Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I was very grateful, then, to the Comtesse, for introducing me to the chamberlain, and did exactly as she asked.

§

Once a week I left the Tuileries Palace for an afternoon, something allowed all of us. It was under the pretense of visiting an invented aunt and uncle, and so for this visit I had a dress, a careful blue one, dark and plain. The other grisettes liked to mock it a little when I came down in it.

It had never belonged to the Empress.

There were not so many uncles and aunts for us all, and like many of the grisettes who pretended to visit a relation on their one day of freedom, I went to the Bois de Boulogne, where I would present myself as if I were like any other girl who went there looking to make an extra coin on her day’s leave on a ride through the park with a gentleman in his carriage. The procession of vehicles and horses was full of people either occupied at this pastime or busy looking at those occupied, a strangely public thing, like a theater’s boxes spilled out into the light of the afternoon.

There was not one of our number who did not need some other way to make money. At times, stepping into or out of the carriage that picked me up, I had the sense of stepping over the death that waited if I was any poorer than I was. For me, it was always the same carriage and the same gentleman who left with me and brought me to this aunt I was to be visiting.

My “aunt,” such as she was, was the Comtesse, the one woman in Europe who knew herself to be Eugénie’s true rival and perhaps the only other woman who could have been empress. She felt her mother had bungled her chance at marrying her off to the Emperor, and so when she was sent by Cavour to Paris as part of Italy’s diplomatic mission to France to seduce Louis-Napoléon to the Italian cause, married as she was to a man she did not love, she preferred this duty to all others and went willingly. She was so beautiful that when she entered late to her very first official ball in Paris the musicians stopped playing, causing the Emperor and Empress to look to see what had happened.

This was a story she loved to tell.

Like the Empress, the Comtesse had red-gold hair that was sometimes light, sometimes dark, but unlike Eugénie’s, her eyes were a brilliant green and set off by her pale skin. Her breasts and her feet were as celebrated as she was, and she often wore no corset and no shoes, letting her breasts loose in her bodice and slipping off her slippers when receiving male guests at home.

When I met her, she was still an extraordinary beauty, but not as she remembered; she considered herself in decline. Even in the time I knew her best, she stayed inside more and more. Her eventual seclusion was still distant for now, the darkness only approaching.

Our ritual, like my appointment to the Tuilieries, had been arranged by the Comtesse, and to repay her kindness, she asked me for this simple task. There was a written schedule of the Empress’s appearances prepared by Pepa and the noble sisters, and it included a catalogue of what she was to wear each time — this was done so we would know what to prepare each day. When the week was concluded, the list was taken down and discarded. I was the one who took this list down. Per her request, I instead kept this and set it in my greeting card wallet, where it stayed until I entered the Comtesse’s home. I placed it in a bowl near the entrance, as one might leave a visitor’s card, and withdrew from near the bowl a small envelope containing my five francs’ pay. I passed on, following her footman into the parlor, where I would sit and wait.

Our ritual was unchanging.

Her entrances were always grand, even when she made no apparent effort, even for such as me; she had no need to seduce me, though she did, as she did everyone. She came down the stairs always with a great refinement of movement, usually in an exotic costume of some kind, such as a silk kimono if she had been alone for the day, but it could as easily be a gown or a toga. Her passion for tableaux vivants and theater meant that, even when she was alone, she would amuse herself with her clothes for much of the day, dressing and undressing until it was time for her to go to her next appointment. And what she would wear to that appointment was somehow drafted over the course of the day’s changes.

The Comtesse greeted me warmly always, her hand covering my own as she entered. She never mentioned the list, and neither did I, though I never failed to bring it. She instead showed me to her table, set out with crystal and silver; and over a bit of rabbit or duck, I ate and listened to her.

If the chamberlain had need of a mute girl to work for the basement wardrobe because she couldn’t talk back, so too had the Comtesse; my second duty, though it was not one she’d instructed me to perform, was to listen to her stories, and her stories were almost entirely of the Emperor and the Empress. She sometimes teased of giving me an education in being an independent Parisienne, but this inevitably involved more stories of the imperial court, which led always to the story of her exile from the court and the injustice of it, how she was blamed for the assassination attempt on the Emperor’s life but not given credit for her role in the unification of Italy. She had neither been brought to trial in Paris — and allowed the vindication of proving her innocence — nor had she been honored at home in Italy for fulfilling her mission.

I did not understand much of this, or did not initially; but with repetition, I came to know it as if I were her, as if these were my own memories. When I returned to the dark of the palace basement, rushing to prepare the Empress’s gown, bent around the dummy in the dumbwaiter, pins in my mouth, careful not to stick them in wrong and thus accidentally ruin the gown, at those times I felt I belonged entirely to the dark basement and might never go above and outside again. It was only when I retrieved the day’s record and brought it to my room did this strange part of my life come back into view, hidden again when I slid the list into my things.

§

The mother superior herself had been the one who sent me to the Comtesse personally. I have undertaken a mission near us here, the saving of a soul, she’d said. A woman of wicked sins, a courtesan, who has made her fortune as a professional beauty, regularly disrespecting the vows of her marriage and of others, and who has become very serious about repenting and joining us here. She feels herself near her end and has asked for a habit of our order to be prepared for her so that she might at least go to her last rest as one of us in this way.

It amused me to think of this courtesan springing up the stairs of her last rest dressed in a habit of the Sisters of the Order of Saint-Denis Convent. She held out a slip of paper. Rue de Passy, near the Bois de Boulogne. The note at the bottom, signed by her, gave me the privilege of leaving the convent to visit her. She will need to be fitted, she said. A soul like hers, that is a great victory to win it. A great victory… and she sighed. Go tomorrow.

The doors on that first visit, as I waited for the courage to announce myself, seemed to me like the doors to Hell itself. The ornate stonework on the building’s façade, carved to look like a giant’s roses and thorns, the wooden double doors that were more than twice my height, the knocker, a bronze Medusa as big as my face, all looked as if, were the doors to open, I would be drawn inside and never allowed to leave.

I was dressed that day in a simple dress and bonnet, and carried with me my sewing tools. Over my mouth I wore a scarf I’d made for myself that read muette, the word stitched there to explain to any stranger why I would not respond — and to hide me, I hoped, from any chance encounter with someone who might recognize me.