This, to be sure, was an unlikely savior. If there was one opera I had never wanted to perform, it was Carmen.
I had known Bizet a little from my time at the Conservatoire, which had finally admitted me on my return to Paris after the war. Pauline wrote to my old address, searching for me, with the news that she had been asked to return to Paris as director of the Conservatoire. If the letter found me and I lived, she asked me to return and work with her, though an audition was required.
I did not write back but instead left at once and went to her house as my answer, where she threw her arms around me, and we hugged each other and wept, grateful to be alive and reunited.
While I had initially feared living in the avenue de l’Opéra apartment again, I knew if I had not returned to the apartment, I might never have been thus blessed. The Prince had spared no expense; beyond the falcon statue, I took note of how the walls had been repainted, the music room now red, the very finest new piano waiting to be played. The walls to the boudoir gleamed curiously to me until I understood they were covered in pressed leather embossed with falcons. As I ran my hands over their wings, I knew I would always keep it.
The concierge told me Doro and Lucy had asked her to tell them if I returned and to say they would return if I agreed, and I did. Over cards and gin, they told me of their own escapes from the vagaries of the war—Doro had hidden with her family outside Rouen, and Lucy spoke vaguely of a hospital for the wounded—she hid something there, but I did not ask. Instead, I tried to remember how to play bezique and then finally set my cards down, and said, Promise me from this day forward you spy only for me.
At which they started, then smiled, then swore to on the cards we played with, as if they were our Bible.
I passed my second Conservatoire audition easily this time, nearly pro forma—the jury would not rule against Pauline. This education was not the same as her private instruction, however, and the work overwhelmed me initially. Music pronunciation, vocal techniques such as bel canto and coloratura, yes, these I’d expected, but not music history or theory. There had been a kindness in that earlier rejection I had not understood, and so there was a tinge of cruelty to my education now, which then proceeded with the difficulties I’m sure that earlier jury had imagined.
The other students could see I was not properly prepared, and they resented my prior relationship to Pauline, though she showed me no other favors except occasional affection, but this was more than she showed them, enough for them to hate me.
My name here was soon La Donnée, the Gifted One.
In the mornings when I was early to my classes and rehearsals, I would sit alone and listen to the violin and cello students as they warmed up. I liked to feel the notes along the bench under my fingers, in the floor beneath my feet, at my back—they bounced along the wooden walls of the Conservatoire as if we were all inside an enormous wooden instrument of many parts.
I also liked these young men with their intemperate musician’s dispositions, their various pettinesses, they reminded me of unbroken colts. They did not know me by sight, and so they smiled at me as they entered and left unlike my fellow singing students.
Aristafeo had mentioned his time here to me, and it was strange to be here after him; I was helpless to think of how I might have met him earlier had I passed that previous audition, though, of course, what separated us then would likely still have kept us apart. On those mornings, though, it felt sometimes as if I’d been admitted to his past, empty of him, a little victory over his death.
Here I learned that the first classical stories of the House of Atreus and their ilk had been sung but the music was lost—opera was new clothes for old tragedies. I liked this idea, the opera stories as refugees of some ancient conflict accommodating themselves anew among us—much as I suppose I was, along with many others. I remember I wondered if there would ever be new great tragedies and then came Georges Bizet and Carmen.
Bizet I knew as one of these young men, one of their heroes, a recent graduate who himself was at the very edge of succeeding. He hid gentle, pale eyes behind gold spectacles, and under his suit jacket, the soft shoulders of a man who couldn’t lift a crate. He had quietly married the daughter of his mentor at the Conservatoire, a composer himself.