He spoke as if this were some disloyalty of hers, the vanity of an aging professional Paris beauty once again betraying the nation like the rest by accepting the aid of any patron who would pay, even a foreign enemy. Talk at the table roundly scorned her for associating with a Prussian prince, as if she owed France any loyalty, having once seduced its Emperor.
I experienced a strange shock on hearing this—I’d nearly believed the connection between the Prince and the Comtesse was my own invention. I remembered well how the crowd that day had looked on her in awe, not hatred, as they’d parted for her. How easily that awe had turned her into the dinner party joke she was to them that night.
Next, another guest told a story of the Prince. Some years after the fall of the Empire, he’d found himself at the same hotel as Eugénie, and as she had entertained him at court, he sent her flowers—She left the hotel at once! Can you imagine? He was part of the army that had turned her out of Paris and he sent her flowers.
None spoke of how Parisians, not Germans, had chased Eugénie from the Tuileries.
A line drew itself in the air that day between the end of the Emperor’s affair with the Comtesse and her entrance into the Paris World Expo on the arm of the Prince, extending all the way to Eugénie’s fleeing the Prince’s flowers in her hotel. But as I pondered my possible antagonists, I saw now I had not drawn the line all the way to me.
Much of Paris mocked the Comtesse as her beauty faded, yet she lived in an apartment on the Place Vend?me, and Eugénie was in exile in London. So many of those who had lost to her before had done so because they believed her beauty was her only power, but I knew better.
As I tried to think of why she would involve herself with me again after all this time, I thought back to her at the time I’d met her. She was in the first year of her mourning, the free woman any widow was, her mission in Paris now entirely her own.
I remembered how she sat and told her stories to me, luxuriating in the victories of her past, preparing to pose for more of those portraits, angry at the glory she believed denied her but rightfully hers. As I remembered those stories, I understood I was mistaken to think my value to her was based entirely on my affair with the Empress’s lover. With the Empire gone, another picture came into view.
On the day I returned from Compiègne, when she discovered the mute girl she’d told her stories to could speak.
A last game of hers, then. What better as a message than to write a role for me in which I ended as a mute again.
And so, sure the Comtesse was my antagonist, I pushed my way into her rooms.
The day the policeman sent me away from my vigil outside the Comtesse’s apartment on the Place Vend?me, I first left in the direction I’d seen her girl take, thinking to myself that I could wait there until she passed and try to bribe her into letting me in. I tried to guess as I walked where she might stop to do the shopping and what she would take as a price.
A girl, as I well know, is the key to a household. A maid is often her lady’s only true confidante. Whatever it is you need you can often get from her, but she must be vulnerable to bribes or flattery. Or threats.
I was sure she was lonely working for the Comtesse. I knew there were likely no great pleasures and little gratitude. But then I passed the window of a new atelier and paused, examining the display.
I knew her well enough to also know she would never let her dressmaker go. No woman would.
As I also knew this meant her dressmaker was my dressmaker.
I let her girl pass on. There was no more need to follow her. I knew I could pick my moment later.
I already had an appointment with Félix, and it was time to begin the dresses owed me from what I had come to call the Dukes’ Bargain. I went to him looking for the opening I was sure was there.
That first morning, as Félix moved among the dress forms, the muslin shapes were like a garden of the days ahead.
There is, he said, a new silhouette.
I’d made him promise no copies, but sly one that he was, he would have me debut a new silhouette. This he could reproduce innocently, and I could not forbid it.
There were to be crinolines that began at the thigh, not the waist. The fit was tight; the hip, more natural. There was already a new, looser sort of corset to the relief of a number of women, the dismay of others. He pulled drawings out.
Will you debut the silhouette? he asked. A formality, for he knew I would.
He did not look up as he said this. I held a cup of tea and traced its warm porcelain sides.