It amused me to think of this courtesan springing up the stairs of her last rest dressed in a habit of the Sisters of the Order of Saint-Denis Convent. She held out a slip of paper. Rue de Passy, near the Bois de Boulogne. The note at the bottom, signed by her, gave me the privilege of leaving the convent to visit her. She will need to be fitted, she said. A soul like hers, that is a great victory to win it. A great victory . . . and she sighed. Go tomorrow.
The doors on that first visit, as I waited for the courage to announce myself, seemed to me like the doors to Hell itself. The ornate stonework on the building’s façade, carved to look like a giant’s roses and thorns, the wooden double doors that were more than twice my height, the knocker, a bronze Medusa as big as my face, all looked as if, were the doors to open, I would be drawn inside and never allowed to leave.
I was dressed that day in a simple dress and bonnet, and carried with me my sewing tools. Over my mouth I wore a scarf I’d made for myself that read muette, the word stitched there to explain to any stranger why I would not respond—and to hide me, I hoped, from any chance encounter with someone who might recognize me.
I could not have guessed how much I looked, in short, like my own tableau vivant or how this would charm the Comtesse.
I pulled on the Medusa’s chin and let it drop, and a loud knock echoed inside. The eyes to the Medusa head slid to the side, and her large green eyes appeared, shadowed by the lamp behind her. Oho, she said.
The bronze eyes slid back into place, the door opened, and inside stood a beautiful woman in something like a toga but which was a black satin dressing gown, her red-gold hair loose and carefully wild. A crystal goblet in her hand glowed with champagne. She waved me in with her free arm, but I was so stunned, I only stood there. Her smile stayed on her face but dimmed slightly, and she spoke through it.
Well, she said. Muette. Is that your name?
I held out the letter of introduction from the convent.
She looked familiar to me, and then I knew—she was the very Parisienne I’d seen my first day in Paris. I was sure of it. The woman in mourning who had parted the crowd in her enormous dress and jewels. She was still in mourning, but she did not seem near death, as I’d been told.
As she pulled the letter open, she asked, Are you perhaps the ghost of the Chateau de la Muette, my neighbor? She gestured at the distance. Or some long lost heir to the château? I had always wondered when La Muette would come for her house. She flicked the letter with her finger and held it out to read it.
I shook my head again, unsure at what she meant. I knew nothing of this château.
You are my convent-bred seamstress, yes?
I nodded. And then smiled from under my scarf.
Come, my girl. You’ve come just in time.
She would always be like this. Familiar, full of vaguely oracular pronouncements, a Pythian oracle fed on champagne and pearls instead of myrrh.
La Muette, she said, as we walked up her stairs. Only in French, she said, would we have a word that can mean mute, hunting dog, or young falcon. Are you any of those?
I felt Fate reach down and trace the word on my scarf.
Slowly, I held up two fingers.
Two? You are two of those. How mysterious. I suppose we shall see which ones you mean. And with that, she threw open the doors to her dressing room.
The Comtesse had need of alterations to a nun’s habit she’d once worn for a tableau vivant, in which she appeared as the sole resident of l’Ermitage de Passy, a comment on her social status as an exile from Parisian society in the aftermath of an affair with the Emperor. The resultant scandal of her in a habit was almost as enormous as her affair had been. She now sought to commemorate the event in a photograph. Her Paris dressmaker had claimed he did not know the details of a nun’s habit, and so she had engaged in this pretense in order to engage me.
She told this all to me as I worked, and more. She was busy commemorating all of her most significant dresses and appearances in a series of photographic portraits. She praised me when I was done that first day and said she had more for me to do if I wanted the work. While the sisters were predictably disappointed, they allowed me to return again and again, imagining, perhaps, that I had bent her toward some last, virtuous response. Instead, I was repairing a red velvet toga dress for her as the Queen of Etruria. Or a fascinating Queen of Hearts costume, cut low and revealing. Or an enormous white gown with a cape trimmed with ermine, which she wore with a black mask.
After another month, she told me she had recommended me and my work to the Tuileries. This seemed extraordinary to me. She then added I was to expect a letter of employment soon from the Empress’s chamberlain.
Are you pleased?
I nodded and wept, overwhelmed.
My dear muette! This is what she called me—she could not remember my name. How good you are and how sweet. Are you prepared to serve them well?
I nodded again.
Good, she said, and glowed with pleasure. When you are in your new position, you must come to see me every week. But our new arrangement must be a secret between us.
The attention and favor of this great woman made me fiercely proud, and I nodded again, agreeing to this condition instantly. But, of course, this was her intention. The result of those visits was not, as the good sister had thought, the capture of a great soul or, at least, the soul that was captured was not the one inside the Comtesse’s famous breast. The soul that was captured was mine.
When the letter arrived, the sisters were greatly honored I was to work at the Tuileries. They did not ask as to how my reputation had traveled to court. I did not tell them.
§
Each of us in the Tuileries lived inside very clear territories, whether it was the Empress or I. I could only be in the kitchens, for example, to leave my dish and spoon or to pick them up. I ran a narrow series of stairs from the eaves to the lower levels, and this path never took me through the royal apartments. Though I lived in the Tuileries Palace, I felt that I lived in a small room with a narrow stairs that led to a larger room full of gowns and furs. Not the palace at all, but something like a rabbit warren, dark and too warm.
In November the Emperor and Empress went for a month to Compiègne, in Pierrefonds. The royals invited the best of European society to join them there for a week of hunting, a hundred guests per week. A few, such as the Princess Metternich, stayed the month. Some of the imperial household staff went with them, but many did not. It was usual to have the month off for most of us. So it was with some surprise that I found myself being spoken to as I was pushing an enormous sapphire silk gown down into a trunk to send to a girl in Rouen who was the next in line for the Empress’s castoffs.
I looked up.
The speaker was the Empress’s own chamberlain, and I came to understand that he was asking me, or telling me, that I was needed to go to Compiègne. The girl who normally would have gone had taken ill, which in the palace usually meant she was with child. I’d been chosen to replace her there.
He paused here, and then, indicating the scarf over my mouth, said, Take that off at once. It will frighten her. And you can’t wear it in the palace; it isn’t the uniform.
I quickly untied it, put it in my pocket, and pressed my hand against it for luck.
The chamberlain indicated I was to follow him. We went out of the cedar rooms of the palace basement, and as we approached the door to the royal apartments, I felt a faint terror, as if I might be burned. The chamberlain’s movements were clockwork mechanical, a sort of stiff, persistent staccato energy drove him, and yet, as he reached out for the door’s handle, he lunged a little, as if he’d held his breath while below.
An incredible light spread up from the bottom of the door as it swung open, and he dissolved in it briefly. He held the door for me, waiting as I also went through.
I walked out into the apartments of the palace and then stopped short as the impossible brightness of the mirrors flashing from the Paris morning
sunlight replaced the cellar dark. The door closed behind me and my heart began to pound in my chest.
The chamberlain, already off in the distance, turned back to see me still by the door and gave me a severe glance, his left eyebrow raised, waving rigorously for me to hurry. The brightness here was like a tunnel also, and finding my senses, I moved toward his dark figure at the center of it, following him to where I would serve next.
Until then, for having so much of what I wanted, I had not considered just how I was not free.
§
As we walked, it seemed to me the light came from the Empress, as if around the turns of the halls in the rooms ahead she sat glowing, an unearthly radiance emerging from her like the figures in the paintings I passed. I remember the first room I entered was barnacled in green and gold, with an enormous mirror that ran the length of the wall on my right and reflected the gardens visible outside through the long, thin windows along the left. It looked as if I could walk through to another garden there, and as I ran by, I caught sight of myself and slowed, looking and then looking away. It was as if I’d never known myself, who or what I was, and I stared not so much at myself as I did at the series of strange details there that resembled what I knew of me. My face seemed to have changed shape; my eyes seemed some new color. And I was thin, very thin, too like the shadow I had fancied myself to be. The chamberlain glanced back, and I smiled at him anxiously, pulling my dress into place as if it could be made more presentable. The mirror image of me marched beside me and I found I listened for its footsteps.
The second room was red, and there were mirrors to the ceiling and paintings of men and women in mythic tableaux, all unfamiliar to me. The chamberlain stopped there and gave me whispered instructions on the presentation, how it was to be quick, that I would remain in the basement wardrobe service when I returned, but that after the presentation I was to be measured for the uniform I would wear in Compiègne. I wasn’t to address her or ask questions but only respond to any question she might direct at me.
And then he pulled a long ribbon outside the door, a bell rang, and I heard what I instantly knew was the Empress, a tired oui. He pushed the doors open to the Salon Bleu.
I sank to the floor as I entered, pushing my face down into the skirt of my dress. My first curtsy to her was clumsy, and I felt her stare. The two of them had a short conversation over my head, and I slowly turned to try to peek up at her despite the terrible danger of doing so. I was presented as you might a new hairbrush or hand mirror, a tool to be put out of sight as soon as it was used.
She was not the legendary beauty I now recognized from a few of the pictures I’d passed by in the imperial apartments, but she was still a very beautiful woman. She was the Andalusian, with her red hair that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. Her pale complexion was still smooth and unlined despite her love of sport. I tried not to stare at this woman I had dressed so often but had never seen. I looked down from her face to her fan, open and paused in its movement on her lap. She held a posy of Parma violets that shocked me for being fresh. On her fan were the painted figures of a man in dark armor kneeling at the feet of a beautiful woman. When it later became my job to care for it, I would know it was her favorite fan and that the picture was of Henry IV at the feet of Gabrielle d’Estrées, the woman whose love gave him the courage to be the great king of France he became. She was never, however, his queen.
It was an odd thing for an Empress to favor. But, as I would also learn, Eugénie loved dark omens and collected them scrupulously.
I was dismissed and left, returning to the dark, airless comfort of my basement palace. The seamstress measured me for my new uniform, and as she pulled the tape around my waist and batted my hands away, clucking her tongue at my size, a strange shame ran through me as I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been touched.
That night the eaves of the Tuileries constrained me in a way they never had before. Unable to sleep, I finally stood and went and looked out the tiny window. The lights made the palace seem made of a gold that glowed in the dark. I tried to imagine what Compiègne would be like. All that I could imagine, though, was the image from her fan. The man in armor bowing before the beautiful woman and the expressions of each.
Sorrow in the man, pleasure in the woman.
My role in the Empress’s destruction begins here.
Three
DURING THE HEIGHT of her affair with the Emperor, the Comtesse had a special illusion door built inside her own so that the door could be open and appear closed, so that someone watching would be persuaded no one had come and gone when, in fact, someone had. I could never find it, but I thought of this each time I passed through.
I had never once seen the Emperor in the time I’d worked in the Tuileries, and as I waited in that doorway on this occasion, I understood I now likely would. As the door opened, as I entered with her butler, as I waited in her sitting room, I could feel, crossing in the air, the many paths of the man; could imagine his cloak, his clothes, his possession of her, still somehow complete after all this time. The door was still there for him to use if he should ever return. She’d had from him the passion that the Empress could feel missing in each part of the Tuileries she paced at night; it had come here and spent itself, and the air was still rich with it.
I left a note alongside the list as I passed the bowl this time, telling the Comtesse about the change in my position, and when she sat down at table at last, she held it up and then smoothed it against the wood by her place setting before looking up at me.
My dear, it’s excellent news, though we’ll need to be more careful. I will reflect on how this then changes your duties to me.
I only raised my eyebrows, waiting, and she laughed.
You are my “spy” in the basement. She laughed again. I’m sure he knows of our little meetings. I chose you because you are a grisette, because you are beneath notice. Because you are La Muette.
She paused as she said this, as if uncertain as to whether she had offended me, and then she pressed on.
When you are nearer the Empress, though, they will begin to observe you. And soon, if he does not already know, he will know. He may even have sent someone to follow you here today.
Terror at the idea of being discovered froze me in place. She smiled when she saw the change in my face.
It is important for him to know I’m spying on what she wears. I’m sure it will amuse him to think I am plotting something involving how many crinolines she wears, something like this. She gestured at her dress.
Looking up at me again, she said, It’s important because then he’ll allow it, and in doing so, he’ll believe he controls the result.
She was lit by the single candle near her at that end of her table, her beautiful red hair rising loose in curls.
He won’t, she said.
I returned to cutting the duck leg in front of me.
If anything, it’s quite the opposite, she said to me. She is so odd, she said. It is, in fact, she who is always copying the fashions of his mistresses, copying the women she has lost to, as if she can win by imitating them. She is the spy of the crinolines. She is always befriending them.
And then she paused and raised her glass. All of them except me, she said. Her eyes glittered, as if she had won a prize of great worth.
During the time of the liaison between the Emperor and the Comtesse, the Empress had been recovering from the birth of the Prince; she sickened and took to bed for much of the year. If the Emperor understood this as a comment on his affair, he had responded by continuing it.
You’re in no danger, she said. In fact, if you are already known to him, I would say you are meant to be a taunt to me, full of tales of what I can never have that you, my muette, cannot ever tell me. It is their revenge on me to bring you, I’m sure. For I am not allowed at Compiègne.
As I listened, she began to tell me of who would be at Compiègne, as well as the story of her banishment, but I could not quite hear it. I raised the
fork to my mouth and paused to look at the delicate meat, pink at the center, before setting it in my mouth. I was careful not to betray any change in my expression as the thought came to me.
She was indifferent as to whether my errand for her resulted in my arrest or death.
The dinner finished soon after that. She called for paper, a pen, and ink.
I want you to copy out an address several times until you can do it from memory, she said. It is not this address, as it would immediately place you under suspicion.
I sat and did as she asked, writing it out, writing it out, writing it out with a terrible effort to keep my hand steady. 7 Place Vendôme, 7 Place Vendôme, again and again.
Very good, she said. Now then, I would like you to record what she wears during the series, a much greater task, as she will be changing approximately four to five times a day. You will post the list to this address from town. During this period, I will pay you a raise, to be collectively paid on your return. Are we agreed?
Oui, I wrote in script under the repeated addresses.
§
When the door to the carriage opened and I was again back at the Bois de Boulogne, I forced myself to walk back slowly to the Tuileries and calmly greet the guards as I did so. They waved me in, smiling; I nodded, opening my packages for them to check, and they passed me through as usual. No one feared me. I walked up my familiar passageways, and as I did, I felt it, like a faint movement of air, even a wind, at my neck.
I waited until I could wait no longer, and then I ran the last part, and once in my room again, I bolted the door, fell on my bed, and pulled out my purse.
Away from her, the fullness of what seemed to be her madness came into view. She was bound up in an obsession with the Empress, who, it seemed, was perhaps likewise obsessed with her. To be caught between them was to be ruined, and that was where I was.
The Queen of the Night Page 16
