Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I waited while another girl went and ate her midday meal in the kitchen; when she returned, I would go. Someone had to be here at all times in case the Empress should suddenly return and need to change for whatever reason.

I had mostly let go of the idea my appearance should matter, at least as it once did. But alone with her dresses and her mirror, this returned. I began to imagine myself in the gowns in front of me and longed to hold one up or just touch the soft silk and imagine it was mine. I contemplated approaching her mirror, empty and reflecting just her pots and brushes, when I heard, from the entrance: Sidonie, what a surprise. I had forgotten you were coming.

Pepa entered. She was very proud of her dress, a castoff of Eugénie’s, which, between the corset and some magician of a seamstress, she’d managed to fit herself into. It was white and blue satins, and looked something like a First Communion gown or the dress of a matron at her daughter’s wedding. She made a show of turning in it in the mirror, the exact gesture I had feared making.

I made a show of smiling.

It’s good, yes?

I nodded my head vigorously and smiled. She had put on airs, as if she were also a guest, but I knew she was not allowed out to see the guests and never in that dress. She wore it only to lord it over the rest of us.

Finally, the other girl returned, and I ran to the kitchen to eat before the Empress arrived. On my return I found the Empress sitting and laughing with Pepa, talking in brisk, softly accented Spanish, waiting, I feared, for me. She stayed seated as I entered, though, and Pepa continued telling her whatever story she was relating. I heard the words Saint-Denis and thought to smile, but they were not speaking to me, only of me.

The Empress stood then and we prepared her first for tea, then soon after for dinner, and then after that, for the first ball that evening. While at first it fascinated— So it was like this , I kept thinking, after my long time in the cellar with the furs — soon it bewildered. By the time she left for the ball that evening, in my mixed hunger and exhaustion, I nearly went to my room until I understood I was to undress her at the night’s end. She would also require one of us to be near her at the ball in case she needed something.

The Empress chose me.

§

There was a painting that kept me company outside the Compiègne ballroom, a night scene, figures moving through what I first thought was a night sky, flying across the clouds like angels, a dark and angry-looking earth below. I stood there night after night, and as I did, it became like a story I told myself again and again, for it was most of what I could see. Soon I thought it was horses riding across a night beach, the moon high in the sky casting a beautiful light on the riders and mounts. Then I came to think of it as swans swimming at night. Later, I was told it was a mythic scene of the first Napoléon’s wars, a night battle.

This was not my post; that was nearby. A bell would ring if I was needed. Standing here, I was in the foyer to the ballroom. I could glimpse the ballroom and still be in shadow. Another tiny rebellion, though this time it was done so I could listen.

The dance master had been winding a mechanical piano for the dances before this, but it seemed the effort eventually winded him, and the guests had begun to despair, if quietly. Still, word of their discontent had reached the Empress, and she had mentioned she intended to correct it at once. I had guessed she meant the pianist.

A quadrille began, accompanied by just a piano, and vigorously so; my pianist was playing, I was sure. His nocturne had left me with a portrait of his movements, his intelligence, his emotions; all playing does. I knew this was him. He was a guest, then, but no common performer.

I stepped closer.

The blur of sparkling gems, the candy colors of the ladies’ gowns alternating with the black-and-white flash of the gentlemen — each couple as they turned went from dark to light, a chiaroscuro following the beats of the dance, and I longed to enter.

The quadrille ended, and a mazurka began. I heard something more tender than what had come before, more lovely. They are not as quick as some dances, but the movement of them, the triple time, one-two-three, one-two-three, has the feeling of something that moves again just when you think it has reached its end. They can be quick and fast; they can be as slow and sad as a funeral march. It seems to me you have to be a little in love to write a mazurka or to play one, and if you dance to one with someone you don’t love, well, for me it’s unendurable.

I believed two things at once in that instance. I was both entirely sure I belonged to this pianist, and he to me, and I was sure that at night the Empress would bring him to her room and that he was hers. I wondered if she likewise commanded her lovers to undress, to come to her naked as the Emperor demanded. I imagined him under the flower of light, her antechamber’s chandelier, the little rainbows on his skin. She would still be painted, the sadness still there on her face as she looked at him. As she perhaps traced her fan over his heart.

Was her mouth as forbidden as the Emperor’s?

This mazurka was Chopin again, the no. 2 in F minor, op. 63, though, again, I didn’t know this then, but instead I felt only the way that this mazurka, in my pianist’s hands, sounded like something undeclared and hidden, impossible — like love or, at least, the love I felt then.

The musical education that awaited me included the knowledge that a Chopin mazurka was unlike any other mazurka; fans of mazurkas were not always pleased to hear them. They were impossible to dance to, being very slow, proceeding in a threefold series of movements, timid, bold, timid, or minor chord, major, minor, just as I’d heard that night. A “proper” mazurka was to be like a jeweled waltz, ornamented, decorated with flourishes so, of course, it was popular with the Empress Eugénie and her friends, but Chopin liked to conceal the rhythm with syncopation, and on the whole, his resembled a lover’s feint in the dark.

It was, in other words, a bit of a disaster for this dance. The frustrated dancers ambled through ably, but another piece was soon called for by the dance master, and it began promptly. A proper mazurka.

The Empress pretended not to notice and kept up her dance with the Duc de Tascher even as she surely understood the gesture. Her asking him to play as a mere entertainment, an honor in some other circumstance, must have humiliated him. The Chopin mazurka as lover’s complaint was noted, perhaps, by the one who knew to find it, and for the rest of the room, only artistic caprice — the musician-composer’s inappropriate tribute to a newly dead musical hero.

At this point he was simply an infatuation of hers for a handsome young artist. For him, he felt sympathy for the woman who could transform his career overnight, and had. He loved that she loved him, and while this was not quite love for her, this feeling inspired its own loyalty from him, and jealousy, too.

The bell rang, the signal she was to change, and so I left for my post in her antechamber.

§

The dressing room was dark and so I lit the lamps to be ready for the Empress’s return.

After I lit the last one, I caught sight of myself in the mirror.

I was still the stranger I’d glimpsed at the Tuileries. My beauty had turned strange. My eyes looked dark and enormous against my face, my figure too small and too thin — like a boy in a dress. I looked younger than I was, my hair drawn back into a simple chignon only to be neat, not attractive. I was plain, undecorated, even rough, and the poverty of what I had compared to my desires made me turn away in shame.