You know I do, he said.
You imagine I am an obstacle to your love for him, I said. And I am. But I am a greater obstacle to you dead.
He laughed. Why speak like this, on this happy occasion? he asked. And risk offending me?
I mean no offense, I said. It is a happy occasion. I will leave shortly for Paris, and he will now marry a wife he can bring to court, one who will never suspect you.
Yes, he said. You will live on in his memories. He will live on here. And so why must you live?
And so I knew I was right to do as I did.
He will come to Paris again someday to sing, I said. And to see me sing.
I could see in his eyes he knew I was right.
You are very alike, I said. He kills everything that stands in the way of what he loves. You as well, I am sure. And so I know you will try to do this as I leave today, or later when you imagine he will have forgotten. But he will not forget me. He will expect reports of me, reports of the glory of my debut in Paris, my career. He will go one day to see me for himself. And if he does not hear these stories, if I am not there when he comes to Paris to see me, and tragedy befalls me instead, he will go to discover who was the author of my death. And if it was you, he will learn it was you. He will come then to kill you himself. And he will.
I paused as the maids finished and I stepped out of the water, steam rising around me in the cold air as I stepped into the towels waiting for me.
Or you will kill him as he tries.
The towels were switched for a robe, and the brushing of my hair began, which told me I was nearly ready to be dressed.
The Prince was silent.
It’s so rare when the world allows you to be with the one you love, I said. Enjoy each other as you can.
He met my eyes now at last, as if after all that scrutiny he finally understood what I was.
With that, I entered the dressing room. When I emerged, there was no sign of him. I left, I did not look back, and there were no more good-byes.
§
There are times I remember my question, the one I had been so afraid to ask of the Comtesse: How does one become a woman on whom a man would settle 500,000 francs?
Now I knew. My life was now the answer to this question, too.
I would never be able to say I had avenged anyone that day I left for Paris.
I remember how I crossed the landscape, still broken from the war, and took out the scroll and the other papers from time to time, if only to believe them.
I could not make war as they had, I could not burn cities as they had, I could not kill their women and their sons. I could only rob from them a little of the sweetness and sureness they felt as I left. That I could do.
I was not followed as I made my way back to Paris; I was not stopped. My papers were accepted with a salute at the border—I wore the medal that far. I could feel in the air at the station, on the train, all the way to the border and then again once I was over it; I could feel it as I kept on right to the door of the avenue de l’Opéra apartment and stood at last, with some amazement, before the falcon statue on its pedestal just inside the door where it commanded the entrance. A note read Please be our falcon.
This gift from the Prince seemed at first more like a tomb marker, but soon, when I passed its smooth dark stone surfaces, I knew it marked my life, not my death; it told me of how I had made my way past all of my mysteries, had reached, past all hope, the secret architect of my life—and had won from him and his agents this freedom, such as it was.
I had set my enemies against one another and won for myself a place I could live in relative peace. Each day I lived after that was a day won from the bargains struck that morning so long ago. But I suppose I also waited to hear for news of their mutual destruction.
This was the balance I had feared disturbed, then. And the amber I spoke of at the start of my tale, the one I lived inside, the one I hoped to break free of, was the waiting I had inflicted on myself. That long act of listening for either the signs of my victories or the footsteps of my killers—a listening that would endure so long I would forget my purpose, until the day Simonet and his novel appeared, and I was sure I heard in his stories that night at the ball the sound of my killers coming at last for me.
Eleven
I DEBUTED AT LAST in the role of Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula in the fall season of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris in 1872. Amina, the beautiful orphan sleepwalker who sleepwalks her way into the bed of a stranger, losing her fiancé to the ensuing misunderstanding. Her climactic aria, “Non credea mirarti”—“I didn’t believe I’d see you”—is among the most beautiful in all of Italian opera and wins him back. This is the song she sings while walking through her town in a dream of grief, ending on the roof of that mill, where she wakes to find herself in her fiancé’s arms. He had been passing by, off to marry another woman, and when he sees her, he finally believes her and rushes to rescue her from certain death.
The aria demands tremendous delicacy and range—she is grieving, raging at her fate, in love, ultimately despairing of all hope, unaware she is in terrible danger until she wakes to her rescue, exultant. I returned to scrupulously studying the role with Pauline again until then, and she cheered from the boxes. I was credited with bringing wit to a role not usually known for its humor. One reviewer even called me “tragedy’s soubrette,” the funny girl who knows the master’s house better than the master himself.
The crowd that evening laughed, roared, wept, and then, to my pleasure, rose to thunderous applause and shouts. Flowers pelted the curtains as they opened for our bows, and as the shouts for an encore increased, I performed one at the urging of the conductor, and then another, and another, in what felt like a fever.
After the performance, admirers surrounded my carriage, unhooked the horses, and tried to carry me through the streets, an honor reserved for only a few. My horses screamed and reared, though, as unfamiliar hands grabbed their reins; and when my driver whipped at the men to let go, they held on tighter instead, afraid of dropping me. I leapt from the carriage into the street, wheeled onto the back of one of my mounts, and rode away from the scene as the other three followed. My stunned suitors then finally dropped my carriage into the street and set after me.
The first illustration of me appeared in the newspapers the next day. I was drawn in a gown with a bustle of a size that can exist only in drawings and that general’s coat, my souvenir of that costume ball at Compiègne—I wore it all winter, that night in particular—and so it was I was drawn as a general on horseback riding down a Paris street, the hem of my train and the tails of the coat billowing out behind me and breaking apart into the shapes of men chasing after me.
You could barely make out the horse—the hooves looked nearly like my own feet.
The caption read La Générale et la légion.
You were an ordinary woman until you earned your sobriquet. La Païva, La Malibran, La Présidente. Cora Pearl was, in fact, such a famous horsewoman she was sometimes called La Centauresse.
The coat, the drawing, and the riot would all make me more famous than any reviews of the debut. The driver was unharmed, the press and the public were electrified, and my admirers loved me more than if I had stayed in the carriage, but I was furious. The end of the night of my debut found me weeping in anger, wishing it had never happened, even that it could all be undone; but then it mattered less than it might have, and I was soon too busy to notice—La Générale it was. Off I went to make my name in the capitals of Europe.
And so it was for eight years until the time when this story begins.
The story of the undoing.
Act V
The Undoing
One
IN THE PERFORMANCES of Faust that followed the Sénat Bal, there were times when I was onstage and the gaslight border erased all but the most stubborn features, the flashes off the biggest jewels, the three tiers there like a portrait of the afterlife—Heaven, Limbo, Hell—the chande
liers the angels guarding each circle, the crystal points the blazing light of their fiery swords.
And then it was like looking at the rooftops, and the streets, and a vision even of the streets beneath Paris.
And then it was only crystal and flame and the rattle of the crowd.
The worst seats are the highest and are called the gods. If they were to sneak in among us, that is where they’d hide.
Those were the only gods I believe in, I would tell anyone. No more secret gods for me. Not my mother’s God, not one. This was what I had sworn to myself when I left Germany. No more omens, no more prophecies.
But now I was back in Paris, waiting for an opera invented out of my life, and as I waited, as I thought I could decide whether to accept, decide whether or not the curse was true, my whole life had become the opera. The curse did not seem to care as to whether I believed in it. My secret god still waited for me to reach my lesson’s end.
The house lights were going down. The stage lights would soon go up. My turn was here.
§
During the years after Aristafeo’s death, I sometimes met those who said their loved ones were still with them—they came to them in dreams, appeared in mirrors, left some token on a pillow—their scent, at times, or a touch. I reflected then on how I was not one of those lucky enough to claim a connection between this world and the other.
His ghost had never found its way to me before this, if this is what this opera was.
I had seen him stabbed twice. This pallor that would never leave me was, in its strange way, a daily reminder of the distance between us.
You are alive and he is dead, this color said to me when I saw my reflection.
I believed in his death more than I believed in God. And yet I had not properly mourned him, it seemed to me, as I sat in his house in the Marais again these ten years later and waited for Simonet to return with the Settler’s Daughter’s things that I’d asked to see.
The house was not entirely unfamiliar now, but no trace remained of what it had been inside, having been redecorated entirely. As I waited, I wondered if it was easier or harder to be there, given how different it was from before.
I decided that it was both.
I stood and went to the wall where I knew the secret room to be and hesitantly reached out my hand to the new soft blue paper and for a moment felt fear as if, were I to touch it, I might feel his heart beating there.
I had come to see for myself, in much the same way I’d gone to see Euphrosyne, the tenor, and the Comtesse. I wanted, if not a confrontation with his ghost, then to see the house and my things at the least. More important, Aristafeo had never shown me the opera he’d been writing for me. I never knew whether it even existed. If it did exist, I now suspected Simonet of discovering it. This seemed a more likely answer than a ghost in that hidden room, still writing it, handing off pages to Simonet, a last act before oblivion called him from this plane.
The puzzle for me was how to ask after it, given I was supposed to be innocent of the house and its past. As my hand lingered on the paper, it was all I could do not to peel it back from the walls.
There was not even a sign of the mechanism, however, and then I heard Simonet’s footsteps on the stairs and returned to my chair so that I was sitting as he came back into the room with my old circus trunk in his hands.
I’m so amazed to think you’ve finally read it, he said, smiling and nervous.
Yesterday, I said, and smoothed out my skirt. I did nothing else.
He patted at his hair, still wild. I could see that he had dressed hurriedly from his half-tucked shirt front, which he then tucked as he noted my notice.
I was not expecting company, he said. I was up until quite late last night, forgive me.
Forgive me for surprising you, I said. I was near and thought to call. This is, to be sure, a whim. But I was very moved, and after finishing the novel, I wanted to see her things.
In truth, I had hoped to surprise him. Perhaps even to catch him and the composer at work.
In his hands, the object he held looked so small I wondered that I had ever carried it.
He set the trunk down on the table between us, undid the latch, and pulled the ruby rose out first. Do you see? he asked. It’s incredible.
Yes, I said. It is.
I took it from him, turning it in the light; it was as whole as it had been the day I received it.
Am I to understand you are with us, then, truly with us? Simonet sat back in his chair.
I am nearly with you, I said. I’ve still to see the music. But this is truly inspiring. I remain interested.
I set the rose down and then picked up the diary, as my new friend had called it. In a circus they called it a route book, and in it I’d kept the entries of my passage during my time as the Settler’s Daughter. It was one of the few things I had taken with me when I’d left, as I’d thought I might someday want to find them again. I had not.
Instead, I had turned it into something of a composition book, a practice book, where I wrote lists of the words I did not know alongside lists of the ones I’d learned. I only occasionally wrote my own entries.
There were no entries from the time I’d spent in Compiègne, to my memory, and yet . . . how had he guessed this? It was more than a guess, it had to be.
We were concerned, he said, in a tone I found strange.
We looked at each other for a moment, uncertain. There’s a rumor, he said finally. That you are turning down roles . . .
It seems to me I have always turned down roles, I said. Even as I have accepted others.
And then it came to me—Where is the chapel you spoke of? I asked. Where you found these objects? May I see it?
I was sure it would be the unveiling of his deception when I asked. I was sure it didn’t exist. But instead he raised his eyebrows in surprise. Of course, he said. Follow me. I will stage it for you.
The courtyard had, of course, belonged to the dogs. I’d spent almost no time there, passing through quickly into the house or to the street. Yet in this one corner a chapel hid, apparently. I felt rebuked for my suspicions as I passed through the door.
It’s in terrible disrepair, he said. It was filthy with the bones of the feasts of the cats I imagine . . . as well you know. He pushed the old doors open, making a fast sign of the cross as he did.
I did the same as a precaution.
The chapel glowed blue. The light came from a stained-glass warrior angel behind the altar, sternly beautiful, his sapphire wings lit by the late morning sun.
Simonet crossed himself again.
In Italy it’s said there’s an angel who watches over all who love.
I think differently of this now. I no longer believe he has my best interests in mind.
I had never discussed religion with Aristafeo. This was yet another secret of his, a place he’d kept, apparently, for himself.
Simonet stood before the altar and admired the stained-glass angel with me. At first, he said, it seemed as if nothing of worth had survived except this—and as you can see, it is quite beautiful. But as we cleaned, we found these here, he said. The ruby rose atop the diary and beside it the dagger, all of them on the altar.
And with that, he pulled out my knife and set it with the other objects on the altar.
Can you imagine her here? Praying? Asking the archangel Saint Michael, perhaps, for some forgiveness?
His excited face was rapt at the scene. He waved at me. Come, he said. Kneel here to see what she saw.
As I had come on the pretense of understanding my own character, as it were, I had to follow through. I came closer, but as I did, I did not see “her” kneeling there. I saw him.
The private ceremony had been his.
What does one ask Saint Michael for? I asked Simonet, who seemed to be a Catholic, as I walked over and knelt where he’d knelt, looking up as I clasped my hands.
What I had taken for the earth under Michael’s feet was the figure of a man in
agony and terror, falling.
Protection from the Devil, Simonet said. He’s casting Lucifer down into Hell here. If he is carrying a sword, he is at war, as you see here. His shield carries the words Quis ut Deus. Who is like God. It’s what he said as he threw Lucifer down into Hell. If you see him carrying scales, you are near death and he’s come to weigh your soul. He is the one who offers the last tally of the good and evil in a man, and then, if the balance is for evil, a chance, before death, to redeem yourself.
He is also the protection of sailors, he added, and then said, though I have never asked the sailor what he asks for.
I’d always hoped Aristafeo was spared that final humiliating gesture—that our time together, hidden inside the Jardin des Plantes, was innocent of this. But I had also noticed Simonet had not included any of the Empress’s bracelets in his little tableau. It seemed Aristafeo had pocketed her bracelets, walked through the house to gather my things, and brought them here, instead.
What had he prayed for?
To my right, Simonet offered his hand. Shall we?
I struggled to my feet.
The ending, I said, seems . . . cruel. For an opéra bouffe. Are the lovers, in fact, reunited? Or does he just go chasing after her, and we never know? Would the composer change the ending?
Well, I suppose I’ve left that as a last mystery for the reader, he said. But I understand, of course, that drama operates by other rules. If you have concerns, I’ll gladly entertain them. Let us go into the library; we can speak of it all there. I will get some refreshment sent in for you.
We looked at each other, and I could see the strangely cold air to him then, the one I had been looking for all this time, never visible until now. I knew at once he had not written the story. And I could see that he knew I knew, the rising panic on his face when he knew he had played his part false in the one moment he should have been true.
You’ll excuse me, I managed to say, as it was all I could say, and then I ran from the chapel into the street, out of his sight, as he shouted protests at my back. I did not stop nor did I turn, but I ran as fast as I could, as if I might be pursued.
The Queen of the Night Page 41
