In the distance I saw the omnibus flag she mentioned above the horizon line created by the tops of the heads in the crowd. Above that still, I saw the street and the strange machines and carriages flying back and forth. Young men mounted on vélocifères, phaetons, landaus, fiacres, victorias, all moving at terrific speeds and not, somehow, running into each other.
The omnibus was a beast all its own when it finally came, an enormous viewing stand set on wheels and drawn by three horses with metal sides and windows enclosing the lower levels. The men sat on top, the women inside, forbidden from the upper level, I suppose, to prevent them from showing to the entire street what was under their skirts. Each omnibus was thus typically crowned with two rows of top hats, the men sitting back to back.
As I stood in the line for the omnibus, I became anxious. I knew my costume stood out enough that any member of the circus who saw me might know it was me dressed as the clown bride. But I soon forgot this particular ensemble when I did first see with my own eyes the woman I would come to know as the Comtesse de Castiglione.
She was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. She had just exited the bateau mouche of some foreign royal, and as she walked through the gaudy international crowd of the Expo, they pulled back. Even the incredible machines all came to a stop to let her cross, all startled into a silence. She was dressed in mourning, a black veil over her eyes that still allowed you to see their green flash, a hat of black ostrich feathers with a single sapphire glinting at the top. A velvet cape covered her black silk gown, floating behind her with a train held aloft by crinolines, the like of which I’d never seen. Jet beads flashed along her jet shoes, answered by jet beads flashing along the edge of her veil. Another sapphire, this one with diamonds along the rim of its setting, held the cape at her neck.
This, I understood at once, was what the costume mistress had referred to—a woman who, in a single toilette, had silenced the street with awe—and from her dress, silk enough to cover an opera stage hung from her waist.
As she crossed the street, she stopped, picked her train up gently—in a gesture I would one day imitate exactly—and continued.
She walked with a steady stride and did not meet the eyes of a single onlooker, looking past us all—a dark bird of myth, her wings having fallen from her back, these feathers at her neck and brow some last remnant, her transformation into a mortal woman nearly complete.
I knew I would remember this sight forever. For all of us who ever saw the Comtesse in her glory, we all remembered our first time. She was one of the great beauties of Paris.
If I had known everything that was to come, I might have fled, run back to the show, and continued on, away from Paris, never to return. But it is too soon to speak more of this.
Instead, I will tell you of how the omnibus arrived with its flag for the station, just as the costume mistress had said. I stepped up, feeling I had learned a lesson about how women dress in Paris, and paid my fare, dreaming of how one day I’d be as fine a lady as the one I’d just seen once I had been reunited with my mother’s family in Lucerne.
§
My first mission to the Gare de l’Est was both easy and unfruitful. I could not read many of the signs at the terminal. Finally, I went to the window of the ticket counter. I was told to go to the Gare du Nord.
At the Gare du Nord I looked for and found the ticket counter and checked the cost of passage to the city of Lucerne. I had nearly enough. I closed my glove over the slip of paper on which the ticket clerk had written the amount and moved through the station, the doves adrift in the beams of light falling in through the windows and the rush of the crowds around me. By the time I returned to the street, I felt as if a wind were slowly lifting me and soon I would be in that far city in the mountains.
The owner liked to boast of how I didn’t own a stitch of clothing that wasn’t one of his costumes, and it was nearly true for most, but not for me. Only the buckskin was his. He’d forgotten the rest of the clothes were my own. He always showed a thick set of teeth when he laughed at this joke, and he enjoyed this joke many times, in as many ways as he could find, reminding me constantly how I belonged to him. I soon hated the sight of those teeth. When I returned to the tent city with my plan nearly complete, he saw me in my borrowed attire. He was soon laughing again at me.
Where did you steal that? he asked.
I ran past him without stopping.
It should be buffalo skin, he said. Settler’s Daughter, not the farm wife. Go and get ready, the show is in an hour.
Paris was lit by gaslights at night, turning the night skies purple, like a bruise—the nights there didn’t feel like night to me, but instead like some permanent dusk, as if the sun had caught on something just after setting and wouldn’t go all the way down. This evening, I knew, was the special presentation for the Emperor and the visiting royalty of the collected nations, perhaps the most important show I would ever sing, but this meant little to me. Thoughts of the trip to come distracted me. The trains for Lucerne were new and crowded, and gleamed with fresh paint.