“I’m not interested in a husband. I want to be a nun, a nurse, a missionary, a suffragette, a … a … oh, I don’t know!” Eve said violently.
“You’ll get a husband whether you want one or not, because your mother will have you married before you’re nineteen, and if she doesn’t, your aunt will, so you might as well make up your mind to it, my poor Mademoiselle.”
“Why? Why?” Eve cried, tearing the branch of frail yellow from the bush with a gesture that alarmed Louise by its ferocity. “If I don’t want to be married, why should I? Why can’t they leave me alone?”
“If you were one of a family of five or six, perhaps you could be allowed to do as you wished—every family needs an old maid aunt to attend to all the things no one else has time for—but you’re the only child and your parents won’t have grandchildren unless you marry, so why try to fight something that is bound to be?”
“Oh, Louise, I dread the thought of a life like my mother’s—nothing but visiting and being visited, nothing changing except the style of my shoe. It simply isn’t bearable, a future with nothing to hope for but making my parents happy by having children—is that why I was born?”
“When it happens you’ll forget everything you’re saying now and become a mother, just like most women, and more than content,” Louise replied. “If I remind you, in three years, of what you’ve just said, you’ll refuse to believe me, and, in truth, you’ll have completely forgotten it.”
“It’s not fair! If time makes you happy with the things you hate—then I say it’s a bad thing to grow up! I must do something wonderful—something big and brave and exciting—something wild, Louise, wilder than I can even imagine!”
“I sometimes feel that way too, Mademoiselle Eve—but I know it’s just because spring is in the air and there’s probably a full moon tonight, and if we don’t go home soon your mother will begin to worry.”
“At least run back with me, let’s race and see who gets there first … I’ll die if I don’t run,” Eve cried.
“Can’t … Madame Blanche and her husband just turned the corner behind us.” Louise gave her warning to the air, for Eve had already flashed away, too far ahead on the path to hear her.
Eve’s imagination was starved by the suitable books her mother gave her to read. The fashion magazine La Gazette du Bon Ton, which Madame Coudert permitted her to study, dealt with women from another planet, women as decorative and unreal as exotic birds in their soft Poiret and Doucet costumes of fantastic colors, which fell softly, with infinite charm, from high waists and tunics to feet that looked like those of harem girls.
However, she discovered that her father’s copy of the leading Dijon newspaper, Le Bien Public, was always left carelessly in his study after he glanced at it each morning. This newspaper became her window into the world and she perfected a technique that enabled her to whisk it away every morning before his study was dusted, and to take it to her room to read whenever she had a few minutes of privacy.
In the high summer of 1913, Dijon was a merry, hospitable and prosperous place indeed, as it prepared for the celebration of Bastille Day on the fourteenth of July. The city resonated like one vast music box. Melodies sounded from all sides; from every street corner; from the singers and piano players inside the many dozens of cafés; from the restaurants; from the bandstands in the squares; from the racecourse called the vélodrome; from the permanent circus of Tivoli; and most stirring of all, from the public performances of the band of the 27th Infantry of the French Army, which was stationed at the Caserne Vaillant.
As Eve and Louise walked back and forth three times a week from the Coudert house to Professor Dutour’s, they passed through zones of different music, and Eve’s pace changed without her realization. Now she walked to a waltz, now to a martial beat, now to the rhythm of one of the songs that escaped from the terrace of a café, a song that, like all the others, had been born in Paris. She hummed as she walked, and only Louise’s sternest efforts kept her from singing out loud the words she picked up so quickly.
Eve’s fever of restlessness and her dissatisfaction with her life had grown steadily since the spring. Louise could hardly wait until Eve’s eighteenth birthday would propel her instantly into a new world in which she would be overwhelmed with the attention of young men, thrilled by new clothes and captivated by new friends. The nervous, troubled, almost unbearable waiting of the last chapter of Eve’s far-too-long-drawn-out childhood would finally come to an abrupt end. The girl was so close to being grown-up, Louise thought, that naturally she was in a turmoil, as edgy and fanciful as if there were a thunderstorm in the air.
Although she knew that her place in Eve’s life would diminish, Louise’s sense of responsibility lay so heavily on her that she almost wished Mademoiselle Helene were back in the house. Soon her duties would be over. A few more months, she told herself, and she could relax.
On the morning of July third, 1913, Eve rapidly scanned the front page of Le Bien Public and then she quickly turned the pages of the densely printed paper, looking for the column devoted to a chronicle of the amusements of the city. Finally she found the announcement of a long-promised arrival of a Parisian music hall troop at the Alcazar Theatre, the most important in Dijon. Eve gave a cry of relief. She had never been convinced that they would really come.
For months, posters had heralded this extraordinary visitation. Even a proper young lady, as sheltered as Eve, was aware that in Paris the modern music hall had claimed its place as the center of the entertainment of Europe. In 1900 the Olympia had been the first to open, and its enormous success had led to the Moulin Rouge, the Grande Hippodrome, the Alhambra and a number of other, less ambitious and less deluxe establishments.
Among these music halls of the second rank was the Riviera, and the Alcazar management had managed to attract the entire Riviera troop to Dijon for an engagement. Only the visit of Buffalo Bill and his circus, in the year of Eve’s birth, had aroused such lively curiosity in the pleasure-loving citizens of the city.
Eve pounced on Louise, who was busy making her bed. “They’re coming, they’re going to be here in a week,” she said, pink with elation.
“And I say what I said yesterday, and last week, and a hundred other times; your mother will never let you go. Last spring she said you were still too young when your father wanted to take you to the opera. But a music hall … never! Not for a girl of your class. Who knows what language the comics use, who knows what the songs may be about?”
“Louise, don’t talk like that. You know perfectly well that I’ve heard all sorts of songs in the street,” Eve said, shaking her friend fiercely.
“I’m only saying what your mother would say.”
“But I have to go, I’ve told you that for weeks.”
“I don’t understand you, Mademoiselle Eve. You won’t listen to reason. Soon you’ll be a grown-up woman. When you’re married, you will be able to do whatever you please, so long as you are attended by your husband, poor man, whoever he is, or another lady—if you can find one as capricious as you. You’ll be free to go to the music hall every day of the week if that’s your fancy, but right now you know as well as I do that it’s impossible, so let go of me and let me finish this bed.”
“So you won’t go with me, Louise?”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been saying ever since you got the idea in that head of yours?”
“I thought you’d change your mind when it was certain that the Riviera company was truly coming.”
“I’m more positive than ever,” Louise said without any hint of compromise in her eye.
“Then I’ll go alone.”
“Indeed? Just how, may I ask?”
“I don’t intend to tell you,” Eve said haughtily. “However, I ascended in a balloon three years ago when I was only fourteen. If I could do that, my poor woman, do you truly think that I couldn’t manage to get myself as far as the Rue des Godrans, buy a ticket to the Alcazar, and walk right in? I believe you un
derestimate me.”
Louise sat down on the bed she was trying to make, with a despairing look on her face. She knew that she had a choice to make. Either she would have to disobey every rule that Madame Coudert had made and many she hadn’t thought of, and take Eve to the music hall matinée in secret, or she would have to resign herself to the fact that her charge would somehow manage, the Lord only knew how, to go by herself.
Of the two choices, the second seemed to her to be far worse. A beautiful girl alone at the Alcazar couldn’t fail to be stared at, spoken to, perhaps even propositioned. No respectable female, even a girl of the people, would go to a music hall by herself. In fact, Louise realized, her choice was already made, as Eve understood perfectly well, judging by the measuring look in her eyes and the knowing, teasing smile on her lips.
They were seated half an hour before the brightly painted fire curtain went up, Eve’s telltale hair caught up firmly in a tightly skewered chignon under a hat pinned on in three places, which Louise had been obliged to loan to her. Already the orchestra was playing the tune of C’est pour Vous, a song which they didn’t know had been written by Irving Berlin and first called “Everybody’s Doing It.” Around them people were tapping their feet and buzzing in anticipation. Every seat of the hall was filled and Louise was somewhat reassured to see that there were many other women there, some of them with children.
Eve, so excited that her hands and feet were freezing in spite of the heat of the theater, studied the program that promised what she had dreamed of for so long; singers, all manner of singers.
Professor Dutour was in the habit of telling his wife that Eve Coudert had broken his heart. That a girl so gifted—a girl who could sing any aria written for the range of the contralto voice; an extraordinary voice, deep and rich, yet able to reach up into a mezzo-soprano without strain; a girl who could sight-read without a sign of effort—that such a girl should actually want to sing popular melodies, songs written for the ordinary public, went beyond his understanding.
It had seemed like sheer perversity to him, this weakness for the easy, obvious tune, yes, he said to his patient wife, waxing more and more indignant, for tunes that he could only call cheap. Not vulgar, no, Eve Coudert had never brought a vulgar song into his studio, but songs that cost her no more than the breath that she wasted on them.
Eve had long ago given up trying to explain her love for everyday music to her professor. He was the only audience she had, and somehow she craved an audience, even an audience of one.
The more she sang street tunes, the more her desire grew to hear the songs she’d picked up performed by professionals on a real stage, to see precisely how they did it, what expressions they wore, what they did with their hands and feet, how they dressed and how they communicated with the public.
At home she often sang to herself, when her parents were out, shutting herself away from the servants.
She took her voice down as far as she could, mining its treasures of warmth and intimacy, then pushed the tremolo to a point where she was barely in control of it. Finally Eve would lift the same melody up, octaves higher, into its resonating alto, until it seemed to beat with wild wings against the roof of her mouth. When she sang the songs of the people, she felt lawless and free, able to impose her own fantasies on the melodies since she was so ignorant of how they were interpreted by anyone else.
Now, as the program began, Eve lost all consciousness of the theater, she forgot Louise sitting grimly at her side, she didn’t hear the eager responses of the audience, as she concentrated totally on what was happening on stage.
The rhythm of the music hall revue was deliberately organized in double time, so that if one act didn’t please, by the time the public realized it, another act had taken its place. Four men on unicycles tossing golden circles to each other in a bewildering pattern were replaced by a thin woman, dressed in bright green, who half-sang and half-spoke two tragic and dramatic monologues in a voice of tattered steel; fourteen dancers in pink ruffles, top hats, fur collars and pussycat tails whirled through their paces and disappeared to give way to a fat man who sang dubious songs in a high, piercing voice, so rapidly that only the quickest of the spectators understood all of his double entendres, although he winked one eye to single them out in advance, and mopped his face with a large handkerchief after his most daring couplets. An acrobatic dancer, dressed in Egyptian draperies, went through a series of amazing contortions as one veil after another fell to the ground, leaving her in a flesh-colored leotard that had the citizens of Dijon gasping. She vanished from the stage to give way to six pretty girls dressed in soldier uniforms, who, in unison, sang patriotic songs while they pranced around showing as much leg as possible. The large orchestra never stopped, not even as the scenery was being changed.
Eve was beginning to feel disappointment and bewilderment. She had been to circuses before she outgrew them, but nothing had prepared her for the vaudevillian hodgepodge of the music hall from which she had expected … well, she wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t this whirlwind of spectacle for the sake of spectacle, it wasn’t this undigestible collection of acts put together for a maximum of gay, noisy confusion.
Suddenly the orchestra stopped playing and the curtain closed for a minute. When it reopened, a single spotlight shone on a piano standing on the darkened stage. From the left a young man walked out and sat down on the piano stool. He turned to the audience, bowed his head for a second, and gravely announced the name of his song.
“Folie,” he said, “one of my favorites, by the immortal Fysher.”
As he began to sing the first slow, dreamlike line, “I only dream of her, of her, of her,” in a baritone whose strength was embellished by emotion, the Alcazar fell silent. All the hullabaloo of the music hall disappeared as the spectators fell under the spell of that mysterious thing, one special human voice. Why this man possessed the configuration of the “inner face” which transformed Fysher’s classic, but minor, lament of unrequited love into an experience that left no one unmoved, was beyond understanding, but it was as solid a reality as the piano on which he accompanied himself.
After Folie he sang Reviens, a slow waltz, with its plaintive refrain, “Come back, my heart, the joy I’ve lost, come back, come back, my heart.” And then he sang, at last with a smile, “I Know a Blond,” and the entire Alcazar exploded with applause. He stood up and bowed, impeccable in his dark suit, its vest buttoned, a gold watch chain just visible on its surface, below a high white collar and a dark tie. The sobriety of his clothes and the whiteness of his shirt only served to emphasize the darkness of his hair, short and brushed close to his head.
Eve and Louise were too far away to see the singers face clearly; he was a study in black and white as the audience insisted on three encores, only allowing him to leave when the orchestra struck up a polka and a crowd of tumblers rushed onstage and rolled away the piano.
“Now that, even I admit it, Mademoiselle Eve, that was worth it. A moment to remember, yes, I’ll have to give you that,” Louise said in a tone she couldn’t manage to turn into a grumble. She looked at Eve for assent. The girl’s seat on the aisle was empty. “Eve!” Louise shouted in shock, but the intermission had begun and the audience had filled the aisles, rushing to seek a breath of air outside before the second half of the music hall was to begin.
Eve raced up the aisle, so filled with enthusiasm and determination that there was no room for hesitation when she found herself in front of the door that led backstage, as the first of the other spectators began to emerge into the lobby. She looked at her program once more, found the name she sought, pushed open the door, glanced around for someone in authority, and walked up to a likely looking man who held a clipboard.
“Monsieur Marais is expecting me, Monsieur. Could you indicate his dressing room, please?” Her voice, although she didn’t realize it, was that of her worldly aunt Marie-France.
“Over there, the second door on the left, Madame—ah�
�Mademoiselle?”
“That does not concern you, Monsieur,” she replied, somehow knowing precisely what words would assure him that she had the right to be backstage.
She tapped on the door.
“Come in,” Alain Marais called, and she entered the dressing room in a rush, and then stopped dead, rigid in shock, the door slamming behind her. The singer, naked from the waist up, was standing with his back to her. His jacket, vest, collar, tie, and soaking-wet shirt had all been stripped off and lay on a chair beside his dressing table. He was wiping his neck with a hand towel.
“Throw me a decent-sized towel, Jules. One more encore in that steam bath and I would have turned into a puddle. Christ, Dijon in a heat wave—the management should pay double.”
“Monsieur, you are sublime!” Eve blurted out, her eyes on the floor.
He whirled around and gave a grunt of surprise. Then he grinned, found a big towel and continued to dry himself. Eve dared to look up, and only the door at her back prevented her from tottering at the sight of his bare chest, strongly muscled, with black hair that ran between his nipples down to his belt. His raised arm showed her the tuft of hair at his armpit that he was vigorously attacking with the towel. Never in her life had she seen a man’s bare chest. Even in the hottest days of summer the working men of Dijon wore undershirts in the street as they went about their business. Nor had she ever been so near a sweating man. The authority, the raw sensuality of the smell of his sweat in the small room was as stunning as a blow. Eve felt attacked, in a profound way, but her knowledge of the attack was on a pre verbal, preconscious level. All she knew was that she was blushing violently.
“ ‘Sublime.’ As good as that? Thank you, Mademoiselle—or is it Madame?”
“Mademoiselle. I had to tell you—I didn’t mean to interrupt, I didn’t know you’d be changing—but oh, the way you sang! I’ve never heard anything so splendid, so glorious!”
Judith Krantz Page 3