Often, there was still wailing.
There was nothing to do, no occupation to keep us busy other than keeping the mice, lice, and spiders at bay as best we could. The food was repulsive to consider and ended hunger bowl by disgusting bowl. And yet its arrival was still welcome; it relieved the tedium.
There was the spoon, the bowl, the terrible porridge or stew to scrape out.
Was it worse to starve or to eat it, always this was the question.
Was it worse to stay or to leave and return to the street?
Was it worse to stay or be bought? And leave to submit to the hands of the purchaser and his wants, the little favors and would-you-pleases and do-this-nows, which you were sure you could do forever instead of this, but your willingness would not matter: you would do it until the one who’d bought you was done with you, when you would return here, no matter your vows, to the bars and the bowl and the spoon, with the memory of who you’d been when you left, when you’d thought the bowl and spoon were never to be seen again. How foolish you were, how silly and small you were: you, you’d thought you were done.
But the bowl, the spoon, they knew they would see you again.
There’s a story told of my voice that says it was bought from a witch, the result of an occult surgery. I am said to treat it nightly with arcane oils and ointments, my real voice in a box on the witch’s mantel.
If you lift the lid, apparently, you can hear it saying everything I can’t say with this voice, the voice that sings. The witch’s bargain is that I cannot perform normal speech.
I never corrected this.
I like to imagine myself returning to the witch to bargain again. Pulling aside my scarf, a door there cut along my throat opening like a clock. I raise the box to my throat, and out comes something small and fierce. It hops in my hand like a little bird.
What would it say?
The real answer to where my voice came from is as ordinary as all of life. In Paris, in the winter, the chestnut trees in the Bois drop their nuts and the poorest gather them and roast them in fires on the street corners. The smell of them to me is the smell of the Paris winter coming. Wrapped in old newspapers, the corners folded back, the chestnuts steam in a neat pile, their split backs curling open.
I wanted to eat and so I learned to sing. I the same as the woman who on a winter afternoon roasts chestnuts from the Bois de Boulogne and sells them so she can buy her dinner. It took more than a witch to make a singer out of me. And if it was a gift from God that made me this way, it was the gift He gave us all, called hunger.
Three
THE NOVEL STAYED on my desk, some strange new artifact. I kept opening it and reading the first page of the chapter on my arrival in Paris and then closing it, unable to read further.
Instead, I would lie down, so as not to run through the bookshops with a torch, burning them all.
I needed to read it, to see what was in it, and yet I could not go past the first page without my thoughts running to who it could be behind this. Simonet still seemed innocent. I still believed he did not know I was the girl singer who so enchanted him. But that did not mean the situation was innocent, only him.
And if the curse was true, I feared that even reading the novel might somehow make her invented fate my own.
It was not much bigger than my thumb, this little ruby rose pin. I could still see it, the jewels so deeply red, my hand closing around it as the Emperor gave it to me. Almost more than I feared anyone who would tell of its secrets, I feared it itself—it had always been bad luck for me. It glowed now, rising in the Paris night from where it still lived, apparently, at the center of my life again, like a tiny midnight sun, tiny and yet enormous, and in its light, a story only I could see.
Or, at least, so I had hoped until now.
There were only three people in Paris who knew of the rose’s time with me and the secrets I’d want to keep. It had taken me to each of them in turn, once I had accepted it from the Emperor’s hand. The first still loved me but had betrayed me, the second had once owned me. The third, I would say, never thought of me at all. Or so I hoped.
She was the most dangerous of them all.
There was once a fourth, but he was dead. I had watched him die; he had given his life for me. And until the day Simonet approached me at the bal, I believed the flower, if not the story, was still with him.
I had left that ruby flower with him.
Not one of the living had any reason to tell this story, and the dead man never would. We had reached our various accommodations and agreements. But if the story had been told, this could only mean something had changed, a mistake had been made or a balance of power shifted. If so, this novel was then either a sign or a signal. And, sign or signal, it was a threat.
When I went down to the bookstalls along the Seine at last, I bought three copies, wrapped one for each of my old friends, determined to give them one and see just what they said.
I began my search with the one who loved me.
You should always begin there, I think. The secret hurt, long nurtured, never brought to light, until it has grown lethal in the dark and the smile of friendship is all that is left to hang there like a lure.
§
She was my one sincere friend in Paris. Euphrosyne, known to most as the Marquise de Lambert now. She ran a salon on Mondays that she named Les Petits Lundis, after the Empress Eugénie’s salon evening of the same name—she was obsessed with the Empress. Her husband, who almost never attended, she referred to as l’Empereur. She’d had herself painted as the Empress dressed as Marie Antoinette—just as the Empress had. I knew almost nothing about her husband except that he was exceedingly rich and he kept her in style, devotedly, in a beautiful h?tel in the sixth arrondissement by the Luxembourg Gardens.
I had sung there on occasion, and it was one of my few diversions, one of the few salons I ever consented to attend.
When I say I suspected Euphrosyne, I mean it was quite possible she knew Simonet well and that the salon I’d heard him at was hers. I expected no treachery from her, except that perhaps Simonet had been her lover and she had said too much. I could imagine him in her bed, writing down everything she said of me, the story not quite her story of me, but his crude drawing of what she knew of me embellished.
The next available Monday, I went and presented myself, was admitted, and waited to be received by her in her reception hall. All seemed to be as it had always been. The hall was still made of white marble and sparely decorated with classical sculptures. When she ran to me, embracing me and kissing me, dressed in some new beautiful lilac chiffon gown, her shoulders bare except for a collar of diamonds, she was a vision, as beautiful as she had always been. I said as much, and complimented her on the gown. She winked at me and said, You. You’ll need your compliments. Come with me, you terrible girl, you have something to tell me, and she then pulled me from the gathering crowd into her empty library.
I have heard you are getting married! she said, as she shut the door. I cannot believe you, that I had to hear it this way from someone else. Who is it? Is it really the tenor at the Paris Opera?
I only laughed, stunned. And then after a pause, during which I said nothing from shock, she said, Ah. I cannot believe I was tricked like this. Of course, you would have written at once.