The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (31 page)

On that particular morning I had made my trip to the hospice, the sole and significant concession I made to my own past—never missing a visit on the permitted date as though vigilance alone was deserving. What it was possible to learn was whether a child continued to live and receive the state's assistance, or if she did not. Now, having spent time in those corridors, I understood how poor the chances were for her survival—and I dreaded going. However, not knowing was worse. Odette thought me lugubrious.

She tapped her fan and and the carriage started with a jolt.

“So,” she said. “The sun rises and falls with Beausoleil, does it? You have tucked yourself into a narrow bed, Eugénie. Rumor has it that you are marrying him.” Even Odette did not know the exact nature of the arrangement.

“No, when the war ends Gabriel is to marry his cousin, so the estate is not split.”

“I suppose it's just as well; those charming Southern ladies cannot be so open-minded at home as they pretend to be here. But then you need to diversify, my dear. Has anything caught your eye?” I hesitated. My eye did not want to be caught.

“All day now he receives the battle reports from the brigadier generals about how badly the war goes. The least I can do is not scheme behind his back. ”

“But you have to think of the future, Eugénie,” said Odette, sighing.

“I am thinking of it. I have filed a petition to reclaim Berthe . . . You have to do it within two years.”

“You
are
stubborn, aren't you?”

“Lili Duval is studying dental science. She says Berthe should have all her milk teeth now. Four front, her central incisors; four lateral incisors on each side, four first molars, four canines. Four second molars, lowers first.” Odette occasionally joined our card table at the rue du Mail, so she knew my neighbor, Lili.

“Charming. Last I heard, she was doing spirit readings at the Psychologic Society for a bunch of monocles. Has she given up the planchette?”

“She has learned that in Mexico City, men don't allow dental surgeons to touch the mouths of their wives, and the women are all in terrible pain with rotting teeth. With a Paris degree all she needs is to put a notice in the papers before she sails.” We under the palms and the persimmon had come up with the wording for advertisements:
The Painless Paris Extraction; Gold Fillings for Less than a Wedding Ring; Evening Session for Ladies in Molar Distress.

“We are still at war in Mexico, you might want to mention to her. And I know for a fact that Lili cannot discuss molar distress in Spanish.” The French-supported Hapsburg, Archduke Maximilian, had been crowned Maximilian I of Mexico. Even though neither the Mexicans nor the Americans recognized him as emperor, Lili had already booked her passage.

“She says by this time next year Haussmann will have paved the Mexican Champs-Élysées.”

“And an American one in Louisiana? I hope you have been keeping an eye on the papers because your Beausoleil is likely to sink himself, along with his cotton frigates.”

“I do read the papers.”

“
L'Opinion
and
La Presse,
or
Le Patrie?
” She tapped me on the wrist with her fan. “Do you want a tip? Take your money out of the ‘American Bastille,' if you have invested any. France will not go with the Confederacy in the end. Lincoln's Proclamation turned the tide.”

“The emperor is still sympathetic. At least, Gabriel believes he is . . . I don't have anything invested, Odette.” I sighed.

“Louis Napoleon can't have everything he wants these days. He's in trouble—just look at the results of the parliamentary elections—Orléanist nobles, independent liberals, republicans—he is surrounded by opposition. Even the empress distances herself from this Southern project. No matter how lacking the Yankee Northerners are, no one but the emperor is comfortable with this question of slaves, and goodness only knows why he is.”

Beausoleil himself was frankly contemptuous of this question. To hear him speak, the Negroes lived in the midst of their families—were family themselves. Gabriel spoke fondly of the nurse who raised him; the cook, all of the house servants he had grown up with. His letters home included greetings to them all, including the midwife who had pulled him from his mother's womb. He pointed out that the European poor were stuffed into factories and starved off their land; even to open the paper in Paris was to hear of the scourges of the underclasses, the filthy slums, the cholera-infected water. As for the infants abandoned at the hospice—that seemed to him the profoundest insult of all. Not even slave babies suffered that; they were suckled by their mothers, he said. He was sympathetic to my plight with Berthe; he'd even pulled some strings with his influential friends.

Odette raised her small whip; we jolted forward at last. “Reclaiming the child is one thing, raising her is another.”

“Gabriel thinks I should take the case to court.”

“Fine for him, since he's not planning to marry you.”

I ignored the comment. “I need a witness who will testify that I and—Berthe's father—lived together at the time of conception. I have located the house girl who took care of the place where we stayed.”

We crawled amid the colorful carriage traffic, past manicured flowerbeds and smooth-pelted, artificially sylvan lawns. The fountains, usually sparkling, were dry. All of the capital's fountains were dry that whole summer long; all of Paris impatient for Haussmann's long-promised waters to flow over the aqueducts and into the taps and fountains.

Odette leaned out and waved as we circled, to say a word to Madame “de V—,” cinched in oyster velvet and ostrich, looking too warm for the weather and every bit like the fat-purse cut-purse she was. A water seller moved among the stagnant crowd with his greenish bottles; Odette again snapped out her fan.

“
That
water is right out of the Seine taps.” Behind Madame de V was another recognizable vehicle, Giulia Barucci's open-air Italian carriage. Giulia gestured toward the water man and then waved at me. We had met at one of the American parties; she was known for extravagant stunts, such as dropping her dress without warning before European potentates, and was rumored to have been the mistress of the prince of Wales. Giulia was dreamily beautiful, with masses of dark hair. She had a daughter, Giulietta, who lived at a convent in Rome, out of harm's way—at least most of the time.

“So you are going to see her, this maid?”

“I have arranged to meet her.”

Odette snorted. “You'd best be careful. In order to claim that your reputation has been damaged, there has to be proof, and that proof has to be that there is a baby and that the man is the father. And that sounds like
recherche de la paternité
to me. And where
is
the man? . . . Eugénie, are you listening?”

“I don't know where he is.”

“But this house girl might? Is the family wealthy?”

I put up my hand. “I've already said too much.”

“You can put me down as dying of curiosity, then.”

I looked off into the distance, at the colorful array of carriages.

“Any news of Jolie?” I said. Even saying her name made my heart ache, caught me in a sticky tangle of emotion.

“Just that she left Deux Soeurs and went to Chevillat.”

“Oh! She has left Nathalie, then? I've written to her a few times—but not a word. I've missed her terribly. I wish—”

That it had all gone differently; that I was not possessed by an inchoate guilt—

“Try Chevillat. How is Clio?”

“La Tigre's favorite; she dines on mackerel and herring every night.”

“Everyone has moved up in the world, then! You must introduce me to the infamous Giulia.
La Barucci.
Perhaps she will emerge from her dress.”

When we finally reached the cascade, we were surprised to see sparkling water pouring over the gray rocks, a verdant mist and a happy crowd milling in the moss-scented air. Every droplet available to the empire must have gone to create this artificial tumble.

T
HREE MONTHS LATER,
I stood on the Turkish carpet of the office of
monsieur le directeur
of L'Assistance Publique, my ivory-handled umbrella dripping from the rain. First I had been summoned to the hospice director's office, then redirected to L'Assistance Publique, and then the rain had arrived all at once. A set of small bronze-plated shoes stood on the desk, and enshrined on the wall was a portrait of Madame holding an infant in her arms, which, I suppose, elevated her to sainthood. Berthe's second birthday had passed, and in the weeks since, I had been nervous as a cat. If we were reunited soon, she might not remember that we had ever been parted; but this illusion could not be sustained much longer. My appointment had been put off for a week, then another—the reasons, as usual, unexplained, while I waited in the hospice corridor. Then, without warning, I received the summons.

My documents were ready; triplicate copies. Beausoleil's friends and my persistence had nagged my petition from the nether end of a bottomless pile; the
directeur
himself had been blizzarded with supplications: from friends of the comtesse (the hospice's patron and the author of the Justine tract), American doctors, Baptists of good standing, even a famous
chanteuse
for whom—as we learned—
monsieur le directeur
had a particular fondness. I had run a gauntlet to get here, a flurry of favors traded, outright bribes, and had been run ragged between administrative offices. Exceptions could be made—harlots all over Paris had repossessed their children; the convents of France and Europe were full of them. The trick was to become one of that lucky group, and on that road I had traveled far.

My petition, as it now stood, attached a statement of income and attested that I was prepared to reimburse the hospice and the state for Berthe's care. I would guarantee her welfare and fees at an appropriate school if it was deemed “most proper” for her to live in a convent rather than at home with me. My profession was listed as
companion, employed by a well-placed New Orleans socialite who had very little idea what she was signing, late one evening, on the piano draped with Confederate colors. At any rate, I
was
a companion. Chaste as a nun, for that matter. Some language had been included about matters of status currently under consideration by the Paris Council, asserting that I had “reformed” and was not practicing my assigned trade. Even that my enrollment on the Register would soon be expunged—a prospect supported by no evidence, though Beausoleil's lawyer had promised to try to pull it off.

The second part of my plan, however, had stalled. I had traveled by rail to Tours, accompanied by Sévérine, and found Léonie blinking in the dusty sunlight at the excavation site of the rediscovered tomb of Saint Martin, a meeting we had planned through an exchange of letters. Beausoleil's lawyer had located the girl. (It was marvelous what lawyers could accomplish. My present situation afforded many such revelations of their ease in dealing with life's various affairs; and my surprise was always a source of amusement for Beausoleil.)

I had chosen the site for luck. Stephan and I had met around Saint Martin's Day. But Léonie—now blossomed into a young woman of sixteen—shifted her feet and evaded questions, casting pleading looks from under her lashes. She appeared diffident and furtive, anxious to get back to her post—a different creature from the quiet but self-assured girl she had been at La Vrillette, when she so devotedly laid our fires and set our table. She was presently employed in the home of a railway official in Tours, she said, but declined to disclose anything else. I asked her to walk with me, explained what I needed. Tugged at her memories of La Vrillette—did she remember us there? Did she know where Monsieur Stephan resided at present? On that question, she demurred . . . His family? Her gesture seemed to indicate that her former employers were not entirely unknown to her (and I wondered, then, about the existence of the railway official). Finally I pressed a letter upon her and paid her a lordly sum to deliver it. She pocketed the money and promised.

She in her plain dress and apron, averting her eyes—while I reassured her from the height of Mademoiselle Colette's latest copy, in my fine linen skirts and pale gloves. We stood in the shadow of Saint Martin, the saint who had cut his cloak in half and shared it with a beggar. Léonie took the letter and I saw that her small hand was chapped, the nails ragged. Had her hands been so hard-used before? I could not recall. And then I had to hurry for a cab to return to Tours station.

 

Now, at the august offices of L'Assistance Publique near the Hôtel de Ville, the
directeur
shifted his feet under the desk, folded and unfolded his spectacles. He rustled a folder of papers on the desk. He was not smiling.

“You have received the itemization of costs incurred in your daughter's care?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“So you can see that a good deal of time has been spent on your case.”

I bowed my head. “Yes, I am grateful.”

“Despite your nearly impossible status,” he continued, “your friends' influence caused us to spend an undue amount of time persuading the Mothers' Aid Society to look kindly upon your petition—no small matter; and one in which our offices endeavored for discretion. The Christian Mothers surely would have followed. And as you know, the functioning of the hospice, the welfare of our many children, depends on these patrons, our volunteers—and they do not necessarily—look kindly on a case like yours.” He cupped his furrowed brow and tired eyes briefly with the palms of his hands, and sighed. Did it indicate a softening of demeanor; or merely a breath between one problem of his afternoon and the irksome next? He was not a terrible man.