We ran.
We ran until the streets were quiet again, away from the fighting, and soon found ourselves at the Jardin des Plantes. Aristafeo made to enter, and I questioned him, and so he explained. The zoo animals had all been eaten or died. No one would search there. The soldiers would go through the wealthy homes around the palace first, even into the palace itself, looting for valuables or food or both, killing as they went. No one would bother to search an empty zoo.
In we went. A few surviving monkeys still lived in the monkey cage. No Paris butcher had managed to defeat them. They shrieked defiance as we passed.
§
We did not speak of death. We did not speak of the secret chamber, the Empress’s bracelets, or my little gift. We did not speak of the strange guns of the Versaillais.
Instead, we lay together in the back chamber of the lions’ cage. It was larger and cleaner than the elephants’, and fit us, lions being of an approximate size.
Tell me a story, he said finally. Anything. Tell me the story of your escapes. I want to hear everything you have escaped from.
I told him of my family’s death, my time in the cirque, and how I had tried and failed to get to Lucerne. Of the Majeurs-Plaisirs and learning to beat men as if they were horses, as if I were racing them to their satisfactions. I told him of the secret of the scratched looking glass, of the long chamber for spying on the secrets of men, of learning to sing my first aria, “Regnava nel silenzio” from Lucia.
This is quite a beautiful aria, he said. Will you sing it for me?
Softly, I sang it as he lay against my chest, his hands tangled in my hair.
I told him still more—of my escape from prison into the convent, and my service to the Empress and the Comtesse; of my capture at Compiègne and my performance as a doll; of my being made to return to the tenor and my study at Baden-Baden.
As I came to the end of my stories, Aristafeo had fallen asleep. In the dark I saw again the tenor as he sat up in the box of the illusion theater with his look of intent surprise, ignoring the angry Euphrosyne. I wondered when he had decided it was time for me to die along with the rest. If he had decided this earlier, say, before he vanished. Or if it was later, when he knew I was with Aristafeo.
Or earlier, when he had taken me back from the Comtesse.
All his little notes, the dance of it all. And then it didn’t matter; he didn’t matter. He couldn’t matter, not now.
§
When we became hungry, I remembered the ham, and we cut off a piece each and ate.
Our shoes were black with blood.
Night had fallen but there was still light from the fires. We climbed to the top of the zoo to see where the fires were and if we should leave, and so from the roof, we watched as Paris burned.
§
In the morning we woke to find the neighborhood had been barricaded and occupied by the Commune, but still no one had searched the institutes and the zoo. Periodically, we heard the screams of fighting, and then, after two days, an enormous explosion rocked the palace.
We cannot stay, Aristafeo said to me, as the noise ended.
We stay until there’s no ham, I said. And then we leave.
§
Our monkey neighbors awakened us. Their screams of defiance, I guessed, meant new visitors.
I shook Aristafeo awake, my hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t say a word.
As the soldiers shot at the monkeys, we left, slipping into the nearest of the greenhouses. We made our way through the silent rows of plants under the vast pleated glass-and-metal roof until we were in the street. We went first to the Luxembourg Gardens, thinking to hide there next, but instead we found the fountains and gardens full of thousands of bodies, all Communards, newly dead. The grass was soaked in their blood. So many had died, the Versaillais likely needed more room for the dead, and so this was why they had turned their attention to the zoo.
We did not dare speak and fled silently until we reached the Seine, pausing only when we were down under one of the bridges.
What are we to do here? I asked him, as he waved at me to go no farther.
Aristafeo smiled at me then.
Why are you smiling? I asked.
What can you not escape? he asked.
Paris, I nearly said, and then Fate, and then the tenor—in the end I said none of these for back then I took more seriously the idea I might curse myself. Instead, I said what a lover would say.
I hope it’s you.
It was then I saw it, the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, up on the quai. It had gotten loose somehow, or the rider had died, it didn’t matter—and no one had shot it yet for steaks and pies. It was most likely the mount of some dead Versaillais—the only well-fed horses in Paris were coming into the city with them.