The First Actress

by C. W. Gortner

  “I will.” He stepped from the desk as I made toward the door. “Sarah,” he said, bringing me to a halt.

  I went still.

  “Did you…?” His question hovered between us.

  “Do you truly want to know?” I said.

  He sighed. “No.”

  “Then we mustn’t ever speak of it again.”

  Before the fiacre, his greatcoat clasped to my chest, he bowed and took my hand, kissing it. Then, without a word, he returned to his office.

  I climbed into the carriage. Halfway to the theater, I lifted his coat to my face.

  It smelled of him. It did not move me in the slightest.

  * * *

  I rallied Marie Agar, Sophie, and Marie Colombier, along with four other company actresses who remained in Paris. We donned the winged headdress and smock of the Red Cross, submitting to a hasty training course provided by a head nurse dispatched by Kératry, leaving me in no doubt that despite my enthusiasm and our bounty of supplies, we were as ill-equipped as possible to tend to actual patients.

  However, our ward was equipped enough to compensate. We penned the hens and geese in the courtyard, and kept burlap sacks of supplies in the basement, along with our stored props and the upended theater seating. Rows of tidy cots now lined the auditorium, with an operating table set up on the stage. Then we enticed the soldiers loitering in the Place du Châtelet, by doling out hot soup from a charcoal stove in the lobby. We discovered most of the soldiers weren’t gravely injured, merely stragglers who’d survived the rout at Sedan and made their way to Paris, like a herd of lost cattle. A few had minor wounds, which we cleansed and bound. Once they were attended, we sent them to the Tuileries to be conscripted. Kératry needed as many men as possible, and he’d fulfilled his promise to me in abundance.

  His society friends, including the Rothschilds, donated wine, chocolate, clothing, and other necessities, which he dispatched on municipal carts, along with a letter assuring me that should I require anything, I need only send word. He didn’t come in person to inspect our ward, but his message was plain, as was his intent. This was his apology for his prior abuse of me. When I had least expected it, he redeemed himself. That he didn’t inquire again about Maurice was, to me, an act of mercy. He had said he’d never acknowledge my child as his, and much as I appreciated his redemption, I did not want to share my son.

  Nevertheless, I was determined to prove my commitment. Yet as September ebbed into a frigid October, with Prussian cannons now heard firing on the outskirts, no patients arrived at our ward. It was disconcerting, as day after day we waited, expecting a deluge, only to find ourselves re-counting the stacks of donated linens and blankets, the rolls of pristine gauze, and the precious boxes of laudanum vials.

  “Are you certain we’ll be nursing soldiers at some point?” yawned Marie Colombier as I stood in the lobby, gazing out into the Place. “Because this is quite the production, without an audience to reap the benefits.”

  I refused to look at her, watching a few pedestrians walk past, bundled against the chill, but no longer scurrying as if the sky were about to fall on their heads. As the weeks dragged on without a single skirmish to remind us that we were under siege, Paris had reverted to a semblance of normality—if not entirely, as we now had Prussians barring safe passage outside the city, but enough so that cafés and restaurants had reopened and those who hadn’t fled ridiculed those who had, remarking that our coastal resorts must be very crowded, indeed. For some, the situation even became one of illicit profit, with newspaper advertisements offering guided tours to view the Krupp cannon blasts from nearby rooftops, as if it were all a passing lark.

  “The war isn’t over, Marie,” I said.

  “I wonder if it’s even begun,” she replied.

  “If it’s such an inconvenience,” I snapped at her, “you can leave whenever you like.”

  She stifled another yawn. “Whenever, perhaps, but not wherever. With all the roads closed, there’s no place to go. I rather think I’d enjoy an invasion about now, if only to put an end to this tedium.”

  I had to agree. It was a bore, but it wasn’t going to stay that way. At some point, our defenses would be put to the test and Marie would receive the excitement she craved, though it might not be the excitement she envisioned. Once she was elbow-deep in gore, I doubted whether she would have the courage for caustic asides.

  At night, I tossed and turned. We had plenty of food, thanks to Kératry, and Madame G. knew how to preserve so as not to waste. I rescued a few of the pluckier hens from the theater pen and let them loose in my mother’s flat; they’d lay fresh eggs for us, I told Madame G., as Caroline giggled, for my dogs chased after them and the hens ended up high on Julie’s bed to evade pursuit, nesting on her satin cushions. It suited me immensely. Let my mother return to find her precious boudoir a mess of feathers and chicken excrement.

  But Maurice was never far from my thoughts. I wondered how he fared and if he missed me. I pictured him in Holland, tripping over quaint bridges spanning canals, then a vise clamped across my chest as I imagined Julie whispering venom in his ear. She was quite capable of it; she would turn my son against me to prove she held the upper hand.

  I’d almost decided to abandon the infirmary and beseech Kératry to help me reach Holland when the shelling began.

  X

  The prized chandelier overhead, mummified in layers of felt as ordained by Duquesnel, who must have begun to regret indulging me, rattled ominously as another explosion nearby shook the Odéon.

  From the bedside where I was binding the stump of what had once been a soldier’s hand while he writhed in agony, I glanced at Marie. She was cringing, her smock splattered in blood. I’d had to relegate her to our lesser wounded, if any could be deemed such, for as the siege took an abrupt turn, so did our time of waiting. Even as the most brutal winter any of us could recall assailed Paris, cutting short those careless jaunts to view the cannon fire from rooftops, the Prussians had mounted an equally ruthless assault, cutting off our supply routes and bombarding us day and night. The soldiers of our battered defense began to flood in, conveyed in carts or upon the shoulders of their compatriots, presenting such horrific injuries that I had to bite back a surge of vomit. Many were delirious, with gangrene setting in, but I set myself to cleansing their putrid wounds, a lavender-drenched mask tied about my nose and mouth to douse some of the stench. Marie, however, swooned and had to be revived with smelling salts. She soon showed herself as inept at nursing as she was at acting.

  “They’re going to bring the very roof down about our ears,” she now cried out, as I jabbed my finger at her, ordering her to see to the invalids she’d been assigned. Around us, the din of moans and implorations for a priest, for their mothers, or for a dose of laudanum rose like a wretched score, punctuated by the howls of those unfortunates undergoing impromptu amputations on the stage, where Marie Agar, despite her age, had taken to collecting the severed limbs to be burned outside on a pyre, though I thought it a waste. We’d chopped down every prop and set, even the seats removed from the theater, for kindling, and still we were blue with cold, our breath wreathing us in icicled clouds. Frostbite was a constant concern, both for us and for our patients. Had it been up to me, we’d have burned the severed limbs in the furnace for heat.

  “Stop it,” I hissed at Marie Colombier, my patience, of which I’d never had an excess supply, strained past its limit. “You’ll frighten our patients. No one is going to bring—”

  She glared. “Our patients are half-dead already. The Left Bank has been shelled to cinders! The Prussians are at our gates. How long must we pretend?”

  “Enough!” I strode to her and seized her by the arm. “We have a duty to perform. We’ve raised our flag to alert those barbarians that we’re an authorized medical facility. I’ll not hear another word of abandoning it, no matter how many shells they throw at
us.”

  She was trembling, though she had enough self-possession to wrench her arm from my grip. “It’s over,” she spat at me. “There’s famine everywhere. Not a cat or dog or pigeon left in the city that hasn’t been turned into soup. Every animal in the zoo of le Jardin des Plantes has been butchered; people are paying out their life’s savings for a quarter kilo of elephant or perishing of starvation. There’s nothing left of your precious cause, and the Prussians don’t care a fig for your wretched white flag. I do not intend to die here, no matter how much acclaim you may seek for your patriotism.”

  I almost struck her. I had to clench my fist to my side, meeting her eyes, her defiance marred by the fear I saw there—a fear I’d seen in the others, as well, though I’d tried to ignore it, just as I’d tried to ignore the same fear scrabbling in the pit of my being.

  “You’re a coward,” I whispered.

  “So be it. Coward or not, I’m leaving.” She tore at her smock, flinging it aside. “No one’s going to have a bust commissioned for surviving the siege, Sarah. If you want to end up as a Prussian prisoner of war for headlines, you can do so without me.”

  I might have hit her then, out of rage and frustration, for she only spoke aloud what the others must be thinking. From a staff of twelve or so actresses who had flocked to my call for assistance, we were down to four—myself, Madame Agar, Sophie, and Marie—plus Madame G. and Caroline, both of whom I’d dragged from seclusion in our flat to oversee our supplies, of which, as Marie had declared, we had nearly nothing left.

  But my anger was cut short by another earth-sundering blast. This time, the entire theater swayed. As I rocked back on my heels, I heard in impossible clarity the creaking of the overheard chains holding the chandelier in place, and then, in a horrifying suspension of time, so that everything seemed to pause, the chains rupturing.

  “Our patients!” I staggered toward the row of cots with a cry, just as the chandelier came crashing down in a deafening explosion of crystal shards.

  Chaos erupted as I dove onto the cots to protect the wounded, lacerating my hands to yank the inert men from under the glass-covered blankets, shouting at the others for help. Madame G. rushed to assist me, as did Sophie and Caroline, but once we’d managed to pair the men together in the few spare cots outside the site of the fallen chandelier, most of them too far gone with pain to even be aware they’d nearly been crushed, I looked to where Marie stood.

  She’d gone immobile, her mouth agape in horror. I knew then, with a dreadful capsizing of my heart, that she was right.

  “The basement,” I said. “Move everyone into the basement. Now.”

  “The basement?” echoed Sophie, her coif askew and her pert blond charm subsumed by fatigue. “Why?” She lowered her voice as she marked the fury in my stance. “To feed whatever rats are still swimming down there?” When she reached for my shoulder, I flinched. “Sarah,” she said. “The pipes have burst from the cold. The basement is flooded with sewage. The men will die down there just as well as they will up here. Or perhaps not as well, if the theater collapses and buries us alive in the basement.”

  “No.” My voice shuddered. “These men will not die under my watch.”

  Marie let out a coarse laugh. “And here it is at last, our lead actress’s soliloquy.”

  I whirled on her, this time fully intending to slap her, but Madame G. halted me with a hesitant “What about Julie’s flat? We have spare beds there….” Her reassuring smile was more like a grimace. “At least we’d be safer, yes?”

  I met her hollowed eyes, marking the fatigue that weighed on her, on all of us. I had to assent. “We also have extra food there, and—”

  “No.” Duquesnel came into the theater, no doubt alerted by the fall of the chandelier. Though he’d allowed the requisition of the theater, he’d kept his distance once my ward was established, living in his office upstairs. “Sarah, we must see every patient transferred to the Hospital of Val-de-Grâce.” He lifted his voice over my protest, thrusting a shred of paper into my hand. “Orders from Kératry. Every civilian-run ward must close.”

  “It…it cannot be.” I didn’t glance at the paper, crumpling it into my smock pocket. “The military hospitals are overflowing. There’s no room.”

  “Nevertheless, these are his orders.” Duquesnel kept his gaze on me. “We’ve done all we can. The Prussians are determined to destroy the city; Kératry says either we surrender or we’ll perish in our own rubble.”

  “But…” I turned to the others, all of whom except Marie averted their eyes. She gave me a look of gloating satisfaction, as if this were a play where she’d finally succeeded in upstaging me. “Now?” I returned my gaze to Duquesnel.

  He nodded. “As soon as we can. We can use my fiacre and the supply carts out back.” He managed a tremulous laugh. “Be glad I refused when you wanted those carts dismantled for firewood or we’d be carrying your invalides to the Val-de-Grâce on our backs.”

  I swallowed a surge of tears. Duquesnel saw it, but he knew me better than I supposed. He did not offer any consolation. He took charge instead, ordering the women and the lone elderly stagehand with the cataracts to prepare our patients for transfer.

  We may have done everything we could, but as another shell exploded in the Place, the impact reverberating through the Odéon’s walls, I feared nothing would be enough to save us.

  * * *

  Once more, Madame G., Caroline, and I huddled in my mother’s flat with my emaciated dogs—my poor parrot had succumbed, to my despair—as the shelling continued, lighting up the smoke-charred sky with an infernal glow and permeating Paris with the stink of charnel and sulfur. It was such a nightmare, such hell on earth, that it defied comprehension. I couldn’t understand how we, the pride of Europe, revered for our exquisite civilization, had fallen so low, our crown jewel of a city in our now-extinct empire buried in debris, with starvation and cholera stalking those of us who remained.

  “How could they have let it go this far?” I demanded, pacing the flat while Caroline eyed me wearily and Madame G. retreated to her garret upstairs, unable to bear my ranting. “When shall it end? Must we die in the ruins of our own country”—I rounded on Caroline—“while hiding behind bolted doors? Kératry shut down our ward because he said we had to surrender, but thus far, I’ve seen no sign of it.”

  My maid had become so drawn and pale, she resembled a ghost. We all did, every soul left in Paris. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, appalled by my spectral gauntness. When I twisted my hair into a chignon in the morning, strands of my hair clung to my fingers. My gums were bleeding and I’d lost a back tooth; it came out as I gnawed on a rot-soft apple core. I didn’t even feel it until I was staring at the broken molar in my palm.

  “We can’t endure much more of this,” said Caroline, my dogs lying listless at her feet, too tired from hunger to move. I’d had a confrontation with Madame G. over my pets’ survival; as the last of our food dwindled, she suggested we must do as everyone else: Butchers were paying for domestic animals, according to the amount of flesh that could be harvested. As the poor creatures were certain to die anyway without sustenance—

  “Not my dogs,” I shouted at her. “We’ll eat you first!”

  She burst into tears and fled. I apologized to her later, but as I now regarded my emaciated animals, I couldn’t evade the dreadful reality. Unless we indeed resorted to cannibalism, we’d soon have no other choice.

  Pausing at the window of my mother’s salon, boarded up to keep the explosions from shattering the glass, I peered into the street through the haphazard nailed slats of wood hauled from the Odéon to replace the broken shutters. The streets were deserted. Although thousands were still trapped in Paris, the entire city felt devoid of life.

  “I should go.” I tugged my shawl across my shoulders. I had to envelop myself in layers against the cold when I headed out to s
earch for food in the lull between the shellings. “There might be something edible today in our so-called black market.” I snorted. “Overpriced and spoiled as it may be.”

  “You only found that cabbage and rancid meat yesterday,” Caroline said. “Who knows what the meat even was? No matter how much we boiled it, it was still tough as a leather sole.”

  “Cat.” I trudged to the door. “The butcher said it was cat. Or was it rat? I can’t recall. Whatever it was, the women were about to slit each other’s throats over it, until I offered up Julie’s pearls and the butcher declared it mine.”

  Caroline crossed herself. She hadn’t shown any particular devoutness before, but now she’d taken to fingering her rosary constantly as shells burst in the distance, making the sign of the cross as if the Holy Virgin were about to descend from heaven to save us. It obviously gave her consolation, even if I wanted to tell her that God cared no more for our plight than the Prussians.

  “Clean up the kitchen,” I said instead, for I’d set down old playbills and newspapers for the dogs, not daring to take them out, lest a starving citizen tried to steal them for slaughter. As if they’d sensed the danger, my dogs had obliged. “And check on Madame Guérard,” I added, wrapping another scarf about my head. “I’m worried about her. She barely ate a mouthful of our leather sole last night.”

  “Please be careful,” implored Caroline as I pulled away the chair that we kept lodged under the doorknob, to deter looters prowling the district, risking life and limb to break into dwellings. “Don’t be gone long. It’s not safe.”

  “Yes,” I said, but as I went out, I thought a German shell striking me dead as I bartered my mother’s earrings for inedible meat would make a fitting epitaph.

  I’d barely reached the end of the district, my mitten-swathed hands shoved into my coat pockets to clutch the dull kitchen knife I carried for self-defense, my lungs wheezing in the thick chill of the morning, when I saw two soldiers shambling toward me.