There must have been a hundred people on the staircase, mounting and descending, gawking over the rail. As she looked upward, Victorine saw only one woman, standing still as a rock in the waterfall of sightseers. Her hair was dark under her green hat, and her profile, when she turned her head, was angular. Victorine’s blood recognized La Fée Verte before her mind did, racing to her face and away again, so that she swayed as she stood.
A hand, beautifully gloved in grey leather, gripped her elbow and Victorine became aware of a gentleman in top hat and a beautifully tailored coat, carrying a gold-headed cane. “Mademoiselle is faint?” he inquired.
Victorine shook her head and sprang up the steps so heedlessly that she caught her toe on the riser. The solicitous gentleman, who had not moved from her side, caught her as she stumbled.
“If you will permit?” he asked rhetorically. Then he slipped one arm around her waist, shouting for everyone to make way, and piloted her firmly out of the palace without paying the slightest heed to her protestations that she was very well, that she’d left a friend on the stair and wished to be reunited with her.
The solicitous gentleman was plumper than Victorine liked, and his hair, when he removed his tall glossy hat, was woefully sparse. But he bore her off to the Georges V for coffee and pastries and then he bought her a diamond aigrette and a little carnelian cat with emerald eyes and agreed that it was a great pity that an exquisite creature like herself should be in exile on the rue de la Tour. What could Victorine do? She took the luck that fate had sent her and gave the gentleman to understand that his gifts were an acceptable prelude to a more serious arrangement. One thing led to another, and a week later, she and her maid were installed in an apartment off the Champs-Élysées, with her name on the lease and furniture that was hers to keep or sell as it pleased her.
It was not a bad bargain. The solicitous gentleman wasn’t as good-looking as the banker and his love-making was uninspired. But, besides being very rich, he was as devoted to amusement as even Victorine could wish.
“Why should I worry about the Prussians?” he said. “I have my days to fill. Let everyone else worry about the Prussians if it amuses them. It is of more concern to me whether M. Gaultier beats me to that charming bronze we saw yesterday.”
Still, the Prussians, or rather the threat of the Prussians, was increasingly hard to ignore. Victorine and her solicitous gentleman made their way to the antiquaries and the rare bookshops through platoons of National Guardsmen marching purposefully from one place to another and ranks of newly-inducted Mobile Guards learning to turn right in unison. She could not set foot outside the door without being enthusiastically admired by the soldiers camped along the Champs, and the horses stabled there made pleasure-drives to the Bois de Boulogne (or what was left of it) all but impossible. Evenings weren’t what they had been, with theatres closing left and right as the timid fled the anticipated discomforts of a siege. The Comédie Française and the Opéra remained open, though, and the public balls and the cafés-concerts were frequented by those without the means to fly. However tenuously, Paris remained Paris, even in the face of war.
One night, Victorine and her solicitous gentleman went strolling along the boulevard de Clichy. Among the faded notices of past performances that fluttered like bats’ wings in the wind, crisp, new posters announced the coming night’s pleasures.
“Look, ma belle,” the gentleman exclaimed, stopping in front of a kiosk. “A mentalist! How original! And such a provocative name. We really must go see her.”
Victorine looked at the poster he indicated. It was painted red and black, impossible to ignore:
The Salon du Diable presents
La Fée Verte!
The mists of time part for her. The secrets of the future are unveiled.
Séance at nine and midnight.
La Fée Verte!
Tears sprang, stinging, to Victorine’s eyes. Through their sparkling veil, she saw a white bed and a room lit only by dying embers. Her palm tingled as if cupped over the small, soft mound of La Fée Verte’s breast; she drew a quick breath. “It sounds very silly,” she said weakly. “Besides, who has ever heard of the Salon du Diable?”
“All the more reason to go. It can be an adventure, and well worth it, if this Fée Verte is any good. If she’s terrible, it will still make a good story.”
Victorine shrugged and acquiesced. It was clearly fate that had placed that poster where her protector would notice it, and fate that he had found it appealing, just as it was fate that Victorine would once more suffer the torment of seeing La Fée Verte without being able to speak to her. Just as well, really, after the fiasco on the Champs-Élysées. At least this time, Victorine would hear her voice.
The Salon du Diable was nearly as hot as the abode of its putative owner, crowded with thirsty sinners, its only illumination a half-a-dozen gaslights, turned down low. A waiter dressed as a devil in jacket and horns of red felt showed them to a table near the curtained platform that served as a stage. Victorine, as was her habit, asked for champagne. In honor of the entertainer, her protector ordered absinthe. When it came, she watched him balance the sugar cube on the pierced spoon and slowly pour a measure of water over it into the virulent green liquor. The sugared water swirled into the absinthe, disturbing its depths, transforming it, drop by drop, into smoky, shifting opal.
The solicitous gentleman lifted the tall glass. “La fée verte!” he proposed.
“La Fée Verte,” Victorine echoed obediently, and as if at her call, a stout man in a red cape and horns like the waiter’s appeared before the worn plush curtain and began his introduction.
La Fée Verte, he informed the audience, was the granddaughter of one of the last known fairies in France, who had fallen in love with a mortal and given birth to a son, the father of the woman they were about to see. By virtue of her fairy blood, La Fée Verte was able to see through the impenetrable curtains of time and space as though they were clear glass. La Fée Verte was a visionary, and the stories she told—whether of past, present, or future—were as true as death.
There was an eager murmur from the audience. The devil of ceremonies stepped aside, pulling the faded plush curtain with him, to reveal a woman sitting alone on the stage. She was veiled from head to toe all in pale, gauzy green, but Victorine knew her at once.
Thin white hands emerged from the veil and cast it back like a green mist. Dark eyes shone upon the audience like stars at the back of a cave. Her mouth was painted scarlet and her unbound hair was a black smoke around her head and shoulders.
Silence stretched to the breaking point as La Fée Verte stared at the audience and the audience stared at her. And then, just as Victorine’s strained attention was on the point of shattering, the thin red lips opened and La Fée Verte began to speak.
“I will not speak of war, or victory or defeat, suffering or glory. Visions, however ardently desired, do not come for the asking. Instead, I will speak of building.
“There’s a lot of building going on in Paris these days—enough work for everyone, thanks to le bon Baron and his pretty plans. Not all Germans are bad, eh? The pay’s pretty good, too, if it can buy a beer at the Salon du Diable. There’s a builder in the audience now, a mason. There are, in fact, two masons, twice that number of carpenters, a layer of roof-slates, and a handful of floor-finishers.”
The audience murmured, puzzled at the tack she’d taken. The men at the next table exchanged startled glances—the carpenters, Victorine guessed, or the floor-finishers.
“My vision, though, is for the mason. He’s got stone dust in his blood, this mason. His very bones are granite. His father was a mason, and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father, and so on, as far back as I can see. Stand up, M. le Maçon. Don’t be shy. You know I’m talking about you.”
The audience peered around the room, looking to see if anyone would rise. In one corner, there was a hubbub of encouraging voices, and finally, a man stood up, a flat cap ove
r one eye and a blue kerchief around his throat. “I am a mason, mademoiselle” he said. “You’re right enough about my pa. Don’t know about his pa, though. He could have been a train conductor, for all I know. He’s not talked about in the family.”
“That,” said La Fée Verte, “was your grandmother’s grief, poor woman, and your grandfather’s shame.”
The mason scowled. “Easy enough for you to say, mademoiselle, not knowing a damn thing about me.”
“Tell me,” La Fée Verte inquired sweetly. “How are things on the rue Mouffetard? Don’t worry: your little blonde’s cough is not tuberculosis. She’ll be better soon.” The mason threw up his hands in a clear gesture of surrender and sat down. A laugh swept the audience. They were impressed. Victorine smiled to herself.
La Fée Verte folded her hands demurely in her green silk lap. “Your grandfather,” she said gently, “was indeed a mason, a layer of stones like you, monsieur. Men of your blood have shaped steps and grilles, window frames and decorations in every building in Paris. Why, men of your blood worked on Nôtre Dame, father and son growing old each in his turn in the service of Maurice de Sully.”
The voice was even rougher than Victorine remembered it, the language as simple and undecorated as the story she told. La Fée Verte did not posture and gesture and lift her eyes to heaven, and yet Victorine was convinced that, were she to close her eyes, she’d see Nôtre Dame as it once was, half built and swarming with the men who labored to complete it. But she preferred to watch La Fée Verte’s thin, sensuous lips telling about it.
La Fée Verte dropped her voice to a sibylline murmur that somehow could be heard in every corner of the room. “I see a man with shoulders like a bull, dressed in long stockings and a tunic and a leather apron. The tunic might have been red once and the stockings ochre, but they’re faded now with washing and stone dust. He takes up his chisel and his hammer in his broad, hard hands flecked with scars, and he begins his daily prayer. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Pa-ter Nos-ter. A-ve Ma-ri-a. Each blow of his hammer, each chip of stone, is a bead in the rosary he tells, every hour of every working day. His prayers, unlike yours and mine, are still visible. They decorate the towers of Nôtre Dame, almost as eternal as the God they praise.
“That was your ancestor, M. le Maçon,” La Fée Verte said, returning to a conversational tone. “Shall I tell you of your son?”
The mason, enchanted, nodded.
“It’s not so far from now, as the march of time goes. Long enough for you to marry your blonde, and to father children and watch them grow and take up professions. Thirty years, I make it, or a little less: 1887. The president of France will decree a great exposition to take place in 1889—like the Exposition of 1867, but far grander. Eighteen eighty-nine is the threshold of a new century, after all, and what can be grander than that? As an entrance arch, he will commission a monument like none seen before anywhere in the world. And your son, monsieur, your son will build it.
“I see him, monsieur, blond and slight, taking after his mother’s family, with a leather harness around his waist. He climbs to his work, high above the street—higher than the towers of Nôtre Dame, higher than you can imagine. His tools are not yours: red-hot iron rivets, tin buckets, tongs, iron-headed mallets. His faith is in the engineer whose vision he executes, in the maker of his tools, his scaffolds and screens and guardrails: in man’s ingenuity, not God’s mercy.”
She fell silent, and it seemed to Victorine that she had finished. The mason thought so too, and was unsatisfied. “My son, he won’t be a mason, then?”
“Your son will work in iron,” La Fée Verte answered. “And yet your line will not falter, nor the stone dust leach from your blood as it flows through the ages.”
Her voice rang with prophecy as she spoke, not so much loud as sonorous, like a church bell tolling. When the last echo had died away, she smiled, a sweet curve of her scarlet lips, and said, shy as a girl, “That is all I see, monsieur. Are you answered?”
The mason wiped his hands over his eyes and, rising, bowed to her, whereupon the audience roared its approval of La Fée Verte’s vision and the mason’s response, indeed of the whole performance and of the Salon du Diable for having provided it. Victorine clapped until her palms stung through her tight kid gloves.
The solicitous gentleman drained his absinthe and called for another. “To La Fée Verte,” he said, raising the opal liquid high. “The most accomplished fraud in Paris. She must be half mad to invent all that guff, but damn me if I’ve ever heard anything like her voice.”
Victorine’s over wrought nerves exploded in a surge of anger. She rose to her feet, snatched the glass from the gentleman’s hand, and poured the contents over his glossy head. While he gasped and groped for his handkerchief, she gathered up her bag and her wrap and swept out of Le Salon du Diable in a tempest of silks, dropping a coin into the bowl by the door as she went.
The next day, the gentleman was at Victorine’s door with flowers and a blue velvet jewel case and a note demanding that she receive him at once. The concierge sent up the note and the gifts, and Victorine sent them back again, retaining only the jewel case as a parting souvenir. She did not send a note of her own, since there was nothing to say except that she could no longer bear the sight of him. She listened to him curse her from the foot of the stairs, and watched him storm down the street when the concierge complained of the noise. Her only regret was not having broken with him before he took her to the Salon du Diable.
In late September, the hard times foretold by the blonde in the Veau d’Or came to Paris.
A city under the threat of siege is not, Victorine discovered, a good place to find a protector. Top-hatted gentlemen still strolled the grand boulevards, but they remained stubbornly blind to Victorine’s saucy hats, graceful form, and flashing eyes. They huddled on street corners and in cafés, talking of the impossibility of continued Prussian victory, of the threat of starvation that transformed the buying of humble canned meat into a patriotic act. Her cheeks aching from unregarded smiles, Victorine began to hate the very sound of the words “siege,” “Prussian,” “Republic.” She began to feel that Bismarck and the displaced emperor, along with the quarrelsome Generals Gambetta and Trochu, were personally conspiring to keep her from her livelihood. Really, among them, they were turning Paris into a dull place, where nobody had time or taste for pleasure.
A less determined woman might have retired for the duration, but not Victorine. Every day, she put on her finest toilettes and walked, head held high under the daring hats, through the military camp that Paris was fast becoming. Not only the Champs-Élysées, but all the public gardens, squares, and boulevards were transformed into military camps or stables or sections of the vast open market that had sprung up to cater to the soldiers’ needs. Along streets where once only the most expensive trinkets were sold, Victorine passed makeshift stalls selling kepis and epaulets and gold braid, ramrods and powder pouches and water bottles, sword-canes and bayonet-proof leather chest protectors. And everywhere were soldiers, throwing dice and playing cards among clusters of little grey tents, who called out as she passed: “Eh, sweetheart! How about a little tumble for a guy about to die for his country?”
It was very discouraging.
One day at the end of September, Victorine directed her steps toward the heights of the Trocadéro, where idle Parisians and resident foreigners had taken to airing themselves on fine days. They would train their spyglasses on the horizon and examine errant puffs of smoke and fleeing peasants like ancient Roman priests examining the entrails of a sacrifice, after which they gossiped and flirted as usual. A few days earlier, Victorine had encountered an English gentleman with a sand-colored moustache of whom she had great hopes. As she climbed the hill above the Champs de Mars, she heard the drums measuring the drills of the Mobile Guards.
At the summit of the hill, fashionable civilians promenaded to and fro. Not seeing her English gentleman, Victorine joined the crowd surrounding the enterprising b
ourgeois who sold peeps through his long brass telescope at a franc a look. A clutch of English ladies exclaimed incomprehensibly as she pushed past them; a fat gentleman in a round hat moved aside gallantly to give her room. She cast him a distracted smile, handed the enterprising bourgeois a coin, and stooped to look through the eyepiece. The distant prospect of misty landscape snapped closer, bringing into clear focus a cloud of dark smoke roiling over a stand of trees.
“That used to be a village,” the enterprising bourgeois informed her. “The Prussians fired it this morning—or maybe we did, to deny the Prussians the pleasure.” The telescope jerked away from the smoke. “If you’re lucky, you should be able to see the refugees on their way to Paris.”
A cart, piled high with furniture, a woman with her hair tied up in a kerchief struggling along beside it, lugging a bulging basket in each hand and a third strapped to her back. A couple of goats and a black dog and a child riding in a handcart pushed by a young boy. “Time’s up,” the enterprising bourgeois said.
Victorine clung to the telescope, her heart pounding. The smoke, the cart, the woman with her bundles, the children, the dog, were fleeing a real danger. Suddenly, Victorine was afraid, deathly afraid of being caught in Paris when the Prussians came. She must get out while there was still time, sell her jewels, buy a horse and carriage, travel south to Nice or Marseilles. She’d find La Fée Verte, and they could leave at once. Surely, if she went to the Place Clichy, she’d see her there, waiting for Victorine to rescue her. But she’d have to hurry.
As quickly as Victorine had thrust to the front of the crowd, so quickly did she thrust out again, discommoding the English ladies, who looked down their long noses at her. No doubt they thought her drunk or mad. She only thought them in the way. In her hurry, she stepped on a stone, twisted her ankle, and fell gracelessly to the ground.
Young Woman in a Garden Page 13
