The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “Come along.” She pulled me away, out of the gaslight and kitchen odors. The sudden change from being half-frozen to overly warm made my limbs soft and rubbery. “I’ll need to find a place for you—we’re past full tonight.”

  “Françoise.” A voice lilted. “Oh, Françoise, what little bird have you caught for us?” A splash of color: azure, gold, cardinal red; a woman leaning from a doorway—red-gold hair loose and wavy; her skin pale, gold-dusted. Then gone, a tall shadow disappearing down a long hall.

  “I can pay you for bed and board in the morning. When the Mont de Piété opens.”

  “Sure . . . but what then? Think the pawnshop will solve all your problems?”

  A door opened and a gas jet flared; Françoise waved me into a kind of parlor, toward a sofa decked with pillows like lace-dipped petits fours. The room was stuffed with bric-a-brac, and a wide armoire spilled odds and ends—a haphazard assortment of lace and tulle, silk flowers and thin wraps festooned over knobs. Vacant, but with no evening chill, the whole labyrinth of chambers and corridors was heated from some vast, glowing core.

  “Drop your things here, then. And you’ll want something hot in your belly, on such an awful night?” She closed a roll-top desk and locked it with a key, companion to hundreds of others on a chain, then turned back with a silky expression.

  I was loath to let it go, that grip on everything I possessed. Corset in red flannel, a camisole and collar in good stiff linen; two hair combs, a pair of stockings, two mended chemises; a petticoat in percale and drawers in the same; a better dress in cinnamon silk and one in fine-loomed wool; canvas ankle boots for spring. The bottle of cleaning fluid and one of freckle-removing milk (purchased out of vanity while I was modeling). A box of stationery; pen with a split nib and the indigo-marbled Plan de Paris, dog-eared, falling apart. Stephan’s letter, its seal broken—my erstwhile protection. And, what was left of my amour-propre. My stomach growled; gave a pang.

  “Supper first,” said Françoise, seizing my arm with surprising strength.

  ***

  “Fished you in off the street, did she? . . . What, are you deaf and mute, like he is?” The cook nodded toward a small, dark-faced boy, rocking on his haunches in front of the hearth. He was playing with a snare made of twine, the kind the village boys used to string up in branches, set with their lures to catch songbirds, marsh birds. Trapped, a bird’s head would hang; wings flung open, cord neatly knotted around the neck.

  “Françoise, you’ll have to get the dogs in, the little poachers are white as ghosts from being all in the flour, and they leave footprints. And no sign of the cat; they feed her on cakes and cream. Rats in my kitchen, and the mouser eating petits fours.”

  She cut a slab of roast, a chunk of bread. Cheese and a slosh of wine in a china teacup. She crossed her arms across her ample waist and gave me a long look. I ate like a starved thing, a wild creature whose teeth rip at flesh.

  Later, sleeping on that sofa in the parlor, I roused, wakeful, to bursts of laughter; dozed off again to the odor of cigar and perfume. An ebb tide of chatter, a river of activity flowed beyond the door and I drifted in and out of clamorous dreams, unable to tell the voices within from those outside. Eerie passages and twisting halls; rooms neither-here-nor-there, a labyrinth of a netherworld.

  And in the morning, the rest happened quickly. Françoise’s twitching fingers hustled me into a different dress, cheap silk, stained in spots and wanting pressing . . .

  Out through yet another door, this one giving abruptly onto the cobbles, and into a waiting carriage. Françoise spoke over the rumble of the wheels; like a clock wound too tight, she emptied her words into the chilly air.

  “Just look,” she said. She dipped into her bag and extracted a small round mirror. I saw my pale skin, dark hair, and soft curve of chin. Eyes clear, despite the tumult within. “I know Madame Jouffroy will have you in; she has a nose for talent. But if she won’t, Madame Trois will find a place for you.” Her voice dropped and sweetened. “Listen: I’m saving you some trouble here.” Her eyes dropped to my lap, to the gathered fabric of the dress, unpleasant against my skin. “Now—you must be firm and say you want to work for us. Otherwise I can’t speak for the consequences. A prison cell till they get you sorted out, and you don’t belong there, anyone can see that.”

  The carriage pulled up before the fortress looming palely over the rue des Fèves. Françoise hurried us across the courtyard, her skirts skimming over the flagstones and many-colored petticoats whipping about in the wind. A gate opened and at a word from my keeper we were ushered past a dozen or more citizens of Paris, men in workman’s blue trousers, women with babies in their arms, a bird seller with a cage at her feet, a young woman or two, hatless and ungloved. Those awaiting an audience at the Paris Préfecture de Police. I would come to know it well.

  M. NOëL read the nameplate in front of a young man with a polished mustache, his thick-fingered hand battened down on an ink pen. The sound of the nib across a dry page was a scuttling of leaves; the questions uttered as though from a conversation begun earlier, now resumed. The din of the place, the roar of a thousand voices echoed off marble, filtered through the cavernous room. On the wall above Noël hung an oily brown and varnished painting—a face from the papers, and here he was, the chief of police, in a portrait pitched at a slant as though he might drop like a blade. Françoise nudged my arm, and the mechanisms of a great machine, long-used and oiled with practice, ticked into place.

  “How long in Paris? Residence, employment? Name and age, place of birth? Then, “Your palms, please.”

  I startled at his touch, the fingers sausage-thick, tobacco-stained, damp. He prodded my palms, one then the other, felt around my fingers and thumbs—the second time in half a year that a man had examined my palm to determine my future.

  “You’ll find them smooth as silk. This one’s no blistered tin cutter or maid of all work. And no identity papers when she arrived, either,” interjected Françoise.

  “Mademoiselle, you have left your family and province to reside and be employed at the Maison des Deux Soeurs, rue du Temple, third arrondissment, Paris? You arrived at that address this morning and stated your intention?”

  His eyes were blue and mild. “You are a long way from home.”

  “She wants to work,” said Françoise, by way of assistance. Another voice, neither Noël’s nor Françoise’s, behind my ear, playful, mocking, clear as a bell: “The mother says nothing, and the girl cannot speak up for herself!” Françoise looked vexed and impatient; M. Noël’s face was impassive, his pen for the moment stilled. “Is your father living? Your mother? . . . Any relative at all?”

  “If you get into a scrape, wave it under someone’s nose!” I’d laughed when Stephan had signed his name to that letter, but I could not produce it now.

  Françoise and Noël were head to head, joking about something else; the pen scratching again, sputtering dry. Inkwells were scarce at the Préfecture these days; too few of them to take account of the river of girls who flowed through the place.

  And my two Selves were silent, foreign to each other, too slow to catch up. My recent lovers, their influence and sometime-protection, were leaking wounds in separate chambers of my heart; their names stuck in my throat. Gascon stubbornness; that ignorance of sycophancy; a rustic muteness that knows so well how to survive in its element—a tongue to bargain and barter, to haggle over the qualities of a foie d’oie or supplicate the spirits at a running stream—that tongue could not speak. My back ached and I wished, so badly, to sit. (Was it a backache, merely the longing to rest, that finished the transaction?) Some emotion, like nausea, and the gulf widened. The rutted road, Papa’s body in a cart. It would have to be another road, now. I saw it stretching before me, a sharp curve into blackness.

  The paper, when it was finished, read:

  Whereas the woman established as Eugénie R—, ex–department of the Gers, is charged with prostitution without being registered, it is consequen
tly in the interest of public health . . . that she be submitted to the administrative regulations . . .

  A flurry of administration: a babble of voices and Françoise’s high-pitched laugh. The mood turned almost celebratory; a milling around of uniformed officers and men in dark suits. Françoise smiled to this official, then that one; fingertips cold against my hand as she steered a swift passage through the halls. How was I to have guessed that I had been arrested, convicted, subjected to an injurious penalty, all without judge, jury, or argument—and in the flick of an eyelash?

  “All we’ve done, here, is to help you use what you’ve got to get what you need. Clean and legal, no more worries. And I don’t know Nathalie Jouffroy if she doesn’t find you to her taste. But I’d never’ve shown you without getting you on the books; I’d be out of a job! You’ll thank me, you know.”

  A rank of benches filled with young women—most poor and disheveled, a few wearing hats and gloves, and our passage caused a fluster and commotion.

  “Madame! May I see you?”

  “Let me walk with you, madame, just to the door.”

  “I can work, madame, I can . . .”

  Françoise quickened her step, pulling me by the arm. One poor soul went so far as to follow us and pluck at her shawl. “You know me, madame. You know me,” she cried, and I started, and stared. Because she looked so like the young, pale-browed woman who had also been, briefly, at the Tivoli. Or perhaps I was mistaken. An officer stepped forward and seized her before I could be sure.

  “My things, where are my things?” I was back in the bric-a-brac parlor, sobbing and furious, now dressed only in a camisole, the other garments having been peremptorily stripped.

  “Calmez, calmez!” The woman who confronted me now had a broad Germanic brow, balmy, pale gray eyes; white-blonde hair piled on her head; and a voice as cool as a cloth dipped in water. She handed me a substantial square of linen, a man’s handkerchief. From Françoise’s rattling discourse I had surmised that my immediate destiny lay in the hands of this Madame Jouffroy who was now towering over me and saying, drily, “Excellent . . . Our enterprising submistress has violated every statute in Paris bringing you in here. Do you want to tell me what kind of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into?”

  She moved to the windows, slid open the draperies. The windowpanes were colored glass: blue and gray, red and violet, like disarranged church windows. They let in a muted light, illuminating the bits and pieces of finery strewn about as well as her own attire, a kind of morning coat embroidered with birds.

  “This is not a hotel and I will not have entrepreneurs incurring fines on my behalf. You can try to come up with a novelty, but these walls have seen it all. Well, whatever it is—let me tell you something. You are not the first and will not be the last. So? Difficulties with a man? And with money?”

  Uneasily I folded my arms around my body; the flimsy shift was unpleasant. Madame Jouffroy’s tone suggested that I was the perpetrator of my trouble and not its victim, an idea from which I jerked back like a hand that had touched a hot stove.

  “All you innocents, you think that everyone in the world has your best interests at heart. Ah, and why not? A girl might fall in love, yes? Then one day she wakes up with the dogs at her heels. How many of these girls do you think there are? You, alone? Half a dozen, a hundred? I’ll tell you: thousands.

  “Oh, they will run after him, or run away from home to go begging in the streets, or go crying to Maman. Then the police catch them with nets and stock the prison cells; or they find comfort in the madhouses, which are stuffed full. Their children fill the hospice and staff the factories—there, have you stopped crying? See, you are not so badly off. And do you know the reason for all of this trouble?” I sniffed, and stared at her. The dusty, bookish odor was tickling my nose. “You do not know the world, and you do not know men.”

  The sneeze came, violently. The room smelled damp and inky; later I would come to understand it was the odor of a bank vault.

  Madame Jouffroy went on. “So now, do you think you can wander Paris, trying your luck, without attracting the attention of the police?”

  “No—I don’t know what you mean!”

  “Mogador was born right over there on the rue des Puits. No older than you when she was inscribed, went on the Register, and began her career at a tolerated house on this very street. But she kept her wits about her, played out her hand, and now she is the Comtesse de Chabrillan. Léonide LeBlanc was a stonebreaker’s daughter from the Loiret. The man didn’t break only stone; I saw the scars on her back. Now she needs a shovel to count her diamonds. This Mademoiselle Pearl who is so popular now—she was born Crouch in the isle of nowhere. She carried a carte, whether or not you want to believe it, and now she beds down at the Tuileries—or so they say. What do you think distinguishes the women who choose their lovers, name their price in Paris, and beat the Bourse by the month—from those who give away their advantages and wind up mad, dead, or both?”

  “I don’t know,” I stammered, and sneezed again.

  “Ignorance will not serve you in this world, my dear, and ‘innocence’ is a tool used to hammer healthy young women into unnatural shapes . . . Come here.” She tipped my face up as though holding a kitten by the scruff of its neck. “You do not look like such an outlaw to me. Un peu panné, bedraggled and starved for too long, that’s all. But the good Lord put us all here on this earth to learn the truth of one another; which always seems to find its way to the marketplace. And it is as good a place as any to start.”

  Beyond my veil of tears, I felt her theatricality, her certainty; her iron grip.

  “But where is my bag, my—my clothes? I have a . . . a letter.” My voice faltered as I made one last futile stand.

  Nathalie Jouffroy turned again as she neared the door, spoke with slow emphasis. “Mademoiselle Rigault, this house is the most selective in Paris. Girls beg to be accepted; we turn away twenty a day, often more. If working here is your intention, as Françoise insists, you have achieved it. If it was not, still, you may have come to the right place. Certainly, mademoiselle, you should find something to your liking . . . Françoise”—her voice echoed down the long corridor—“see to her particulars.” She closed the door behind her with a quiet click of the latch.

  A row of empty bottles, champagne and Madeira, marched down the length of one wall; a long mirror with edges of chipped gilt and a crack running through its center was fixed on another. I had been shepherded up six flights to a slope-floored, slant-raftered attic made over into living quarters far less salubrious and decorative than the parlor downstairs. The place felt ancient, with the thick beams and heavy doors of a fortress. Cabbage-rose wallpaper, streaked with slashes of charcoal, was patched over ancient plaster; and on every available surface was a litter of combs and hairpins, pots of rouge, matches, playing cards, sticky glasses. A stove bubbled with heat, and the scuttle was brimming: even this drafty quarter was warm. A ragtag group was gathered; their voices rose in a babble; cigarette smoke coiled upward.

  “Girooonnnde.” An arm caught me around the waist.

  “Chouette . . . ,” said another girl, and laughed, a sound as clear and hard as glass. Sinuous fingers crept up my arms, a dance of importunate, daring touches.

  “Journée gourd . . . a good catch for Françoise, eh?” The last deep-throated and husky. Tiger-eyed, with red-gold hair. Another girl stood behind her, brushing it with long, slow strokes.

  On the center table was a large plate with the remains of a yellow cake that looked to have been eaten by fistfuls. A girl with creamy skin reached back and broke off a piece, and put it to the lips of another, who lolled against her knees, eyes half-closed, her tawny curls dusted with crumbs. The others were in various stages of dress and makeup, with hair half-curled or twisted or pouffed under nets. One applied feathery blue lines to her temples with a brush, making veins like delicate branches; she held her hand steady and stared into a small mirror. Colored robes were tossed about, and
little low-heeled slippers were scattered over the floor. On the table, as well, was a mortar and pestle, corked phials from a pharmacy, and small pieces of moldy, blackish sponge.

  “Enough of that,” said the girl who’d put her arm around my waist. “We’ve got no quinine, and these sponges are diseased. They look like they’ve been scrubbing the bottom of a boat.”

  “This is what they have on offer for protection around here?” said another girl, a plump blonde who’d been brought upstairs at the same time I had. But unlike me, she seemed to know the ropes.

  “They like to keep the midwives in business.”

  “Angel makers, you mean,” said a third.

  “Merde on the sponges; it’s like trying to keep black flies out of India with those. I’m handing out préservatifs from now on.”

  “That’s what we did at Chevillat; things looked better over there, I’ll tell you,” said the blonde girl.

  “Michés put them on?”

  “Tell them they’ll be pickled if they don’t.”

  “Not here, maybe at Chevillat!” Laughter.

  “They’re all afraid of infecting their wives and their progeny, just need a bit of reminding.”

  “Yes, real estate will plunge into the sewer if their sons have the pox,” said one of the girls who was eating cake.

  “Yes, well, they’d rather the sewer, plenty of ’em.”

  “When your boyfriend gets his transfer out of the Brigade, what rotten luck!”

  “Oh, your luck won’t hold with him, the fouille merde.”

  “There’s a new douche at the apothecary’s; some girls like it. Someone’s Hygienic Waters. It’s in a tin with flowers.”

  “Hah—Jeannel’s. He was in the Morals Brigade before he went into water.”

  “ Now that’s rich.”