So, we will be like sisters, or first wife and second wife, or who knows? Who knows how many he has? she said airily, as she continued our procession. Three, five, a thousand.
Her dressing room was sumptuous with gowns thrown this way and that, as if it had been the scene of a fight. I dressed quickly, I always do, she said. She reached down to the floor. Here! This is what I wanted. Something for you, she shouted as she raised a small bag from Boucheron into the air. The gentleman who gave me this was unworthy, she said. I threw it at him and it landed here, but my maid still has not picked up. I must beat her. But you are a jeune fille still, you can wear this, it will look beautiful and it will be a sign of our good friendship, yes?
I pulled the velvet back until the box came into view and opened it.
Inside was a small emerald pendant, perfectly beautiful, but something of a pebble, it was easy to see, a poor companion to the dazzling collar, bracelets, and earrings she wore. I held my hand to my mouth and laughed. You didn’t give this to someone who had diamonds on the soles of her boots. You gave it to a woman who said her prayers before bed.
This was meant for his wife, I said finally.
Good eye, she said. Never trust a man who gives you something he was going to give his wife, she said. And with that, she pulled the necklace from the box and draped it around my neck and turned us to look into her mirrors.
The sight of her against my neck, like some terrifying devil come to tempt me, the beautiful small matrimonial emerald glinting in the candlelight. I knew it was more than I’d ever had. She smiled. He’s very handsome, isn’t he? she said. I nodded.
I will warn you of two things, she said then. He will try to make you a singer. Do you have a good voice?
I do, I said.
Good, she said. I didn’t, and I never will. See where I am now! If I had a voice, I could conquer. Now. Do you love him?
No, I said. I wasn’t sure, so it was easier to say no. Too easy, and I saw her catch it.
Never love, she said. Do you understand? Not him, not any of them. That is the secret to all of this around me.
Outside in her halls, the party in celebration of her debut raged. I waited silently, finally reaching up to touch the little gem at my throat.
Never love, she said. For if you do, that is all you’ll get, if you’re lucky. And nothing else.
I returned to the party in my necklace, Cora now behind me. My tenor friend smiled up at me and I knew instantly from his expression as he looked to my throat, while Cora’s laughter caroled against my neck, that he had given it to her.
§
He did come to love me, and perhaps it began that night, as our Cupid manqué, the woman he really loved, tossed me down the stairs to him wearing his rejected love gift to her.
Years later, when I learned she had died a pauper and subscriptions were being sold to pay for her grave, I took this necklace and sold it and sent the sum and two thousand francs toward the cost.
I did not take her warnings to heart. Such was her vanity, she thought I sought to replace her, and such was mine, I found her warnings of little use. Our mutual friend was already trying to make a singer of me, or to make me into her—it was hard to know which that night. I left suspicious that I was only like a little doll of her to him. It seemed his preferences with me all came from her—Eau de Lubin would not mean the same thing ever. But unlike her, I had a voice, and with it, I knew, a real chance.
This was my consolation then.
As for loving him, how could I not at least imagine what I felt for him, which was perhaps more gratitude and fear than anything else, how could I, ignorant as I was, not imagine it was love?
She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn’t want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more.
For years after that night, she haunted me. I would be assembling my toilette and see her face over my shoulder, just as I had that night. The confident way she warned me off.
The word for her in Paris, a courtesan who had made it to the stage, was grue—it happened so often there was a word for it. I never wanted anyone to use this word for me. I even wore my hair dark and close to my head so as to be as unlike her as I could imagine.
And then I became a singer, and the night of my eventual debut was nothing like hers, and I was sure I had won my way free.
Seven
IN ALL THE YEARS I’d known the tenor, I had rarely ever visited him at his apartments; he was more often at mine in the years when I belonged to him. His apartment was where he went to be apart from women—near me, on the rue de Richelieu, close to the Place Vend?me and decorated in a German style; to enter was to feel one might have left Paris. The furniture was mostly Bavarian, very dark and carved with German motifs and animals or trees. A full suit of knight’s armor stood in the foyer with an enormous, two-handed sword for killing something larger than I knew to fear. Hunting rifles and more swords from his family decorated the mantel of the fireplace in his library.
I went to call on him, thinking that if it was not my Euphrosyne it had to be him. Another copy of the novel, for him, wrapped, sat under my arm.
He would be returning shortly, his butler said, as he answered the door. Would I care to wait?
I said I would. I was shown into his library, where I seated myself on his couch.
The butler offered to take the package, but I said I had to hand it to him myself.
Of the men who had come to me at Odile’s, he was the only one who had ever wanted to know me. His loneliness was different. The distinct proportions of it in his mind were like those of a theatrical that needed casting more than anything else.
He sought a playmate, almost a rival.
Almost.
There was a coda to my evening with him at Cora Pearl’s those many years ago, and I remembered it as I waited. We had sat down eventually to her catered supper served on gold-rimmed china. She had caught my expression of pleasure at the gold rim, as the plate for my soup went down in front of me, and raised an eyebrow.
You should take your little doll of me out more, she said to the tenor. Get her used to fine china.
Here at dinner, as everyone ate, this wounded me, but I had been trained not to react or, at least, not to cry out. As the tenor turned toward me, I put a practiced smile on my face and said, Yes. Yes, you should. Teasing him.
The guests at table, quietly waiting for my reaction, erupted in laughter. I hadn’t meant to be funny, and I knew it was dangerous to humiliate him too much, so I pulled his head in close to mine for a kiss on his cheek, at which the laughter increased. As we each sat back, I found Cora Pearl smiling at me.
We would not be friends, as she had said, but I had earned her respect.
When the dinner ended, she ordered the waiters to fill her tub with champagne and asked anyone who wished to join her to come with her into her salle de bain. The tenor looked on as she stood, her bare shoulders gleaming in the candlelight, before leaving silently with me after she had made her exit.
Perhaps a few weeks later, friends of the tenor’s entered his box at the intermission to greet him and recount how the men who’d stayed after our departure had sat round Cora’s champagne bath, filling their glasses from it as they spoke to her until her figure appeared, and the tenor made a face, as if at something disgusting. At this cue, they all began to speak of how badly she’d sung in Orphée aux Enfers.
He smiled a little and interrupted these complaints to present these friends to me.
She is a soprano, he said. My protégée. There were some grins, but all took my hand and kissed it in greeting. I am preparing her for her debut, he added, and they all smiled at this as if they could already hear me sing.
As I answered his friends’ questions on my student repertoire, I noticed how he seemed proud of me, and I knew I was mistaken as to Cora’s and my fortunes.