I stayed with him as long as he wanted me, I said. And even a little longer than that.
I wonder if that was the agreement, she said. Perhaps it will suffice. How will you repay me for this humiliation, I wonder. She reached out then and pinched one of the candles out. I will think on it, she said. She pinched out the next, and the darkness around her said our interview was done. There would be no tea.
Show her out, she said to her girl, and I was shown out.
She had not been my tormentor then, but now it seemed she would be, one last time.
Two
AFTER THE SPECTACLE of my failure with the Comtesse, I did not want to be alone in the apartment with my fears, and so I pushed myself out into the whirl of dinners and balls and midnight drinks and nights ending in breakfasts, supplied as I was with my Dukes’ Bargain of gowns.
As I did, the press began its chorus—I was a favorite of theirs after the news of my curse, the scandal of the second grand entrance in the new dress, the brother dukes on each arm. The press now made reports of daily fittings with the new dressmaker, Félix, the new silhouette he introduced with me, and where I wore each new dress in its turn, from the Louvre Palace to the Café de Paris to the markets at Les Halles. No detail was too small. Doro cut out the illustrations as they appeared in the papers and pinned them to the mirror, little paper dolls of me running around the edge of my reflection. She glued them to matchsticks and made them run in puppet shows by my makeup table to make me laugh after she and Lucy had strung me in.
You’re terrible, wicked women, I said to them, cursing them, for it hurt to laugh in a corset, but soon the joke we had, if the dress was awful, was Best get the dukes.
And just when it was said to be over, the next scandal came: the dukes had their choice of women after all of this, and by the end of that month, the dressmaker Félix was likewise overrun, but a disappointment awaited the women the brothers entertained after me as the dukes’ promise to me included that none of the women to follow me were to be allowed the gift of a dress from that house for one month. The dukes’ new loves could be allowed any other dressmaker except mine.
With that came a new illustration of me, running down the street again on a horse, but this time the shapes falling from my dress were the shapes of these other women springing up to chase after me in fury.
While this amused me, it was time for me to protect myself from these follies: I needed to find some way to attach myself to the tenor again—at least in appearance, publicly, and in a way that would appease the Comtesse—and then to prepare for the ball Euphrosyne was to throw for me and, lastly, to repair my relationship with Verdi. The question of who, if not the Comtesse, was behind the novel and the opera was now too much to consider—or too little. There was too much else to do, and so I set myself to the tasks I understood. The plans for the ball were the most pleasant of these and thus the most urgent. And as I’d never sung the Queen of the Night aria Euphrosyne had asked me for, as it was outside my Fach, I would need to prepare it very carefully.
Euphrosyne wrote to me with her plans for the ball and made an appointment with me to attend my fitting at Worth for our costumes. Worth, who, she said, was contrite at my displeasure with his last offering.
He really is so very sorry and has said he will make you a magnificent costume, she said. He has vowed it.
In the meantime, proof arrived daily that I’d been a fool to think the news of the curse meant the end of my career. Doro no longer brought my mail in on my tray as there was too much. I was besieged. Offers arrived as never before.
I should always be cursed, I joked to Doro, who did not approve.
Despite failing to find anything more to my mystery opera than what had presented itself, I now only waited. The result was that the season itself became something of a masked ball, the masks, the faces of the people I met everywhere I went. Is it you? I’d wonder each time a stranger pulled out a chair, or offered a light, or refilled a glass, or smiled in greeting as he was introduced. Is it you? It became a light refrain as I passed through crowds potentially as full and as empty of an answer.
And so I went through the days between that Sénat Bal and the one Euphrosyne threw for me, dress by dress, rehearsal by rehearsal, detail by detail, night by night, holding on at least to the hope of the ball, not quite knowing what was real, what was phantasm, each day still empty of an answer to what had filled it the weeks previous, until one week before the ball when amid the day’s offers one distinguished itself. The solution I’d been waiting for arrived, the answer to all my troubles.
The offer of the role of Carmen at the Opéra-Comique, with the tenor as Don José.