But this was not what I had done.
The newspaper’s writer also assumed her smile was a memory of having heard me sing, but I wonder if she ever had or if she remembered something else if she did, in fact, smile: her New Year’s balls, the Tuileries, the dances at Compiègne. Or perhaps it was simply the pleasure of seeing the emeralds along my neck, reminding her of her own—my taste in emeralds came from handling hers. It is almost certain to me she did not recognize the girl who’d once cared for her furs and put away her jewels, the one who had packed her for Compiègne, waiting for her to ring all those times in the back stairs of her palaces, running to her at once at the sound of her bell. Until she ran away.
The girl who also had so foully betrayed her, in other words. And if she did recognize me, it may be she smiled for seeing that girl bow to her one more time. For, of course, she had seen my neck the most of all.
Afterward, as Aristafeo rejoined me, after she had moved on, we toasted our luck in avoiding recognition by ordering champagne in our box. He laughed at how something as simple as a bow or curtsy could disguise one. I felt sure the evil I’d feared coming for us had passed over us now. And that this luck of ours had come about because we were together finally.
And so we toasted a long life together, full of this luck.
We could see her in the distance. Her white halo of hair in the royal box across from ours glowed in the gaslight, she the guest of the Queen, of course, her opera glasses flashing or, mostly, turning to an unseen friend to make remarks on what was certainly not the opera.
I had not wanted to see her again in Aristafeo’s company; after all that had transpired, it seemed too much. Now, though, I could think of it all more easily. Still, the moment in Aristafeo’s library when I lifted the musket returned. The memory of her scent, the sight of her nightgown. Her bracelets on the table.
The ruby rose from the Emperor that I’d set down beside them.
I understood finally something I had never understood before then. The Emperor wore no ruby flowers. My ruby token, it had been from her.
The Emperor, the Comtesse, the Empress. Their loneliness had made a back passage through all their lives, and I had spent so much of my life there. It was fitting, it seemed to me, that I should see her here like this.
For theirs had been my loneliness, too.
I should have known her for the omen she had to be, there in the dark. It was fitting that I should see her right before this departure. She in her exile some sign of my own to come. The Comtesse having hunted us both here. But I did not.
Instead, I wondered if she had known the way I was used against her or if I was only a secret between the Emperor and the Comtesse, a counter in the secret battle they had waged. I would never know. Those were always the terms.
And then the opera began, and we watched as Amelia, the soprano lead, searched the execution grounds for an herb of forgetfulness, eager to rid herself of the memory of sinful passion. I had the thought I always had at this point in the opera: How young she must be to think an herb could take something like this memory away.
§
In the paper the next day, the item of our meeting ran with a caricature of us, THE EMPRESS AND HER GéNéRALE.
The item read: At last night’s performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, the attendees outside were greeted to another performance, that of Paris’s own La Générale, Lilliet Berne, greeting her Empress-in-exile Eugénie with that most proper French curtsy, bringing a smile to her face and gasps from the crowd around her. No doubt the sight of her subject-in-exile giving her this honor warmed Eugénie’s heart.
We were drawn with doll’s bodies and the enormous outsized heads of dolls. Her crown was drawn askew, of course, giving her the appearance of being confused or drunk. And I, I appeared to be the picture of servility, my general’s coat drawn over my gown despite my having left it at home; I wore it only when I wanted to be recognized.
The item soon made it to Paris, where it was repeated in the French papers with the same caricature and a great deal of public outrage. I should not, as a patriot, have greeted her this way, to do so was to declare oneself still her subject. Was I a monarchist? And so on. And what’s more, speculation ran as to why I was there at all, as I was thought until then to still be in Paris, in mourning for the tenor.
This was not the beginning of our good luck, then, but the long shadow’s first fall. It was not where we thought it would be, and so we did not see it for what it was.
§