To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To feel either enjoyment or self-pity meant you might allow them too much time, and this meant possibly missing your next monsieur. I soon found the pleasure I could sneak, which I preferred, enjoyed like something I’d picked from their pockets. But I somehow knew without ever being told that to really give myself to one of them was to begin to fray, to make in myself a weakness I could never undo, and so whenever some were able to pleasure me, here or there, I tried to bring the hour to its quickest end.
At Odile’s direction, I would make notes of habits, gifts received, preferences, and displeasures. I reviewed this before they arrived, and this made each client believe they were so important to you that you remembered everything they liked, every little gesture, each time they visited—an impossible act of memory, really, but one they never questioned, for it suited them to think it was so. This was, of course, part of what they paid for, perhaps more than any of the acts themselves—to be so remembered.
A great scandal appeared in the press shortly after I joined the house—all of the girls talked of it—a disappointed lover had rifled a famous courtesan’s books, hoping to find the truth as to whether she loved him, only to see she was not kind to him, at least there. She was made to seem insincere in the press, and this angered us. It was like charging backstage, shocked to discover Phèdre had been played by an actress when you knew all along you were in a theater.
Odile joked of hiring someone to write a diary for all of us in which each client was described only in the most flattering terms—and to leave them where they might be found easily, our real journals hidden elsewhere.
To keep ourselves safe, the system was simple enough. We named clients by their jobs, like minor characters in a play. I wanted it to be clear to myself as well as to whatever future spy might see it that I never really thought of him except like this. What’s more, names would have made a gentleman into someone I could feel affection for—love, perhaps, or hate. It was better, easier, to feel nothing—if you loved him, he could disappoint you; if he disappointed you, you might hate him; if you might hate him, you would still have to see him for as long as he had funds to pay. It was enough to remember them all; that was all that was needed, nothing more. But this lesson, to feel nothing for them, was one I seemed always to be tested on, never more so than by what happened next.
One night, after I had been there for several months, I returned to the salon to find it consumed with dancing. A man was playing a cancan on the piano, and the room had exploded with it. Even Odile, whom I rarely saw move more than her counting hand, had her skirts over her hips. The dancing spilled out into the hall and from there into the garden, not usually used. The night was warm, and the windows into the garden were thrown open so we could hear the music there as well.
We had been visited by a regiment. Odile didn’t usually let her doors open to enlisted men, for soldiers normally used women too brutally.
The piano music finished as I entered. I found Euphrosyne in the arms of one of the soldiers, a beauty. He was Prussian, had arrived that day from Morocco; the sun there had turned his skin bronze, his sleek blond hair bright.
This is her, Euphrosyne said, as she reached out and drew me closer, turning to face him again. She’s my friend who can sing, she said.
He’s not really a soldier, she said to me. He’s a singer.
A tenor, he said.
§
Here then is the one who owned me.
He was the only man Euphrosyne had ever competed with me for, the only one who ever came between us. She introduced us.
Of those I feared had betrayed me to this writer, he was the one I knew was not over me. He was the Prussian tenor at the Paris Opera, rumored to be marrying me, said to be the real reason I was leaving the stage—and the first man to insist I get on one.
Five
IF WE WERE called to perform in a fantasy, we had to do so and do it with all our might. Most times the fantasy held. And so when Euphrosyne’s tenor friend suggested to Odile that I sing for him as he took Euphrosyne in the seats of the little theater, she sent me to change into a formal gown at once and put me on the illusion stage there in front of the boxes where no one had ever stood and sung before.
Odile prided herself on the education we received at her hands in preparation for these fantasies. She regularly took us to attend the opera, the ballet, and the symphony, each trip narrated by her, making points as to appropriate conduct, the way to gossip in an entertaining fashion, and then the occasional sharp remark for whichever of us had misbehaved. She had seen too many girls embarrass clients, themselves, and their houses in public with ill manners or ignorance; educating us this way was good for business, and then the sight of us, our little parade in our new dresses and jewels, meant she educated us even as she advertised us to the gentlemen in the room who would see her and then us, and know instantly we were the Majeurs-Plaisirs. Their friends might ask after us; their friends would explain.
I was new and had been to the opera exactly once. The opera was Lucia di Lammermoor, the story of a young woman who falls in love with a man her family despises. They love in secret, marry in secret in the woods, and when he becomes a fugitive, are then separated. While he is away, her brother forges a letter to tell her this lover has betrayed her and forgotten her, and urges her to marry the man they have chosen for her instead. Lucia does, reluctantly, and then murders her new husband on her wedding night, at which point her lover returns to find her mad and singing of how they can be together again as she drifts down the stairs in her gown covered in blood. She dies, and her lover, in order to be with her again, takes his own life as well.
Her first aria, “Regnava nel silenzio,” or “Reign of silence,” is her telling her maid she has seen a ghost in the woods, the ghost of a girl killed by a man from the family of her lover. This is what she sings before she goes to marry her lover in secret.
Whenever I thought of it, I could still hear the oboes murmuring as Lucia enters. The night we went, Adelina Patti sang, one of the very best Lucias in history.
Odile was moved enough by my attachment to this aria that she had urged some of the various musicians who came to the house to help me learn to sing it—so I could prepare, perhaps, for a concert in the salon. She often had us enact salon dramas and tableaux vivants as a way to begin the night; some nights we began as begowned princesses; others, as harem girls; still others, as goddesses. One composer even promised a salon opera. She had decided I would go from being the girl with a crop to being her opera siren. A baritone client, on hearing of my love for the aria and the opera, had even written out the lyrics for me one night and left them for me as a love note.
I had suspected this meant Odile was somehow moving Euphrosyne out. Which I could not imagine. But if a circus was a family you had to audition for, a maison close was a family that would sell you as a compliment.
Regardless, this was truly all the training I had in this kind of singing at the time, and while I was reluctant to sing for anyone with so little by way of preparation, I sang my best rendition of “Regnava nel silenzio,” accompanied on the piano by the tenor’s friend who had played the cancan in the salon, even though I knew it was all crude improvisation and the illusion stage was so close to them I could see Euphrosyne’s legs shake in the air—I still cannot imagine it gave him any pleasure, and yet it did not matter what I could imagine, what matters is what happened next.
It seems to me that when I am near him, heaven opens itself to me, Lucia sings at the end, telling her maid of why she will go to marry in the woods.
When I reached this and the diminuendo of the piano, the scene above came into view: Euphrosyne’s tenor leaning over the box, staring at me with fierce ardor. Euphrosyne behind him, her face lit by the ember of a cigarette.
Incredible, he said. And then he began to clap, finally turning to Euphrosyne, who clapped at last as well.
§
What training do you have? he asked me. We were downstairs in the salon again, drinking Odile’s champagne, seated on a crimson velvet chaise. Euphrosyne had left for her ablutions.