Have you kept to our agreement? she then asked.
I stayed with him as long as he wanted me, I said. And even a little longer than that.
I wonder if that was the agreement, she said. Perhaps it will suffice. How will you repay me for this humiliation, I wonder. She reached out then and pinched one of the candles out. I will think on it, she said. She pinched out the next, and the darkness around her said our interview was done. There would be no tea.
Show her out, she said to her girl, and I was shown out.
She had not been my tormentor then, but now it seemed she would be, one last time.
Two
AFTER THE SPECTACLE of my failure with the Comtesse, I did not want to be alone in the apartment with my fears, and so I pushed myself out into the whirl of dinners and balls and midnight drinks and nights ending in breakfasts, supplied as I was with my Dukes’ Bargain of gowns.
As I did, the press began its chorus—I was a favorite of theirs after the news of my curse, the scandal of the second grand entrance in the new dress, the brother dukes on each arm. The press now made reports of daily fittings with the new dressmaker, Félix, the new silhouette he introduced with me, and where I wore each new dress in its turn, from the Louvre Palace to the Café de Paris to the markets at Les Halles. No detail was too small. Doro cut out the illustrations as they appeared in the papers and pinned them to the mirror, little paper dolls of me running around the edge of my reflection. She glued them to matchsticks and made them run in puppet shows by my makeup table to make me laugh after she and Lucy had strung me in.
You’re terrible, wicked women, I said to them, cursing them, for it hurt to laugh in a corset, but soon the joke we had, if the dress was awful, was Best get the dukes.
And just when it was said to be over, the next scandal came: the dukes had their choice of women after all of this, and by the end of that month, the dressmaker Félix was likewise overrun, but a disappointment awaited the women the brothers entertained after me as the dukes’ promise to me included that none of the women to follow me were to be allowed the gift of a dress from that house for one month. The dukes’ new loves could be allowed any other dressmaker except mine.
With that came a new illustration of me, running down the street again on a horse, but this time the shapes falling from my dress were the shapes of these other women springing up to chase after me in fury.
While this amused me, it was time for me to protect myself from these follies: I needed to find some way to attach myself to the tenor again—at least in appearance, publicly, and in a way that would appease the Comtesse—and then to prepare for the ball Euphrosyne was to throw for me and, lastly, to repair my relationship with Verdi. The question of who, if not the Comtesse, was behind the novel and the opera was now too much to consider—or too little. There was too much else to do, and so I set myself to the tasks I understood. The plans for the ball were the most pleasant of these and thus the most urgent. And as I’d never sung the Queen of the Night aria Euphrosyne had asked me for, as it was outside my Fach, I would need to prepare it very carefully.
Euphrosyne wrote to me with her plans for the ball and made an appointment with me to attend my fitting at Worth for our costumes. Worth, who, she said, was contrite at my displeasure with his last offering.
He really is so very sorry and has said he will make you a magnificent costume, she said. He has vowed it.
In the meantime, proof arrived daily that I’d been a fool to think the news of the curse meant the end of my career. Doro no longer brought my mail in on my tray as there was too much. I was besieged. Offers arrived as never before.
I should always be cursed, I joked to Doro, who did not approve.
Despite failing to find anything more to my mystery opera than what had presented itself, I now only waited. The result was that the season itself became something of a masked ball, the masks, the faces of the people I met everywhere I went. Is it you? I’d wonder each time a stranger pulled out a chair, or offered a light, or refilled a glass, or smiled in greeting as he was introduced. Is it you? It became a light refrain as I passed through crowds potentially as full and as empty of an answer.
And so I went through the days between that Sénat Bal and the one Euphrosyne threw for me, dress by dress, rehearsal by rehearsal, detail by detail, night by night, holding on at least to the hope of the ball, not quite knowing what was real, what was phantasm, each day still empty of an answer to what had filled it the weeks previous, until one week before the ball when amid the day’s offers one distinguished itself. The solution I’d been waiting for arrived, the answer to all my troubles.
The offer of the role of Carmen at the Opéra-Comique, with the tenor as Don José.
This, to be sure, was an unlikely savior. If there was one opera I had never wanted to perform, it was Carmen.
I had known Bizet a little from my time at the Conservatoire, which had finally admitted me on my return to Paris after the war. Pauline wrote to my old address, searching for me, with the news that she had been asked to return to Paris as director of the Conservatoire. If the letter found me and I lived, she asked me to return and work with her, though an audition was required.
I did not write back but instead left at once and went to her house as my answer, where she threw her arms around me, and we hugged each other and wept, grateful to be alive and reunited.
While I had initially feared living in the avenue de l’Opéra apartment again, I knew if I had not returned to the apartment, I might never have been thus blessed. The Prince had spared no expense; beyond the falcon statue, I took note of how the walls had been repainted, the music room now red, the very finest new piano waiting to be played. The walls to the boudoir gleamed curiously to me until I understood they were covered in pressed leather embossed with falcons. As I ran my hands over their wings, I knew I would always keep it.
The concierge told me Doro and Lucy had asked her to tell them if I returned and to say they would return if I agreed, and I did. Over cards and gin, they told me of their own escapes from the vagaries of the war—Doro had hidden with her family outside Rouen, and Lucy spoke vaguely of a hospital for the wounded—she hid something there, but I did not ask. Instead, I tried to remember how to play bezique and then finally set my cards down, and said, Promise me from this day forward you spy only for me.
At which they started, then smiled, then swore to on the cards we played with, as if they were our Bible.
I passed my second Conservatoire audition easily this time, nearly pro forma—the jury would not rule against Pauline. This education was not the same as her private instruction, however, and the work overwhelmed me initially. Music pronunciation, vocal techniques such as bel canto and coloratura, yes, these I’d expected, but not music history or theory. There had been a kindness in that earlier rejection I had not understood, and so there was a tinge of cruelty to my education now, which then proceeded with the difficulties I’m sure that earlier jury had imagined.
The other students could see I was not properly prepared, and they resented my prior relationship to Pauline, though she showed me no other favors except occasional affection, but this was more than she showed them, enough for them to hate me.
My name here was soon La Donnée, the Gifted One.