We have done nothing to make it beautiful. The flowers I put on the mantel died long ago, the vase was empty of water. V’s petticoats are soiled from lying on the dirty floor, which was covered with ashes from the fireplace.
The cracks in the ceiling have become my roadmap. That one there, a split in the concrete, a split in the road: when she first introduced me to the extraordinary delights of pleasing her orally. That fractured star, cracked into seven directions: when she turned to offer her beauty from behind. She knew all the secrets of lovemaking, and I was not jealous. She came to me whole and free of any past. I have accepted everything; I will accept anything. She who is so completely mine cannot have had any past outside of my imagination.
But this thought made me uneasy. I did know what this room was for. But V’s childhood with the nuns, their fond recollections of the lovely blonde child, had never been real to me; nothing that ever happened before I met her can ever be made real to me.
Except for the Empress’s Children.
“What do you want to tell me, V?” I asked, covering my suddenly nervous hands by getting up to gather her petticoats and stockings from the floor.
“I don’t want to tell you something,” she said imperturbably. “I want to give you something.”
I stood bent, clutching the soft silk in my hand. There was a pale shadow on the wall that showed where a painting once hung. I wanted to know what it was a painting of.
“Will you let me give you a present?” She reached over to run one sharp nail down my back, light like the scratch of a spoiled, sleepy kitten.
“You know I will do anything you want,” I told her. A boating scene, a scene of indecent love? A portrait of a little blonde girl in a parochial-school uniform?
She was preparing me a glass of absinthe, sitting up naked in bed, expertly mixing the water, the sugar, the green.
The familiar clink of ice and metal soothed my ravaged nerves, but still I did not know if I could take seeing what she wanted me to see.
We went shopping for fruits and vegetables the next morning, I in my cape and she demure in gray muslin. She was dressed for the summer, which had suddenly come upon us, in gray faille shaped like a proper suit coat, but lighter; it gave the impression almost of indecency although it was very proper indeed. She wore a gray hat with dyed violet ostrich feathers laced around the brim. Her boots were dove, her stockings, petticoats, and gloves brightest white. We browsed the stalls of the rue Cloisot: cheeses and live chickens and loaves of fresh bread, ducks and eggs and heaps of red tomatoes, yellow squash, and exotic delights from far away: pomegranates and grapefruit, star fruit and mangos. V had not said anything more, last night, about what she wanted to show me. And I had not asked.
We walked slowly. V took time at almost every stall. She held the fat rock doves and asked the vendor what sauce was best with squab. She tasted a walnut, the tip of her pink tongue visible for an instant, and in that instant four men were staring at her mouth, her pearly teeth. She bit. I smiled at the man nearest us, and he turned away almost angrily.
“I used to find them here,” she said, bemused “I didn’t have to take them home.”
I should have felt only revulsion; I should have left her in the street.
I was excited. So delicate she looked, like a china figurine. I knew what she was capable of. The men staring at her voluptuous mouth did not know, no matter what they dreamed while they looked at her.
She pulled off one glove and slipped her hand into my pocket, and I grasped her fingers, surprisingly coarse fingers for a woman of her delicate beauty. She stepped closer to me. She turned slightly and brushed her hip against me; and the men stared.
“I will whet your appetite first,” she said.
FOR A WEEK we spoke no more of it. We did not go to V’s room. She seemed to take extra pleasure in the luxuries of our life together: dried rose petals and lavender in the bath, hot toddies and poached fruit; frequent presents of lace for collars, and new kid gloves and silk stockings. I loved spoiling her. I bought her a pair of harem slippers covered with pearls; I bought her candied quinces. She never said thank you. She knew I did not want words. I wanted to watch her pull her new stockings on slowly, with painted toe and extended leg. She knew I wanted to watch her sink into the steam of her scented bath. To see her delicate teeth bite into crystal sugar with a barely audible crushing sound.
V took pleasure in spoiling me, too. A new spoon for my absinthe ritual, shaped like a young girl with a basket and a hat with ribbons, and the clogs of a peasant. She liked to point these girls out to me on the street, so different than she. Thicker around the waist, with heavy wrists and coarse hair. Perhaps it was because of Tabby; how had I thought she noticed so little?
“What do those farmer-girl hands feel like on a man’s body?” she asked more than once. She was not jealous; her eyes were shining. I told her that I did not care for farm girls, which on the whole was true. I had wanted Tabby so desperately because I knew that she was going to die.
Once, upon awakening, I found V almost ready to go out. We slept when we wanted to, and often I did not know whether I was waking into day or nighttime. It was twilight, and the streets were full. The men’s top hats created a shining sea of undulating sheen amid waves of black luster. The women’s skirts flowed mauve and blue and yellow along the busy street; their feathered hats bobbed. All Paris was on the Boulevard tonight.
Every man looked at V; she was so obviously not the demure young lady she looked.
“I want to give you my gift,” she said to me, clutching my arm with a girlish grip. She knew that her light touch excited me, I who knew how thoroughly woman she was.
“You wanted to take me for a walk,” I said. “You know that I am yours to command.”
So we walked to the Seine and along the quays, past Nôtre Dame, where a carnival atmosphere pervaded the large square, as it always did: Tumbling troupes performed their antics while pickpockets fleeced the crowd; Gypsies read cards for the credulous; young men took liberties under the guise of protecting their young ladies from the frightening faces of the gargoyles smiling placidly and obscenely out of the Middle Ages on the cathedral walls, protecting nothing.
We walked on. V had one hand in her muff and the other on my arm, but she removed it to put it into the pocket of my topcoat. Such a schoolgirl gesture. I squeezed her hand. We walked over one of the oldest bridges over the water toward the neighborhood of the apartment. I was not surprised.
There was no one at all on the bridge. V took her hand out of my pocket and slipped it down to touch my crotch.
“I will take you to a club I know,” she said.
We walked for a long time holding hands, seemingly aimlessly. I wasn’t thinking, particularly; walking had become kind of a dream. The streets got darker and dirtier and more deserted. The air was clouded silk against my face, my body. We did not speak until we came to a small door, scoured by age, set down a flight of worn stone steps on a no-name street.
The steps were slippery, almost mildewed, and bowed in the center from wear. I felt I was descending into an underwater cave. V seemed to float down the steps in front of me, a miasma of color and scent, and at her gentle knock the door opened immediately.
Smooth dim light, a lot of red brocade. Women in clothing so diaphanous it seemed no more than colored smoke around their breasts, their bellies. A stage. A sudden, raucous can-can performed by women wearing red corsets with black trim, black garters and red hose, and short red-silk skirts with a white froth of petticoats. They wore nothing to cover the sweet darkness between their legs: When they twirled and bent, flinging up their skirts, their white asses gleamed and made the darkness leap.
I looked at V and her eyes were glistening. Her lips were parted and her teeth pearls.
“You remember La Salpêtrière,” she said finally, after she saw my face relax and knew that the green music was playing in my veins. “That girl. You remember that girl.”
“The young thing with the frightened blue eyes? Yes, I remember her.” I closed my own eyes. I could see the girl now, standing terrified before the crowd, and I felt myself grow hard.
V laughed. “Yes, you do remember her.” I opened my eyes, but V was looking only at my face; she could not see beneath the table!
“I have an idea about that girl,” she went on. “It is likely that she is all alone. That her family is far away and does not visit her. I have known girls like that one, girls who were sent to institutions simply for being girls, for speaking their minds at their fathers’ tables.”
I waited.
“It is called green disease,” she said, and I started to laugh.
“I thought this was called green disease,” indicating my glass.
V laughed too. “That is the Green Muse.”
“You are the Green Muse.”
“Certainly not. Green is my worst color.”
“But you are inspiration and addiction both. You are as powerful as a drug, and beautiful as any angel that inspires a poet.”
“And you are talking green nonsense. Listen, Charles, we can do something extraordinary here. This girl she is our opportunity.”
“Opportunity?” I was high in the night sky—I was the sky itself, filled with flocks of birds fleeing southward.
“We should have taken Tabby home,” I said, and knew the green had taken complete hold of me.
V laughed. “Yes,” she said. “We should have. But this girl from the hospital, she will be better than Tabby. Augustine is a simple country girl. She is already cowed. She is accustomed to doing as she is told, at home as well as at La Salpêtriêre. A girl like that will be easy to tame. And she will not have the slightest idea of how to save her life.”
This club, thi
s table, were far away. I was flying higher than any bird ever had, alone in the night sky with V.
Chapter 34
Edouard
“LOOK, EDOUARD. DO you see her?” Rosalie was casting aspersions at the vacant corner of the courtyard. Adelaide, sunning herself imperiously on the crumbling stoop of the ancient door? And then I did see her. It was Augustine’s pitiable imbecile. She was smiling the unrestrained smile of a child while she flapped her hands in front of her at the waist. She seemed intent on something, although I couldn’t say what it was. There was a bed of roses, fresh petals littering the courtyard. The only other flowers were the dents de lions, which had struggled up through uneven bricks. I looked carefully at her: Her skin was so pale, her features so immobile, she might have been entirely constructed of moonlight and wax.
Then the smile disappeared as if it had never been, and her face held no expression whatsoever. I glanced at Augustine; she was watching the poor madwoman with something like a mother’s pride.
“She has the mind of a child,” Augustine said. “I want to befriend her.” I must have looked startled; it had not occurred to me that one would want to be friends with anyone who had spent her entire life in a mental institution.
“But what possible good can you do this poor creature? If in the past twenty-five years in the mental institution the doctors have not been able to reach her, well, my dear Augustine, it is unlikely she can be reached.”
Augustine shot me the first disapproving look I had received from her. She felt that I was demeaning something that was important to her—or perhaps she felt that I was being patronizing. I realized that she lived now in a place where much of the treatment she received might indeed seem patronizing to her. I went beet-red.
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