“I’m not sure why, but I didn’t imagine there would be so many well-dressed people here,” I said to Julien as we got on the end of the line.
“Pawning is practically a national pastime. Victor Hugo used to come here when he was short of cash. Auguste Rodin often had to hock his tools. Artists and musicians and writers are frequently in and out of trouble and visit their ‘aunt’ for help. There are stories of women who bring their mattresses in the morning, use the money to buy potatoes in bulk in the market, proceed to sell them for a profit, and come back at the end of the day to redeem their mattresses and start the whole process again the next week.”
The line snaked from the street, through a large stone courtyard and into the building itself. Half of Paris must have been there that day. I saw women wearing large hats and elaborate costumes walk in with jewels and exit without them. A fancy gentleman carried a violin case. An old woman, an ornate and ugly painting. A couple struggled with an oversize garish gold clock. The courtyard teemed with activity as those on line talked to others behind and in front of them, and a street vendor hawked roasted chestnuts.
The man behind us had a rococo chair that he kept picking up, moving, and then putting down again as the line progressed. Behind him, an elderly couple each lugged a sack of books. The man in front of us pulled a large Louis Vuitton trunk on a trolley. It was the same luggage my grandmother used, and I felt a pang of remorse that I was here without her knowledge. But my excitement was enough to dispel it. The whole of the Paris art world waited for me.
Inside we finally sat down at a worn wooden desk opposite a dour-faced bureaucrat who eyed my offering, carefully examining the frog with a jeweler’s loupe.
The sum he offered was adequate, but not what I’d hoped for.
“Can you give us any more?” I asked.
His eyes lighted on my necklace.
“That should bring in quite a bit more. If those are real, they are very large rubies.”
I put my hand up to my throat and touched the rosettes. Why not? I would be able to come back and retrieve all these things as soon as I figured out how to get some of my money from my father’s banker in New York.
Reaching behind my neck, I tried to open the clasp to the necklace, but the mechanism wouldn’t release. I tried again, but it didn’t budge. The stones felt warmer, almost as if they were heating up as I touched them. Almost as if I might get burned.
“Julien? Can you help me?” I turned to him.
“There seems to be something wrong with the clasp. I can’t get it open.”
“What’s going on there? We are waiting—you can get undressed at home,” a man behind us shouted.
Raucous laughter.
“Is there a holdup? They’re closing soon, and we all want our money,” a woman said.
“It’s all right,” I told Julien. “This will be enough for a while, and we can always come back.”
As the bureaucrat wrote out the slip we were to take to the cashier, my fingers worked the clasp. I no longer was intent on pawning it, but it seemed odd that it was stuck.
Back in a carriage on our way to a clothing store, my fingers crept to my neck again, and this time I unlocked the necklace without any trouble at all. My neck felt suddenly bare and exposed, and I reclasped it. But the mystery remained. Neither of us had been able to unlock it while we were inside the Crédit Municipal. And now it was incredibly easy. How was that possible?
Chapter 11
With the count being in town for an extended stay, my grandmother’s days and nights were busy and preoccupied. The next morning, when she invited me to her room for our usual pot of chocolate, I walked into a flurry of activity. As the maid did up Grand-mère’s hair, she gave the housekeeper instructions for that evening’s salon.
“Caviar . . . there must be enough caviar. And oysters. The count loves oysters. Do we have enough champagne?”
I had been concerned about what kind of excuse to make up for my going out without her that day, and had concocted a lie about a friend of mine from New York being in Paris. But before I had a chance to offer it up, my grandmother made her apologies for not being able to spend the day with me.
“I need to visit the dressmaker and the hairdresser and then meet the count at Cartier.” She was looking at me in the mirror, not facing me directly. “He wants to buy me an anniversary gift.” She smiled, and her fire opal eyes lit up.
“How exciting. Do you know what it’s going to be?”
“He said it is to be something of my choosing.” The maid pulled Grand-mère’s hair too tight, and for a moment the smile left her face. “Alice, do be careful.” Her eyes returned to mine. “I wish you would let me put some makeup on you and bring out the warm tones in your hair and the red in your lips. You’re so pale, Sandrine.” And with that she applied another dusting of powder to her own face. “What will you do to keep yourself occupied today?”
I told her about my made-up friend.
“Oh, wonderful. Will she be in Paris long?”
“Quite long, I think. Perhaps the whole winter.”
“You’ll have to bring her around for tea.”
“I will, of course,” I said, hoping that my grandmother would be too busy with the count to remember about the invitation.
“What is her name?”
“Eloise Bedford.” I named one of the girls I’d gone to finishing school with.
“Is her family French?”
“No. Her father works for the government and has been posted here.” I assumed that would keep Eloise and her family off Grand-mère’s invitation list. She found government officials boring and preferred filling her salon with artists, writers, musicians, and dilettantes.
“Government men don’t make good lovers,” she said. “They are too obsessed with proving their power, and too often they prove it with force. I pity Madame Bedford.”
Two hours later I was looking at myself in a very different mirror in one of the fantasy boudoirs in the Maison de la Lune.
Julien had left me alone to undress. I’d taken off all my clothes and removed the ruby necklace. But I felt strange without it around my neck. Diminished somehow, and even though it was impossible, weaker and less capable, as if it were some ancient talisman created to give me strength and power.
I put it back on, covering it up first with undergarments and then a shirt and finally the cravat I’d bought the day before. I finished dressing just as Julien knocked on the door.
“Are you decent?” he asked.
“Yes, come in,” I said as I slipped on a black suit jacket, “and meet the newest applicant to école des Beaux-Arts.”
Julien stood on the threshold and examined me in the mirror. For a few moments he didn’t say a word but just stared. I watched him trying to make sense of the illusion that stood before him.
It was difficult even for me. Not only did I look different, but I felt different, too. These clothes were unlike anything I’d ever worn. The fabrics were heavier and rougher than my frocks, but from the first step I took in the pants, I adored the freedom the masculine garb allowed. There was also another benefit to my costume, a comforting one: if Benjamin did manage to trace me to Paris, dressed like this, I’d be that much more difficult to spot.
“I don’t know what I’m seeing. Or not seeing,” Julien said. “You aren’t there.”