The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  The other students could see I was not properly prepared, and they resented my prior relationship to Pauline, though she showed me no other favors except occasional affection, but this was more than she showed them, enough for them to hate me.

  My name here was soon La Donnée, the Gifted One.

  In the mornings when I was early to my classes and rehearsals, I would sit alone and listen to the violin and cello students as they warmed up. I liked to feel the notes along the bench under my fingers, in the floor beneath my feet, at my back—they bounced along the wooden walls of the Conservatoire as if we were all inside an enormous wooden instrument of many parts.

  I also liked these young men with their intemperate musician’s dispositions, their various pettinesses, they reminded me of unbroken colts. They did not know me by sight, and so they smiled at me as they entered and left unlike my fellow singing students.

  Aristafeo had mentioned his time here to me, and it was strange to be here after him; I was helpless to think of how I might have met him earlier had I passed that previous audition, though, of course, what separated us then would likely still have kept us apart. On those mornings, though, it felt sometimes as if I’d been admitted to his past, empty of him, a little victory over his death.

  Here I learned that the first classical stories of the House of Atreus and their ilk had been sung but the music was lost—opera was new clothes for old tragedies. I liked this idea, the opera stories as refugees of some ancient conflict accommodating themselves anew among us—much as I suppose I was, along with many others. I remember I wondered if there would ever be new great tragedies and then came Georges Bizet and Carmen.

  Bizet I knew as one of these young men, one of their heroes, a recent graduate who himself was at the very edge of succeeding. He hid gentle, pale eyes behind gold spectacles, and under his suit jacket, the soft shoulders of a man who couldn’t lift a crate. He had quietly married the daughter of his mentor at the Conservatoire, a composer himself.

  It was said he was too proud to teach, but many times, when I arrived at rehearsals, he was at the piano working as an accompanist to earn extra money to pay for rehearsals of what he was sure was his masterpiece, Carmen, a commission from the prestigious Opéra-Comique.

  Students often bragged to one another about the clear successes among the school’s graduates. I think we imagined that before a career began there was a bargain to be struck with Fame and that the way to learn how to do this was to study those Fame had chosen. Bizet’s story was told with every possible detail, for at any moment it seemed as if some deciding success or failure would descend and supply the lesson the story lacked. There were as many signs supporting a good end for him as a bad one.

  Bizet had won the Prix de Rome, but the students spoke assuredly on how he’d chosen his previous librettos badly and that this had held him back as a composer. The libretto he’d chosen this time, though, came from a famous novel, and the librettists, Meilhac and Halévy, were widely considered to be the best. And Halévy was related to Bizet by marriage. This was thought to be a good omen.

  Pauline told me what she had heard of his struggle from Louis, who knew the director of the Opéra-Comique well.

  The story was of a young seductress, murdered when she steals a young man away from an arranged marriage and then rejects him. This troubled the theater’s manager, for the Comique was a family theater and marriages were regularly arranged between performances or even during them. The bourgeois families paid for boxes in order to have a better view of one another, not the stage; and they typically talked all the way through, believing the real drama was with them. They were famous to the singers, composers, and musicians of the Conservatoire as Paris’s most ungrateful and wealthiest subscription audience, and so when the management began canceling rehearsals of Bizet’s opera, saying it was for lack of funds, the students scoffed. Bizet only took them at their word and earned the money required, and so the rehearsals continued.

  It soon seemed there was no one who would not betray him. The most famous song, the Habanera, he rewrote thirteen times at the insistence of the soprano who was creating the role of Carmen, and she still hated it; the orchestra complained, incomprehensibly, that the music was “Indochinese.” This made me laugh—there was a pidgin used inside of a maison close, I knew, that this referred to—but then the soprano put her disappointment in a letter to a friend, delivered by what would seem to be a very deliberate accident to the director, who, in turn, kept the dress rehearsals empty in order to protect the debut. More letters still appeared the next day, published in all of the newspapers, denouncing the opera as immoral—the complaints of ghosts.

  The opera finally opened. Many of us from the Conservatoire attended, proud as the audience applauded vigorously at the end of the first act—but this was when the very proper young Micaëla brought a note to the young soldier from his mother that was the opening of a marriage negotiation. Carmen appeared, and by the time the aforementioned Habanera concluded, it was clear, as the soldier picked up the flower Carmen dropped for him, that the marriage negotiation would be for nothing. Next the cigarette girls lit real cigarettes and stabbed each other with knives; Carmen wed the soldier in a Gypsy wedding in the mountains, their hands soaked together in a chalice of red wine; and then at the end, the young soldier murdered her for rejecting him. After he stabbed her to death, the audience sat in silent fury. No applause from them—though we, his claque, did try, full of dread.

  The next day the papers were filled with reviews declaring it was “a revolting display of animal passion.” Bizet was heartbroken, refused our congratulations, and went away to his family’s country estate and did not seem to return. On the night of the thirty-second performance, the unlucky letter-writing lead soprano fainted during the third act, and when she was revived, she refused to go back onstage, overcome with a premonition of Bizet’s death.

  It seems to me if she’d known what it would bring she likely would have stood and gone on.

  By the thirty-fifth performance, after it was published that Bizet had been found dead of a broken heart at his country estate very close to the time of the soprano’s fainting, Paris rushed to see the opera, and the remaining performances sold out. It closed after the forty-eighth performance to go to Vienna, where the director sought to shock audiences further by adding real horses and a bullfighter’s parade. There, it triumphed.

  For those of us students seeking a lesson in telling the story of his career, Bizet’s tale had finally concluded. The lessons were that sometimes the composer died in the third act and not the soprano in the fifth. You could devote yourself relentlessly to art and there would be no great reward; you could go to your death for all of your talent thinking you had failed at your great work. There was no bargain to be made with Fame, who was, perhaps, the most fickle god of all or, perhaps, the bargain was this—Fame had taken his life as its price for conferring fame on the opera. In this way, while Bizet did not teach, he did teach.

  And so there was one opera, perhaps, in the history of music that I never wanted to sing, and that was Carmen. And yet I saw over the years the success of the imperial productions, the theaters across Europe eager to perform it, and the sopranos lined up to sing the “Indochinese” music as if waiting in a queue for eggs and milk after the Siege. I knew one day it would be offered to me, and I would have to choose.

  This was that day.

  I sat in bed and read the music pages and came quickly to the Habanera. I remembered the cold-eyed girls of the chorus exhaling their smoke that first night toward the virgins in the boxes and giggled in my bed.

  This chance was too delicious to refuse—it was even its own kind of revenge. The Opéra-Comique had decided to return Carmen to Paris for the first time since the debut and had done, as reported in the papers, a Carmen with no cigarettes, ballerinas made to stand still, and a young Don José who dropped his knife when he went to kill his murderer-seductress. She stood waiting for him to stab her.
Amid the screams from the audience that it was a desecration, and the screams of laughter, a new production was decided on. The cigarette girls’ cigarettes would be lit again, the horses brought back onstage, the bawdy jokes told.

  And, as the letter indicated, if she would consent, La Générale for the title role.

  The letter requested that I be borrowed from my contract at the Garnier for the performances, scheduled during my typical break in between performing Gounod’s Faust there and my departure for Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in Milan.

  The break I took between productions was a necessary one, but I’d not previously been invited to perform with this company, which was composed, perhaps more than most, of former classmates of mine from the Conservatoire. They, like the rest, no doubt all hoped the cursed soprano would increase sales, the house filled with audiences eager for a daredevil act—especially from Carmen.

  I decided to let the rumor be. There was nothing I could do to disprove it to the public now, after all, except to live—and to take their dare and perform Carmen.

  In the meantime, I hoped the news that I was performing with the tenor again would show the Comtesse I intended to continue my bargain and was preferable to some false attempt on my part to renew our affair. The illusion of a rapprochement was all that I needed here.

  I signed the contracts that morning and returned them with a note indicating my great pleasure in accepting this honor and then made arrangements with Euphrosyne that after I performed her Queen of the Night aria the tenor would be Faust to my Marguerite in two of the songs from Faust, at the end of which we would announce our news. I reflected on how neatly it had all been resolved as I dressed the night of Euphrosyne’s bal in an apartment she’d allowed me to use as a dressing room.

  All’s well that ends well, then, she even said to me over my shoulder as Lucy and Doro put me into my costume, and then she asked me to meet her by the stairs.

  I was sure it wasn’t him, Euphrosyne said. It’s really him?

  She was speaking of the tenor, whom she remembered quite differently. She had not seen him in years, and his new girth hid him well.

  We stood at her stairs, each of us with a glass of champagne, as around us the guests made their way to the buffet.

  I like you as a married lady, I said.

  I don’t, she said, petulant, and raised her jade cigarette holder. She lit it with her left eye closed, as if she were shooting a rifle, and drew on it hard. The tip burned brightly and then faded. I’m very serious!

  Above, I heard the announcement of the names of the arrivals ringing out in sturdy voices. I did not ask after her husband then. She looked at me with mock evil, understanding as much, and then, briefly, an expression of hurt crossed her face as she looked away, banished as she exhaled.

  I’m sure I preferred it when I was his fantasy, she said. I didn’t take all this trouble just to be ignored. Now, let me return the guest of honor to her rightful place. She tried to put her arm through mine and gestured up, but our skirts were too enormous to allow us to walk arm in arm, and so we laughed as she let go.

  She turned to me just at that second and said, Never marry.

  I don’t intend to, I said.

  What, Euphrosyne said, did you not hear me? I only laughed and leaned in to kiss her twice.

  Come, she said. Let us look down on what we’ve made.

  I reached down and grabbed the flounces until I caught the loop in my hand and set it on my wrist, and Euphrosyne and I ascended the stairs.

  I had never been able to correct Euphrosyne about the Queen of the Night and Faust, and tonight I was glad. The bal, for size and splendor, had surpassed my expectations, as had my costume. True to his word, Worth had driven his seamstresses hard. In his vision for the Queen of the Night, Worth had created a costume for me that made me look to be covered in a shower of stars and comets. The embroidery was hand stitched in a technique original to him that shaped the fabric as it was sewn, and the silhouette of the bodice was sculpted as a result. One comet outlined my left breast and wound down to circle my waist, meeting others, all beaded in crystal and leaving long white silk satin crystal-beaded trails that ran across an indigo velvet train. More comets created a gorgeous bustle and the edges of their trails scalloped the skirt down to the floor—the comets looked like wings. On the front panel of the gown’s skirt, more comets streaked across a night sky of indigo silk satin, and clouds hid a crescent moon as rays of white and gold light spread from it, embroidered in silver thread. The moon was beaded in pearls.

  At my throat I wore a diamond pendant, and in my ears, diamond pendants also. For now my head was bare, but a glorious headdress waited upstairs, to be added just before the performance. The star shower would begin in my hair and descend from my headdress, a net of beads, diamonds, and diamanté stars, my hair added to with false hair and crystal pendants, and at the center of these was a diamond tiara.

  I could barely move my head when the headdress was on, but this was not a nuisance. It was steadying, somehow, because of the focus it required.

  Euphrosyne had been done beautifully by Worth also. She’d had him create a version of the Marie Antoinette shepherdess costume Eugénie had been painted in, so she looked like Eugénie as Marie Antoinette as a shepherdess at Petit Trianon. She’d worn a pale powdered wig and painted a beauty mark above her mouth. She did not at all remind me of the Empress—if anything, I think she looked the way Pepa must have wished all those years ago.

  Wherever you are, dear Pepa, I wished silently, I hope you are happy now.

  We were to descend in a cortège from the second-floor terrace of the salon to the floor at the beginning of the concert. The other beauties Euphrosyne had gathered were new to society, mostly unknown to me. Another friend of hers she had assured me I knew I did not recognize in her magnificent Cleopatra costume. Still another was the Empress Josephine; another, I soon recognized, was Madame du Barry—and then I saw it was Maxine. My erstwhile nemesis from Baden-Baden.

  She nodded to me. I had not known she even knew Euphrosyne. I turned to say something, but Euphrosyne gave my gloved hand a pat, as it was time for us to go wait along the balcony for the performance to begin and then make our entrance.

  My bal came into view.

  The staircase we were on was a stately one that led to a second-floor terrace library that circled and looked down onto the entire ground floor of her conservatory. To our backs were books, and below were the celebrants. Grand Persian carpets spread across the golden herringboned marble of the floors, and guests had begun to gather on the red-velvet loveseats limned in gilt. Banquettes were sheltered by the enormous tropical plants that rose above them, and above each plant, as if a mirror to them in crystal, were flaming candle chandeliers hung on chains from the ceiling, which itself had glass canopies to let in the light, though it was the night we saw just past the reflections of the party below.

  This was the light of that old world, the light by which I’d first encountered Paris. Euphrosyne’s hôtel was a grand one. No gaslights here.

  We each grasped the slender brass rail as we watched the milieu below. The guest list I’d left entirely to her; I’d given her a very short list of the people she should not invite, however, which had made her laugh. I’d forgotten to include Maxine.

  Euphrosyne tapped her cigarette holder clean into a plant by her side and withdrew her cigar case. She smiled as she cut the tip and walked to a candelabrum behind her and pulled a candle loose. Not for me, I said, not until I’ve sung. She lit her cigar, and she turned and put the candle back.

  I heard a story about you seeing the Comtesse at Félix’s atelier, she said. How? No one sees her! Tell me. I must hear about it.

  She was there to have a dress taken out, I said. But she still has her face.

  Not her teeth, I hear, Euphrosyne said, and let out a cackle, and I allowed myself a laugh.

  The Emperor loved her once, I said. Perhaps only her, I think.

  Euphro
syne pushed at my arm. So . . . you were never with him? she asked.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  She gestured to the room. Half the women in this room have likely had the pleasure of watching as the imperial butler folded their gowns. She turned toward me with a bit of a swagger.

  I let out a mock gasp.

  Of course, she said. And the Prince Napoléon, too. She squinted at the crowd. Just to be sure.

  To be sure?

  We didn’t know how that was going to turn out, did we? I wanted to be sure both Bonapartes were fond of me. The first was duty to country; the second, insurance within that country.

  I shook my head and laughed.

  No butler ever folded the Comtesse’s dress for her, I said. If anyone had, it was the Emperor himself.

  Euphrosyne’s laughter at this rang out so loudly the people below looked up.

  For all I knew, she was why he never kissed any of his mistresses after her. He hadn’t saved himself for Eugénie.

  If you’d told me, back when we met, that someday I’d be in this room, married, and he’d be dead in the suburbs of London, I’d have slapped you for lying to me, Euphrosyne said. Are you ready for your little concert?

  I am.

  It’s almost time. Another hour, I think, she said. And then we’ll prepare your hair.

  Ladies, I heard then. I turned to see my novelist friend Simonet. He had a bottle of champagne with him. He blinked slowly, his pleasure at seeing me considerable. That vaguely guilty shadow hovered still in his eyes.

  What is it? Euphrosyne said. Have you met my friend here? I extended my hand to him, though he seemed almost afraid of me.

  I have, I said. Thank you. I gave you his novel, if you recall.

  Ah! I knew there was a reason I had invited him. Is there some story here that I should know, not in the novel? Euphrosyne teased.