The voice, at least, was true.
In my year away, the theaters that had once thrilled me—La Scala in Milan, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg—no longer excited me as they once did. I stayed always in the apartments given over to the company singers, and soon it seemed as if the rooms were a single place that stretched the length of Europe and opened onto its various capitals.
The details of my roles had become the only details of my life. Onstage, I was the druidic priestess, the Hebrew slave in Egypt, the Parisian courtesan dying of consumption, the beautiful orphan who sang as she walked in her sleep, falling into and out of trouble and never waking up until the end. Offstage, I felt dim, shuttered, a prop, the stick under the puppet. I seemed a stranger to myself, a changeling placed here in my life at some point I couldn’t remember, and the glass of the mirror at the entrance to the palace seemed made from the same amber of the dream that surrounded me, a life that was not life, and which I could not seem to escape no matter where I went or what I sang.
And so their celebration of me that night at the ball, sincere as it was, felt as if it were happening in the life neighboring mine, visible through a glass.
I tell you I was distracted, but it was much more than that. For I was also focused intensely, waiting for one thing and one thing only, my attention turned toward something I couldn’t quite see but was sure was there, coming for me through the days ahead. I’d had a premonition in accepting the role of Marguerite that, in returning to Paris this time, I would be here for a meeting with my destiny. Here I would find what would transform me, what would return me to life and make this life the paradise I was so sure it should be.
I had been back in Paris for a little more than a month now, though, and my hopes for this had not yet come true, and so I waited with an increasingly dull vigilance, still sure my appointed hour was ahead of me, and yet I did not know what it was or where it would be.
It was here, of course.
I rose finally from a third curtsy and was halfway to the doors to the terrace when I noticed a man crossing the floor quickly, dressed in a beautiful new evening suit. He was ruddy against the white of his shirt and tie, if handsomely so. His hair was neatly swept back from his face, his blond moustache and whiskers clean and trim, his eyes clear. I nodded as he came to stand before me. He bowed gravely, even ostentatiously.
Forgive me this intrusion! he said, as he stood upright. The diva who throws her suitors’ diamonds in the trash. The beggars of Paris must salute as you walk by before they carry your garbage shoulder high.
I made to walk past him, though I smiled to think of his greeting. I had, in fact, thrown diamonds in the garbage twice, a feint each time. My maid knew to retrieve them. I did it once to make sure the story would be told in the press, the second time for the story to be believed. I was trying to teach my princes to buy me dresses instead of jewels—jewels had become ostentatious in the new Paris, with many reformed libertines now critical of the Empire’s extravagance, and there was little point to a jewel you couldn’t wear.
I enjoyed your magnificent performance in Faust last night—it was tremendously subtle, very moving, he said.
He waited to see if his flattery would affect me. It did. I also believed that last night’s performance had been my finest night as Marguerite. And as he was very awkward, like someone who had never done what he was about to do, I stopped for him, thinking to be kind.
I made to curtsy to him for the compliment, as I had just previously, and he laughed. No! Please. Let me bend to you, and with that, he knelt as he took my hand. I am Frédéric Simonet, a writer. I’ve longed to meet you, he said, but never more than tonight. I have a proposition for you, if you’ll allow me a moment of your time. There are no loathsome diamonds involved, I promise, unless you insist. Will you hear me out?
I held my hands out and smiled by way of invitation.
Last year I was at a dinner in Rome, recounting a favorite memory, of a girl singer at the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Did you see her? They called her the Settler’s Daughter, and she was said to have been rescued from the savages and able to sing only a single song her mother had taught her—and was entirely unable to speak otherwise. She was performing in a show from the colonies, Canada, I think. Her song moved the Emperor to give her a token of his right there in the hall. A tiny ruby brooch of a rose. Shortly after, the papers reported she’d vanished, escaped into the Paris surroundings. I never saw any sign of her again. In the months after, I wondered what had become of her and eventually even checked with the Conservatoire, as I wanted to see if perhaps she had come to them, perhaps to be made over into one of their mediocre sopranos. They said they had no knowledge of a singer of this kind. Incredible, yes?