Mme Dumesnil was nearly forty then, an old woman to a child of five or six, and years of white-lead had made her look older still, her face and neck wrinkled as crêpe and stained with cheap rouge. I remember watching her dress herself, the way she'd frown into the mirror over the careful placement of her patches and adjust her breasts to swell just so at the neck of her gown. How like a harlequin she looked, with her chalk-white face and vermilion cheeks, her headdress heavy with plumes and paste jewels, her gown trailing yards of train! Yet not twenty minutes later, when I saw her tread the boards as Medea, as Penelope, as Zedima, as Phèdre, I always thought her exquisite.
This nightly transformation of an ordinary woman from crone to queen I may regard as my first experience of the art of magic. That the metamorphosis was achieved by means of paint and candlelight rather than talisman and spell makes not the least difference in the world. For sorcery and acting both are informed by the will and temperament of their agents, and the end of both is to dazzle and to suspend for a time the ordinary course of nature. Their common essence is desire—for power, for adulation, for command. Their common vehicle is passion.
Ah, the passions of actors! How grand they are, and how vital. Like the queens and generals they portrayed, the artistes of the Comédie Française were tossed by emotions as deep and violent as the sea in storm, emotions that could only find expression in voices that reached for the third tier and gestures that encompassed the heavens. On stage or off, my mother's clients were either devastated by grief or transported by joy. They quarreled like angels and loved like fiends. They were as different from my stout, rosy, shrewd maman as peacocks are from wrens, and I adored them. Twice or thrice each week I would weep over their sorrows, laugh at their jests, tremble at their rages, ache when fate or a playwright heaped unbearable hardship on them. And afterwards I would trot home with maman to our tidy shop in the rue Montorgueil and stitch sleeve-ruffles in perfect contentment.
Ah, she was a good woman, my maman. She taught me the value of common sense and of telling the truth—if circumstances permitted—of looking neat, of minding my manners, of speaking proper French. She was the very pattern of a bonne bourgeoise, counting it a greater sin to be a debtor than a whore. She died of a summer flux when I was nine years old, and her business passed into the hands of my father's family.
My father's sister was a pinch-penny, low-minded, jealous sort of slut who turned me out of doors before maman was cold in her grave. Too old to apprentice and too young to work in a shop, I could not earn my keep as maman intended, and was forced to look about me for some other means of making my way in the world. When her old clients discovered how things stood with me, they were kindness itself. The proprietress of Saint-Honoré's most expensive bawdy house offered me a bed and a percentage of the sale of my virginity. And Mme Dumesnil offered to sponsor me with a company in Bordeaux whose manager was willing to employ an untried actress, provided she was young and pretty.
Oh, I thought about it, you may be sure of that. I loved the theater. Had I been a boy, I might have begged to be made a changer of scenes, and my tale (had I cause to tell it) a history of great loves that endured a week and small jealousies that endured a lifetime. As it was, Louise Duvet's daughter suspected that Bordeaux meant whoring no less than the establishment of Mme Godinette, only less well paid. And to say the truth, I'd no real taste for the sound and fury of acting. Even so young, I preferred to watch and listen while others strutted and declaimed. By the mercy of le bon Dieu, I had a third string to my bow: my mother's second cousin Olympe Darnton, who was femme de chambre to Mme la baronne du Fourchet.
When I left maman's shop on the morning of the fifteenth of August, 1754, I turned my back upon the Comédie Française and bent my steps south-west, towards the Marais.
More than two centuries have passed since I made that journey from the rue Montorgueil to the rue Quincampoix, and this library in which I sit is further from those teeming streets than from Cathay. Yet when I close my eyes, they are there, bright miniatures, like plates in a volume of Rétif de la Bretonne: the carved swan above the shop door, black crêpe tied about its neck in token of mourning; my tante Duvet frowning beneath it, arms folded bonily over her bony chest. The bright cascading ribbons in the windows of the modiste across the way. The slick, sickly pallor of flayed carcasses hung for sale in the butchers of the Halles des Blés. Why, I can smell the dusty, floury, meaty smells of the market; hear its shouting, cursing frenzy and the sudden quiet of the Marais; feel the chill of the rue Quincampoix, whose tall, gray hôtels block the sun from the street, the better to hoard it in their bright courtyards. I can see the rust-red livery of the lackey who answered my knock and how his stone face cracked into humanity when I told him I was Olympe's cousin. And I can see Olympe herself, all fluttering ribbons and lacy apron, tapping towards me in smart high-heeled shoes, feel how her silk-clad arms clasped my shoulders and her easy tears tickled my face.
A little time later, she bathed her eyes, brushed the Paris mud from my skirts, and led me before her mistress.
Mme la baronne du Fourchet was drawing on her gloves to go out. I remember thinking as I curtsied before her that her sleeve-ruffles were clumsily made. Maman would not have let them out of her shop.
"What a pretty thing, to be sure!" the baronne exclaimed. "And what a charming cap! Pray, what can she do, besides curtsy and smile?"
"If madame pleases," I said shyly, "I can sew and make patterns, and I have been taught to read and write as well."
"Why, 'tis a veritable scholar you have brought me, Olympe. Black hair, a brilliant eye, a charming face, a sempstress, educated, and young enough to be malleable! Of a surety, we cannot set such a paragon to sweeping floors! She shall be a femme de chambre, and you shall have the training of her."
My first lesson in waiting upon a lady was to change my mourning black for a gown of painted cotton. When I protested, Olympe told me that I was a servant now and entitled to no grief of my own. I could wear black if a connection of the du Fourchets were to die, and not otherwise. Ladies of the ton wanted none save young, pretty, cheerful attendants around them. Some of these ladies simply desired to possess beauty—another's if not their own—and used their attendants like slaves, turning them out when they wearied of them, fit only for the lowest of brothels. I must count myself fortunate that Mme du Fourchet had an altogether more spiritual image of her women.
"She says that we must think of her as a priestess," Olympe told me with careful gravity, "and of ourselves as acolytes. The goddess we serve is Beauty, and Beauty, she says, is best served by the beautiful. She also says a woman reflects her surroundings like a deep pool. It therefore enhances her if we, who surround her, are pleasant to look upon. Do you understand, child?" I struggled with laughter; Olympe shrugged ruefully. "Moi non plus. My advice is, when she starts on one of her flights, just smile and curtsy and say, 'To be sure, madame,' or 'Fancy! How clever.' "
For one who had spent her girlhood in the company of actresses, that was an easy enough part to play. I put my heart into the rôle and soon, as a thuribular in the mysteries of Mme du Fourchet's Sacred Rites of Pride, hovered with perfumes and unguents at Olympe's elbow and watched each gesture and ritual as if my soul's welfare hung upon it.
How it all comes back to me! Pearl powder for the cheeks and bosom, a dab of serkis rouge here, here, and here, in the valley between the breasts. Lamp black on the lashes—oh, the veriest soupçon—and brushed delicately along the brows. Was that a stray hair? Pluck it out at once! And the patch. Would it be the badine, the baiseuse, the équivoque, the galante? Or perhaps the majestueuse to draw attention to the height of madame's brow? And then there was the coiffure to be decided on, the corset to be laced, the gown, the jewels, and the headdress to be discussed, chosen, tried, and changed.
Two hours were required for Mme la baronne to gird herself to face the world each day. And two hours more were required for Olympe and me to clear her dressing-room of spilled pow
der and discarded ribbons, to mend what needed mending and brush what needed brushing. After that was done, my time was my own, to be spent walking in the Palais-Royal if I liked, or in the gallery seat Mme Dumesnil had given me for the sake of my dead mother and a little free mending. All in all, 'twas a comfortable life I led on the rue Quincampoix, though at first there was much about it to puzzle the daughter of Louise Duvet.
I remember my wonder, for example, upon discovering that the greater part of M. le baron's household was like a painted scene in a theater, for show and not for use. Oh, the kitchen-boys worked hard enough, as did the grooms and cooks, and monsieur's valet Saint-Cloud. His forty lackeys, however, spent their days lounging and dicing in the antechambers, gossiping with M. le baron's petitioners, admitting the favored and the generous to the master's presence while barring the despised and the miserly. When I remarked that five men would be sufficient to these tasks, Olympe laughed and said that a superfluity of lackeys was simply a sign of monsieur our master's great wealth and power, just as a succession of lovers was a sign of madame our mistress's beauty and wit.
I cannot say I entirely understood this explanation, not at my tender age. I did, however, understand that M. le baron's consequence needed all the ornament he could afford. Bien sûr, I saw very little of him—maids, if they're lucky, are not well-acquainted with their mistresses' husbands. Yet from time to time I'd encounter him: a great, red pudding of a man who stumped over the polished floors with his head bowed and his heavy cheeks falling in worried folds over his jabot. When he saw me, he'd pinch my bum, wink prodigiously, exclaim, "Hmph! Pretty piece, but you won't hear it from me!" and stump heavily on again. A coarse man. And yet—according to Olympe—clever enough to have risen from the Third Estate to the Second, from plain M. Fourchet the banker to M. le baron du Fourchet, Farmer General, collector of his Most Serene Majesty King Louis' taxes, customs, tithes, and levies, purse-keeper to the Crown of France.
As for madame's lovers, her "dear friends," well, M. le baron was often from home and not at all attentive even when present. And backstairs gossip soon taught me that 'twas as à la mode for highborn ladies to have dear friends as it was for actresses to have noble admirers. In all conscience, they seemed harmless enough, full of poems and sighs and pretty little gifts, no less civil to madame's maids than to madame's husband when they chanced to encounter him upon the stairs. No, Louise Duvet's daughter was not shocked by madame's lovers. Madame's indifference to her children, however. That shocked me to the heart.
There were three scions of the house Fourchet: three daughters. I remember, not long after I entered service, Olympe telling me of them: the two oldest who were off at a convent learning the skills proper to young ladies of noble blood, the youngest who was still in the nursery. Of course I wanted to see them, to know their ages, their natures, their statures and tastes, whether they missed their mother or thought their father a comical fellow.
Olympe laughed at me. In those days, it seemed she was forever laughing at me. "What a funny little shop-girl you are, Berthe! I declare, I quite love you. See them? Why, Mme la baronne herself hasn't seen them above six times since they were christened. Noble ladies aren't like lingères, Berthe. They have better things to do than dance attendance upon their children. Why, I dare say you think she suckled them at her own breasts!"
Not wishing to appear more foolish than I'd already made myself, I shrugged and forbore to ask Olympe whether 'twas accomplishing her toilette or entertaining her lovers that kept madame from her daughters' company.
I think 'twas the next day, though it may have been later, that Olympe made me known to the youngest du Fourchet's nursemaid. I'd often seen her upon the stairs, carrying possets and gruels and such invalid's fare—a sallow, quill-nosed, creak-voiced piece in a shabby apron. She eyed me unpleasantly while Olympe accosted her in her best Mme du Fourchet drawl. "Ah, Christophine. Permit me to present to you my cousin's child, Berthe Duvet. A pretty thing, is she not? And monstrous clever, too. I'm training her up as a femme de chambre."
Christophine's long nose turned pink; she gave me the briefest of nods. "Fancy," she said. "An infant like her, to wait upon madame."
"An infant femme de chambre, and under my eye. Never fear. She's a lot to learn before she's ready to wait upon Mlle Adèle. I'd say you have perhaps two years before you need think of finding new employment."
How Christophine received this shot I don't know, for I was busy goggling at Olympe on my own account. Olympe, having successfully astonished us both, laughed her throaty, careless laugh and flounced away with me chasing behind, pelting her with questions. Was I really to wait upon Mlle Adèle? What was she like? Was she a monster, that she must spend her days hiding from the sunlight? Why had I never seen her?
Olympe, who liked to tease, answered lightly that I needn't concern myself what the girl was like. She was only seven, after all, and me, I had my work cut out learning my new profession.
"I don't understand why I haven't seen her," I persisted. "We live under the same roof, after all. Is she a monster, or is she not?"
"She's often ill," said Olympe shortly. "Never you fear. She'll be a credit to your skill, if she lives."
Mlle Adèle recovered of her fever, and a few days later I caught my first glimpse of a small figure swaddled in a fur manteau wandering up and down the pebbled paths of the formal garden. Thereafter I saw traces of my future mistress everywhere: a scrap of pink satin skirt whisking around a corner; an echo of childish sobbing in a stairwell; a wooden cat on wheels abandoned in an antechamber. Shamelessly, I crept upstairs to see whether I might catch a closer look at her. Christophine, jealous creature, made sure I did not. All I could learn from listening at doors was that Mlle Adèle was a weepy little thing, prone to agues and fits of languor, biddable as a lamb and quiet as a louse. As for her sisters, when Mlles Pauline and Hortense Fourchet visited the rue Quincampoix for a week at Christmas, I learned that Mlle Pauline, the eldest, was the image of her mother, while Mlle Hortense, poor girl, strongly favored her plain, stout father. Mme du Fourchet paid them little attention. I paid them little more. They were nothing to me, not like Mlle Adèle.
A year passed. Knowing that one day I'd be femme de chambre to a baron's daughter (if she lived), I painted and coiffed, laced up and let out, tucked and draped with a will. Mme du Fourchet gave me a castoff robe battante of Lyons silk. Olympe made me free of the society of femmes de chambre, who drank cheap wine in the Palais-Royal and told tales to make me shudder of masters who fumbled at their breasts and mistresses who threw hairbrushes at their heads. I learned to starch fine lace and sponge brocade. By the end of my second year in the Hôtel Fourchet, maman and the shop on the rue Montorgueil had faded into a comfortable memory. My present was Olympe and Mme du Fourchet, her lovers, and her toilette. My future was Mlle Adèle.
What dreams I spun around that unknown child! By what means I forget, I had collected some five or six second-hand volumes of the bibliothèque bleu, which added Charlemagne and Roland, Gargantua, the Princesse Printanière, Chaperon Rouge, and assorted good and evil fairies and sorcerers to a head already crowded with Medea and Jason, Le Cid and Donna Anna. From this hodge-podge of phantasms I conjured up a fairy child, frail as a cobweb, black-haired, jewel-eyed, with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Tenderly I yearned over this poppet, imagining how she'd bloom under my care, how she'd love me as a sister and share her secrets with me. My own loneliness spoke in these fantasies, I fear, as well as my youth and naïveté. Yet they were closer to the truth than Mme du Fourchet's complexion, as I learned in the summer of 1756, when I met Mlle Adèle du Fourchet at last.
Madame was at her levée, I remember, attended by a young poet and one abbé Pinchet. For some time the young poet had been courting madame with sonnets and sighs, and today he'd brought her his chef-d'oeuvre, a composition in the classical manner. Madame listened politely enough at first, but when her hair had been powdered, her face painted, her garters tie
d, her gown laced, and the poet still not done declaiming, she took up a letter from the jumble on her dressing-table, beckoned her page to her, and murmured in his ear.
The poet fell reproachfully silent.
Madame was all pretty contrition. "I cry your pardon, dear chevalier," she fluttered. "A matter of family business that cannot be put off. So tiresome. I am confident that I may depend upon your understanding."
The poet was still assuring the baronne that her confidence was not misplaced when a lackey opened the door to admit Christophine and a little girl clinging to her skirts. The child hung back a moment, clearly overcome with shyness, then ran and threw her arms about my mistress' neck.
"Ah, sweet child," said madame. "Yes, mignonne, I know you love me, but have a care for my rouge, 'tis only this moment applied. Come, let us look at you." Unwinding the child's arms, she smoothed her dress as though she had been a doll, then gave her a little shove towards the center of the room and bade her turn around slowly. "Ah, abbé, is she not a pretty creature? Much prettier than Hortense, of course, or even Pauline. What do you think?"
"Exquisite," murmured the abbé, and put up his eyeglass to look at her more closely. "Such a sweet naturalness in her dress. The chemise dragged through the lacing—is that the new mode for children?"
Madame gave him a hard look, then took the child by the hand and drew her against her shoulder. "Mignonne, your appearance is so unworldly that I fear the good sisters will think we intend to pledge you to a life of prayer. Alas, 'tis my fault, for forgetting you are grown to be a young lady who needs a maid of her own to attend her.
"Berthe, come forward and curtsy to your new mistress. You may begin your service by doing something with her hair—it much resembles a bird's nest."
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