The aria demands tremendous delicacy and range—she is grieving, raging at her fate, in love, ultimately despairing of all hope, unaware she is in terrible danger until she wakes to her rescue, exultant. I returned to scrupulously studying the role with Pauline again until then, and she cheered from the boxes. I was credited with bringing wit to a role not usually known for its humor. One reviewer even called me “tragedy’s soubrette,” the funny girl who knows the master’s house better than the master himself.
The crowd that evening laughed, roared, wept, and then, to my pleasure, rose to thunderous applause and shouts. Flowers pelted the curtains as they opened for our bows, and as the shouts for an encore increased, I performed one at the urging of the conductor, and then another, and another, in what felt like a fever.
After the performance, admirers surrounded my carriage, unhooked the horses, and tried to carry me through the streets, an honor reserved for only a few. My horses screamed and reared, though, as unfamiliar hands grabbed their reins; and when my driver whipped at the men to let go, they held on tighter instead, afraid of dropping me. I leapt from the carriage into the street, wheeled onto the back of one of my mounts, and rode away from the scene as the other three followed. My stunned suitors then finally dropped my carriage into the street and set after me.
The first illustration of me appeared in the newspapers the next day. I was drawn in a gown with a bustle of a size that can exist only in drawings and that general’s coat, my souvenir of that costume ball at Compiègne—I wore it all winter, that night in particular—and so it was I was drawn as a general on horseback riding down a Paris street, the hem of my train and the tails of the coat billowing out behind me and breaking apart into the shapes of men chasing after me.
You could barely make out the horse—the hooves looked nearly like my own feet.
The caption read La Générale et la légion.
You were an ordinary woman until you earned your sobriquet. La Pa?va, La Malibran, La Présidente. Cora Pearl was, in fact, such a famous horsewoman she was sometimes called La Centauresse.
The coat, the drawing, and the riot would all make me more famous than any reviews of the debut. The driver was unharmed, the press and the public were electrified, and my admirers loved me more than if I had stayed in the carriage, but I was furious. The end of the night of my debut found me weeping in anger, wishing it had never happened, even that it could all be undone; but then it mattered less than it might have, and I was soon too busy to notice—La Générale it was. Off I went to make my name in the capitals of Europe.
And so it was for eight years until the time when this story begins.
The story of the undoing.
Act V
The Undoing
One
IN THE PERFORMANCES of Faust that followed the Sénat Bal, there were times when I was onstage and the gaslight border erased all but the most stubborn features, the flashes off the biggest jewels, the three tiers there like a portrait of the afterlife—Heaven, Limbo, Hell—the chandeliers the angels guarding each circle, the crystal points the blazing light of their fiery swords.
And then it was like looking at the rooftops, and the streets, and a vision even of the streets beneath Paris.
And then it was only crystal and flame and the rattle of the crowd.
The worst seats are the highest and are called the gods. If they were to sneak in among us, that is where they’d hide.
Those were the only gods I believe in, I would tell anyone. No more secret gods for me. Not my mother’s God, not one. This was what I had sworn to myself when I left Germany. No more omens, no more prophecies.
But now I was back in Paris, waiting for an opera invented out of my life, and as I waited, as I thought I could decide whether to accept, decide whether or not the curse was true, my whole life had become the opera. The curse did not seem to care as to whether I believed in it. My secret god still waited for me to reach my lesson’s end.
The house lights were going down. The stage lights would soon go up. My turn was here.
§
During the years after Aristafeo’s death, I sometimes met those who said their loved ones were still with them—they came to them in dreams, appeared in mirrors, left some token on a pillow—their scent, at times, or a touch. I reflected then on how I was not one of those lucky enough to claim a connection between this world and the other.
His ghost had never found its way to me before this, if this is what this opera was.
I had seen him stabbed twice. This pallor that would never leave me was, in its strange way, a daily reminder of the distance between us.
You are alive and he is dead, this color said to me when I saw my reflection.
I believed in his death more than I believed in God. And yet I had not properly mourned him, it seemed to me, as I sat in his house in the Marais again these ten years later and waited for Simonet to return with the Settler’s Daughter’s things that I’d asked to see.
The house was not entirely unfamiliar now, but no trace remained of what it had been inside, having been redecorated entirely. As I waited, I wondered if it was easier or harder to be there, given how different it was from before.