The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  A velvet-covered box stood at the center of the room, upon a chair of tufted pink satin. I pulled the tacks out of the long wooden dress box; unwrapped a garment from its rustling bed of tissue. The dress was beautiful: deep green shot silk, like leaves seen through shafts of golden sunlight, with tiny embroidered buttons up the back to the neck. In a second box lay, collapsed, a crinoline, a drifting hollow cage. I fastened it at my waist, felt the curious air around my knees. The dress, Chasseloup explained, was a wedding gown based on an eighteenth-century design; and green was the most ambitious color in the painter’s palette. And so the “unknown girl” must be dressed in it, dressed in green. An artistic challenge.

  The fabric was stiff and carried the scent that only new fabric has, fresh from the bolt. Its gored panels were cut to flow smoothly over the crinoline; flatter the waist and pouffe out behind. My fingers fumbled at the button loops. I tried with damp palms to smooth the skirt, but where it was cut to flatten in front, reinforced by whalebone, it bunched outward. This was only emphasized by the overskirt, a piece of drapery made to part like a theater curtain over my middle.

  “I will use an old technique, an underpainting—and layer the green over it. The painting will be about language, the voice of desire, emerging from centuries. Vollard thinks we should call it An Unknown Girl at Nineteen. Nineteen is a symbolic number.”

  “If she’s unknown, how can you say she is nineteen? And her desire is probably to pay the grocer and her rent,” I said, fuming, struggling with the buttons. “May we do without the overskirt?”

  “The woman of the nineteenth century is beginning to voice that for which she yearns. The painting is about that initial moment, her departure from the mute and into what she longs to express—”

  “Is that the latest topic at Vachette these days?” Pierre sometimes brought me what was left from his dinners there with his new-minted set of fashionable friends. “From what I can tell, the ‘woman of our era’ is like the pot you boil water in. Useful until unnecessary.” I was snappish and tired, despite the weather.

  “There’s no reason for you to speak that way.” Chasseloup had a peculiar look on his face. He was silent, and continued arranging his supplies. But a demon (or two) persisted in my guts, wanting to bring the whole matter to a boil.

  “You’ve never asked once who she is, where she came from—your ‘unknown girl.’”

  Chasseloup was silent, then finally said, “What? You’re angry. Because I had to go to Croisset to finish—or for having some success at last, some hope of a career?”

  “You never gave a thought to what would happen when you left, that I’d be thrown out on the street—”

  “I had arranged for you to stay!”

  “It wasn’t a legal tenancy, any fool knows that. And with the rent in arrears—”

  “For goodness’ sake, we had just met—I didn’t know where you’d come from, where you might be going.”

  “And you didn’t care enough to ask.”

  “And you’ve been in a fury ever since you’ve been back, avoiding me every night. Eugénie, I am grateful you’ve agreed to sit, and of course we are creating a kind of . . . story, but I’ve tried to help, really.”

  “Whatever happened to your other ideas? Badinguet’s social accidents, the rings of the wealthy pull down their carriage shades, all of that?”

  “A man can’t eat political commentary, not these days.”

  “Can’t dine out on it, you mean.”

  “Eugénie. It is a good painting . . . How is the dress fitting?”

  I gave a last, weary tug at the fabric, but the tiny buttons would not meet their loops. I said, finally, “It’s not going to . . . fit.”

  Chasseloup stepped behind the screen and kneeled down. “How have you put on weight, living on milk and soupe?”

  “Oh, Chasseloup . . . I’m not nineteen. And I’m—” I took his hand, gently, and placed it on the green silk of my belly.

  PERNOD, DUVAL, CUSENIER, JOANNE, read the silver stamping on the bottles, a shop window full of them. Liquid emerald to take you beyond the horizon. Slough of green silk, opalescent, viscous . . . Remorse. I can tell Monsieur Balesta—that remorse does vibrate; and with such terrible motion that you are sick on it, like being dropped from a height into churning, merciless waters. It’s not only absinthe that is the cause, and no storyteller’s description would help us tonight.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.

  That painting, the first one, had been made from some truth passed between us across the studio—my present cure—that current, Chasseloup’s sightline, my pulling taut; or like the bright streak of a meteor in the late summer sky, one we had seen at the same moment, calling out to each other. I hesitated, I did. The words were formed and on my lips.

  It’s not yours, Chasseloup. You’ve nothing to do with this.

  I looked at him over the carafe, the two filigree spoons set over tall glasses. He was fiddling with the sugar. “Where is the painting, actually?”

  “Crated up at the Palace of Industry. Waiting for its owner.” Chasseloup poured; the liquid in the glasses turned milky, opaque.

  “I’d like to see it. After all.”

  “Yes, well, without you—I don’t know. My plate of trout would have had to win. As it was, the poor fish never got a second glance!” He laughed.

  I laughed, stopped.

  It’s not yours.

  “Oh, come. Even Vollard said—”

  “Vollard? He thought An Unknown Girl was unfinished; I had to fight him to submit it. And he wasn’t wrong; I was up on a ladder painting in the background on hanging day. But, one way or the other. Maybe only because Chasseloup is near the beginning of the alphabet, before the judges were tired. Salut.”

  “So.” My hand trembled on the glass.

  “And thank God it has happened this year; I couldn’t have held out.”

  I hesitated. My hands slid down, down to my belly, still wrapped in the fabric of the green dress. Chasseloup brushed my cheek with the back of his palm.

  Whose life was worth saving, an artist’s, a woman’s, a child’s? . . . The green burned the back of my throat as it went down, trickling through my hollow, tenanted body. The first swallow tasted like poison, and my whole being reached for the second. Chasseloup stretched and yawned.

  “Now I’m starved . . . Shall we go out? Find something that fits from the racks. Vollard’s idea is that the unknown girl remains a secret until the next one’s done.” His voice sounded far away, a purring sound, shh-shh, a cat’s tongue rasping against its belly. The absinthe green snake coiled around and around us; it felt like my belly glowed in the candlelight, the warmth of the stove. He pulled a pin out of my hair, which stayed in place. Silence filled the room like a sad, opalescent cloud.

  Even then I wasn’t certain. I wasn’t a good liar.

  “We both have snakes,” I said, “sitting on our heads.”

  “I was just thinking of a snake, how did you know?”

  He leaned down to my lips, our glasses tipped, and my hair came all the way down. We set aside our glasses and I reached for the soft brush of his hair. Hunger of my hunger, Chasseloup—present, firm-fleshed, warm—not a memory, not a dream; not a lump of clay, not broken-hearted, or broken. He was real—flesh, blood, and bone real; and I had been uprooted, plucked like a weed, fuzzy, jagged-edged, unwanted—to plant myself, try, again, to send pale shoots down into the cold clay of the earth . . . and he was dark-jawed, looking down on me from his towering height. What does the gardener feel for his weed?

  “We die from lying long . . . With flowers, and with women.” He was trembling all over, wormwood soft, swallowing the bitter with the sweet. “I’m sorry, you know . . . Let me take care of you. I can, I will.”

  . . . Did he say it? Such slight words, to kindle a thing. Ah, but it was such an old dream, returned to like a nest even after the forest has burned, the scarred road cleared for another passage. Even my compatriots at
the maison had kept it locked in their hearts: a dream of care and order, gardens tended; fruits heavy on the vine. As impossible to abandon as to think of the earth leaving behind its sun, around whom it has revolved for lifetimes.

  I reached for Chasseloup like a rope across an abyss. Tie the knot, secure the cord. Quick—quick, before the wolves come. We lay tousled together, in front of the stove, where the flame began to lick greenishly, and Chasseloup’s hands stayed tangled in my hair.

  Very late, we floated downstairs and took a flyaway to the Closerie des Lilas, to dine under a vaulted ceiling, panes of rainbow-colored glass reflecting a thousand lights. Tobacco smoke and wild violins; an expanse of white cloth, scattered candlelight flickering off wineglasses and flower petals. Melt of Brie on a grape leaf; Chasseloup’s cow eyes and close-trimmed beard. Champagne bubbles in my nose; tongue tasting the sour of pickled vegetables. Around us shimmered dark suits and bare shoulders, jewels dangling from ears and wrists; a woman’s voice speaking, the soft gust of her perfume. Men who were poets and men who were painters.

  Later, in the small hours, on the divan under the map, in the spooning half-circle of warmth, in a wakeful, wormwood-dreaming state, I felt the infant already in my arms, her head, or his, lying against my breast. My belly was flat, and whole; and the whole awkward, girdled orb of Paris—in fact, the entire globe of earth—was again well.

  11. Rue Serpente

  WORMWOOD IS AN ANCIENT plant, known through the centuries for its bitterness as the bringer of calamity and life’s extreme sorrow. But its history turns back on itself, contradicts. Wormwood’s essence was also said to void the guts of worms, cure melancholia, free virgins from the scab; heal the right eye of a man and a woman’s left; comfort spleen and liver; repel moths from linen chests. It prevented drunkenness by producing euphoria without inebriation . . . even cured the pox. In Roman times, winners of chariot races were required to drink it as a reminder that even within victory lies sorrow. Because of its bitterness, wet nurses wiped their nipples with its tincture to wean infants; and so it perhaps represents the first bitterness of time’s passage. According to legend, it was wormwood that grew up in the path of the serpent as the prophetic creature departed from Paradise: and that was the faint sound of Paris’s late spring: a rustle through the leaves; barely an exhale through dense foliage, then a slow and poisonous unfurling.

  The following morning Chasseloup (an adept with his new spirit lamp and balancing siphon) made coffee and brought it to the divan. I should rest, he said—but he wouldn’t mind a chop and a salad of spring greens, later on?

  His boots echoed on the stairs and I lay for some time under the breast of Paris, sipping at hot, dark liquid; gazing at the iridescent dress coiled like summer leaves in its coffin box. Eventually I got up to rattle the money tin; and found its contents replenished for once. As a result, the coal man filled the bin with black lumps, and the dewiest and most delicate lettuces at the vegetable stall went into my basket, along with red-and-white radishes, long, bright spring onions, and waxy potatoes the size of a baby’s fist. Two good beef chops, fat-streaked and on display in the butcher’s window, were tucked in as well, and the man in the blood-soaked apron instructed me on how to grill them. A small crock of goose fat was procured for the potatoes. And the wine-shop keeper stood on a ladder and reached for a bottle.

  By evening, the table was set and a small, careful fire bubbling. Lettuces had been torn; the grilling pan (first scrubbed of rust) was oiled and heated; wine poured. My hands shook as I waited for the sound of boots on the stairs. Chasseloup finally came down; and without stopping to wash his color-smeared hands, cupped his palms around my waist.

  . . . Paint fingerprints all over the newly laundered and fresh-scented indigo dress, which only made us laugh. It was midnight when we tore the end off the white loaf. But the chop was perfect. Tender and rare.

  So, now the floor was swept; the sheets and linens clean. We had cabbage and carrots, beef bones and onions; bottles of red and occasionally a three-franc chicken in the larder. Our little ménage was a household, not just a box in which to keep ourselves. Hours regularized, which probably surprised a few at the Trap and Vachette.

  I had not intended to name him as the father; it was against the Code, the law of the land; recherche de la paternité it was called, I knew that much. And I had not named him; we had slipped and slid into it; he had thought it himself, had as much as offered—and I—with accusations on my lips—had accepted. Pierre Chasseloup had a decent heart in this careless city, and he had turned me upside down. All of this had the unpleasant consequence of making me more aware of my shame, and defiant about it.

  Outside, people now seemed different. I was aware of distinctions: which girls were likely inscrits; who were the possible clandestines, non-inscrit or insoumise—girls not on the Register but “working” nonetheless, on the boulevards and in the arcades, sucking the clientele from the filles en carte. Such competitors were the subject of much conversation at Deux Soeurs; indeed, they drove many registered girls into the houses, where they could be assured a clientele. Thus the spying-and-telling was carried on—the denunciations and tips, true or false, that landed many a young woman at the Préfecture. There, if she could not give a credible report on her morals, the name of a “protector,” or a solid job and family connection, she went on the Register and joined the ranks of the inscrits. With my new double vision, some movements on the boulevards and in the markets, previously opaque, became clear.

  And it was impossible, now, to abide in the capital without sharp reminders of the way things could go, and perhaps bring my house of cards tumbling down. One afternoon at the poissonnière, a flurry of movement caught my eye; an abrupt, almost silent scuffle. A clerk cried out; a couple of matrons dropped their loaves. Two gendarmes in flaring gray overcoats stepped smartly through the crowd. Then suddenly a display table was overturned—a brief chaos ensued and then they had a girl by the arms. These were twisted behind her back and I was close enough to wince at the wrench, at the pale of her cheek; to see the flounce of her skirts.

  “Carte!” demanded one of the officers. He was answered by a final, faint sob of protest, and the girl was borne off, a limp knot fluttering between two gray coats. My legs went weak and watery, as though her protest had passed to me like a baton, on a wave of humiliation and fury—hers, my own, or both.

  Carte de brème, carte de brème! the girls at Deux Soeurs called the carte our street-level counterparts were required to carry, naming it after the flat white fish. “It’s only after a few days that it begins to stink!” However, obtaining one (which is what the law required me to do) involved re-registering at the Préfecture. Since doing so would result in my immediate arrest as a debtor-runaway, the very thought made me sick with dread.

  The fishmonger shifted his gaze; for a moment his eyes bored into mine. Then he looked away, back to the matrons shaking themselves like elegant dogs. The citizens of the capital carried on with their loaves and fishes and pastry boxes wrapped with string. Only the tourists gawked.

  In practice, on the street, the Brigade des Moeurs didn’t check information in the Register before apprehending a girl; rather, they judged her by her dress and behavior, and then stepped in if they pleased. She might be a registered girl who had committed some infraction, or a non-inscrit—a “clandestine” who really did have something to hide. Or she might be merely an innocent going about her business, who somehow aroused suspicion. It made us all vulnerable and helped explain why nearly all women disappeared at dusk; why they wore this or that—playing, as adeptly as they could, this guessing game. I took to avoiding everything I imagined an inscrit might tend to do, the places where she might go, and how she might attract the eye of the Brigade—easier said than done, because inscrits were forbidden to behave or dress in any way that could be described as tempting, a quite inclusive category. As a result, every unescorted female under thirty was behaving in approximately the same way—suspiciously, i
n the eyes of the police. She was presumed guilty unless married, rich . . . or a real cocotte decked out in finery and driving her carriage through the Bois. I did not yet understand this contradiction, how that other tier of women operated—as open and brazen as tulips in June, plying a trade in kings, princes, and the empire’s wealthiest men.

  Some of Chasseloup’s grocery money went to a cheap gold-colored band to slip onto my finger whenever I left the Impasse—it went, I told myself, with my condition, and provided camouflage. I was rather proud of this innovation; marriage was a sacrament of the church, and most girls would not dare go so far. I shopped always in crowds, avoided the arcades and boulevards; took care to steer clear of single men, or girls who might view me as “competition.” I walked without stopping or appearing to look up, while making a covert study of gray coats: where they traveled, at what times; where they ate and attended the pissoir. Whom they noticed or stopped; what they did, when they did it. It was a lonely business, shot with bouts of alarm.

  As for what I was wearing, the indigo gown had stood me in good stead. It was proper looking, not too worn, and nondescript. I had let out its side seams a little, gusseted them with fabric from the hem. And soon it would be too small.

  Chasseloup and I seemed to have crept around to some kind of understanding, but matters were hardly settled. His only interest in dresses concerned the one he wanted to paint—so I resorted to the only solution I could come up with—the secondhand market back on the rue du Temple. Near the Mont de Piété and only a stone’s throw from Deux Soeurs, and for all I knew, another of Françoise’s trawling grounds. But after another week, need had gotten the better of wisdom.

  The fripperer’s bins were a sea of secondhand flotsam: ancient handbags, fossils of shoes, shawls of every fabric. Crinolines hung like giant birdcages amid Turkish carpets, mantillas on strings, racks of whalebone stays, and tattered point lace. Hordes of shoppers behaved like pecking flocks, like the ruckus of a goose pen. My arm was one among many raking hastily through the bins, clutching at sleeves or a bit of hem, tossing and clawing for any decent scrap: nothing dyed too bright, cheap-looking, or gaudily trimmed. Bursts of argument flared when opposing hands grabbed at the same bit, and bargaining and bartering clamored all around. We all wanted the same rare item: a suitable dress in summer fabric; decent gloves, a bonnet, a pair of shoes not entirely worn through. A few of these dangled overhead on hooks, just out of reach. Their prices, written on fluttering yellow tags, were nearly as much as those in the shops.