Like the Empress, the Comtesse had red-gold hair that was sometimes light, sometimes dark, but unlike Eugénie’s, her eyes were a brilliant green and set off by her pale skin. Her breasts and her feet were as celebrated as she was, and she often wore no corset and no shoes, letting her breasts loose in her bodice and slipping off her slippers when receiving male guests at home.
When I met her, she was still an extraordinary beauty, but not as she remembered; she considered herself in decline. Even in the time I knew her best, she stayed inside more and more. Her eventual seclusion was still distant for now, the darkness only approaching.
Our ritual, like my appointment to the Tuilieries, had been arranged by the Comtesse, and to repay her kindness, she asked me for this simple task. There was a written schedule of the Empress’s appearances prepared by Pepa and the noble sisters, and it included a catalogue of what she was to wear each time—this was done so we would know what to prepare each day. When the week was concluded, the list was taken down and discarded. I was the one who took this list down. Per her request, I instead kept this and set it in my greeting card wallet, where it stayed until I entered the Comtesse’s home. I placed it in a bowl near the entrance, as one might leave a visitor’s card, and withdrew from near the bowl a small envelope containing my five francs’ pay. I passed on, following her footman into the parlor, where I would sit and wait.
Our ritual was unchanging.
Her entrances were always grand, even when she made no apparent effort, even for such as me; she had no need to seduce me, though she did, as she did everyone. She came down the stairs always with a great refinement of movement, usually in an exotic costume of some kind, such as a silk kimono if she had been alone for the day, but it could as easily be a gown or a toga. Her passion for tableaux vivants and theater meant that, even when she was alone, she would amuse herself with her clothes for much of the day, dressing and undressing until it was time for her to go to her next appointment. And what she would wear to that appointment was somehow drafted over the course of the day’s changes.
The Comtesse greeted me warmly always, her hand covering my own as she entered. She never mentioned the list, and neither did I, though I never failed to bring it. She instead showed me to her table, set out with crystal and silver; and over a bit of rabbit or duck, I ate and listened to her.
If the chamberlain had need of a mute girl to work for the basement wardrobe because she couldn’t talk back, so too had the Comtesse; my second duty, though it was not one she’d instructed me to perform, was to listen to her stories, and her stories were almost entirely of the Emperor and the Empress. She sometimes teased of giving me an education in being an independent Parisienne, but this inevitably involved more stories of the imperial court, which led always to the story of her exile from the court and the injustice of it, how she was blamed for the assassination attempt on the Emperor’s life but not given credit for her role in the unification of Italy. She had neither been brought to trial in Paris—and allowed the vindication of proving her innocence—nor had she been honored at home in Italy for fulfilling her mission.
I did not understand much of this, or did not initially; but with repetition, I came to know it as if I were her, as if these were my own memories. When I returned to the dark of the palace basement, rushing to prepare the Empress’s gown, bent around the dummy in the dumbwaiter, pins in my mouth, careful not to stick them in wrong and thus accidentally ruin the gown, at those times I felt I belonged entirely to the dark basement and might never go above and outside again. It was only when I retrieved the day’s record and brought it to my room did this strange part of my life come back into view, hidden again when I slid the list into my things.
§
The mother superior herself had been the one who sent me to the Comtesse personally. I have undertaken a mission near us here, the saving of a soul, she’d said. A woman of wicked sins, a courtesan, who has made her fortune as a professional beauty, regularly disrespecting the vows of her marriage and of others, and who has become very serious about repenting and joining us here. She feels herself near her end and has asked for a habit of our order to be prepared for her so that she might at least go to her last rest as one of us in this way.
It amused me to think of this courtesan springing up the stairs of her last rest dressed in a habit of the Sisters of the Order of Saint-Denis Convent. She held out a slip of paper. Rue de Passy, near the Bois de Boulogne. The note at the bottom, signed by her, gave me the privilege of leaving the convent to visit her. She will need to be fitted, she said. A soul like hers, that is a great victory to win it. A great victory . . . and she sighed. Go tomorrow.
The doors on that first visit, as I waited for the courage to announce myself, seemed to me like the doors to Hell itself. The ornate stonework on the building’s fa?ade, carved to look like a giant’s roses and thorns, the wooden double doors that were more than twice my height, the knocker, a bronze Medusa as big as my face, all looked as if, were the doors to open, I would be drawn inside and never allowed to leave.
I was dressed that day in a simple dress and bonnet, and carried with me my sewing tools. Over my mouth I wore a scarf I’d made for myself that read muette, the word stitched there to explain to any stranger why I would not respond—and to hide me, I hoped, from any chance encounter with someone who might recognize me.
I could not have guessed how much I looked, in short, like my own tableau vivant or how this would charm the Comtesse.
I pulled on the Medusa’s chin and let it drop, and a loud knock echoed inside. The eyes to the Medusa head slid to the side, and her large green eyes appeared, shadowed by the lamp behind her. Oho, she said.
The bronze eyes slid back into place, the door opened, and inside stood a beautiful woman in something like a toga but which was a black satin dressing gown, her red-gold hair loose and carefully wild. A crystal goblet in her hand glowed with champagne. She waved me in with her free arm, but I was so stunned, I only stood there. Her smile stayed on her face but dimmed slightly, and she spoke through it.
Well, she said. Muette. Is that your name?
I held out the letter of introduction from the convent.
She looked familiar to me, and then I knew—she was the very Parisienne I’d seen my first day in Paris. I was sure of it. The woman in mourning who had parted the crowd in her enormous dress and jewels. She was still in mourning, but she did not seem near death, as I’d been told.
As she pulled the letter open, she asked, Are you perhaps the ghost of the Chateau de la Muette, my neighbor? She gestured at the distance. Or some long lost heir to the chateau? I had always wondered when La Muette would come for her house. She flicked the letter with her finger and held it out to read it.
I shook my head again, unsure at what she meant. I knew nothing of this chateau.
You are my convent-bred seamstress, yes?
I nodded. And then smiled from under my scarf.
Come, my girl. You’ve come just in time.
She would always be like this. Familiar, full of vaguely oracular pronouncements, a Pythian oracle fed on champagne and pearls instead of myrrh.
La Muette, she said, as we walked up her stairs. Only in French, she said, would we have a word that can mean mute, hunting dog, or young falcon. Are you any of those?
I felt Fate reach down and trace the word on my scarf.
Slowly, I held up two fingers.