After I’d dressed again, she took me to a door in her office at the back and unlocked it.
She turned to me, put a finger on her lips to shush me, and led me into a dark passage consisting of a series of viewing stations with peepholes. Today, to begin, you observe, she whispered. She set an hourglass down. When the sand is gone, go to the next one, and the next. Make not a single sound. I will retrieve you when the doctor is here.
At other houses, they throw you to the men, and you are forced to take what wisdom you can. This way, she said of it later, as she brought me to the doctor, you can see even what my girls would forget to tell you.
You will have a week to decide, as will we, Odile said, after I had received my tour. I hope you will make us proud.
At the end of the week I was free to go if, that is, I could repay her. And I could only stay if I pleased her.
When I only smiled weakly at this, she grew sharp. She sat back and raised one perfectly drawn eyebrow.
We entertain some of the world’s most important men here. Do not be mistaken, she said. This is a profession; you are performers. These men, they entrust us with their most secret fantasies, and we, we keep that trust—they rule the day, we rule the night.
She stood and came around her desk, leaning against it to lift my chin with her own hand, and brought her face down before mine.
Do not be sad, then. Be proud. The night is a wonderful country to rule. Welcome to the Majeurs-Plaisirs.
§
Afterward, as I sat in that dark hall, moving from peephole to peephole, turning the hourglass as I did, I felt as if I were a ghost hidden in the walls. The peepholes were either scratched into the silver at the back of a mirror, or looked out through mantels, or were an “eye” set so as to resemble the eye in a painting, or one of a series of glass beads along the base of a lamp.
In the first, I saw a stout soldier, naked, his face firmly between one woman’s buttocks as another smacked him from behind and he cried out without lifting his face or running away or striking her. In the second, a woman I soon realized as Euphrosyne in performance as a young girl, waiting for the return of her chaperone at the opera and surprised by her visitor. She was enacting a melodrama, during which he called her by another name, that culminated in her being ravished by him—at which point Odile, playing the chaperone, returned to catch and punish him. In the third, a woman held out her delicate bare foot, and a man spread across the floor kissed it, murmuring her name, begging to do more than that.
She refused until he perfected his kisses to her content.
Anytime you wonder, Odile said later, as to a lover’s devotion to another, anytime it seems ridiculous, there is only ever one reason.
What reason? I asked, for I knew it was a prompt. We were seated in one of the theaters as a man waited on us, naked, his eyes downcast in obsequious submission. We were toasting my agreement, signed on the table between us.
He paid me for the privilege of serving us, she said, as the man finished his pours. I am charging him more for you. What is the reason they are loyal? Why would he pay for such a thing? They have found someone to do the one thing they’ve always longed for, and they are afraid they will never find someone to do it again.
I laughed, and she said, Don’t laugh. It’s a loyalty greater than love.
She stroked her champagne glass and looked off into the distance over the rim. She did not meet the eyes of the man trembling now by the wall.
It may be the only loyalty there is, she said, and held out her glass to be refilled.
§
Did you get them? I asked Euphrosyne, once we were alone in the dormitory, the long attic hall of beds I now knew was where she slept. I had written to her, asking her to go to my room at the Cirque Napoléon and take my things before they were sold or thrown away.
She nodded her head. Yes . . . except your little rose, it was gone.
Gone?
She laid out my little kit on the bed we were to share—no girl in the house slept alone. Yes, gone, she said. That and your money. But these remained, and she gestured at the contents now on her bed.
I had feared the rose lost already when it was not with clothes returned to me at Saint-Lazare. The coat seemed still quite good as did the rabbit-fur bonnet; and the sight of my little route book, my cancan shoes, and the dagger all cheered me. But I had hoped to sell the brooch to Odile to raise what I owed.
I’m so sorry, my friend, Euphrosyne said. I went as fast as I could.
She then showed me the dresser where I could keep my things, and the salle de bain, and as I bathed, she told me of her ordeal after jail, how she had returned to discover she owed fantastically huge fines to Odile for our escapade. When I offered to help her pay them, she refused. You already have, she said, somewhat sadly; and then she told me she would receive a generous recruitment fee once it was determined that I would stay.