The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (11 page)

“This is not a hotel and I will not have entrepreneurs incurring fines on my behalf. You can try to come up with a novelty, but these walls have seen it all. Well, whatever it is—let me tell you something. You are not the first and will not be the last. So? Difficulties with a man? And with money?”

Uneasily I folded my arms around my body; the flimsy shift was unpleasant. Madame Jouffroy's tone suggested that I was the perpetrator of my trouble and not its victim, an idea from which I jerked back like a hand that had touched a hot stove.

“All you innocents, you think that everyone in the world has your best interests at heart. Ah, and why not? A girl might fall in love, yes? Then one day she wakes up with the dogs at her heels. How many of these girls do you think there are? You, alone? Half a dozen, a hundred? I'll tell you: thousands.

“Oh, they will run after him, or run away from home to go begging in the streets, or go crying to Maman. Then the police catch them with nets and stock the prison cells; or they find comfort in the madhouses, which are stuffed full. Their children fill the hospice and staff the factories—there, have you stopped crying? See, you are not so badly off. And do you know the reason for all of this trouble?” I sniffed, and stared at her. The dusty, bookish odor was tickling my nose. “You do not know the world, and you do not know men.”

The sneeze came, violently. The room smelled damp and inky; later I would come to understand it was the odor of a bank vault.

Madame Jouffroy went on. “So now, do you think you can wander Paris, trying your luck, without attracting the attention of the police?”

“No—I don't know what you mean!”

“Mogador was born right over there on the rue des Puits. No older than you when she was inscribed, went on the Register, and began her career at a tolerated house on this very street. But she kept her wits about her, played out her hand, and now she is the Comtesse de Chabrillan. Léonide LeBlanc was a stonebreaker's daughter from the Loiret. The man didn't break only stone; I saw the scars on her back. Now
she
needs a shovel to count her diamonds. This Mademoiselle Pearl who is so popular now—she was born Crouch in the isle of nowhere. She carried a
carte,
whether or not you want to believe it, and now she beds down at the Tuileries—or so they say. What do you think distinguishes the women who choose their lovers, name their price in Paris, and beat the Bourse by the month—from those who give away their advantages and wind up mad, dead, or both?”

“I don't know,” I stammered, and sneezed again.

“Ignorance will not serve you in this world, my dear, and ‘innocence' is a tool used to hammer healthy young women into unnatural shapes . . . Come here.” She tipped my face up as though holding a kitten by the scruff of its neck. “You do not look like such an outlaw to me.
Un peu panné,
bedraggled and starved for too long, that's all. But the good Lord put us all here on this earth to learn the truth of one another; which always seems to find its way to the marketplace. And it is as good a place as any to start.”

Beyond my veil of tears, I felt her theatricality, her certainty; her iron grip.

“But where is my bag, my—my clothes? I have a . . . a letter.” My voice faltered as I made one last futile stand.

Nathalie Jouffroy turned again as she neared the door, spoke with slow emphasis. “Mademoiselle Rigault, this house is the most selective in Paris. Girls beg to be accepted; we turn away twenty a day, often more. If working here is your intention, as Françoise insists, you have achieved it. If it was not, still, you may have come to the right place. Certainly, mademoiselle, you should find something to your liking . . . Françoise”—her voice echoed down the long corridor—“see to her particulars.” She closed the door behind her with a quiet click of the latch.

 

A row of empty bottles, champagne and Madeira, marched down the length of one wall; a long mirror with edges of chipped gilt and a crack running through its center was fixed on another. I had been shepherded up six flights to a slope-floored, slant-raftered attic made over into living quarters far less salubrious and decorative than the parlor downstairs. The place felt ancient, with the thick beams and heavy doors of a fortress. Cabbage-rose wallpaper, streaked with slashes of charcoal, was patched over ancient plaster; and on every available surface was a litter of combs and hairpins, pots of rouge, matches, playing cards, sticky glasses. A stove bubbled with heat, and the scuttle was brimming: even this drafty quarter was warm. A ragtag group was gathered; their voices rose in a babble; cigarette smoke coiled upward.

“
Girooonnnde.
” An arm caught me around the waist.

“
Chouette
. . . ,” said another girl, and laughed, a sound as clear and hard as glass. Sinuous fingers crept up my arms, a dance of importunate, daring touches.

“
Journée gourd
. . . a good catch for Françoise, eh?” The last deep-throated and husky. Tiger-eyed, with red-gold hair. Another girl stood behind her, brushing it with long, slow strokes.

On the center table was a large plate with the remains of a yellow cake that looked to have been eaten by fistfuls. A girl with creamy skin reached back and broke off a piece, and put it to the lips of another, who lolled against her knees, eyes half-closed, her tawny curls dusted with crumbs. The others were in various stages of dress and makeup, with hair half-curled or twisted or pouffed under nets. One applied feathery blue lines to her temples with a brush, making veins like delicate branches; she held her hand steady and stared into a small mirror. Colored robes were tossed about, and little low-heeled slippers were scattered over the floor. On the table, as well, was a mortar and pestle, corked phials from a pharmacy, and small pieces of moldy, blackish sponge.

“Enough of that,” said the girl who'd put her arm around my waist. “We've got no quinine, and these sponges are diseased. They look like they've been scrubbing the bottom of a boat.”

“
This
is what they have on offer for protection around here?” said another girl, a plump blonde who'd been brought upstairs at the same time I had. But unlike me, she seemed to know the ropes.

“They like to keep the midwives in business.”

“Angel makers, you mean,” said a third.

“
Merde
on the sponges; it's like trying to keep black flies out of India with those. I'm handing out
préservatifs
from now on.”

“That's what we did at Chevillat; things looked better over there, I'll tell you,” said the blonde girl.

“
Michés
put them on?”

“Tell them they'll be pickled if they don't.”

“Not here, maybe at Chevillat!” Laughter.

“They're all afraid of infecting their wives and their progeny, just need a bit of reminding.”

“Yes, real estate will plunge into the sewer if their sons have the pox,” said one of the girls who was eating cake.

“Yes, well, they'd rather the sewer, plenty of 'em.”

“When your boyfriend gets his transfer out of the Brigade, what rotten luck!”

“Oh, your luck won't hold with him, the
fouille merde
.”

“There's a new douche at the apothecary's; some girls like it. Someone's Hygienic Waters. It's in a tin with flowers.”

“Hah—Jeannel's. He was in the Morals Brigade before he went into water.”

“ Now
that's
rich.”

“Don't need to make him any richer. There's plenty of vinegar in the kitchen.”

“Douche with wine and turpentine; nothing can survive that.”

“Has Delphine come back? Françoise sent her lover to the rue Thérèse.”

“Think she'll come clean?” asked another girl, small-boned and lovely, dragging on a cigarette.

“I wouldn't trust that bone-cracker,” drawled the tiger-eyed one. “He's a murderer.” A brief silence.

“The Dab will be here on Monday—tell
him
it's in the name of public health.”

A bell clanged from the stairwell. Cigarettes were stubbed out and the group shook itself out and stood, as during a second-act intermission when the play is bad. It sounded again and the unruly band paraded down the stairs, a flurry of thin robes and satin slippers. None of their flimsy toilettes looked to have cost ten francs, and not one appeared as though she'd need a shovel to hoist her diamonds. The tall girl with red hair was last to crush her cigarette. Gave me a long stare as she drew a fluttering dressing gown around her shoulders. I followed the others as though being lowered by a rope.

 

And so it began. The price of ignorance paid, first, on tufted pouffes under chandeliers downstairs in the salons, where each client's “choice” was made. Then upstairs, in fancily named rooms with theatrical furnishings; on bed linens more staged than laundered; and, at intervals, at the long, scarred dining table where we gathered for meals, silently rising and sitting for Françoise and the two madames, at noon, six, midnight, and two in the morning. It was paid especially at dawn, when I dragged my tender, insulted body up a rope ladder that led up to a sleeping bunk in the attic quarters, tugged aside the curtain hanging on brass loops. This was the sole place of retreat; but even there, my pallet was shared with another girl who wedged her body next to mine. Later, where her head had rested, would be a tangle of hair, tufts of it, soft and dark. Like the first hair of an infant when it falls.

Crawling beneath that drape, pulling my knees to my chest, I listened to pigeons beat their wings and cluck and coo under the eaves. Willed myself back from oblivion. How, then, had it come to this? Was it the world's justice, its further transgression—or a colossal, evil joke? How was I to contour myself to this new, distorted logic? To navigate blindly, hurtling ahead? For it was dark indeed, and my compass had failed.

Memory has strange ways. Downy-throated geese in their pens, the beating of wings . . . Chunks of pigment in Maman's palette box and the creamy weight of her dowry linens in the press. The uneven height of the stairsteps to Chasseloup's studio, the slant of the light from the windows. Even the battered spines and torn covers of love novels, the rapt expression of a girl sucking sweets and turning pages in an attic bunk—all of these leave imprints. But those other initiations, events of absent flesh passing over my own, are darker vessels over the river. For increasingly, my attention retreated inward to its own emptiness, its frozen emergency.

T
HE RHYTHMS OF LIFE
at Deux Soeurs were not defined by nature. We worked until dawn, breakfasted, then slept until noon, when we rose from the dead to eat. Macaroni, potatoes, and pies;
matefaim
(a kind of fried dough) and roasts; wine and bread and viscous sauces weighted down our off-hours. My compatriots believed in minding the rules most of the time, stealing what they could, getting past the doctor—(called the Dab, after his loathsome instrument) and staying on the good side of Françoise. Hairnets at the table, gloves downstairs, rising and sitting and a facsimile of obedience to the madames; a schedule governed by bells and meals, by chits, by red marks and black marks collected in an old cracked-binding book. The place housed a collection of feminine spirits at odds with our keepers, collected here for a purpose but always ready to display a flagrant disregard for it. The Mignons, Ninettes, Blondines, Frisettes wore the shadow of the world on their flesh; the bruises from its fists and the marks of its teeth. They varnished over weaknesses, lacquered old sores. Hid this wound, sold what paid, tied off ruptures above the hemorrhage, and did what might (at some point) allow them to scramble up a rung or two; take half-measures toward better lives. Like flowery wallpaper peeling down in strips, or lacy hems dragged through the gutter, our sex took hard use here.
But just for now. Not for long, not me!
On Sunday, at a designated hour, they put on rented dresses at a stiff tariff and filed out to confess their sins. I watched them come and go.

 

After the first week, I was no longer inhabitant of my own skin but hovered some distance away; a vacancy of flesh and its ghost. Obscurely, amid the conversation that ebbed and sucked between the walls—often about ways and means to prevent pregnancies, or the various forces that could be marshaled to abort them—I had come to a new idea: that half-starvation, the filthy streams of the bedrooms, street gutters, excesses of coffee, and a too-sudden stagnation of love—this miasma had halted my body's rhythms, stopped its courses. Indeed, everthing else I had once known had been suspended, thinned down, or dried up. If a second life had indeed begun in this body, perhaps it had now fled. I could not tell anymore; could feel no flicker of life.

One of those mornings-that-were-not-mornings, a moody pall lingered in the attic quarters; a flurry of restless anxiety blew through the place like a shifty wind. Pots of powders, paints, and brushes were marshaled to the new task. The girl who slept next to me—she was called Lucette—was mixing kohl in a tiny pot, her hair hanging limp. The rest lined up for the mirror.

I had endured a sanitary examination after my registration at the Préfecture, but it had been superficial and cursory, as though my relatively innocuous status was understood, despite what the paperwork had to say. From what I had heard up in the attic quarters, the ordeal ahead would be different.

Lucette glanced me over. She had built a dark beauty mark on a flaking ulcer near her lip. “If you know what's good for you, don't ask questions, just get in and get out. It's not much, just a poke and a turn-around. Routine.
You've
got nothing to worry about . . . There, how's that?” Most of them, I knew, were only worried about being shipped off to the Saint-Lazare infirmary with the pox; the Dab wasn't looking for babies.