After some time, I opened an eye. The room was nearly the color of the inside of my eyelid. I knew the sun had set and remembered my lie to the driver, who, if he still waited at the church, was no doubt beginning to wonder how many sins I might confess to and was still likely hoping to be paid. I could see him finally going in to search before driving away, the church door opening as he looked in and closing as he left.
When I did not return, I knew the tenor would go through my rooms for signs—and there he would find my clothes still waiting, the shoes all there except the one pair. He would ask Lucy as to my whereabouts, and she would say I’d gone to confession and that she’d told me to take our driver. He would notice I had not. It was then he might go to see if I had taken any money and my jewels.
I had left the money. I wanted him to imagine I was still preparing to leave, not that I had left.
Whether he believed this or not, today was the beginning of all the tenor would never forgive, and if there was the slightest chance he learned I was still alive, it would mean our deaths unless we left now.
Wake up, I said.
He rolled to the side, his beautiful face smiling at me as his eyes blinked open and he kissed me.
Have you finished our plan of escape? I asked. For we should leave, and soon.
He laughed. Ah, he said. Yes. Where are we going?
London, I said. Or if not there, perhaps Leipzig.
I see, he said. And how will we eat?
I reached out to my dress and withdrew one of the little bags, this one with my earrings and the rose pin, which I dropped on his stomach. Bijoux, I said.
He pulled it open and held one of the earrings up to his eye. You have also been a baroness of some kind, it seems, he said.
Gifts from admirers, I said, and shrugged. You may know of this tradition.
I once played with the Conservatoire orchestra for a very rich baroness, he said. She had been trained to sing and wanted to have a concert with a soprano friend of hers. She hired the entire orchestra of the Conservatoire and brought them into her vast ballroom, where we played accompaniment to the two women for more than three hours.
Were they talented? I asked.
The friend had some talent, he said. We laughed.
We were rented for less than the cost of their bracelets. Our director asked the one with talent if she gave concerts, and she said her family would be scandalized if she took to the stage. She laughed at the idea.
He sat up and looked off into the garden, brushing his fingers across his moustache.
I had a fantasy of barricading the room to make them listen to us instead and to take, for our pay, everything they wore, he said. Leave them naked, tied to the chandelier. And the baroness, she liked me. He winked. Instead, we took our pay and drank. I have lived on the generosity of women with bracelets that could pay for a room full of men like me. But this is not how I wish to live with you.
He set the bag back on my thigh and sat up to push back my hair.
You may notice, we are surrounded by Communards who would shoot us as deserters, he said. And should we escape them, Germans who may shoot us as spies. And then, apart from the patriots, the siege takers, and the partisans, there are the ordinary thieves who would kill us just for one of these. He pointed at the bag.
I must leave, I said. I must leave him, and Paris, and he must not know where I go, and you must come with me.
So it’s like that, he said. I had wondered. This was your first stop.
I said nothing.
I’ve just only found you again, he said. I am not ready to lose you or to die as quickly as that. But we should not go now. He touched the little bag with a finger. But don’t go back. Does he know you’re here?
No, I said. Well, he may. I left no evidence of a next address. But he is clever.
Stay here then, he said. We will be safe here until it is safe to leave.
You don’t know him, I said. He’ll find us if we stay in Paris. And then he’ll kill us both.
You don’t know me, Aristafeo said, smiling, and he kissed me again. I keep the dogs a little hungry for a good reason. He may try to kill us. But he’ll die first. And if not, then at least I’ll be sure we’ll all die together.
This silenced me.
I won’t let him have you, he said.
I only nodded.
He helped me dress again, laughing at all of the strings and undergarments, but he was very able at it all the same, and it was then I looked around at his surroundings.
A few touches seemed to be entirely his, like a walking stick by the bed, topped by a silver fox head. The rest was a bland elegance: In his study there was a golden velvet couch and a Persian rug in red, blue, and white. A dark walnut chair with legs like corkscrews and dark leather upholstery sat by an old desk painted black wood with gold leaf. A sword on the wall and a musket.
I felt myself looking for a sign that the Empress had been here, but I could not see it.
Welcome to your new home, he said.
With that, he leaned in and kissed my head once more, and whispered, as if he’d guessed at what I suspected, She was never here.
§
In those first days I was anxious; I stayed inside as much as possible, and when I went out, I wore kerchiefs to shadow my face. I did not know the tenor’s regular path through the city; I did not know where to expect him. I did not even know which markets Lucy attended, which butcher and so on, but I knew enough to know they would not come to the Marais for goods. I knew to avoid my little perch at the Opera, but this no longer mattered as it once had.
And while thoughts of the market and seeing Lucy or Doro sometimes gave me pangs of missing them, the moment I understood that one of them had betrayed me to the tenor on Aristafeo’s visits meant that among their tasks was spying on me, and the memory of my affections for them now humiliated me instead.
I would spare you such trips, Aristafeo said. I assured him I would do my best to help him with whatever errands could still be attended to as I didn’t want to stay only in the house. This was another Paris I was meeting there in the Marais, one without the tenor, and I began to enjoy the city in my newest disguise in some way I never had before.
Soon enough, there was less and less need of going to the markets for there were only long lines in the cold for what little was there.
Is it time to leave? I would ask him every so often.
No, not yet, he would say each time.
By December, the food crisis in Paris was in extremis. The cold at least kept the smell of the garbage down, and there was less garbage also, and what there was had less and less in it that would rot.
The Third Republic had proved no more effective at ending the Siege and fighting the Prussians than the Second Empire, though, of course, I wanted to know only when we could eat again. As winter started, the hunger became unbearable, and now there was also a need for wood for fires. I sometimes longed for my dresses, but the last dresses made in Paris would bag on me where once they had fit perfectly. I could no longer wear them even if I could retrieve them, for fear of appearing a woman of means. I instead contented myself with my one dress and took hat pins and pinned it for some time so it fit until I became too thin, and then I let it hang loose so people would not stare.
To eat, I went to the Bois with Aristafeo and the Lords of the Lower Gardens, and watched them as they hunted for animals while I collected chestnuts for roasting later. Soon I also gathered the leaves, and sometimes pieces of bark, to make soup. I did this until the trees were all bare, stripped from root to just above where the tallest man could reach.
The walking stick was for disciplining Gaston and Frédéric. Aristafeo let them range over the Bois, where as late as November they found rabbits and rats and sometimes a cat. We let them eat first, and then they would hunt for us.
To be so hungry again, hungrier than I’d ever known as winter began, I felt with certainty that my death was coming for me; soon I’d be reunited with my family, called before the Lord; for all of my sins, my lies, my selfishness, and my lust, now I would finally be caught.
And each time I arrived at this conclusion, I put it out of my head until it became a trail I walked regularly in my thoughts, from waking to the hunger, from the remembering to the forgetting.