The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  “So.” She paused. “There’s no reason for me to stay around here. I’m going back to where I came from. To Belleville.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not? People live there, you know.”

  My guts clenched. I knew Jolie had grown up in the slums on the eastern outskirts of Paris; even more overcrowded now, since Haussmann’s demolition had pushed thousands there from the inner rings of the city. Seething warrens of illness and poverty—Belleville was a place to leave if you could, not to go back to. “The air is bad, the water. The—I don’t have to tell you.” Cholera, typhoid, putrid vapors. I looked at the gifts of gloves and cologne, ludicrous. “You’ll be dead in six months.”

  “You should see the place we’ve found. It’s in a huge block of apartment buildings. From the street they look like slum palaces, but inside the walls have been removed between the separate buildings, and our hall is just like one long boulevard, way up high. Everything goes on there, it’s like a village, with street vendors and workshops and cafés, even a bar à vin. Everyone knows everyone else. You don’t understand it, you don’t know. It’s not lonely, it is living. Mothers and babies and old people and young ones. We’ll all help one another. Share and share alike.”

  I gave her a look.

  “Well, rob each other, then. But not the way they do down here. It’s not easy to get a place up there, but we did it.”

  “We . . . who?” Louise?

  “Henri.”

  “Your brother?”

  “He’s been a prisoner, but he’s released. He’s out past Prussian lines, but he’ll get in.” She leaned across, fierce and tender, her mouth turned up like Clio’s used to when she settled down to her fish heads. “It isn’t the cage that feeds the bird, as they say. So I’m going to fly now. In whatever time I have left.” And she laughed. Her old laugh; and it made me gasp with loneliness for the rusty velvet sofa and Clio’s soft belly fur. But how, on the rue du Mail, with money to burn up on peacock gloves, with Sévérine to brew the coffee and go to the laundress, could I miss those terrible times? Jolie, her voice clear as a bell, calling down as I clomped up the stairs from the rue Serpente, the strings of some unaffordable package tangled around my fist, stopping on the landing below to catch my breath. Shouting up for her to guess what I’d brought. But I was the one who hadn’t been able to give them up, those indulgences, those comforts.

  “Will you ever wear them?” I fingered the silk gloves. “This is your old cologne!”

  “They are pretty things. But maybe I won’t wear them to the barricades, chouette.”

  “It won’t come to that. This war will end very soon. Everyone says so. It’s not as though the Prussians can invade Paris—” I stopped. Jolie looked pensive, as though she was about to speak, but another shot sounded close by—so near we both flinched; the shouts of drunken off-duty soldiers rang in our ears.

  “They think they can shoot all the Germans,” said Jolie. “But they don’t realize that then they won’t have their bread or morning Kaffee. Not to mention, the streets won’t be cleaned. Did you know that most of the street cleaners in Paris are Germans?”

  “No . . . You can’t go back there, Jolie.”

  “Eugénie.”

  “What?”

  “You’re up to your old tricks, living in the past. Everything is different now. Shall we have a coffee?”

  After we parted, I hiked my skirts over the debris left from the army carnival, the spent bullets in the gutters. They say that when Paris first let out its laces, expanded its girth, and under the empire and Haussmann breathed beyond its ancient perimeter, the old cart horses stopped where the city gates had once been, stood stock still, and would not move, despite the fact that no toll taker, no wall stood before them. Even the drivers’ whips did not make them budge. Perhaps it was my old friend who was galloping ahead, out into the new, unknown city.

  Francisque, Lili, and I shopped the sales for wool petticoats and crinolettes (the newest improved shape in dresses) in department stores hot as ovens and crowded to bursting. Markdown signs had sprung up out of season and suddenly; the aisles of the big stores showed riots of violently colored fabrics, winter boots appearing from nowhere alongside polka-dot neckties and pink gloves and parasols; a chaos of paisley shawls and vests, all hastily cut from the same bolt. Customers fingered ready-made clothing in a frenzied delirium while pickpockets, dress destroyers, hair snippers, and frotteurs—all the disturbed minds of the capital—were out in force.

  “I don’t see why everyone is worried, with thirty thousand Prussian prisoners and victories at Forbach . . . or is it Froeschwiller?” said Francisque, struggling with a stretch of red flannel that didn’t seem to know what kind of garment it was. Other conversations flurried around the racks.

  “No, Saarbrücken was the victory, Forbach a retreat,” said Lili.

  “What do you think of this? Laces from the inside, so you can change the shape of the loops in back.”

  “No, Woerth was a victory as well. The dispatch was posted,” said a young woman with a variety of crinolettes in her arms.

  “Where?”

  “Bourse.”

  “I didn’t see it, but I heard the same,” said a second woman.

  “I’ve heard that the Prussians have surrounded Strasbourg,” said a third.

  “Never! Who says?”

  “Lili, you are going to have to take out the planchette to tell us what’s what,” said Francisque.

  “All we need is a decent news source,” snapped Lili. Since the war had been on, it had been impossible to get any papers other than French ones, which reported only victories and, perhaps, empire-favorable lies.

  “Why did the crinoline have to become so wide, and what will we use the old cages for now—protecting plants this winter?” someone behind us complained.

  “The empress set the fashion wide so the emperor couldn’t reach her—”

  “All the doors in Paris had to be widened so the empress could fend off her husband? The old toad.”

  “I have to say, these new ones are worse. All these tapes and laces and bands to flatten the front and flare out in back; we are going to look like huge beetles with wings extended.”

  “Whom does the empress love, then?”

  “War, and chocolate, and her American dentist,” said Lili, tossing a stack of shawls over her arm. “You’ve no idea how hard I have tried to meet him!”

  On the way back, we passed cafés filled to overflowing; the streets stank of alcohol. Men and women alike reeled along the boulevards and around mountainous refuse. Most were celebrating the victory at Woerth, but one rowdy group nearer Montmartre was singing about the imperial prince: “So Monsieur fils picked up the enemy’s bullets, which someone laid down in front of him!” The heat had gone on so long we were ill with it, and not a breath of air on the horizon.

  “The whole city is drunk,” huffed Francisque, her usual perfect façade ruffled and overheated by the time we finally reached the harp-playing stairwell cherubs at the rue du Mail. We had settled ourselves with cool drinks provided by La Tigre; ferried up by Sévérine. “I hope the boxes will be here soon.” In the crush, we had all assigned our purchases for delivery. We looked at one another over fizz and lemon.

  “Aha!” I said, flipping through the day’s mail. La Tigre had sorted it and left it on a tray as usual, which was just one of the means by which she knew all our business. (To be fair, it was practically a job requirement.) “From Sylvie; she must leave Vienna.” She had been touring there with the opera. “And Odette, finally . . . posted from London.”

  “Open it!”

  A handful of news clippings fluttered out from between the pages of a letter. The first was from Illustrated London News dated August 6. Lili snatched it and smoothed it out on the tea tray.

  Lili said, “Oooh. Look at this.” And we did, while our drinks sweated in the heat. The picture was very different from our own artists’ renderings, printed in th
e French papers. It showed peasants with flat spades, in a pelting rain, burying bodies on a battlefield. Burying the French dead at Woerth, said the caption—even I could read that much in English.

  “Could this be?”

  “Here is the Pall Mall Gazette, with no pictures. Dictionary?”

  We picked out the words, one by one. “You don’t have to be a medium to see what is going on,” said Lili pensively.

  “All of the battles—Forbach, Froeschwiller, Woerth, Spicheren—were French defeats?” asked Francisque, puzzled. “Do you think the English papers are telling the truth? Spicheren is near Saarbrücken, I think, but the army won there. Didn’t they?”

  “Well, the prince imperial . . . as we know . . .”

  “Yes, yes! Who could forget?” said Lili. “I think that—this is why they won’t let this news into France.”

  We sat silent, and Sévérine removed the tray, casting a questioning glance at us as we sat still as statues, with a few pieces of newsprint where the cards usually were.

  “What does Odette say?” asked Francisque finally. “What is she doing in London?”

  I scanned the page and read aloud, summarizing. “The Préfecture’s violation was . . . classified as a crime rather than an offense, so the matter was referred to the ministère public. We applied to him, and he put the complaint in his wastebasket in the name of the ‘Principle of Authority.’ According to this good principle, the police cannot be tried for a crime. And we cannot prosecute that frotteur for reporting what he believed was a crime.”

  “So you can’t sue the Préfecture,” said Lili.

  I continued. “‘My lawyer then sent a letter asking that my name be expunged from the Register—”

  “What?” exclaimed Francisque.

  “He denounced her for rejecting him, so she was put on the Register, of course,” said Amé.

  I kept on reading. “But meanwhile, the police had the right to arrest me whenever they liked. As a result, at my lawyer’s suggestion I have removed myself to London. In fact, he has accompanied me. I am seeing the sights and sitting out the war. And we are investigating the work of some English women who are suing against the Act of Contagious Diseases. Please tell Lili that I have seen an excellent dental surgeon . . .”

  Later that evening, to distract ourselves, we went to see that famously bawdy queen of the cafés chantants, Mademoiselle Thérèse, who was doing a special performance at the Gaïté. We were accompanied by a group of officers: de Ligneville, de Montarby, Savaresse, others. The chorus was satirically costumed as revolutionaries of the past century: soldiers with ancient rattling swords, peasants, bourgeoisie, and so forth. The scenery was fragmented, falling apart. Thérèse herself wore a red skirt with blue stockings and a white sash; with her sleeves rolled up washerwoman-style and her bodice very low, she sang “La Marseillaise” with great and winking fervor. We all laughed along with the rest. “How we love to mock ourselves,” said Francisque. “Odette will miss that, with the English.”

  So Odette left before the Paris walls closed, and that alone was worth the price of her lawyer.

  22. Crise

  STRASBOURG, NOW: EVERYONE spoke of Strasbourg, first in low tones, then at an escalating pitch. “How is the defense going, what is happening?” “Strasbourg holds out!” “That city cannot be defended; it is riddled with spies.” “London reports that the Prussians have opened fire.” “Strasbourg is a proving ground; Paris is next. Look at the structure of the Strasbourg walls.” “The Prussians would not dare. We are five times the size of Strasbourg!” “Do you think we are next?” Eager chroniclers, boulevardiers of the conflict, were available for consultation. One could clock the moments of change, when something became something else. Certainty became doubt; Strasbourg went from being distant to very close. The new fashion in panniers turned into the “bulletproof” silk bodice. Carelessly extravagant dinner parties became canned goods from Potin’s, scurrilously hidden.

  We went from solid ignorance to greater familiarity with maps, and eastern railway lines, and where they could be disrupted; the status of the fortifications girdling Paris. Fleeting rumors were heard about uniforms, sugar supplies, absent battle gear, and phantom victories. The papers continued to present bloodless marches and brave scenes. On any given day, flags flew from windows and victory lamps were lit; the next, the flags were snatched from sight and the lamps extinguished. The nonstop “La Marseillaise” ceased its drone and an eerie silence fell; a single pair of boots echoing on the cobbles the only sound. At the rue du Mail, nerves ran high; Sévérine was forever running up and down stairs with cold rags, smelling salts, and pots of tea for someone’s crise and looking as though she could use some relief herself.

  By the end of August, the heat was intolerable; travel on foot beyond bearing. Waste clotted the gutters; mountains of rubble and garbage had grown up like barricades; the Seine ran turbid with waste. We lifted our skirts and held handkerchiefs to our faces to walk to the corner. The fouille merdes, the cesspool workers, the sewer-and-rubbish men, had all been German and they had either left or been shot, just as Jolie predicted. No one had considered the consequences of this robust defense of the capital. In every corner black flies clustered, and with them arrived the flux of watery diarrhea, cholera’s first sign.

  Jérome Noël’s hair had thinned, his jowls thickened under his Louis Napoleon beard. It was nearly a decade since I had first stood before him, a pale, trembling girl, as he presided over the Register of the inscrits. Now, as lieutenant, he made his lair in an interior office with a green-shaded lamp, with his silver-framed photographs of Madame Noël and the children dressed in their Sunday best, along with a framed carte de visite of the imperial family. Noël carried upon his shoulders a burden of licensing, regulating, and policing upper-echelon tolérances, but he was a clean-desk man and actually disliked corruption. He made a great effort to conduct proper research into families, to keep underage girls and foreign traffic out of the tolérances and clean bills of health inside. In many ways he was an admirable officer and these past few years I’d seen a good deal of him. However, a summons to the Préfecture was a bit out of the usual; generally I reported directly to Nathalie.

  And so, turning down his corridor and tipping my nose to the fevered activity there, the rushing of uniforms to and fro that late August—I wondered, what next?

  ***

  “You have been helpful to the Préfecture, Mademoiselle Rigault, your contribution to the public health. But a matter of greater importance has arisen.”

  Noël seemed nervous; his well-nourished paunch pressed against the edge of his desk. Noël had inked me; Noël held the power of erasure, and it occurred to me that I should seize the opportunity before it was too late. With this precariously ill-planned war, a capital seething with anxiety, train stations filled with our former clientele—any remaining visitors and the fleeing well-to-do—how important was arresting girls under street lamps? Noël’s pale mustache hairs twitched.

  “Madame Jouffroy is a native of Strasbourg. You have traveled with her, from time to time?”

  “Yes. But not to Strasbourg.”

  “A beautiful city that will never fall.”

  “Surely not. If there are setbacks, they will be turned around.” These were the patriotic utterances of the day, and I faithfully recited my part.

  “Persons of Prussian or German extraction were turned away from the Maison des Deux Soeurs from what date forward, if you please?”

  “Why—I don’t know. Certainly the clients have always been international. Perhaps Madame Trois—”

  “You are aware of Nathalie Jouffroy’s aliases?”

  “No.” But who doesn’t have other names, on our end of things?

  “You defend her, Mademoiselle Rigault?”

  Defend her, Nathalie Jouffroy? My employer, the woman to whom I owed my relative freedom—who was I to defend her or not? However, Noël’s words set a dozen scenes playing through my mind: Nathalie on the
arm of various uniformed officers; Nathalie speaking German, in which she was fluent (but also in Spanish); Nathalie before her mirror, dictating letters while at her toilette. Nathalie on her way to Baden-Baden this past July. Vain, self-absorbed, preoccupied with anything that offered a diversion or turned a profit—and who had half of Paris at her beck and call. Never mind which half; the woman had her admirers, some very high placed . . . So Noël was turning his back on Nathalie, who has lined his pockets and has done him a dozen favors a week for fifteen years.

  I was the tiniest of cogs—not even the speck of oil on the smallest gear of this vast administrative machine now being dismantled and put to another use; from peacetime surveillance of the non-inscrits to turning up Prussian spies under every rug. Oh, I’d gone down the road with them—find this girl, that Brigade officer, these theater tickets, or that racing box. Around every bend, a new helter-skelter set of urgencies. Now it was spies, supposed spies, possible spies, someone’s idea of who a spy might be, a neighbor one didn’t much like, an old score settled. Was it a sign that Noël was out in the cold at the Préfecture if he was sniffing round Nathalie, betraying his line commander in yesterday’s war? Did he need a promotion from poor girls to Prussian informants; was I the day’s best prospect?

  “She has always been Nathalie Jouffroy to me,” I said quietly.

  “No information at all, then, Mademoiselle Rigault?”

  “I know you understand, sir, that my desire is to offer my best efforts to the Préfecture.”

  “Mademoiselle Rigault, I am aware of your service and your circumstances. I recall you standing before me as a young girl . . . perhaps unjustly. However, you have had opportunities that others have not, to learn and improve yourself. If you can be helpful to us in the matter, when the war is over you could find your situation much changed. Now. Let me share with you a few facts about the woman you know as Nathalie Jouffroy.”