He turned as if he knew he was being observed and looked at me, his eyebrow crooked, over the top of the piano. He smiled as he continued the piece’s conclusion, which he let fade away gently. But he looked directly at me, and our eyes met.
I stood still, unable to look away. When the music was gone, I remained a moment longer, and then it was I felt the entirety of my trespass. I quickly turned and left, curtsying as I went before anything could be said.
Unknown to me then, he was both a pianist and composer. He was young, handsome, reckless, enormously talented. He could stand while playing mazurkas on the piano and turn to face the crowd and continue playing backward while he smiled into the audience. It was ridiculous and thrilling to watch, and he didn’t make mistakes. He had a young wolf’s face, and his eyes looked hungry, his dark hair rising in curls. When he smiled, his huge teeth flashed. Shortly after arriving in Paris from Argentina, he was invited everywhere, including, now, Compiègne. But it was unusual for him to be early and alone with a piano, left to himself in the music room off the Emperor’s library; there was to be a week for distinguished artist visitors, but it had not yet come.
Later, when we knew each other, he would tell me he had been waiting for me to leave before playing. That he had sat down and, hearing the door open, realized he was not quite alone.
He was, at this time, accustomed to using the piano to get his way with women.
§
Here then was the last one, the one who knew all, but could not betray me as he was dead. I had watched him die. He was the one I had promised to marry, the only man I would ever consider. The h?tel in the Marais had been his, the room there his, that ruby rose left for him.
On the evening at the Luxembourg Palace when a man approached me and told me he’d found that rose, it was as if he’d told me he’d found his grave.
Five
OUR ROOMS HERE were cold stone, cold enough to make me miss the warm stink of the Tuileries. I was sure the bed was smaller, but it didn’t matter, full as it was with three girls desperate to stay warm.
Out the window, I could see bright moonlight coloring everything a silvery blue and black.
I reached out to touch the stone wall next to me, and my eyes followed my hand, and I briefly rested it as long as I dared on the cold stone, staring as if I could push out the mortared stones with my gaze like a sorceress, to walk free out to the fields and whatever lay beyond the edge of the forest. I shivered finally and drew my hand back, warming it on my leg. The single advantage to dressing the Empress over my previous position, was the time spent in the warm rooms of her apartment.
The day’s events passed through me as I lay still, unable to sleep. I could still hear the piano notes in the air as if the young man were playing somewhere nearby, and the memory of his eyes, the glance, looked back at me from the darkness above my head.
The mystery of him had puzzled me, and then the puzzle had resolved itself that afternoon.
The ladies of the court still retained the privilege to enter the Empress’s chambers at any time, even though their duties as her dressers had concluded; I found this unnerving. The Princess d’Essling was the least intrusive, perhaps, and the Duchesse de Bassano was the most. The widow Murat entered like a warm, matronly shadow, the ghost of a mother returned to give some comfort or advice. But Eugénie did not take advice from these women; instead, they gossiped. And with some shock, I learned they gossiped in English.
From them I heard how Louis-Napoléon had never been a very learned or intelligent man, but this was not to be required of him, either. He was descended from the first Emperor Napoléon indirectly, the son of that emperor’s brother. Whatever you could say of Louis-Napoléon, he didn’t love a good song nor did he love a bad one. He had very little taste for music and mostly only tolerated it. He went to the opera because he was the emperor and it was an imperial entertainment, and so his opera had to be grand beyond all others, and it was very grand. But not for his great love of opera but for his great love of himself.
There was no reason, this is to say, for there to be a consummate pianist and composer in the palace before the beginning of the series. Not, at least, there in the Emperor’s library, alone.
I found I thought of the pianist each time I sat idle, wondering when I could steal out into the passageways to see if I might see him again, though I told myself, of course, that I only desired the freedom.