The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  §

  From my arrival, I was concerned almost entirely with Her Majesty’s furs. They were heavy, and even if well cured, the animal musk of them made the air of their room thick and close. This was where Pepa and the sisters refused to go most often. These were not given away like the gowns, and as if they resented this fact, Pepa and the sisters ignored them all the more.

  My French was of a very odd kind at this time—I knew curses and sexual positions, and how to ask for a drink, and then a few more words from lyrics learned for the tenor. At the convent I had added prayers and psalms, but in written form only. Of what I learned here, I often knew neither how things were said nor what they sounded like, and I learned as I could by listening.

  When I was presented to Pepa and the sisters on that first day, for example, I understood very little of what they said to me. Pepa’s French was thickly accented by her Spanish in a way I found charming; it would be the only thing I ever found charming about her. The very stout Spaniard and the two slender, quiet French women seemed at something of a loss when I only nodded to everything they said but, of course, this was the loss the chamberlain had in mind, had even hoped for; when the chamberlain indicated that I was mute, they stared, as if it were something they could see. They then walked me through the basement kingdom, showed me the dress dummies, the boxes of pins, the dumbwaiter, the bell that would ring for me, enunciating everything carefully. And then they brought me to the room where the furs were kept. Pepa gestured with a sideways grin to me. I couldn’t tell the source of her pleasure, exactly. I could only think it was because her time in this room was done as mine began.

  A list of the furs the Empress abandoned when she fled the Tuileries was published in the British newspapers shortly after the end of the Empire.

  One Swansdown cloak, lined with Silver Fox.

  One black velvet mantle, trimmed with Marten Sable.

  One black velvet circular cloak, lined and trimmed with Chinchilla

  One black velvet pelisse, lined with Weasel, with Sable collar.

  One otter skin cloak.

  One blue Cashmere opera cloak, lined with Swansdown.

  One black Cashmere opera cloak, lined with Swansdown.

  One hunting waistcoat, lined with Chinchilla.

  One black silk boddice, lined with Chinchilla.

  One grey silk boddice, lined with Chinchilla.

  One Marabout muff.

  One Sable muff.

  One Silver Fox muff.

  One Ermine muff.

  One Otter muff.

  One Otter’s Head muff.

  One Marten Sable boa.

  One collar of Sable tails.

  One collar of Marten Sable heads.

  One pair of Chinchilla cuffs.

  One pair of Silver Fox cuffs.

  One green velvet wrap, lined with Canadian fur.

  One carpet of Thibet Goat skin.

  One white Sheepskin carpet.

  One set of Otter trimming.

  Two caracos of Spanish Lamb skin

  8 ¾ yards of Chinchilla trimming.

  27 yards of Sable tail trimming.

  One front and a piece of Black Fox.

  Four strips, a wrist band, two pockets, two sleeves and one trimming of Black Fox.

  Two Swansdown skins, in pieces.

  Fourteen Silver Fox skins.

  Six half skins of Silver Fox.

  Twenty Silver Fox tails.

  One Otter collar.

  Three tails of Canadian fur.

  Two Marabout collars.

  Some odd pieces of Chinchilla.

  Four large carpets of black Bear skin.

  Two small carpets of black Bear skin.

  One brown Bear, with head.

  One stuffed Bear.

  One white Fox rug.

  One caraco, one petticoat, and one waistcoat of chestnut coloured plush, trimmed with Otter.

  19 ¾ yards of Otter trimming.

  Two Pheasants’ skins

  Three white Sheepskin stools.

  One Sable dress trimming.

  Three Sable skins.

  Two squares of Chinchilla.

  One Weasel tippet and two cuffs to match

  Two pieces Swansdown.

  Two Pheasant wings.

  One stuffed Fox.

  One pair of Otter gloves.

  3 ½ yards of Skunk trimming.

  Two court mantles bordered with Ermine.

  I knew they’d published this list to shame her; but as many furs as were found, I knew well there’d been many more.

  As often as not, under one of those ermine court mantles, Eugénie wore only a flannel wrapper, brought with her from Spain. It made the Emperor quite cross when he would look over and see a bit of it showing. I sometimes wanted to explain to the Emperor that he had married a horsewoman, but if he didn’t know it, it wasn’t for me to tell him. He’d admired her horsewomanly ways, having fallen in love with her on a hunting party at the Château Compiègne, meant to be six days that became eleven. At the end of it, he gave her the horse she rode in the hunt and an emerald pin shaped as a cloverleaf and covered in small diamonds in memory of a moment when she’d paused to admire a clover after the rain. He had it made in Paris while the hunt went on, and it arrived in time to be his token to her.

  For all any of us know, he had the hunt extended so as to give this to her before she left, all of them waiting while the jeweler did his work and the Emperor his.

  She lives now outside London, having escaped the mobs that screamed for her death. A brave few of her loyal subjects had rushed her from the palace in the first moments after the Emperor’s capture and the fall of the Empire. Like Louis-Philippe before her, she was rushed from the palace to London in a disguise, on the yacht of a British dentist.

  I wondered how it felt to her, if she’d read the list of her furs, if she missed any of it at all, or if she was content to wear as much flannel as she liked now over there in England, the Emperor and the Prince dead.

  I had a pang on reading the list, of missing my life there. I thought of the Tuileries and how the enormous buildings of the palace looked to me sometimes like the cars of enormous trains. I missed walking toward them in the night and knowing there was a small room for me within, where I could close the door and vanish, no one knowing who I was or where. In those days, the Emperor and Empress were both everything in my life and nothing to me, for I never saw them. I wasn’t among the servants who were close to her physically, not at first, though through my work I had to know, constantly, the intimate details of her life—if she had gained or lost weight, if she was with menses, angry or sad or in good humor. Each day had a schedule to it, determined by her events, when she would need this or that dress or gown or fur, and when she would no longer need them. It was not constant drudgery, but instead there were short periods of intense work and then long stretches with nothing to do. Nothing of my life mattered to them except that I be present according to my schedule, which I received weekly, with some changes daily, the times I was to climb inside the dumbwaiter and get the dress on. The hours were very irregular, as the parties could go late into the night or early morning, though usually her lady’s maids would leave the night’s last dress in the dumbwaiter, and we were to rise and send up the new one before the Empress woke. We knew, for example, when she was wearing the flannel underneath, as there would be no requests, nothing for us to do when the schedule clearly said something like Ambassadeur du Brésil.

  I felt she let her flannel show to punish His Majesty for how he met for hours on matters of state with his “secretaries” every night, which is to say, his whores, his wives of other politicians and royals, their daughters, women who often imagined they could be his next Eugénie. As this was conducted below, his first Eugénie wandered the upper galleries and halls of the palace alone, with little or no hope of seeing him, visiting her courtiers in their apartments and playing with their children, always staying too late. No one could send her out; s
he was the Empress, and she was very lonely without her Emperor. And yet because it would be dangerous for her to have a lover, in case she was to bear a false heir, her movements were carefully guarded by secret police.

  None of the young women who wanted her position knew what her position was.

  §

  As my role had no precedent, I was given a room of my own, a luxury, up in the eaves of the palace. I had a window that looked out onto the courtyard, a bed, a trunk with my name on it, and even a lamp for reading at night. A scarlet-eyed pigeon with bronze feathers was my single regular living visitor there. I was fed regularly and well, and passed my time mostly in the company of the other household servants. All of this suited me.

  I remembered the stuffed fox on that list. Also the bear. I remembered the twenty silver fox tails. I liked to set a silver fox head, the mouth open around the head of the otter on the muff, and leave it lying out to make the other grisettes laugh. The stuffed otter I kept up in my room with me for company. In the dark, by lamplight, the glass beads for his eyes seemed always to be almost alive.

  I’d found him in a corner of the fur closet, covered in three marabout boas. I quickly propped the boas on something else and then pushed him back behind several cloaks so he couldn’t be seen. A few nights later, as the courtyard blazed with the lights of a ball and the staff drank bad sour wine near the pantry stairs, I went down quickly to the basement fur closet and brought him to my room. I knew I could be arrested for theft, but there was none who missed him. He was tribute and sent, I imagined, from Quebec.

  He had been made so he stood upright, as if he’d seen something. There were faint black silk stitches on his wrist, repairing the tear in the fur from the trap. In the dark, he looked whole and alive.

  If he could have spoken, I would have known then, without any doubt, that I was lost in a fairy tale, but he never spoke. The single speaking animal in the palace was a parrot, a present to the Empress who’d sent it home with a maid, where it learned to swear and curse like the maid’s lovers. Sometimes I could hear it shouting, Tais-toi! Tais-toi! The creature had become much beloved by the Empress after that but was thought to be too obscene to be allowed anywhere near the apartments, and instead the bird was kept in the basement with us.

  In days as carefully measured as Her Majesty’s gowns, I grew to be at peace with my lot in life somehow. I didn’t imagine that I would stay there forever, nor did I see any opportunity to leave. I was hidden deep inside the enormous machinery of the institution that was dressing the Empress for her public and private appearances, and what I thought, what I looked like, and who I was were of no importance to anyone as long as I accomplished my singular tasks. I had found a very strange and beautiful kind of shelter, and there was work I could accomplish easily. Here, no one knew me as anything other than une muette of indistinct origin. I was sure I was content to spend my life inside the warm circle of light my lamp made, whether it lit my room or my passage to the vast cloakroom of the Empress.

  I was very grateful, then, to the Comtesse, for introducing me to the chamberlain, and did exactly as she asked.

  §

  Once a week I left the Tuileries Palace for an afternoon, something allowed all of us. It was under the pretense of visiting an invented aunt and uncle, and so for this visit I had a dress, a careful blue one, dark and plain. The other grisettes liked to mock it a little when I came down in it.

  It had never belonged to the Empress.

  There were not so many uncles and aunts for us all, and like many of the grisettes who pretended to visit a relation on their one day of freedom, I went to the Bois de Boulogne, where I would present myself as if I were like any other girl who went there looking to make an extra coin on her day’s leave on a ride through the park with a gentleman in his carriage. The procession of vehicles and horses was full of people either occupied at this pastime or busy looking at those occupied, a strangely public thing, like a theater’s boxes spilled out into the light of the afternoon.

  There was not one of our number who did not need some other way to make money. At times, stepping into or out of the carriage that picked me up, I had the sense of stepping over the death that waited if I was any poorer than I was. For me, it was always the same carriage and the same gentleman who left with me and brought me to this aunt I was to be visiting.

  My “aunt,” such as she was, was the Comtesse, the one woman in Europe who knew herself to be Eugénie’s true rival and perhaps the only other woman who could have been empress. She felt her mother had bungled her chance at marrying her off to the Emperor, and so when she was sent by Cavour to Paris as part of Italy’s diplomatic mission to France to seduce Louis-Napoléon to the Italian cause, married as she was to a man she did not love, she preferred this duty to all others and went willingly. She was so beautiful that when she entered late to her very first official ball in Paris the musicians stopped playing, causing the Emperor and Empress to look to see what had happened.

  This was a story she loved to tell.

  Like the Empress, the Comtesse had red-gold hair that was sometimes light, sometimes dark, but unlike Eugénie’s, her eyes were a brilliant green and set off by her pale skin. Her breasts and her feet were as celebrated as she was, and she often wore no corset and no shoes, letting her breasts loose in her bodice and slipping off her slippers when receiving male guests at home.

  When I met her, she was still an extraordinary beauty, but not as she remembered; she considered herself in decline. Even in the time I knew her best, she stayed inside more and more. Her eventual seclusion was still distant for now, the darkness only approaching.

  Our ritual, like my appointment to the Tuilieries, had been arranged by the Comtesse, and to repay her kindness, she asked me for this simple task. There was a written schedule of the Empress’s appearances prepared by Pepa and the noble sisters, and it included a catalogue of what she was to wear each time—this was done so we would know what to prepare each day. When the week was concluded, the list was taken down and discarded. I was the one who took this list down. Per her request, I instead kept this and set it in my greeting card wallet, where it stayed until I entered the Comtesse’s home. I placed it in a bowl near the entrance, as one might leave a visitor’s card, and withdrew from near the bowl a small envelope containing my five francs’ pay. I passed on, following her footman into the parlor, where I would sit and wait.

  Our ritual was unchanging.

  Her entrances were always grand, even when she made no apparent effort, even for such as me; she had no need to seduce me, though she did, as she did everyone. She came down the stairs always with a great refinement of movement, usually in an exotic costume of some kind, such as a silk kimono if she had been alone for the day, but it could as easily be a gown or a toga. Her passion for tableaux vivants and theater meant that, even when she was alone, she would amuse herself with her clothes for much of the day, dressing and undressing until it was time for her to go to her next appointment. And what she would wear to that appointment was somehow drafted over the course of the day’s changes.

  The Comtesse greeted me warmly always, her hand covering my own as she entered. She never mentioned the list, and neither did I, though I never failed to bring it. She instead showed me to her table, set out with crystal and silver; and over a bit of rabbit or duck, I ate and listened to her.

  If the chamberlain had need of a mute girl to work for the basement wardrobe because she couldn’t talk back, so too had the Comtesse; my second duty, though it was not one she’d instructed me to perform, was to listen to her stories, and her stories were almost entirely of the Emperor and the Empress. She sometimes teased of giving me an education in being an independent Parisienne, but this inevitably involved more stories of the imperial court, which led always to the story of her exile from the court and the injustice of it, how she was blamed for the assassination attempt on the Emperor’s life but not given credit for her role in the unification of Italy. She had neither
been brought to trial in Paris—and allowed the vindication of proving her innocence—nor had she been honored at home in Italy for fulfilling her mission.

  I did not understand much of this, or did not initially; but with repetition, I came to know it as if I were her, as if these were my own memories. When I returned to the dark of the palace basement, rushing to prepare the Empress’s gown, bent around the dummy in the dumbwaiter, pins in my mouth, careful not to stick them in wrong and thus accidentally ruin the gown, at those times I felt I belonged entirely to the dark basement and might never go above and outside again. It was only when I retrieved the day’s record and brought it to my room did this strange part of my life come back into view, hidden again when I slid the list into my things.

  §

  The mother superior herself had been the one who sent me to the Comtesse personally. I have undertaken a mission near us here, the saving of a soul, she’d said. A woman of wicked sins, a courtesan, who has made her fortune as a professional beauty, regularly disrespecting the vows of her marriage and of others, and who has become very serious about repenting and joining us here. She feels herself near her end and has asked for a habit of our order to be prepared for her so that she might at least go to her last rest as one of us in this way.