THERE WAS NO La Lune to help me. Instead, there was Odile.
First came a basket from her, sent to the prison, with a fine piece of sausage and bread and, to my surprise, a beautiful new dress, complete with stockings, shoes, gloves, a hat. The gloves were stitched with roses. The hat was a bonnet meant to be worn at a rakish tilt. The other girls made a fuss as it was delivered. The note read, Something to keep you alive until you leave, something for you to wear to come see me when you are free. Your friend, Odile.
There was her card also, with the address. This surprised me. The only Odile I remembered was the angry concierge in Euphrosyne’s foyer. The one who had said to her, You aren’t allowed guests like that. The one who had threatened Euphrosyne with a fine. Why had her concierge concerned herself with me?
I did need work, however, and resolved to go to see her, thank her, and repay her, and then ask about a job.
On the last morning of my sentence, I dressed in her gifts. Outside, Odile’s carriage waited for me—a kindness and a luxury. I blinked back tears I hated as I climbed inside and tried to act on the ride as if I took this trip every day.
§
Odile was certainly no concierge. She was a procuress, a former danseuse in the Paris Opera Ballet corps, and had taken on dancers, actresses, and singers who sought to make arrangements of this kind but lacked for either rooms or liaisons, using the spare rooms of a deaf aunt of hers, who owned a simple, clean house near the Opera. A share went to the aunt, of course, whose idea it was, worried about the prospects of her beautiful niece. Odile’s first théatre du désir, then, as she called them, had a view of her aunt Virginie’s kitchen garden.
She learned quickly that she could charge more if men had a specific fantasy and that they would be loyal if the fantasy could be fulfilled with brio. When one of her admirers told her Baron Haussmann was set to order her aunt’s neighborhood to be condemned for Paris’s renovation, Odile took her aunt in hand, sold the house to the city at a high price, and built the current establishment on roughly the same spot with the help of investors—all clients. A portrait of Virginie presided over the salon, where her girls lingered in talk with their gentlemen; and every so often Odile would solemnly toast or bless her, even leaving a glass of claret for her on the mantel.
Odile’s new establishment was called l’H?tel des Majeurs-Plaisirs, a pun on the Menus-Plaisirs, the school of the arts. Each of the rooms was the set to a different fantasy. The room I’d gone into with Euphrosyne on the night of our adventure had not been hers—it was for gentlemen who had a fantasy of seducing a woman while at the opera, something Euphrosyne often provided. The clothes she had taken for us were props for the room. Odile had hired the same craftsmen who’d made the Paris Opera’s boxes to make this one.
And despite my role in the trouble Euphrosyne had made for her, and for her unhappy client, once Odile learned of my registration, she had sent her basket right away. There were many men who wanted the attentions of a hippodrome rider. She explained all of this to me once I stood in her office in the clothes she’d sent me. Which she then asked me to remove.
I did so at once. I did not like the dress or the now-visible obligations it represented.
You have the arms of an acrobat, of course. Very strong, if too slim. We will have you eat more for these, she said, and gestured at my smallish breasts. At least they do not sag. Pastries for you. You are no virgin, yes? And at least age sixteen?
I nodded twice.
Virgins fare badly; they know so little. I would have to pay someone to teach you and charge you for it. I may still need to. My doctor will be here shortly to inspect you. She flicked her finger at my arm. So strong, she said. But your face, you look innocent. People think you are good no matter what you do, yes? She walked over to the wall, where an array of cruel instruments hung, whips, crops, paddles. She withdrew a simple crop and handed it to me. I grasped it.
Perhaps we will make use of this. The strong arm and the innocent face. Please, she said, indicating the empty dress. We will discuss your duties.
After I’d dressed again, she took me to a door in her office at the back and unlocked it.
She turned to me, put a finger on her lips to shush me, and led me into a dark passage consisting of a series of viewing stations with peepholes. Today, to begin, you observe, she whispered. She set an hourglass down. When the sand is gone, go to the next one, and the next. Make not a single sound. I will retrieve you when the doctor is here.
At other houses, they throw you to the men, and you are forced to take what wisdom you can. This way, she said of it later, as she brought me to the doctor, you can see even what my girls would forget to tell you.
You will have a week to decide, as will we, Odile said, after I had received my tour. I hope you will make us proud.
At the end of the week I was free to go if, that is, I could repay her. And I could only stay if I pleased her.
When I only smiled weakly at this, she grew sharp. She sat back and raised one perfectly drawn eyebrow.
We entertain some of the world’s most important men here. Do not be mistaken, she said. This is a profession; you are performers. These men, they entrust us with their most secret fantasies, and we, we keep that trust—they rule the day, we rule the night.
She stood and came around her desk, leaning against it to lift my chin with her own hand, and brought her face down before mine.
Do not be sad, then. Be proud. The night is a wonderful country to rule. Welcome to the Majeurs-Plaisirs.
§
Afterward, as I sat in that dark hall, moving from peephole to peephole, turning the hourglass as I did, I felt as if I were a ghost hidden in the walls. The peepholes were either scratched into the silver at the back of a mirror, or looked out through mantels, or were an “eye” set so as to resemble the eye in a painting, or one of a series of glass beads along the base of a lamp.
In the first, I saw a stout soldier, naked, his face firmly between one woman’s buttocks as another smacked him from behind and he cried out without lifting his face or running away or striking her. In the second, a woman I soon realized as Euphrosyne in performance as a young girl, waiting for the return of her chaperone at the opera and surprised by her visitor. She was enacting a melodrama, during which he called her by another name, that culminated in her being ravished by him—at which point Odile, playing the chaperone, returned to catch and punish him. In the third, a woman held out her delicate bare foot, and a man spread across the floor kissed it, murmuring her name, begging to do more than that.
She refused until he perfected his kisses to her content.
Anytime you wonder, Odile said later, as to a lover’s devotion to another, anytime it seems ridiculous, there is only ever one reason.
What reason? I asked, for I knew it was a prompt. We were seated in one of the theaters as a man waited on us, naked, his eyes downcast in obsequious submission. We were toasting my agreement, signed on the table between us.
He paid me for the privilege of serving us, she said, as the man finished his pours. I am charging him more for you. What is the reason they are loyal? Why would he pay for such a thing? They have found someone to do the one thing they’ve always longed for, and they are afraid they will never find someone to do it again.
I laughed, and she said, Don’t laugh. It’s a loyalty greater than love.
She stroked her champagne glass and looked off into the distance over the rim. She did not meet the eyes of the man trembling now by the wall.
It may be the only loyalty there is, she said, and held out her glass to be refilled.