When I entered the antechamber where the Empress sat, her hair waiting for the imperial hairdresser, I hoped I again resembled her mute grisette.
I was late, but as I had never been late before, the Empress was generous if stern, merely raising an eyebrow as I had arrived just in time to help with the removal of the afternoon’s tea gown. Service had not been disturbed. From the face of my former rival, I could see a story of me had been told, but it couldn’t have been too incriminating or it would likewise ruin her fun, and it would have to avoid describing her as the loser—the mute girl was an unconvincing victor, and this would humiliate her.
The Duchesse de Bassano came to complain of the councils again—even to scold. The Empress was neglecting her guests with these long meetings, and guests were offended. All through the palace, these women sat dressed, waiting to be invited, and were not invited, and came to dinner as a group, feeling snubbed. To have tea with the Empress in the afternoon was a great honor, and she was not extending it.
White tulle again for the bodice, I thought, as I set the tea gown gently over my arm. The wrapper came off, and a skirt like sea foam spread out down her crinolines, and I clasped a long white velvet train over the skirt behind her. She added a diamond brooch to her waist, a bracelet of pearls over her sea-foam gloves, and then the Regent again at her neck.
She did not reply to the Duchesse, and instead pulled at her jewel box. She set her fingers on the emerald brooch from the Emperor and turned it where it sat. She held it up, as if to put it on, then set it down again, repeating this quietly as she waited for the hairdresser, her eyes watching the door through her mirror’s reflection.
§
For the recital, I found a hiding place better than the one previous, able to view the piano in part, though not the tenor.
The Princess Metternich welcomed the assembled gathering. This was my first glimpse of her. She looked to me at first like a youth in a gown, her face more the face of a charming boy. The Princess’s eyes were deep set and large so she always appeared intent and serious, but also always a little amused. Her nickname was Cocoa Monkey, I knew from the ladies-in-waiting, and the rumor among the servants was that she was half-caste. To me, she exuded a different kind of chic from the other women of the court for the way her features were already original. She wore a particularly sleek gown of a pale green silk, which made her look even more exotic, her thin shoulders bare and a collar of pearls at her throat. Her hair was worn slicked close to her head and parted severely like a man’s. She appeared distinctly beautiful, while the others appeared only to decorate the room around her. The Princess had none of the seriousness of the Empress and wore her rank the more lightly, as I think she believed in it in a way the Empress did not believe in her own. The Empress seemed as if she could not believe she was Empress until you did. The Empress looked like an actress beside her.
This evening the Princess was full of a barely contained excitement. I arrived as she declared to the gathered crowd that the composer she was introducing was her discovery, found on a night she and the Prince attended the Bal Mabille in secret. They were so taken by the pianist, they sat at a table near the musicians and left more impressed by him than by the dancers. They at once had become his patrons and introduced him to the Empress’s Monday salons.
I was so stunned to think I had danced to his music and never knew that I barely heard her as she gestured to him and then welcomed the tenor to the stage as well, praising him as the greatest living Prussian heldentenor.
She went and stood by the Empress, and they spoke to each other.
I never surrender, the Empress said.
They were rivals for him, or so it seemed—this was all I heard of what she said. I was so full of my new confidence, so certain I belonged right where I was, that I was shocked to see the Princess had noticed me.
Her expression was a steady one; she was not going to interrupt the performance to reprimand me. Instead, she looked at me as if a horse had wandered into the hall, and in commanding it with her eyes, she could get it to return to its stable.
I stepped back three quick steps without turning around; and, content, she returned her attention forward. I quickly made my way into the service hall, walking until I was back in the Empress’s rooms.
§
There I sat and looked at the Empress’s gowns, waiting for her to wear them. In the darkened room, each of them looked as if it were the ghost of the Emperor’s next mistress. I listened to the music, which I could hear faintly. I imagined myself in a gown, black and fantastic, meters of silk and glittering jewels, and the composer leading me across the floor to dance. We were at a ball at least as grand as any the Empress might have here, glowing in the candlelight.
Then the tenor began to sing, to great applause.
And then I began to see myself putting the dresses away, and then the tenor putting them on me for his strange game.
In my bed later, as I tried to sleep, I heard it again, in memory, the slow, meandering footsteps of the piano, of the mazurka that was not quite a mazurka—to me more like a lover’s search of the rooms of a party after it has ended. He wanders, watching for the object of his pursuit. The wildness has spent itself, and now there’s just caution in the step and the insistence of what is felt, almost the sound of footsteps, something in search of what it loves. I wished it were the composer and that he would find me as well, and I heard it until I slept.
Eight
THE WOMAN THE tenor had brought to the spare apartment was an American soprano singer married to a French nobleman and an intimate of the Emperor and Empress.
He had gone from trying to turn his lovers into singers to turning singers into his lovers, I noted.
He told me this as he described the mission that he insisted was the price of his goodwill.
The soprano was to appear in a tableau vivant that evening, to sing onstage in a little salon play written that week by the Prince Metternich. In that tableau, I would take her place as the American Doll, shipped from America. The theme of the play was “exposition,” in honor of the Paris Exposition; it was a charade. The audience of guests and the Emperor and Empress were to try to guess the theme.
I was her height; I was her size. I lacked her fair hair, but mine would be under a wig, my face under a doll-face mask and powdered. She would be with the tenor, enjoying at last the consummation of their affair.
I have not sung all these months, I said to him.
It’s fine, he said. You’re to sing badly. You’re the American Doll, but you’ve been broken in transit.
Now I stood backstage in my wig, mask, and powder, dressed in a traditional Tyrolean peasant costume with a black bodice and a red skirt, both beautifully embroidered, and a Tyrolean hat, a long pheasant feather jauntily rising above me. A large turnkey sat on my back like a metallic single wing. The Princess Metternich was dressed in a coachman’s costume, with a cape, pants, and riding boots, a pipe resting in her mouth. She was busy winding a very wide silk ribbon around me, as if I were a package, tying it finally in a bow. The ribbon parted at my mouth and eyes to allow me to see and breathe.