The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (33 page)

Haussmann's water not yet in Paris and yet—from nowhere—a trickling, dripping sound, behind and above—
where?
A drip like agony. Hypnotic, that drip; if you didn't look around, it could even be the sound of light rain on leaves. A rivulet dripping down a wall, cutting a darker groove into the mottled stone. Or a long slow leaking through the body, fluids, vinegar water pumped up from a rubber bulb, running, trickling, cold then warm, down a thigh; a shift hitched up above the waist. Ablutions, afterward; back turned to the bed with its tumbled linens.

Excellent linens now on my own bed; a thousand threads under a thumbprint.

The girl on the bench twitched her skirts as an old man swept up dirt and leaves with his twig broom. Pigeons pecked at the ground. Little boys drove their hoops; soon it would be twilight and they would all go inside and this girl would retrace the steps she came by, because she was hungry; or perhaps—if she was just hungry enough—she would not.

 

I thought of defecting to America. Lili and I plotted and planned because Mexico was somewhere nearby, so we could visit. She booked her passage, but I dragged my feet. In the end I could not resolve to leave the soil on which Berthe—somewhere—lived. Beset by a stifling fury—yearning for all that had been denied—I was contemptuous too of my own vain, self-justifying tales.

. . . Dark moods, then. Without Beausoleil's protection, his comradeship, and his social whirl, I was once again at the mercy of forces stronger than myself. Besides, I had acquired tastes beyond my ability to pay. Gabriel's parting gift kept my bed linens out of the Mont de Piété, but it wouldn't last forever. For the practical reader, it may seem that more prudent investments could have been made—that it would have been wise to pay off old Madame Récit's interest as well as principal. Ah, but Mademoiselle Colette's new dresses were so immediate and urgent. The wine merchant's wares too; and the florist, and the tobacconist. While Nathalie Jouffroy, over in her countinghouse on the rue du Temple, bided her time, like a spider on a glittering, treacherous web.

It will already be clear that I was never a Bellanger with a garden of pleasure in a smile; a clownish, fun-loving Cora Pearl. Not a bewitching Giulia Barucci—nor the heroine of
La Dame aux Camélias.
Oh, I heard the stories of how it used to be, when there was more to it than commerce. Great claims were made for the old Paris: its wit and festivity, its narrow and winding streets, the charming personages winking down on us now, shaking their ghost heads and tugging their ghost beards and wishing we were having a better time of it during the reign of commerce. I found myself less and less able to contour my talents to any mold, though, and as time passed, became ever more the unknown girl; unknown to myself most of all. No one had told me that a Self is built up slowly over a life, and that all of its splits and fissures, gaps and weaknesses—its strengths and structure—come in time to be understood. Our small world, in fact, told us the opposite: that we were born in perfection, and either preserved ourselves morally and physically, or fell and decayed. Thus time became our enemy. At least I saw it as mine.

 

The last recourse, then, was surrender. To cease excusing myself with reasons that fell apart like old silk; attempting to defy the forces outflanking my army of one. Perhaps, as I learned to slip the
passe
so long ago to a slight girl called Banage on a velvet sofa, my course was already carved out. Finding the world's disgraced and abandoned in a sunbeam on a bench, mending and shaping them like a
rebouiseur
to the dispossessed
.
(Anyone would shudder at that girl's story, a common one, but I will not tell it here.) Some might even say I saved her, and the others like her, if you want to stretch the truth. Truth has its stretchers. But my own truth-sized truth died with the warrant from Stephan's lawyers and the threat of arrest. I was not like Jolie; I knew I could not survive Saint-Lazare prison. The goose-girl, finally, had the last word. Procurer of
foie d'oie
and other delicacies and desirables—with that dogged Gascon heart, bound to finish what she so rashly had begun—oh yes, she knew how to bring a fatted duck to market. How to save the day by the skin of her teeth.

Of some matters, one does not write accounts. One prefers not to, especially at times when life's business proceeds apace, leaving little time for inky reflection. Instead, at my escritoire—bills piled high, a heart leached of passion, and eyes that could see only impasses, I wrote to Nathalie Jouffroy. She, of course, was one of my creditors—the only one who never pressed. I'd been in her debt since La Palette; and after that, she had loaned me money to pay my legal bills. Her response came quickly. The dessert course of our long-ago dinner.

 

It should be clear, by now, that the business of Regulation was a very busy one indeed; and I became one of its pillars. At first I merely wrote Nathalie's letters, as there were always matters at hand between Deux Soeurs, the Préfecture registry, and the Paris Council. Also, correspondence with the
“
women's bourse” at Brussels, where the regulated were bought, sold, and traded. (Later I traveled there myself, in first class. It was not the kind of place you might think: for example, my trips there involved dining with the same jewelers who catered to clients on the rue de la Paix. But jewelry rentals were a secondary business at the
maisons de tolérance;
a beautiful young girl dressed in emeralds and nothing else might raise her price considerably.) My duties broadened once it was understood how useful, in fact, I could be; how faithful to the causes of Regulation; the issue of public health; the Code Civil, the Préfecture . . . aiding the proper course of the new
inscrit;
drafting letters about proposed variations in the articles—suggesting appropriate delays in the licensing of new houses, for example.
In the name of administration and the public good.

As far as matters with Stephan's family went, arrangements were made to stave off prosecution and ensure that nothing occurred. This was my last shred of justice; the final, defiant fragment upon which I built a precarious structure of stones and bones, of the tears of girls on benches, and the cold hearts of their lovers. Lesson learned: those hearts could always be counted on for the bank account.
Why
it should be so is a question for the poets and philosophers—although they don't seem to have much to say about it.

 

In the spring of 1865 we had the news out of Appomattox, and there was much jubilation in Paris on behalf of the freed American slaves. Beausoleil wrote to tell me that he had married, left the property to his wife to manage, and settled in New Orleans. I must come and visit, he wrote.

In 1867 came the final disaster for Maximilan and Louis Napoleon's Mexican adventure: the proposed “emperor of Mexico” was shot by firing squad; all of the European ladies sailed home. Lili, who had finally saved enough for her passage, turned around mid-Atlantic with her case of dental instruments. She returned with a heavy heart for the Mexican wives, for whom there was to be no relief.

Odette was more often between lovers now—and more often at the card table at the rue du Mail. Jolie surfaced once she had risen through the ranks at Maison Chevillat, settled in as one of the “seniors” of the establishment—reassuring clients that all was right with the world, keeping younger recruits in line. She was eligible for paid holidays now, and wrote that she wanted to go to Trouville because she had never seen the sea. Would we like to come to Trouville, Odette and I? Her bold scrawl on paper imprinted with the name Chevillat. A pilfered supply.

 

Three times a year, as before, I made my trip to the hospice. Demoted again to the corridor, subjected to encores of the pious ruminations of the Good Ladies. The benches outside the director's office were weighed down by a fresh crop of tear-stained faces, the newest novels and knitting patterns. I was the senior stalwart, intransigent—but the state continued its allotted payments; and this was some indication that Berthe lived. So I watched the sisters come and go, listened to the
nourrices
gossip, struck up the occasional conversation. I collected many stories in that corridor; but mostly just waited, as the law allowed, with neither strategy nor hope. When he passed, the director did not look my way. But he knew I was there, a needle in his side.

Thanks to Haussmann's new aqueducts and reservoirs, my rooms at the rue du Mail were eventually fitted with water at the sink. Clear, clean waters of the Dhuis River flowed from the taps; and soon after, at least a portion of the Paris citizenry could not remember when the drinking water and the cesspool were contained in the same courtyard. The old builder, indeed. And the new.

And slowly, slowly, in those waning days the clocks ticked, and I knew myself to be growing away, at last, from childish things.

. . . How does a woman learn to doubt herself? When does it happen, and why?

But the answers take us to insalubrious realms, and finally it may be better to go to dine; finish the evening with a brandy and a good cigar, if we possibly can. Let blessed silence fall and these sorts of questions fade like a puff of smoke.

Since everyone must dine, even those who want to wage war, around six o'clock the streets were passable.

—Mogador,
Memoirs

W
E WERE NOT
—any of us—paying attention when it began, the beginning of what we all now know as the
end,
during a sultry stretch of July 1870, in the nineteenth year of the empire. The mood was languorous, up in the glassed-in veranda at the rue du Mail. Odette and I made fans out of
L'Opinion Nationale
because there was nothing much to read in it. The playing cards had slick, hot surfaces as we dealt tarot or played
manille
(silent
manille,
talking
manille,
manille de misère;
a
manille
for every mood, but always the same game). There was some imperial bluster about a Hohenzollern candidate for the vacant Spanish throne and the typically inconsiderate behavior of Prussians. Visitors to the apartments on the rue du Mail included rather more of those in uniform, colorful and stiff with gold and silver braid; but this wasn't so unusual. Francisque and Amélie often expected such decorative persons to take them to dinner. Lili occasionally mentioned how ruinously expensive small things had become, combs or a pair of gloves. Francisque, porcelain-lovely, was impeccable as always; she minded her popularity assiduously but seemed to live at some distance from herself—more so with the passage of a few years. Amélie was warmer, sympathetic, and better read; to hear her speak, one would never believe she was a
cocotte.
Amé came from an old Dijon family (she was on familiar terms with the varieties of mustard) but had wanted to go on stage as a girl, and no good advice could stop her. A string of suitors from generals to opera tenors occupied her, keeping La Tigre lively, lest they mix up their evenings. Lili, dimpled and adorable, cultivated paying jobs beyond a string of protectors, though it did send her bounding in several directions at once. They lived by their wits, their lovers, the prevailing winds of fashion—the discretion and management provided by La Tigre, our “concierge”—and the stock market. The Bourse's current lurches up and down caused Francisque palpitations, and Lili to comment that she hadn't felt so seasick since Mexico Bay.

 

I dealt tarot; gave my opinion that things would pick up. Everything depended on how you wanted to look at it, and one might, indeed, choose. Shuffle and strategize your bets, avoid the struggling runner, and allocate to the stronger, as we did on the grassy downs at Longchamp. Diversify, put it off your own shoulders, never take things too seriously. Keep a cushion in the savings bank. This had been Beausoleil's attitude, and I had worked to make it mine.

The empire had its share of grumblers and a fresh helping of critics, to be sure. Louis Napoleon was not as young as he once was and suffered from gallstones. But his signature style continued unabated: balls and masquerades and all manner of extravagance and
volupté
at the palaces, at the Tuileries and Compiègne. Imperial mistresses and dalliances came and went, and the demimonde, the world of fashion that was the empire's assiduous imitator, was on parade and as spendthrift as ever. France had survived the Mexican disaster and made a shining tableau of wealth, beauty, and social progress in a giant glass dome on the Champ de Mars two years past. The Great Exhibition showcased Paris as Europe's glittering jewel, and the whole world, it seemed, arrived to view the macadam-paved streets under sparkling gaslight, the parks and boulevards planted with trees; even the new sewer system was available for tours. Louis Napoleon had reviewed thirty thousand splendidly outfitted troops, cannon, and artillery; he was saluted by the Russian tsar and the king of Prussia and, with great and solemn ceremony, accepted a prize for his model workers' dwellings proposed for the slum districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant. Working people in their blue
cottes
and dull-colored dresses came to this exhibit to shift on their feet and stare, dumbfounded, at the display.

Still, the past year's elections, after all of the strikes and disturbances, had resulted in some liberalizations—freedom of the press, for one. We at the rue du Mail now fanned ourselves with
La Lanterne
and its brick-red cover, as well as the other papers. A new crop of journalists faulted the empire's tyranny; its tarnished-silverplate arrogance, ominous indebtedness, tinsel parades and spectaculars—but in our hothouse quarters these rumblings remained on the periphery. Closer to our own affairs, a few socially intended novels produced a flurry of anti-Regulation opinion and clothing drives for the “victims of Saint-Lazare,” though I was never sure what cause would be served by dressing up these unfortunates and putting them back on the streets—certainly not an overturning of the social order as we knew it.