The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (10 page)

It was the violence of that idea—a rag stuck into the world's cracks—that made the assault on a person. But is the crack to be blamed, or the rag, or the hand that put it there? Life's exigencies and the old builder had created a lie at the very center of things, a place where flesh could be purchased as a surrogate for love, since love's demands were too great, too rigorous for our weak souls. Neither our circumstances, nor our character, were equal to what love asked of us.

 

On that cold night of exile, I made my way back from the Seine's banks toward the Mont de Piété. Settled against the stone steps of Notre Dame des Blancs Manteaux to sleep a little under the moon's eye, pulling skirt and bag well back into the shadows, succumbing to the cold's dangerous lull. Faint rustlings—rats, presumably—kept me from dropping deeper into sleep; and it was not long before a new sound interrupted the dark, the creaking of a gate, the swish of a skirt. Pointed toe of a boot, nudging. And a voice, light and girlish, touched with honey.

“
Hello?
You can't stay here, you know. The gray coats will come along any time now and it's a night for making salad if
I
know. The Brigade boys have to line their pockets with the city's lettuce!”

“I'm waiting for the pawnshop to open,” I said drowsily.

“How about a bed with us tonight? Better than the basket to the Saint-Lazare prison, with a bounty on your head.”

In the gas lamp's half-light, her hair, a glossy black sheet, fell unconfined to her shoulders; she was wasp-waisted, tensile. Her age might be twenty or twice that, and she spoke as if we shared a secret. “Didn't I see you a few days ago? Coming from the Mont? Don't worry, we have a remedy for that.” Her patter of words like spinning pins of rain, and before I knew it, I was up and following her, her touch on my arm light but firm. On the rue du Temple, she paused before a building with a large number on it. The step was swept, lit with its own gas flares; it reminded me of a drawing I'd pored over in
Paris
Illustré,
puzzled as to the caption's joke. “
No, the number you want is down the block!”
said a frock-coated man to a gawking group of tourists.

We passed the front gate, skirted the side of the building. Another door swung open to a jangle of keys, to a hand's breadth of gaslight; then she was behind me, deft as a thief in the night, and we were both inside.

 

It was warm. Not just the warmth of a candle flame, or a coal stove; this heat felt like a hundred logs in a hundred hearths. Warmth in which to bask, to melt. Buttery yellow light and the smell of drippings and bread, coffee grounds and wood smoke; a fire crackling in the hearth—the old kind of hearth, with hinged doors on the side for bread baking. We had entered a back door into a big kitchen, with a long trestle table cluttered with half-empty wine bottles, rinds of cheese, a wooden bowl of yellow pears and red apples spotted with brown, soft and sugary. The fire's heat crackled, loosened the bones, radiated to the corners of the room. My flesh, stiff from the cold, began to relax.

“Come along.” She pulled me away, out of the gaslight and kitchen odors. The sudden change from being half-frozen to overly warm made my limbs soft and rubbery. “I'll need to find a place for you—we're past full tonight.”

“Françoise.” A voice lilted. “Oh, Françoise, what little bird have you caught for us?” A splash of color: azure, gold, cardinal red; a woman leaning from a doorway—red-gold hair loose and wavy; her skin pale, gold-dusted. Then gone, a tall shadow disappearing down a long hall.

“I can pay you for bed and board in the morning. When the Mont de Piété opens.”

“Sure . . . but what then? Think the pawnshop will solve all your problems?”

A door opened and a gas jet flared; Françoise waved me into a kind of parlor, toward a sofa decked with pillows like lace-dipped petits fours. The room was stuffed with bric-a-brac, and a wide armoire spilled odds and ends—a haphazard assortment of lace and tulle, silk flowers and thin wraps festooned over knobs. Vacant, but with no evening chill, the whole labyrinth of chambers and corridors was heated from some vast, glowing core.

“Drop your things here, then. And you'll want something hot in your belly, on such an awful night?” She closed a roll-top desk and locked it with a key, companion to hundreds of others on a chain, then turned back with a silky expression.

I was loath to let it go, that grip on everything I possessed. Corset in red flannel, a camisole and collar in good stiff linen; two hair combs, a pair of stockings, two mended chemises; a petticoat in percale and drawers in the same; a better dress in cinnamon silk and one in fine-loomed wool; canvas ankle boots for spring. The bottle of cleaning fluid and one of freckle-removing milk (purchased out of vanity while I was modeling). A box of stationery; pen with a split nib and the indigo-marbled
Plan de Paris,
dog-eared, falling apart. Stephan's letter, its seal broken—my erstwhile protection. And, what was left of my
amour-propre.
My stomach growled; gave a pang.

“Supper first,” said Françoise, seizing my arm with surprising strength.

***

“Fished you in off the street, did she? . . . What, are you deaf and mute, like he is?” The cook nodded toward a small, dark-faced boy, rocking on his haunches in front of the hearth. He was playing with a snare made of twine, the kind the village boys used to string up in branches, set with their lures to catch songbirds, marsh birds. Trapped, a bird's head would hang; wings flung open, cord neatly knotted around the neck.

“Françoise, you'll have to get the dogs in, the little poachers are white as ghosts from being all in the flour, and they leave footprints. And no sign of the cat; they feed her on cakes and cream. Rats in my kitchen, and the mouser eating petits fours.”

She cut a slab of roast, a chunk of bread. Cheese and a slosh of wine in a china teacup. She crossed her arms across her ample waist and gave me a long look. I ate like a starved thing, a wild creature whose teeth rip at flesh.

Later, sleeping on that sofa in the parlor, I roused, wakeful, to bursts of laughter; dozed off again to the odor of cigar and perfume. An ebb tide of chatter, a river of activity flowed beyond the door and I drifted in and out of clamorous dreams, unable to tell the voices within from those outside. Eerie passages and twisting halls; rooms neither-here-nor-there, a labyrinth of a netherworld.

And in the morning, the rest happened quickly. Françoise's twitching fingers hustled me into a different dress, cheap silk, stained in spots and wanting pressing . . .

Out through yet another door, this one giving abruptly onto the cobbles, and into a waiting carriage. Françoise spoke over the rumble of the wheels; like a clock wound too tight, she emptied her words into the chilly air.

“Just look,” she said. She dipped into her bag and extracted a small round mirror. I saw my pale skin, dark hair, and soft curve of chin. Eyes clear, despite the tumult within. “I know Madame Jouffroy will have you in; she has a nose for talent. But if she won't, Madame Trois will find a place for you.” Her voice dropped and sweetened. “Listen: I'm saving you some trouble here.” Her eyes dropped to my lap, to the gathered fabric of the dress, unpleasant against my skin. “Now—you must be firm and say you want to work for us. Otherwise I can't speak for the consequences. A prison cell till they get you sorted out, and you don't belong there, anyone can see that.”

The carriage pulled up before the fortress looming palely over the rue des Fèves. Françoise hurried us across the courtyard, her skirts skimming over the flagstones and many-colored petticoats whipping about in the wind. A gate opened and at a word from my keeper we were ushered past a dozen or more citizens of Paris, men in workman's blue trousers, women with babies in their arms, a bird seller with a cage at her feet, a young woman or two, hatless and ungloved. Those awaiting an audience at the Paris Préfecture de Police. I would come to know it well.

 

M. NOëL
read the nameplate in front of a young man with a polished mustache, his thick-fingered hand battened down on an ink pen. The sound of the nib across a dry page was a scuttling of leaves; the questions uttered as though from a conversation begun earlier, now resumed. The din of the place, the roar of a thousand voices echoed off marble, filtered through the cavernous room. On the wall above Noël hung an oily brown and varnished painting—a face from the papers, and here he was, the chief of police, in a portrait pitched at a slant as though he might drop like a blade. Françoise nudged my arm, and the mechanisms of a great machine, long-used and oiled with practice, ticked into place.

“How long in Paris? Residence, employment? Name and age, place of birth? Then, “Your palms, please.”

I startled at his touch, the fingers sausage-thick, tobacco-stained, damp. He prodded my palms, one then the other, felt around my fingers and thumbs—the second time in half a year that a man had examined my palm to determine my future.

“You'll find them smooth as silk. This one's no blistered tin cutter or maid of all work. And no identity papers when she arrived, either,” interjected Françoise.

“Mademoiselle, you have left your family and province to reside and be employed at the Maison des Deux Soeurs, rue du Temple, third arrondissment, Paris? You arrived at that address this morning and stated your intention?”

His eyes were blue and mild. “You are a long way from home.”

“She wants to work,” said Françoise, by way of assistance. Another voice, neither Noël's nor Françoise's, behind my ear, playful, mocking, clear as a bell:
“The mother says nothing, and the girl cannot speak up for herself!”
Françoise looked vexed and impatient; M. Noël's face was impassive, his pen for the moment stilled. “Is your father living? Your mother? . . . Any relative at all?”

“If you get into a scrape, wave it under someone's nose!”
I'd laughed when Stephan had signed his name to that letter, but I could not produce it now.

 

Françoise and Noël were head to head, joking about something else; the pen scratching again, sputtering dry. Inkwells were scarce at the Préfecture these days; too few of them to take account of the river of girls who flowed through the place.

And my two Selves were silent, foreign to each other, too slow to catch up. My recent lovers, their influence and sometime-protection, were leaking wounds in separate chambers of my heart; their names stuck in my throat. Gascon stubbornness; that ignorance of sycophancy; a rustic muteness that knows so well how to survive in its element—a tongue to bargain and barter, to haggle over the qualities of a
foie d'oie
or supplicate the spirits at a running stream—that tongue could not speak. My back ached and I wished, so badly, to sit. (Was it a backache, merely the longing to rest, that finished the transaction?) Some emotion, like nausea, and the gulf widened.
The rutted road, Papa's body in a cart.
It would have to be another road, now. I saw it stretching before me, a sharp curve into blackness.

The paper, when it was finished, read:

 

Whereas the woman established as Eugénie R—, ex­–department of the Gers, is charged with prostitution without being registered, it is consequently in the interest of public health . . . that she be submitted to the administrative regulations . . .

 

A flurry of administration: a babble of voices and Françoise's high-pitched laugh. The mood turned almost celebratory; a milling around of uniformed officers and men in dark suits. Françoise smiled to this official, then that one; fingertips cold against my hand as she steered a swift passage through the halls. How was I to have guessed that I had been arrested, convicted, subjected to an injurious penalty, all without judge, jury, or argument—and in the flick of an eyelash?

“All we've done, here, is to help you use what you've got to get what you need. Clean and legal, no more worries. And I don't know Nathalie Jouffroy if she doesn't find you to her taste. But I'd never've shown you without getting you on the books; I'd be out of a job! You'll thank me, you know.”

A rank of benches filled with young women—most poor and disheveled, a few wearing hats and gloves, and our passage caused a fluster and commotion.

“Madame! May I see you?”

“Let me walk with you, madame, just to the door.”

“I can work, madame, I can
.
 .
.
”

Françoise quickened her step, pulling me by the arm. One poor soul went so far as to follow us and pluck at her shawl. “You know me, madame. You know me,” she cried, and I started, and stared. Because she looked so like the young, pale-browed woman who had also been, briefly, at the Tivoli. Or perhaps I was mistaken. An officer stepped forward and seized her before I could be sure.

 

“My things, where are my
things?
” I was back in the bric-a-brac parlor, sobbing and furious, now dressed only in a camisole, the other garments having been peremptorily stripped.

“
Calmez, calmez!”
The woman who confronted me now had a broad Germanic brow, balmy, pale gray eyes; white-blonde hair piled on her head; and a voice as cool as a cloth dipped in water. She handed me a substantial square of linen, a man's handkerchief. From Françoise's rattling discourse I had surmised that my immediate destiny lay in the hands of this Madame Jouffroy who was now towering over me and saying, drily, “Excellent . . . Our enterprising submistress has violated every statute in Paris bringing you in here. Do you want to tell me what kind of trouble you've gotten yourself into?”

She moved to the windows, slid open the draperies. The windowpanes were colored glass: blue and gray, red and violet, like disarranged church windows. They let in a muted light, illuminating the bits and pieces of finery strewn about as well as her own attire, a kind of morning coat embroidered with birds.