I never surrender, the Empress said.
They were rivals for him, or so it seemed—this was all I heard of what she said. I was so full of my new confidence, so certain I belonged right where I was, that I was shocked to see the Princess had noticed me.
Her expression was a steady one; she was not going to interrupt the performance to reprimand me. Instead, she looked at me as if a horse had wandered into the hall, and in commanding it with her eyes, she could get it to return to its stable.
I stepped back three quick steps without turning around; and, content, she returned her attention forward. I quickly made my way into the service hall, walking until I was back in the Empress’s rooms.
§
There I sat and looked at the Empress’s gowns, waiting for her to wear them. In the darkened room, each of them looked as if it were the ghost of the Emperor’s next mistress. I listened to the music, which I could hear faintly. I imagined myself in a gown, black and fantastic, meters of silk and glittering jewels, and the composer leading me across the floor to dance. We were at a ball at least as grand as any the Empress might have here, glowing in the candlelight.
Then the tenor began to sing, to great applause.
And then I began to see myself putting the dresses away, and then the tenor putting them on me for his strange game.
In my bed later, as I tried to sleep, I heard it again, in memory, the slow, meandering footsteps of the piano, of the mazurka that was not quite a mazurka—to me more like a lover’s search of the rooms of a party after it has ended. He wanders, watching for the object of his pursuit. The wildness has spent itself, and now there’s just caution in the step and the insistence of what is felt, almost the sound of footsteps, something in search of what it loves. I wished it were the composer and that he would find me as well, and I heard it until I slept.
Eight
THE WOMAN THE tenor had brought to the spare apartment was an American soprano singer married to a French nobleman and an intimate of the Emperor and Empress.
He had gone from trying to turn his lovers into singers to turning singers into his lovers, I noted.
He told me this as he described the mission that he insisted was the price of his goodwill.
The soprano was to appear in a tableau vivant that evening, to sing onstage in a little salon play written that week by the Prince Metternich. In that tableau, I would take her place as the American Doll, shipped from America. The theme of the play was “exposition,” in honor of the Paris Exposition; it was a charade. The audience of guests and the Emperor and Empress were to try to guess the theme.
I was her height; I was her size. I lacked her fair hair, but mine would be under a wig, my face under a doll-face mask and powdered. She would be with the tenor, enjoying at last the consummation of their affair.
I have not sung all these months, I said to him.
It’s fine, he said. You’re to sing badly. You’re the American Doll, but you’ve been broken in transit.
Now I stood backstage in my wig, mask, and powder, dressed in a traditional Tyrolean peasant costume with a black bodice and a red skirt, both beautifully embroidered, and a Tyrolean hat, a long pheasant feather jauntily rising above me. A large turnkey sat on my back like a metallic single wing. The Princess Metternich was dressed in a coachman’s costume, with a cape, pants, and riding boots, a pipe resting in her mouth. She was busy winding a very wide silk ribbon around me, as if I were a package, tying it finally in a bow. The ribbon parted at my mouth and eyes to allow me to see and breathe.
The Prince and Princess Metternich knew the tenor and the singer well, and were in on the conspiracy.
The first part of the word, Ex, had been performed as a skit between invalids at Aix-les-Bains competing with descriptions of their elaborate diseases and miseries. Then the Princess had performed a song the Prince had written for her, “That Was Paris, and Now It Is Gone.” She had cracked a riding whip over her head with great authority, causing the audience to shriek, and smoked the pipe through the song. The audience laughed at it all, though I did not understand why. Following her had been a young man insistent on learning to fence in order to defend himself against the hordes of foreigners who had invaded Paris for the exposition. When he finished, the curtain came down to much applause, and then I was set on the stage to await my decoration.
I should have liked for the Princess and I to be friends, I had decided, watching her song. I tried to think of how to speak to her as she decorated me, but she treated me as if I were only another piece of her costume. That afternoon we had rehearsed my song and the various trills and pieces of songs I was to sing in the skit.