Mon général, I heard someone say, and a hand shook me awake. Pardon.
I opened my eyes to the darkness of the mask. I remembered I’d arrived to find the station closed and hid here behind the railing when I heard a rider on a horse. I’d only meant to rest for a moment, but instead I had slept.
For how long? I wondered, as the station clerk tugged at me.
Wake up and buy a ticket, and I will not call for the police, he said, and laughed.
I stood shakily and tried to move the mask’s mouth to at least see him, but then I heard his keys in the lock. I muttered a thank–you and steadied myself as he went in and closed the door.
I took off the mask. My hair was stuck to my throat and ears, waxy and damp. I pulled it out to my shoulders to dry and, anxious to find another spot to hide in until the train came, I walked down the platform. Vapor rose off me like smoke in the new cold.
A young family arrived, a husband and wife, with two daughters and a son. Their youngest, the son, noticed me and waved as their carriage was unpacked. His mother pulled him away, cutting her eyes from me in disgust. She was, perhaps, a few years older than I was, dressed in a new traveling dress and coat, a fine hat and gloves, new leather shoes. She was my dream of me as I was to have been on the day I headed to Lucerne, but made real, and I watched her as the door closed behind her.
And, as if mocking me, another like her, and another, and another all arrived to take the next train wherever it was going.
In the dawn light of the Compiègne station, my dreams of arriving in Lucerne played before me. In them, it was always morning. I drank a rich coffee in the dining car, and the sun beat brightly through the window like a whip. I wore a beautiful dress, my hair braided carefully, and smiled as the train passed over the canals filled with swans, the one thing I knew of Lucerne. The rooftops glowed dark red in the early morning sunlight, and the streets to my aunt’s house were clean and quiet. I would knock on the door to her large respectable town house, a house that looked as if nothing could ever bring it low, and be recognized, embraced, welcomed inside. I would finally meet my mother’s sister and discover if she is like her in any way—in the face, her smile, a gesture, her scent. I would be fed, given a beautiful room, beautiful clothes, a beautiful life with everything I wanted to eat, and I would rest at last in the love of my family. I would find it all had just been waiting for me here to come and pick it up.
I reached into my pockets to be sure the napoleons Pepa paid me hadn’t been taken from me as I slept. As I did, I took in my boots. My pants, my coat.
My costume saber.
In the window by the door, I saw my reflection. The young woman in a general’s coat, as if I were a favorite cantinière he’d left his coat with to keep her warm. The coat suited me, but to go like this meant I would not arrive in a beautiful dress. It would not be morning. There would be no coffee for me in the dining car, not dressed like this. I would arrive like a refugee from some mysterious war—one concluded by a masked ball from which I’d escaped.
I tried to judge what I thought a toilette like the young mother’s would cost. The clothes I was accustomed to up until now either cost much less—a grisette’s dress—or so much more. If I needed more than I had, I could go to a junk peddler in town to sell the costume and the mask to him. But it seemed to me he might know these things had come from the palace theater. He might even have sold them to the costumer. And then I might not be able to afford the ticket as well.
I stepped down to the street as if to go to do this and then did not, waiting instead.
I needed one last disguise. One last disguise when I did not want even one more.
I imagined myself then, sitting before this aunt I had never met, dressed in the dress I would have to buy to make my way to her, and giving the news of my mother’s death—and that of my family. And the very next question she would ask me.
However did you get here?
And I would look at her and see my mother’s coffin, the dirt shining by her grave. The farmhouse burning in the night, the blood on my skirts, the horses as I sold them. The face of the widower farmer and the graveyard on the hill. The tents of the Cajun Maidens, the cheering crowds, the lights in Flambeau’s hair, Ernesto as he picked me up off the horse and set me down. The Emperor and his ruby gift to me, his hand opening like a magician. The Cirque Napoléon, Euphrosyne, Odile, the Bal Mabille. The nights at the Majeurs-Plaisirs, the tenor, the Garnier, the Conservatoire. La Muette. The Comtesse and the Empress. My composer . . .
The palace garden at night.
La poupée a été probablement dérangée pendant le voyage.
Indeed she was.
To leave for Lucerne that day was to leave it all, and all of this would have to hide inside me as I told my aunt a story that I’d sold the farm and that a young, unmarried, unaccompanied girl had traveled to her, virtue intact, through the terrors between the farm and Lucerne. She would nod and smile, most likely not believing me, but accepting the story and me. And so I would be able to remain with her until she found me a man willing to marry her foreign-born orphan niece, sitting before her in the dress she likely would have stolen to get there.
The strange one, who sometimes smelled of a cigar. Hidden in her last disguise forever.
To do this felt like death. All the rest I could do except this.
I laughed and then stopped.
As I stood there, I burned like something thrown off a falling star, as if I’d crashed to earth still surrounded by the fire of the passage. The memory of the bright palace in the night behind me haunted me, as did the memory of the composer leaping down from the air above my head. I could still feel his hand at my face. I was at the edge of the victory I’d long sought over my circumstances and fate, the correction I was so certain I needed. And yet I was also at the edge of something else, something I could only see now. Where once I’d hoped to be made pure again, to be forgiven, returned to the state I existed in before the death of my family, I now longed to be loved in a way that would be a triumph over death and misfortune, over all that had been forbidden to me and all that had been taken from me.
I had escaped from a masked ball, one the size of the world strung between the farm and here, and I was proud to have come this far, proud enough to want a hero’s welcome, and in my costume uniform, no less. I saw myself tumbling and falling through the air, in and out of disguises, on and off horses, leaping, singing, changing as I became whomever I had to be next to be here. And the hesitation I felt now was nothing like that morning in Paris when I’d only wanted to keep the one most beautiful thing I’d ever earned. I hesitated now because what I could see, here by the station, was that this trip was a mistake. There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.
On the day I had myself arrested to escape the tenor, the day I hid myself in the clothes and future of La Muette, it was not to protect this dream of going to Lucerne so I could live on as some imitation of someone I’d never been. I’d wanted the dignity of a fate unencumbered by the tenor’s obsession, and whatever this could bring me—to learn to sing again, somewhere else, under some other, better teacher. And I still wanted this, but I was remembering this only now, for I had confused myself with my disguise.
I wanted to return to Paris. I wanted to study voice. I wanted a life, a destiny free of the tenor. I wanted my beautiful composer, who I was sure I could find again at the Bal Mabille.
I would begin at once. And thus resolved, I went inside.