The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  §

  The sight of the Empress at the atelier, the Emperor at his ease in disguise in the Bois, this meant Compiègne had ended. And somewhere in Paris that evening, my new love was also here.

  Back at my room, the driver’s wife first made a fuss over my new toilette—how beautiful I look, I am too fine for her house—and then showed me a trunk that had come for me and helped me examine its contents: a tea gown of simple black muslin, much like the Comtesse’s own; a boar’s bristle hairbrush, lotions, maquillage, a nightdress, slippers, hair ribbons. And room exactly for the toilette I wore and the other two bodices in their boxes.

  It was if I were to be on a voyage soon, this much I could see, and yet while the driver’s wife cooed over each item, my dread returned and increased until she locked us in once more, put her key in her bodice, and set out her gin and cards. I dressed in the nightdress and slippers, and we played into the night.

  I was certain all of this meant I was to leave Paris, and I expected to be taken away the next morning but, instead, a note came from the Comtesse through the driver, inviting me to attend the opera with her that night. I was to wear the opera bodice but to be ready in the afternoon. And so I was.

  §

  The Comtesse’s son and his nurse greeted me as I arrived. He was a boy with beautiful long chestnut hair, the longest hair I’d ever seen on a boy. He looked like a faerie, neither girl nor boy, at the edge of youth, the sort of creature who could cast you out of paradise if you answered a question wrongly.

  You are my mother’s friend, he told me, more than asking me.

  Yes, I replied carefully.

  You’re very pretty, he told me. It’s how I knew. All of Mother’s friends are pretty.

  Not as pretty as you, I said, and he smiled, vanishing quickly up the stairs.

  I was shown up to her boudoir where the Comtesse sat waiting for her hairdresser. She told me she had called me early to have my own hair done as well. As her maid settled a kimono around my neck and over my gown, and I joined her in waiting, she withdrew a small velvet bag and shook its contents into her hand.

  Here, she said. For you to wear this evening.

  Emerald earrings in the shape of leaves, three stones in each, and the stones the size of small tears.

  I give this to you now because, when you have your hair done for an evening, you should always show the hairdresser your jewelry so that he may make any necessary adjustments or suggestions. Tonight I am introducing you to a potential admirer. We will go to the opera and then dine afterward at the Grand Seize, where he will meet us. This completes my part of our bargain. At dinner I will speak of yours.

  Thank you, I said.

  It’s really nothing, she said. I ask that you wear them this evening. And that you continue your habit of refraining from speaking in public so as to keep up the alias I have created. It will only be necessary a little longer.

  I turned them over in my hand, and as I did, she said, A lesson on jewelry. You only rid yourself of a gift if you are at the end of an affair—if you are sure there is no hope. If you are in need of funds, sell your jewelry last; first suggest to an admirer the nature and scope of the debt, and then if that fails, sell the separate stones first rather than the entire piece. Always avoid selling the entire piece as it would likely be recognized by the giver on someone else and this would, even if you have ended the affair, embarrass or offend him. Especially if he could have covered the debt happily. Sell the original piece whole only if it is a historically important piece of jewelry.

  She sat back. Do not keep the setting and have the original stones replaced with paste, as no one is fooled by this. Either restore the setting as you are able or reset the stones remaining. Take these with my blessing. Let them remind you of all I have told you.

  The hairdresser and his assistant arrived then and began to heat their tongs, playful, speaking of new styles, admiring our clothes and hair and the earrings as I placed them in my ears. As I examined them, I could tell they were not new; they had been hers.

  There was an affair she was ending or had ended. There was no hope. But who? I wondered. But as I admired the earrings in the mirror, I knew them.

  The Empress, that day at Compiègne, waiting for her hairdresser and fiddling with the emerald leaf she had from the Emperor. These were a match, I was sure of it. They were a set, and he had split it between them.

  §

  In Italy, when we go to the opera, we watch the opera, she said to me, as we exited the victoria and the coachmen helped us down. In Paris we watch one another, and she gestured a little at the crowd outside the theater.

  We entered and ascended the stairs of the Théâtre-Italien. A hush descended over the crowd along the stairs and ahead of us; people turned to stare and whisper. It was a strange, quiet procession she and I made. I remembered when I’d first seen her move through the crowd at the Exposition, thinking it was her beauty that made people stare, but it was also envy, fury, spite.

  In her private box she cast an eye over the people entering the other boxes, who were themselves looking up to see her. Then she sat back, drew her wrap closer, and smiled at me.

  Have you ever been to the opera? she asked me. You may speak freely until we are joined.

  Yes, I said.

  You were perfect as we entered, she said. Perfect, perfect.

  Thank you, I said. This word, her highest praise.

  Tonight is Verdi, she said. Il Trovatore. It is about a wandering troubadour. Do you know what a troubadour is?

  A little, I said.

  He is a traveling singer, she noted. And he also travels as an agent for his king. They are excellent spies, singers, she said. No one thinks to stop them.

  There was a commotion in the hall and then the door to the box opened. Shadowed at first was the figure of a woman, her hair piled high on her head and an enormous choker of pearls covering her throat and chest. When the door closed, we could see her more clearly.

  Jou-jou, my dear, the Comtesse said. I present to you Giulia Barucci. The greatest whore in Paris. Giulia, this is Jou-jou of the Bal Mabille.

  The new arrival smiled at this, as if it were a royal title, and made something of a curtsy before laughing as she stood upright. Enchanté, she said to me, and then she threw herself into a chair.

  They then dropped into conversation in rapid Italian. Giulia made occasional nodding glances at me as her eyes swept repeatedly up and down the box and my own figure. She then reached out and touched the emeralds on my ears.

  Que bellissima, she said, with a sigh.

  I was careful not to reply or even look at my patroness. I was nervous, though, to be introduced that way—was it a joke?

  She stood. See you in Baden-Baden, then, she said in clear English to me, and left, her glass nearly untouched.

  When the door was shut, the Comtesse asked the waiter to stand outside the box, and then when he was gone, she said, She meant you. I won’t be going.

  The opera began.

  May I use your opera glasses? I asked.

  Of course, she said.

  I was curious and excited, but I had also become afraid and, with the glasses, searched the boxes near us as surreptitiously as I could. This was the opera the tenor loved above all others, and as such, it contained the soprano role he most wanted me to learn, that of Leonora, the doomed lover to the trovatore. We’d never seen it performed during my time with him, and if I were still with him, we would have been seated in another of these boxes that night. For this reason, I was sure he was near; he would have to be ill or away from Paris to miss this. But I could not see him and decided to be content: If I could not see him, he likely could not see me, and in the meantime, I was grateful for the chance to decide on the role without him.

  I passed her opera glasses back to her.

  The curtain rose. Guards sat outside a palace at night, anxious to help their Count di Luna catch the trovatore who had been coming regularly to serenade the Duchess Leono
ra at night. The Count loved her jealously and, having failed to court her successfully, was anxious to end this interference. The guard captain sang to the guards of the Count’s tragic history to keep them awake—how as a child, the Count’s younger brother fell ill, and the Count’s father blamed a Gypsy and burned her at the stake. After the fire, a child’s bones were found among the Gypsy’s ashes and the brother was missing. It was said the Gypsy’s daughter had kidnapped the sick boy and left him to burn with her mother in revenge. Only the Count’s father was sure his youngest boy was still alive somewhere and charged the Count with finding his younger brother.

  But for now, the Count was in love, and his guards were ready to help him.

  The curtain closed and reopened to applause. A beautiful young woman in a veil stood in a garden at night, another woman approaching her through the dark, calling for her. When the woman in the veil turned to face us, the applause deepened. Adelina Patti was tonight’s Leonora, the best possible surprise. I had not seen her since she had changed my life with her Lucia. My fears left me; surely this would be the best night of my life.

  She began Leonora’s first aria, of a mysterious knight in black armor she’d crowned the victor at a tournament, and described how she fell in love with him then. War had begun shortly thereafter, separating them, and she’d sustained herself on her memories of that day until one night here in the garden she was surprised to hear the song of a troubadour, her name on his lips. When she came to the garden, she saw it was him, the love she’d feared lost.

  The night I’d heard her sing as Lucia was nothing compared to this—on that night I had only remembered the music, which moved me. This, however, was my first experience of the ridiculous and beloved thief that is opera—the singer who sneaks into the palace of your heart and somehow enters the stage singing aloud the secret hope or love or grief you hoped would always stay secret, disguised as melodrama; and you are so happy you have lived to see it done. The singer singing to you with the full force of what you feel is transfigured and this transfigures you; you feel as if it were you there in the opera, the opera your story, the story of your life. And so I stared in amazement from the box as Patti sang what was in my heart, what I hoped was my secret future; and in her slow, soaring, searching aria full of surpassing sweetness I found my first real consolation since leaving Compiègne. By the time she began her defiant cabaletta—My fate will not be complete if he is not by my side! If I do not live for him, for him I will die—her final note sustained like a sword held to the sky, the crowd rose to its feet cheering, the flowers raining down on the stage, and I, I caught myself. I had already stood, clutching the edge of the box.

  The Count appeared alone then, singing stolidly of his hopes for his love for Leonora. Also of his jealousy. And so I sat.

  I knew then I would sing Leonora if I could. I wanted nothing more. I was her, and she was me.

  This was, of course, what the tenor had hoped for, what he’d never been able to arrange for me or describe. The roles he had tried to tempt me with were like little crumbs he had laid out for me compared to this. He knew this was the quickening; he knew what I would know after this night: that it is impossible to sing opera if the singer has never felt this.

  The song for the entrance of the trovatore, Manrico, began next. It is one of the most beautiful, I think, of the songs there are for men. He is announced first by a harp, which is his lute, heard in the distance as he approaches through the forest at night, intent on Leonora, who listens for him from her window as Count di Luna, on hearing him, hides in the dark garden.

  Alone on this earth,

  at war with his fate,

  one hope in his heart,

  of a heart for the troubadour!

  If he possesses that heart,

  beautiful in its pure faith.

  He is greater than any king . . .

  The troubadour king!

  Leonora rushes to the garden and embraces the Count, not the trovatore, mistaking the one voice for the other, the one man for the other, upsetting both. I knew the story well enough from the tenor; this is a clue that the trovatore is the Count’s long-lost brother, his hated rival for Leonora’s affections, unknown to him. But I knew, even if the tenor had a brother who sang, his voice would not sound like the tenor’s; there could be no mistake.

  The tenor was not in the audience because he was on the stage.

  You imagine it, I told myself then, for the trovatore was still singing in the distance, unseen. And so I even believed this little lie for an instant more until the moment he stepped into the clearing and removed his mask.

  I wondered if he could see me through the dark, sense me here in the box. I glanced at the Comtesse, who held her opera glasses close to her face, intent on the stage. Was this a trap? She betrayed no sign of what I suspected.

  If this was a trap, it was a beautiful one.

  Never, I silently swore there in the dark. Never will I be on that stage with you, singing this. Never.

  The scene ended as Count di Luna and Manrico fought a fierce duel and Leonora threw herself to the ground in despair.

  Manrico wins the duel but spares the Count’s life and returns to his Gypsy camp, where his Gypsy mother reveals she is the daughter of the Gypsy the Count’s father murdered. Manrico is really the Count’s brother—the bones found when her mother burned were her own son’s. This is why Leonora mistook them for each other. Manrico is told Leonora believes he is dead and is entering a convent out of grief, and so he runs to stop her but finds the Count there to do much the same. He and Leonora escape to the woods where they can live together as lovers, but a trick of the Count separates them, and the Count kidnaps her and imprisons Manrico. Leonora agrees to marry the Count if he would free Manrico, but she swallows poison instead and goes to the prison so she can die in Manrico’s arms.

  After her death, Manrico loses his will to live without her, stays a prisoner, and goes to his execution willingly. The Count discovers the truth of his brother’s identity only when it is too late for the Count to save him. He has killed the brother his father had asked him to save.

  Victory, defeat, victory, defeat, victory, defeat. Such is tragedy.

  The Gypsy’s daughter cried out in victorious revenge: the audience again came to its feet cheering. The Comtesse rose to leave the box early. As I still expected the tenor as the Comtesse’s next guest, I was relieved to make an exit. We entered the lobby just as the rest of the audience flooded out, the Comtesse and I their first sight as their eyes adjusted to the light of the candelabras.

  She studiously paused, and the crowd likewise paused to see her turning slowly to display herself in the black velvet gown she wore that evening, her hair piled high on her head and spilling down the back, the hair at her brow powdered à la Madame Pompadour, the enormous rows of pearls at her neck, a necklace of hers for which she was famous. I know there would be stories of her told describing all of this and ending with the slow turn she made, the lobby briefly her theater before she tossed her hair and departed with me.

  As I turned to leave, I saw myself as I must have looked beside her to the crowd: the blue silk of my own dress a contrast to her black velvet, my dark hair swept back and curled to display the Emperor’s love gift to her. Our little tableau vivant.

  She had been like an actress running for her cue. All was as she’d wanted it.

  To the Café Anglais, she told the driver as we were seated, and we left, off to meet my prospective admirer.

  §

  When we were seated finally at our table, the Comtesse ordered for us, and after the champagne was served, she spoke.

  You asked what you might do for me, she said. I have certainly found a position for you as well as an admirer. But first I must speak of a somewhat uncomfortable matter, which is that the Emperor has requested you.

  I did not immediately understand her meaning, and so she waited until I did.

  As I smiled and lifted a glass of champagne to my l
ips, she said, He does like a horsewoman. Eugénie, of course, and then also Marguerite Bellanger. You wouldn’t be one of the ones he has there at night, though, she said. You’re young but you’re not trivial, not at all. Even when you don’t speak, I think that voice is there. It comes with its own atmosphere.

  All of my thoughts stilled as I understood she meant my singing voice. I had never discussed it with her.

  I won’t let him have you, though, she said. But he did ask and then insist. I can still refuse him, and he’s not as well as he once was—I think such an audience would disappoint you. Still, the idea of being able to take the young woman who stole Eugénie’s lover from her is, well, it has an undeniable appeal for him. It makes you an extraordinary prize.

  There was a beat of silence amid the din of the room around us, the wing of some terrible angel overhead.

  You’re under the protection of the Italian embassy here in Paris, such as I can offer. You have, however, humiliated me to the Emperor. So I must set some conditions.

  She said this quietly, pausing to sip from her glass.

  You seduced a favorite of the Empress’s and escaped from her service, leaving her short a dresser during the series at Compiègne. I admire this as a feat, certainly—I have also taken a man she loves. You are, perhaps, nearly like my own daughter to have done so. And it is very useful to me to know the Empress has a closely guarded lover, but I’ve had to deny I know where you are. For even though she may not have lovers, when her lovers take lovers, her guards are certain to punish the girls involved.

  She let out an exasperated, dismissive chuckle and surveyed the room.

  And so to prevent your being hunted as a fugitive, tortured, or even executed as a spy, I have introduced you to Paris this way. Hidden you in plain sight, in gowns, your hair freshly curled.