Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

The playing became louder briefly, as he moved to the music’s conclusion. I was sure that this music had to require all of the attention of the person playing, certainly enough to keep him from noticing me. I thought I was safe enough then to peer around the corner into the room beyond the library, and so I crept to the far entrance and peeked around the corner.

A young man sat at a pianoforte, dressed in a beautiful dark green frock coat, a pale green tie knotted at his neck, and the strange short white pants the imperial court found fashionable then gleaming along his muscular legs. He was dark, as if he spent considerable time in the sun, and had the sharp, handsome features of a Gypsy, all set off by the strict white and green of his clothes. The effect was nearly narcotic.

He turned as if he knew he was being observed and looked at me, his eyebrow crooked, over the top of the piano. He smiled as he continued the piece’s conclusion, which he let fade away gently. But he looked directly at me, and our eyes met.

I stood still, unable to look away. When the music was gone, I remained a moment longer, and then it was I felt the entirety of my trespass. I quickly turned and left, curtsying as I went before anything could be said.

Unknown to me then, he was both a pianist and composer. He was young, handsome, reckless, enormously talented. He could stand while playing mazurkas on the piano and turn to face the crowd and continue playing backward while he smiled into the audience. It was ridiculous and thrilling to watch, and he didn’t make mistakes. He had a young wolf’s face, and his eyes looked hungry, his dark hair rising in curls. When he smiled, his huge teeth flashed. Shortly after arriving in Paris from Argentina, he was invited everywhere, including, now, Compiègne. But it was unusual for him to be early and alone with a piano, left to himself in the music room off the Emperor’s library; there was to be a week for distinguished artist visitors, but it had not yet come.

Later, when we knew each other, he would tell me he had been waiting for me to leave before playing. That he had sat down and, hearing the door open, realized he was not quite alone.

He was, at this time, accustomed to using the piano to get his way with women.

§

Here then was the last one, the one who knew all, but could not betray me as he was dead. I had watched him die. He was the one I had promised to marry, the only man I would ever consider. The hôtel in the Marais had been his, the room there his, that ruby rose left for him.

On the evening at the Luxembourg Palace when a man approached me and told me he’d found that rose, it was as if he’d told me he’d found his grave.

OUR ROOMS HERE were cold stone, cold enough to make me miss the warm stink of the Tuileries. I was sure the bed was smaller, but it didn’t matter, full as it was with three girls desperate to stay warm.

Out the window, I could see bright moonlight coloring everything a silvery blue and black.

I reached out to touch the stone wall next to me, and my eyes followed my hand, and I briefly rested it as long as I dared on the cold stone, staring as if I could push out the mortared stones with my gaze like a sorceress, to walk free out to the fields and whatever lay beyond the edge of the forest. I shivered finally and drew my hand back, warming it on my leg. The single advantage to dressing the Empress over my previous position, was the time spent in the warm rooms of her apartment.

The day’s events passed through me as I lay still, unable to sleep. I could still hear the piano notes in the air as if the young man were playing somewhere nearby, and the memory of his eyes, the glance, looked back at me from the darkness above my head.

The mystery of him had puzzled me, and then the puzzle had resolved itself that afternoon.

The ladies of the court still retained the privilege to enter the Empress’s chambers at any time, even though their duties as her dressers had concluded; I found this unnerving. The Princess d’Essling was the least intrusive, perhaps, and the Duchesse de Bassano was the most. The widow Murat entered like a warm, matronly shadow, the ghost of a mother returned to give some comfort or advice. But Eugénie did not take advice from these women; instead, they gossiped. And with some shock, I learned they gossiped in English.

From them I heard how Louis-Napoléon had never been a very learned or intelligent man, but this was not to be required of him, either. He was descended from the first Emperor Napoléon indirectly, the son of that emperor’s brother. Whatever you could say of Louis-Napoléon, he didn’t love a good song nor did he love a bad one. He had very little taste for music and mostly only tolerated it. He went to the opera because he was the emperor and it was an imperial entertainment, and so his opera had to be grand beyond all others, and it was very grand. But not for his great love of opera but for his great love of himself.

There was no reason, this is to say, for there to be a consummate pianist and composer in the palace before the beginning of the series. Not, at least, there in the Emperor’s library, alone.

I found I thought of the pianist each time I sat idle, wondering when I could steal out into the passageways to see if I might see him again, though I told myself, of course, that I only desired the freedom.

Why was he here? I wondered. But there was no one to ask. It was no business of mine.

Days passed like this. The first week of the series was nearly concluded when I chanced to let my eyes rise up and see the Empress as she examined herself in the mirror. She was sadly beautiful; in every portrait of her, her eyes have a kind of immortal melancholy, as if they contain in them a picture of some larger, divine sadness. But this day there was also a fierce edge of pride, which made it impossible to feel entirely sad for her. This day there was also something romantic to the way she prepared herself, something of the coquette. There was someone she anticipated, someone she wanted to have see her and, in doing so, to be ruled by her. Not for her being empress, but for something else.

The thought waited in my mind, and finally I allowed it. I looked down, afraid of her seeing it in my eyes.

He was here for her.

§

I stood by and watched her as she posed in the mirrors of her bedroom’s antechamber, dressed in her first gown of the day, a chiffon of the palest lilac, before picking up the day’s bouquet of violets waiting on the table. She posed with that as well, and when she was done, she went out to attend to the last-minute arrangements for her guests before returning to wait for the ministrations of her hairdresser, Leroy.

Ça y est, she said, waving me and the other girl off.

As I watched her fretting, that curious servant fondness, almost maternal, returned, and as I felt it, I was grateful, for it obliterated the fear. At this distance, seeing myself as I once was, I understand it for what it was.

It made it possible to stand there.

She adjusted her expressions in the mirror until they suited her, but the expression she put back on immediately when she looked away from the mirror was the one she had discarded: the melancholy of the neglected beauty.

When she was gone, I sat in the empty antechamber, grateful to be alone and warm. Her mirror beckoned me, but the risk of her returning quickly and finding me in front of it was too great, and so I went over to examine the day’s clothes instead: a tea gown, a gown for dinner and dancing. Another in case she changed her mind or there was a tear or stain, and as an excuse to touch them, I primped them lightly on the dummies around the edges of the room.