The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  She finally looked at me. I hope we understand each other.

  I said nothing and then remembered to nod. She continued once I did, returning to looking around the room.

  All of this is better than you deserve, I think. For there’s the matter of one Jou-jou Courrèges. A former star of the Cirque Napoléon and a favorite of the Bal Mabille, declared dead at Saint-Lazare and stricken from the registry. Mysteriously beaten to death despite arriving at the jail in good health. This after a bitter argument in the street with a famous tenor who was one of her amours. And who, it would seem, owned her contract, having bought her from a popular house in the Marais.

  Here I was, thinking you were a poor mute orphan girl, and it would seem you have been crisscrossing Paris in disguise for years. You are, I should say, an incorrigible criminal. And yet he is so happy at the thought of your reunion, our mutual tenor friend. And he is so dear to one of my own dearest friends. You are, he says, a rare talent.

  As she said this, she sat back in her chair and smiled, her gaze again on me directly. He is our mutual friend, yes? He will be here shortly to confirm you are who we believe you are.

  Your education at my hands ends here. You will now renew your relationship with your tenor friend. He is going to train that voice of yours properly this time, in Baden-Baden, at the hand of Pauline Viardot-García. There he will tell everyone you are his protégée.

  She returned her attention to me. You will, to show your thanks to me for this, stay with him. She raised her glass. The single condition of this is that you can never leave him and you may never speak to him of this bargain. Not without my permission. Your stay with him repays me for my assistance to you. Leave or betray him, and without question, the dossier I have on you will be sent to the authorities. And the Emperor will then have you to do with as he pleases.

  She waited, her good humor unwavering throughout. I am returning you to your owner, she said. But I won’t, she said, likely make you stay with him forever.

  You owe me another debt, however, for the humiliation of leaving your position, the Comtesse said. And here is the way you will repay me: The day may come when I will send someone to take you to the Emperor. You will go to him and do whatever he wishes. And whatever else you wear that day, you must wear those earrings.

  Slowly, I reached for my glass and raised it. She thought it was to toast her, and she raised her own.

  Congratulations, my dear, she said. Your first admirer is one of Europe’s most famous singers. You have done well.

  Our glasses touched. At that moment the tenor entered, and the gathered crowd stood and applauded him as he walked over and stood by our table. He bowed deeply to the corners of the room and then begged them to sit. They kept applauding. The maître d’ came and pulled the chair back himself, at which the others took their seats.

  He took first the Comtesse’s hand and kissed it, and then mine.

  So good to see you again, he said to me. Our little runaway, he said then to the Comtesse.

  Yes, my girl. What is your name? the Comtesse asked.

  The tenor reached for my hand across the table, the gesture of a lover. I looked at it briefly, cautiously.

  I set my hand on the table also and slid it toward his. He then opened his palm, the ruby flower there.

  His hand glowed white in the candlelight, the rubies dark in his palm, like blood.

  How we hold on to what we believe is ours. How we mourn when it is lost. And how unprepared we are when it then returns to claim us.

  Lilliet, I said. Lilliet Berne.

  My future lifted up on the light emanating from that ruby rose in his hand, out past the tables of elegant diners and the gleaming walls of the restaurant into the rest of my life. I knew what I was to do. I saw myself take it back from his hand, pin it to my dress, look up at him, smile, thank him, smile at the Comtesse, thank her for being our intermediary, curtsy to her, and leave with him. His carriage taking me on to this education and whatever it would bring me. All of this would begin once I picked it up.

  I picked it up.

  The tenor was speaking of how glad he was that I’d finally seen him sing in his favorite opera and of how much he hoped one day I would join him onstage as his Leonora. He said this as I moved the flower along my dress, searching for a place to pin it. I wanted just a breath before the rest that was to happen; I could survive it if I could have just another breath.

  Without stopping his conversation, he reached over and took my hand, taking the rose back before carefully pinning it over my heart.

  When at last I looked up, his face was unexpectedly tender, even kind. His expression told me how strongly he believed he was in a story in which I was the contrite penitent he’d already forgiven for running away.

  Thank you for returning to me, he said. He reached up and touched my chin, searching my eyes with his eyes.

  The Comtesse smiled approvingly and touched the enormous coil of pearls at her neck.

  The tenor’s eyes changed suddenly, concerned, as he looked past me and reached to my ears. He traced one of the emerald earrings. These are an emperor’s ransom, he said, turning to my teacher.

  Yes, the Comtesse said. Yes, they are.

  After all my time among the Empress’s secrets that no one but the Comtesse would think to keep, I had become one.

  Act IV

  First Love

  One

  MY THEME HERE is love. Love and the gifts of love, love kept secret, love lost, love become hatred, war, a curse. Love become music. Love and those who died for love.

  Love—and, especially, first love. My first love, the one I could not keep and could never, will never, lose.

  If you were to have visited me in my apartment on the avenue de l’Opéra, you would have been greeted in the foyer by an onyx falcon on a wrought-iron pedestal beneath an enormous chandelier, displayed as if it were the most valuable thing I owned. And it was very fine—the claws were gold; the eyes, carved rubies; the feathers outlined carefully, so that they glittered even in the dark. A small gold dish for visiting cards sat by its feet, and beneath that, hidden in the pedestal, was a jewel safe.

  This was a trap of a kind, bait for thieves.

  Inside were some jewels I did not value, my real treasures in another safe hidden elsewhere.

  I kept the emerald earrings from the Comtesse there. My hope was that if a thief found them they would convince him he had discovered my trove and he would leave immediately and take nothing else.

  So far no thief had been thus blessed.

  Jewels told you a story each time you put them on, as Faust’s Jewel Song made plain. Sometimes the story was of your future, sometimes of your past. You sold them when you never wanted to hear the story again. I had never found cause to sell even one emerald, but neither did I wear them more than a few times in the years that followed the night she gave them to me. I was sometimes asked as to their provenance, and each time I could only shrug.

  A gift, I would say.

  With time, they had proven to be a spur to the richest of my admirers who sought to do them one better, jealously imagining my spending other evenings with the one who could afford such gifts, and I could never say otherwise. They’d had their uses, I suppose. But that night with the Emperor had never come to pass, and now that he is dead, it never will.

  I never doubted my sense of their provenance. I’d had an education in jewels since, and the handiwork, even the color of the stones, told me the story the Comtesse would never tell. I am sure that the Emperor had them made at the same time, perhaps even from the same stone, as the color and style were a perfect match. Had the Comtesse ever worn them in front of the Empress? Or had the Comtesse, in turn, ever seen the Empress’s brooch? Each would have known at once, as I had.

  Divided stone, divided heart.

  The Comtesse had come to Paris well after the marriage to the Empress had been made, which meant the Emperor had kept these, perhaps meaning to give them to the Empress
later on the occasion of an anniversary of some kind or the birth of a son, but he instead gave them to the woman who would go to her death believing she should have been empress.

  That the Comtesse had kept these earrings all this time told me she had been nursing some secret hope for herself and the Emperor. On the night she gave them to me, these were that hope’s grave. And by instructing me to wear them if I went to him, she sought to create a certain moment. When I would undress for the Emperor and he pulled back my hair, these were what he would see.

  I had imagined the scene in my head many times as I waited, trying to prepare if I was called, and I am certain this was her plan. Some days I imagined him enraged, some, come over with passion. Or both.

  She meant even then, even as the Emperor would have me as revenge for the Empress’s affair, to take some revenge of her own. Known only to her.

  But I would never know the earrings’ last secrets, the ones they cannot tell; I can only guess. What I know for certain is that Il Trovatore was a favorite opera of the Empress’s, and she and the Emperor would have attended together. Certainly, I was there to be seen, on display to the Emperor, or one of his intimates, or one of his agents, perhaps even the Empress. I went with her that night as the proof she had me in her custody. And for her to place these earrings in my ears, this was her declaration of war.

  In those years when I believed the ruby rose lost to me forever, I would sometimes take the earrings out and reflect on what I thought was the irony of my situation: that after the loss of one tiny jeweled gift from the Emperor, I was now the custodian of this other, far greater gift he had given to the Comtesse.

  Now it seemed I was fated to have both.

  These were my thoughts on that evening, many years later, when I again went to the statue, opened the lock, and took these earrings out to wear them one more time.

  §

  I was dressed in a gown of black chiffon and taffeta; sheer sleeves and a black lace ruff at the neck were the gown’s only whimsy, and so the emeralds went well with this. They suited me finally. Back when I first wore them in the Café Anglais, I most likely looked like an overdressed girl who’d taken them from her mother, out trying to pass herself off as an elegant woman. I remember I sat there that night, too aware of the fortune in my ears, trying to look as if I deserved them, all the while I felt myself to be vanishing, falling further inside a story I couldn’t see, in which I occupied a role that was both central and yet also minor, and that required this of me to operate—and would not give me my freedom. This story seemed, perhaps, to have begun when I put on the earrings, or further back, when the earrings were given to the Comtesse, or even further back, when they were made. Or even further back still, when the idea of them was born in the mind of the giver. I couldn’t know. I only knew that something was in motion to which my actions had proven vital and that I was not to be allowed to see any further than this. Questions had repeated through me in a chorus that night. Why could the tenor not know of her arrangement with me? Who had set those terms, in turn, with her—who had the power to do so? Had he been in the lobby of the opera? Had we succeeded then? Whose story was I in?

  Whose story was I in?

  This was the question I had asked myself that night so long ago as the tenor led me to his carriage. This was also the question I asked myself now in my apartment each time I held Simonet’s novel in my hand. Once again, I had the distinct feeling of being inside of a story that had begun somewhere out of my sight. A story around me that would also not let me inside it. A story begun with someone imagining my holding the book as I did just then. There was something this person wanted me to believe as I did so—what was it? And why?

  The return of this feeling, more than anything else, was what had made me suspicious.

  Whose story was I in?

  I had woken that morning from a long dream that had turned and tumbled until I could no longer remember any of it except a name that stayed with me as I was delivered up from the ocean of sleep.

  Simmonet? Simonet.

  And with that, a memory came of the writer George Sand. Sand had a nephew by that name or something like it.

  Was my Simonet, the author of this novel, her nephew? Or even secretly George Sand?

  I stepped from my bed, took the novel from my nightstand, and turned it over in my hands as if some previously hidden secret to its authorship would fall out, but there was, as ever, nothing except the words I’d refused thus far to read.

  Sand was dead now these last six years—if she was the author, this was the work of her ghost. After being presented to her, I’d admired her so much that I hoped to inspire a character in one of her novels some day, much as Pauline Viardot-García, my voice teacher, had—Pauline had introduced me to Sand; she was her oldest friend. I tried to remember if, on that fortnight’s visit, I was ever presented to Sand’s nephew or if he’d any literary aspirations. But my Simonet had been so free in speaking of other French writers, it seemed to me that if he was Sand’s nephew, I would already have been told by him directly.

  I set the novel down, full of the same dread I’d felt since being told of its existence and rang for my breakfast tray.

  Not quite a week had passed since the bal and the mysterious novel’s arrival, and in attempting to certify whether its existence constituted a betrayal of some kind, I had gone through my short list of suspects—Euphrosyne, the tenor, the Comtesse—without luck. Euphrosyne seemed entirely innocent to me, even of carelessness, and seeing her glittering in her elegant home reminded me that my past was not a subject she spoke of to others, just as she did not speak of hers; she would protect me much as she protected herself. She had forgiven me instantly for my abrupt departure from her salon, and now each day’s mail brought me more letters from her of the bal she was planning for me.

  My visit to the tenor had likewise reassured me that all between us was as it had been for some time. His long obsession with me seemed unchanged. I did not suspect him of being the source of the marriage rumor, either. He had once proposed marriage to me, and I had rejected him as, just as the Comtesse had said so plainly all those years ago, I was as unfit to marry him or any other men of his class as I ever had been; and this, like his social class, would never change. What he wanted from me did not require marriage nor did it derive from it. We both knew that when he saw me sing on that little stage at the Majeurs-Plaisirs he hadn’t imagined our sitting with a batch of baby tenors and sopranos, and my pulling at a spindle somewhere in Prussia. He imagined us together in Paris, on the stage, at last singing Il Trovatore at Les Italiens.

  I had rejected him by reminding him of all of this in no uncertain terms. And by denying him, I had ensured he would be a servant to this dream forever and, in a way, to me—in a way that protected me. My visit had assured me all of this was as it had been since that rejection so long ago. It would thus be too painful for him to joke in public of something he still desired.

  And there was every chance he had since married some Prussian princess picked out by his family at birth and left behind to be the mistress of that distinguished, ancient, if also somewhat reduced, domain—him all the while in Paris. In the times I had seen him since the end of our liaison, he had seemed richer than before, and I knew well that for men of his class a wife was what secured you your inheritance and her dowry, and a lover was where you spent both. But I did not know, and had never asked, if there was a wife. Either way, I no longer suspected him.

  The Comtesse alone remained, albeit out of reach. I had never told her of the end to my liaison with the tenor. I was sure my value to her—and our bargain—had ended once Eugénie had been driven from the palace. The discovery that she was still surrounded by agents, and French agents at that, not Italian ones, a decade after the passing of the Empire, this had only made me fear she did not agree that our agreement had ended; this left me the more sure she was my mysterious antagonist. And while the police officer I’d spoken to that day seemed content to think h
e knew me for knowing my reputation as a singer, if he were to check into my background, he might find that series of mysteries that could lead him even a little of the way back to the Comtesse, who knew the answers to most every question he might ask—and I was certain she could still provide my old dossier on request. For all I knew, she had my old carte from the registry and the record of my examinations and arrests—and death.

  This novel and the opera, though if a plot of hers, had not yet revealed her style. If she sought some final revenge on me, she was unlikely to come for me this way. She had a great love of theater, yes, but her theatrics were meant to draw your attention directly to her. If she was behind this, it would mean she had changed in some way I had not foreseen and couldn’t imagine. And certainly, hidden as she was now inside of her blackened apartment, this was possible.

  My single consolation was that if the Comtesse read the paper as the officer had, then she likely knew the rumor of my forthcoming marriage to the tenor and might be reassured to think the arrangement she’d set was still in place. That might stay her hand if that hand was raised to strike.

  This was the very slightest of consolations to me, however. And for now, the only person from my past I could find who seemed clearly intent on my destruction was me. That one seemingly harmless lie I had told to Verdi continued to hurtle through Paris, leaving a trail of rumor and chaos in its wake.

  I was determined to at least stop the damage to my reputation and to repair what I could of this life. Afraid of what I had done and what I might still do, I thought to cancel all of my social engagements and take to bed, where I could at least, perhaps, finally read the novel and not lie to anyone any further. But before I did so, I still wanted some further assurance that this composer Simonet had mentioned existed—if he was real, and the opera real, that alone could assure me this was not the trap I feared it was.