The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  Dimly, perhaps, I was aware of having lost the thread of the real, but what was real—and if one decided, what was to be done about it?

  A (pseudonymous) gossip columnist once described a few of my first-class passengers thus: “Mlle. Julie, a brunette with sparking eyes and a Spanish foot. Mlle. Dina, an intrepid rider of the Bois de Boulogne, possessed of a rosy mouth, embellished with pearls. Annette M—, an English milliner, fair complexioned, with rosy ringlets and black eyes. Gabrielle La B—, a Creole retrieved from a host of angels, fallen to earth. We must applaud a certain ‘unknown hand’ for bringing a sparkle to the foothills of Montmartre and to the better of the tolérances . . .”

  “Well done, my dear; I can see your stamp on this,” Nathalie Jouffroy would say of a season’s lineup of the willing and warm-fleshed. She appreciated my seriousness about the “refurbished” although she preferred to spend fortunes on “starts” at Brussels—acquisitions that often ended in a mountain of debt and urgent trades down the line. But that is what kept her in the footlights of the half-world; in the adored swirl of intrigue. Émilie Trois was always there to pick up the pieces. Trois would assess the line and say, “But now you must find us some merchandise as well. After all, we’re not entertaining Olympus here. The human animal just wants to be fed.” And so I went down to the previous night’s trawls at the Préfecture, negotiated the raw materials, then brushed up and refitted them for the Deux Soeurs salons. As for spying on my own kind—that popular empire occupation of tipping off the Préfecture that Mademoiselle So-and-So was down on protection and ripe for the Register . . . information was conveyed, but never out of revenge, and my friends knew they could trust me.

  On the writing desk Beausoleil had bought me, an overflow of correspondence; pens and blotters; ink and seals.

  To Monsieur le Préfet: Mademoiselle D— wishes to convey that cruel reversals of fortune have driven her close to the final act of despair. If she had not been kept back by religious feeling she would have succumbed . . . Her circumspect conduct, the care that she has bestowed on her parents, and that which she lavishes on her children have been deserving of the esteem and consideration of all worthy people; not being able to work, she begs for authorization to receive into her house six women of quality . . .

  To Madame Jouffroy of the Maison des Deux Soeurs: I take the liberty of writing to you to ask if you are willing to enter into business relations, and to know if you want any English girls of the age of seventeen. —Albert, hairdresser, Leicester Square, London

  And a hundred more like them. I had learned to exhaust my energies at such work. When it was finished, for a day, a week, or a season—such fearsome effort at my little walnut-inlaid writing desk, or rattling around Paris at night—I harbored a further ambition, a secret, poisonous dream: that my service to the Préfecture would, at last, have amassed enough chits and credits that I might request my own erasure from the Register. After all, I had not practiced my “trade” for years, even while I was young enough to have a future. That summer, with business proceeding briskly (even though tourists had drained from the boulevards as though a plug had been pulled) and with the empire’s functionaries cemented into their secure and lucrative positions—my intention was to get myself erased from the Register before the year was out.

  Under the potted palms around the card table at the rue du Mail, Francisque fanned out the hand she’d been dealt with a lacquered fingertip.

  “Odette has not been with us for three weeks! Is she in love?”

  “Or in trouble?” Amélie shook out her chestnut curls, sending hairpins scattering.

  Francisque gave her a dark look. “Lili, what do you think of holding another dental clinic for molar distress?”

  “I’ve got my eye on an excellent instrument case at the Mont.” Lili was thumbing through a used textbook on horse anatomy. Her latest passion was veterinary science, a field she swore was expanding too quickly for men to keep up.

  “No, really,” said Amé. “What if she is?” She raised her bid and played the Fool, which won wry comments all around; then caught my eye.

  “I’ll see what I can learn,” I murmured.

  It was true that something had taken hold of Odette, the strategist prepared for every new hand. Neither too loyal nor too fickle, she never lost her heart nor gave it away. Every one of her lovers felt lucky to have her, and their protection usually outlasted the duration of the affair, which is how she stayed afloat—that, and market tips. Such a career required endless diplomacy and vigilance and Odette seemed immune to fatigue. But her last affair had ended badly; I suspected she had allowed herself expectations. Or loved him a little more. It was an odd point for her to stumble upon—so obvious, like a stairstep one has gone up and down a thousand times before.

  Again the next week she failed to appear at the green baize table. The air was charged and torpid; pent up. The kind of evening when the storm threatens but never breaks, and even Sévérine, usually so placid, walked around like a thundercloud, spilling a drink without a murmur of apology.

  “No word at all?” said Amé. “Eugénie, have you heard anything?”

  “Yes, I believe she was . . . detained.” Jérome Noël, the original agent of my inscription and still Nathalie Jouffroy’s close connection at the Préfecture, was out with a summer grippe. I’d made delicate inquiries via his deputy, Coué—a real stiffneck who was always haunting the arcades or hauling in trembling milliners and ladies out shopping sans chaperone.

  “Monsieur Hibiscus, I’m afraid.” Francisque turned white.

  “Catastrophe,” gasped Amélie. “He denounced her!”

  “Coué didn’t say as much, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Monsieur Hibiscus” was an importer of exotics and dwarf palms who had been courting Odette for months, showing up at her door with giant bouquets, a parakeet in a gilded cage, and once even an iguana. Her dance of innuendo and resistance had occupied much of the spring; he did not meet her standards, and besides, he lived nearby and therefore was a risk. When we’d last seen Odette, she was determined to confront him directly.

  “She’s retained a lawyer,” I said.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” said Francisque. “She wants to bring a case against this frotteur?”

  “Against the police, actually. For violation of privacy,” I said drily. “I gather she gave them a list of protectors as long as her arm. Under duress.”

  “I would have liked to hear the names on that list,” said Francisque. Odette was not one to identify her lovers.

  “Is it possible to sue the Préfecture?” asked Lili.

  “Even La Lanterne doesn’t go that far,” said Amélie.

  “What lawyer in his right mind would take the case?

  “I hate to think what it will cost her,” I said.

  “Goodness, it’s hot,” said Amé. “Where is Sévérine with the drinks?”

  We had not even begun the diversions of manille when one of Francisque’s officers arrived, a chasseur in the Imperial Guard—de Ligneville, I think it was; his picture was popular on cartes de visite and that evening he looked as though he had just sat for his photograph, tightly buttoned, sashed, and braided into his uniform; boots polished and saber at his side. He declined to sit; we suspended our conversation; turned our sunflower heads toward his bright armor.

  “Let me be the first to tell you,” he said. “The government of France has declared war.”

  “War?” said Francisque, and her milky skin paled perceptibly.

  “The breach is caused by the Prussians’ absurd idea that a Hohenzollern could ascend to the Spanish throne.”

  Lili looked startled and put down her textbook. “But Prince Leopold was withdrawn!”

  “Bismarck brushed off France’s demand for an absolute guarantee that he would stay out of Spain. So it is an excellent opportunity at last to drive the message home. Put the German question to rest once and for all.”

  “So much for the finer points of dip
lomacy,” said Amélie. “Whatever happened to Il ne faut rien brusquer?”

  “I thought that the whole issue of the Hohenzollern candidacy in Spain was nothing but a tactic,” I said. “A—kind of Prussian taunt, to see if France would take the bait?”

  Amélie said, “Any trifle can be made serious when men want to go to war.” She looked pensive. She too had been prickly of late, and I wondered why.

  “There, you’re wrong,” said Lili. “It is the empress who wants this.”

  The officer laughed. “Yes, she says, ‘I shall go to bed French and wake up German if this is allowed to continue!’ You will see,” he said smartly. “It will be brisk, victorious, and very good for us all.” Francisque pulled on her gloves. We picked up the cards and dealt, three-handed.

  The next day, as it may be remembered, if anyone cares to recall—the imperial curtain rose on its last spectacular show. The declaration was complete with costumes, wigs, and makeup. Caricatures of Germans with drooping mustaches and long pipes appeared in the papers; French soldiers, decked out with flags and plumes, paraded with trumpets; parrots were trained overnight to squawk “To Berlin!” The major papers were bellicose and frantic over the notion of a France encircled; gassily inflated it to the level of an international incident, one to be quickly avenged. It sounded more like a duel than a war, with the French army eager to prove its mettle, and I remember my initial surge of irritation, a helpless sense of the absurd nature of the thing—even as the boulevards filled with marching troops in brilliant colors and excited little boys jumped from foot to foot. Tempers were touchy; the weather too hot. Some critics ventured to suggest that despite outward appearances, our army was not prepared for a conflict with the Prussians, but these voices of reason were rapidly denounced as traitors, as was anyone else who opposed the war. The Bourse soared. Francisque relaxed and dined out every night, generally at the Jockey Club. Lili procured her dentistry kit; Amélie, between engagements, took to reading all the leftist papers. I felt uneasy, unable to concentrate on the great volume of paperwork on my desk. Still no word from Odette, but I had a few scrawled words from Jolie, proposing dinner. Since Trouville, we’d gotten together only a handful of times, which Jolie attributed to her employer’s demands.

  In late July, Louis Napoleon and his son, the prince imperial, age fifteen, embarked from Saint-Cloud to the front lines. Soon the papers and broadsheets were shouting about the “invasion of Germany” and proclaimed that the prince had retrieved a bullet from the victory battlefield in his hand. Badinguet knew what kept the quibuses in their seats.

  Should one blame the long-throttled journalists? Their censored pens spewed only the flimsiest tittle-tattle, copied out messages from the imperial press office, and blared them at a loud, incessant pitch. Even the best among us were distressed, distracted. To live under the empire was to be blinded by the flare of gaslight, diverted by a thousand glittering inventions and the clatter of trains. Preoccupied by the movements of the Bourse, the building up of the bank account. The full-bellied and fur-lined looked over their shoulder, feared the rising tide of the dispossessed, and soaked their hearts in champagne. The poor were ill and dreaded the landlord’s boot and the Brigade; they were happy for military conscription, the higher wages of war, and the ability to direct their misery at an enemy at last. It was what we knew: to be childish, credulous concerning our leaders, zealous, and unprepared; to rely on compromises, however shabby and inadequate. The abyss between poverty and plenty was decorated, façaded, landscaped, and policed, but still it loomed ever larger; the brisk whirl of commerce—dizzying, maddening, unnatural—was our chosen distraction. But the number of Parisians who could with certainty find Saarbrücken on a map in July was roughly equal to the quantity of fresh eggs inside the city walls six months later.

  Jolie leaned back, balancing her glass on her long fingertips, tossing back her hair, which was falling from its pins, and I felt a pang for her spark; her small, bright explosions.

  “What do you think about Odette?” I asked. “That Coué is a devil; he thinks every female over the age of twelve should be registered. I’d make a bet he was involved.”

  “He may have met his match. Suing the Préfecture, indeed.” Jolie laughed. “Our excellent friend. I’ve missed her.”

  The weather may have suggested oysters on ice, but we were eating from a pot on a charcoal brazier, and the meal was calf’s stomachs simmered with a steer’s foot. It was Jolie’s favorite dish, served at a hole-in-the-wall near Les Halles; a late birthday celebration, and she would take it out on us with tripe. We had eaten a lot of it together, once. When my big belly was shoved against the tabletop in our little match-to-a-haystack flat. And it was as hot as it was then; another long-ago July.

  My friend’s features had hardened just perceptibly; eyes a little deeper under the lids; her tall, languid body a shade more gaunt. She—who had never favored the ascetic, even if she had to tear apart, fumigate, and sew her attire back together (sometimes in a way that did not exist before)—now wore a mossy-gray elbow-patched dress that blended in with the smoke, her hair a flame above it. An umbrella, a battered green one, leaned against the table. As always she was strangely alluring, the scent about her, and my own toilette felt fussy and dilute by comparison. For her birthday I had given her a pair of gloves in peacock silk and a bottle of gentleman’s cologne. Removed from their boxes and stripped of their tissue, these lay on the table between us, incongruous amid the tripe pots.

  “You look more like a Blanquiste than a grande horizontale,” I said, spooning up a gelatinous serving. Jolie reached for the carafe, and her hand trembled enough to allow the neck to slip and the wine to spill.

  “Merde.” She leaned across the table. “I’ll bet you don’t lick your fingers like that at the rue du Mail.”

  “That’s why I’d rather eat more often with you.”

  January was when I’d last seen her. Louise in a man’s trousers and Jolie in a long cloak, both with hair pinned up under caps. They had been following a funeral cortege through the frigid streets in a steady rain, shouting, part of a crowd led by the old revolutionary Blanqui. (I had been on my way to the florist, making preparations for a dinner party we were to hold that night at the rue du Mail.) The funeral was for Victor Noir, one of the increasingly noticeable brash-voiced men who wrote against the empire. The boulevards were in a furor because the emperor’s cousin, Prince Pierre, had shot the journalist over a disagreement about the terms of a duel, a dispute concerning criticism of the empire in the press.

  Louise and Jolie were a pair of jubilant insurgents—sooty, drenched, exhilarated; Louise brandishing a French navy pistol. She showed us how the smooth curve of its grip fit her palm, demonstrating its mechanism as easily as a cook breaks an egg. “And whom are you planning to shoot—Prince Pierre?” I’d asked. Louise still had her schoolmistress’s demeanor, but it had a new edge. When she spoke—about barricades going up and the guns echoing those of ’forty-eight and ’ninety-three—the air crackled and you could almost smell the powder, although she didn’t answer my question. Jolie had interrupted her, plucking her sleeve and calling her former teacher “Clémence” with a familiar joking affection. My heart had snagged, then. As it did now, remembering. I didn’t want to lose Jolie entirely; but what did that mean? It was impossible to see much of her; she sent a note when she pleased; half a year might pass before the next. One could more easily capture smoke in a fist. Harder to admit were the alterations in my own life that had created distance between us—my new-money companions, my comings and goings with the Préfecture and Nathalie Jouffroy. Those we did not discuss.

  A shot went off now in the street, very close. I jumped, nearly upsetting the brazier.

  “You’d better get used to it,” said Jolie, who did not pause as she moved the spoon from the tripière to her bowl.

  Earlier that day, more troops had stretched across the city, still celebrating the successful attack at Saarbrücken. Lines and lines
of soldiers, all the regiments and battalions brilliant and colorful, a coxcomb display in their various uniforms—tight Zouave breeches, bright blue ballooning Turco trousers, ten thousand kepi-covered heads. Drums and horns and flags, colors flashing in the sun, and flotillas of cannon on the Seine, all tying up traffic for hours. Now with the festivities over, the participants caroused through the streets, with shouts and the breaking of bottles, gunshots and singing, heading off to rout the German bakers from their beds.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said. “Where have you been?”

  She looked up. “I’ll tell you something. I’ve got news; I’m off the books.”

  “What? Have you left Chevillat? How in the world did you manage that?”

  “Infirmary Saint-Lazare for a month of mercury. And then another stint, compliments of Chevillat’s Dab, at Hôpital de Lourcine—where, on the whole, the food was better.”

  The wine tasted vinegary, suddenly unpalatable; shreds of stomach lining and carrot congealed on my plate.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well, it was sudden, you know. They just whisk you away. The mercury makes you sicker at first, so I had to recover. They don’t let you send letters from Saint-Lazare; and no visits to speak of because they don’t want the souteneurs coming round. Then Chevillat offered me a second round of mercury and a submistress’s job. Or to pay me out. So then I had to think things over, and I have. I’ve decided to leave . . . You don’t have to look like that; I’m not going to fall over tomorrow. Syphilis has three stages; I’m only in the first. My whole life is ahead of me.” She gave a black laugh.

  “It’s the tripe,” I said quickly. “You know I only eat it for you.”

  She scraped up the last of the sticky remains.