How is it I am here? I wondered, as I walked away. But I knew.
I was looking for someone who’d been thrown away, she had said to me, of how she found me.
Once she was done with me, I was to disappear.
Of those I suspected had betrayed me, she was the one I was sure never thought of me. The most dangerous one of all.
Two
IT IS SAID there were four hundred Italian assassins hidden in Paris, each sworn to take the Emperor’s life if he wavered in his support for the cause of Italian unification.
Four hundred Italian assassins, and then there was me.
As the Empress Eugénie didn’t fit in the dark basement passageways of the Tuileries Palace once she was dressed, her many gowns were delivered there instead, where they were stored and then sent up on dressmaker’s forms in a dumbwaiter to an antechamber where she would dress quickly, like an actress, and make her grand imperial entrances.
I arrived at the Tuileries in the early fall of 1868, a girl of seventeen, there from the Saint-Denis convent to work as one of the maids in the palace basement wardrobe, a grisette. The name means little gray one, or gray girl. I liked the word because it made me feel as if I’d become a shadow, working as I did in the basement of the Tuileries and sleeping in a small room in its eaves.
L’Impératrice, that was the word for empress, and there was just the one.
That word stayed in the air a little after it was said, a kind of glittering dark omen. The guards said it as she made her way through the crowd, or we said it in a fierce whisper, a signal to stop what you were doing and throw yourself to the ground in her general direction. Once I heard it, every moment I was not on the ground was one in which I felt my life might be forfeit. This dismayed her, I believe, though, of course, it was done to please her. She never said it—even the Empress, I think, feared this word.
The ladies of her court wore her badge on their left shoulder, tied there with a ribbon. Three wore her portrait, painted in miniature, circled in diamonds—these were her most powerful, the most senior: the Duchesse de Bassano, Princesse d’Essling, and Madame Murat, widow of Admiral Murat and Gouvernante des Enfants de France—her title made me think of her as the ruler of a small kingdom of French orphaned children, bordered in sorrow. The other nine wore her monogram, diamond letters on a black enamel background: I for Impératrice, E for Eugénie, and an I stepping through an E, as if someone had plunged daggers into the E from above and below.
She could not choose her ladies-in-waiting. Some were her friends, but many were not. Two were with her at all times for a week at a time in Paris, a month if she went to the country. Pepa, though, she could choose. Pepa belonged to her.
Pepa was the mistress of Her Majesty’s wardrobe. A fellow Spaniard, she was squat, ugly, fierce, and strong, brought by Eugénie to Paris from Málaga. She might have been pitiable but for the rages she used to enforce her ways. If beauty didn’t make you good, Pepa was proof ugliness didn’t, either. She was assisted by two sisters, the daughters of the governor of the Chateau de Saint-Cloud. The governor had once been the Emperor’s jailer, and his appointment, and that of his daughters, was meant to repay the man for the trouble the Emperor had made for him by escaping from his jail. But obeying Pepa offended the sisters, and as there was something each of them would not do, a girl was needed who could not refuse.
So it was I came to the Tuileries.
I was known to them as Sidonie, from the orphanage of the Legion of Honor of Saint-Denis Convent, chosen for this work as I was small, young, quick, and believed to be mute; the chamberlain felt it best to find someone incapable of speaking back to either Pepa or the sisters. I undertook my responsibilities gladly, eager to confirm for them that they had chosen well.
I quickly proved handy at climbing inside the dumbwaiter and wrangling the dress forms into place without either tearing the silk swaths of the enormous skirts or dirtying them on the walls of the chute. The skirts or the bodices or both were often jeweled, sometimes took a month to make, and were never washed—you couldn’t clean something studded with diamonds in water and soap.
The Empress wore during the fall and winter, the high season of the balls, as many as four dresses in a day, and the single, finest, most expensive one was always for the New Year’s ball. The seconds, as they were known to us, once they’d been worn, were often stripped of their gems and given out to the poorer relations of ladies-in-waiting or sometimes, if it was not too expensive, one would be given as a present to a favorite servant.
Someone unlikely to wear it in her presence.