The Porcelain Dove (2 page)

"I have waited two hundred years to hear your tale. I can wait two hundred more, if need be. Patience is the first lesson of a sorcerer."

"So I understand." Pompey had always said so, I thought, which reminded me of Linotte, which reminded me of Linotte's wedding and a thousand other horrors. Peronel. The beggar-children. The dungeon.

"This truth you desire," I said. " 'Tis not all school-girl pranks and enchanted gardens, you understand. Much of what I have to tell will cause you pain. You know not what you ask of me."

"I do know," Colette said gravely. "I ask you to cast a spell. Like any magic, 'tis dangerous. Like any spell, 'twill unfold according to its own logic, in its own time, by its own will."

"Stubborn little witch," I said softly.

She smiled, her face as bright as a new-blown poppy, a sturdy peasant girl with black hair and ruddy cheeks who, after so many years in the library of Beauxprés, is more learned than all the philosophes in all the salons in Paris. She smiled and then she went to a tall, gilded cabinet and removed from it a writing desk and laid it in my lap.

"I conjured it up myself," she said. "I hope you like it."

For form's sake, I protested a little more, consulted with Jean—who promised to advise me—and at length sat down alone in the library of Beauxprés with my face to the wall for fear of distractions.

So here I am, wondering where to start. My writing desk is open before me. It is plain varnished rosewood and well-stocked with one perfect goose-feather quill, several quires of creamy paper, and a crystal inkpot in the shape of a nestling. A witty touch, that inkpot, and very like Colette.

And now I have taken up the pen and dipped it into the inkpot's gaping beak, determined to write this tale as honestly and plainly as I may, from the beginning.

Honestly and plainly, then, what is the beginning? Was it the February night in 1777 when the beggar laid his curse on M. le duc de Malvoeux? That makes a good, strong beginning, and Jean says it's best to start with your strongest point, like showing a buyer a horse's good legs (if he has good legs) before you get around to his hard mouth or his sway back or whatever else is wrong with him. There's always something wrong with a horse, Jean says, and there are always tedious parts to a story, but good and bad all go together to make a whole animal or a whole tale, and a horse without sound legs or a tale without a sound beginning can never get far.

But the tale did not begin with the beggar's curse, nor yet with his first appearance in our lives, when Mlle Linotte was still in leading-strings and my waist was slender as a willow. The tale began more than six hundred years ago, when the first duc de Malvoeux . . .

No, a story is not like a horse after all, for the history of the first
duc de Malvoeux is not at all like a horse's legs (unless the horse has been treading in dung) and not, therefore, the place to begin. Where, then? Well, 'tis Adèle's tale as well as the duc's; and Adèle's tale, at least since her seventh year, is my tale also. So. I will begin with myself, which is at least familiar territory, and let the rest follow as it may.

CHAPTER THE FIRST

In Which Berthe Duvet Begins Her Tale

I was born in Paris on the fifteenth day of September, 1745. My father, M. Émile Duvet, was a corset maker. My mother, Mme Louise Duvet, was a lingère. Together they kept a shop upon the rue Montorgueil.

When maman spoke of my father, she'd praise his eye for sound whalebone and his skill at fitting a difficult torso, then shake her head sadly and say that she'd have wished him as careful a provider as he was a corset maker. And then she'd shrug and sigh that such was life, after all, and what would you? Life is seldom fair. From this, I concluded that money had melted in my father's hands, and was just as happy never to have known him. In any case, he died before I was a year old, and maman sold all his whalebone to buy linen so she could set up in business by herself.

She began making négligées for the girls of a nearby house of accommodation. Her work was so fine that before long she was supplying chemises, peignoirs, pockets, and sleeve-ruffles for the artistes of the Opéra and the Comédie Française. While she was not at all ashamed of her clientèle—neither the actresses nor the whores—she intended a better for me, in preparation for which she gave me the finest education she could devise.

That she taught me fine sewing goes without saying; why, before I could lisp my catechism, I could cut and sew a simple chemise. Yet my mother knew that any unlettered grisette might learn to do as well and still spend her life cutting and sewing to plump some other
woman's purse. When I was four or thereabouts, she sent me to a petit école where I might learn to write and cipher as neatly as any Jesuit and to read both print and writing. Nor was that the sum of her efforts. To teach me to carry myself discreetly upon all occasions, she took me with her everywhere: to the rue de la Vieille-Draperie to bargain for linen; to the tenements of Saint-Antoine to hire assistants; to the whorehouses of Saint-Honoré to fit chemises; to the tiring-room of the old Comédie Française to deliver ruffles and fichus and embroidered petticoats.

My earliest memories are of that tiring-room: how the famous LeKain bounced me upon his knee; how the beautiful Mlle Huys gave me a spangled scarf to peacock in; how La Clarion and Mme Gaussin pressed me to their fragrant bosoms. I was a pretty child. 'Tis not vanity that I say so. Had I been plain, they would never have made such a favorite of me, nor would the great tragedienne Mme Dumesnil have arranged for maman and me to watch weekday performances
gratis
from a box on the second tier.

Mme Dumesnil was nearly forty then, an old woman to a child of five or six, and years of white-lead had made her look older still, her face and neck wrinkled as crêpe and stained with cheap rouge. I remember watching her dress herself, the way she'd frown into the mirror over the careful placement of her patches and adjust her breasts to swell just so at the neck of her gown. How like a harlequin she looked, with her chalk-white face and vermilion cheeks, her headdress heavy with plumes and paste jewels, her gown trailing yards of train! Yet not twenty minutes later, when I saw her tread the boards as Medea, as Penelope, as Zedima, as Phèdre, I always thought her exquisite.

This nightly transformation of an ordinary woman from crone to queen I may regard as my first experience of the art of magic. That the metamorphosis was achieved by means of paint and candlelight rather than talisman and spell makes not the least difference in the world. For sorcery and acting both are informed by the will and temperament of their agents, and the end of both is to dazzle and to suspend for a time the ordinary course of nature. Their common essence is desire—for power, for adulation, for command. Their common vehicle is passion.

Ah, the passions of actors! How grand they are, and how vital. Like the queens and generals they portrayed, the artistes of the Comédie Française were tossed by emotions as deep and violent as the
sea in storm, emotions that could only find expression in voices that reached for the third tier and gestures that encompassed the heavens. On stage or off, my mother's clients were either devastated by grief or transported by joy. They quarreled like angels and loved like fiends. They were as different from my stout, rosy, shrewd maman as peacocks are from wrens, and I adored them. Twice or thrice each week I would weep over their sorrows, laugh at their jests, tremble at their rages, ache when fate or a playwright heaped unbearable hardship on them. And afterwards I would trot home with maman to our tidy shop in the rue Montorgueil and stitch sleeve-ruffles in perfect contentment.

Ah, she was a good woman, my maman. She taught me the value of common sense and of telling the truth—if circumstances permitted—of looking neat, of minding my manners, of speaking proper French. She was the very pattern of a bonne bourgeoise, counting it a greater sin to be a debtor than a whore. She died of a summer flux when I was nine years old, and her business passed into the hands of my father's family.

My father's sister was a pinch-penny, low-minded, jealous sort of slut who turned me out of doors before maman was cold in her grave. Too old to apprentice and too young to work in a shop, I could not earn my keep as maman intended, and was forced to look about me for some other means of making my way in the world. When her old clients discovered how things stood with me, they were kindness itself. The proprietress of Saint-Honoré's most expensive bawdy house offered me a bed and a percentage of the sale of my virginity. And Mme Dumesnil offered to sponsor me with a company in Bordeaux whose manager was willing to employ an untried actress, provided she was young and pretty.

Oh, I thought about it, you may be sure of that. I loved the theater. Had I been a boy, I might have begged to be made a changer of scenes, and my tale (had I cause to tell it) a history of great loves that endured a week and small jealousies that endured a lifetime. As it was, Louise Duvet's daughter suspected that Bordeaux meant whoring no less than the establishment of Mme Godinette, only less well paid. And to say the truth, I'd no real taste for the sound and fury of acting. Even so young, I preferred to watch and listen while others strutted and declaimed. By the mercy of le bon Dieu, I had a third string to my bow: my mother's second cousin Olympe Darnton, who was femme de chambre to Mme la baronne du Fourchet.

When I left maman's shop on the morning of the fifteenth of
August, 1754, I turned my back upon the Comédie Française and bent my steps south-west, towards the Marais.

More than two centuries have passed since I made that journey from the rue Montorgueil to the rue Quincampoix, and this library in which I sit is further from those teeming streets than from Cathay. Yet when I close my eyes, they are there, bright miniatures, like plates in a volume of Rétif de la Bretonne: the carved swan above the shop door, black crêpe tied about its neck in token of mourning; my tante Duvet frowning beneath it, arms folded bonily over her bony chest. The bright cascading ribbons in the windows of the modiste across the way. The slick, sickly pallor of flayed carcasses hung for sale in the butchers of the Halles des Blés. Why, I can smell the dusty, floury, meaty smells of the market; hear its shouting, cursing frenzy and the sudden quiet of the Marais; feel the chill of the rue Quincampoix, whose tall, gray hôtels block the sun from the street, the better to hoard it in their bright courtyards. I can see the rust-red livery of the lackey who answered my knock and how his stone face cracked into humanity when I told him I was Olympe's cousin. And I can see Olympe herself, all fluttering ribbons and lacy apron, tapping towards me in smart high-heeled shoes, feel how her silk-clad arms clasped my shoulders and her easy tears tickled my face.

A little time later, she bathed her eyes, brushed the Paris mud from my skirts, and led me before her mistress.

Mme la baronne du Fourchet was drawing on her gloves to go out. I remember thinking as I curtsied before her that her sleeve-ruffles were clumsily made. Maman would not have let them out of her shop.

"What a pretty thing, to be sure!" the baronne exclaimed. "And what a charming cap! Pray, what can she do, besides curtsy and smile?"

"If madame pleases," I said shyly, "I can sew and make patterns, and I have been taught to read and write as well."

"Why, 'tis a veritable scholar you have brought me, Olympe. Black hair, a brilliant eye, a charming face, a sempstress, educated, and young enough to be malleable! Of a surety, we cannot set such a paragon to sweeping floors! She shall be a femme de chambre, and you shall have the training of her."

My first lesson in waiting upon a lady was to change my mourning black for a gown of painted cotton. When I protested, Olympe told me that I was a servant now and entitled to no grief of my own. I
could wear black if a connection of the du Fourchets were to die, and not otherwise. Ladies of the ton wanted none save young, pretty, cheerful attendants around them. Some of these ladies simply desired to possess beauty—another's if not their own—and used their attendants like slaves, turning them out when they wearied of them, fit only for the lowest of brothels. I must count myself fortunate that Mme du Fourchet had an altogether more spiritual image of her women.

"She says that we must think of her as a priestess," Olympe told me with careful gravity, "and of ourselves as acolytes. The goddess we serve is Beauty, and Beauty, she says, is best served by the beautiful. She also says a woman reflects her surroundings like a deep pool. It therefore enhances her if we, who surround her, are pleasant to look upon. Do you understand, child?" I struggled with laughter; Olympe shrugged ruefully. "Moi non plus. My advice is, when she starts on one of her flights, just smile and curtsy and say, 'To be sure, madame,' or 'Fancy! How clever.' "

For one who had spent her girlhood in the company of actresses, that was an easy enough part to play. I put my heart into the rôle and soon, as a thuribular in the mysteries of Mme du Fourchet's Sacred Rites of Pride, hovered with perfumes and unguents at Olympe's elbow and watched each gesture and ritual as if my soul's welfare hung upon it.

How it all comes back to me! Pearl powder for the cheeks and bosom, a dab of serkis rouge here, here, and here, in the valley between the breasts. Lamp black on the lashes—oh, the veriest soupçon—and brushed delicately along the brows. Was that a stray hair? Pluck it out at once! And the patch. Would it be the badine, the baiseuse, the équivoque, the galante? Or perhaps the majestueuse to draw attention to the height of madame's brow? And then there was the coiffure to be decided on, the corset to be laced, the gown, the jewels, and the headdress to be discussed, chosen, tried, and changed.

Two hours were required for Mme la baronne to gird herself to face the world each day. And two hours more were required for Olympe and me to clear her dressing-room of spilled powder and discarded ribbons, to mend what needed mending and brush what needed brushing. After that was done, my time was my own, to be spent walking in the Palais-Royal if I liked, or in the gallery seat Mme Dumesnil had given me for the sake of my dead mother and a little
free mending. All in all, 'twas a comfortable life I led on the rue Quincampoix, though at first there was much about it to puzzle the daughter of Louise Duvet.