Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I could not have guessed how much I looked, in short, like my own tableau vivant or how this would charm the Comtesse.

I pulled on the Medusa’s chin and let it drop, and a loud knock echoed inside. The eyes to the Medusa head slid to the side, and her large green eyes appeared, shadowed by the lamp behind her. Oho, she said.

The bronze eyes slid back into place, the door opened, and inside stood a beautiful woman in something like a toga but which was a black satin dressing gown, her red-gold hair loose and carefully wild. A crystal goblet in her hand glowed with champagne. She waved me in with her free arm, but I was so stunned, I only stood there. Her smile stayed on her face but dimmed slightly, and she spoke through it.

Well, she said. Muette. Is that your name?

I held out the letter of introduction from the convent.

She looked familiar to me, and then I knew — she was the very Parisienne I’d seen my first day in Paris. I was sure of it. The woman in mourning who had parted the crowd in her enormous dress and jewels. She was still in mourning, but she did not seem near death, as I’d been told.

As she pulled the letter open, she asked, Are you perhaps the ghost of the Chateau de la Muette, my neighbor? She gestured at the distance. Or some long lost heir to the château? I had always wondered when La Muette would come for her house. She flicked the letter with her finger and held it out to read it.

I shook my head again, unsure at what she meant. I knew nothing of this château.

You are my convent-bred seamstress, yes?

I nodded. And then smiled from under my scarf.

Come, my girl. You’ve come just in time.

She would always be like this. Familiar, full of vaguely oracular pronouncements, a Pythian oracle fed on champagne and pearls instead of myrrh.

La Muette, she said, as we walked up her stairs. Only in French, she said, would we have a word that can mean mute, hunting dog, or young falcon. Are you any of those?

I felt Fate reach down and trace the word on my scarf.

Slowly, I held up two fingers.

Two? You are two of those. How mysterious. I suppose we shall see which ones you mean. And with that, she threw open the doors to her dressing room.

The Comtesse had need of alterations to a nun’s habit she’d once worn for a tableau vivant, in which she appeared as the sole resident of l’Ermitage de Passy, a comment on her social status as an exile from Parisian society in the aftermath of an affair with the Emperor. The resultant scandal of her in a habit was almost as enormous as her affair had been. She now sought to commemorate the event in a photograph. Her Paris dressmaker had claimed he did not know the details of a nun’s habit, and so she had engaged in this pretense in order to engage me.

She told this all to me as I worked, and more. She was busy commemorating all of her most significant dresses and appearances in a series of photographic portraits. She praised me when I was done that first day and said she had more for me to do if I wanted the work. While the sisters were predictably disappointed, they allowed me to return again and again, imagining, perhaps, that I had bent her toward some last, virtuous response. Instead, I was repairing a red velvet toga dress for her as the Queen of Etruria. Or a fascinating Queen of Hearts costume, cut low and revealing. Or an enormous white gown with a cape trimmed with ermine, which she wore with a black mask.

After another month, she told me she had recommended me and my work to the Tuileries. This seemed extraordinary to me. She then added I was to expect a letter of employment soon from the Empress’s chamberlain.

Are you pleased?

I nodded and wept, overwhelmed.

My dear muette! This is what she called me — she could not remember my name. How good you are and how sweet. Are you prepared to serve them well?

I nodded again.

Good, she said, and glowed with pleasure. When you are in your new position, you must come to see me every week. But our new arrangement must be a secret between us.

The attention and favor of this great woman made me fiercely proud, and I nodded again, agreeing to this condition instantly. But, of course, this was her intention. The result of those visits was not, as the good sister had thought, the capture of a great soul or, at least, the soul that was captured was not the one inside the Comtesse’s famous breast. The soul that was captured was mine.

When the letter arrived, the sisters were greatly honored I was to work at the Tuileries. They did not ask as to how my reputation had traveled to court. I did not tell them.

§

Each of us in the Tuileries lived inside very clear territories, whether it was the Empress or I. I could only be in the kitchens, for example, to leave my dish and spoon or to pick them up. I ran a narrow series of stairs from the eaves to the lower levels, and this path never took me through the royal apartments. Though I lived in the Tuileries Palace, I felt that I lived in a small room with a narrow stairs that led to a larger room full of gowns and furs. Not the palace at all, but something like a rabbit warren, dark and too warm.

In November the Emperor and Empress went for a month to Compiègne, in Pierrefonds. The royals invited the best of European society to join them there for a week of hunting, a hundred guests per week. A few, such as the Princess Metternich, stayed the month. Some of the imperial household staff went with them, but many did not. It was usual to have the month off for most of us. So it was with some surprise that I found myself being spoken to as I was pushing an enormous sapphire silk gown down into a trunk to send to a girl in Rouen who was the next in line for the Empress’s castoffs.

I looked up.

The speaker was the Empress’s own chamberlain, and I came to understand that he was asking me, or telling me, that I was needed to go to Compiègne. The girl who normally would have gone had taken ill, which in the palace usually meant she was with child. I’d been chosen to replace her there.

He paused here, and then, indicating the scarf over my mouth, said, Take that off at once. It will frighten her. And you can’t wear it in the palace; it isn’t the uniform.

I quickly untied it, put it in my pocket, and pressed my hand against it for luck.

The chamberlain indicated I was to follow him. We went out of the cedar rooms of the palace basement, and as we approached the door to the royal apartments, I felt a faint terror, as if I might be burned. The chamberlain’s movements were clockwork mechanical, a sort of stiff, persistent staccato energy drove him, and yet, as he reached out for the door’s handle, he lunged a little, as if he’d held his breath while below.

An incredible light spread up from the bottom of the door as it swung open, and he dissolved in it briefly. He held the door for me, waiting as I also went through.

I walked out into the apartments of the palace and then stopped short as the impossible brightness of the mirrors flashing from the Paris morning sunlight replaced the cellar dark. The door closed behind me and my heart began to pound in my chest.

The chamberlain, already off in the distance, turned back to see me still by the door and gave me a severe glance, his left eyebrow raised, waving rigorously for me to hurry. The brightness here was like a tunnel also, and finding my senses, I moved toward his dark figure at the center of it, following him to where I would serve next.

Until then, for having so much of what I wanted, I had not considered just how I was not free.

§

As we walked, it seemed to me the light came from the Empress, as if around the turns of the halls in the rooms ahead she sat glowing, an unearthly radiance emerging from her like the figures in the paintings I passed. I remember the first room I entered was barnacled in green and gold, with an enormous mirror that ran the length of the wall on my right and reflected the gardens visible outside through the long, thin windows along the left. It looked as if I could walk through to another garden there, and as I ran by, I caught sight of myself and slowed, looking and then looking away. It was as if I’d never known myself, who or what I was, and I stared not so much at myself as I did at the series of strange details there that resembled what I knew of me. My face seemed to have changed shape; my eyes seemed some new color. And I was thin, very thin, too like the shadow I had fancied myself to be. The chamberlain glanced back, and I smiled at him anxiously, pulling my dress into place as if it could be made more presentable. The mirror image of me marched beside me and I found I listened for its footsteps.