The fit of a dress determines the stride of a woman—whether she can bend at the waist, sit, or ride—and so for a woman to change her dress was to change even the way she walked and the speed at which she ran to her fate.
If I had stayed in the terrible dress, or if a better dress had been made and sent over, if I had gone up the stairs, had dinner with the writer and composer, all would have been different.
But I did not stay.
He extended his arm and made to lead me back in through the crowd.
He saw I had not accepted the invitation to walk in and let his arm drop again with a questioning smile.
Yes, I said. How incredible. The gods indeed.
It’s no use, we’ll never make it through the crowd right now, he said, looking at the stairs. We shall wait a moment. But what a pleasure it is to hear you express interest.
Thank you, I said.
I can see it right now, he said. If I can ever find a store willing to stock the book between their piles of Zola and Daudet, I think it will be quite a success. But an opera with you in it, well, Ceci tuera cela, he said.
This will kill that.
I know this, I said of his quote. What is it from?
It’s Hugo, the writer said.
Of course, I said.
I now remembered what I knew of him. I had even heard him at a salon at least once, carrying on about this very quote. He was very mortal after all, then, known for writing novels based almost entirely on the scandals of his friends. While he typically hid their identities, his most recent subjects could be guessed at by whoever dropped him for the season following his most recent book. He knew everyone, though, and was otherwise everywhere.
He nodded, pleased. It’s the complaint from a priest character of his, that the written word would destroy cathedrals. The novel would separate us from God. He smiled as he said this.
I should warn you, he said.
I waited as he tried to think of what he would say. My novels . . . it would seem they have a way of coming true. He looked away as he said this, as if ashamed.
It came to me this was perhaps how he explained the way he stole from his friends’ lives. Not theft then, but magic.
So if I accept, I said, then . . . for you have not told me of the ending.
She rejoins her circus. You would become an equestrienne in a circus, in love with an angel. He would give up his wings for you, and you . . . well, your voice.
So be it, I said.
He laughed, surprised. Very well then, he said. Caveat cantante.
He presented his card, and there, indeed, was the address. I had not seen it in years.
I set his card in the wallet at my wrist and made the excuse of feeling too poorly to stay for dinner, but I promised to read the novel and await the music.
Oh, but you really must at least meet the composer . . . He gestured at the balcony.
Perhaps we will set an appointment, I said. I would like very much to see the brooch.
His face brightened at this. Yes! You must come; I will show you everything.
I offered my hand to say good night and watched his back vanish into the crowd.
I stayed there until I could move again. It had taken all I had just to stand. I then recalled I’d not asked the composer’s name, but I couldn’t shout to Simonet without a scene. I was to dine with the Verdis the next day, though, and resolved instead to ask after this composer then.
I turned and walked farther into the dark back of the garden, full of fear. Yet once there, my feelings had changed. I was no longer sure I could wait contentedly for my dinner with the Verdis before meeting this composer. I had the impulse to strip this dress off and walk back through the bal in just the corset, for the corset, at least, was beautiful. I’d had one other dress ready at another dressmaker’s, Félix, the man I relied on besides Worth, and thought sadly of having chosen this dress over that.
The bal was full now and wheeled in the night, monstrous, the picture of the fifth act ballet in Faust, in the Cave of Queens and Courtesans. The demon Mephistopheles, having rejuvenated Faust and aided him in the seduction of the virtuous young Marguerite, finds him desperate, preoccupied by her imprisonment, as she awaits execution for the crime of killing the child he fathered on her out of wedlock. He has driven her mad. Mephistopheles convenes a ballet orgy with the most famous beauties in history—Cleopatra, Helen, Astarte, Josephine—all to cheer his sad philosopher, who will not be cheered. The queens and courtesans frolic around him with madcap ballerinos and ballerinas, all while Faust thinks only of his doomed beloved.
My cue to enter is when the dancing ends, when I, as Marguerite, appear before Faust, an apparition only he can see. He demands Mephistopheles help him rescue me, the scenery shifts, and Faust is then magically in my prison cell, exhorting me to leave. I refuse him—I refuse to be saved by devils—and beg for forgiveness instead from God and His angels, who descend finally as I die redeemed.
Standing here now, it was as if I’d escaped from the jail into the fifth act ballet, arriving before my cue, a prisoner to this dress.
I withdrew a cigar to console myself, and as I clipped the end, a man I hadn’t noticed held out a flame for me. I drew carefully, and as the tip glowed, I saw him and his companion more clearly. They smiled and nodded, and I smiled as well and began to turn away.
Mademoiselle, said the man who had offered his light to me.
My madcap ballerinos, then.
They introduced themselves, but I knew very well who they were. Brother dukes, known to most for their handsome profiles, philanthropic works, enormous wealth, and, most important to me on this evening, their reputation for returning women from an evening in their company with their dresses cut to pieces by sabers—and for supplying those women afterward with more dresses in return, presumably to meet the same fate. Their sabers were said to be quite sharp, and the women never harmed. Many had spoken of this preference but none had ever admitted to submitting to it, except to say, And if you were never going to wear the dress again . . . This was usually punctuated with a laugh.
This perhaps my destiny also, then. My luck changing from bad to good in a single trip through the garden.
Ceci tuera cela.
I drew the first saber myself, holding my first new friend’s gaze as I plunged it into the taffeta flounces and cut all the way to the hem. He uttered a soft cry of happiness and fell to his knees to press the dress to his face before he lay back in ecstasy, groaning.
When he and his brother were done, the taffeta resembled an enormous flower torn to petals in the grass. Only the gold wings of the bodice remained, the skirt now like a very short tutu, as if I’d been transformed into one of Faust’s ballerinas.
I shivered, pleased with the result. I’d learned long ago, for men with pleasures this specific, the rest was of no consequence to them. There was no mark on me as I stood there, free at last of the evening’s first mistake, and they were well satisfied.
Fantastic, said the one.
You are our goddess, said the other.
Whatever you ask of us, whatever we can provide, we are at your disposal, the first said.
As we made our way out through the back of the garden to their carriage, the jacket of one of them on my shoulders, the jacket of the other at my waist, I knew what they could provide and handed them my other dressmaker’s card.
Félix was in his evening suit when I arrived. He was about to set off for the ball himself—he’d been busy dressing clients and was only just now ready. He threw open the door and pulled us in.
My dears, what possible errand could you be on? he asked, smiling in greeting first at me and then at the young dukes.
Yes, it seemed, the dressmakers of Paris would know them quite well. I walked to Félix’s ledger, took his pen from his stand, and wrote:
These good gentlemen have said they will do anything I ask of them tonight. Let us help them keep their word.
I had Félix’s assistants
box up the ruined dress and send it back to Worth, including a note that said only Pas comme ça.
I made my second entrance to the ball in a beaded black silk satin gown, the train behind me like the glittering tail of a serpent. The dukes were on each arm. As we were announced together, the crowd turned and, at the sight of us, roared with delight. The dinner had been served, so many stood on their chairs to see us as I descended again to the garden to enter under a roof of crossed swords made for us by officers who had served in the army with the dukes. As we made our way off the terrace again, I looked to the balcony the writer had indicated to see the men there watching me, their faces changing as they took in what had happened, and then I heard the cheers in the garden and the laughing as the men saluted me.
This was the entrance I deserved. This was what I wanted this composer to see. I had returned for this.
I took a breath. O Dieu! Que de bijoux! The opening words to the Jewel Song aria from Faust rang out across the garden. There was a shocked silence, and then the orchestra quickly joined in.
This was the song Marguerite sang after being presented with the demon’s gift of jewels meant to seduce her into a life of sin. The chaste girl is transformed at once into a woman in love with her beauty, a beauty the jewels reveal to her. It begins and ends in classic soprano entrance style, on long, clear, high notes, as if Gounod knew it should be sung in a palace garden at a Paris ball at night.
I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me. I sang it as a taunt to the Fates, too. I was weary of my fears as well as my desires, and so I sang it in simple defiance of all of it, even defying myself. I covered the night and its secrets and regrets in coloratura cavatina, until all that could be remembered was me.
La Générale! the crowd shouted as I finished and came down the stairs, and I lifted both my hands into the air to the crowd, smiling. I could feel the applause beat against my skin as it echoed and grew. A woman screamed as her dress swept the candles on her table and caught fire as she stood on her chair to see me. She was rushed to the fountain, where it was put out, and even this was cheered. The group of officers who had roofed my entrance with their swords then knelt, offering them to me, and the crowd changed from shouting my name to laughter as I took one and mock-knighted them all. La Générale! La Générale!
The fear, the feeling of the mad scene, the sense of a trap in wait, even the feeling of destiny, all faded into the applause. I looked afterward for the writer to see if I might finally meet the composer, but as in a fairy tale, he was gone.
My maid Doro waited until the afternoon and then came and pulled the shutters in my bedroom open.
I had lain awake in my bed for some time, which was unlike me. I had not slept well. The strange amber twilight I’d lived with was gone, and in its place was some terrible new brightness. I’d gone from feeling lost in a dream to lost in wakefulness, as if I might never sleep again.
No more gaslights as I dress, candles only, I said to Doro.
Of course, she said, and tied back my drapes.
Gaslight is a liar, I said. She smiled as she stepped back. On second thought, gaslight and then a last check by candlelight, I said. My dresses must look good in both. Last night’s dress was a foul betrayer. Candles would have caught it out.
Perhaps it only gave its life to make room for the ones to come, she said, and hung the new gown away with a faint smile.
As she walked past, I saw the morning’s papers on my tray with my coffee. Between them and the new dress she had not put on me, she likely knew the story. She asked no questions, though, as ever.
I stood; she put on my dressing robe and left me to my coffee by my window. The alley was unchanged. But here, within the robe, I felt myself to be an imposter in my own life.
I was unnerved after I’d been unable to find my new friend and his composer, and had even withdrawn his card again to prove to myself the conversation had been real. I went again to my wallet and withdrew it once more. Frédéric Simonet, it read, and with that address, the letters like a fracture, the faintest of cracks along this life of mine.
He had not lied. The Marais house was indeed his.
Of all the accolades heaped at my feet, the one I lacked for was the honor of originating a role, a part written precisely for my voice. This was the opportunity with the power still to entrance me. I could not turn away lightly. For a singer, this was your only immortality. All the rest would pass.
But this story was somehow of my life—and to immortalize it, this was not in me to do.
I went to my closet and touched the new dress, hung there just now.
A singer learned her roles for life—your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed. Though when you put them on, it was then you were the something worn—these old tragedies took you over.
Here was my old tragedy, then. Waiting, held open, as if the writer had come to me with my old costume, asking me to put it on.
Had there been even one poster left somewhere, still on the side of a wall, peeling away? The Settler’s Daughter had been my first role. I did not know how to be her again, the girl who sang her way over the sea with a single hope in her heart, abandoned here—abandoned, in fact, the morning after she took the Emperor’s favor from his hand. To be her again or, really, perform as this odd shadow of her? This was too much.
The life I led now I’d made so I would never be her again. I’d never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I had come back to Paris once again with one hope in my heart, sure of my moment of destiny, and had been given this, the past I’d hoped to forget, asking to be my future.
An earlier suspicion returned then, renewed, something odd in Simonet’s story I could not forget. He had mentioned a chapel, and there was no chapel that I remembered. The other details he’d mentioned were so close to my life, this alone of all of it seemed a lie, even a clue. Less like the work of Fate, then, and more like an imitation of Fate. A plot.
That little ruby flower, I knew the reason I had left that flower behind. I knew just where I had left it, the exact room of the house. It was no chapel. To be recognized from my song that day at the Exposition Universelle, this alone did not bother me. The one secret that mattered to me could be said to be there in the Marais with Simonet.
Whatever this was, it had come from that room.
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About the Author
ALEXANDER CHEE won a Whiting Award for Edinburgh and is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and on NPR, among others, and he is a contributing editor at the New Republic. He lives in New York City.
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