Luncheon of the Boating Party (45 page)

Ages had prayed behind that rose window for the very same thing she had been waiting for. Yes. It was unmistakable. Relief fl ooded her.

Through blurry eyes, Paris was beautiful. She loved every kiosk,

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every paving stone, every pigeon she passed. The café terraces on boulevard des Italiens were filling, and at Café Tortoni, a waiter was placing pansies in glass bowls on cream-colored tablecloths.
“Charmant,
monsieur,”
she said as she passed. A little girl trotting alongside her mother bobbed a red balloon bearing the word
Louvre,
an advertisement for the department store, Le Grand Magasin du Louvre.
“Elle est
très jolie,”
Ellen said to the mother, who responded with a smile. Seeing a little boy playing marbles alone, Ellen crouched, took a marble, and shot it toward another. It went astray. The boy did the same and his tapped hers.
“Bravo! Tu es un champion!”
She stood up. Words! She could say lovely words to all of them, smooth and melodic.

Onstage that night, her arms were fluid with feeling, her hands elo-quent with love, her fingers alive with new witticisms. She wrenched applause from the grand horseshoe-shaped theater, took a deeper bow than usual, and descended the iron steps breathing hard, loving the Folies after all.

The stage manager stopped her in the corridor. He’s going to congratulate me, she thought.

“You owe a fine,” he said.

Her stomach cramped. “What!”

“For gathering a welfare collection.”

“Where is it written? Show me in my contract.”

“It’s understood as policy. The more people solicited, the larger the fi ne.”

“How do you know what I’m doing?”

“
Some
people are loyal to Monsieur Sari.”

“Who snitched? Mademoiselle Zénobie? Mademoiselle Flambeau?”

“No.”

“The Distinguished Traveler?”

“No.”

“Who, then? Émile?”

The manager glanced down the corridor. “Someone of impeccable

honor.”

“Émile. He’s lower than an ant. That’s just personal vendetta. You go and call Monsieur Sari. I want to hear it from his own lips.”

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She strode toward her dressing room but stopped at the bulletin board listing fi nes.

Balthazar Rasmakov, late for performance, 5 francs.

Lulu Lagrange, disturbance in the wings, 2 francs.

Carmen and Carlotta, quarreling during rehearsal, 50 centimes

each.

Hyménée Baudouin, indecency onstage, 8 francs.

Ellen Andrée, gathering a collection, 20 francs.

“Twenty francs! That’s extortion!”

She flung open the door to her cell and stood a moment stunned and staring. Charlotte’s poster of Jeanne Samary, Charlotte’s hairbrush wound with her black hair, her own dear dressing table. She removed her makeup quickly and changed into her street clothes.

Behind her, a knock on the doorframe. Monsieur Léon Sari loomed in his black evening dress and ruby studs. “Monsieur Duval tells me you have some objection to the company rules?”

Cold fear shot up from her toes. “I have some objection to a fi ne imposed for caring about a fellow performer.”

“There are reasons for rules.”

“You only make it against the rules because you don’t want people discussing how stingy you are. If you’d given her a paid leave, I wouldn’t have made the collection, and you would have earned some respect around here.”

“You’re telling me how to run the place? An operation of more than two hundred performers? A little
mimeuse
is presuming to know what’s best for the Folies-Bergère?”

If she said one more word, it would send her on a road she might not be ready for. Could she, the daughter of a department store clerk, actually fi nd a place on the legitimate stages of Paris? Her fi ngernails dug into her palms.

“I know what’s humane. And I know what’s inhumane. It’s inhu-

mane not to help a hard-working, loyal worker when she’s in trouble and it’s inhumane to prevent people from showing that they care about

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her and it’s inhumane to demand that the
trapézistes
throw their baby in order to give the audience a two-franc thrill and I won’t work for such an inhumane man. Not someone who makes a joke of the war either. So that’s it. Drop the fine, drop the rule, and let them throw a rubber baby the way they’ve done before, and I’ll work till my heart bursts and you’ll never hear a peep from me. Otherwise, you’ll have a hole in
The Rivers
come matinee tomorrow.”

“Impudent rebel.”

“Your choice.”

“What’s come over you, Ellen? You’ve never been a problem before.”

Hearing him say that threatened to sink her. For five years she had thrived under his guidance.

“You’ll be nothing without the Folies.”

“Wait till you see me in the Odéon.”

Sari grabbed her costume for the Ferryman’s Daughter and back-

handed Monsieur Duval in the stomach with it. “Get that Blanche girl, that choice piece who dances in Forbidden Pleasure, get her fi tted into this and bring her to the practice room. Immediately.”

Their patent-leather shoes pounding up the iron stairway rang in her ears.

Trembling, she looked around her dressing room, her second home.

She swept her cake white and grease pencils, her cold cream and sponges, her brushes and lipstick into a hatbox. She wrapped her curling iron and spirit lamp and alcohol in a towel and then in her kimono, and stuffed the bundle into her carpetbag with her stage slippers and her autographed picture of Sarah Bernhardt. She rolled up the posters advertising her in
The Rivers of France,
took one last look down the corridor to the iron stairway, and went the other way.

At the stage door, Émile looked smug until he saw all that she was carrying. “What happened?”

“Weasel.”

She shouldered the door open herself and stepped out into the dark street.

In a matter of hours, it would be Sunday.

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In a Closed Field

Paul buttered his bread and took a thoughtful bite. In an hour, Auguste would be expecting them. He looked around at the Café

Nouvelle-Athènes where they always met on Sundays before going out to Chatou. He gripped the cool marble edge of the very table where he’d written the Mardi Gras story. That it should come to this—

absurd.

“When was the last time you handled a pistol?” Pierre asked in a low voice, hunched over a letter on the table.

“In Algeria, just after the Prussian War.”

Pierre scoffed. “Nine years ago.”

“I had a quick hand.”

“Then. This is now. I tell you, you’re a fool. Can’t you pay him off?”

“I tried that last year.”

Pierre gulped his
café.
“This has been seething that long?” He pushed away from the table. “I won’t have this on my conscience.”

“I’m not asking for that. I’m just asking you to go with me.”

“Does Auguste know this?”

“Not exactly. I was hoping to arrive only an hour late.”

“A fi ne fix you’ve gotten yourself into. What’s the man’s issue?”

It was so petty he hated to recount it. “Her name is Gabrielle,” Paul said quietly. “It started with a satiric piece I wrote for
Le Petit Journal
about the behavior of some unnamed women at a masked ball at Mardi Gras. I described their costumes and their methods of keeping their lovers’ affections at white heat. One Robert Douvaz took offense, see-

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ing his mistress in my remark, this Gabrielle who wore a costume similar to one I had described. I had known her, indiscreetly, on one occasion.

She keeps coming back to me. I beg her not to. She comes anyway, steals some little thing from me and taunts him with false evidence of her infidelity to stir his ardor.”

“Then you’re a dupe.”

“Not by choice.” Paul ate another bite.

“So you agreed to this encounter?”

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s just better to have half a chance than be bludgeoned to death in a Montmartre alley.”

“He’s threatened that?”

“In a manner of speaking. Several times. Once when I was with

Auguste.”

“Then what makes you believe he’ll actually do it?”

Paul tapped the parchment. “This is the first written cartel.”

Pierre read it again. It was written in fl amboyant calligraphy.

Monsieur Paul Lhôte,

Being that you have compromised Mademoiselle Gabrielle Carême

by giving her the lie in the public press, be prepared to engage in an encounter to justify your words Sunday noon in a closed fi eld at Résidence Balfour, hard by Epinay-sur-Seine on the road to

Villetaneuse.

Robert Douvaz, Appellant.

“Puh! This is ridiculous!” Pierre blurted. “That article is long forgotten.”

“It’s just an excuse. He hates me because he thinks she loves me. I don’t give a damn about her.”

“But this is the modern age, not the
ancien régime.
”

“Not for him. Not for plenty of men from his class.”

“Can’t you take it to the authorities and have him arrested?”

“They would never do anything about it. Currently there’s no law against dueling.” Paul chewed on his bottom lip. “It’s wearisome to second guess every man approaching on the street whenever I go out at night.”

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“You’re too bloody calm about it.”

“Fascinating word choice, Pierre.” He finished the bread and sipped his
café crème.
“I’ve been taking exercise with a fencing master.”

“Little help that, if he chooses pistols.”

“It’s not his choice, if he goes by traditional rules.”

“And if he doesn’t, you can’t see worth a rat’s ass, and here you sit eating your breakfast just like you were going on a little boat ride.”

“Douvaz is a big target.”

Pierre glared at him. “Your humor is ill-timed.”

“I saw well enough during a sandstorm in Algeria. The Zouaves

taught me some maneuvers.” Paul folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket. “What’s so awful about dying is that you don’t get to do anything anymore. No more roaming under the streets of Paris. Just lying there. I hate sleeping on my back.”

“Stop. I can’t stomach it.” Pierre bolted out the door and around the corner.

Paul lit a cigarette and waited, giving him his privacy. Sweat trickled down his neck, irritating him. He mopped it with his handkerchief, and lay his palms on the table to feel its coolness. Coolness had saved him on his third escape from the Prussian camp. And again when some urchin pulled a knife on him in the bazaar in Algiers. The greater the danger, the greater the icy calm. He wanted it to be over, regardless of the outcome, but the only way for it to be over was to go through it.

In a few minutes Pierre returned, and wiped his mouth and chin on a napkin. Paul shoved his
café
toward him and Pierre finished it off.

They went about the grim task of hiring a hackney coach and securing a surgeon to accompany them, and the three of them arrived at Epinay-sur-Seine, on the loop north of Argenteuil, well before noon. On a Sunday morning no shops were open. At the peal of a bell, villagers came out of the church. Pierre inquired after the road to Villetaneuse and the location of Résidence Balfour. The driver found what fit the description in open farmland far away from other dwellings, a large derelict country house overgrown with vines reaching up to the mansard roof. One of the four chimneys had been damaged and several of the upper win-

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dows were missing glass. Apparently no one lived inside. There was an unkempt orchard on one side and a broken stone path on the other that led to the rear of the house. Two closed carriages were already there.

Paul instructed the hackman to wait. He took the path. Pierre followed with the surgeon carrying a case. At the rear of the house was a crumbling stone enclosure with an iron gate. Pierre opened it for him.

Inside, what had once been a garden was now grown rank and weedy except for a swath freshly scythed stretching down the length of the enclosure. The reality of it made him suddenly aware of his pulse.
La
piste,
it was called, according to his fencing master, with tables at both ends. At one of them, Robert Douvaz stood with a number of men in top hats. Douvaz and three others approached.

“I am heartened to see you’ve arrived, and in good time,” Douvaz said.

Jesus! The bastard was going to play it for all its worth.

“I am glad to see you well,” Paul replied. Obligatory crap. He summoned the calmness that had saved him in the past, and it reassured him.

Douvaz introduced one man as Monsieur Balfour, master of the

field, another, Monsieur Roy, as his
parrain,
or godfather, and another as a second. “The gentlemen to the rear are my witnesses and a surgeon. I see you have brought your own.”

“Have you a second?” Monsieur Roy asked.

Paul looked at Pierre whose eyes opened wider before he nodded.

“This is Monsieur Pierre Lestringuèz, who will be my second only in matters of preparation, not in execution.”

“Understood,” Roy said.

Monsieur Roy read the cartel and asked for his response.

Paul cleared his throat. “The article which you deem injurious to the mademoiselle was intended as a generality in the tone of humor, Hora-tian, not Juvenalian, and was not directed at her. Nevertheless, I am prepared to proceed.”

Roy folded the paper and clasped his hands behind his back. “It falls on me to state the conditions and procedure. The encounter is to be executed with pistols of equal weight, equally fitted with a hair trigger,

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