“What better argument than that a woman’s other prospects have been ruined?”
Jolie snorted.
“Certainly, a lawyer would have to prepare a clear case,” said Louise.
“Lawyers have to be paid, or so I hear,” said Odette drily.
Jolie said, “Shall we dine? Odette, this bird smells like heaven!”
“So, now that you’ve jumped out a window, are you finally ready to move up in the world, minouche?” asked Odette as we drew our chairs around the table to a meal that, at least for Jolie and me, was Balthazar’s Feast.
Jolie laughed. “Is that possible?” To Louise, she said, “I’m the only guttersnipe here, picking out my alphabet. These two have gone to school; they can carry on with whom they please. You’ll have to take us as we are, Louise.”
“You knew enough to get yourself out of Saint-Lazare,” said Louise, and I wondered, not for the first time, why she was here and what she wanted from Jolie. What everyone else did, or something else?
“What those nuns taught I could write on a thumbnail,” said Odette, pouring again. “I learned everything I know from my old man’s library.”
Jolie helped herself to salad and a leg. “A band of thieves raised me—I was the little one who took care of them. Iced their lumps and black eyes with what I scraped up from the fishmonger. My first trip inside, I’d been picked up for stealing ice. At the poissonnière.”
“It’s a favorite spot with the gray coats,” I said. “Even Odette prefers chicken.”
“You should have seen the two of them, Jolie and her brother, Henri. Pierrot and Pierrette of the bandits,” said Odette.
“But oh, the girls at Saint-Lazare back then! The packages they got, the flowers—from their madames and lovers. And they acted like being inside was nothing. While I, flea-bitten and half-starved—and I thought myself tough—cried like a baby. And I’d put up with a lot by then. But when I saw them cry, it seemed like an adventure—maybe they were crying over a lover. Where does a kid get those ideas? I never even bothered to look at the old women, of course. Dead sticks in the corner.”
“And what happened?” asked Louise.
“I made friends with a girl who was a bit older. She told me that when I got out, she could get me better work than thieving, and I’d walk on a carpet and wear a pretty dress. I’d never seen one.”
“A dress?” said Odette, munching on a thigh.
“A carpet.”
“When I met Jolie we were both living on Vertus, and she did wear trousers from time to time. To think she signed away her life for a rug!”
“A cheap copy from a Paris factory, in the first dump I worked. And not much in the way of a dress.” Jolie chuckled. “But this time—this last time at Saint-Lazare, Nathalie Jouffroy found out I was there and sent a box to me—so I was the one passing out sweets. But do you want to know something—out of the corner of my eye, I could see only the older women now. As if I’d opened the closet door and found them, like Bluebeard’s wives. But still breathing; that’s the curse. When you’re young, you can’t see where things lead, and why is that?”
“No education is complete without ‘Bluebeard,’” remarked Louise wryly.
“What drags us down, in the end,” Odette mused, “is taking care of everyone else when we can’t scrape up enough for ourselves. How is it that we think we can be and do and care for everyone else without being able to take care of ourselves first? Not in this world.” She looked across the table, nodded at me. “You may have loved that baby, Eugénie, but soon you’d have been afraid to keep her near you. The daughters just become what the mothers have been.”
A silence fell over the half-picked carcass, the empty jars, which Odette refilled . . . How could I ever have envied Odette? The woman was made of marble.
“And do you think that pretending you are a capitalist changes that?” Louise said finally to Odette, just short of acidic.
“I’m no better than my neighbors, Louise . . . Peel me a beet, minouche?”
Jolie wiped chicken grease from her mouth with the back of her hand. Speared a beet, stripped its charred skin off, made ruby slices. She dropped one on the white cloth, staining it. I looked down, felt tears well. How long could I go on asking her to be strong for us both?
“Your heart is leaking and if you don’t stop it up, you’re going to bleed to death, chouette. All over the floor,” said my friend abruptly.
Louise sawed off the last chunks of meat and offered the plate around.
“Jolie and I have been studying the case of American slavery. I’d be interested to know how much each inscribed girl is worth to the city of Paris.”
“I saw sugar slaves in Barbados,” said Odette. “Are they worth very much?”
“For the price of a healthy young man you could probably build a chateau on your little plot of land. That is what the Confederacy is defending. Its wealth in slaves,” said Louise. “I don’t believe that Paris will easily give up Regulation. Not until there is something else to put in its place. Or—the women refuse.”
“I don’t see many refusing,” said Jolie. “I’ve never seen so much competition on the street.”
“Set them free and educate them,” said Louise. “Then you’ll see.”
“I don’t know what army would fight to free us,” I said.
“An army of the just,” said Louise. A brief silence fell over the onion skins. “Meanwhile, I wonder if you could organize a trade union. Negotiate for some basic rights.”
Odette yawned. She stared at the schoolteacher, a flicker in her pale eyes; the same twitch of the lips Berthe used when my father spoke. His Limoges notions, she called them; as if Limoges was as distant as China. Papa would give her a gentle, helpless glance. Jolie looked doubtful. I swallowed; closed my eyes. Metal, the taste of metal always now in my throat.
“Louise always gets to the point,” said Jolie, finally. “That’s why I asked her to come. Is it time for chocolate?”
With the taste of poulet rôti and wine and now the bittersweet chocolate melting in our mouths (even Louise had liked the tart), the mood around the table mellowed. I said, under the rosy tinge of wine, “When I was young I wanted to mean something, to be important to someone, or to do something larger than myself. Once I thought the point was to be of use. And to care for those you love.”
“Use in the sense that you mean it is an eighteenth-century idea. Now the meaning has been corrupted, and it means the strong using the weak for their own gain; it has led to instrumentalism.” Louise nodded to Odette. “From your notion follows self-mechanization and the death of the soul. And yours”—she turned to me—“your conception of it foundered on the rocks of a new meaning. Living in the past has put you at the mercy of others.”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to tell her,” said Jolie.
“I think she just falls in love with the wrong men,” said Odette.
“Oh, they’re all wrong, Odette.”
I persisted. “So, what is the answer, Louise?”
“It is a weak society that depends on wars abroad and selling women’s bodies at home. A sign of internal rot, like marrow disease.” She paused, gestured to Odette. “But I don’t mean to moralize. Until society grows stronger and women can earn a decent living, the money you make should be yours. You should be able to have your furnishings and live in your flats any way you’d like.” Despite her brave words, Louise looked as though she was still mulling it over.
“Hear, hear,” said Jolie.
“Well—getting back to the point of the evening—first we need to figure how to keep any roof at all over these two pretty heads, and Clio in mackerel,” Odette said.
I’d drunk a lot of wine. A vinegary feeling coursed in my blood, a stubborn, full-stomach-and-gunpowder sensation. I leaned forward. “No, I want Louise to tell me the point of what she is saying. The point of—of living. For us. As we are now. If it is not just that we are wretched, meant to be endlessly punished to r
emedy a sin—to be held up as an example. If we are just being used for the profit of others, which is not what they say, that—that is—” I stopped, confused. “What are our lives for?”
“It’s not such a mystery,” said the teacher, slowly. “Life’s purpose is to learn and to grow. To be able to sit at the banquet the world offers, to eat and drink your fill, you as well as anyone else. You, Eugénie, and that other one, that so-called empress whose name you share—are not so different . . . You too have the right to a defense. Believing it is the first step.”
Odette sighed and pulled out a tiny lacquered snuffbox. Jolie’s eyes were shadowed. I stared—perhaps unfairly, because no one had been more generous than Odette—at her plump caressing hands as she delicately mounded a pinch of aromatic tobacco between her left thumb and forefinger. She took a long sniff and said, “Louise, this revolution of yours—because that’s what you’re talking about? The rights of man, guns in the street, et cetera—I think that is the ‘eighteenth-century idea.’ Finally a woman with her wits about her can live more or less unencumbered, and I mean to do it. Your ideas led to the guillotine.” Odette sniffed again and sat back. Her peacock earrings dangled, catching Clio’s attention as she sprawled against the faded Perrault. The cat pricked up her ears. Jolie lit a cigarette. Looking over at her, I felt my heart give a stab.
“I would not actually call living by the carte unencumbered,” I muttered.
“The carte is an egregious insult. I’ve said so before . . . Care for a pinch?”
Louise shook her head. “For the moment, I was talking about trade unions. And litigation on behalf of fairness.” Looking at me, she said, “Be more generous with yourself. If you are not—who on this earth will be, for you?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, low-voiced as Louise. The table was covered with bones and cups and crumbs. “How?”
Odette cast me a sad glance. As though I was naive and rustic; as, in fact, I was.
Louise said, “That gold you must find for yourself.” She rose and plucked a label from the line. Turned it over and scribbled on the back. “Come and talk it over with others who are also asking the same questions, if you’d like. Jolie knows where the school is.” She left it, got up for her shawl. “Now, my friends—I am due at a meeting. So it is good night, for now.”
We listened to her boots echo down the stairs.
“School indeed,” said Odette, raising her glass. “To the Bastille, more like.”
“You’re going to be short a bergamot,” I said, turning over the paper on which Louise had written.
“My legs hurt,” said Jolie. “The bones aren’t setting right, I can feel it.” She closed her eyes; she had gone pale and a sheen of sweat lay over her brow. I went to the window and opened it; the air felt like lead, again. Louise had rattled our chains but left the padlocks without their keys. I found what was left of the laudanum, helped Jolie to the divan. She’d been running through the stuff like wine. “Chouette, you’re a darling.”
Silence settled as the glint of candlelight flickered over empty plates and jars.
“So, to business?” said Odette. She found a pen and tested its nib against her fingertip.
“What do you think about what Louise said,” I began, slowly. “About—suing for child support?”
Odette said, “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Do we have a choice?” said Jolie, easing back on the pillows.
“That the ground has been torn out from under you, Eugénie. And you have to build it back up again, stone by stone.”
“Like Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli,” Jolie said languidly. Her eyes were a little glassy; the laudanum was sinking in.
“The best lawyer in the world isn’t going to get you what you don’t feel you deserve. You need to face them. All of them, before you ask any lawyer to do the job for you. This painter—”
“I told Odette about those newspaper articles and An Unknown Girl. I thought she might know how to get these michés to pay up,” Jolie said.
“Yes, Mademoiselle Cat’s-Got-My-Tongue—why was it Jolie who had to tell me?”
I sighed. “Believe me, they don’t think they owe me a thing. You know, Odette.”
“I want to see those clippings.”
I went and rummaged for them, my gray and fraying little stack of newsprint. The past spring’s Salon columns from various papers. Odette became absorbed in them, and when she surfaced, said, “So—fill me in. Who was it that paid off what you owed to those villains at Deux Soeurs?”
“Vollard. He’s a sort of—he organizes business for Chasseloup. He sold the painting.”
“For a fortune,” interjected Jolie.
“Hm. So—how did he come to pay your debt to that place?”
“I saw him there. After I left he wanted me to sit for Pierre again, to paint another Unknown Girl.”
“Presumably, the second time around she’d be Known.”
“That’s what I said. But they thought I could still be Unknown because—I wasn’t in the press, at the parties—”
“So?”
“Pierre got angry and refused. When he found out where I’d been.”
“After Vollard had paid up? . . . He had qualms, but Vollard did not?”
“This Chasseloup is a bit of a prig,” Jolie said.
“So, Monsieur Vollard is out his sum. There’s one point.”
“Whatever it is, I’m missing it,” said Jolie. Her heavy lids were half-closed and she was stroking Clio’s tawny belly.
Odette sat back and tapped her fingers together. “I think that the subject of An Unknown Girl has to be launched into society. We can throw a big party. The press will eat it up. Vollard—he might just jump at the chance to get Chasseloup’s name in the papers again. What do you think, Jolie?”
“With what kind of lettuce? Who’d stake us?” Jolie, still pale, had rallied but she winced when she moved.
“I have an idea,” said Odette. “Nathalie Jouffroy . . . Well, why not? She could front us the money and invite her friends. We’ll have to have them lining up like German princes at a caviar bar, anyway, to get you two through the winter with your chocolate tarts.”
“Well, she’d know how to work this thing, if anyone would. I’ve never understood this art business,” said Jolie.
“It’s a fairy tale people want to believe.”
“Leading to cash being thrown in Eugénie’s direction?”
“More at a figment of their imagination, but the money is real enough. I’ve seen stranger things happen in this city. So if you want my opinion, it’s worth a try.”
“I suppose it’s odd that people spend a fortune on a picture at all,” said Jolie. “Paint. What is it, really?”
“Chasseloup will never go along with this,” I said.
“Oh, you might as well go for the game and try, chouette.”
“I’ll tell you about this Chasseloup,” said Odette. “I heard of him, back when I tried modeling. He’s been around forever. By the time you came along, not a model in Paris would sit for him; he’d run through them all. He was slow and never paid, never turned up when he was supposed to. Everyone but this Vollard had given up on him. Without you, he’d have been left painting a plate of turnips and then having them for dinner. Now he’s got his little corner on fame and fortune, but I’ve known an artist or two in my time. They all need to chase the press like it’s their last hope.”
“And if we have this—party, then what?”
“You do make me sing for my dinner as well as bring it along, don’t you,” said Odette, yawning. “You are set up for society. You have gone public; you are launched.”
“Will I be able to get Berthe back?” I asked, my voice flat.
“Stop making yourself sick on regret, chouette. Let me squeeze that bottle,” Jolie said, reaching for the laudanum.
Odette said, “I’ll tell you one thing. You need to come out of your child’s world of ‘If I do this, may I do that?’
Wait to be told and I’ll tell you what you’ll get.”
“Or the police will—there’s one sure bet,” Jolie said, with mock cheer. “Things can always get worse.”
Odette said, “What do you think, Jolie? About Jouffroy.”
Jolie looked thoughtful. Even now, I didn’t know her whole history with Nathalie, how well she knew the woman, and on what terms. “She does love a party, when there’s enough in it.”
“Is she interested in art?” Odette riffled the stack of clippings.
“Sure, why not?”
“Eugénie will have to propose it,” said Odette firmly.
“You mean to her? Jouffroy?” I shuddered, remembering my last encounter, sobbing into a handkerchief with the woman towering over me, an iron fist dressed in flamboyant colors, spinning her yarns about wealthy courtesans and ignorant girls. She—so confident and certain, bent on culling and selecting—deciding who would live and who die, for that’s what it was—she had never seen Lucette’s ashen face in the mirror when she put on her kohl and rouge, or heard Claudine weep after a rough night, or listened to Banage’s black jokes. Nathalie Jouffroy was never around to hear the silence that fell when Delphine’s name came up. And the morning the Dab took Lucette—she hadn’t even been allowed back upstairs. I knew because before I left in my own haste, I found her few belongings stuffed under the pallet—among them, a bent and stained carte de visite of an older couple wearing photographer’s rentals. An empty envelope addressed to Germinie, which must have been her real name. A ribbon; a rhinestone hairpin. No, Nathalie Jouffroy never went far afield of that bank-vault parlor of hers, the countinghouse where she reigned with Émilie Trois and the chief of police. Jolie railed about the Morals Brigade but I didn’t find our own keepers any better. If anything, they were worse. Closed their eyes to what was happening under their noses.
“I won’t, I won’t go back there,” I said violently.
Jolie drawled, “Well, she’s right—if they meet, it shouldn’t be there.”
“And you’ll have to be dressed,” said Odette firmly, turning to me. “I don’t mean in what you’re wearing.”
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 20