We left for Russia the next morning. From the Empress-in-exile we then went for an audience with another, reigning under a near permanent midnight at the end of the Baltic Sea in her palace of crystal and mirrors. Our trip was long but urgent—if we waited any longer the sea ice would soon make the trip impossible.
At first, I thought the Russian Empress had sensed that the opera was not precisely for her, much less her son, in the way any woman who’s become an empress can tell these things. She was a patroness of the arts with a sapphire the size of an infant’s face in her crown. And the face of a child herself. She was a beautiful woman, Maria Feodorovna, but with large sad eyes. She looked as if she were the fisherman’s wife whose husband had caught the magic fish and the jewel of wishing, the one she uses to wish herself a palace—and finds herself lonelier than she thought.
During our audience, I watched my reflection in her sapphire as I sang for her the opera’s major arias in the mirrored recital room of her frightening palace. I knew not to look directly at an empress’s eyes, and so I looked instead into the sapphire.
A peculiar hunger, that for sapphires. I wanted to reach out and pluck it from her brow, to press it against my cheek.
I forgot myself only once and looked down to see her terrified eyes look back. I pitied her what I saw in those eyes. My song never broke. I swept my eyes down farther as if this were only a part of the dramatic gesture.
At the conclusion, she was polite, but she rejected the opera commission, declaring it, with its cast of animals and circus freaks, too expensive to produce on the stage anywhere in Europe.
Perhaps the Prussians can afford this, she said, with a dark look at us both. With their war duties.
I tried not to laugh at this, for how clearly it was a lie. The opera had been written precisely to anticipate the extravagance of a young Russian prince’s celebration. The animals alone wouldn’t have cost more than the jewels on one of her slippers that day. As she pronounced against it, I listened as if I were very far away. I watched as Aristafeo accepted her decision politely, for she was an intelligent woman somewhere under the enormous gems.
I knew her sapphire, then; I was sure it had been Eugénie’s. There on her brow a fortune enough to set us up for the rest of our days, though it would appear not to have been enough to rescue Eugénie after all.
We were to have stayed for a fortnight. He had expected to audition other singers, to speak to animal trainers, to meet the orchestra. Instead, we were told we could return the next day.
Who’d have thought the Russians were paupers now, he said, once we were at sea again.
She spent all their money on that sapphire, I said. I should have had you trip her and I’d have snatched it.
The Prussians, he said. Are they so rich?
They are, I said, melancholy to think of it.
It’s said she’s a beauty, he said, of the Empress. What did you think?
I liked the sapphire, I said. What did you think?
I liked the sapphire, too, he said.
§
An opera too expensive for the Russian Empress attracted a great deal of talk; and gossip, sometimes kind, found the composer and his soprano lover returned to Paris the more famous for their defeat in Saint Petersburg, complete with great reviews: My performance of the arias was said to have been astonishing. And wasn’t this likely be the last role to which I would consent?
Aristafeo had taken rooms at Brown’s on our return from Russia, down the hall from my own so as to be closer to me. I listened from within my bed as he read these reports to me, and while I tried to be as amused as he seemed to be, I wondered who had spied on us and how they had traveled back more quickly than we.
He did not wonder. Instead, as he set the papers down, he was all confidence, convincing me of the soundness of his new plan to stage the opera in London after my run in I Masnadieri—with the Empress’s dismissal, we were free of the Baroness’s last favor to him. And so we made the rounds of the British theaters for a week, giving our presentation, and I let go of my curiosity as to our enemies. Our next new future seemed possible, after all, and now our little spy in Russia wouldn’t matter. There was a new lightness to that week, the one I had waited for. But these theaters all eventually rejected the opera as well, in the same spirit as the Russian Empress, complaining of the costs, of having to clean after manure, of animal smells, questions of where the animals could be stabled. All of this was published in the gossip columns with speculation that the failure of the opera to find a home was perhaps related to my voice’s famous curse, and I thought again of that day in Rouen when I entered the Baroness’s chateau, the garden covered in her deathless roses. The circle of chairs in her ballroom full of opera’s most powerful men.
I knew she could turn them toward him; I knew she could turn them against him.