The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (35 page)

 

Jolie leaned back, balancing her glass on her long fingertips, tossing back her hair, which was falling from its pins, and I felt a pang for her spark; her small, bright explosions.

“What do you think about Odette?” I asked. “That Coué is a devil; he thinks every female over the age of twelve should be registered. I'd make a bet he was involved.”

“He may have met his match. Suing the Préfecture, indeed.” Jolie laughed. “Our excellent friend. I've missed her.”

The weather may have suggested oysters on ice, but we were eating from a pot on a charcoal brazier, and the meal was calf's stomachs simmered with a steer's foot. It was Jolie's favorite dish, served at a hole-in-the-wall near Les Halles; a late birthday celebration, and she
would
take it out on us with tripe. We had eaten a lot of it together, once. When my big belly was shoved against the tabletop in our little match-to-a-haystack flat. And it was as hot as it was then; another long-ago July.

My friend's features had hardened just perceptibly; eyes a little deeper under the lids; her tall, languid body a shade more gaunt. She—who had never favored the ascetic, even if she had to tear apart, fumigate, and sew her attire back together (sometimes in a way that did not exist before)—now wore a mossy-gray elbow-patched dress that blended in with the smoke, her hair a flame above it. An umbrella, a battered green one, leaned against the table. As always she was strangely alluring, the scent about her, and my own toilette felt fussy and dilute by comparison. For her birthday I had given her a pair of gloves in peacock silk and a bottle of gentleman's cologne. Removed from their boxes and stripped of their tissue, these lay on the table between us, incongruous amid the tripe pots.

“You look more like a Blanquiste than a
grande horizontale,
” I said, spooning up a gelatinous serving. Jolie reached for the carafe, and her hand trembled enough to allow the neck to slip and the wine to spill.

“
Merde.
” She leaned across the table. “I'll bet you don't lick your fingers like that at the rue du Mail.”

“That's why I'd rather eat more often with you.”

January was when I'd last seen her. Louise in a man's trousers and Jolie in a long cloak, both with hair pinned up under caps. They had been following a funeral cortege through the frigid streets in a steady rain, shouting, part of a crowd led by the old revolutionary Blanqui. (I had been on my way to the florist, making preparations for a dinner party we were to hold that night at the rue du Mail.) The funeral was for Victor Noir, one of the increasingly noticeable brash-voiced men who wrote against the empire. The boulevards were in a furor because the emperor's cousin, Prince Pierre, had shot the journalist over a disagreement about the terms of a duel, a dispute concerning criticism of the empire in the press.

Louise and Jolie were a pair of jubilant insurgents—sooty, drenched, exhilarated; Louise brandishing a French navy pistol. She showed us how the smooth curve of its grip fit her palm, demonstrating its mechanism as easily as a cook breaks an egg. “And whom are you planning to shoot—Prince Pierre?” I'd asked. Louise still had her schoolmistress's demeanor, but it had a new edge. When she spoke—about barricades going up and the guns echoing those of 'forty-eight and 'ninety-three—the air crackled and you could almost smell the powder, although she didn't answer my question. Jolie had interrupted her, plucking her sleeve and calling her former teacher “Clémence” with a familiar joking affection. My heart had snagged, then. As it did now, remembering. I didn't want to lose Jolie entirely; but what did that mean? It was impossible to see much of her; she sent a note when she pleased; half a year might pass before the next. One could more easily capture smoke in a fist. Harder to admit were the alterations in my own life that had created distance between us—my new-money companions, my comings and goings with the Préfecture and Nathalie Jouffroy. Those we did not discuss.

A shot went off now in the street, very close. I jumped, nearly upsetting the brazier.

“You'd better get used to it,” said Jolie, who did not pause as she moved the spoon from the
tripière
to her bowl.

Earlier that day, more troops had stretched across the city, still celebrating the successful attack at Saarbrücken. Lines and lines of soldiers, all the regiments and battalions brilliant and colorful, a coxcomb display in their various uniforms—tight Zouave breeches, bright blue ballooning Turco trousers, ten thousand kepi-covered heads. Drums and horns and flags, colors flashing in the sun, and flotillas of cannon on the Seine, all tying up traffic for hours. Now with the festivities over, the participants caroused through the streets, with shouts and the breaking of bottles, gunshots and singing, heading off to rout the German bakers from their beds.

 

“I've missed you,” I said. “Where have you been?”

She looked up. “I'll tell you something. I've got news; I'm off the books.”

“What? Have you left Chevillat? How in the world did you manage that?”

“Infirmary Saint-Lazare for a month of mercury. And then another stint, compliments of Chevillat's Dab, at Hôpital de Lourcine—where, on the whole, the food was better.”

The wine tasted vinegary, suddenly unpalatable; shreds of stomach lining and carrot congealed on my plate.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Well, it was sudden, you know. They just whisk you away. The mercury makes you sicker at first, so I had to recover. They don't let you send letters from Saint-Lazare; and no visits to speak of because they don't want the
souteneurs
coming round. Then Chevillat offered me a second round of mercury and a submistress's job. Or to pay me out. So then I had to think things over, and I have. I've decided to leave . . . You don't have to look like that; I'm not going to fall over tomorrow. Syphilis has three stages; I'm only in the first. My whole life is ahead of me.” She gave a black laugh.

“It's the tripe,” I said quickly. “You know I only eat it for you.”

She scraped up the last of the sticky remains.

“So.” She paused. “There's no reason for me to stay around here. I'm going back to where I came from. To Belleville.”

“You can't do that.”

“Why not? People live there, you know.”

My guts clenched. I knew Jolie had grown up in the slums on the eastern outskirts of Paris; even more overcrowded now, since Haussmann's demolition had pushed thousands there from the inner rings of the city. Seething warrens of illness and poverty—Belleville was a place to leave if you could, not to go back to. “The air is bad, the water. The—I don't have to tell you.” Cholera, typhoid, putrid vapors. I looked at the gifts of gloves and cologne, ludicrous. “You'll be dead in six months.”

“You should see the place we've found. It's in a huge block of apartment buildings. From the street they look like slum palaces, but inside the walls have been removed between the separate buildings, and our hall is just like one long boulevard, way up high. Everything goes on there, it's like a village, with street vendors and workshops and cafés, even a
bar à vin.
Everyone knows everyone else. You don't understand it, you don't
know.
It's not
lonely,
it is
living.
Mothers and babies and old people and young ones. We'll all help one another. Share and share alike.”

I gave her a look.

“Well, rob each other, then. But not the way they do down here. It's not easy to get a place up there, but we did it.”

“We . . . who?”
Louise?

“Henri.”

“Your brother?”

“He's been a prisoner, but he's released. He's out past Prussian lines, but he'll get in.” She leaned across, fierce and tender, her mouth turned up like Clio's used to when she settled down to her fish heads. “It isn't the cage that feeds the bird, as they say. So I'm going to fly now. In whatever time I have left.” And she laughed. Her old laugh; and it made me gasp with loneliness for the rusty velvet sofa and Clio's soft belly fur. But how, on the rue du Mail, with money to burn up on peacock gloves, with Sévérine to brew the coffee and go to the laundress, could I miss those terrible times? Jolie, her voice clear as a bell, calling down as I clomped up the stairs from the rue Serpente, the strings of some unaffordable package tangled around my fist, stopping on the landing below to catch my breath. Shouting up for her to guess what I'd brought. But I was the one who hadn't been able to give them up, those indulgences, those comforts.

“Will you ever wear them?” I fingered the silk gloves. “This is your old cologne!”

“They are pretty things. But maybe I won't wear them to the barricades,
chouette.
”

“It won't come to that. This war will end very soon. Everyone says so. It's not as though the Prussians can invade Paris—” I stopped. Jolie looked pensive, as though she was about to speak, but another shot sounded close by—so near we both flinched; the shouts of drunken off-duty soldiers rang in our ears.

“They think they can shoot all the Germans,” said Jolie. “But they don't realize that then they won't have their bread or morning
Kaffee.
Not to mention, the streets won't be cleaned. Did you know that most of the street cleaners in Paris are Germans?”

“No . . . You can't go back there, Jolie.”

“Eugénie.”

“What?”

“You're up to your old tricks, living in the past. Everything is different now. Shall we have a coffee?”

After we parted, I hiked my skirts over the debris left from the army carnival, the spent bullets in the gutters. They say that when Paris first let out its laces, expanded its girth, and under the empire and Haussmann breathed beyond its ancient perimeter, the old cart horses stopped where the city gates had once been, stood stock still, and would not move, despite the fact that no toll taker, no wall stood before them. Even the drivers' whips did not make them budge. Perhaps it was my old friend who was galloping ahead, out into the new, unknown city.

 

Francisque, Lili, and I shopped the sales for wool petticoats and crinolettes (the newest improved shape in dresses) in department stores hot as ovens and crowded to bursting. Markdown signs had sprung up out of season and suddenly; the aisles of the big stores showed riots of violently colored fabrics, winter boots appearing from nowhere alongside polka-dot neckties and pink gloves and parasols; a chaos of paisley shawls and vests, all hastily cut from the same bolt. Customers fingered ready-made clothing in a frenzied delirium while pickpockets, dress destroyers, hair snippers, and
frotteurs
—all the disturbed minds of the capital—were out in force.

“I don't see why everyone is worried, with thirty thousand Prussian prisoners and victories at Forbach . . . or is it Froeschwiller?” said Francisque, struggling with a stretch of red flannel that didn't seem to know what kind of garment it was. Other conversations flurried around the racks.

“No, Saarbrücken was the victory, Forbach a retreat,” said Lili.

“What do you think of this? Laces from the inside, so you can change the shape of the loops in back.”

“No, Woerth was a victory as well. The dispatch was posted,” said a young woman with a variety of crinolettes in her arms.

“Where?”

“Bourse.”

“I didn't see it, but I heard the same,” said a second woman.

“I've heard that the Prussians have surrounded Strasbourg,” said a third.

“Never!
Who
says?”

“Lili, you are going to have to take out the planchette to tell us what's what,” said Francisque.

“All we need is a decent news source,” snapped Lili. Since the war had been on, it had been impossible to get any papers other than French ones, which reported only victories and, perhaps, empire-favorable lies.

“Why
did
the crinoline have to become so wide, and what will we use the old cages for now—protecting plants this winter?” someone behind us complained.

“The empress set the fashion wide so the emperor couldn't reach her—”

“All the doors in Paris had to be widened so the empress could fend off her husband? The old toad.”

“I have to say, these new ones are worse. All these tapes and laces and bands to flatten the front and flare out in back; we are going to look like huge beetles with wings extended.”

“Whom does the empress love, then?”

“War, and chocolate, and her American dentist,” said Lili, tossing a stack of shawls over her arm. “You've no idea how hard I have tried to meet him!”

 

On the way back, we passed cafés filled to overflowing; the streets stank of alcohol. Men and women alike reeled along the boulevards and around mountainous refuse. Most were celebrating the victory at Woerth, but one rowdy group nearer Montmartre was singing about the imperial prince:
“So
Monsieur fils
picked up the enemy's bullets, which someone laid down in front of him!”
The heat had gone on so long we were ill with it, and not a breath of air on the horizon.

“The whole city is drunk,” huffed Francisque, her usual perfect façade ruffled and overheated by the time we finally reached the harp-playing stairwell cherubs at the rue du Mail. We had settled ourselves with cool drinks provided by La Tigre; ferried up by Sévérine. “I hope the boxes will be here soon.” In the crush, we had all assigned our purchases for delivery. We looked at one another over fizz and lemon.

“Aha!” I said, flipping through the day's mail. La Tigre had sorted it and left it on a tray as usual, which was just one of the means by which she knew all our business. (To be fair, it was practically a job requirement.) “From Sylvie; she must leave Vienna.” She had been touring there with the opera. “And Odette, finally . . . posted from London.”