Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Sidonie, the magistrate then wrote for my name. He held it up and showed it to me. This is your name now, do you understand? They are giving you this name, will call you by it, he said, and then he gestured for the guards to take me off, and as I left, I felt the name close over me like a door.

§

She is most likely in the rue d’Enfer now, one of many in the hedge of skulls down in the catacombs. There’s an entire city of the dead under Paris, complete with streets and corners. I sometimes wonder if it is any more merciful than this one.

As for me, I was delivered to the Convent of Saint-Denis orphanage. The sisters stripped off my uniform and burned it and shaved my head for lice, as they called me Sidonie and I struggled to remember to look at them as they did so.

I had again taken a dead girl’s name to make my escape.

In the first months, I waited for the police to angrily return, to take me from the sisters and return me to jail. But they never did.

I knew my last life was truly over, my name struck from the registry, a death certificate written for me. No one owned me but me.

Alone in this new country made by my new name, as I walked the convent walls, learning my alphabet, my sewing, I felt something surely miraculous waited for me now, something only possible now that I had died and been reborn.

WHEN THE TIME came for me to find the Comtesse de Castiglione again, it was easier than I would have thought.

She was said to receive no one now, and yet everyone I asked knew where she lived — an apartment on the Place Vendôme, said to be painted black and empty of mirrors, the windows shrouded. The building was stately but conservative, strangely understated for her.

I could see the black curtains I had heard about from the street as I approached.

Her apartment on the rue de Passy, well known to me, was still hers, and another residence also, but it was said she treated these as museums to herself, filled with her gowns, props, and photographs, the souvenirs of her legend. She visited them occasionally but lived here. This apartment looked, from the street, as if the widow’s weeds she’d put on in 1867 had bloomed over the years until they’d made a black hood over her entire life, though she no longer mourned her husband, if ever she truly had. It was said she mourned her beauty, which people still spoke of as of a vanished champion from another age. She had buried herself alive in public, on one of Paris’s most fashionable streets. One final tableau vivant until death.

She was the beauty in mourning I’d seen on my first day in Paris. She had become for a time my teacher, protector, and, eventually, an adversary — though I had never had the power to threaten her. It was she who had crushed me, who had taken my measure and set me down according to her purposes.

This address, she had made me memorize it before I ever knew what it would become. I think, even back in the days of my service to her, she knew she meant to come to spend her last days here.

I rang her bell, waited, and presented my card to a suspicious young woman, who returned quickly, her face a shield.

I’m afraid she cannot receive you, she said, before showing me to the door.

I thanked her and left and returned the next day to try again. This time, as the door opened, there was not even surprise on the girl’s face. She looked away then back to me, and said, You must know she will never receive you. Please take no offense. I always ask once, but she receives no one now. Please, do not return. It is an anguish to her.

I went across the street.

The neighborhood had many little cafés to choose from, so I found one I liked and waited, drinking a coffee and having luncheon. I wanted to see what hours she kept and if she ever left.

I had not seen or heard from her in more than ten years. I had since created a new life, one I thought of as empty of her and my service to her. But if I had an enemy who knew the whereabouts of the Settler’s Daughter after she’d left the circus, with a penchant for the theatrical and the patience to plan, it could only be her. If the book I had brought with me, if it meant the old war between us had been renewed, I needed to know why and what it would take to end it.

She never appeared. Sometime in the late afternoon I saw her maid leave by the service entrance and go off to do some errand from which she returned.

The next day I went over again to the café and spent the day in much the same manner. On the third day of my vigil, a gentleman came and sat down in the café at the table next to mine.

Mademoiselle, he said. Please excuse me. Good morning. I’m an officer of the secret police, he said, very quietly, so only I would hear. The Comtesse de Castiglione is under our protection. We have been made aware that she refused you three days ago and that you are apparently conducting a surveillance of her apartment. So I must now give you a warning. If you are found here again after this, you will be arrested and taken in for questioning.

I stood and looked at her windows to see if there was any movement there.

There was not.

Ah, he said. I’m so sorry I did not recognize you. You are Lilliet Berne, La Générale, yes? I nodded. Forgive me. I saw you sing this season in Faust; you were extraordinary. Please forgive me. It is an honor to meet you, he said. And then his smile dimmed, and he said, Do not force me to take you to the station; it would be a terrific scandal in the press. He paused, and a terrible silence stood between us. For me to be the one who questioned La Générale.

Yes , I thought, as I took in his expression, the papers would enjoy that very much .

We both looked at the wrapped package in front of me.

I smiled and nodded to him, picked it up, and left.

I had managed this all badly, I saw as I made my way down the street away from the Place Vendôme. I had come here as if all were the same between the Comtesse and me, sure she was my antagonist, even that she knew my name — my professional name — and had not thought that perhaps she would refuse me or simply take my card to be that of a stranger’s. I was stung, too, as I had briefly expected something more like the request for an autograph from my young policeman friend as he turned to me, and so I chided myself for my vanity.

But there was fear as well. I had not expected the Comtesse to still be protected by secret police, especially not in Paris. I believed the fall of the Second Empire had sundered all the agreements I knew of this kind for everyone, but for her especially. Instead, she and her agreements had outlasted it.

Whether or not our old war had begun again, she, at least, was armed.

How is it I am here? I wondered, as I walked away. But I knew.

I was looking for someone who’d been thrown away, she had said to me, of how she found me.

Once she was done with me, I was to disappear.

Of those I suspected had betrayed me, she was the one I was sure never thought of me. The most dangerous one of all.

IT IS SAID there were four hundred Italian assassins hidden in Paris, each sworn to take the Emperor’s life if he wavered in his support for the cause of Italian unification.

Four hundred Italian assassins, and then there was me.

As the Empress Eugénie didn’t fit in the dark basement passageways of the Tuileries Palace once she was dressed, her many gowns were delivered there instead, where they were stored and then sent up on dressmaker’s forms in a dumbwaiter to an antechamber where she would dress quickly, like an actress, and make her grand imperial entrances.