The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (37 page)

 

I stared down at the papers. The war would end somehow; all wars did. I could end my own—wipe the slate clean. I filled the pen's reservoir with ink, wiped its nib . . . I had not heard from Nathalie for weeks; my employer had stretched her summer holidays, been absent since she left for Baden-Baden in July. To gamble and take the waters at the Rhine bathing palace whose grandeur rivaled that of Versailles. I thought about Olga, smuggling pastries up from the kitchen at Deux Soeurs so we could share something sweet . . . Saint-Lazare for Olga. Baden-Baden for Nathalie.

It seemed likely that she was a spy. What Noël said had made perfect sense, although I was no witness to any of it. Lacking the heart to consider it further I riffled through the pages of the document to find the line for the signature.

 

“A moment please, Madame Eugénie?”

“Yes, what is it?” I had not slept well and was late in rising; had not called for Sévérine. Now my maid sat stiffly in her going-out dress and gloves so neatly mended, the stitches were invisible, and my heart sank. Her sudden good humor over the past few days now seemed too brittle; and I had overheard quick, fiery bursts of conversations with La Tigre. I wondered, not for the first time, if the girl begrudged us her service; but she was an excellent maid—more than a maid. She was essential to all of the business in which I was involved. I tried to recall where her family was. Normandy. But she was not close to them.

“I'm sorry to give you my notice, Madame Eugénie. But the Prussians have gunners around nearly every fort; they mean to starve us out just like at Strasbourg, over the winter. I have taken service with another lady. She says there are many more Prussians than—than—is thought—and Paris is full of spies. Anyone with any sense is leaving and I have to go and pack her tonight.”

I threw the pen at the wall and spattered it with ink, hardly missing her nose. Sévérine ducked.

“Sévérine! When?

“Tonight, madame.”

“You can't—
tonight?
That's not any sort of notice—where are you going?” I had no time to interview replacements. “Are you ill? Take the day off. Sévérine—what I mean to say is—it is a very bad time.” I had Noël's document to deal with, and everything required haste, as though it had to be done before the city burned down; but what would it matter then?

“It is worse than you think, madame, if I may say so. I will leave my things; the lady is to give me a new set of dresses to wear, she is very—”

“A lady—what lady? Are you going across the Channel? To Brussels?”

Sévérine closed her lips. I knew that expression of hers; indeed, I had relied on it. Her discretion.

“Yes, yes. All right, then. I hope you are not leaving it to me to tell La Tigre; she relies on you too much—and Lili—” (Since Beausoleil had departed and Lili had come back, she and I shared the services of Sévérine.)

“I packed Mademoiselle Lili last night.” Sévérine's freckles stood out on her pale nose; and her curls were escaping from under her bonnet. Now I started in shock.

“
Lili
is going?”

“Sailing tomorrow, madame. On
Napoleon III
from Le Havre to New York. I believe she means to try again for Mexico.”

“Well, at least one further errand is needed. To the Préfecture.”

“I'm so sorry, Madame Eugénie.”

 

So I did not have her services to convey the document on that day. By the time I carried it there myself, the man at the desk was Coué, and he told me that Noël had been reassigned to a post on the battlefield at Sedan, a fortified town at the edge of the Ardennes forest and near the French-Belgian border, reporting under General the Marquis de Gallifet. Gallifet's wife, the marquise, was famous for having made a dazzling appearance not very long ago at an imperial costume ball, dressed as a white swan. All the papers had written about her costume. So Noël had his promotion after all.

I returned to my escritoire with the denunciation of Nathalie Jouffroy still in hand. I broke the seal and removed the sheets, took stock once more of the document, my amendments to it, my bold scrawl at its foot. I had not wanted to give it to Coué; didn't trust the man. Then, on an impulse and without knowing why—not for loyalty to Nathalie, and nothing to do with Noël, Coué, or any of them—I tore the paper to shreds.

Perhaps I knew in some way that it was growing late for spies . . . growing late for the Préfecture, had any of us known it.

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, or toward morning, the roaring began. A dull torrent from the direction of the Bourse, filtering in and out of dreaming night. I threw open the shutters, opened the window to the watery sky, and leaned out, as the roar resolved itself into a clear syllables.

 

DÉ-CHÉ-ANCE!

ABDICATION.

 

And so. As the world now knows, on a crisp day in early September 1870, not even two months after his declaration of war, Emperor Louis Napoleon III surrendered to King Wilhelm of Prussia and Chancellor Count von Bismarck on the battlefield at Sedan. His troops, 104,000 men who had staged a gallant burst of fighting worthy of the last battle of Troy, were taken prisoner. His regent, Empress Eugénie, fled the palace with her American dentist, abandoning her breakfast egg, hot and freshly cracked with a silver spoon.

And the roaring of Paris started a day that was to become gloriously sunny, perfect September weather. The citizens were mustering for the empire's end. And the streets, even at that hour, were filled. A solid river of people marched toward the center, to the Hôtel de Ville. By evening, the Third French Republic was declared.

The war, Louis Napoleon's war. It had been lost; but for a moment or two defeat receded. Who had wanted to fight it? Not the tarot-and-
manille
players, the gossips of the rue du Mail. Yes, yes. We were to learn who wanted it, and why. But for an intake of breath at the dawn of the new republic, we had peace without an empire, and the Age of Reason made a brief reappearance. Reason, that old-fashioned, past-century notion? We breathed it for whole moments at once, saw things as they could be. Honored the republic soberly that bright September, with the corpses of Sedan not yet surging back through the gates. And with passion, tearing down the emblems of empire. The words
PROPERTY OF THE PEOPLE
were chalked in front of the Tuileries. Busts of Napoleon III thrown into the Seine.

Jérome Noël returned from the Sedan battlefield as one of the dead. The man who had inspected my hands for signs of softness, had labored over my inscription and thousands of others; who had transcribed my intelligence in the name of the public health, collected what information I had to offer—but never erased me from the Register. This man shot in the line of duty, carrying a message for Gallifet. Inspector Coué, persecutor of milliners and lately, of Odette, was set to replace him at the Préfecture.

And then suddenly—as it seemed, though in fact it was not so sudden—a lull took the place of the clatter and chaos, the flags and “La Marseillaise”; everything became businesslike. New proclamations were unfurled on the walls, replacing the winding, deceptive discursions of the previous regime. The current message was brief.

 

The enemy is on the move toward Paris.

The defense of the capital is assured.

B
UT THE WEATHER WAS
brilliant, and the gutters and fountains again dry as an endless stream of people and product surged through the Paris gates like a misguided herd. Not only was the enemy “on the move,” but so was everyone else; and the population of the capital was changing. The well-off tumbled out of the city with their locked trunks, tapestry bags, horsehair luggage, and servants; those on the outskirts moved into the center. No one wanted to be trapped between the Prussian army and the Paris walls; Paris, at least, was sure to be defended. Wagons lined up one behind the next, piled with household goods, as goats and chickens straggled behind. Families trudged with their bundles; children pushed loaded carts down the tree-lined streets, trampling the city's sprucely trimmed shrubs. Young men came to enlist with the National Guard. Any streets not filled with marching and drilling soldiers were overrun with girls in clogs and caps, with women carrying infants; farm boys driving pigs and sheep to any open space, including parks, courtyards, and buildings whose ground floor had been vacated. The formerly clean-swept boulevards were littered with household detritus: coal and vegetable peelings and lost laundry; the squares were filled with animals; clotheslines were strung between tree branches. Provisions rolled in too: piles of cauliflower, leeks, and turnips; apples and plums and pears—sides of beef and pork—great wheels of cheese and tall tin containers of milk. All the countryside's harvest was hauled, hand over fist, in through the perimeter walls as though a great and torrid feast was in the offing. Apples fell off a cart, but there were so many that the urchins didn't even scramble for them.

 

The girl was barely more than an urchin herself: sharp-angled knees poking out from her thin skirt, and thin elbows jutting from the sleeves of her dress, not much more than a rag against the cold. Deep-set eyes and loitering on the corner of the rue Montmartre, but she looked scared and out of luck. The lead medallion of the
abandonnée
around her neck.

“Finette
is
my name,” she said, her chin forward. She insisted that she had been promised employment at the Black Cat, but they had turned her away for being too young.

“Finette is a famous dancer, and you are certainly too young to be she.”

“I'm sixteen,” she muttered.

“Let me see your medallion.” My chest tightened as I touched the small flattened bullet of lead, the hammered disc heavy as a heart, dangling on a filthy cord.
How old? Too old.

The string was made up of sections, one knotted to the next, to enlarge the circle around her neck. The bit closest to the metal disc was black and frayed. She'd tried to scratch off the number—as though everyone wore medallions and it was only her number that gave her away. I hated to see them on the street so young. The year she was put under state care was still visible under the scratches: 1857. An unmothered little gypsy, an air creature brought up on noxious fumes. The soles of her feet were black. Callused and bare.

“Who promised you the job on the hill?”

“If I didn't he said I'd be sent to the coffee grinder!”

“He was lying then. They send boys only to Cayenne. Not girls of your age; you are thirteen if you are a day.”

“They
will
send me to the coffee mill, he told me so.”

“From where?”

“Saint-Denis.”

Tiny sparkling chips in her grimy earlobes.

“And he gave you earrings, so you will do whatever he says?”

“I
don't.
Not whatever.”

“Well, you're in luck today. I need a maid.” I dangled the medallion. “Or you can go back to where you belong. The hospice doesn't like to lose track of its own.”

She looked afraid.

“If you come with me I'll show you where to take a bath and where you'll sleep, and give you supper, if you ask nicely. And a pair of shoes.”

“A bath . . . in a bathing tub?” she said doubtfully. “Will it be warm?”

“Quite hot,” I said, looking her over again. “And a lice comb.”

“I don't like to wear shoes,” said Finette.

The name stuck.

 

La Tigre would give me the sharp side of her tongue for hiring a maid off the street; Francisque and Amélie would never share her. But her big gray eyes, and the way she said
I don't,
suggested she might be honest and bright, under the grime. I would send a note to the Préfecture about illegal procuring out of Saint-Denis. For all the good it would do.

Soon Finette, with freshly scrubbed fingers, was ripping stitches in a pool of gaslight, tearing out the seams of Sévérine's castoff, which could make three gowns for her. La Tigre folded her arms and gave me a
look.

“Might you do me the favor of lacing me up for tonight, madame? I'll teach her tomorrow how it's done.”

 

Lights from a hundred apartments glimmered like underwater diamonds from my carriage window, and the earlier hubbub of the streets had subsided. Swimming through a silky liquid, the night spread loose; the moon was three nights past half, waxing, high and bright; clouds scudded by, obscuring then releasing it. Tonight's supper was in honor of my friend Giulia, our celebrated
Italienne,
who like everyone else was leaving Paris. I dressed as though it was the last celebration in the world, in midnight blue silk and black lace. The wind came up as the driver slammed closed the carriage door; I pulled my cloak tighter. It had a swan's-down ruff that tickled my neck and ears. An autumn moon; chill in the air—the first real cold, the shivering kind; the first night on which fire must be lit—the real change, the one that doesn't relent back into summer's arms.

 

Flickering tapers in the chandeliers and the flash of waiters' dark sleeves; a rising din of conversation and popping corks. A hubbub; a whirl, the pouring of wine; a clamor as some Russians arrived. (Did Russians remain in Paris? Apparently some few.) The white of Giulia's famous shoulders and neck, where her creamy skin met the curve of bodice. Giulia, with white camellias in her hair, kissed me on each cheek and on the lips and placed Giulietta's hand in mine.

“Be a darling and watch out for her, Eugénie. She so wanted to come, I couldn't say no, and I had to promise my life to the nuns to let her out.” Giulietta was now eight, a lovely small princess with wide, dark eyes and tendrils of hair escaping from her too-adult coiffure; the dress she was wearing was a miniature, though more demure, copy of her mother's. I had watched her grow, playing on the carpets in my rooms at the rue du Mail when Giulia came to talk, to cry, to read poetry on my little balcony. I would have loved to see more of Giulia, but she must play “La Barrucci” and tour the capitals of Europe. She was a captive of her fame; I did not envy her, as did most women—certainly Francisque and the others. The Russians settled themselves, tipping back small, cold glasses of vodka; a draft blew through a crack at the tall windows. I squeezed Giulietta's hand as conversation swirled, and her big eyes smiled at me.