Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  She had grown, if anything, more wraith-like since quitting Mme Boulard’s, her skin white as salt under her smart hat, her narrow body sheathed in a tight green walking dress and her wild black hair confined in a snood. She was alone, and on the table in front of her was all the paraphernalia of absinthe: tall glass of jade green liquor, carafe of water, dish of sugar cubes, pierced silver spoon.

  Victorine passed the café without pausing, but stopped at the jeweler’s shop beside it and pretended an interest in the baubles displayed in the window, her heart beating so she was almost sick with it. Having seen La Fée Verte, she must speak to her. But what would she say? Would she scold her for her faithlessness? Inquire after her lover? Admire her gown? No. It was impossible.

  Having sensibly decided to let sleeping dogs lie, Victorine turned from the sparkling display and swept back to the café, where, having tempered her absinthe with water and sugar, La Fée Verte was lifting the resulting opaline liquid to her lips. There was a glass of champagne on the table, too, its surface foaming as if it had just that moment been poured.

  Victorine gestured at the wine. “You are expecting someone.”

  “I am expecting you. Please, sit down.”

  Victorine sat. She could not have continued standing with that rough, sweet voice drawing ice along her nerves.

  “You are sleek as a cat fed on cream,” La Fée Verte said. “Your lover adores you, but you are not in love with him.”

  “I have been in love,” Victorine said. “I found it very painful.”

  La Fée Verte smiled, very like the cat she’d described. “It is much better to be loved,” she agreed. “Which you are, which you will always be. You are made to be loved. It is your destiny.”

  Victorine’s temper, never very biddable, slipped from her control. “Are you setting up for a fortune-teller now?” she sneered. “It’s a pity the future, as outlined in your lover’s novel, appears so dull and unconvincing. I hope he still loves you, now that you’ve make him the laughingstock of Paris. Your stories used to be much more artistic.”

  La Fée Verte made a little movement with her gloved hand, as of brushing aside an insect. “Those stories are of the past,” she said. “Me, I have no past. My present is a series of photographs, stiff and without color. My future stares at me with tiger’s eyes.” She held Victorine’s gaze until Victorine looked away, and then she said, “Go back to your banker. Forget you have seen me.”

  Victorine picked up her champagne and sipped it. She would have liked to throw the wine at La Fée Verte’s head, or herself at La Fée Verte’s narrow feet. But the past months had taught her something of self-control. She took money from her purse, laid it on the table, and rose. “My destiny and my heart are mine to dispose of as I please,” she said. “I will not forget you simply because you tell me to.”

  La Fée Verte smiled. “Au revoir, then. I fear we will meet again.”

  July–August 1870

  La Fée Verte’s prophecy did not immediately come to pass, possibly because Victorine avoided the neighborhood of the café where she’d seen La Fée Verte in case she might be living nearby. It was time, Victorine told herself, to concentrate on distracting her banker, who was much occupied with business as the General Assembly of France herded the weak-willed Emperor Napoleon III toward a war with Prussia. Kaiser Wilhelm was getting above himself, the reasoning ran, annexing here and meddling there, putting forward his own nephew as a candidate for the vacant Spanish throne.

  “How stupid does he think we are?” the banker raged, pacing Victorine’s charming salon and scattering cigar ashes on the Aubusson. “If Leopold becomes King of Spain, France will be surrounded by Hohenzollerns on every side and it will only be a matter of time before you’ll be hearing German spoken on the Champs-Élysées.”

  “I hear it now,” Victorine pointed out. “And Italian and a great deal of English. I prefer Italian—it is much more pleasing to the ear. Which reminds me: La Bohème is being sung at the Opéra tonight. If you wait a moment while I dress, we should be in time for the third act.”

  Victorine was not a woman who concerned herself with politics. It was her fixed opinion that each member of the government was duller than the next, and none of them, save perhaps the empress, who set the fashion, had anything to do with her. She did her best to ignore the Emperor’s declaration of war on July 16 and the bellicose frenzy that followed it. When her banker spoke to her of generals and battles, she answered him with courtesans and opera singers. When he wanted to go to the Hôtel de Ville to hear the orators, she made him go to the Eldorado to hear the divine Thérèsa singing of love. When he called her a barbarian, she laughed at him and began to think of finding herself a more amusing protector. Men admired her; several of the banker’s friends had made her half-joking offers she’d half-jokingly turned aside. Any one of them would be hers for a smile and a nod. But none of them appealed to her, and the banker continued generous, so she put off choosing. She had plenty of time.

  One Sunday in late August, Victorine’s banker proposed a drive. Victorine put on a high-crowned hat with a cockade of feathers and they drove down the Champs-Élysées with the rest of fashionable Paris, headed toward the Bois de Boulogne, where the sky was clearer than within the city walls and the air was scented with leaves and grass.

  As they entered the park, Victorine heard an unpleasant noise as of a building being torn down. The noise grew louder, and before long the carriage drew even with a group of men wearing scarlet trousers and military kepis, chopping down trees.

  The banker required his driver to stop. Victorine gaped at the men, sweating amid clouds of dust, and at the shambles of trampled grass, tree trunks, and stumps they left in their wake. “Who are these men?” she demanded. “What are they doing?”

  “They are volunteers for the new Mobile Guard, and they are clearing the Bois.” He turned to her. “Victorine, the time has come for you to look about yourself. The Prussians are marching west. If Strasbourg falls, they will be at Paris within a month. Soon there will be soldiers quartered here, and herds of oxen and sheep. Soon every green thing you see will be taken within the walls to feed or warm Paris. If the Prussians besiege us, we will know hunger and fear, perhaps death.”

  Victorine raised her eyes to her lover’s pink, stern face. “What have these things to do with me? I cannot stop them.”

  He made an impatient noise. “Victorine, you are impossible. There’s a time of hardship coming, a time of sacrifice. Pleasure will be forced to bow to duty, and I must say I think that France will be the better for it.”

  She had always known his mouth to be too small, but now it struck her for the first time as ridiculous, all pursed up like a sucking infant’s under his inadequate moustache.

  “I see,” she said. “What do you intend to do?”

  “My duty.”

  For all her vanity, Victorine was not a stupid woman. She had no need of La Fée Verte to foresee what was coming next. “I understand completely,” she said. “And what of my apartment?”

  He blinked as one awakened from a dream. “You may stay until you find a new one.”

  “And my furniture?”

  The question, or perhaps her attitude, displeased him. “The furniture,” he said tightly, “is mine.”

  “My clothes? My jewels? Are they yours also?”

  He shrugged. “Those, you may keep. As souvenirs of happier times.”

  “Of happier times. Of course.” Really, she could not look at his mouth any longer. Beyond him, a tall chestnut tree swayed and toppled to the ground with a resounding crack, like thunder. The banker started; Victorine did not. “Well, that’s clear enough.” She put out her hand to him. “Good-bye.”

  He frowned. “I hadn’t intended. . . I’d thought a farewell dinner, one last night together.”

  “With duty calling you? Surely not,” Victorine said. He had not taken her hand; she patted his sweating cheek. “Adieu, my friend. Do not trouble yourself to call.
I will be occupied with moving. And duty is a jealous mistress.”

  She climbed down from the carriage and walked briskly back along the path. She was not afraid. She was young, she was beautiful, and she had La Fée Verte’s word that it was her destiny to be loved.

  September, 1870

  Victorine’s new apartment was a little way from the grand boulevards, on the rue de la Tour, near the Montmartre abattoir. It was small—three rooms only—but still charming. When it came to the point, none of the admiring gentlemen had been willing to offer her the lease on a furnished house of her own, not with times so troubled. She had sent them all about their business, renting and furnishing the place herself on the proceeds from an emerald necklace and a sapphire brooch. She moved on September 3. When evening came, she looked about her at the chaos of half-unpacked trunks and boxes, put on a smart hat, and went out in search of something to eat, leaving her maid to deal with the mess alone.

  Although it was dinnertime, everyone seemed to be out in the streets—grim-faced men, for the most part, too intent on their business to see her, much less make way for her. Passing a newspaper kiosk, she was jostled unmercifully, stepped upon, pushed almost into the gutter. A waving hand knocked her hat awry. Gruff voices battered at her ears.

  “Have you heard? The emperor is dead!”

  “Not dead, idiot. Captured. It’s bad enough.”

  “I heard dead, and he’s the idiot, not me.”

  “Good riddance to him.”

  “The Prussians have defeated MacMahon. Strasbourg has fallen.”

  “Long live Trochu!”

  The Devil take Trochu, Victorine thought, clutching purse and muff. A thick shoe came down heavily on her foot. She squealed with pain and was ignored. When she finally found a suitable restaurant, her hat was over her ear, and she was limping.

  The Veau d’Or was small, twelve tables perhaps, with lace curtains at the windows and one rather elderly waiter. What made it different from a thousand other such establishments was its clientèle, which seemed to consist largely of women dressed in colors a little brighter and hats a little more daring than was quite respectable, gossiping from table to table in an easy camaraderie that reminded Victorine at once of Mme Boulard’s salon.

  The conversations dropped at Victorine’s entrance, and the elderly waiter moved forward, shaking his head.

  “We are complete, madame,” he said.

  Presented with an opportunity to vent her ill temper, Victorine seized it with relief. “You should be grateful, monsieur, that I am sufficiently exhausted to honor your establishment with my custom.” She sent a disdainful glance around the room. “Me, I am accustomed to the company of a better class of tarts.”

  This speech elicited some indignant exclamations, some laughter, and an invitation from a dumpling-like blonde in electric blue to share her corner table.

  “You certainly have an opinion of yourself,” she said, as Victorine sat down, “for a woman wearing such a hat as that. What happened to it?”

  Victorine removed the hat and examined it. The feather was broken and the ribbons crushed. “Men,” she said, making the word a curse.

  The blonde sighed agreement. “A decent woman isn’t safe in the streets these days. What do you think of the news?”

  Victorine looked up from the ruin of her hat. “News? Oh, the emperor.”

  “The emperor, the Prussians, the war. All of it.”

  “I think it is terrible,” Victorine said, “if it means cutting down the Bois de Boulogne and stepping on helpless women. My foot is broken—I’m sure of it.”

  “One does not walk on a broken foot,” the blonde said reasonably. “Don’t spit at me, you little cat—I’m trying to be friends. Everyone needs friends. There’s hard times ahead.”

  “Hard times be damned,” Victorine said airily. “I don’t expect they will make a difference, not to us. Men desire pleasure in hard times, too.”

  The blonde laughed. “Possibly; possibly not. We’ll find out soon enough which of us is right.” She poured some wine into Victorine’s glass. “If you’re not too proud for a word of advice from a common tart, I suggest you take the veal. It’s the specialty of the house, and if it comes to a siege, we won’t be able to get it any more.”

  “Already I am bored by this siege,” Victorine said.

  “Agreed,” said the blonde. “We will talk of men, instead.”

  That night, Victorine drank a glass of absinthe on her way home. It wasn’t a vice she usually indulged in, finding the bitterness of the wormwood too intense and the resulting lightheadedness too unsettling. Tonight, she drank it down like medicine. When she got home, she dug the green kimono out of her wardrobe and fell into bed with it clasped in her arms, her head floating in an opalescent mist.

  Her sleep was restless, her dreams both vivid and strange. Her banker appeared, his baby mouth obscene in a goat’s long face, and disappeared, bloodily, into a tiger’s maw. A monkey wore grey gloves, except it was not a monkey at all, but a pig, beyond whose trotters the fingers of the gloves flapped like fringe. It bowed, grinning piggily, to the dream-presence that was Victorine, who curtsied deeply in return. When she rose, the tiger blinked golden eyes at her. She laid her hand upon his striped head; he purred like the rolling of distant thunder and kneaded his great paws against her thighs. She felt only pleasure from his touch, but when she looked at her skirts, they hung in bloody rags. Then it seemed she rode the tiger through the streets of Paris, or perhaps it was an open carriage she rode, or perhaps she was gliding bodily above the pavement, trailing draperies like the swirling opalescence of water suspended in a glass of absinthe.

  She slept heavily at last, and was finally awakened at noon by a group of drunks singing the Marseillaise at full voice on the street under her window. She struggled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, prepared to empty her chamber pot over them. Seeing her, they cried out “Vive la République,” and saluted, clearly as drunk on patriotic sentiment as on wine. Victorine was not entirely without feeling for her country, so she stayed her hand.

  France was a Republic again.

  Victorine considered this fact as her maid dressed her and pinned up her hair. If the drunkards were anything to judge by, the change of government had not changed a man’s natural reaction to the sight of a shapely woman in a nightgown. She would walk to the Tuileries, buy an ice cream, and find someone with a full purse to help her celebrate the new Republic in style.

  It was a warm day, grey and soft as mouse fur. The streets were full of workers in smocks and gentlemen in top hats, waving greenery and tricolor flags with democratic zeal. Spontaneous choruses of “Vive la République!” exploded around Victorine at intervals. Victorine bought a patriotic red carnation from a flower seller on the steps of Notre Dame de Lorette, and pinned it to her bosom. As she walked down the crowded streets, her heart beat harder, her cheeks heated; she felt the press of strange bodies around her as the most intense of pleasures. Soon she was laughing aloud and shouting with the rest: Vive la République!

  At last, she reached the gate of the Tuileries. A man thrust a branch in her face as she passed through. “This is it!” he cried blissfully. “Down with the emperor! Vive la République!”

  He was a soldier, young, passably good-looking in his little round kepi and gold-braided epaulets. Victorine turned the full force of her smile at him. “Vive la République,” she answered, and brushed his fingers with hers as she took the branch.

  He didn’t seem to notice.

  For the blink of an eye, Victorine was filled with a rage as absolute as it was unexpected. And then it was gone, taking her patriotic fervor with it. Suddenly, the pressure of the crowd seemed intolerable to her, the shouting an assault. She clung to the iron railings of the high fence and fanned herself with her handkerchief while she caught her breath and surveyed the seething mass of humanity overflowing the wide promenade. Her view of the palace was obstructed by top hats and cloth caps, smart hats and sh
abby bonnets and checked shawls. By standing on tiptoe, she could just see a stream of people swarming up the steps like revelers eager to see the latest opera. La République had moved quickly, she thought. The N’s and imperial wreaths had been pried from the façade or shrouded with newspapers or scarlet sheets, giving the palace a blotched and raddled look. And above the gaping door, someone had chalked the words UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE CITIZENS on the black marble.

  Thinking that she was a citizen as much as anyone else, Victorine put away her handkerchief, took a firm hold on her bag, and launched herself into the current that flowed, erratically but inevitably, toward the forbidden palace where the emperor and his foreign wife had lived so long in imperial splendor.

  The current bore her up a flight of shallow steps, the press around her growing, if possible, even denser as the door compacted the flow. She stepped over the threshold, passing a young infantryman who held out his shako and shouted with the raucous monotony of a street vendor: “For the French wounded! For the French wounded!” Impulsively, Victorine fished a coin from her bag, dropped it into his shako, and smiled up into his sweating face. He nodded once, gravely, and then she was in the foyer of the Imperial Palace of the Tuileries.

  It was magnificent. Victorine, who had a taste for excess, worshipped every splendid inch of it, from the goddesses painted on the ceiling, to the scintillating lusters on the chandeliers, the mirrors and gold leaf everywhere, and the great, sweeping staircase, designed to be seen on. She pressed forward, determined to show herself upon it.