by M. J. Rose
“I don’t know,” she insisted, but there was something in how she turned away from me, almost imperceptibly, that alerted me. She was lying. She knew exactly where my father had heard it, but for some reason wanted to keep that from me.
“You haven’t chosen anything,” she said, scooping up a handful of gleaming jewels and sorting through them herself. “Earrings, perhaps, since you didn’t bring any with you?” Picking out a pair of turquoise-and-diamond earrings, she held them up to my face. Each smooth stone was the size of a hazelnut and surrounded by a halo of pink diamonds that sparkled in the morning sunlight.
“It’s believed by the ancients that turquoise can draw evil to itself and away from the person wearing it.” She held them out. “I think these will do.”
“So you know a lot about stones and their properties, too?” I asked as I screwed in the first earring.
“A bit. Why?”
“Papa loved studying gems and stones. He once told me how Renaissance painters made their own paints by grinding stones: turquoise, lapis, ochre, malachite, and then took me to the museum to show me the masterworks that had been painted with stones.”
“The two of you spent a lot of time together, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“He was a wonderful father to you. And a wonderful son to me.”
Grand-mère’s eyes closed for a single second, and I saw her eyelashes quiver against her cheeks. Then she shook her mane of glorious sunset hair and forced some gaiety into her voice. “So what will you do today? I think you should get out of the apartment even though it’s drizzling. No moping around. The time for that is over.”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. I think I’ll take myself off to the dusty Louvre.”
This made her smile.
But I was lying. I wasn’t thinking about going to the museum but rather visiting the Maison de la Lune. If Monsieur Duplessi was there again today, he’d let me in, and I wanted to walk around the house, wanted to see all the rooms that were still so vivid in my memory. I wanted to surround myself with La Lune’s treasures.
Chapter 6
Getting up my courage, I asked, “Monsieur Duplessi, what is it you are doing here exactly?”
We were once again in the kitchen, eating his croissants and drinking the bitter coffee he’d brewed for us.
“Haven’t you asked your grandmother that?”
I could see he was confused by my question.
“No.”
“And why is that?”
“She is too upset to speak of this house.” It was true: whenever I brought up La Lune, she’d become uncomfortable. I guessed that since she had raised my father here, the memories were bittersweet and too painful.
“But she doesn’t seem upset when she’s here,” he offered with a slightly sly smile, as if he was half teasing, half challenging.
His hair had fallen onto his face, and I found myself wanting to reach out and feel its silkiness. I stared down at my hands as if they belonged to a stranger. I had never given a single thought to touching my husband’s hair.
“Mademoiselle?” Julien was looking at me, waiting for a response.
“Perhaps you don’t understand Grand-mère well enough to judge whether she’s happy or unhappy. Exactly how do you know her?” I asked, finally.
“I’m an architect,” he said, and I noticed that he lifted up his head a little when he said it. “She hired me.”
“So you are renovating the house?”
“Yes. Didn’t she tell you?”
“She did, but what are you doing here every day without any workers?”
“I’m making an inventory. If we are to turn the mansion into a museum, I need to know what items will be displayed and how to show them off and how much room will be needed for the different exhibitions so I can plan accordingly.”
I felt cold. Certainly I had not heard him correctly. A museum? “But she lives here. This is our home.”
He shrugged. “She never revealed her reasons to me. All I know is there’s more than enough here to make for a fine jewel of a museum. There are over thirty pieces of sculpture. Eighty paintings, some that rival anything in the Louvre. An excellent selection of china dating from as early as 1700. Your family’s holdings are a treasure trove of objets d’art going back to the 1600s. It’s astonishing.”
“But she’s going to live here after you’re done, correct?”
“I am so sorry to distress you.” He was looking at me tenderly. “But no, our conversations would suggest not. We’ve discussed using the second-floor bedrooms as galleries devoted to the art of seduction. Your grandmother has collected antique clothes and accessories used in the courtesan’s art, which will fascinate visitors.”
I gripped the edge of the table. Felt the chilly marble on my fingertips. A shiver ran through me. I could not allow this house to be turned into a museum . . . could not allow strangers to walk through the doors and examine the things that belonged to us . . . belonged to me.
I pulled myself up and walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and out into the grand foyer, with its glass-domed ceiling. I then moved into the drawing room, where I stood and gazed around the most excessive and elaborate room in the house.
It was a riot of golds, reds, scarlets, purples, peacock feathers, ferns, palms, and orchids. From the turquoise and lapis tiles around the fireplace to the exotic Indian carpet to the ebony monkeys with ruby eyes holding up gold bananas outfitted with candles, the room was a marvel of opulence, style, and wit. How could she open it up to strangers?
I was unaware that Monsieur Duplessi had followed me until he spoke.
“She says she wants to call it the Museum of the Grand Horizontals. Quite an avant-garde concept, don’t you agree? A flirting museum. Centuries of artwork collected by France’s most revered courtesans.”
The cold I had experienced before intensified. Taking a step away from the sudden draft, I felt cobwebs brush against my face and hands. No, this had been my father’s home, too, and one of the places I could feel close to him. He had eaten breakfast at the kitchen table every morning, munching on hot pastries the cook had just taken out of the oven. I glanced over at the grand staircase. He’d gone sliding down that banister, and been spanked for it—more often, he’d said, than he could count. I knew he’d found hiding places under the piano in the music room, inside a giant brass vase in the smoking room, and under the four-poster bed in Little Red Riding Hood’s chamber—some of the bedrooms in the house were named for fantasy or fairy-tale characters that might incite a gentleman’s imagination. Other bedrooms were designed to evoke a particular exotic time period or place. I had yet to go searching for the little things my father had told me he’d stashed away: marbles, a frog skeleton, broken pottery he’d found digging in the gardens that he was sure dated back to Roman times. If this house was taken apart, it could not become my refuge.
“Are you all right? You look pale. I should not have said anything.” He was standing beside me and had taken my arm as if he was prepared to keep me standing if I became faint.
“I’ll be fine, thank you.” I looked into his face, and he returned my glance. The moment lasted one beat longer than was appropriate. I looked away first, but even when I did, he didn’t take his hand off my arm, and my skin felt hot where he was touching me.
The freezing air was gone now. The atmosphere around me had returned to normal. In fact, there was the faint odor of violets in the air. How was that possible? It was the dead of winter. Perhaps there was a bowl of potpourri in a corner somewhere, perfuming the room. There was almost gaiety in the atmosphere. As if the house itself was pleased.
But that was impossible. A house didn’t have emotions or personality. I was simply overwrought, as my grandmother had been telling me since I’d arrived in Paris. And for good reason. Losing my father would have been bad enough, but how
I lost him—that my husband had ruined my father, had in effect killed him by destroying his ability to salvage his reputation if he turned Benjamin in—was enough to test anyone’s sanity.
“Are you sure you are fine?”
“Yes.” Of course I wasn’t, but I couldn’t share how I felt with someone I barely knew. Fury filled me. How dare my grandmother make a decision like this without me. Maison de la Lune was my birthright. She had inherited it; she had not built it. Not created it. It was not hers to destroy.
My eyes rested on an Ingres painting of a harem of sensual, naked women at a Turkish bath that hung above the fireplace. This one was far more evocative and erotic than the similar painting of the same scene in the Louvre. Heat rose up my neck, and I knew I was blushing. To be examining these with Monsieur Duplessi right beside me was brazen, and yet I didn’t turn away as I would have imagined.
It was one thing for the men who attended my grandmother’s evening salons and visited with her to see these rooms, but to have tourists walking through the house and gaping at our treasures?
All around me the house seemed to be reaching out and asking for help. I had to get to her heart and comfort her, reassure her that I would not allow this to happen.
Suddenly I was sure this emergency was what had brought me back to Paris. After all, I could have taken refuge with my Aunt, my mother’s sister, and her husband, who lived in Chicago and with whom I had spent so much more time. No, of course not. It was not my wild and irrepressible grandmother, who had always flitted in and out of my life on a whiff of L’Etoile’s bespoke fragrance, who had brought me here. It was the house, this living thing, that had called me back so that I might save her.
I began to run. Back out into the grand foyer. Up the sweeping stairs to the second floor. Up to the third floor. Down a long hallway past rooms used by servants. At the end of the hallway was another staircase that led to the attic. The pathway through the stored trunks and furniture seemed to circle in on itself, and I was caught in its coil.
I’d discovered this part of the house when I was fifteen. Remembered coming up here and finding a silk robe in one of the trunks and wearing it downstairs, showing off how I looked, only to have my grandmother fly into a fit of rage. It was the same robe as the women in the portraits wore. A beautiful burnt-orange silk, embroidered with russet and cream flowers and green dragons. My grandmother had ripped it off me. Why had she cared so much that I was wearing it? I couldn’t remember now, but she had lectured me adamantly about never venturing into this antique-filled part of the house after that excursion. There was nothing here but old, useless things, she’d said.
“But what about the door?” I’d asked her.
Her face fell at the mention of it. “The door?”
“There are stone steps leading from the attic to a very old wooden door. Why does it look like that? Where does that door go? What’s behind it?”
Reluctantly she explained that in the fifteenth century a church had stood on this plot of land. At some point it had been torn down except for its bell tower, and the house had been erected abutting the ancient structure. A structure my grandmother insisted was not safe. It was too old, too fragile to hold the weight of a person. It was empty, she said, and absolutely not a place to explore. “The steps are broken, and you could trip. The bell tower is only scaffolding now. If you even tried to walk there, you would fall right through!”
I had never completely believed her. And now, as I walked up that last flight of steps, I thought about how solid the stones felt. Narrow and steep, yes, but sturdy and strong. Three hundred years of bell ringers had tramped up and down them. Could the tower they led to be any less well constructed?
At last I came to the door. It was not even as wide as my outstretched arms, but every inch was carved with the most extraordinary tiny bas-reliefs, each one intricately detailing events similar to etchings I’d seen in my father’s alchemy books. In the center of this whole amalgam of magick and religion was a facsimile of the same bronze hand from the front door downstairs. But here the hand was flat, not three-dimensional, and in its very center was a keyhole.
I was out of breath. I’d run all this way to stand here, in front of this strange door. Why? My grandmother had told me it had been locked since she was a little girl and that no one had ever discovered the key.
“This is astonishing,” Monsieur Duplessi exclaimed as he examined the door. “Where are we?”
I hadn’t even known he’d been following me, but I was glad. It felt right to have him here with me.
I explained what my grandmother had told me about this part of the house. He agreed that it looked sturdy, noting that often these old structures made of stone in the Middle Ages withstood time better than most of our modern buildings would.
“Let’s see what’s here, shall we?” And without waiting for my answer, he reached out and tried the knob.
Of course it didn’t turn.
For no reason that made any sense, for certainly he was stronger than I was, I reached out and tried the handle after he had. The most peculiar thing happened. Without any great effort, without pushing or pulling, the door opened for me.
“But it was locked,” he said incredulously.
Together we stepped into a large circular stone room. In its center was a spiral staircase. Looking up into it was like gazing into a seashell, a perfect nautilus spiral leading up and up and up. At its summit was the bell chamber itself beneath a pitched roof crisscrossed with wooden beams, and hanging from those beams were three large brass bells.
Long ruby-red velvet cords, frayed and faded, dangled from the bells all the way to where we were standing. At the end of each was a hand-sized sandbag covered with iridescent muslin.
Smells assaulted me: dust, mold, years and years of stale air, and something familiar that I couldn’t identify. As I stood there, looking around, taking in the sights and odors, I heard something. Listened harder.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Monsieur Duplessi.
He listened for a moment. “No, what is it?”
I shook my head. How to tell him I thought I heard tears being shed? Tears can’t be heard. They are silent as they slide down a cheek. Except I was, I was, hearing the silken slip of them. I was listening to someone’s broken heart.
But whose? There was no one here but Monsieur Duplessi and me.
As I looked around, trying to pinpoint the sound, I noticed different-sized shapes shrouded in sheets.
Monsieur Duplessi saw them, too, and pulled off one of the coverings. “Look at these,” he said as he revealed a stack of paintings.
“Look at the walls,” I said, pointing. “Beneath all that dust it looks like all the walls are decorated with frescoes.”
“It’s clearly an artist’s studio,” Monsieur Duplessi said as he opened the doors to a cabinet filled with dusty bottles and jars of brushes and a tall stack of wooden palettes.
I walked closer, ran my finger over one bottle and then another, bringing bright red pigment to light in one and verdant emerald in another.
How long since anyone had touched these things?
“Your grandmother isn’t a painter, is she?”
I shook my head.
“Perhaps she was renting it out to an artist?”
“I don’t think anyone has been here in a long, long time. Since before . . . since before she was born.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I can smell the centuries, can’t you?”
He sniffed the air.
“Your grandmother never even mentioned this part of the maison existed,” Monsieur Duplessi said.
I was listening to him, but at the same time thinking that I had to let fresh air into the studio. It wanted to breathe.
Long iron rods hung against the walls. Approaching one, I began to twist it. The shut
ters covering the windows that were cut into the stone high in the tower began to open. With a final creak, a whoosh of fresh air poured in.
I opened the next window, and then the next, until all six were open and the room was filled with light and cool air.
Gently I took hold of one of the sandbags, pulled the crimson cord, and held my breath as the first bell let out a lovely peal. I pulled the second cord. Then the last. The sounds were pure and deep but ominous, too. A glorious warning rising up to the heavens. Beautiful and portentous, like snow falling on a dark lake on a moonless night.
I shivered. Something in the room shifted and altered.
I looked at Monsieur Duplessi. “Do you feel that?”
“What?” He didn’t seem surprised by my question. The expression on his face suggested he might have felt what I felt, but first wanted to hear what I thought it was before he acknowledged it.
“As if . . . someone just flew in . . .”
“Or maybe flew out. Certain cultures used bells to chase away unwanted spirits and negative energies, especially from a place of worship.”
The bell’s last reverberations surrounded us, embracing us in a final melancholy echo.
“Do you believe in unwanted spirits?” I asked.
He had a faraway look in his eyes. “I don’t believe in spirits, wanted or unwanted, but fascination in the occult and the supernatural has exploded, and we hear about such things all the time. A few years ago more than forty thousand occultists attended a Congrès Spirite et Spiritualiste here in Paris. On the one hand it’s a phenomena. On the other, it’s nothing new. There have been mystics and Freemasons in France since the 1700s, but interest does seem to be greater than ever.”
“Do you think there’s a tangible reason?”
“I’ve read it’s not unusual for people to become overly superstitious and nervous at the end of a century—perhaps that’s all there is to it. Or perhaps we are experiencing a backlash against positivism, naturalism, and secularism. It’s possible the occult movement has escalated because we are searching for answers that we can’t find through science, reason, and facts. Sometimes I think this preoccupation with the supernatural demonstrates the real tensions wrestling for the soul of France.”