I wondered how it felt to her, if she’d read the list of her furs, if she missed any of it at all, or if she was content to wear as much flannel as she liked now over there in England, the Emperor and the Prince dead.
I had a pang on reading the list, of missing my life there. I thought of the Tuileries and how the enormous buildings of the palace looked to me sometimes like the cars of enormous trains. I missed walking toward them in the night and knowing there was a small room for me within, where I could close the door and vanish, no one knowing who I was or where. In those days, the Emperor and Empress were both everything in my life and nothing to me, for I never saw them. I wasn’t among the servants who were close to her physically, not at first, though through my work I had to know, constantly, the intimate details of her life—if she had gained or lost weight, if she was with menses, angry or sad or in good humor. Each day had a schedule to it, determined by her events, when she would need this or that dress or gown or fur, and when she would no longer need them. It was not constant drudgery, but instead there were short periods of intense work and then long stretches with nothing to do. Nothing of my life mattered to them except that I be present according to my schedule, which I received weekly, with some changes daily, the times I was to climb inside the dumbwaiter and get the dress on. The hours were very irregular, as the parties could go late into the night or early morning, though usually her lady’s maids would leave the night’s last dress in the dumbwaiter, and we were to rise and send up the new one before the Empress woke. We knew, for example, when she was wearing the flannel underneath, as there would be no requests, nothing for us to do when the schedule clearly said something like Ambassadeur du Brésil.
I felt she let her flannel show to punish His Majesty for how he met for hours on matters of state with his “secretaries” every night, which is to say, his whores, his wives of other politicians and royals, their daughters, women who often imagined they could be his next Eugénie. As this was conducted below, his first Eugénie wandered the upper galleries and halls of the palace alone, with little or no hope of seeing him, visiting her courtiers in their apartments and playing with their children, always staying too late. No one could send her out; she was the Empress, and she was very lonely without her Emperor. And yet because it would be dangerous for her to have a lover, in case she was to bear a false heir, her movements were carefully guarded by secret police.
None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.
§
As my role had no precedent, I was given a room of my own, a luxury, up in the eaves of the palace. I had a window that looked out onto the courtyard, a bed, a trunk with my name on it, and even a lamp for reading at night. A scarlet-eyed pigeon with bronze feathers was my single regular living visitor there. I was fed regularly and well, and passed my time mostly in the company of the other household servants. All of this suited me.
I remembered the stuffed fox on that list. Also the bear. I remembered the twenty silver fox tails. I liked to set a silver fox head, the mouth open around the head of the otter on the muff, and leave it lying out to make the other grisettes laugh. The stuffed otter I kept up in my room with me for company. In the dark, by lamplight, the glass beads for his eyes seemed always to be almost alive.
I’d found him in a corner of the fur closet, covered in three marabout boas. I quickly propped the boas on something else and then pushed him back behind several cloaks so he couldn’t be seen. A few nights later, as the courtyard blazed with the lights of a ball and the staff drank bad sour wine near the pantry stairs, I went down quickly to the basement fur closet and brought him to my room. I knew I could be arrested for theft, but there was none who missed him. He was tribute and sent, I imagined, from Quebec.
He had been made so he stood upright, as if he’d seen something. There were faint black silk stitches on his wrist, repairing the tear in the fur from the trap. In the dark, he looked whole and alive.
If he could have spoken, I would have known then, without any doubt, that I was lost in a fairy tale, but he never spoke. The single speaking animal in the palace was a parrot, a present to the Empress who’d sent it home with a maid, where it learned to swear and curse like the maid’s lovers. Sometimes I could hear it shouting, Tais-toi! Tais-toi! The creature had become much beloved by the Empress after that but was thought to be too obscene to be allowed anywhere near the apartments, and instead the bird was kept in the basement with us.
In days as carefully measured as Her Majesty’s gowns, I grew to be at peace with my lot in life somehow. I didn’t imagine that I would stay there forever, nor did I see any opportunity to leave. I was hidden deep inside the enormous machinery of the institution that was dressing the Empress for her public and private appearances, and what I thought, what I looked like, and who I was were of no importance to anyone as long as I accomplished my singular tasks. I had found a very strange and beautiful kind of shelter, and there was work I could accomplish easily. Here, no one knew me as anything other than une muette of indistinct origin. I was sure I was content to spend my life inside the warm circle of light my lamp made, whether it lit my room or my passage to the vast cloakroom of the Empress.
I was very grateful, then, to the Comtesse, for introducing me to the chamberlain, and did exactly as she asked.
§
Once a week I left the Tuileries Palace for an afternoon, something allowed all of us. It was under the pretense of visiting an invented aunt and uncle, and so for this visit I had a dress, a careful blue one, dark and plain. The other grisettes liked to mock it a little when I came down in it.
It had never belonged to the Empress.
There were not so many uncles and aunts for us all, and like many of the grisettes who pretended to visit a relation on their one day of freedom, I went to the Bois de Boulogne, where I would present myself as if I were like any other girl who went there looking to make an extra coin on her day’s leave on a ride through the park with a gentleman in his carriage. The procession of vehicles and horses was full of people either occupied at this pastime or busy looking at those occupied, a strangely public thing, like a theater’s boxes spilled out into the light of the afternoon.
There was not one of our number who did not need some other way to make money. At times, stepping into or out of the carriage that picked me up, I had the sense of stepping over the death that waited if I was any poorer than I was. For me, it was always the same carriage and the same gentleman who left with me and brought me to this aunt I was to be visiting.
My “aunt,” such as she was, was the Comtesse, the one woman in Europe who knew herself to be Eugénie’s true rival and perhaps the only other woman who could have been empress. She felt her mother had bungled her chance at marrying her off to the Emperor, and so when she was sent by Cavour to Paris as part of Italy’s diplomatic mission to France to seduce Louis-Napoléon to the Italian cause, married as she was to a man she did not love, she preferred this duty to all others and went willingly. She was so beautiful that when she entered late to her very first official ball in Paris the musicians stopped playing, causing the Emperor and Empress to look to see what had happened.
This was a story she loved to tell.