by Kate Mosse
Around her, the air was filled with the sounds of a city at dusk, as day gave way to night. Entre chien et loup. The clink of harness and wheels on the busy streets. The song of distant birds in the trees in the Boulevard des Capucines. The raucous cries of hawkers and ostlers, the sweeter tones of the girls selling artificial flowers on the steps of the Opéra, the high-pitched shouts of the boys who, for a sou, would blacken and shine a gentleman’s shoes.
Another omnibus passed between Léonie and the magnificent façade of the Palais Garnier on its way to the Boulevard Haussmann, the conductor whistling on the upper deck as he punched tickets. An old soldier with a Tonquin medal pinned to his breast stumbled back and forth, singing an intoxicated army song. Léonie even saw a clown with a whitened face under his black domino felt cap, in a costume covered with gold spangles.
How could he leave me waiting?
The bells began to ring out for evensong, the plangent tones echoing across the cobbles. From Saint-Gervais or another church nearby?
She gave a half-shrug. Her eyes flashed with frustration, then exhilaration.
Léonie could delay no longer. If she wished to hear Monsieur Wagner’s Lohengrin, then she must take her courage in both hands and go in alone.
Could she?
Although without an escort, by good fortune she was in possession of her own ticket.
But dare she?
She considered. It was the Parisian premiere. Why should she be deprived of such an experience because of Anatole’s poor timekeeping?
Inside the opera house, the glass chandeliers glittered magnificently. It was all light and elegance, an occasion not to be missed.
Léonie made her decision. She ran up the steps, through the glass doors, and joined the crowd.
The warning bell was ringing. Two minutes only until curtain up.
In a flash of petticoat and silk stockings, Léonie dashed across the marble expanse of the Grand Foyer, attracting approbation and admiration in equal measure. At the age of seventeen, Léonie was on the verge of becoming a great beauty, no longer a child, but retaining yet flashes of the girl she had been. She was fortunate to be possessed of the fashionable good features and nostalgic colouring held in high regard by Monsieur Moreau and his Pre-Raphaelite friends.
But her looks were misleading. Léonie was determined rather than obedient, bold rather than modest, a girl of contemporary passions, not a demure medieval damsel. Indeed, Anatole teased that while she appeared the very portrait of Rossetti’s La Damoiselle Élue, she was in point of fact her mirror image. Her doppelgänger, her but not her. Of the four elements, Léonie was fire not water, earth not air .
Now, her alabaster cheeks were flushed. Thick ringlets of copper hair had come loose from her combs and tumbled down over bare shoulders. Her dazzling green eyes, framed by long auburn lashes, flashed with anger, and boldness.
He gave his word that he would not be late.
Clutching her evening bag in one hand, as if it was a shield, the skirts of her green silk satin gown in the other, Léonie hurtled across the marble floors, paying no heed to the disapproving stares of matrons and widows. The faux pearls and silver beads on the fringe of her dress clipped against the marble treads of the steps as she rushed through the rose marble columns, the gilded statues and the friezes, and towards the sweeping Grand Escalier. Confined in her corset, her breath came ragged and her heart pumped like a metronome set too fast.
Still Léonie did not check her pace. Ahead, she could see the flunkeys moving to secure the doors into the Grande Salle. With a final spurt of energy, she propelled herself forward to the entrance.
‘Voilà,’ she said, thrusting her ticket at the usher. ‘Mon frère va arriver . . .’
He stepped aside and permitted her to pass.
After the noisy and echoing marble caverns of the Grand Foyer, the auditorium was particularly quiet. Filled with hushed murmurings, words of salutation, enquiries after health and family, all half swallowed up by the thick carpets and row upon row of red velvet seats.
The familiar flights of woodwind and brass, scales and arpeggios and fragments of the opera, increasingly loud, issued up from the orchestra pit like trails of autumn smoke.
I did it.
Léonie composed herself and smoothed her gown. A new purchase, delivered from La Samaritaine this afternoon, it was still stiff from lack of wear. She pulled her long green gloves up above her elbows, so that no more than a sliver of bare skin could be seen, then walked down through the stalls towards the stage.
Their seats were in the front row, two of the best in the house, courtesy of Anatole’s composer friend and their neighbour, Achille Debussy. To left and right, as she passed, were lines of black top hats and feathered headdresses and fluttering sequined fans. Choleric faces of red and purple, heavily powdered dowagers with set white hair. She returned each and every look with a cordial smile, a slight tilt of the head.
There is a strange intensity in the atmosphere.
Léonie’s gaze sharpened. The further she went into the Grande Salle, the clearer it became that something was amiss. There was a watchfulness in the faces, something simmering only just beneath the surface, an expectation of trouble to come.
She felt a prickling at the base of her neck. The audience was on its guard. She saw it in the darting glances and mistrustful expressions on every other face.
Don’t be absurd.
Léonie had a faint memory of a newspaper article read aloud at the supper table by Anatole about protests against the presentation in Paris of works of Prussian artists. But this was the Palais Garnier, not some secluded alleyway in Clichy or Montmartre.
What could happen at the Opéra?
Léonie picked her way through the forest of knees and gowns along the row and with a sense of relief sat down in her seat. She took a moment to compose herself and then glanced at her neighbours. To her left were a heavily jewelled matron and her elderly husband, his watery eyes all but obscured beneath bushy white brows. Mottled hands rested, one on top of the other, on the head of a silver-topped cane with an inscription band around the neck. To her right, with Anatole’s empty seat making a barrier between them like a country ditch, sat four scowling and bearded men of middle years with sour expressions, each set of hands resting upon undistinguished boxwood walking sticks. There was something rather unnerving about the way they sat in silence facing front, an expression of intense concentration upon their faces.
It passed through Léonie’s mind that it was singular that they should all be wearing leather gloves, and how uncomfortably hot they must be. Then one turned his head and stared at her. Léonie blushed and, fixing her eyes front, admired instead the magnificent trompe l’oeil curtains, which hung in folds of crimson and gold from the top of the proscenium arch to the wooden surface of the stage.
Maybe he is not late? What if some ill has befallen him?
Léonie shook her head at this new and unwelcome thought.
She pulled out her fan from her bag and flicked it open with a snap. However much she might wish to make excuses for her brother, it was more likely to be a matter of poor timekeeping.
As so often these days.
Indeed, since the dismal events in the Cimetière de Montmartre, Anatole had been even less reliable. Léonie frowned at how, yet again, the memory slipped back into her mind. The day haunted her. She relived it endlessly.
In March she had hoped that it was all over and done with, but his behaviour was still erratic. Often he disappeared for days on end, returning at odd hours of the night, avoiding many of his friends and acquaintances and throwing himself instead into his work.
But tonight he promised he would not be late.
The chef d’orchestre walked on to the rostrum, scattering Léonie’s thoughts. A round of applause filled the expectant auditorium, like a volley of gunfire, violent and sudden and intense. Léonie clapped with vigour and enthusiasm, all the stronger for her anxious state. The quartet of gent
lemen beside her did not move. Their hands remained motionless, perched on their cheap, ugly walking sticks. She threw them a look, thinking them discourteous and boorish and wondering why they would even bother to come if they were determined not to appreciate the music. And she wished, although it irritated her to acknowledge such nerves, that she was not sitting so very close to them.
The conductor bowed deeply, then turned to face the stage.
The applause faded. Silence fell over the Grande Salle. He tapped his baton upon his wooden stand. The blue jets of gaslight in the auditorium spluttered and flickered, then dimmed. The atmosphere became charged with promise. Every eye was upon the chef d’orchestre. The men of the orchestra straightened their backs and lifted their bows or raised instruments to their lips.
The chef lifted his baton. Léonie caught her breath as the opening chords of Monsieur Wagner’s Lohengrin filled the palatial spaces of the Palais Garnier.
The seat beside her remained empty.
CHAPTER 2
The whistling and catcalling began almost immediately in the higher tiers. At first, the majority of the audience paid no heed to the disturbance and pretended it was not happening. But then it became more obtrusive, louder. Voices were heard in the circle and from the stalls also.
Léonie could not quite make out what the protesters were saying.
She kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the orchestra pit, and attempted to ignore each new hiss or whisper. But as the Overture continued, an increasing restlessness seeped through the auditorium from top to bottom, side to side along the rows, sly and insidious. Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Léonie leaned over to her neighbour.
‘Who are these people?’ she whispered.
The dowager frowned at the interruption, but answered all the same.
‘They call themselves the abonnés,’ she replied, behind her fan. ‘They oppose the performance of any but French composers. Musical patriots they would claim. In principle, I have some sympathy, but this is not the way to go about things.’
Léonie nodded her thanks and sat back straight in her seat, reassured by the woman’s matter-of-fact manner even though, in point of fact, the disturbance seemed to be growing.
The closing bars of the Overture were barely dry in the air when the protest proper commenced. As the curtain rose on a scene of a chorus of tenth-century Teutonic knights standing on the banks of an ancient river in Antwerp, a louder commotion began in the upper dress circle. A group of at least eight or nine men leapt to their feet in a cacophony of whistling and booing and slow hand-clapping. A wave of disapproval washed along the rows of the stalls, the upper tiers, countered by other outbursts of objection. Then taunting from the protesters, a chant that at first Léonie could not properly distinguish. A crescendo of noise, and it became unmistakable.
‘Boche! Boche!’
The protest had reached the ears of the singers. Léonie saw darting glances pass between the chorus and principals, alarm and indecision writ large on every face.
‘Boche! Boche! Boche!’
Whilst not wishing for the performance to be disrupted, at the same time Léonie could not deny it was exciting. She was witnessing the sort of event that in usual circumstances she only heard about in the pages of Anatole’s Le Figaro.
The truth was that Léonie was thoroughly bored by the restrictions of her daily existence, the ennui of accompanying M’man to dull afternoon soirées at the drab townhouses of distant relations and former comrades of her father. Having to make painful small talk with her mother’s current friend, an old military man who treated Léonie as if she was still in short skirts.
What a story I shall have to tell Anatole.
But the mood of the protest was changing.
The cast, pale and uncertain beneath their heavy stage make-up, continued to sing. Indeed, they did not falter until the first missile was thrown on to the stage. A bottle, narrowly missing the bass taking the role of King Heinrich.
For an instant, it seemed as if the orchestra must have stopped playing, so deep and suspended was the silence.
The audience appeared to be holding its collective breath as the glass spun, as if in slow motion, catching the harsh white limelight and sending out dazzling green gleams. Then it hit the canvas scenery with a thump, fell, and rolled back into the pit.
The real world rushed back. Pandemonium broke loose, on stage and off. There was an upsurge of noise. Then a second missile soared over the heads of the stupefied audience, bursting on contact with the stage. A woman in the front row screamed and covered her mouth as a foul stench, of blood and decaying vegetables and old alleyways, filtered out over the stalls.
‘Boche! Boche! Boche!’
The smile faded from Léonie’s face, replaced by a look of alarm. She had butterflies in her stomach. This was ugly, frightening, not an adventure at all. She felt nauseous.
The quartet to her left suddenly leapt to their feet as one man and began to clap, perfectly in time, slowly at first, baying like animals, imitating the sounds of pigs and cows and goats. Their faces were cruel, vicious, as they chanted their anti-Prussian leitmotif, now taken up in every corner of the auditorium.
‘In God’s name, sit down, man!’
A heavily bearded and bespectacled gentleman, with the sallow complexion of one who spent his time with inkwell and wax and document papers, tapped one of the protesters on the back with his programme.
‘This is neither the time nor the place. Be seated!’
‘No, indeed,’ agreed his companion. ‘Sit down!’
The protester turned and delivered a sharp and glancing blow across the man’s knuckles with his stick. Léonie gasped. Taken by surprise by the speed and ferocity of the retaliation, the man howled and let drop his programme. His companion leapt to his feet as beads of blood sprang up along the line of the wound. He attempted to grab hold of the protester’s weapon, seeing now that there was a metal pin deliberately lodged in the head, but rough hands pushed him back, and he fell.
The conductor attempted to keep the orchestra to time, but the players were throwing fearful glances all around and the tempo grew ragged and uneven, at once too fast and too slow. Backstage, a decision had been taken. Stagehands in their blacks, their sleeves rolled to the elbows, suddenly swarmed from the wings and began to usher the singers out of the direct line of fire.
The management attempted to drop the curtain. The weights clanged and boomed dangerously as they flew up too fast. The heavy material tumbled through the air, then caught on a piece of scenery and stuck.
The shouting intensified.
The exodus began from the private boxes. In a flurry of feathers and gold and silk, the bourgeoisie made hurried exits. Seeing them, the desire to withdraw spread into the upper tiers, where many of the nationalist protesters were stationed, then to the circles and stalls. The rows behind Léonie also, one by one, were emptying into the aisles. From every part of the Grande Salle, she heard seats snapping shut. At the exits, the rattle of the brass rings on their rails as the heavy velvet curtains were pulled roughly open.
But the protesters had not yet achieved their goal of stopping the performance. More missiles were hurled at the stage. Bottles, stones and bricks, rotting fruit. The orchestra evacuated the pit, snatching up precious music and bows and instrument cases, shoving through the obstacles of chairs and wooden stands, to exit under the stage.
At last, through the half-gap in the curtain, the theatre manager appeared on stage to appeal for calm. He was sweating, and dabbed at his face with a grey handkerchief.
‘Mesdames, messieurs, s’il vous plaît. S’il vous plaît!’
He was a substantial man, but neither his voice nor his manner commanded authority. Léonie saw how wild his eyes were, as he flapped his arms and attempted to impose some sort of order upon the mounting chaos.
It was too little, too late.
Another missile was thrown, this time not a bottle nor some acquired object, but a piec
e of wood with nails embedded into it. The manager was struck above the eye. He staggered back, clutching his hand to his face. Blood spurted through his fingers from the wound, and he fell sideways, crumpling like a child’s rag doll to the surface of the stage.
At this last sight, Léonie’s courage finally deserted her.
I must get out.
Horrified, terrified now, she threw desperate glances around the auditorium, but she was trapped, hemmed in by the mob behind her and to the side, and by the violence in front. Léonie clutched at the backs of the seats, supposing she might escape by scaling the rows, but when she tried to move, she discovered the beaded hem of her dress had caught in the metal bolts beneath her seat. With increasingly desperate fingers, she bent down and tried to pull, tear herself free.