I was stunned to learn Odile charged even her daughter. She reached out and brushed my hair back behind my ears, smoothing it, and then leaned in and kissed my brow. We should be called filles en compte, not filles en carte.
The night ended always with us in bed, dressed in slips, our hair long on our pillows like wraiths. We lay together like the sisters we said we were, talking quietly to each other until we slept. Odile kept the dormitory dark with thick velvet drapes that also shut out drafts, a false night to keep us from waking until the afternoon when she opened them to prepare us to begin again.
§
I soon had my own tricks to get by. The less I told men, the better they thought they knew me. Silence was a mask of a kind; it let me be whatever or whomever they needed me to be in our hours together, a little cabaret of their loneliness, really.
Of theirs and ours.
To survive, much less succeed, I learned I could not give myself over to either pleasure or misery in excess. Whatever you felt was not important. To feel either enjoyment or self-pity meant you might allow them too much time, and this meant possibly missing your next monsieur. I soon found the pleasure I could sneak, which I preferred, enjoyed like something I’d picked from their pockets. But I somehow knew without ever being told that to really give myself to one of them was to begin to fray, to make in myself a weakness I could never undo, and so whenever some were able to pleasure me, here or there, I tried to bring the hour to its quickest end.
At Odile’s direction, I would make notes of habits, gifts received, preferences, and displeasures. I reviewed this before they arrived, and this made each client believe they were so important to you that you remembered everything they liked, every little gesture, each time they visited—an impossible act of memory, really, but one they never questioned, for it suited them to think it was so. This was, of course, part of what they paid for, perhaps more than any of the acts themselves—to be so remembered.
A great scandal appeared in the press shortly after I joined the house—all of the girls talked of it—a disappointed lover had rifled a famous courtesan’s books, hoping to find the truth as to whether she loved him, only to see she was not kind to him, at least there. She was made to seem insincere in the press, and this angered us. It was like charging backstage, shocked to discover Phèdre had been played by an actress when you knew all along you were in a theater.
Odile joked of hiring someone to write a diary for all of us in which each client was described only in the most flattering terms—and to leave them where they might be found easily, our real journals hidden elsewhere.
To keep ourselves safe, the system was simple enough. We named clients by their jobs, like minor characters in a play. I wanted it to be clear to myself as well as to whatever future spy might see it that I never really thought of him except like this. What’s more, names would have made a gentleman into someone I could feel affection for—love, perhaps, or hate. It was better, easier, to feel nothing—if you loved him, he could disappoint you; if he disappointed you, you might hate him; if you might hate him, you would still have to see him for as long as he had funds to pay. It was enough to remember them all; that was all that was needed, nothing more. But this lesson, to feel nothing for them, was one I seemed always to be tested on, never more so than by what happened next.
One night, after I had been there for several months, I returned to the salon to find it consumed with dancing. A man was playing a cancan on the piano, and the room had exploded with it. Even Odile, whom I rarely saw move more than her counting hand, had her skirts over her hips. The dancing spilled out into the hall and from there into the garden, not usually used. The night was warm, and the windows into the garden were thrown open so we could hear the music there as well.
We had been visited by a regiment. Odile didn’t usually let her doors open to enlisted men, for soldiers normally used women too brutally.
The piano music finished as I entered. I found Euphrosyne in the arms of one of the soldiers, a beauty. He was Prussian, had arrived that day from Morocco; the sun there had turned his skin bronze, his sleek blond hair bright.
This is her, Euphrosyne said, as she reached out and drew me closer, turning to face him again. She’s my friend who can sing, she said.
He’s not really a soldier, she said to me. He’s a singer.
A tenor, he said.
§
Here then is the one who owned me.
He was the only man Euphrosyne had ever competed with me for, the only one who ever came between us. She introduced us.
Of those I feared had betrayed me to this writer, he was the one I knew was not over me. He was the Prussian tenor at the Paris Opera, rumored to be marrying me, said to be the real reason I was leaving the stage—and the first man to insist I get on one.
Five