Whatever you ask of us, whatever we can provide, we are at your disposal, the first said.
As we made our way out through the back of the garden to their carriage, the jacket of one of them on my shoulders, the jacket of the other at my waist, I knew what they could provide and handed them my other dressmaker’s card.
Félix was in his evening suit when I arrived. He was about to set off for the ball himself—he’d been busy dressing clients and was only just now ready. He threw open the door and pulled us in.
My dears, what possible errand could you be on? he asked, smiling in greeting first at me and then at the young dukes.
Yes, it seemed, the dressmakers of Paris would know them quite well. I walked to Félix’s ledger, took his pen from his stand, and wrote:
These good gentlemen have said they will do anything I ask of them tonight. Let us help them keep their word.
I had Félix’s assistants box up the ruined dress and send it back to Worth, including a note that said only Pas comme ?a.
I made my second entrance to the ball in a beaded black silk satin gown, the train behind me like the glittering tail of a serpent. The dukes were on each arm. As we were announced together, the crowd turned and, at the sight of us, roared with delight. The dinner had been served, so many stood on their chairs to see us as I descended again to the garden to enter under a roof of crossed swords made for us by officers who had served in the army with the dukes. As we made our way off the terrace again, I looked to the balcony the writer had indicated to see the men there watching me, their faces changing as they took in what had happened, and then I heard the cheers in the garden and the laughing as the men saluted me.
This was the entrance I deserved. This was what I wanted this composer to see. I had returned for this.
I took a breath. O Dieu! Que de bijoux! The opening words to the Jewel Song aria from Faust rang out across the garden. There was a shocked silence, and then the orchestra quickly joined in.
This was the song Marguerite sang after being presented with the demon’s gift of jewels meant to seduce her into a life of sin. The chaste girl is transformed at once into a woman in love with her beauty, a beauty the jewels reveal to her. It begins and ends in classic soprano entrance style, on long, clear, high notes, as if Gounod knew it should be sung in a palace garden at a Paris ball at night.
I sang it as a gift to the audience, to the composer, to me. I sang it as a taunt to the Fates, too. I was weary of my fears as well as my desires, and so I sang it in simple defiance of all of it, even defying myself. I covered the night and its secrets and regrets in coloratura cavatina, until all that could be remembered was me.
La Générale! the crowd shouted as I finished and came down the stairs, and I lifted both my hands into the air to the crowd, smiling. I could feel the applause beat against my skin as it echoed and grew. A woman screamed as her dress swept the candles on her table and caught fire as she stood on her chair to see me. She was rushed to the fountain, where it was put out, and even this was cheered. The group of officers who had roofed my entrance with their swords then knelt, offering them to me, and the crowd changed from shouting my name to laughter as I took one and mock-knighted them all. La Générale! La Générale!
The fear, the feeling of the mad scene, the sense of a trap in wait, even the feeling of destiny, all faded into the applause. I looked afterward for the writer to see if I might finally meet the composer, but as in a fairy tale, he was gone.
§
My maid Doro waited until the afternoon and then came and pulled the shutters in my bedroom open.
I had lain awake in my bed for some time, which was unlike me. I had not slept well. The strange amber twilight I’d lived with was gone, and in its place was some terrible new brightness. I’d gone from feeling lost in a dream to lost in wakefulness, as if I might never sleep again.
No more gaslights as I dress, candles only, I said to Doro.
Of course, she said, and tied back my drapes.
Gaslight is a liar, I said. She smiled as she stepped back. On second thought, gaslight and then a last check by candlelight, I said. My dresses must look good in both. Last night’s dress was a foul betrayer. Candles would have caught it out.
Perhaps it only gave its life to make room for the ones to come, she said, and hung the new gown away with a faint smile.
As she walked past, I saw the morning’s papers on my tray with my coffee. Between them and the new dress she had not put on me, she likely knew the story. She asked no questions, though, as ever.
I stood; she put on my dressing robe and left me to my coffee by my window. The alley was unchanged. But here, within the robe, I felt myself to be an imposter in my own life.
I was unnerved after I’d been unable to find my new friend and his composer, and had even withdrawn his card again to prove to myself the conversation had been real. I went again to my wallet and withdrew it once more. Frédéric Simonet, it read, and with that address, the letters like a fracture, the faintest of cracks along this life of mine.
He had not lied. The Marais house was indeed his.
Of all the accolades heaped at my feet, the one I lacked for was the honor of originating a role, a part written precisely for my voice. This was the opportunity with the power still to entrance me. I could not turn away lightly. For a singer, this was your only immortality. All the rest would pass.
But this story was somehow of my life—and to immortalize it, this was not in me to do.
I went to my closet and touched the new dress, hung there just now.
A singer learned her roles for life—your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed. Though when you put them on, it was then you were the something worn—these old tragedies took you over.
Here was my old tragedy, then. Waiting, held open, as if the writer had come to me with my old costume, asking me to put it on.
Had there been even one poster left somewhere, still on the side of a wall, peeling away? The Settler’s Daughter had been my first role. I did not know how to be her again, the girl who sang her way over the sea with a single hope in her heart, abandoned here—abandoned, in fact, the morning after she took the Emperor’s favor from his hand. To be her again or, really, perform as this odd shadow of her? This was too much.
The life I led now I’d made so I would never be her again. I’d never wanted to be reminded of her and her struggles again. And yet I knew I had always been her; I still was her. I had come back to Paris once again with one hope in my heart, sure of my moment of destiny, and had been given this, the past I’d hoped to forget, asking to be my future.
An earlier suspicion returned then, renewed, something odd in Simonet’s story I could not forget. He had mentioned a chapel, and there was no chapel that I remembered. The other details he’d mentioned were so close to my life, this alone of all of it seemed a lie, even a clue. Less like the work of Fate, then, and more like an imitation of Fate. A plot.
That little ruby flower, I knew the reason I had left that flower behind. I knew just where I had left it, the exact room of the house. It was no chapel. To be recognized from my song that day at the Exposition Universelle, this alone did not bother me. The one secret that mattered to me could be said to be there in the Marais with Simonet.
Whatever this was, it had come from that room.
Two
THE NEXT EVENING, after my performance, I washed the maquillage from my face, exchanged my Marguerite prisoner cap for the wig I wore as a disguise, and easily passed by the men waiting outside the theater, fogging the streets with their hundred kinds of tobacco smoke. I arrived to my dinner with the Verdis that night determined to get an answer on the question of the protégé.