Each writer, even each form of opera, uses Fate differently. Usually an opéra bouffe ends with forgiveness. Offenbach’s Fate was a kindly if canny grandmother with a pragmatist’s eye for the main chance. Verdi’s Fate was a punisher—a Fury.
I thought next of the Prince Metternich and his play at Compiègne. The sort of drama I was involved in, this was how he passed his days. La poupée a été probablement dérangée pendant le voyage. The story was in some ways a grand elaboration of the broken American doll at the Paris Exposition Universelle, singing to the crowned heads of Europe in a disguise within a disguise. Had the Prince Metternich written the role for me in his salon play at Compiègne or was it for the tenor’s American soprano, a taunt aimed at one or both of us?
If this was his work, Simonet treated Fate as a punishment, a lover’s revenge. This rose the singer cannot take off, the flower that always returns to her, I had left that rose for my beloved in a room Simonet seemed to have no knowledge of. I had left it as a taunt for my love, a last insult in a ridiculous argument, not knowing it would be my final word to him. The novel, with its foolishness about faeries and spells and love for the Emperor, read almost like the same taunt thrown back to me. Was Simonet’s secret, then, my composer sitting by his side, dictating the story to him, his angel wings wrapped closely about him?
Still so angry at me, even in death. Still in that room.
I still believed a mortal to be behind the novel and the opera, but whereas before I had excluded my love’s ghost, I no longer did so entirely.
It is at last time to tell you the story of the rose and the room.
Four
IN THE FIRST month of the Siege, it was said the Germans were going to empty all of our pétrole supplies into the river and set the Seine on fire.
In fact, it would be Parisians who set Paris on fire, almost a year later, but not one of us would have believed it then. After I heard of this plan, whenever I saw the Seine I imagined it aflame, a river of smoke in the air above it.
I saw an advertisement on the street, a poster: AMAZONES DE LA SEINE! A woman in a black hood and cap peered proudly down out of it, dressed in black-and-orange–striped pants, a rifle slung over her shoulder. A man was passing out broadsides and handed one to me. It was a call for a corps of women soldiers to defend Paris, asking for volunteers to train and serve in the National Guard. They were to carry needles filled with prussic acid and had only to reach out, if their honor was threatened, to prick the offender and watch him die.
It asked the women of Paris to donate their jewels to the effort. A hundred thousand women were to be armed this way.
I was not yet starving; it was easy to be defiant. I imagined going to my Prussian tenor armed this way, his opening the door to me, my face hooded as I reached out. I would stand over him as he fell and died, turning blue from the poison. Prussian blue. I would walk away, free at last, forever.
But, of course, this is not what I did, and he was not the man I would leave for dead.
This also I would not have believed.
On my last night at Nohant, Sand had urged Pauline to sing a favorite song of hers, “Que Quieres, Panchito.” As I watched Pauline sing her song, and Sand looked on, enraptured, the sense of how I would be leaving the next day and what it might mean stole over me.
The grand house and its inhabitants, from these great ladies before me to their lovers and children to their children’s lovers and children, all of it would be gone. I would vanish into whatever strange future the tenor had planned for me.
As I came to the end of my time with these women and their families, I was aware, too, that I had no family of my own; would I ever? I somehow had been spared both marriage and children thus far, mostly as a condition of my class, but not entirely. I had been spared worse, as well—the clap, tuberculosis, smallpox, wasting—and till now, I had given it little thought. Your health, when you have it, is invisible to you. I only thought of myself as lucky and that this was my only luck. But was I lucky? Or did I have a spiteful womb, as Euphrosyne had once said of her own? Or was it the horseback riding, as Odile had once suggested playfully, or something else altogether? At the Majeurs-Plaisirs, I had taken the teas Odile supplied, cleaned myself as directed; I had gone to my required doctor’s visits, and none of the familiar misfortunes associated with my former livelihood had come to pass, as near a miracle in my life as anything.