’Dres Petitpas looks down on the pack of us. His face is red as fire and his eyes glow hot as coals. “I see you boys still got some learning to do. I take your bet, swamp owl girl. You bring up a fiddler to play for us, and I dance the sun around again.”
Everybody get real quiet, and Octavie says, “’Dres, you know there ain’t no other fiddler in St. Mary’s Parish.”
“That’s it, then. I don’t dance without music. The bet’s off.”
Someone in the crowd laughs. I’d laugh myself if this was a story I was hearing, about Young ’Dres Petitpas and how he owns all the music in St. Mary’s Parish.
Then another voice speaks out of the crowd. “I will play for this dance,” says my friend Ulysse.
I spin around to see him in a store-bought suit, with his wild, black hair all slicked down with oil, looking innocent as a puppy in a basket.
“I have an accordion,” he says, and gives me a sharp-toothed smile, and I know, just then, that I love him.
Another man turns up with a washboard and a spoon, and he and Ulysse jump up on the table as ’Dres Petitpas climbs down. Ulysse strikes up a tune I’ve heard a thousand times: “T’es Petite et T’es Mignonne,” which is Tante Eulalie’s special tune for me. It gives my weary feet courage, and I dance up to Murderes Petitpas and take hold of his hand.
That is when the good people of Pierreville discover that Murderes Petitpas cannot dance. He has two left feet and he can’t keep time, and he may know what a Window or a Cajun Cuddle or a Windmill looks like from above, but he for sure doesn’t know how to do them. We stumble and fumble this way and that around the floor while the storm breaks at last in a gale of laughter. I am laughing, too, in spite of the pain in my feet, like dancing on nails or needles. I don’t care if he falls first or I do. I’ve won already, me. The good people of Pierreville have seen ’Dres Petitpas for what he is. His sons will marry whoever they want, and he will not dare say a word against it.
Scree, scraw goes the accordion; thunk-whoosh goes the washboard, with Ulysse’s hoarse voice wailing above it all, and I’m dancing like the midges above the water at dusk, with ’Dres stumbling after me. Somehow my feet don’t hurt so much now, and my legs are light, and I enjoy myself. It is still dark outside the barn when ’Dres falls to his knees and bends his head.
As the accordion wheezes into silence, Octavie runs to her husband and puts her arms around his shoulders. His sons are kissing their sweethearts, and everybody’s talking and fetching more food and slapping Ulysse and the washboard player on the back and pretending that I don’t exist.
I step up to Octavie and I say, “Miz Petitpas, I’ll take my fiddle now, my Tante Eulalie’s fiddle your husband took from me.”
She looks up and says, “Eulalie? Old Eulalie Favrot, that run away to the swamp? You kin to Eulalie Favrot?”
I nod. “Tante Eulalie take me in when I’m a baby, raise me like her own.”
Octavie stands up and waves to an ancient lady in a faded homespun dress. “Tante Belda, you come here. This here’s Eulalie Favrot’s girl she raised. What you think of that?”
The ancient lady brought her face, wrinkled as wet cloth, right up to my lace collar so she can squint at it better. “That ’Lalie’s wedding lace,” she says. “I know it anywhere, me. How she keeping, girl?”
“She catch a cough this winter and die,” I say.
“I sure am sorry to hear that,” the ancient lady says. “’Lalie is my cousin, godmother to my girl, Denise. She marry Hercule Favrot back in the ’teens sometime. Poor Hercule. He lose his shrimp boat and his nets to ’Dres Petitpas because of some couyon bet they make. Hercule take to drink, him, beat ’Lalie half to death. One morning she find him floating in the duck pond, dead as a gutted fish. ’Lalie go away after the funeral, nobody know where. She never have no children.”
“She have me,” I say. “Can I have her fiddle back now?”
Someone brings me a plate of food while I wait, but I am too tired to eat. My legs shake and my feet burn and sting. I think maybe I should sit down, but I can’t move my legs, and how will I get home before light? I feel tears rising in my eyes, and then there is an arm around my waist and a voice in my ear.
“Cadence, chère,” Ulysse says. “Miz Petitpas bring your fiddle. Take it, you, and I carry you home to sleep.”
The plate disappears from my hands and Tante Eulalie’s fiddle and bow appear in its place. Ulysse picks me up in his arms like I’m a little child, and I put my head against the tight weave of his store-bought suit and let him carry me out of the Doucets’ barn.
The moon’s getting low, and there’s a chill in the air says dawn isn’t far away. Ulysse sets me in my pirogue, crawls in after, casts off, and starts to paddle. I see the Doucets’ wharf get small behind us, and the people of Pierreville standing there, watching us go. The ancient lady that once was the prettiest girl in the parish waves her handkerchief to us as we slip among the cypress trees and the lights of the farm disappear behind Spanish moss and leaves.
We do not speak as we glide through the waterways. The music echoes in my ears, accordion and washboard and fiddle all together as they play them at the loup-garous’ ball. I hum a little, quietly. The sun rises and Ulysse throws me his jacket to put over my head. When we get to my cabin, Ulysse carries me and my fiddle inside and closes the door.
Not long after, we are married together, Ulysse and me, with Tante Eulalie’s gold ring. We still live in the swamp, but we visit Pierreville to hear the gossip and go to a fais-do-do now and then. Ulysse always brings his accordion and plays if they ask him. But I keep my dancing for the loup-garous’ ball and for my husband in our own cabin. We dance to the music of our voices singing and the fiddling of our eldest daughter, ’Tit ’Lalie.
And Murderes Petitpas?
Old ’Dres Petitpas fiddles no more, him. He says he fiddle himself dry in those two days and two nights. He won’t go out into the swamp either, but sits on his front porch and sorts eggs from Octavie’s chickens and tells his grandchildren big stories about what a fine fiddler he used to be. Aristile has Old Boudreaux’s fiddle now, and you can hear him playing with his wife’s brother and two cousins on the radio. But Aristile Petitpas ain’t the only fiddler in St. Mary’s Parish, not by a long shot. There’s plenty of fiddlers around these days, and singers and accordion players and guitar players. They play Cajun and zydeco, waltzes and two-steps and the new jitterbugs, and they play them real fine. But there’s none them can fiddle the devil out of hell, like ’Dres Petitpas did one time.
La Fée Verte
Winter 1868
When Victorine was a young whore in the house of Mme Boulard, her most intimate friend was a girl called La Fée Verte.
Victorine was sixteen when she came to Mme Boulard’s, and La Fée Verte some five years older. Men who admired the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine adored La Fée Verte, for she was exquisitely thin, with the bones showing at her wrist and her dark eyes huge and bruised in her narrow face. But her chief beauty was her pale, fine skin, white almost to opalescence. Embracing her was like embracing absinthe made flesh.
Every evening, Victorine and La Fée Verte would sit in Mme Boulard’s elegant parlor with Madame, her little pug dog, and the other girls of the establishment, waiting. In the early part of the evening, while the clients were at dinner, there was plenty of time for card-playing, for gossip and a little apéritif, for reading aloud and lounging on a sofa with your head in your friend’s lap, talking about clothes and clients and, perhaps, falling in love.
Among the other girls, La Fée Verte had the reputation of holding herself aloof, of considering herself too good for her company. She spoke to no one save her clients, and possibly Mme Boulard. Certainly no one spoke to her. The life of the brothel simply flowed around her, like water around a rock. Victorine was therefore astonished when La Fée Verte approached her one winter’s evening and sat beside her on the red velvet sofa. Her green kimono fell open over her bony frame an
d her voice was low-pitched and a little rough—pleasant to hear, but subtly disturbing.
Her first words were more disturbing still.
“You were thirteen, a student at the convent when your grandmother died. She was your stepfather’s mother, no blood kin of yours, but she stood between you and your stepfather’s anger, and so you loved her—the more dearly for your mother’s having died when you were a child. You rode to her funeral in a closed carriage with her youngest son, your step-uncle.”
Victorine gaped at her, moving, with each phrase, from incredulity to fury to wonder. It was true, every word. But how could she know? Victorine had not told the story to anyone. How did she dare? Victorine had never so much as smiled at her.
La Fée Verte went on: “I smell old straw and damp, tobacco and spirits. I see your uncle’s eyes—very dark and set deep as wells in a broad, bearded face. He is sweating as he looks at you, and fiddling in his lap. When you look away for shame, he put his hands upon you.”
Victorine was half poised to fly, but somehow not flying, half-inclined to object, but listening all the same, waiting to hear what La Fée Verte would say next.
“He takes your virginity hastily, as the carriage judders along the rutted lanes. He is done by the time it enters the cemetery. I see it stopping near your grandmother’s grave, the coachman climbing down from his perch, opening the door. Your uncle, flushed with his exertions, straightens his frock coat and descends. He turns and offers you his hand. It is gloved in black—perfectly correct in every way, save for the glistening stains upon the tips of the fingers. I can see it at this moment, that stained glove, that careless hand.”
As La Fée Verte spoke, Victorine watched mesmerized as her hands sketched pictures in the air and her eyes glowed like lamps. She looked like a magician conjuring up a vision of time past, unbearably sad and yet somehow unbearably beautiful. When she paused in the tale, her great dark eyes were luminous with tears. Victorine’s own eyes filled in sympathy—for her own young self, certainly, but also for the wonder of hearing her story so transformed.
“You will not go to him,” La Fée Verte went on. “Your uncle, impatient or ashamed, turns away, and you slip from the carriage and flee, stumbling in your thin slippers on the cemetery’s stony paths, away from your grandmother’s grave, from your uncle, from the convent and all you have known.”
Then La Fée Verte allowed her tears to overflow and trickle, crystalline, down her narrow cheeks. Enchanted, Victorine wiped them away and licked their bitter salt from her fingers. She was inebriated; she was enchanted. She was in love.
That night, after the last client had been waved on his way, after the gas had been extinguished and the front door locked, she lay in La Fée Verte’s bed, the pair of them nested like exotic birds in down and white linen. La Fée Verte’s dark head lay on Victorine’s shoulder and La Fée Verte’s dusky voice spun enchantment into Victorine’s ear. That night, and many nights thereafter, Victorine fell asleep to the sound of her lover’s stories. Sometimes La Fée Verte spoke of Victorine’s childhood, sometimes of her first lover in Paris: a poet with white skin and a dirty shirt. He had poured absinthe on her thighs and licked them clean, then sent her, perfumed with sex and anise, to sell herself in cafés for the price of a ream of paper.
These stories, even more than the caresses that accompanied them, simultaneously excited Victorine and laid a balm to her bruised soul. The sordid details of her past and present receded before La Fée Verte’s romantic revisions. Little by little, Victorine came to depend on them, as a drunkard depends on his spirits, to mediate between her and her life. Night after night, Victorine drank power from her lover’s mouth and caressed tales of luxury from between her thighs. Her waking hours passed as if in a dream. She submitted to her clients with a disdainful air, as if they’d paid to please her. Intrigued, they dubbed her la Reine, proud queen of whores, and courted her with silk handkerchiefs, kidskin gloves, and rare perfumes. For the first time since she fled her uncle’s carriage, Victorine was happy.
Spring, 1869
That April, a new client came to Mme Boulard’s, a writer of novels in the vein of M. Jules Verne. He was a handsome man with a chestnut mustache and fine, wavy hair falling over a wide, pale brow. Bohemian though he was, he bought La Fée Verte’s services—which did not come cheap—two or three hours a week.
At first, Victorine was indifferent. This writer of novels was a client like other clients, no more threat to her dream-world than the morning sun. Then he began to occupy La Fée Verte for entire evenings, not leaving until the brothel closed at four in the morning and La Fée Verte was too exhausted to speak. Without her accustomed anodyne, Victorine grew restless, spiteful, capricious. Her clients complained. Mme Boulard fined her a night’s takings. La Fée Verte turned impatiently from her questions and then from her caresses. At last, wild with jealousy, Victorine stole to the peephole with which every room was furnished to see for herself what the novelist and La Fée Verte meant to each other.
Late as it was, the lamp beside the bed was lit. La Fée Verte was propped against the pillows with a shawl around her shoulders and a glass of opalescent liquid in her hand. The novelist lay beside her, his head dark on the pillow. An innocent enough scene. But Victorine could hear her lover’s husky voice rising and falling in a familiar, seductive cadence.
“The moon is harsh and barren,” La Fée Verte told the novelist, “cold rock and dust. A man walks there, armed and helmed from head to foot against its barrenness. He plants a flag in the dust, scarlet and blue and white, marching in rows of stripes and little stars. How like a man, to erect a flag, and call the moon his own. I would go just to gaze upon the earth filling half the sky and the stars bright and steady—there is no air on the moon to make them twinkle—and then I’d come away and tell no one.”
The novelist murmured something, sleepily, and La Fée Verte laughed, low and amused. “I am no witch, to walk where there is no air to breathe and the heat of the sun dissipates into an infinite chill. Nevertheless I have seen it, and the vehicle that might carry a man so high. It is shaped like a spider, with delicate legs.”
The novelist gave a shout of pleasure, leapt from the bed, fetched his notebook and his pen and began to scribble. Victorine returned to her cold bed and wept.
Such a state of affairs, given Victorine’s nature and the spring’s unseasonable warmth, could not last forever. One May night, pretending a call of nature, Victorine left the salon, stole a carving knife from the kitchen, and burst into the room where La Fée Verte and her bourgeois bohemian were reaching a more conventional climax. It was a most exciting scene: the novelist heaving and grunting, La Fée Verte moaning, Victorine weeping and waving the knife, the other whores crowded at the door, shrieking bloody murder. The novelist suffered a small scratch on his buttock, La Fée Verte a slightly deeper one on the outside of her hip. In the morning she was gone, leaving blood-stained sheets and her green silk kimono with a piece of paper pinned to it bearing Victorine’s name and nothing more.
Summer 1869 – Winter 1870
Respectable women disappointed in love go into a decline or take poison, or at the very least weep day and night until the pain of their betrayal has been washed from their hearts. Victorine ripped the green kimono from neck to hem, broke a chamber pot and an erotic Sèvres grouping, screamed and ranted, and then, to all appearances, recovered. She did not forget her lost love or cease to yearn for her, but she was a practical woman. Pining would bring her nothing but ridicule, likely a beating, certainly a heavy fine, and she already owed Mme Boulard more than she could easily repay.
At the turn of the year, Victorine’s luck changed. A young banker of solid means and stolid disposition fell under the spell of Victorine’s beauty and vivacity. Charmed by his generosity, she smiled on him, and the affair prospered. By late spring, he had grown sufficiently fond to pay off Victorine’s debt to Mme Boulard and install her as his mistress in a charming apartment in a building he
owned on the fashionable rue Chaptal.
After the conventual life of a brothel, Victorine found freedom very sweet. Victorine’s banker, who paid nothing for the apartment, could afford to be generous with clothes and furs and jewels—sapphires and emeralds, mostly, to set off her blue eyes and red hair. She attended the Opéra and the theatre on his arm and ate at the Café Anglais on the Boulevard des Italiens. They walked in the Tuileries and drove in the Bois de Boulogne. Victorine lived like a lady that spring, and counted herself happy.
June 1870
So Victorine buried all thoughts of La Fée Verte as deep in new pleasures and gowns and jewels as her banker’s purse would allow. It was not so deep a grave that Victorine did not dream of her at night, or find her heart hammering at the sight of any black-haired woman with a thin, pale face. Nor could she bear to part with the torn green kimono, which she kept at the bottom of her wardrobe. The pain was bearable, however, and every day Victorine told herself that it was growing less.
But Nemesis is as soft-footed as a cat stalking a bird, as inexorable, as unexpected. One day, her banker brought her a book, newly published, which claimed to be a true account of the appearance of the Moon’s surface and man’s first steps upon it, to be taken far in an unspecified future. The banker read a chapter of it aloud to Victorine after dinner, laughing over the rank absurdity of the descriptions and the extreme aridity of the subject and style. She laughed with him. But next morning, when he’d left, she gave it to her maid with instructions to burn it.
Some two or three weeks later, Victorine was not altogether astonished to see La Fée Verte seated in a café on the Boulevard des Italiens. It seemed inevitable, somehow: first the book, then the woman to fall into her path. All Paris was out in the cafés and bistros, taking what little air could be found in the stifling heat, drinking coffee and absinthe and cheap red wine. Why not La Fée Verte?
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