The Painted Girls (17 page)

“Tomorrow, Antoinette? You’ll come?”

Tomorrow is Sunday and already I arranged it with the jailers Sunday would be my regular visiting day. I nod, looking over my shoulder as I get hauled from the cell. “Tomorrow.”

We are a dozen steps away when the called-out words of Émile echo in the passageway: “All I got in the world.”

My hand goes to my heart, and I think of that boy counting on me above everybody else, loving me the most.

The jailer loosens his grip on my arm, says, “It’ll be the guillotine for him.”

I suck the inside of my cheeks, land the gob of collected spit on his polished boot. I crumple with the blow that comes. On my knees, I grip my aching ribs, gulp dank air.

Marie

I
feel the smallest creature in the world, leaning a shoulder into the massive door of the Foyer de la Danse, budging it open just enough, passing through into a place reserved for the abonnés and the senior-ranking ballet girls they come to admire. Always it is off-limits to the petits rats, nothing we are allowed to taste, always except today.

I stand there, neck craned, feet shuffling in a slow circle. No doubt each of the girls already limbering at the barre did the same on seeing the glory for the first time. Every bit of ceiling is painted or carved with cherubs and flowers and scrolls. The walls are gold and glittering, lined with velvet banquettes, lit with a chandelier dripping crystal, ringed at the highest reaches with a garland of medallions, each framing a portrait of an étoile. Will I ever be deserving of the glory of this place? It is a question we are meant to ask ourselves today, the reason we were told to gather here, awaiting our names, called one by one, our moment upon the stage, our moment of proving ourselves capable of flitting and fluttering and hovering over the earth, of otherworldliness and grace.

Around me mothers fluff perfect tarlatan, new skirts bought for fifteen francs, and tie bright sashes costing a further six, and pin into place silk flowers paid for with the last of the sous they scrimped to put aside. All of it is doubled by a looking glass taking up the space of an entire wall. I glimpse myself reflected there—my monkey face, the hair Antoinette did not put up—a worm among peaches, well, except for my new slippers and the scarlet sash Charlotte wrung from Antoinette. Charlotte had me begging to borrow it in the morning. How could she be so ungrateful, considering the bakery wages, the baguettes, the buckets of water I haul? I did not mind too much, though, not when it gave me a chance to say out loud about the importance of the day. “Oh, Christ,” Antoinette said, fingers thumping her brow. “I meant to do your hair. I really did. And now it’s too late.”

It was true she had turned forgetful about little things like asking how was my day or was my allegro coming along or was Blanche being nice. Still, allowing something as momentous as my examination day to slip her mind was new.

She stepped between me and Charlotte, who was still gripping her sash behind her back. A hand on each of my shoulders, Antoinette said, “Let the music fill up your head. Let the music push away the fear. You’re ready, Marie. Not a speck of doubt.” She whirled around then and faced Charlotte. “You got one second to hand that sash over to Marie, or it won’t take me but a further second to tear it in half.”

I
tell Lucille that her flowers are the prettiest of all, Ila that her sash is the pale pink of a cherry blossom, Perot that a skirt so white shows the creaminess of her skin. And they say they wish they had backs as supple as my own, that we are sure to be asked for fouettés en tournant, that mine are the steadiest of all. Blanche holds me tight, and I look firm into her eyes and say, “Together, soon enough, upon the stage,” and we touch a post holding up the barre because maybe it is iron underneath the gilt. It is how we are today—golden, good.

Madame Dominique had gone over exactly what to expect, how each of us will stand, alone, front and center, upon the Opéra stage, awaiting the instructions called out by Monsieur Pluque. He will be seated in the first row of the orchestra stalls, she told us, alongside Monsieur Vaucorbeil, the director of all the Opéra, and Monsieur Mérante, the ballet master. She and Madame Théodore will be just behind them, in the second row.

A good way back from the examination board, in the boxes of the first balcony, will be any abonnés or senior-ranking dancers caring to watch, also the mothers—crossing fingers, pinching the crucifixes hanging from their necks, their knitting needles for once left quiet in their bags. Every mother will be there, except my own, which is what I prefer. I have worries enough without fearing her calling out to me upon the stage or deciding she might have a bit of sway with Monsieur Pluque or thinking she is whispering to the other mothers when she is cackling worse than a hen laying an egg.

Monsieur Pluque will call out a series of adagio steps, slow movements like taking sixteen bars of music to rise up onto the toes of one foot and make a grand rond de jambe en l’air. There will be a pianist in the orchestra pit, accompanying the movements, which means the tempo is up to someone who cannot even see whether a girl is teetering and wanting the adagio over and done with before she topples from her toes. It is not the part I fear most, though. Madame Dominique says I have the balance of clockwork and the suppleness of a green twig. It is the allegro combinations that fill me with dread. Feet flying, beating together in the air, slip-sliding across the floor, then up in the air again but this time toe to knee and remembering to land in fifth position, right foot behind. On and on and on. My mind races. My shoulders inch ever higher. It is what happens when I think too hard about my feet, that and Madame Dominique thwacking her cane upon the ground. “Two entrechats,” she said just the other day, holding up two fingers, like it might help me count. “Then a single glissade—just one—before the saut de chat.” She nodded to the violinist, starting up the music again, and turned away, her focus on another girl. And getting the steps right is not even enough. “Each step must be given a particular character, your hallmark as a dancer,” Madame Dominique says. “That’s what will earn you a position in the quadrille.”

With the girls called in an order decided by the lengths of drawn straws, I will be the very last in front of the examination board. Like every other waiting girl, I labor to keep my muscles limber, making pliés deep and slow with feet wide apart in second position, laying my torso flat over the leg propped upon a barre. I join the others in calling out good luck when a girl leaves and searching her face for some sign when she comes back. Sometimes there are tears—the pianist did not keep an even tempo, Monsieur Vaucorbeil twisted around in his seat before even three bars of the adagio were done, she forgot to grind a bit of rosin beneath her slippers and slid on landing a grand jeté. We nod, lips tight and brows knit, cloaking any gladness at our own chances improved.

I
stand stock-still upon the Opéra stage, feet in fifth position, arms en repos, waiting for Monsieur Mérante to look up from his notebook and give the tiny nod signaling Monsieur Pluque to call out the last of the steps. My gaze moves beyond the examination board, across the stalls of the main floor, to the four rows of balconies, all of it plush red velvet and elaborately carved gold and veiled in dusk with only three gas lamps lit, two upon the stage and the third casting a halo of light around the examination board and also Monsieur Degas, hunched over his drawing pad three rows behind.

I ache to hear the step, the piano cleaving the air and coaxing the place behind my heart, filling me from inside out. I want to dance again, to feel the music lifting my limbs, arching my back, streaming from my fingertips, my toes. Grace is with me today, also steadiness and lightness and speed. I have seen Madame Dominique’s quiet smile, Monsieur Mérante’s lifted eyebrows, Monsieur Pluque’s bewildered gaze.

“Four fouettés en tournant,” says Monsieur Pluque, pushing himself up in his seat. “Eight, if you can manage it.”

I swallow the smile that appears with being asked for the turns that have come so easy to me ever since Antoinette told me the trick of an imagined string pulling me up from the crown of my head. It is the step I wished for when I stroked the horseshoe on the small table in front of the stage-door keeper’s loge. I ready myself in fourth position, conjure up the string, fix my gaze upon Madame Théodore’s orange head scarf, the spot where my focus will linger even as my body turns and then snap to again each time I return to facing downstage. Spotting adds sharpness to a turn, but more important, it stops the giddiness that comes from whirling like a top. I breathe in a single bar of music before rising onto the toes of my left foot and whipping around fast, not four times. Not eight. But sixteen. Sixteen fouettés en tournant. I land quietly, steadily, feet in a perfect fourth croisé, and I hold myself still, feeling the joy of a step perfectly done rolling through me like a wave.

Madame Dominique’s smile is wide, so much so that until she leans her mouth against her fist, I think she will laugh. After a bit of whispering and head tilting and nodding among the examination board, Monsieur Pluque calls out, “If you please, Mademoiselle van Goethem, a révérence.”

I make a révérence, arms reaching out in front to the examination board and then opening wide. My gaze, solemn as ever, moves from face to face—Monsieur Vaucorbeil, Monsieur Mérante, Monsieur Pluque, Madame Dominique, Madame Théodore. I spend the final seconds of the révérence honoring Monsieur Degas.

Yesterday I climbed the stairs to Madame Dominique’s practice room—one last class before facing the examination board. I went to the very spot where every day I began the chore of loosening my back. But there, dangling from the barre by the ribbons, I found a pair of ballet slippers without a single scuff. A small tag was attached:
Mademoiselle van Goethem, so your feet will shine.
Monsieur Degas knew my spot at the barre. Only his burning gaze could be as accurate as a ruler in measuring my feet.

O
utside the Opéra there is a moment of pure joy, bliss, and I bound across the courtyard to the back gate, hanging on to that moment, but hanging on so hard I give shape to the thought I wanted to keep away: With the quadrille comes the stage in the evenings and late nights, an end to my early morning laboring at the bakery, the wages I need, no different than I need air. I slow to walking, and when I look up it is to see Monsieur Lefebvre’s carriage glinting in the sunshine of the day. The plumed horses whinny and bluster and stamp, their tails whisking away the flies gathering with the warmth. “Mademoiselle van Goethem,” Monsieur Lefebvre calls out, leaning from the carriage, beckoning for me to come.

“You were splendid today,” he says, stepping clear of the doorway, waving his hand in a way that makes me think he means for me to go inside. I inch closer to the carriage, not so boldly that he will think me brazen if his waving meant something else. “Yes, yes,” he says, “out of the hot sun.”

Inside he points for me to sit, takes the spot beside me, crowding a little close, considering the bench is wide enough for four and that across from ours a second runs the width of the carriage. “Your turns at the end,” he says. “Even Vaucorbeil pulled himself up at little straighter in his seat.”

“You were in the house?” Monsieur Vaucorbeil sat straighter on account of me? But does Monsieur Lefebvre know the seriousness of such a claim?

“My little gift? The size was right? Of course I was in there.”

“The slippers?”

“Come now, Mademoiselle van Goethem. There’s hardly a girl in all the corps buying her own.”

“It’s only that I thought they were from someone else.” I feel a dunce, now, for assuming the slippers were from Monsieur Degas. With three months come and gone since he asked me to model and the statuette being a failure, it was a stupid thing to think.

He puts his face close to mine, and his voice snaps from light to stern. “I told you I would put in a good word with Monsieurs Pluque and Mérante. I kept my promise. Now, who did you think the slippers were from?”

Almost, it is like I am back in Sister Evangeline’s classroom, fearing the answer I am about to give is wrong and wanting so badly to get it right. With the slippers, was Monsieur Lefebvre showing a desire to help? Now more than ever I need his charity. “Monsieur Degas.”

He waves away Monsieur Degas with the flick of his wrist, like men with rumpled waistcoats and sloppy beards are no more than vapor in his mind. He opens the velvet-lined box sitting at his feet and takes out a glass etched with garlands and wreaths and hands it to me. Then he lifts the cloth draping a silver bucket of ice and twists the cork from a dark bottle sweating the heat of the day. “I’ve been assured of your elevation to the quadrille,” he says.

He does not seem like the sort of man to say what is not true, not like Maman getting weepy and calling me her dearest dear when we all know it is Marie the First, or if we are only counting those who are not angels, then tiny Charlotte. To hear such a thing and then not find my name upon the list posted outside Monsieur Pluque’s office in the morning will break my heart a thousand times worse than if he never opened his mouth. “Please, Monsieur Lefebvre, I can only hear what is cast in stone.”

He fills my glass. “I understand the seriousness of what I said.” He puts a hand on my thigh, gives a gentle squeeze, like Papa, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dancing my happiness. His hand lifts to my glass and tips it to my mouth. “Now, my dear, be a good girl and drink your champagne.”

Should I ask about Blanche? She came into the Foyer de la Danse after her turn, and I saw right away her hands clutched together, holding in her glee. She would not leap and carry on, fueling bitterness, not today. She gave me the little smile that said the examination board had seen her very best. And I have no reason to turn Monsieur Lefebvre’s mind to her dove arms. It is not a thought I am proud of thinking, not when she is my only true friend at the dance school, but the truth is, if he has more to give than slippers, my need matches that of Blanche.

I wet my tongue, swallow a mouthful. Champagne, which I never before sipped, is like drinking air. I feel tiny bubbles breaking open in my throat, taste the tang of a metal knife slicing a tart apple. “In the rue de Douai we are used to tasting the cask in our wine.”

He laughs, fills his own glass, slides open a little window across from our bench and tells the driver we will pass along the Seine. Once we are under way, he says, “A celebratory drive, mademoiselle?” and I nod and wonder about him opening the closed drapes blocking out the lapping Seine.