The Painted Girls (20 page)

Antoinette

I
am rushing in the dark, dodging the ridges of ugly, yellow slush masking the pavements. My boots are filthy and soaked, no different from the hem of my skirt. How I hate the month of December, the sun that don’t show itself until after eight o’clock in the morning and then has the nerve to disappear before five o’clock in the afternoon. And this at a time when bones are aching with damp, shivering with cold, craving a needle of sunshine hot enough to breach the wool of our winter cocoons.

I intended to leave our lodging room early and, by eight o’clock, to pass under the great archway of La Roquette, the prison where Émile and Pierre Gille been sent to count the hours. They wait, like all the others there—most for transport to New Caledonia; some for the dawn they greet the guillotine; Émile and Pierre Gille for word from the president, news of their fates.

It was Marie kept me from leaving on time. “Can you spare a minute?” she said, pushing herself up from the table, traipsing after me to the door. Same as always, when preparing to open her trap against Émile, she wore a particular look—nervous as a whore in church.

Her heart was cold and black, rigid like a rock when it came to Émile, and there was no way to think of it except that she did not love me all the way through. I was a good sister and a decent laundress, but also a failed ballet girl and a walker-on who had let down Monsieur Leroy, and all of that was just fine with Marie. Such was not the case, though, for the part of me that was the lover of Émile. That part she would feed to the dogs. And it stung, her hateful talk, the way she did not love me enough to shut tight her trap.

Tugging my shawl up over the back of my head, I said, “Tonight.” She would be out, at the Opéra, rehearsing for her debut in
La Korrigane
, and I was done with her poking a finger at the newspaper, all those stories cropping up about whether Émile was deserving of clemency. Never once did she think to keep from my ears the arguments favoring the guillotine. In all the long months since he first got hauled off to Mazas, her yammering has not let up, not a bit, not even with his “Story of a Man Condemned.” No, after that, all she bothered to spit out was “He says, ‘It’s more important to judge the heart of a man than a moment of panic.’ A moment of panic! He confessed to slitting a woman’s throat.” It was the beginning of the hundred times I would say to her, “He was only showing remorse, Marie, saving his own neck. Monsieur Danet decided what to write.”

This morning, just like always, there was no dodging the girl. She put herself between me and our lodging room door and touched my arm. “A minute? A single minute, Antoinette?”

“Émile didn’t have a papa like our own,” I said, cutting her short. “There wasn’t a papa putting sprigs of lavender upon his mattress or bringing home a figurine of Taglioni hovering above the earth. Émile didn’t get none of that.”

Her bottom lip quivered. She sucked it into her mouth, and I felt sorry for stirring up the memory of Papa. I let my face go gentle, and it was enough to bring about her cheek against the matted wool of my shawl.

I counted to ten, before I said, “I need to go, Marie. I really do.”

She looked up, like a starved dog snuck into a café. “Please.”

“Not a word against Émile,” I said.

She rattled her head, like all her harsh words were only something I dreamt up. “It’s about modeling.” She bit her lip.

“Don’t got all day.”

“Monsieur Lefebvre, he doesn’t have a proper workshop.”

“Those artists up in Montmartre, half of them paint in the same rabbit hutches where they sleep.” Her lip was again between her teeth. “If you’re worrying, don’t see why you wouldn’t ask to be paid up front.”

“It’s not that.” She looked as earnest as a cat after a bird. “He isn’t much of an artist at all.”

“Christ, Marie.” Always she was complaining about Monsieur Degas cutting off feet.

“He does more looking than drawing.”

I shrugged.

“He had me standing in a tub the other day. Bathing.”

Was she going to ask me to accompany her, like that first time she went to Monsieur Degas? I missed a day’s wages from the Ambigu and was sent home within five minutes of arriving at his workshop. “The water was warm?” My voice was like the edge of a knife.

She nodded.

“Sounds rosy, getting paid to take a bath.” I pulled my shawl tighter, and she cleared out of my path. The skin below her lips was pink with the rawness of being grazed by her teeth, and a rotten feeling came into my gut, but already the street outside our window was waking up. Already I would be running and panting half the way to La Roquette.

C
lose to the prison the streets grow congested with carriages and carts. The cobblestones are crawling with street hawkers, as if all the flower sellers and coal peddlers suddenly got word the rue de la Roquette was the best place in all of Paris for selling their wares.

A boy, no more than ten, grabs at the sleeve of a shorter one. “Hurry up,” he says. “Dawn is nearing.” And it comes to me that this morning, set up on the five smooth stones not twenty paces outside the arched doorway of La Roquette, the guillotine looms. Already those boys watching the shed in the rue de la Folie-Regnault, from where it was brought, ran the boulevards, hollering the news. I lurch, clutch the lapels of the taller boy, tug him close. “Who?” I say. “Who is facing the guillotine?”

“Billet.” The boy struggles, and his lapel tears. “The butcher who hacked his wife to death.”

I let go, run my hands over my skirt while the boys scramble away, each looking over his shoulder from a distance before slowing down.

I sit on the sill of a low window, put a hand over my heart, racing more wildly than when I was hurtling along the pavements. And in that moment I feel myself shifting, believing in the realness of Émile’s bare neck upon the lunette of the guillotine. The tale I was clinging to, the one with him free on the streets of Paris, his fingers on my back, steering me around corners, like that first time we met, I see with an icy, new clearness it is a memory, something past, nothing that is yet to come. Never again will that tale be coaxed into my dreams at the end of the day, drawn there by longing and hope. For Émile there are only two options—New Caledonia and the guillotine. And knowing it is a blow to the gut.

Eventually I push myself up from the sill and put one foot in front of the other, following the crowd. Not once before did I join the horde gawking at the misery of another; and maybe it was a mistake, the blunder that allowed the tale I went to sleep with at night. I conjure up what Billet has already this morning endured: a flash of lantern light in his sleepy eyes, a jailer calling him from his cell, the prayers of the chaplain, the promise of forgiveness, the disbelief crippling his knees, the cold steel of shears touching his flesh, the hair clipped from the back of his neck.

I shoulder my way through the crowd, until the scaffolding of the guillotine comes into view—the two straight posts supporting the lintel, the struts of the base. In the darkness of early morning, only the light of the blazing faggots glints from the blade. Between the two posts, it hangs from the wheel of a pulley, like savagery forged into a shape.

A man all Paris knows by name—Monsieur Roch, the custodian of the guillotine—walks in a broad circle around the machine, the eyes of the gathered tinsmiths and bankers and fishmongers following him. Without touching the cigar hanging from his lips, he puffs smoke from his nose. Three times, he hauls on a rope, causing the blade of the guillotine to slide up and down. Then he strokes the lever, testing. The blade falls with a thud upon the wood below, and a contented look comes to his face.

The gates of La Roquette swing open, and there, between the two aides of Monsieur Roch, is Billet. The moment he is brought into open air, he surely sees the rosy tints of morning appearing in the east and knows with daylight his time has come. Pale, he faces the gawking, hushed crowd. He takes a few steps, stumbles but is pushed forward, his feet lagging, his eyes moving up and down the guillotine at the end of his path. Once there, his waistcoat and shirt are removed, leaving him in trousers and a knitted undershirt. His hands are tied, and he turns toward another man all Paris knows—the Abbot Crozes, chaplain to the condemned. Billet kisses him upon the lips. “Good-bye, my father,” he says, in a trembling voice. Monsieur Roch draws the straps and fastens Billet to the plank of the guillotine. The plank turns over on its pivot, laying his neck upon the lunette, and the yoke with its slit for the passage of the blade comes down.

Quick as quick, Monsieur Roch puts a hand upon the lever, and there is a dull thud and the severed head of Billet falling upon the mound of sawdust piled in a large basket. I stagger backward at the quickness of life snuffed out, and Monsieur Roch and his two aides send the rest of Billet rolling into the basket after the head. A cover is put into place.

I want to erase the memory of that severed neck—the glistening white bone, the pale flesh, a second later turning dark with seeped blood, and a further second after that, awash in the brightest of reds. I lift my eyes to the sky turning from grey to blue, strain to hear a bird warbling its morning carol even if there is no chance with wintertime all around. I want New Caledonia for Émile.

I
f I could feel the glow of hope instead of the knife’s edge of dread, I might imagine myself to be back in a visitor’s cell at Mazas rather than at La Roquette. The bare plaster walls, the brickwork floor, the two sets of iron grates, the intervening passageway—the stench of it all is exactly the same.

The door of the cell opposite my own opens up a crack, and the low voice of Émile reaches my ears: “When the Abbot Crozes gets back, you’ll let him know I want him to come to me?”

A jailer answers back, saying, “You sure it isn’t the warden you want me to tell?” And then with his tone changing to that of a child, he adds, “Monsieur Warden, that Émile Abadie, he is consumed with remorse. Be sure to let the president know.”

The door opens fully and there is Émile, sunken hollows under his eyes and lines etched upon his brow. “Just tell the abbot,” he says.

He slumps onto the chair waiting in his own cell, and the door closing behind him, his shoulders heave. “Old Billet went to the guillotine this morning,” he says.

“Yes.”

He slumps further, eyes closed, arms now wrapping his waist. “I can’t take the waiting.”

“It’s a good sign. You said so yourself.”

“Old Billet was hoping for clemency.” Émile looks up.

“Never mind about him.”

“I’d hang myself if I had so much as a belt. I could braid strips of sheet. Make a noose.”

“New Caledonia,” I say. “You got to keep your mind on that.”

He waits, staring hard, his chest rising and falling. “You’ll follow me?”

A promise to follow him to New Caledonia don’t seem like much, only words to bring comfort to a boy. But what if it turns out the promise is more than just words? With all the ink spilled daily in the newspapers about youth and remorse and reform isn’t there a chance? Even Marie is not against hard labor and New Caledonia for Émile and the rest so long as not a single one ever comes back to France. I think of Maman, her sodden snoring, her reeking breath, her life of widowhood and soiled linens and a tipped bottle of absinthe. I remember the old chaise in the storage room, about being adored, how I felt so awake, like nothing in the world was dusty and grey, not the colors or the creaks of the chaise or the feel of his breath, the smell of the smoke in his hair. He chose me above the rest, and my world was shifted to dazzling and sharp.

I nod. Marie and Charlotte have each other. They have the Opéra.

“Say it. Say you’ll follow me.”

“I’ll follow you.”

There is a tiny crack of the smile I have not seen in a hundred years. “Since that first day, outside the Opéra, you been my one and only, Antoinette. Always will be, too.”

I swallow his promise, the warmth of it swelling in my throat.

He runs his hands over his thighs. “You’ll need money. Not just for passage. The guards in New Caledonia, you got to bribe them to get assigned the better jobs.”

I nod for a second time.

“More than you make at the washhouse.”

I understand what he is not saying—that riches do not come to the poor girls of Paris by way of honest laboring. “I know it.” I inch up my chin.

“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me how it is going to be.”

And so, my feet numb with cold in soggy boots, my skirt soaked through to my knees with grit and filth and wintertime, I spin a tale. A small house by the sea. A roof of thatch. A garden. Sunshine spilling down. Him, his freedom won, with a hoe. Or maybe a fishing net. Yes, a fishing net. And me, a settler’s wife, cooking up those fish all but jumping into his tiny boat.

Begin, you darlings, without the futile help
Of beauty—leap despite your common face,
Leap, soar! You priestesses of grace.

For in you the Dance is embodied now,
Heroic and remote. From you we learn,
Queens are made of distance and greasepaint.

—E
DGAR
D
EGAS

Marie

I
n the long, narrow loge of the second set of the quadrille, I close my eyes, blocking out the scuttling, limbering, nail-chewing girls, the greenest of the corps de ballet, all of us awaiting our debuts upon the Opéra stage. My mind flits to the theatergoers I know to be lurking in the darkness beyond the reaches of the gas lamps lighting up the stage. Antoinette and Charlotte are not in the house. Antoinette has turned stingy in a way that is new, and with opening night seats, even in the fourth balcony, going for eight francs, she said she would have to wait. Charlotte would come later, too, once the house was no longer selling out and Madame Théodore arranged for her class to attend a matinée, and I hardly cared. She had called me chickenhearted for saying how I feared my debut, and I wanted to say how she should keep her mouth shut since she would someday be trembling in the wings, but it was not true. She would be licking her chops at the chance to get out there and shine. It was something in her I envied, more in this moment than ever before.

I put my hands on my belly, suck in a breath counting to four, let it out counting again, just like Madame Dominique said for calming the nerves. Oh, how I want to get through the night, to make Madame Dominique proud, to be admired. What I need is quiet, to shush the shuffling feet, the nervous giggles, the words spoken low. More deep breaths, I tell myself, more counting to four.

Tonight is the opening of Monsieur Mérante’s new ballet,
La Korrigane
, and in the first act I appear as a Breton peasant, wearing a costume more fine—I am sure—than any worn in all the countryside of Brittany. Two gold bands mark the hem of my skirt and the cuffs of my blouse, and the prettiest of laces edges my apron, collar, and cap, all of it far too white for any girl who ever tugged the teat of a cow or snatched an egg out from underneath a hen.

The first time I set foot upon the decorated stage, I gaped, eyes growing wide. A massive church with carved stone doorways and colored glass windows and spires of fantastic height towered over the square where the dancing took place. Off to one side were cottages and on the other, shops bedecked with garlands and flags and beyond all that, soaring trees, so real-looking I stroked a leaf to decide if it was truly silk. I could not believe such a thing of beauty existed in the world, but now with the costumes, I have the idea that no public square in Brittany matches what is built upon the Opéra stage. A single glance around the quadrilles’ loge, and I know I am right. We are the daughters of sewing maids and fruit peddlers, charwomen and laundresses, dressed up and painted to look like something we are not. All the years of practicing, the sweat and toil, the muscles aching at the end of the day, it comes down to learning trickery—to leap with the lightness that lets the theatergoers think of us as queens of the Opéra stage instead of scamps with cracking knees and heaving ribs and ever-bleeding toes. Sometimes I wonder, though, if for the very best ballet girls, the trickery is not a little bit real, if a girl born into squalor cannot find true grace in the ballet.

When finally we were rehearsing on the stage—the full orchestra coaxing the place behind my heart, the floorboards beneath Rosita Mauri’s and Marie Sanlaville’s feet the same as were beneath my own—the joy of it lasted more than a week. But in truth, for the peasants of the second set of the quadrille, rehearsal amounts to a lot of standing around and being fully ignored. The Breton dance takes place at the beginning of act one and is no more than six minutes in length; and when we rehearse, the coryphées and the sujets are straightening their skirts and kneading their calves and the première danseuses and the étoiles are in the wings, posing and lifting up their legs for the lurking abonnés. The rest of the time we are props, a backdrop of color, nothing more. Still, when it is time, I dance my heart out, never leaping lower than my best, never forgetting to hold my neck long, always remembering to keep my teeth out of sight.

La Korrigane
tells the story of Yvonette, a poor tavern maid all of a sudden furnished with the silks and jewels that win the heart of handsome Lilèz, the role Monsieur Mérante gave to himself, never mind his thinning hair. The Korrigane—the wicked fairies of Brittany—steal Yvonette away, until Lilèz overcomes their treachery and claims her as his prize. Blanche had me laughing at one rehearsal, saying how it was the best part of choreographing a ballet, casting yourself in a role where you are fine-looking and young and allowed to paw at the girl of your choice.

I do not mind being a prop so much when Rosita Mauri is dancing upon the stage as Yvonette. No, I watch her feet, the way they beat in the air, flying this way and that, neat, quick. She dances one section in wooden clogs. No one else could manage the steps. It was something I made the mistake of saying to Monsieur Lefebvre, and the next time I went to his apartment he handed me a pair. “Now dance,” he said. One of the sofas had been pushed back and the carpet rolled up, leaving an area of bare floor.

“What dance?” I said, gripping the clogs.

He stared, and it felt like he was daring me not to do as I was told. “Rosita Mauri’s dance, of course.”

I knew the steps from watching at the rehearsals, and alone in the practice room I had tried to copy them, dreaming all the while of someday having the same lightness and speed as Rosita Mauri. But even with my feet in canvas slippers instead of wooden clogs, I was nowhere near capable of what she was.

I said the truth to Monsieur Lefebvre, and he took me by the arm, walked me over to the pushed-aside sofa and pointed, telling me to sit. “Do you know about Emma Livry?” he said, lowering himself to the spot beside me.

Everyone knew. Ever since Marie Taglioni, the people of France had been waiting for an étoile of the same skill, talent enough to capture the hearts of all those seeing her upon the stage. Emma Livry was to be such a sensation. At the age of sixteen she appeared before the public for the first time—the role of the Sylph in
La Sylphide. Le Figaro
called her a second Taglioni, and by nineteen she had reached the rank of étoile. But two years later she was bedridden, suffering. While she awaited the moment of her entrance in the wings, her skirt shifted into the sphere of a gas lamp and in an instant she was aflame. Even with Marie Taglioni herself rubbing greasepaint into Emma Livry’s charred skin, even with the straw that was placed on the cobblestones before her apartment to deaden the clacking of the wheels, she drew her last breath at the age of twenty-one. All that took place before I was even born, but still every ballet girl knows to look right and left in the wings, checking the locations of the gas lamps, before giving a final fluffing to her skirt.

I
told Monsieur Lefebvre all I knew about Emma Livry, and he nodded, staying quiet, until I ran out of words and said, “I can’t think of anything else.”

“Have you never wondered why a child was cast in the role of the Sylph? The house was full the night of her debut and the press eager to report her success.” He said Emma Livry was the daughter of a sujet called Célestine Emarot and her protector—a baron—that when the arrangement between the two of them ended, Célestine found herself a new protector. “This time, a viscount.”

It was through the viscount’s influence, he said, that it was decided Emma Livry would make her debut in a major role. With him footing the bill, no expense was spared. She was prepared for four months. Three weeks in advance of her debut, he arranged for publicity in the newspapers, with the end result that she appeared as the Sylph before a full house. He lifted up his eyebrows. “You know about the claque?” I had heard of the famous Auguste, of the money he was paid by the director of the Opéra for stirring his colleagues in the orchestra stalls into a fervor of clapping, the fury of which had everything to do with the weight of the coins put into his hands. “All that was a long time ago,” I said.

He gave me a pat, a pat for a girl green as the first shoots in the spring. “The viscount spent a fortune, making sure no one in the house was left making up his own mind about the greatness of Emma Livry.”

“I don’t see why you’re telling me all this,” I said.

“After the debut the viscount embraced Emma Livry, and he told her, ‘You were only a caterpillar, but I made you into a butterfly.’ ” He smiled.

I swallowed, dipped my chin the tiniest bit. Tuesday mornings with Monsieur Lefebvre I was earning the twenty francs that allowed me to go on making the meager wages the Opéra paid to the girls in the second set of the quadrille. But it was more than that, too. He had clout with Monsieurs Pluque and Mérante, maybe Monsieur Vaucorbeil, too. He had the money to line their pockets, if that is what it took. He made a habit of getting his way. And even a girl with the talent of Emma Livry had an abonné greasing the wheels.

Monsieur Lefebvre knelt before me, unlacing my boots and slipping them from my feet. He held each of my ankles, pressing one foot and then the other into the wooden clogs. Standing up, backing away, he said, “Now, do as you are told.”

I made a mess of it. I told him I would. Me standing there, disgraced, my lip sucked between my teeth, he said, “Again.” I tried. I failed. He said, “Again.” Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, until my feet bleed in the clogs and his voice was like vinegar in a cut.

“Undress,” he said.

I did.

“On the sofa.”

I sat down and he went to his easel, on the far side of the cleared space. From behind it, he called out for me to lie back, to open my legs. And then more instructions—lower my knee, close my eyes, part my lips.

There were other times, when I almost knew. There were his knees, below the bottom edge of the canvas, shifting slightly, back and forth. There was his trembling breath, the final stifled grunt, and afterward the quick handing over of the twenty francs I was owed. But he pretended, and so did I. I thought about the steps of
La Korrigane
or listened to the sounds coming in through the shutters—the hollering groomsmen, the boats on the Seine, the chatter of the ladies passing by in dresses fine enough that they would be let into the Jardin des Tuileries at the bottom of the street. That day, with legs spread open on the sofa, I told myself to put my mind on Antoinette, the scent of soap clinging to her skin and hair, the tavern where she says she now works, her new stinginess. But I could not send my mind beyond his apartment.

Sister Evangeline’s catechism laid out the rules about sin, the two different kinds. It said smaller sins—venial sins—were easier for God to forgive, even without confessing to a priest, especially if the sinner was forced or did not fully understand the breach. Mortal sins were deliberate, and without confession and God’s mercy, they meant everlasting damnation of the soul. The difference was important. I did not own a skirt fine enough to climb the steps of the église de la Sainte-Trinité to the confessional booth, and even if I did, even if I managed to work up the nerve, I did not want to hear how I should seek virtue, the hundred ways a ballet girl’s life was not pleasing to God. That day, lying back on the sofa, my mind stayed put and Monsieur Lefebvre’s panting and grunting, the final swelling moan filled up my ears, and there was no more clinging to the idea that the sinning going on would pass as the lesser kind.

Afterward when Monsieur Lefebrve put thirty francs in my hand—your new allowance is what he said—I did not refuse the extra ten francs. Sister Evangeline’s catechism was a long time ago. Was I even correctly remembering what it said? Antoinette would say it was only drivel, written up by the priests because they were in love with rules, not that she wasted a minute thinking about some old catechism. No, Antoinette was too bold in speaking her mind to end up with her legs spread open for a slumming gentleman.

F
rom the stage the theater is a black, gaping hole, but you can feel the breathing coming from the seats, the thousand pairs of eyes. My heart beats wildly, and my feet move, only because they know the steps of the Breton dance like I know to write my name. My mind skitters—elbows soft, shoulders down, mouth shut. I grip Perot’s and Aimée’s hands for the portion of the dance we make in a line. A hundred times I took their two hands and never before was there the slipperiness, the gripping of today. Never mind the earlier grinning, the whispers of “Long last, the stage!” in the wings. We are all afraid. It is the moment when I know I will not trip or collapse or make a mess of a single step, and the chatter inside my head stops.

Like sometimes happens in the practice room, when I am at my very best, the music goes inside me, then comes from inside, spilling out. There is the sheer pleasure of dancing, a knee extending, a foot striking the wooden planks of the stage, of breath. There is something words cannot explain, a moment of rapture, a moment of crystal clearness. I know the miracle of life, the sorrow of death, the joy of love, and I know none of it is any different for a single soul in the world. Oh, how I want the moment to last. But then Rosita Mauri is whirling across the stage, and the second set of the quadrille is retreating to our waiting spot amid the cottages and shrubbery. And, oh, I want that moment back. I want that moment again.

Did Antoinette ever snatch such a moment? No. She would have kept her mouth shut in front of Monsieur Pluque to get the moment again. And Charlotte? Sometimes that small girl was coming down from the practice rooms when I was going up, even though her class was over and done two hours before mine began. Every chance she had she sat with her legs spread wide and lowered her chest to the floor. She wanted to know the allegro combinations Madame Dominique called out to my class, wanted to know was her cabriole high enough, landed soft enough. Would I say the beating together of her calves was good and neat? She badgered until I showed her the steps of the Breton dance, kept it up until she knew every one. Charlotte had tasted that moment, the one I wanted again.

The debut of
La Korrigane
goes off without a hitch, and afterward the applause is like thunder. While Monsieur Mérante hops around, clapping the backs of set painters and étoiles and Madame Dominique and even Perot, the entire corps de ballet lines up in the wings for our final bows. “The curtain. The curtain,” the stage manager yells. “Your place, Monsieur Mérante, if you please.”