Maggie looked up and around warily. The theater’s interior was a bit ornate for her taste, but that was part of its charm. Looking down over the milling French and Germans, she realized that the Occupation was re-creating in real life the predemocratic era they’d craved. Like royalty of the good old days, these die-hard noblemen and noblewomen were enjoying outrageous privilege, while misery lay just outside the palace gates: the Jewish quarter was only minutes away.
Chanel leaned in, and Maggie realized that the designer was wearing Chanel No. 5. The same perfume Clara Hess—Maggie and Elise’s mother—wore. Stop it, Hope. No time for that. “That one’s mine”—Chanel was saying, pointing to a gown—“and that one—and that one—and that—”
Finally satisfied, Chanel led the way to their seats, the first box near the stage, a grand red-velvet jewelry box completed by a formal antechamber with wide fauteuil en Bergère chairs, coat hooks, and a large girandole mirror for last-minute primping. It’s almost as if we’re the performers, Maggie thought as she took one last look to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth before making her entrance.
As they took their seats in the box’s front row, Maggie felt a bit like the girl with the pink roses in Renoir’s La Loge. She looked around the theater, an otherworldly place of storybook glamour. The walls were gold and gleaming, and the seats upholstered in scarlet. Every inch of the high coffered ceiling was painted with cherubs and flowers or carved with scrolls and garlands of roses, illuminated by the infamous glowing crystal chandelier from Gaston Leroux’s Le Fant?me de l’opéra. There was no question that Parisian cultural life was glittering under the Occupation—obviously, the Germans had money and wanted to be entertained. “It must be wonderful to see so many women wearing your fashions,” Maggie murmured to Chanel.
“Darling, I don’t do fashion—I am fashion.”
To avoid rolling her eyes, Maggie opened her program. There was Sabine Severin in the long list of attendants, and Hubert Taillier in the orchestra listing. She looked down from the box at a perfect view of the orchestra members drifting in and taking out their music, adjusting their stands, rosining their bows. She saw Hugh taking his cello from its case and blinked. When did he start wearing glasses? Then she realized her hostess was once again speaking to her.
“Feminine Paris in the arms of masculine Berlin,” Chanel noted, taking in the French women with German officers. “Do you know,” she added, “that in the twenties and thirties, I was known as Mademoiselle Ballet?”
“Really?” Maggie responded. Hugh was now seated behind his cello, tightening the strings of his bow. The new glasses suit him.
“Oh yes.” Chanel didn’t seem to notice Maggie’s distraction. “I worked with Picasso, Stravinsky, Dalí—designed costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—Le Train bleu, Orphée, Oedipe roi—I adore androgyny. ‘Avant-garde perversity’ is what one critic called it. We were all delighted by that sort of review, of course.”
Maggie realized that for the privileged few, like Chanel and her entourage, wartime Paris was really no different from peacetime; high society danced on much as before, just with a different partner. As Chanel pontificated, needing only the occasional nod or mmm-hmm, Maggie’s eyes wandered around the spectacle.
It was the Palais Garnier, but in her mind’s eye she saw occupied London reflected in a nightmarish image. Would the Sadler’s Wells Ballet still be dancing under Nazi rule? Maggie had once met Ninette de Valois and thought no—at least not with Madame in charge.
But if the Nazis had invaded, Lord Halifax most likely would have been made Prime Minister and put in charge of some sort of shadow government. The Duke of Windsor would have been crowned King, Wallis Simpson made Queen…Maggie shuddered, suddenly seeing it clearly: Nazi banners flying from Buckingham Palace, the Luftwaffe put up at Claridge’s, Hermann Goering taking his pick of art from the National Gallery. Germans in gray-green uniforms and jackboots marching past Nelson’s column, as the clock of Big Ben chimed on Berlin time…
We shall fight on the beaches…she remembered typing for newly named Prime Minister Churchill in those fateful days of the summer of ’40, but she knew it was true. If it had come to that, the Brits would have fought, with bottles and pickaxes if they had them, and stones and handfuls of sand if they didn’t. Churchill’s speeches, the indomitable will of the people, all those young RAF pilots defending Britain with their Spitfires like knights of yore. Maggie knew, in her very bones, that even if some of the anti-Semitic Fascist-leaning British aristocracy might have been wooed, the rest of London would not, like Paris, have gone so gently into the glittering night.
She heard a pause in Chanel’s monologue and sensed an opportunity. “Do you know the conductor?” she asked, glancing down at her program. “Hugo Boulez?” Surely Coco Chanel, who seemed to know everyone, would know him—and he might know the famous German Maestro Miles Hess, and might even know where his Parisian flat was located. Which might lead her to Elise. So many mights.
“Why, yes. Yes, of course.”
Maggie smiled. “I’d love to meet him, after the ballet—if you wouldn’t mind introducing us.”
“You’re a music aficionado?” Chanel arched a penciled eyebrow. “Certainly you’re not interested in taking him as a lover—Boulez is old as Methuselah.”
Spycraft 101: Don’t lie if you don’t have to. “I’m not interested in him personally—but I do love music. And meeting conductors.”
As the houselights dimmed and the low roar of conversations quieted, Maestro Boulez, a rotund, white-haired man in his seventies, entered to warm applause. He made his way to the podium, bowed to the audience, and then turned to the orchestra and lifted his baton. The overture began.
The gold-tasseled velvet curtains opened onto the interior of a Versailles-inspired palace, the courtiers wearing elaborately coiffed white powdered wigs. It was a ballet of pomp and ceremony, with decorous formations of royals and fairies. Even with the wigs, Maggie spotted Sarah immediately as a bejeweled noblewoman in blue silk. She should be Aurora, Maggie decided loyally. Or the Lilac Fairy. She loved her friend’s dancing and thought she was better than Margot Fonteyn.
As the dancers spun and soared, Maggie watched, entranced. Perhaps this is a different sort of resistance. A French, not a British, one. Wasn’t the very choice of performing The Sleeping Beauty a battle cry in and of itself? The ballet was wholly French in spirit, with French technique, the story based on a French fairy tale, the architecture, décor, and costumes undeniably classically French. Wasn’t this a reminder of France eternal, a vision and defense of nobility and court life, of chivalry and etiquette with high ideals and formal principles, symmetry and order?
Maggie started when the evil fairy, Carabosse, entered, costumed in black and red. An allusion to SS uniforms? Maggie looked over the faces of the audience below. No one seemed in the least perturbed. She smiled. Resistance comes in all forms. With that in mind, she enjoyed the performance much more than she’d expected. It was as beautiful and delicate as a butterfly, and a precious balm for her soul.
When the curtains finally closed, there was a standing ovation, and then endless bows and curtsies, with Maggie clapping especially hard for Sarah’s group. As the velvet curtains at last closed, and the houselights came up, Chanel looked to Maggie. “We will meet everyone at Maxim’s,” she announced as the audience began to disperse, smiling and laughing.
“Will Maestro Boulez be there?”
“Of course, my dear—anyone who’s anyone these days goes to Maxim’s.”
—
Chanel and Maggie were taken to the famed restaurant in the same long black Benz that had brought them to the ballet. Maggie didn’t ask how Chanel managed a car and driver in the midst of such deprivation. Most likely thanks to the same someone who got her papers to be out past curfew, Maggie decided. A high-ranking Nazi lover?