The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (15 page)

The final word on this is that it is a moderately good painting, and possibly even deserved its third as a work that both engaged the critics and spoke to the public. But the so-called investigation of the identity of the model is absurd. Once we insist upon hanging creative works on literal ropes, we are hangmen of Art. After all, why do paintings matter so to us? Not because their flesh-and-blood analogues may be stepping aboard an omnibus, or buying a loaf.
—Félix Duport, “The Mosquito,” Figaro

 

Jolie dragged a hand over her eyes. She was slouched on a chair in the Josephine Room, skirt hiked past her knees, looking as though she'd been pulled from bed and would rather still be there. I'd gone to some lengths to get her here—passing a note through Bette, because I hardly ever saw her upstairs, and never alone. Now I wasn't at all sure it had been a good idea.

“Look at these,” I said, my voice shaking, holding out the clutch of papers I had taken,
Figaro, Gazette, Paris Illustré—
stuffed them under my pallet. “This painting they are writing about—”

Jolie stared at the clippings, first one and then the next, then said at last that I should just tell her what they said so it didn't take her all day to figure it out. Jolie had no idea what the Salon was and could care less. When I finished my explanation she said, “I don't know what those
michés
get up to on the Champs-Élysées. Art modeling's worse than the stage. After the show there's nothing in it. And these artists come around here all the time, adoring themselves. Think that a paint box gives them license for anything; they always want to draw you and not pay a sou. So, is he rich and old, this one?”

“No, poor and young.”

“Ah. So you're just like those
stupides
upstairs, waiting for your boyfriend to come love you back?”

“No . . .”

“What, then? . . . You want out, and my help with it, I guess. You might think again, being such a favorite around here.” Her voice was cold, or tired. Her face unreadable; tangles of hair, like fine-spun, wavy gold, shielded her eyes, the curve of her mouth; her eyes were shadowed.

“Hardly!”

“You have no idea, do you? You wonder why the others don't like you, but you've no idea what they've been through, most of them. While Françoise is giving you bottles and sending you up here for a rest cure, letting you slip the
passe.
Oh, I've heard. If you're not careful, you'll be traded at Brussels . . . And you don't want that, let me tell you, because this place is a palace compared to anywhere else.” Jolie stared at the draperied window. Her voice trailed off and she pulled off her shawl, cheap silk in acid yellow. Underneath she had on a too-small camisole with thin black straps, tight across her shoulders and breasts, and a dark underskirt, ruched in tiers like a petticoat, faded and marked with cigarette burns. Even though the Josephine Room's hearth was unlit, the warmth of the whole house was extravagant enough for bare shoulders.

“So, why are they letting me off?”

“Françoise wants
mesdames
to think she can drag in the talent. Why do you think she trawls the Mont de Piété on her days off, watches the line, sees who hasn't picked up her pocket watch? She goes to the maternity hospital with dresses and hats too. Françoise just loves to hook them at La Maternité. First to the
tour
to hand off the brat to the Sisters of Charity. You are her acquisition,
chouette,
so she's in the mood to spoil you.” Jolie got up and rummaged by the bedside for cigarettes, found one, and struck a match.

I considered this. “I thought they turned away dozens of girls every week.”

“Not the ones they want, I suppose.”

“I watered a plant with the ergot.”

“Fine, then you can suffer the same fate.” Jolie glowered. “Anyway, do you think you can get away with that? The Dab will catch you out.”

“Already has. Now she says I must go to the midwife.”

“You could say she's trying to spare you, Eugénie.” A veil of hair fell over Jolie's eyes as she dragged on her smoke.

It was startling, to hear her speak my name; I would not have made a bet that she'd remember it. I took a breath. “That other girl never came back. Delphine?”

“They sent her to the angel maker, sure. But that's not the whole story. Nathalie was done with her around here.” Jolie smoked until she burned her fingertips and tossed the butt into the cold hearth, shook out her hair, and ran her hands through it. “Look—I'm trying to help you. It's no good outside right now. Unless you think the painter will take care of you.”

“I have my doubts.”

“Well, then, what? Look, you're on the books now. You understand that, right?”

She stopped and stared at me, took stock of my actual state of ignorance—humiliating, provincial—all the same, I
didn't
know. She took a breath, gave a short laugh. “Listen. You are what they—the Register, the Morals Brigade, the Dabs, the madames—say you are. You aren't anyone else, in the city of Paris—well, even in all of France, I think, though I've never been anywhere else.”

“There's nothing like this place where I came from, I can tell you that.”

“Well, girls get traded away to Marseille and Toulon all the time. Lyon. Other places. You're on the books, registered,
inscrit
unless you can figure a way off, which is a good trick if you can do it.” She paused briefly; elaborated. “First of all, if you bolt and leave a debt behind, they will put the Brigade boys on you straight away. You're playing into their hands, really, by doing that. It's how they break a girl down, a stint at Saint-Lazare, and if you get out alive, you come back with a warning—or Brussels.”

I looked at her. Who was this Jolie creature? Trickster, prankster, comrade, spy?—So beautiful, with her tangled flame of hair and heavy-lidded eyes, in her strange costume. No wonder she had special privileges; they must all be half in love with her.

“But even if you work off what they say you owe, or get someone to pay it off, it's different ‘outside.' The rules change.” She ticked them off on her fingers.

“Carry a
carte
and produce it upon request. Health check and re-registration at the Préfecture every fifteen days. Walk only on certain streets, at certain hours. Stay away from windows, churches, and schools. No living in furnished rooms; you have to buy your own furniture, which puts you in hock and the chair and table men are all
souteneurs
—at least, I never met one who wasn't. If you go around the corner, say good morning to the baker, it might be ‘procuring off location'­—two charges against you. You are in and out of the lockup, and no leaving Paris unless a madame somewhere else sponsors you, so don't think of that. No women friends if they are also
inscrits.
But who else would be your friend? Other than your
souteneur,
and you can bet he'll be in the picture, robbing you blind in the name of ‘protection.' Sitting here and talking, like we are doing, is breaking the law, if we're raided and caught—” She took a breath and turned aside. “Damn, I need another cigarette, and I'd better not steal anymore. Even Bette counts them.” Jolie pushed her hands over her face; her nails were bitten. All the girls smoked as though a cigarette were a lifeline off a sinking ship.

In the end that was why girls preferred the houses, she said: for the company. “And everyone wants to come to a place like this. Look—” She flung her bare arm in a gesture that took in the whole room. “Satin on the bed. Four meals a day. Off hours, we sit around playing cards, and they handle the Dab and the police.” She got up abruptly, hunted around the room, found half of someone's butt tossed into the hearth, crushed. She smoothed and lit it. Sucked in her smoke and exhaled; gray air drifting toward the dark cordoned drapes.   Then she came closer, nestled near my feet; reached up and wrapped her arms around my knees—part caress, part the casual use of a convenient support. Warily, as though it might burn, I let my hand fall so it touched her hair, that tousled skein of soft-flaming thread. She smelled of cigarettes and bed linens.

“We should both get out of here,” I murmured into her hair. Leaned into her; skin light as feathers. “Will you come?” She moved abruptly; pulled away.

“Where, to a cozy little somewhere? Haven't you been listening to a word I've said?”

“Feel,” I said, and laid her palm, again, on my barely rounded belly. “I swear I just felt something.”

“You're imagining it . . . can't feel anything.” But she left her hand there, warm.

“I need to leave
soon,
” I whispered. “Because I'm not going to lose the baby for—for
Françoise.
For—a place like this.”

“Ssh . . .” We were quiet a moment, and Jolie shook out her great long limbs, went to the bed, and lounged across it like she lived there, beckoning me to join her. “We can . . . be together here. Here, it's easy. Not outside, you know. You know, don't you? Once after a raid, another girl and me—they locked us up, separated us, she didn't make it out. I can't forgive myself for that. And Nathalie, you know—she understands.”

But there was a question in her voice; and lodged behind it somewhere, some kind of strangled hope. I slipped in beside her, and we touched each other lightly, with exquisite slowness, then lay tangled in the bedclothes until all the clocks in the house had stopped. Smoothing away her rough spots and jagged edges, the way my own had been when I had first felt myself cared for. She'd gotten under my skin, Jolie.

 

“
Merde,
what time is it, anyway? Past supper. Another one of Madame B's macaroni pies that could be used to fill the holes in the rue du Temple—”

“You still haven't answered. Will you come? I've got no one outside. Nothing.”

Jolie sighed and kicked back the sheet. “I'm tired, you know? . . . I've been out, I've been in. Been just about everywhere. Nearly got nabbed again, last time. I don't like the police,
chouette.
They're expensive.”

“Where I come from they say, ‘You think your eggs are on the fire, when only the shells are left.'”

“Meaning?”

“You think you've got something going on, but really they've robbed you behind your back. It's no good here, Jolie. Not really.”

“We have to hurry or Françoise will take out her pocket watch. Or at least I do, those of us who care about making the month,” she said. Bonus tokens, allotted monthly, were currency inside Deux Soeurs—if you amassed a few hundred, you were entitled to a silk chemise, a hair bauble, or some other treat. A protest rose and died in my throat; Jolie's head had disappeared under the bed. “Where is my slipper—ah,
merde!
Look what I just found under here.” She started to laugh and, when I looked over, dangled a man's opera shoe, large, of yellowish snakeskin. “Now, how did this
miché
get out of here—hopping on one foot?”

“If that's the only way . . .”

“All right, all right,
chouette.
If you have to.”

“You won't—help Françoise turn me in to the police?” I took a breath. “I mean—for all I know she sent you to me, before.”

Jolie pushed back her hair and turned her head in surprise. “No,” she said slowly, her voice a languid growl. “No, she didn't.”

The way she said it might have kept me there forever.

 

Madame B, as it happened, harbored certain sympathies. The old cook understood how a girl might need a cold slap of night air, a taste of Paris rain on her face. She could turn her back without seeming to, when she was scrubbing the pots after midnight. And for a few sous the deaf-and-mute boy might hover hearthside, leave a key to the gate after he took out the slops and the trash. He might stash a sack of street clothes in the narrow alleyway where the king's
valets de chambre
once rubbed shoulders with the royal procurers . . . and shoes. Otherwise you wouldn't make it down the block—not after having walked on carpets for a month in slippers, those flimsy things frizzed with feathers or pocked with rhinestone.

Françoise would eventually take her night off. When? It was a fact that could be learned.

“And then—what about you?
” I'd asked Jolie, my only friend. But once the plan was set, she drifted away. Curled up against Olga for cake and cigarettes, flirted with either of the Mignons or both; teased Bette and made her bring in sweets and almonds. She was forever in the center of some smirking knot of girls, with a bottle, sticky fingers, a cache of tobacco. My heart ached, and I tried to ignore it.

Then, on a night that was not so long in coming, just when the bell rang and everyone trooped downstairs, Jolie brushed by me and whispered, swift as a swallow skimming the glassy surface of a pond. The submistress was out; Madame Jouffroy was taking the waters; Madame Trois up to her ears because the Dab had called for the removal of some of our number, and she was several girls short just on the night that the police were in as guests. One of the girls called for removal was Lucette, my pallet mate. Her makeup job, the fake kohl beauty mark by her lip, had been discovered, and she was bundled away without even a chance to say goodbye . . . Everyone was in a tumult. Olga was whisked into Salon Deux and the Mignons were furious. There was a new Danish girl who couldn't speak a word—younger than me, and even more terrified as she was made up, her hair yanked by the roots and held high in the hairdresser's hand.

“The police, here?” I muttered to Jolie. Nausea clenched my belly: a dizzy, rootless dread. But that was exactly the point: fewer of them on the streets.

“The place is teeming. Even the chief is downstairs, relaxing in the countinghouse.” The man in the portrait, down at the Préfecture. I'd seen him from time to time, being whisked through the halls by Madame Jouffroy. “Best to do it right under their noses,” Jolie said. “The way they least expect.”