It’s nothing to speak of, he said. I’m sure I just made the mistake of doing someone a favor, and now he is telling people he is my protégé.
He exchanged the briefest look with Giuseppina before turning back to me.
If I had as many protégés as I am said to have, I would command an army, he said.
There was no avoiding any longer that the evening, and perhaps more, was spoilt, and the only rescue for it began with my exit.
I excused myself, they brought my cape, we exchanged muted kisses good night, and I hired a driver home.
As the little calèche made its way to my home through the dark, past the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, on its way to the avenue de l’Opèra, I pushed back into the seat, and the wood and hide creaked. In the wind, I could smell the mushroom whiff of dead leaves and earth.
He had lied to me, you see. That was clear from the look he’d exchanged with Giuseppina—he had lied to me and was warning her not to contradict him. But this had the effect of telling me the protégé was real. The new mystery as I left was as to why he’d lied.
And as to what I had dared that might offend the gods, well, I had lied to Verdi. And he knew.
The Paris I’d met when I first arrived during the last days of the Second Empire and Napoléon III was a series of ascents that looked at first like descents; going down brought you up—succès de scandale. The women I met then dressed as if choosing weapons; their balls, parties, and dinners were a series of duels and mêlées, and the salons and ateliers of the city, outfitters for a vast assassins’ guild too decorated by half. A girl could enter this world as a grisette, taking in laundry, and in a week or two, be at Worth for a gown; two weeks more, leave at dawn in the carriage of an Austrian industrialist, having been stolen from the bed of the Emperor just to be protected from the Empress. She’d be returned within the month if the industrialist were either assassinated for presumptuousness or titled for his rescue of the Emperor’s happiness. Everyone I met had the look of seeing a story repeated in front of them, actors in a rehearsal on a marked stage: the laundress, the couturier, the industrialist, the Emperor, the Empress. As I passed each, I soon saw that this world was new only to me; and when I was done with my turn, I had found my place and learned to listen for the wooden shoes of the next girl as she came through.
Napoléon III was now dead, in his mausoleum in England, the Second Empire replaced by the Third Republic, but I could still make out the shapes of the new grisettes in the dark, walking and waiting for their lovers, careful of the police, studying me and my calèche carefully as they shifted from foot to foot, as I once had, and wondering how to become one such as me. I nearly saluted from where I sat.
By one unhappy thought, the chorus sings in Lucia di Lammermoor, a thousand joys are lost. Perhaps, I told myself, I could write to Verdi in the morning and accept. I could tell him it was foolishness and beg his forgiveness. But each time I thought it, there stood Madame Verdi, with her blithe assurance that my lie was the truth, greeting me at what I did not know would be this next station in my journey.
Her quick acknowledgment of my little lie as some long-standing secret truth among singers did not reassure me, though. Instead, it made the lie seem like a spell I’d been tricked into casting on myself, one that made it so. As if I had cursed myself.
The music for Un Ballo in Maschera as well as I Masnadieri waited on my tray at home, no doubt sent over before or during our dinner—he had been so certain! There was a note, a short Brava! And his looping signature below.
I prepared to send the one back and then could not—not just yet.
In Un Ballo in Maschera, my character, Amelia, was dishonored but would live. The orphan Amalia in I Masnadieri was murdered. They were like so many of the roles I’d played, roles close to my life, a procession of orphans, grisettes, courtesans, wronged lovers, the disgraced ones. But Amelia, the American, Amalia, the orphan, they were very close, like some strange duo that was really the same girl leading the way. The letter e in Amelia changing to an a, like a tiny mask just for me, all of them, perhaps, leading to this next role, if I agreed to it, as the Settler’s Daughter in Le Cirque du Monde Déchu.
Me, as I once had been.
What was her fate? Was her ending happy or sad? The writer had said something about an angel and love, and Hell, of course.