The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “Now, there’s some investigative reporting for you. Do you think Duport put his back into it, or did Chasseloup tell him your story?”

  “Not Pierre. He’d rather throw himself under an omnibus.”

  “Vollard, then? . . . So the scoundrel has written about you; what more do you want?”

  “I never set foot in La Maternité,” I said shortly. I was dizzy with a champagne headache; last night was a blur of chandelier light, straining violins, faces from opposite worlds shuddering against one another. Jabbering voices amid noisy chaos; my ribs gripped by ferocious baleine as the room whirled. Pierre drunk and not speaking to me; Vollard following us with his eyes. Later, Chasseloup across the room, drinking more and laughing with his smirking coterie. Any notion of rekindling Pierre’s affection (it had occurred to me, cravenly) dried up like a puddle in the baking sun; and soon I was only dancing with men I did not know; one with small pinkish eyes, a white piqué vest; another with skin like a baby, who spoke French but said he was an American Indian. Nathalie Jouffroy’s parting growl, her approving grimace stretched over her powdered parchment skin as she drew on her gloves.

  “Enjoy the champagne, my dear!”

  Another man taking me up and away, again. Later, half-delirious, looking for Chasseloup, needing badly to speak to him—why? I couldn’t remember now. But he was nowhere and the journalists were settling in for serious pleasures at the zinc. By the end of the evening, Vollard bending seamily over my hand as though flies and dirt clung to my honey gown. Odette had declared the evening a success.

  “What now?” I asked. Odette yawned and stretched like a big cat. Jolie appeared, scowling and rubbing her eyes.

  “Yes, what now? That champagne was cheap, by the way,” she said.

  “We wait. Like spiders on a new web.”

  In fact, Odette won the bet. By evening, a gold-wrapped box arrived via the concierge to Jolie’s flat on the rue Serpente. It lay squat and elegant on the burn-scarred table littered with the remnants of paints, crumbs, the morning’s papers, and flecks of tobacco. Jolie was painting and didn’t lift her head as she said, her voice full of doom, “Did you see the concierge head-to-head with old Madame Boudet, after dropping that on us?” She eyed it as though it was a stinking carcass. Since last night, her mood had suddenly reversed. Clio stared out the window, twitching her tail at sparrows.

  I slipped my fingers under the folds of foil-backed paper. The box bore a label from a fancy confectioner’s shop on the rue de la Paix. Marrons glacés, honey-soaked chestnuts. A note, penned in black ink:

  My thanks for providing a rare evening in which the Known improved greatly upon the Unknown.

  Jolie said, “I suppose we’ll eat sweets for supper? Because we don’t have a single sou around here.”

  I picked up a sweet from the box. “Look,” I said. “Cash.”

  The candied chestnuts were individually wrapped, but not in ordinary paper: bank notes had been folded around each of the sticky nuggets. Jolie put down her brush and stared. The notes clung together, and to my fingers as I tried to peel them off.

  “Give them to me.” Jolie took over, dabbing at each with her painting cloths, then clipped the bills up on the line. How much? We counted again. My friend raised her eyes to the notes now fluttering gently, then said softly, “Look at Clio; she’s flicking her tail.”

  “She doesn’t like me these days, even when I smell like fish.”

  “Where did all this loot come from?”

  The envelope showed an address on the avenue d’Antin.

  “That’s where the Confederates are waiting out the war. What is his name?”

  “Beausoleil.” I stared at the slanting signature.

  “Maybe he is a slaveholder!” Jolie stared straight at me for the first time since before Récit had come around, her eyelids heavy. “Eugénie. I think something awful is going to happen.”

  “Something awful has already happened,” I said.

  “You can’t—this man could be—”

  “What? An art lover who likes candied chestnuts and just—”

  “Wraps them in hundred-franc notes like a madman? Oh, Eugénie, I just—want to go back to the way it was.” I stared at her; Jolie was not herself. I tried to joke her back into her customary insouciance.

  “The way it was when? Name one time we should go back to.”

  “I spoke to Chasseloup last night, you know.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say he is remorseful. But he is not without regrets.”

  “He only came at all because Vollard forced him to—and you think I can crawl on my knees to him now?”

  “I don’t think you should take this money. Send it back. Then—”

  “What?”

  “We’ll figure something out.” I looked at my friend, bony and wide-eyed, her hair in tufts. Last night she’d worn a great plumed hat all evening; the rouge had stood out on her cheeks, her eyes were laudanum-bright, and I knew she’d been worn down, she’d lost ground with this injury.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m figuring out,” I said. “I’m starving, and I’m going out to bring us something hot, and then I am going to sit down and see what we owe to those screeching violinists and Madame Récit and—God knows who else. Old Boudet and the concierge, for not telling on us all of this time.”

  “I told you, I don’t want it. Any of it.” Jolie made a funny choking sound and I realized I’d never seen her cry before, not once, and I went to where she was sitting and kneeled down. I wanted to put my arms around her but didn’t dare; she’d shake me off.

  “Jolie. Is it so bad, Odette’s stunt, having this money, what?”

  “You don’t see that it—it changes everything. It will change. Everything.”

  “You’re the one who said I was living in a dream world,” I said, more gently.

  “Well, now I think it was me. I’ve been living in it . . . Eugénie?”

  “What is it?”

  “Nathalie Jouffroy spoke to me last night too. She says she needs me back.”

  “Oh. Oh, no.” My throat constricted; I swallowed dust.

  “I can’t believe it, I look like a scarecrow. And I—I don’t want to go. I want to—be here, and paint, and see Louise and read more—and you, chouette.”

  Then I did put my arms around her, as if two girls like us could hold the world together. Just like that.

  Jolie was asleep when I returned, later, with hot potatoes and trout and a bottle. Hanging on a new line next to the dry bank notes were a whole string of labels that should have been heliotrope but were painted entirely red.

  ***

  “Embracevirtue Avertyourcourse from the Abyss Renounce sinful ways Turn to God?” the young woman said in a tremulous rush, as though asking an implausible question. She was about my age, pretty; eyes fastened somewhere on my breastbone. My knees pressed uncomfortably into the wooden edge of a prie-dieu.

  The wide doors to the Hospice des Enfants Assistés had brushed open silently on oiled hinges. Soot-shadowed floors, vitriol-dripping walls; the smell of soured milk and the air dense with the authority of the church, like a fist closed around the throat. This was a day—of all days, the first Monday following the revelation of the unknown girl—on which I was permitted to file a request to discover Berthe’s situation. A wide-eyed, sober-cloaked girl handed out tracts; a collared chaplain rushed down the corridor, whispering to a black-coated surgeon. Sisters of Mercy milled in dark skirts, crucifixes glittering. At the end of that hall, a corridor branched off into yawning halls like those of an elaborate tomb. The clatter of sabots echoed; then a line of small children appeared, marching in file. Two by two, silent and unsmiling; first boys and the girls behind them; the younger holding the hands of the older. They were a wan bunch dressed in identical blue cottes, medallions dangling. At the end of the line, several paces behind the last pair, trailed a single little girl, smaller than the rest—too small even for the
tiniest worker’s smock, in a gray pinafore. She clomped along on sturdy little legs, a scowl on her face. A long, exhausted sentence punctuated by one small, fierce dot.

  A dozen of us—reclaimants, petitioners, defiants who considered ourselves worthy of news—perched on the benches at the end of a polished corridor. One or two visibly pregnant, others with heaps of piecework sewing; our shawls and cloaks damply shoved under us. One unabashed girl was reading The Charterhouse of Parma. Another did nothing but cry and wipe her eyes on her sleeve, but not for being moved by literature. From time to time a lay sister, hair skimmed back under a veil, came forward to call a name, and we all looked up.

  Imagine, I wished I could say, now, to this girl who sat rigid before me under the cross’s weight, a village in the hills, where finches dart and poppies grow by the side of the road, and the wind blows up in gusts, and hailstones are the size of moons. The land is as beautiful as you are; Paris is a distant and charming place!

  I raised my head, refusing to budge until the mutterings were finished and at the end I was given a flimsy fold of paper:

  THE STORY OF JUSTINE.

  Justine, innocent and good of heart, falls and is abandoned.

  Justine gives herself body and soul to Redemption.

  Justine corrects her state, retreating from Paris, returning to her province.

  She marries; returns her husband (a profligate) to the Faith.

  Justine is duly rewarded with legitimate children.

  At the end of this day, with our crumpled Justine tracts in our hands, we filed past the sisters who, black-skirted, hush-footed, never looked up. Monsieur le directeur had had a demanding schedule, was too busy to take on the Mothers; and the tears of the Invisibles were left to be mopped by the Virtuous.

  “Is this always the way it is?” I asked the girl who’d been reading Stendhal. She shrugged.

  “We are done with Justine, at least. The tract handlers will be at La Maternité tomorrow.”

  “Do they really expect us to leave Paris without knowing about our children?”

  “It doesn’t apply to me; I was born a block away. But they have to let us sit here; it’s the law.” She tucked her book under her arm. Cries of infants echoed down the halls as doors to the wards opened and fell shut as we passed. Sisters on hurrying feet. The hospice doors brushed shut behind us.

  What I’d learned was no surprise, really. To retrieve a child the hospice required full reimbursement for care; a marriage certificate; assertions of paternity or filiation. I had none of these, but not to appear would have been to relinquish my claim to Berthe; and so I had gone—just to say that I existed. It was a beginning. And I allowed myself some meager congratulation for that.

  Voices drifted down to the fifth landing as I made my way up the stairs of the flat on the rue Serpente. I stopped by the hall stove. The door stood ajar, which was not usual. And a small crowd seemed to fill the tiny rooms. Jolie, disheveled and in a kimono, was on her hands and knees next to the bed. Two men in gray coats.

  “Clio, come here, sweetheart!”

  And another woman, the least welcome face in the world. Pointed chin, slippery dark hair, and lithe, boyish. Heart pounding, I stepped back. Here it is, again. Police. Françoise—the submistress from Deux Soeurs, to do Nathalie Jouffroy’s dirty work.

  “Françoise—help me get Clio, I won’t leave her!”

  “She’ll be fine.” The submistress’s voice a glissando whine.

  “Do a thorough search of the place. Smells foul enough,” said one of the officers.

  Creak of wood, clatter of an umbrella to the floor, and a tumble of hatboxes.

  “Enough contraband here to stock a store.”

  “These yours, or does another one stay here?”

  “Just storing things for a friend,” said Jolie.

  Guttural laugh. “Stolen goods; it’s police property now.”

  “Clio!”

  A hubbub from within, a crash and a yelp, maybe from one of the men. I took a step back, felt for the banister. A tiny mouse was a gray streak out the door, Clio an orange blur racing after it, both of them darting into the privy. Mind frozen, my body moved of its own accord, but leaden, as if in a dream. Or as if you are dead and the spirit stamps its foot in frustration—the body cannot budge, I cannot move it anymore . . . ! But the body did move, through the viscous air. Oh, cowardly body—yes, I ran away, hating myself at every step I took farther from Jolie and the flat . . . Down and down, and down again, away through the courtyard. Past the pasty, rancid face of the concierge as she lolled on her seat.

  Much later, when I came slinking back, I couldn’t find Clio anywhere; she didn’t come when I called. Jolie’s pots were knocked askew; water ran in painty rivulets across the slanting floor. The latest wad of packets, painted, dry, neat, and ready for their wrappers. IMPERIAL BATH SACHETS. A few labels still clung to the line; a final box of blanks stood forlorn in the corner. Bottle of laudanum, empty. Armoire pegs bare. My rental clothes gone. Crinoline, lace camisole. Worked stockings. Beaded purse. Gray shot silk. Lemon chiffon. Brocade gloves . . . Marrons on the floor, coated with grit and dust.

  Uselessly I picked up Jolie’s paint pots, her color boxes and brushes. Stared at them as if I had time to think about it. But the gray coats would be back; they already suspected what was up. And Jolie was on her way back to Saint-Lazare, or Deux Soeurs—or both.

  And like the hands of a clock, the finger of blame came back around. I knew I could not have saved her. And yet, and yet. With my knees pressed on the prie-dieu at the hospice, under the gaze of that wood carving of a girl muttering pieties in the bowels of the place that had swallowed up my daughter—I had wished to forgive and be forgiven; to be washed clean. What was on offer was a faked-up absolution applied under impossible conditions; a travesty of what any God would offer, wielded by blunt and grasping hands. But my desire, my trapped and impotent longing—that, at least, had been genuine. I would have cried; but I was dry-eyed with urgency now, and had no more time to wait. Left Clio a paint pot of milk.

  . . . Stark light from the gas lamps staring in through the slats in the shutters of a nowhere-garni room on the outskirts of the city, where the poorest factory girls slept; the kind of place you go to just to be invisible; that I’d never been able to bear before, not while Jolie would take me in. Selfish, self-serving wretch that I was . . . And the dark suffering hole of a dream. The same one, just past the eyelid of consciousness. They came when most needed; the warp and weft of what was beloved; as it had been loved. Sometimes, physical selves tumbled together as they once had; supple and lusty and strong. I had dreamed of Stephan; of Chasseloup; tonight—of Jolie. The dreams did not discriminate, or trade in guilt or moralizing; but were epics of breath and bone; spark and softness imprinted in a place that could not be erased. Sometimes great baroque plots occupied my nights: letters, secrets, intrigue; sensuous deceptions, messengers, and stolen moments. A proscribed love; a great, chivalrous love; a medieval love. We traveled on canals (Venice?) or ran away to some battered, ramshackle place. Sometimes there was a rival between us . . . woman or man. Dreams of quarrels; of making up; arguing and parting. Of country banquets, of poetry unfurling.

  The dreams were not hope nor expectation; not even desire. Just a part of me, a current, a draft, an infiltration—gust before the storm; then the storm itself. I needed them; they were some comfort, but my dreaming nights dismantled and unfit me for life. Dreams abandoned me to scraps of daylight, left me raw and empty, less fit for the kind of survival that others lived for, or seemed to.

  That night I woke past midnight, at an hour when night looms for desperate hours. On a terrible garni pallet, shouts behind the thin walls, ferment from the privy in the hall to which I was afraid to venture; and Beausoleil’s money crinkling underneath me in the stays I still wore, in bed—I saw a small girl carrying a slop pail, patiently, waiting, walking. Carrying it forever.

  And that night, I discarded a burden I myself
had carried for a very long time—lifetimes, perhaps. That voice—hers. My mother’s, accusing; full of reproach.

  Petite salope!

  Tossed it over the parapet, watched it gush and eddy away.

  And I said, aloud to Jolie, I know you are strong. You are strong enough.

  When morning finally broke, it was a cold dawn. I made a list—not the first of my life, nor the last. Move rooms. That was item number one.

  18. Waters of Paris

  AMONG AMERICANS, APPARENTLY, there are those sufficiently impressed that one has managed to climb out of the gutter and onto the curb that it does not matter by what means, or if one’s undergarments are splattered in the process. History, although it haunts the empty purse, is forgotten in the glare of daylight on new currency, and the blessing of blindness pursues any gain—though it should not be such a mystery that every flowing tide also has its ebb. Still, natural laws were irrelevant as a bolt of drapery fabric shimmered and was taken down from a shelf on the rue de Rivoli; textures and weight tested with a finger. Carolina’s finest—a combed medium staple from the Sea Islands, soon to be among the last in Paris; the rest of it rotting in bales on docks, the result of a blockade of the Confederate ports, said Beausoleil. Zachary-Gabriel Beausoleil.