Heartbroken, she sings a final aria of her grief to have both found him and lost him. As it concludes, the voice leaves her and she runs from the stage even as the former angel in the audience finally remembers her, leaps to his feet, and chases after her.
I closed the book.
Each writer, even each form of opera, uses Fate differently. Usually an opéra bouffe ends with forgiveness. Offenbach’s Fate was a kindly if canny grandmother with a pragmatist’s eye for the main chance. Verdi’s Fate was a punisher—a Fury.
I thought next of the Prince Metternich and his play at Compiègne. The sort of drama I was involved in, this was how he passed his days. La poupée a été probablement dérangée pendant le voyage. The story was in some ways a grand elaboration of the broken American doll at the Paris Exposition Universelle, singing to the crowned heads of Europe in a disguise within a disguise. Had the Prince Metternich written the role for me in his salon play at Compiègne or was it for the tenor’s American soprano, a taunt aimed at one or both of us?
If this was his work, Simonet treated Fate as a punishment, a lover’s revenge. This rose the singer cannot take off, the flower that always returns to her, I had left that rose for my beloved in a room Simonet seemed to have no knowledge of. I had left it as a taunt for my love, a last insult in a ridiculous argument, not knowing it would be my final word to him. The novel, with its foolishness about faeries and spells and love for the Emperor, read almost like the same taunt thrown back to me. Was Simonet’s secret, then, my composer sitting by his side, dictating the story to him, his angel wings wrapped closely about him?
Still so angry at me, even in death. Still in that room.
I still believed a mortal to be behind the novel and the opera, but whereas before I had excluded my love’s ghost, I no longer did so entirely.
It is at last time to tell you the story of the rose and the room.
Four
IN THE FIRST month of the Siege, it was said the Germans were going to empty all of our pétrole supplies into the river and set the Seine on fire.
In fact, it would be Parisians who set Paris on fire, almost a year later, but not one of us would have believed it then. After I heard of this plan, whenever I saw the Seine I imagined it aflame, a river of smoke in the air above it.
I saw an advertisement on the street, a poster: AMAZONES DE LA SEINE! A woman in a black hood and cap peered proudly down out of it, dressed in black-and-orange–striped pants, a rifle slung over her shoulder. A man was passing out broadsides and handed one to me. It was a call for a corps of women soldiers to defend Paris, asking for volunteers to train and serve in the National Guard. They were to carry needles filled with prussic acid and had only to reach out, if their honor was threatened, to prick the offender and watch him die.
It asked the women of Paris to donate their jewels to the effort. A hundred thousand women were to be armed this way.
I was not yet starving; it was easy to be defiant. I imagined going to my Prussian tenor armed this way, his opening the door to me, my face hooded as I reached out. I would stand over him as he fell and died, turning blue from the poison. Prussian blue. I would walk away, free at last, forever.
But, of course, this is not what I did, and he was not the man I would leave for dead.
This also I would not have believed.
On my last night at Nohant, Sand had urged Pauline to sing a favorite song of hers, “Que Quieres, Panchito.” As I watched Pauline sing her song, and Sand looked on, enraptured, the sense of how I would be leaving the next day and what it might mean stole over me.
The grand house and its inhabitants, from these great ladies before me to their lovers and children to their children’s lovers and children, all of it would be gone. I would vanish into whatever strange future the tenor had planned for me.
As I came to the end of my time with these women and their families, I was aware, too, that I had no family of my own; would I ever? I somehow had been spared both marriage and children thus far, mostly as a condition of my class, but not entirely. I had been spared worse, as well—the clap, tuberculosis, smallpox, wasting—and till now, I had given it little thought. Your health, when you have it, is invisible to you. I only thought of myself as lucky and that this was my only luck. But was I lucky? Or did I have a spiteful womb, as Euphrosyne had once said of her own? Or was it the horseback riding, as Odile had once suggested playfully, or something else altogether? At the Majeurs-Plaisirs, I had taken the teas Odile supplied, cleaned myself as directed; I had gone to my required doctor’s visits, and none of the familiar misfortunes associated with my former livelihood had come to pass, as near a miracle in my life as anything.
But I had since left the circle of Odile’s protections. The tenor’s attentions to me, however, had continued, though his carnal interest in me had been transformed by affection. He no longer sought to relieve himself in me as before, but now acted as a man in love—husbandly, even at times like a fiancé. But he and I could never marry, I knew; our time in Baden-Baden had meant being surrounded by his aristocratic peers, and while these German royals deigned to attend Pauline’s salon, I knew well the invisible line around me that would keep me from ever being the tenor’s bride, and I was grateful, in a way, for that.
I was concerned, though, with another line, visible in the light of the candles illuminating these happy families. My luck seemed to me something else: a decree from that hidden god, or my mother’s God, or perhaps Fortune, whom Pauline often invoked—a sign that I was to remain in this world until my lesson, such as it was, had ended, and only then would I join my family in death, at which time we would pass from the world forever. No family and no children for me. I was to be the last of my line, I was sure of it.
The tenor appeared in a hired carriage the next morning, seeming much as he had the last time we saw him; there was no visible sign of his transformation. He was handsome, witty, charming Pauline with his jokes as he always did, and Sand as well. Pauline did not let on in the least that she was angry or disappointed or afraid, projecting only that same benign queenly power. And just as she did not complain, he did not perform an apology nor did he explain his reasons for changing our plans. Sand invited him to stay for lunch but he begged off; urgent business, he said, and this was the single moment when a faint pall appeared. What business could there be?
After the carriage had been packed and I had kissed all of them, Pegasus appeared then to push his snout into my hand one last time.
Your true love, Turgenev said. I cannot think of when this dog has ever said good-bye to anyone.
May Fortune protect us all, Pauline said, and the door to the carriage shut behind me.
As we traveled back, I believed the tenor was bringing me to Paris to die with him. Some final act of spite in the face of the war. Having failed to arrange for us to perform together in a tragedy onstage, he would make a tragedy out of our lives.
There was no other way for me to understand why a Prussian tenor would return to Paris if there was to be war between France and Prussia. Why would he not return home? Would he not be captured or expelled, kept from crossing the border? We would be going deeper into the war on the enemy side, not away from it.
The answer to my own question was visible in these questions. I simply wasn’t prepared to understand it.
§
The tenor had reassured me repeatedly on the train back from Nohant that Paris would be the safer during the war—it was so widely loved, the idea it would be destroyed was madness; after all, who could shell the Louvre? And this was what people said in the streets on my return.
My calm lasted until the drive back from the station in our carriage, when we passed the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, which seemed already set to the task of manufacturing cannons. From the street, the machines inside sounded like thunder.
Whether or not the Louvre was shelled, it seemed it might be transformed so as to shell the Germans itself.
All of Par
is was to become a weapon; we were not so much at war as in the belly of a machine that was going to war. There were regular predictions in the newspapers of methods for the waging of war with Germany: guns mounted on balloons and fired from the sky; poisoning the Seine against invaders; setting loose the animals at the zoo if Paris was occupied. None of this was done. Instead, late into the Siege to come, when the zoo animals were finally remembered, they were not set loose but instead butchered and eaten.
Most never found money enough to try the blood pudding made from the elephant’s heart, though. For them, there was the bark on the trees, which cost nothing, and would soon all be stripped bare by the hungry from the ground to just above shoulder height.
Given the transformation at work around us, it would have seemed to be a foregone conclusion that we also would be changed; and yet, for longer than I might have believed, we carried on as if nothing about us could be changed.
§
I found the avenue de l’Opéra apartment mostly as it had been, as if it were aloof to my absence, though all had been prepared for my return. Fresh flowers sat in vases, the shrouds had been taken off the furniture, the rooms aired out, the floors swept and dusted. Lucy and Doro appeared from behind the kitchen door as if I had only just gone out earlier that day. Their faces were expectant, and I shouted and hugged both of them, to their embarrassment and evident pleasure. The tenor deposited me with my trunks and left to settle himself as well.
I sat down at the piano in the music room, intent on doing my exercises, to find it out of tune. Unable to practice, as was now my habit, I was reminded again of how the tenor had been unequal to the task of guiding my voice before. This had been a courtesan’s piano, not that of a soprano. I was once again alone with the unsteady hands of his obsession.
Yes, at Baden-Baden, I had been inside it also—but there he had made up for abuses like this. We had returned to those old ways in some way, I feared, as well as to Paris, and I could not foresee a happy end.
I dressed to go out and take a walk. I dressed simply, still in the style of the Baden-Baden camp, as if the clothes might keep me there at least in spirit. I added a parasol, hat, and gloves, for it was now summer. As I stood there, about to exit, the doorbell rang. I was nearest to it and opened the door to find the tenor there.
The piano is out of tune, I said to him by way of greeting as he bowed deeply and I offered my hand.
Forgive me, he said, as he stood. I’ll be sure it’s seen to at once.
Thank you, I said.
Are you . . . headed out? He asked this in a lightly incredulous voice.
I am, I said. I am so sorry. Please excuse me. I must go. But Lucy and Doro can bring you whatever you might need for refreshment while I am out. I won’t be long so you may wait or return for me, as you like. I have no dinner plans.
We stood there as he took this in, unmoving.
Shall I tell them to set one more place? I asked.
His face darkened as he looked up to answer me.
Apologies, mademoiselle princesse. I should have sent a card to say I was coming. It was rude of me.
I do belong to you, I said. But we both prefer it, I think, if it feels as if I belong to you of my own free will, yes?
Yes, he said. His smile returned to his face.
So then, I said. Let us have this as we would prefer it. Escort me, I said. It was a long way, and I would walk. I waited expectantly, like a lady might, and he offered his arm.
Where shall we go? he asked. He set my hand in the crook of his arm.
Let us go to the Garnier, I said. For old times’ sake. I would like to see if there has been any progress.
Construction has been halted, he said. Due to the cost of the war. A lack of funds. There had been some complaints in the newspapers about the cost of the Empress’s diamonds. She had promised to buy fewer of them. Soldiers are more costly than an opera house. For now. And that is as it should be.
And with that, we went out into the street.
§
The sun was low in the sky, a gold light on the gold leaf of the Garnier. I wondered if they would peel the gold off to make coins for war.
The Garnier rose grandly, covered in the busts and names of famous men, and surrounded, of course, by those black-iron dragon’s-teeth fences, the imperial N E N E N E, and the bronze muses with their lanterns.
I studied the nearest muse’s face carefully and wondered who had posed for it.
With time, it had become less bitter, this life; the tenor had come to feel more like my companion, the man who kept me safe, fed, clothed, and even educated in exchange for what he needed from me, which was that I would not leave him. This life with him, this enclosure, the fine clothes, the fine apartment, the fine meals, all would be fine, fine, fine, and yet none of it moved me. I already knew to take my pleasure from among his pleasures, certainly, but those moments were like trying to dine from the crumbs off his meals, snatched as I could while he ate well from all of life.
I had learned to hope for a certain future during my time spent with Pauline and her circle; this was all that had made this life bearable. Here in Paris, alone with him, I could only feel the madness of his mission and that doom it seemed he sought for us both. There was some final scene he hoped to enact, and I could not apprehend it. I could only feel him arranging us on this stage to his purpose.
The tenor had said nothing since our conversation at the door. He raised an eyebrow as I looked his way and turned to face me.
How did you find Baden-Baden in my absence? he asked.
Like many, I gambled, I said.
Did you win? he asked.
Sometimes, I said. Enough to have an appetite for it now.
He nodded at this.
Careful of your appetites, he finally said. They make for poor masters.
Yes, I said. I’ve masters enough.
Here another expression came over him, new in this light, which turned to copper as the sun set farther. I’m too fond of you, he said.
I had never expected him to say this.
Is it a fondness? I asked.
Take care, he said. For it is.
I reached to his cheek and placed my hand there, and he ducked his head down against it.
Men often complain of the wickedness of women. Of how we delight in what power we have over their hearts. But they reign over everything else, so of course, they grudge us this, should we ever come to rule over this thing the size of their fist. I had to restrain in myself the urge to laugh at him, at the idea that he loved me, that he truly loved me. And yet, as he had granted me my little freedom, or my illusion of it, to follow my whim to go outside, to refuse his immediate physical gratification, the idea that he perhaps did love me filled me for a moment with something like tenderness.
I harshly corrected myself.
I was only back in his little theater again. I had never left it, not really. I would need to, for it would soon fill with death.
I did not understand his apparent nonchalance at the prospect of the war, and I did not understand how to ask after the source of it, and so I could only pretend to share it and hope to learn in the process.
You are so quiet, he said. Have you tired of me, then? He said it lightly, but he did not look at me.
No, no. This place saddens me, I’m afraid, I said. Please take me home.
He offered me his arm again, and together we returned to the apartment.
§
The very next morning, having slept the night beside me, something he rarely did, he slunk from the bed, looked at my clothes, and said, I buy you all the dresses you want, but I shouldn’t.
The tenor had taken to saying this often.
I shouldn’t buy you any dresses at all, he continued. You are better nude. But these Baden-Baden dresses will not do.
I sat up.
You can wear them once more to be fitted for new ones, he said. Order at least a dozen. Go to see someone decent, have them present the bil
l to this address. He slid a card onto my vanity table. Go to your favorite.
He fitted his collar into his shirt, tied his tie, and then sat to put on his stockings and shoes. As he stood and straightened himself, he turned back to me, and said, Welcome back to Paris.
I presented myself at the dressmaker who knew me well, the only place I knew to go, the one the Comtesse had sent me to—Félix. Jou-jou! he said. Welcome back. It has been so long! How was your time in Baden-Baden?
Fantastic, I said. I did not bother to correct him as to my name.
It has agreed with you, he said. The Comtesse said you were very happy there.
I smiled as if I knew this. I look forward to calling on her shortly, I said, though I knew I could not bring myself to do so. I gave him the tenor’s card. He handed it back to me. I looked at him questioningly.
He laughed. My dear, we have his card already—we expected you! He wrote just the other day that we were to see you soon. Follow me, he said. This time I will show you the new fabrics. They have just come in. And it’s just as well, he said. These may be the last dresses made in Paris. He pushed back the curtain to his atelier and withdrew his tape ribbon from his watch pocket. I have not even seen the orders yet for the Empress’s series at Compiègne.
§
After the constant company in Baden-Baden, Paris felt empty. I went to see Euphrosyne’s barman, to leave her a message with him, but when I entered the café, another man stood behind the counter. I left at once.
I returned again another time at a different time of day, and it was still the same stranger. Again, and it was yet another stranger. There was no sign her friend worked there any longer.
I had not written to Euphrosyne during my absence, for I blamed her for what had happened—for her advice that I go to see the Comtesse. But it was the summer again, and I was sure the Bal Mabille would be full. She would be there. As would my fantasy composer.
The Queen of the Night Page 33