The day’s events passed through me as I lay still, unable to sleep. I could still hear the piano notes in the air as if the young man were playing somewhere nearby, and the memory of his eyes, the glance, looked back at me from the darkness above my head.
The mystery of him had puzzled me, and then the puzzle had resolved itself that afternoon.
The ladies of the court still retained the privilege to enter the Empress’s chambers at any time, even though their duties as her dressers had concluded; I found this unnerving. The Princess d’Essling was the least intrusive, perhaps, and the Duchesse de Bassano was the most. The widow Murat entered like a warm, matronly shadow, the ghost of a mother returned to give some comfort or advice. But Eugénie did not take advice from these women; instead, they gossiped. And with some shock, I learned they gossiped in English.
From them I heard how Louis-Napoléon had never been a very learned or intelligent man, but this was not to be required of him, either. He was descended from the first Emperor Napoléon indirectly, the son of that emperor’s brother. Whatever you could say of Louis-Napoléon, he didn’t love a good song nor did he love a bad one. He had very little taste for music and mostly only tolerated it. He went to the opera because he was the emperor and it was an imperial entertainment, and so his opera had to be grand beyond all others, and it was very grand. But not for his great love of opera but for his great love of himself.
There was no reason, this is to say, for there to be a consummate pianist and composer in the palace before the beginning of the series. Not, at least, there in the Emperor’s library, alone.
I found I thought of the pianist each time I sat idle, wondering when I could steal out into the passageways to see if I might see him again, though I told myself, of course, that I only desired the freedom.
Why was he here? I wondered. But there was no one to ask. It was no business of mine.
Days passed like this. The first week of the series was nearly concluded when I chanced to let my eyes rise up and see the Empress as she examined herself in the mirror. She was sadly beautiful; in every portrait of her, her eyes have a kind of immortal melancholy, as if they contain in them a picture of some larger, divine sadness. But this day there was also a fierce edge of pride, which made it impossible to feel entirely sad for her. This day there was also something romantic to the way she prepared herself, something of the coquette. There was someone she anticipated, someone she wanted to have see her and, in doing so, to be ruled by her. Not for her being empress, but for something else.
The thought waited in my mind, and finally I allowed it. I looked down, afraid of her seeing it in my eyes.
He was here for her.
§
I stood by and watched her as she posed in the mirrors of her bedroom’s antechamber, dressed in her first gown of the day, a chiffon of the palest lilac, before picking up the day’s bouquet of violets waiting on the table. She posed with that as well, and when she was done, she went out to attend to the last-minute arrangements for her guests before returning to wait for the ministrations of her hairdresser, Leroy.
Ça y est, she said, waving me and the other girl off.
As I watched her fretting, that curious servant fondness, almost maternal, returned, and as I felt it, I was grateful, for it obliterated the fear. At this distance, seeing myself as I once was, I understand it for what it was.
It made it possible to stand there.
She adjusted her expressions in the mirror until they suited her, but the expression she put back on immediately when she looked away from the mirror was the one she had discarded: the melancholy of the neglected beauty.
When she was gone, I sat in the empty antechamber, grateful to be alone and warm. Her mirror beckoned me, but the risk of her returning quickly and finding me in front of it was too great, and so I went over to examine the day’s clothes instead: a tea gown, a gown for dinner and dancing. Another in case she changed her mind or there was a tear or stain, and as an excuse to touch them, I primped them lightly on the dummies around the edges of the room.
I waited while another girl went and ate her midday meal in the kitchen; when she returned, I would go. Someone had to be here at all times in case the Empress should suddenly return and need to change for whatever reason.
I had mostly let go of the idea my appearance should matter, at least as it once did. But alone with her dresses and her mirror, this returned. I began to imagine myself in the gowns in front of me and longed to hold one up or just touch the soft silk and imagine it was mine. I contemplated approaching her mirror, empty and reflecting just her pots and brushes, when I heard, from the entrance: Sidonie, what a surprise. I had forgotten you were coming.
Pepa entered. She was very proud of her dress, a castoff of Eugénie’s, which, between the corset and some magician of a seamstress, she’d managed to fit herself into. It was white and blue satins, and looked something like a First Communion gown or the dress of a matron at her daughter’s wedding. She made a show of turning in it in the mirror, the exact gesture I had feared making.
I made a show of smiling.
It’s good, yes?
I nodded my head vigorously and smiled. She had put on airs, as if she were also a guest, but I knew she was not allowed out to see the guests and never in that dress. She wore it only to lord it over the rest of us.
Finally, the other girl returned, and I ran to the kitchen to eat before the Empress arrived. On my return I found the Empress sitting and laughing with Pepa, talking in brisk, softly accented Spanish, waiting, I feared, for me. She stayed seated as I entered, though, and Pepa continued telling her whatever story she was relating. I heard the words Saint-Denis and thought to smile, but they were not speaking to me, only of me.
The Empress stood then and we prepared her first for tea, then soon after for dinner, and then after that, for the first ball that evening. While at first it fascinated—So it was like this, I kept thinking, after my long time in the cellar with the furs—soon it bewildered. By the time she left for the ball that evening, in my mixed hunger and exhaustion, I nearly went to my room until I understood I was to undress her at the night’s end. She would also require one of us to be near her at the ball in case she needed something.
The Empress chose me.
§
There was a painting that kept me company outside the Compiègne ballroom, a night scene, figures moving through what I first thought was a night sky, flying across the clouds like angels, a dark and angry-looking earth below. I stood there night after night, and as I did, it became like a story I told myself again and again, for it was most of what I could see. Soon I thought it was horses riding across a night beach, the moon high in the sky casting a beautiful light on the riders and mounts. Then I came to think of it as swans swimming at night. Later, I was told it was a mythic scene of the first Napoléon’s wars, a night battle.
This was not my post; that was nearby. A bell would ring if I was needed. Standing here, I was in the foyer to the ballroom. I could glimpse the ballroom and still be in shadow. Another tiny rebellion, though this time it was done so I could listen.
The dance master had been winding a mechanical piano for the dances before this, but it seemed the effort eventually winded him, and the guests had begun to despair, if quietly. Still, word of their discontent had reached the Empress, and she had mentioned she intended to correct it at once. I had guessed she meant the pianist.
A quadrille began, accompanied by just a piano, and vigorously so; my pianist was playing, I was sure. His nocturne had left me with a portrait of his movements, his intelligence, his emotions; all playing does. I knew this was him. He was a guest, then, but no common performer.
I stepped closer.
The blur of sparkling gems, the candy colors of the ladies’ gowns alternating with the black-and-white flash of the gentlemen—each couple as they turned went from dark to light, a chiaroscuro following the beats of the dance, and I longed to enter.
; The quadrille ended, and a mazurka began. I heard something more tender than what had come before, more lovely. They are not as quick as some dances, but the movement of them, the triple time, one-two-three, one-two-three, has the feeling of something that moves again just when you think it has reached its end. They can be quick and fast; they can be as slow and sad as a funeral march. It seems to me you have to be a little in love to write a mazurka or to play one, and if you dance to one with someone you don’t love, well, for me it’s unendurable.
I believed two things at once in that instance. I was both entirely sure I belonged to this pianist, and he to me, and I was sure that at night the Empress would bring him to her room and that he was hers. I wondered if she likewise commanded her lovers to undress, to come to her naked as the Emperor demanded. I imagined him under the flower of light, her antechamber’s chandelier, the little rainbows on his skin. She would still be painted, the sadness still there on her face as she looked at him. As she perhaps traced her fan over his heart.
Was her mouth as forbidden as the Emperor’s?
This mazurka was Chopin again, the no. 2 in F minor, op. 63, though, again, I didn’t know this then, but instead I felt only the way that this mazurka, in my pianist’s hands, sounded like something undeclared and hidden, impossible—like love or, at least, the love I felt then.
The musical education that awaited me included the knowledge that a Chopin mazurka was unlike any other mazurka; fans of mazurkas were not always pleased to hear them. They were impossible to dance to, being very slow, proceeding in a threefold series of movements, timid, bold, timid, or minor chord, major, minor, just as I’d heard that night. A “proper” mazurka was to be like a jeweled waltz, ornamented, decorated with flourishes so, of course, it was popular with the Empress Eugénie and her friends, but Chopin liked to conceal the rhythm with syncopation, and on the whole, his resembled a lover’s feint in the dark.
It was, in other words, a bit of a disaster for this dance. The frustrated dancers ambled through ably, but another piece was soon called for by the dance master, and it began promptly. A proper mazurka.
The Empress pretended not to notice and kept up her dance with the Duc de Tascher even as she surely understood the gesture. Her asking him to play as a mere entertainment, an honor in some other circumstance, must have humiliated him. The Chopin mazurka as lover’s complaint was noted, perhaps, by the one who knew to find it, and for the rest of the room, only artistic caprice—the musician-composer’s inappropriate tribute to a newly dead musical hero.
At this point he was simply an infatuation of hers for a handsome young artist. For him, he felt sympathy for the woman who could transform his career overnight, and had. He loved that she loved him, and while this was not quite love for her, this feeling inspired its own loyalty from him, and jealousy, too.
The bell rang, the signal she was to change, and so I left for my post in her antechamber.
§
The dressing room was dark and so I lit the lamps to be ready for the Empress’s return.
After I lit the last one, I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
I was still the stranger I’d glimpsed at the Tuileries. My beauty had turned strange. My eyes looked dark and enormous against my face, my figure too small and too thin—like a boy in a dress. I looked younger than I was, my hair drawn back into a simple chignon only to be neat, not attractive. I was plain, undecorated, even rough, and the poverty of what I had compared to my desires made me turn away in shame.
After so much time spent wishing myself away, I now longed for my own return.
I contended for the affections of the pianist with no less than the famous beauty I assisted in being a famous beauty. I could not compete for him, not like this.
That moment in the music room, it was pure chance; it was not to be repeated. Most likely, I would never see him again, but what’s more, I was too ashamed to let him see me one more time.
And so when Eugénie returned finally, it was very easy to keep my eyes from her, very easy to be just what she thought I was. Easy to put her gown away quickly before going to bed myself.
Timid, bold, timid. The timidity in me, so like that in the Chopin, seemed permanent, the mazurka a false mirror for my feelings, leaving me unaware of the movement rising in me next.
§
I stood in the spare palace apartment where the Empress’s dresses were now kept before and after she wore them. It had been commandeered after a guest had complained of the drafts and was moved to other quarters; the chamberlain had said he was sure it was to prevent the man’s wife from being seduced by the writer Théophile Gautier, who was said to be writing her a poem every day.
The draft is from him opening the door to deliver his poems, no doubt, he said.
I batted my hand and, sure enough, felt no draft. The pink brocade walls, if anything, helped keep these rooms warmer, though all of Compiègne, I had learned, was famously drafty.
The apartment being unoccupied, if also in use, was something most of the staff had taken advantage of thus far; one girl had brought a lover in here and dressed herself in the gown in which Eugénie had received the week’s guests. It was thought to be the Prince Napoléon himself who’d had her there, though she refused to say. When she told us this, another girl said, Well, you’re the picture of Her Majesty from behind, and then laughed shrilly until she was slapped by the offended grisette.
The lovers aside, the part of the story that stayed with me most was the idea of her wearing the Empress’s dress.
The Empress had just left for the hunt in her emerald-green riding costume, the green tricornered hat pinned to her head, which I knew she meant to look rakish. The palace was emptied of guests and we had a few hours of peace without them. I took off the palace uniform, folded it carefully in a place where only I would find it, and drew out the gown she had worn to the first ball, the gown she had worn to dance to his music. Rose-petal pink and white, the skirt and cuffs were covered in black lace that rose to a strange, witchy black lace collar, unearthly in its beauty.
I stood quietly, mesmerized by it, holding it up in front of me. I then reached behind myself and began to unbutton my dress, working quickly until I was naked. I put my feet into the shoes she’d worn, of the same pink, with black trim and black heels, and then threw the dress aloft as I went underneath it, pulling it over my head. It was like crawling into a tent. Her scent was still in the bodice. I found I could button and lace most of it myself, and while the dress bagged a bit on me, in the mirror I looked a little like what I remembered myself looking like at the Majeurs-Plaisirs. I had thrown myself to the floor in front of the mirror in a mock grand curtsy, pressing my head into the skirt, when I heard the door to the apartment open.
I stayed on the floor, unmoving.
A voice called out the name of the girl who’d been had here. It came closer and closer. Soon the caller was standing over me, and he laughed.
I looked up at my discoverer. I already knew him.
The tenor was a handsome man of fair complexion, but this day he was painted purple, as if to resemble a Negro; the effect was to make him look like neither race, but like something else, a demon. I did not recognize him in the first instant, then, but in the second. He wore his typical evening dress coat and the tight white pants the Empress favored. Though the style favored only a few, it favored him.
We stared at each other openly.
He likewise did not recognize me in the first instant, but on the second one; and when he did, he swore viciously in German before striding quickly to my side and gripping both my arms tightly, pulling me to my feet as he stared into my eyes.
Dead, they said to me. Dead! I begged them to release your body to me and they said it had already been taken to the rue d’Enfer. I came with money for your bond and they told me you were dead and I went and threw it at any beggar I found along the Seine! I then went to a church and prayed for your coward’s soul. I! I prayed for you. I wept for yo
u as I did so. Do you know whom I have prayed for in this life? You don’t even deserve to know this.
His speech was the more terrifying for his monstrous appearance, and yet I could not run.
All the while, I knew it couldn’t have been you who died, he said. They told me you’d been beaten to death and received no treatment for having not described your injuries. I had seen the police take you away; I knew you did not resist them.
He threw me to the floor. I did not cry out—I could not even breathe to see him.
I should beat you to death now. He raised a hand, and then it stayed up, like a lost thought.
I was the one who had faked my death, and yet here I was surprised to see him alive. That the tenor, currently at the Paris Opera, would be invited to Compiègne, this had never occurred to me but, of course, it was him; there could be no one else.
I could pull you from here now by your hair and insist the sheriff of Compiègne help me. You still belong to me.
I had moved not at all but seemed to watch from inside my eyes, though I did not look at him.
He stepped closer and stood over me as he opened his coat, and then I saw my ruby rose, worn there on the inside of his jacket, facing in over his heart.
I kept it, he said. I kept it to remember you. Along with all your shabby little things.
I saw his eyes then, the raw, angry wound of them. He held out his hand, and I flinched until I saw he waited to help me up.
And just like that, his eyes had closed up again, the terrible fire in them gone.
I stood and he circled me, taking me in. He pulled at his cuffs. I am here to perform Othello, he said. Thus my appearance. Why are you here, dressed this way? Is the Empress lending you one of her gowns? Are you . . . is it possible you’re a guest?
The Queen of the Night Page 18