The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  Comprimaria, I heard him say behind me. What news? Please, he said, let me see the letter.

  I tried to hold it away, and as he reached for it, I ran for the door.

  No, he said. No, no, no, and he caught me and then tried to hold me. I struggled, pushing him, and then screamed.

  He couldn’t console me, and yet he was all I had.

  No, he said, it is a mistake.

  Nothing could happen with him, I understood, as he stroked my back. Whatever his intentions, for me to be a singer, to really be a singer, I needed to be rid of him.

  Dark thing, night, shooting stars. How ridiculous. How beautiful and how cruel to know what I was or could be, and yet to be kept from it—and to know it could vanish as I reached for it. Still, it was enough to be everything I wanted, and this was when I knew.

  I pushed away from him and ran out to the street, a street where I knew I was not to be, and having spent so much time avoiding arrest, I knew exactly what to do next. I drew my knife as I had at the Bal Mabille and walked slowly toward the police officers I saw who rushed for me.

  When I looked back, I saw him at the gate to the apartment, startled. He ran to speak with the police, desperately shouting first at me and then to the police, insisting they release me. They asked if he was my husband, and when he said he owned me, they told him to come to the jail for me and bring my contract and bill of sale.

  I would not look at him again after this; there was nothing more to say. I did not know what was next, only that it began here.

  §

  When my turn came before the magistrate, I was told I was to be taken to Saint-Lazare.

  I was put in with a girl they called only La Muette, the mute. They had no way to know her name. But they were certain that, for being mute, she could not be corrupted by the likes of me.

  She sniffled occasionally, weeping, leaning into the corner of the cell as if it might give way and let her go. But soon she was quiet, and the two of us were a pool of silence amid the noise as the other prisoners argued and insulted one another, alternately threatening and weeping.

  All grew quieter eventually as the night began and sleep came over the jail. I unfurled my sleep roll on the floor and I lay there awake for some time before thinking to at least help my cellmate to her own sleep roll—she shouldn’t, I thought, sleep there in the corner that way. I stood and went over to her to find her cool to the touch.

  She was quiet because she was dead.

  The magistrate had ordered her to be sent to the convent orphanage, its having been decided that she needed some sort of education in reading, writing, and a trade, as well as some protection from vice and sin. But she didn’t react to most of what was said, and I was left to wonder if she even knew what her fate was.

  By now it was becoming light. I could see her soft expression, so like sleep I envied her a little. Soon the tenor would come, he would pay my bail and show my papers, and I would be returned to him.

  I had thought to ring for the guards. I looked down the hall to see the one set to watch over us asleep at his post. He’d be angry to be woken, I knew, and would demand to know which of us was who, and it was then I knew it was likely all the same to them which one they buried, and which they sent on to the nuns.

  She had been mortally injured but unable to say so, her girl’s body all bruises and infected wounds, which I saw as I undressed her, for I was now determined to take her place. I felt a terrible sadness and also fear, that to even pass myself off as her would make me share this fate or worse. If you were damned before this, I told myself, you’ll be twice damned now. But I wouldn’t be stealing from the dead—she couldn’t use her future, and I could. The only person it would matter to was me.

  I remembered the prayer I had said over my own mother’s body and whispered it softly, as if she could listen, and then kissed her hand, pressing my cheek against it.

  I know you can’t give a blessing, I said to her quietly. But spare me a curse.

  §

  The guards came to take us to our breakfasts, such as they were. As I had suspected, the morning shift was new.

  You there, wake her up, the first guard said, before the second yelled over him, Wake up, my dear! It is time for breakfast!

  They laughed at this, but stopped laughing when she didn’t wake.

  They looked at her, arranged in a posture of sleep, her face turned to the wall, her feet set into my cancan shoes, visibly displayed. This had been the most difficult part, her feet having stiffened after death and me still wanting the shoes.

  What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid? asked the first guard to me, before the other said, She’s dumb, she can’t understand us. They began miming to me, for me to go over to her.

  I did. I pulled at her shoulder, and she fell to the side with that unmistakable slowness of death. I stepped back, my face a perfect expression of terror, fit to make Delsarte proud.

  All right then, one less mouth to feed, the second guard said, as he unlocked the door. Our little slut is dead.

  §

  After breakfast, I was returned to wait in the now-empty cell. I stared at the cell door for some time, waiting for them to angrily return and accuse me of what I had done. But the guards returned to escort me to the sisters, and I was handed a small satchel I understood to be the girl’s effects.

  I had not expected this somehow. Light as it was, it was heavy in my hands. Not quite a warning.

  Her name was unknown to me, and so as I stood before the magistrate again, he asked me if I understood that he was releasing me to the care of the orphanage. I only stared as I had seen her do.

  Sidonie, the magistrate then wrote for my name. He held it up and showed it to me. This is your name now, do you understand? They are giving you this name, will call you by it, he said, and then he gestured for the guards to take me off, and as I left, I felt the name close over me like a door.

  §

  She is most likely in the rue d’Enfer now, one of many in the hedge of skulls down in the catacombs. There’s an entire city of the dead under Paris, complete with streets and corners. I sometimes wonder if it is any more merciful than this one.

  As for me, I was delivered to the Convent of Saint-Denis orphanage. The sisters stripped off my uniform and burned it and shaved my head for lice, as they called me Sidonie and I struggled to remember to look at them as they did so.

  I had again taken a dead girl’s name to make my escape.

  In the first months, I waited for the police to angrily return, to take me from the sisters and return me to jail. But they never did.

  I knew my last life was truly over, my name struck from the registry, a death certificate written for me. No one owned me but me.

  Alone in this new country made by my new name, as I walked the convent walls, learning my alphabet, my sewing, I felt something surely miraculous waited for me now, something only possible now that I had died and been reborn.

  Act III

  Un Ballo in Maschera

  One

  WHEN THE TIME came for me to find the Comtesse de Castiglione again, it was easier than I would have thought.

  She was said to receive no one now, and yet everyone I asked knew where she lived—an apartment on the Place Vendôme, said to be painted black and empty of mirrors, the windows shrouded. The building was stately but conservative, strangely understated for her.

  I could see the black curtains I had heard about from the street as I approached.

  Her apartment on the rue de Passy, well known to me, was still hers, and another residence also, but it was said she treated these as museums to herself, filled with her gowns, props, and photographs, the souvenirs of her legend. She visited them occasionally but lived here. This apartment looked, from the street, as if the widow’s weeds she’d put on in 1867 had bloomed over the years until they’d made a black hood over her entire life, though she no longer mourned her husband, if ever she truly had. It was said she mourned her beauty, which p
eople still spoke of as of a vanished champion from another age. She had buried herself alive in public, on one of Paris’s most fashionable streets. One final tableau vivant until death.

  She was the beauty in mourning I’d seen on my first day in Paris. She had become for a time my teacher, protector, and, eventually, an adversary—though I had never had the power to threaten her. It was she who had crushed me, who had taken my measure and set me down according to her purposes.

  This address, she had made me memorize it before I ever knew what it would become. I think, even back in the days of my service to her, she knew she meant to come to spend her last days here.

  I rang her bell, waited, and presented my card to a suspicious young woman, who returned quickly, her face a shield.

  I’m afraid she cannot receive you, she said, before showing me to the door.

  I thanked her and left and returned the next day to try again. This time, as the door opened, there was not even surprise on the girl’s face. She looked away then back to me, and said, You must know she will never receive you. Please take no offense. I always ask once, but she receives no one now. Please, do not return. It is an anguish to her.

  I went across the street.

  The neighborhood had many little cafés to choose from, so I found one I liked and waited, drinking a coffee and having luncheon. I wanted to see what hours she kept and if she ever left.

  I had not seen or heard from her in more than ten years. I had since created a new life, one I thought of as empty of her and my service to her. But if I had an enemy who knew the whereabouts of the Settler’s Daughter after she’d left the circus, with a penchant for the theatrical and the patience to plan, it could only be her. If the book I had brought with me, if it meant the old war between us had been renewed, I needed to know why and what it would take to end it.

  She never appeared. Sometime in the late afternoon I saw her maid leave by the service entrance and go off to do some errand from which she returned.

  The next day I went over again to the café and spent the day in much the same manner. On the third day of my vigil, a gentleman came and sat down in the café at the table next to mine.

  Mademoiselle, he said. Please excuse me. Good morning. I’m an officer of the secret police, he said, very quietly, so only I would hear. The Comtesse de Castiglione is under our protection. We have been made aware that she refused you three days ago and that you are apparently conducting a surveillance of her apartment. So I must now give you a warning. If you are found here again after this, you will be arrested and taken in for questioning.

  I stood and looked at her windows to see if there was any movement there.

  There was not.

  Ah, he said. I’m so sorry I did not recognize you. You are Lilliet Berne, La Générale, yes? I nodded. Forgive me. I saw you sing this season in Faust; you were extraordinary. Please forgive me. It is an honor to meet you, he said. And then his smile dimmed, and he said, Do not force me to take you to the station; it would be a terrific scandal in the press. He paused, and a terrible silence stood between us. For me to be the one who questioned La Générale.

  Yes, I thought, as I took in his expression, the papers would enjoy that very much.

  We both looked at the wrapped package in front of me.

  I smiled and nodded to him, picked it up, and left.

  I had managed this all badly, I saw as I made my way down the street away from the Place Vendôme. I had come here as if all were the same between the Comtesse and me, sure she was my antagonist, even that she knew my name—my professional name—and had not thought that perhaps she would refuse me or simply take my card to be that of a stranger’s. I was stung, too, as I had briefly expected something more like the request for an autograph from my young policeman friend as he turned to me, and so I chided myself for my vanity.

  But there was fear as well. I had not expected the Comtesse to still be protected by secret police, especially not in Paris. I believed the fall of the Second Empire had sundered all the agreements I knew of this kind for everyone, but for her especially. Instead, she and her agreements had outlasted it.

  Whether or not our old war had begun again, she, at least, was armed.

  How is it I am here? I wondered, as I walked away. But I knew.

  I was looking for someone who’d been thrown away, she had said to me, of how she found me.

  Once she was done with me, I was to disappear.

  Of those I suspected had betrayed me, she was the one I was sure never thought of me. The most dangerous one of all.

  Two

  IT IS SAID there were four hundred Italian assassins hidden in Paris, each sworn to take the Emperor’s life if he wavered in his support for the cause of Italian unification.

  Four hundred Italian assassins, and then there was me.

  As the Empress Eugénie didn’t fit in the dark basement passageways of the Tuileries Palace once she was dressed, her many gowns were delivered there instead, where they were stored and then sent up on dressmaker’s forms in a dumbwaiter to an antechamber where she would dress quickly, like an actress, and make her grand imperial entrances.

  I arrived at the Tuileries in the early fall of 1868, a girl of seventeen, there from the Saint-Denis convent to work as one of the maids in the palace basement wardrobe, a grisette. The name means little gray one, or gray girl. I liked the word because it made me feel as if I’d become a shadow, working as I did in the basement of the Tuileries and sleeping in a small room in its eaves.

  L’Impératrice, that was the word for empress, and there was just the one.

  That word stayed in the air a little after it was said, a kind of glittering dark omen. The guards said it as she made her way through the crowd, or we said it in a fierce whisper, a signal to stop what you were doing and throw yourself to the ground in her general direction. Once I heard it, every moment I was not on the ground was one in which I felt my life might be forfeit. This dismayed her, I believe, though, of course, it was done to please her. She never said it—even the Empress, I think, feared this word.

  The ladies of her court wore her badge on their left shoulder, tied there with a ribbon. Three wore her portrait, painted in miniature, circled in diamonds—these were her most powerful, the most senior: the Duchesse de Bassano, Princesse d’Essling, and Madame Murat, widow of Admiral Murat and Gouvernante des Enfants de France—her title made me think of her as the ruler of a small kingdom of French orphaned children, bordered in sorrow. The other nine wore her monogram, diamond letters on a black enamel background: I for Impératrice, E for Eugénie, and an I stepping through an E, as if someone had plunged daggers into the E from above and below.

  She could not choose her ladies-in-waiting. Some were her friends, but many were not. Two were with her at all times for a week at a time in Paris, a month if she went to the country. Pepa, though, she could choose. Pepa belonged to her.

  Pepa was the mistress of Her Majesty’s wardrobe. A fellow Spaniard, she was squat, ugly, fierce, and strong, brought by Eugénie to Paris from Málaga. She might have been pitiable but for the rages she used to enforce her ways. If beauty didn’t make you good, Pepa was proof ugliness didn’t, either. She was assisted by two sisters, the daughters of the governor of the Château de Saint-Cloud. The governor had once been the Emperor’s jailer, and his appointment, and that of his daughters, was meant to repay the man for the trouble the Emperor had made for him by escaping from his jail. But obeying Pepa offended the sisters, and as there was something each of them would not do, a girl was needed who could not refuse.

  So it was I came to the Tuileries.

  I was known to them as Sidonie, from the orphanage of the Legion of Honor of Saint-Denis Convent, chosen for this work as I was small, young, quick, and believed to be mute; the chamberlain felt it best to find someone incapable of speaking back to either Pepa or the sisters. I undertook my responsibilities gladly, eager to confirm for them that they had chosen well.

  I quickly
proved handy at climbing inside the dumbwaiter and wrangling the dress forms into place without either tearing the silk swaths of the enormous skirts or dirtying them on the walls of the chute. The skirts or the bodices or both were often jeweled, sometimes took a month to make, and were never washed—you couldn’t clean something studded with diamonds in water and soap.

  The Empress wore during the fall and winter, the high season of the balls, as many as four dresses in a day, and the single, finest, most expensive one was always for the New Year’s ball. The seconds, as they were known to us, once they’d been worn, were often stripped of their gems and given out to the poorer relations of ladies-in-waiting or sometimes, if it was not too expensive, one would be given as a present to a favorite servant.

  Someone unlikely to wear it in her presence.

  And so we took great care with each dress before she wore it, as it was hers, and then great care afterward, in case it was to be one of ours.

  The dressmaker’s forms were made just to the size of her and she was measured every season for them. One was sent up dressed, the other empty for the dress she’d take off. When the door to the lift opened, there were always the two dummies side by side, the one bare, the other in the recently quitted dress or gown. They looked to me like two headless women, and it always gave me pause. Given how much the Empress worshipped her forerunner, Marie Antoinette, I can’t imagine she didn’t think of it. But Eugénie was Spanish, and Louis-Napoléon not quite French, either. There was not much French in him or any other Napoléon, for that matter. That would mean many things in the course of their lives, but I think, most of all, it meant they didn’t entirely understand how it was with France and her rulers and how it had always been, how it might always be.