The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “We should both get out of here,” I murmured into her hair. Leaned into her; skin light as feathers. “Will you come?” She moved abruptly; pulled away.

  “Where, to a cozy little somewhere? Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

  “Feel,” I said, and laid her palm, again, on my barely rounded belly. “I swear I just felt something.”

  “You’re imagining it . . . can’t feel anything.” But she left her hand there, warm.

  “I need to leave soon,” I whispered. “Because I’m not going to lose the baby for—for Françoise. For—a place like this.”

  “Ssh . . .” We were quiet a moment, and Jolie shook out her great long limbs, went to the bed, and lounged across it like she lived there, beckoning me to join her. “We can . . . be together here. Here, it’s easy. Not outside, you know. You know, don’t you? Once after a raid, another girl and me—they locked us up, separated us, she didn’t make it out. I can’t forgive myself for that. And Nathalie, you know—she understands.”

  But there was a question in her voice; and lodged behind it somewhere, some kind of strangled hope. I slipped in beside her, and we touched each other lightly, with exquisite slowness, then lay tangled in the bedclothes until all the clocks in the house had stopped. Smoothing away her rough spots and jagged edges, the way my own had been when I had first felt myself cared for. She’d gotten under my skin, Jolie.

  “Merde, what time is it, anyway? Past supper. Another one of Madame B’s macaroni pies that could be used to fill the holes in the rue du Temple—”

  “You still haven’t answered. Will you come? I’ve got no one outside. Nothing.”

  Jolie sighed and kicked back the sheet. “I’m tired, you know? . . . I’ve been out, I’ve been in. Been just about everywhere. Nearly got nabbed again, last time. I don’t like the police, chouette. They’re expensive.”

  “Where I come from they say, ‘You think your eggs are on the fire, when only the shells are left.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “You think you’ve got something going on, but really they’ve robbed you behind your back. It’s no good here, Jolie. Not really.”

  “We have to hurry or Françoise will take out her pocket watch. Or at least I do, those of us who care about making the month,” she said. Bonus tokens, allotted monthly, were currency inside Deux Soeurs—if you amassed a few hundred, you were entitled to a silk chemise, a hair bauble, or some other treat. A protest rose and died in my throat; Jolie’s head had disappeared under the bed. “Where is my slipper—ah, merde! Look what I just found under here.” She started to laugh and, when I looked over, dangled a man’s opera shoe, large, of yellowish snakeskin. “Now, how did this miché get out of here—hopping on one foot?”

  “If that’s the only way . . .”

  “All right, all right, chouette. If you have to.”

  “You won’t—help Françoise turn me in to the police?” I took a breath. “I mean—for all I know she sent you to me, before.”

  Jolie pushed back her hair and turned her head in surprise. “No,” she said slowly, her voice a languid growl. “No, she didn’t.”

  The way she said it might have kept me there forever.

  Madame B, as it happened, harbored certain sympathies. The old cook understood how a girl might need a cold slap of night air, a taste of Paris rain on her face. She could turn her back without seeming to, when she was scrubbing the pots after midnight. And for a few sous the deaf-and-mute boy might hover hearthside, leave a key to the gate after he took out the slops and the trash. He might stash a sack of street clothes in the narrow alleyway where the king’s valets de chambre once rubbed shoulders with the royal procurers . . . and shoes. Otherwise you wouldn’t make it down the block—not after having walked on carpets for a month in slippers, those flimsy things frizzed with feathers or pocked with rhinestone.

  Françoise would eventually take her night off. When? It was a fact that could be learned.

  “And then—what about you?” I’d asked Jolie, my only friend. But once the plan was set, she drifted away. Curled up against Olga for cake and cigarettes, flirted with either of the Mignons or both; teased Bette and made her bring in sweets and almonds. She was forever in the center of some smirking knot of girls, with a bottle, sticky fingers, a cache of tobacco. My heart ached, and I tried to ignore it.

  Then, on a night that was not so long in coming, just when the bell rang and everyone trooped downstairs, Jolie brushed by me and whispered, swift as a swallow skimming the glassy surface of a pond. The submistress was out; Madame Jouffroy was taking the waters; Madame Trois up to her ears because the Dab had called for the removal of some of our number, and she was several girls short just on the night that the police were in as guests. One of the girls called for removal was Lucette, my pallet mate. Her makeup job, the fake kohl beauty mark by her lip, had been discovered, and she was bundled away without even a chance to say goodbye . . . Everyone was in a tumult. Olga was whisked into Salon Deux and the Mignons were furious. There was a new Danish girl who couldn’t speak a word—younger than me, and even more terrified as she was made up, her hair yanked by the roots and held high in the hairdresser’s hand.

  “The police, here?” I muttered to Jolie. Nausea clenched my belly: a dizzy, rootless dread. But that was exactly the point: fewer of them on the streets.

  “The place is teeming. Even the chief is downstairs, relaxing in the countinghouse.” The man in the portrait, down at the Préfecture. I’d seen him from time to time, being whisked through the halls by Madame Jouffroy. “Best to do it right under their noses,” Jolie said. “The way they least expect.”

  . . . Flare of match light; moth flutter against my hand, a key turned in one lock, then the next; through the gate on its rusty hinges that wheezed a hideous, heart-slamming au revoir. I slipped back a screw of paper with a few coins into the boy’s waiting shadow of fingers. He knew the movement exactly.

  The fresh, cold air caused me to gasp. Immediately I began to shiver in my thin garments; damp crawling up from slippers to knees. For a moment, forgetting the existence of weather, I turned my face up to the black sky. A light rain was falling. A match was needed to grope behind the odorous rubbish pile—it sputtered, fizzled . . . finally, after an eternity, my fingers latched on to the hemp texture of a sack. I seized it and fled: down the rue Simon Le Franc, around the corner, where my useless footwear was dumped in favor of street shoes; past the corner of Pierre au Lard, the raucous laughter of a café following my steps; into the shadows of Saint-Merri. There, under the pitted and blackened eaves, with the scent of the pissoir at my back (even then the church wall was a watering ground for the unfaithful), I pressed my back against the wall and shed my tissue-weight clothes, using the damp chiffon to blot at my face and scrub off the rouge. Tore the terrible bangles off my wrists and struggled into more solid fabric: a dress dreadfully creased, smelling of a stranger’s sweat, but a luxury of heavy woven stuff, substantial against the skin—and the fit was good; Jolie had chosen well and I thanked her for that. A cloak, sturdy against the rain; a shawl for good measure. (To whom had these things belonged—the Danish girl? Someone else? And under what circumstances had she given them up?) As promised, Jolie had knotted a few extra coins into a handkerchief.

  But I had lingered too long. I took a quieter pace to calm my racing heart, slipped through an alleyway and down a set of blackened stairs on the tiny rue de Bon, past a knot of workers clinking bottles, across another street, under gaping window holes where linen flapped, ghostlike—and finally, beckoned by the magnificent lights of a cab stand on the rue de Rivoli, I flung open a door that I could not afford and, barely able to gasp, gave the driver the address of the only place in Paris I knew.

  Chairs were legs-up on the tables, and Claude was wiping down the zinc. A single dark-coated figure sat hunched over the bar, a nearly empty carafe in front of him. Another late-nighter keeping Claude from his supper and bed. The drinker sat up strai
ght when he felt the draft as I parted the drapes and stepped inside; unfolded himself like a knife. “Salut,” said Chasseloup. “Where the hell have you been keeping yourself?” He inclined his glass in my direction. “I am celebrating tonight. An Unknown Girl has been sold.”

  10. L’Absinthe

  THE RAGGED-EDGED PARIS map was tacked onto the wall above Chasseloup’s divan, exactly where it had always been: The rounded, fawn-color form of Paris was shaped like a breast; Notre Dame a brown marker at its center and the Seine a blue vein coursing through. It was crisscrossed with black lines, inked with curling italic labels, illustrated with tiny monuments, hospitals, gardens. A dark-notched perimeter surrounded the city, where fortresses orbited like guardian planets. FORT D’ISSY, BICêTRE, FORT DE NOISY, ROMAINVILLE, MT. VALéRIAN—names that would in the not-distant future become imbued with a universe of meanings but were then merely words, strangers one had not met. Fortifications, city walls, buildings of stone and brick and mortar and glass; skirts, crinolines, and at last—the corset, the tightest of all, formed concentric circles of girdling. Not for the first time I reflected on the term for Paris’s perimeter, the enceinte—and its world of double meanings.

  This window, at least, let in light: even at this hour of the morning, cast its delicate beam on the map, on the tumbled bed linen and Chasseloup’s white thigh, with its delicate dark hairs, like tentative sketch marks on a tablet. He was stretched full length, his breath long and even. Morning light: who would have thought it such a miracle?

  My old lover had been pleased to see me: a blurred supplication of lips and fingers. What was it about those cow eyes, that loping stance, and those bony knees that made me forgive the man? He’d given up absinthe because he had read Henri Balesta’s tales of ruined absintheurs, he said; and taken the man’s words to heart. “‘Nothing vibrates anymore . . . everything is dead. Only remorse, that last record of his sinking, survives—’” Pierre had felt remorse himself, he said. For half-ruining himself with the green bottle.

  Even before we’d climbed the stairs, my flesh had become another kind of wall, cold as clay or whatever lies on the Seine’s riverbed. Chilled from my long dash across the city, a headlong flight to the corner where memory lay, I was cold but even more aware of the sensation on my skin. It was not just the heavy dress that lay like a hard shell of varnish. The emotional senses that had once met those of my body had vanished, as though blood, nerve, and flesh were severed from feeling. For a moment, when Chasseloup’s hand caressed mine, I felt an abstraction of tears, a mood or remnant of a feeling, but when he reached for me with all the familiarity of a lover, my consciousness veered away; wandered to the Paris map and its ring of fortresses; to the wrought iron pattern of the balcony shadowed against the wall.

  A regulated body divides itself from memory and desire.

  Chasseloup did not seem to notice a difference, and I convicted him on a dozen counts for that.

  Afterward I lay awake, bubbling with distress. My body was telling me that it was not time to sleep but to wash out (although I had no bowl or syringe) and it was unpleasant not to do so. My stomach pinged with hunger and sent up a complaint for midnight supper. But here was Chasseloup, immovable as a tree fallen across the path.

  At first daylight, he was fresh and eager again, like an infant to the suck, and I drowsed insensible, a dry-teated nurse chafing in surprise. When finally he swung his legs to the floor, I turned over and dropped off . . . woke, much later, to sun harsh and dazzling; illuminating the dust in all the corners of the room. From the open window, traffic sounds and midmorning merchants’ cries.

  I was alone. A marvelous rush of air, fresh and cool, billowed in, bringing the lavender scent from the bunches always carefully tied with twine by the old street vendor. Children’s shouts. And then I knew just from the sound and the scent of the air, even the soot-laden Paris air of the Impasse de la Bouteille: it was May. And here was an edge of something, what lies between one world and the next; the place where the hem turns under, where the outside becomes the inside, and the reverse . . . a place on the verge of a change; and a quiet ecstasy tingled through me like the first greening of gray winter stalks.

  I looked around; took inventory. It was an indigo-colored dress I had worn, of heavy linen gathered at the wrists and flat across the bodice; a thin shawl printed with a paisley design. Compared to my earlier borrowings (a lifetime ago), these items reflected a lower rung on the social ladder; a working girl might have worn them on a Sunday. I wondered again at its original owner and in what circumstances she now found herself—not unaware that in some measure, I owed my freedom to what she had left behind. The full, heavy skirt went over my head with an odor of sweat and vinegar . . . No underthings, and I hadn’t even missed them. A gray cloak.

  Within Chasseloup’s cupboard lay signs of domestic improvement: bread and confiture. Butter. Mustard. The new, fashionable kind of coffeemaker; tins labeled FéLIX POTIN: cocoa, honey, coffee, peas. Bottles from a water man—so Chasseloup no longer drank from the pump. Starved, I tore off the end of the loaf and smeared it with butter and fruit; shoveled old newspapers off the table . . . then seized one back.

  The model for An Unknown Girl may once have been a denizen of the Mabille pleasure gardens, a suggestion stiffly denied by the artist and his representative. The painting’s buyer, that estimable owner of the concern Maillard et Cie, professes no interest in the identity of the sitter, but so apparently besotted is he that he has initiated a bidding contest for her hand—the one made of canvas and color, at least. An Unknown Girl will sell for a fortune.

  A shaft of sunlight pooled over the newsprint, my stained and wrinkled skirt, and a puddle of soiled linens on the divan. From the street rose a babble of children’s voices. A small tide of orphans, perhaps a hundred in all, dressed in red smocks and caps—stood at the mouth of the Impasse. A black-winged cadre of nuns gathered them, moved onward, and the piping clamor faded and passed. Irritation swelled in me like a boil under the skin, a festering site of infection that inflamed and subsided, trapped and unable to surface . . . a fortune?

  Chasseloup’s boots clomped down the stair from the studio sometime after that. Paused before the door, then passed. Echoed down, down. Down to the courtyard, the street.

  Of course, the man had money now—he could go out and dine.

  “For God’s sake. A man has to eat.” Chasseloup sluiced water into the basin, more energetic than I remembered him to be, and washed his hands. He must be using watercolor. I folded my arms and stared at him, biting my tongue. Oh, a man does, but a woman? She eats her own hand, saves the other one for tomorrow!

  “Your beard is dripping on the floorboards.”

  Chasseloup shook his head; droplets scattered. “And I have no damned towel.” He bent to search in the mound of mildewed laundry. Finally he said, “You want to stay here, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You have another place?

  “Not just now.”

  “Let me guess. You are hard up.” Glancing at my dress.

  “I was in a pinch and had to take every stitch to the Mont.”

  “The money from the painting comes in installments. Vollard took his cut from the first and booked a trip to Africa. I owe my father for loans—and everyone else, from the landlord to the water man. At least I’m not drinking cholera. Now, of course, Vollard says there must be a follow-up. Everyone does, except for Duport and I don’t give a damn about him . . . Did you read the Gazette? He nearly had the best of me. But as they say, ‘The artist who does not paint the woman of his era will not endure.’ Do you want to sit for me again, Mademoiselle Rigault?” Chasseloup eyed my mess of a dress.

  “You’ll need to pay me, this time around.”

  The painter stretched his long arm, circled it round my waist, and drew me toward him, then somewhat away. “Phew, can you take these rags to the laundress?”

  “Your linens are nothing to brag about, Chasseloup. I’ll take them along
.” His glance softened and that phantom of emotion crept through the room like a fog. Chasseloup leaned his cheek against the top of my head, briefly. I tipped my chin up to him, felt the brush of his beard, which smelt faintly of linseed. Then shook myself free. On the stove, the zinc pail was steaming with the last of what the water seller had brought, bubbles rising from its silvery bottom. That old pail.

  “Stay here if you’d like. Really.”

  Paris was in a forgiving mood: lilacs and chestnuts had burst into bloom, children played with hoops in the streets, shopkeepers opened their windows and doors to the breezes, and café tables came out on the boulevards. Chasseloup’s atelier clattered with messengers bearing invitations; students come to look over his “technique,” dealers to sell paints and canvas. Artists previously unknown to these quarters regularly stomped up and down the stairs; and visitors, well-wishers, and the curious climbed them, not to sit in front of a tripod in rented clothes, but to pay their regards to the new medalist. The entire studio, in fact, was all easels and props, sketches, studies, and armchairs facing the buttes; Chasseloup’s own with a smoking jacket draped over the back. The clothing racks had been relegated to a corner, I noticed, on the day Pierre invited me up for a trial.