The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (9 page)

“No, I told you—”

“Told me what?”

“That I can't work in Paris; I need some air.” He paused. “I'm sorry.” He looked down, miserably, spooning his soup. “I have—well, I have only about three weeks to finish. I'm going to Croisset.”

Oh, he was like the weather. And one never could predict what would come. I should have known by now—that Chasseloup would think of himself and I had wrapped my life around him, these past weeks.
Too much, too much around him.
It had been more of my keeping Chasseloup, these past weeks, than he me. Oh, I knew this—knew how a good line appeared, a promising streak of charcoal, and I knew how art had to consume everything, every scrap, how it swept through like fire, leaving nothing even for wolves to eat.

The next morning was a frantic chaos; hours in which nothing went well. Not the buckles on his baggage; the supplies he had intended to collect; the fact that he was feverish and jittery, his eyes worn out. I saw what it was like for him and was sorry; made tea and a boiled egg. He pulled me up for a kiss, nearly lifted me off the ground, but then he was absent, already elsewhere. We went together to the station. He'd be back in a few weeks; would write to the landlord from Croisset. Then, hoisting up bag, easel, big wooden paint box; half-finished canvas, a long cylinder balanced precariously atop everything—Chasseloup waved from the window, wan and pale and with light behind his eyes. Clanking echo of the turning key in the lock; belly suddenly tight like a gourd; heavier now, with its inner sea.

My situation was as old as the River Lot and just as fetid with the centuries' waste, but still there was no ready cure. For the next two days I rattled around in the triangular flat, pacing off the distance between Stephan and Chasseloup; Stephan, Chasseloup, and myself; the great gulf between Tillac and Paris in every respect; social, moral, geographic—my thoughts in furious tumult. Curfews, sidelong glances, and the clicking beads of Paris; the society newspapers and the mounds of earth in the streets all bled together, with the ill winds; with disappointment; with shame and contempt. Some in my condition, penitent or not, gave themselves up to bleach and boiling halls; the scurry of nuns' habits over stone and a wet lash to the wrists, in return for an anonymous bed when the time came.

Alone in that wedge in a tiny corner of the sky, I stared at the map of the capital, the scatter of clothing across the divan. Had I been too crediting, easily led by surfaces; indolent in my pleasures, insufficiently shrewd? Some truth-observing element within my Self seemed frozen; bound to a second, greater part oblivious to practical alternatives, the grave matter of life and what help might exist for it. Those two sides of my Self—the one that observed the world but could not act; the other that moved heedlessly, lacking a sense of the world's consequence, and the machinery to stave it off—these halves did not speak; possessed no common language; were incompatible residents in my woman's body. Some slippage, some muteness lay between; some fault or crack. That is what divided me and sealed my fate. I had, in that room, the first shuddering sensation of my own particular folly.

Then, was ill in the hall privy, with a sickness that did not soon abate. And within hours, the concierge's heavy knock informed me that despite the pawning of my hat, the cinnamon gloves, and the sop to the landlord, and whatever Chasseloup had written, my tenancy was not legal and the locks would be changed.

An icy rain was falling, the kind that stings fingers and cheeks and adds its chill to heartbreak. Letting go of the scent of bedclothes, the heat just left by a lover's body; the slap of wind was a reminder of the world's scant warmth. My reflection in shop windows showed a face barely recognizable, pale and puffy from too many meals of milk and white bread and sugared absinthe. I was hatless,
en cheveux,
like the artist's
grisette
I had pretended to be for a scant few weeks. But if one could not claim a lover in some dusty garret, hatlessness meant one thing only, which was not much different: a woman without resource.

I walked. Furious; the bag heavy and awkward. Vendors pushed their carts home; shops closed their doors. Here, then there, figures appeared under street lamps, first shadowy, then picked out by the light. A touch of rouge, a ragged glance, a smile that could shatter glass. Girls from a different world, one that allowed them some few hours on the street between gaslight and midnight. Anger drained and with it my energies as I walked, vaguely now, back to my old neighborhood, toward the Tivoli, edging into the dimness of rolled-up shop awnings; avoiding the lamps.

Rough voices, foreign; a whiff of the docks. They came up, slouched, one on either side of me, jostling as though we were in a crowd. One of them seized my elbow; I gasped and shook free, dragging my terrible bag over the cobbles. Haggard laughter behind, slapping feet. An omnibus came and I dodged in front of the horses; then cut a corner, zigzagging through streets until certain they were lost . . . and so was I.
Lost.
The gas lamps had stopped, and I leaned against a wall to catch my breath. I had missed the streets that led to Les Halles, the bright establishments that stayed open late. Enormous slanted red letters were painted on the bricks:
DéFENSE DE STATIONNER
.
No standing. And indeed, I could not. My legs felt rubbery, like they might bend and collapse.

Across the way was a church; an open gate to the side led to a tiny chapel. I pushed open its old, rusty-hinged door, not without glancing behind once more.
SANCTUARY FOR ALL. OPEN FOR PRAYER
.
(The practice had not been mine, lately.) Heart pounding, I let my eyes adjust to the dim of the place. A gilt, open-armed Christ caught the dull flicker of the old-fashioned oil lamps. At the altar's foot stood silk roses in lurid pink. I slipped to my knees and rested my hot forehead against the wooden chair in front of me. The chapel smelled of old turnips and the crypt; floors scrubbed with greasy water; the wet, bleached knuckles of the boiling hall . . . I prayed now; I did pray. For succor, for mercy, to be able to stay there all night, to turn back the clock, for Stephan's return, for Pierre—? But a prayer for Chasseloup was lacking, just then . . . Had I not loved him much?

 

When I was very young, when our own roof was still made of thatch and not yet tile; in the autumn when the wind picked up and the skies darkened with the threat of a hailstorm, Berthe and I climbed down to the cellar. For me it was an adventure that involved everything known—the sky and trees; the house, her hand—my small one clenching hers; the smell of damp stone, worms, and dust.

Maman's hand would be soft and warm against my own, her face pale, dark tendrils of hair sticking to her brow. Ranged around us was our faithful harvest of cabbages and beets, apples and pears and chestnuts; preparations for winter. Outside, the bell ringer in his blue smock dropped his scythe at the door of the church; climbed the tower and threw his weight on the rope. Pealing slowly at first, then clanging and clanging as the storm rolled over. The bells an invocation; a prayer, an amulet; our tête-à-tête with the heavens.

When the skies cleared, we climbed up and walked out to the fields to see the hailstones, like moons and planets fallen from the sky. They made round holes in the soft black earth and I would gather as many as I could, bundle them into my skirts, and stack them in the kitchen garden as if preparing for a snowy cannonade. In our village, the bells had always rung the thunder past, pushed away the lightning bolts so they struck down harmlessly in open fields. Tillac had always been a fortunate place.

A tug at my sleeve. Odor of unwashed cloth, dampness, and onions; a swaying lamp lit a stained robe; the stubbled chin and the rough eyes of a priest. I was out of luck, I could smell it.

I hoisted my bag (had it been so heavy earlier?) and moved quickly, blindly; walked. Down that block, then another and another. An old woman, rocking from side to side, swerved before me for a while, muttering to herself. A necklace of keys—a hundred or more—swung from a cord around her neck, and when she stopped beneath a street lamp, it illuminated the big, gaudy red-and-white fabric flower petals stuck onto the front of her bodice. A lopsided grin. Which lock, which key? Perhaps she has tried them all . . .

Quiet.
As it can only be, at that time of night; and I had reached the Seine, the ebb and suck of the current, dark and oily-cold against stone. Suddenly sober, as though I had not had a clear thought for months. The sky was a cold sea of stars and in it swam a full moon, high and bright. The wind caught briskly in my hair.

She was once part of earth, the moon. But earth turned too fast for the heaviness inside her. A bulge formed and earth began to list and wobble. Distressed, she did not slow but spun faster. Finally in a lopsided frenzy she pitched out this daughter in her and flung her far out into the sky. Staring up into that high cold heaven, I understood what had been writ large all around: I was now an exile. A pale body flung upward and cut off from the green and teeming life below. Hail from the storm; unsolicited and apart. A high, abandoned daughter. And
this
day, in the turning of the earth, was what all the previous months and weeks and days had led to, and all of my will could not stop the force of this orbit.

 

Thousands of girls entered Paris as I did, that year. Born somewhere else, blessed and cursed, they came from the four directions: from Brittany and Algiers, Moscow, London. By cart or train or mule or carriage or on foot, past fields, orchards, brick-and-stone-and-thatch villages, they followed their desire and need into the world and through the Paris walls. Hiked up skirts over the street debris; pulled meager shawls around their shoulders, and defiance and passion even closer, when the wind blew. Sooner or later, they began to search. For a place, a lover or a man to marry; a home or fortune; or just a bed and
soupe.
Magic in a blue bottle, like the fairy tale. So many searches began in Paris, and ended there, in those days at the height of the empire. And then the fun began—the real game of cat-and-mouse, the one you play for your life.

If they could be shown the future in a dream . . .
they would all recoil.

—Mogador,
Memoirs

T
HE MAISON DES DEUX SOEURS
was an old place, founded on a fear of vapors. Its original owner, himself a builder, had lived in the time of the real kings, and had planted the house in Paris's elegant heart, on former marshlands a stone's throw from the place des Vosges. The court's carriages had once passed under gates garlanded in carved stone; the streets of the Marais were filled with courtiers and theater banners, and a joyous mob of passersby went to and fro through the wide porte- cochères.

The house on the rue du Temple had not, originally, been built as a
maison de tolérance.
The old builder had intended it to be his own thick-walled fortress; a bulwark against the sins of his youth and a foothold on the future—a haven, eventually, for a wife and children. Because he had harbored weaknesses. He had wandered, in spite of himself, toward bruised vagabonds, outcasts, and the ill-done-by; the luckless in-betweens of the fairer sex. His own heart-softness ensnared him in dragging hems and hair falling in wisps; dreaming looks and warm currents of feeling; tongues turned slippery and fingers sly. More than anything he feared the pox; and at a certain point on life's compass, he became warier; even began to look with remorse on his past deeds.

Upon completion of any fine new structure, the plaster must dry and be purged of its sulfur stink and poisonous emanations. So (as was the custom then) the man let the place out to Madame X so the walls could be cured by musk and perfume, and a decent rent collected in the meantime. After six months, she and her flock moved on, and the place was emptied of the royal overflow from the Vosges square.

From the attic to the wine cellars, the builder found his walls whole and uncracked, but the saltpeter in the plaster had formed a porous, humid crust. The bedchambers in particular were pocked with virulent-looking boils, and his own fears seeped into the clean lines of the architecture. How strange that as one aged, the young replicated themselves; past ghosts (one of Madame X's girls, in particular) could materialize even from new walls. Then he began to fret that the mortar and plaster and wood, though they no longer stank, had retained agents of infection, a Madame X miasma; perhaps there was real poison in the walls and floors. Embarrassed that he could not purge his own building and live in it, as so many others lived within the walls he had constructed, he began to doubt himself into a feverish agitation that neither the priests nor the medics could cure.

So refinements were added: thick windows of smoked glass; alcoves off the smaller rooms; a dining hall large enough for a long, refectory-style table and rough bed stalls under the eaves. He fumigated with cinnabar, sealed the doors and windows: containing the contamination, the cesspools of desire; bottling infection. This good man cemented his relationships with the local authorities and the king's officers; imagined himself protector not only of the weaker sex, but also of religion and the city of Paris. Fear and desire, doubt and chaos and sweetness, would be closed up behind padlocks and smoky panes: clocked by the madames, regulated by the police, and checked by the doctors.

 

Like the generations of maids who dressed in black gowns and colored caps and aprons, descending its stairs by twos—the
maison
passed down its secrets. Deux Soeurs, as it was known (although the name appeared on no deed or document), reflected the world's double-sidedness. Its lowly activities stocked the larders and wine cellars of distant investors, even though it also paid dividends of infection and ruin. Through a succession of kings, until the mobs marched and the blade fell and the fashionable fled and grass grew up between the cobbles of the rue du Temple and pigeons pecked in the empty dust on the place de Vosges—Deux Soeurs stood irreproachable and blind-eyed, its patrons various but never few. Later, in the progressive age of machinery, its workings remained simple and old-fashioned—power derived not from steam or coal but from life's errors, the places where edges didn't quite meet, where the Code Napoleon went silent and Regulation picked up the tune. What was to be done with those who did not fit—the wayward or unmarriageable daughters, the straying wives, and the rivers of desire that ran in the veins of men? Wherever the warp, the fault line lay, whatever the insufficiency of the world—it was made of that, and the ways a female body contoured itself to fit it.