This coin, it had been joined by another, and another, and with this next task, perhaps a flood. This had been the first in a trail of coin I hoped I might someday lay down, leading to a world without the Tuileries, without the Empress. Without the Comtesse.
This work was not my ruin, then, but providence, a test that, if I passed, would provide a way for me to finally go to my mother’s family in Lucerne. Seeing her that first day in Paris now seemed like a sign from God that she would put me back on my path. And so I blessed the day I’d been brought to her and counted the coins until I was calm.
Four
THE DAYS OF preparations leading up to Compiègne passed very slowly. For weeks, in addition to keeping up with the Empress’s daily schedule, we also set ourselves to the business of packing the Empress for the retreat: a month of furs, shoes, hats, crinolines, costumes, robes de chambre, tea gowns, evening gowns.
In the dark of the morning on the day of our departure, we found a special breakfast of café au lait and a piece of toasted bread with butter and cinnamon on it floating in the coffee. This was a rich surprise and lent the work of overseeing the final details of the packing of the trunks the feeling of both a holiday and a conspiracy; I and the other grisettes conducted it in an unusual, even solemn, silence.
I’d never thought for a moment of what the Empress looked like in the dresses before this, but now that I had seen her, little scenes of her cast themselves in my head. As I laid the dresses in tissue in their trunks, I thought, Oh, this will look quite fine on her or She will want to wear this with these, and so on. I had never felt this way before.
To feel a small pleasure in it.
Previously, I had been like the abbess of her furs. A solitary mission. Now, dressed in the green and gold uniform dress of the autumn palace, I kissed my friends in the basement good-bye and left, as if off for war.
Her luggage was by comparison to the Emperor’s the greater. The trunks were made by Louis Vuitton in a pale gray known as Trianon gray, her favorite gray. It was as if the Empress were secretly something enormous, disassembled in the morning dark, her various parts in the neat rows of boxes and trunks we’d prepared and brought up to the surface.
She was to be there for a month. Her lady guests each week were required to bring twenty-four distinct toilettes, changing three or four times a day, and could not repeat a dress or gown or piece of jewelry in the Empress’s presence during their stay. And as Her Majesty could not repeat, either, and required choices, that morning we departed for Compiègne with two hundred toilettes, each of them new.
I stood near the trunks while the imperial train cars were loaded, testing the feeling of my new uniform with my hands along my hips. The crowd around us seemed to communicate an automatic respect for me, as if I were a Cent-Garde of the Emperor’s, not the Empress’s grisette.
The train gave its signal.
Eugénie appeared then. A veil covered her face, falling down from the brim of a tweed cap, but she wore the diamond known as the Regent, a diamond the size of a sparrow, and in the sunlight coming through the station, it flashed so brightly I almost expected there to be a sound. I wondered why she wore it, as it seemed dangerous to me—watching her cross the station I imagined a thief snatching it from her neck in a dash or the clasp coming loose and the diamond rolling along the floor. But I saw the people around her looking on with pride at the flash of the Regent in the morning sun of the station; at the trunks; at her careful procession, all heavily guarded; at me, waiting by the train, and I knew it was very much what they wanted of her. I’d thought of it as her own greed for these things, but that morning I understood it was also theirs.
Her guards in a phalanx around her repeated, L’Impératrice, l’Impératrice, l’Impératrice, and the men in the station doffed their hats and bowed, the women made half curtsies. As she approached the car, I threw myself to the ground in my now-customary way. Vive l’Empereur, vive l’Impératrice, vive la France! shouted the men and women in the station, and then I felt her steps on the stairs, and with her safely inside, I stood and made my way to my own car with the other servants, brushing the dirt from my skirt as the people cheered and the doors closed behind us.
We were met at the station at Compiègne by imperial carriages that took us to the palace quickly, cutting past the town’s enormous cathedral and humble rain-stained square.
The palace was nearly plain by comparison with the Tuileries, cut of a stone of the color of bone, though not of ivory but a bone found in the woods. From the coach, it resembled a library or a tax office, not quite the rich retreat I’d imagined from my glimpse of the imperial retreat at Biarritz. The single greatest feature was the long park that extended into the imperial forests, where the hunts were to take place.
Orderly rows of chestnut trees, their leaves turned to gold by the new cold and beginning to fall gently in the hard autumn sunlight, bordered the palace, a bank of color high above the black iron fences with their gilt dragon’s teeth, which seemed to surround any place the Emperor and Empress were to stay the night. More than the Tuileries, this place seemed prepared for some attack—black cruel spikes feathered the walls and entrances.
This palace’s chamberlain stood in wait, with pages in court dress in lines to either side of the entrance. The colors were the same as my own. They took no observable notice of me, though, which was its own kind of notice—if I’d looked wrong, only then would they have glanced at me directly—and then quickly unloaded the carriages and brought us in. I followed the luggage and the other lady’s maids, and left the chamberlain to his observances with the Empress.
The imperial apartments here were more familiar, hung in the same red and gold as the Tuileries, as if we’d taken the trains and cars all this way just to find ourselves back home.
In her dressing room, we waited for her, preparing for her first change from her traveling costume to her riding one; she wanted to go for a ride before the Emperor arrived. A bell rang and we stood quickly while she walked in. The dressing room was circular; an enormous pendant chandelier hung above us radiating an unearthly sparkling light. White silk hangings draped the walls and ceiling so that it was like standing in a tent, if a very well-appointed one. She looked at us expectantly but I hesitated, as no one had briefed me on my duties, mistaking me, perhaps, for the girl who always came. I waited for a moment as she stood there, her arms aloft. The first girl glared at me, an eyebrow raised with contempt, and then made a yanking gesture with her arms.
You are the new girl, said the Empress, quite suddenly. She said it in the same Spanish-accented French that was familiar to me from Pepa.
I nodded, instantly blushing.
This duty, it was once the duty of my ladies-in-waiting. But no longer. Not since Marie Antoinette.
The other girl was blinking quickly, as if whatever the Empress had said had stung her eyes.
You used to dress my dummies at the Tuileries, yes?
I nodded again.
Treat me a little gentler than that. And then she smiled softly.
I hadn’t thought she would speak to us. I imagined us beneath her, not worthy of her conversation. The earlier, nascent affection I’d felt for her budded, and while I let the other girl lead in taking her jewels, which I didn’t know very well, much less how to handle them, I helped her with her riding costume and found her green velvet tricornered riding hat and her coat with the Emperor’s badge for his hunt. I set the hat on her head gently and pinned it into place, careful not to look at her eyes directly all the while.
She left with a quick thank-you, spoken to the walls, and only when she was gone did we relax our postures, at which point the anger in the other girl returned.
How stupid you are, she said. You should have asked someone to tell you your duties. I nodded, as if this were true.