The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (32 page)

“Surely you understand the law,” he said.
Surely, surely.

“Yes, of course.”

“And you have worked very hard to make yourself an exception—so—forgive me, Mademoiselle Rigault; your actions make no sense.” My heart lurched.

“ . . . Monsieur?”

“ The birth certificate . . . was not in the proper case file. But it has now been found.” He slid it across the polished surface of the desk to me now, the document I had thrust into the hand of the night guard, the certificate that had not accompanied Berthe into the
tour.
Of course, I knew what it said. Or what it
had
said, because the name on the line identifying the father was now effaced by a black rectangle of ink.

“After all that you had accomplished—to conduct a research into paternity, put forward a claim involving one of the foremost families of Paris, to deliberately violate article 340 of the Code Civil? What—
what
was your intention?”

“I don't—sir, what do you mean? I have not—” But indeed I had; I had inscribed Stephan's name on the certificate; had put a letter into Léonie's hand.

“The birth certificate has been corrected, but you have made it untenable for me to proceed. I believe that you are in possession of further detail on this matter from the family's legal counsel. If not—certainly it will be forthcoming. Case number 3568 has been closed to further inquiry.”

He rang for a Sister, and one appeared to see me out.

 

Furiously, horribly, back to the rue du Mail in a pounding squall. In the summer's heat the downpour would have been welcome; now the streets had become running torrents, clogged with cabs and omnibuses. Finally home to sift through the foul matter of receipts and visiting cards; scrawled notes for debts at cards; Lili's draft of the dental advertisement; opera programs. Menu and seating plan for a private dinner for twelve, including Gabriel and his newest
ami-coeur,
a dashing young man never seen without a very fine leather riding crop. A note from Mademoiselle Colette about boots in mauve calfskin,
very unusual.
Bill for eight baskets of violets, third notice (for what occasion?) . . . Galopin's statement for the last order, a dozen bottles of champagne, as many of red and white; seven of port; one absinthe; and a Tennessee bourbon, special-ordered . . . Had some letter been buried? What did he think, this
directeur,
that I could attend to everything? I had no bevy of sisters all neat and tidy in their caps, just Sévérine . . . although I now remembered that La Tigre had slid an envelope on top of my stack and murmured something I could not now remember.

Finally, it was discovered between Mademoiselle Colette's most recent note and a perfumer's bill. And a note from Beausoleil—probably about tonight's engagement—what was it, dinner, or the theater and dinner late?

 

On behalf of the aggrieved party and on pain of prosecution . . . Illegal breach of article 340 of the Code Napoleon forbidding
recherche de la paternité
 . . . Cessation of correspondence with the referenced aggrieved and his immediate family . . . The registered prostitute Eugénie Rigault to be placed under authority according to the provisions of the municipal council.

 

Signed, stamped, and sealed within an inch of its life and embossed with the insignia of a Paris law firm.

 

I sank down into a Louis XV bergère chair, covered in striped silk and chosen by Gabriel. Stared out the balcony window, down to the rue Montmartre. The hotel, the café, the Mont de Piété
.
All of the evening comings and goings.
Recherche de la paternité
. . . All that I asked—that my dreaming, impractical Self had asked—was that Stephan acknowledge the past. I had written to the Stephan I had known, the loved man. And also because Beausoleil's lawyer had told me that I needed material proof of our liaison.

I saw, now, in a sudden, cold light that the sort of truth my letter requested was out of the question. It could not possibly have been understood as I had intended; not in the shadow of legal proceedings. So why had I clung with such a grip, maintained an allegiance to what was long over; courting destruction, throwing myself down an abyss? I should have known better. I
did
know better, but had refused what I knew . . .

The rain cleared, casting a waning sunlight over the geraniums. The warrant stared up at me from the escritoire; its graceful curved legs holding up a pile of indulgences.

Stephan.
In a certain way, the warrant was the first solid piece of evidence that Berthe's father was anything but a dream. Was that—in the midst of the eddying whirl of what had become my life—what I had needed to prove?

I wondered when the police would pound at the door.

 

At last, I brought myself back and opened Beausoleil's note. But it did not concern this evening, or any other evening. It consisted of several paragraphs, not the usual brief lines about our rendezvous. What he wrote now was that the French ministry had reversed its position on the matter of the empire's support of the Confederacy. The government ministers denied ever having approved such support, which had been the subject of Beausoleil's careful negotiations (involving the building of French ships at Bordeaux and Nantes to come to the aid of the Confederate ports) . . . Now, instead, a pact of neutrality was to be affirmed. France would favor neither side, North nor South. “
We have lost a good deal in the matter,
” wrote Beausoleil, in the same hand that had once penned
“the Known improved greatly upon the Unknown.”

Beausoleil, for all his love of theater, play, and illusion—knew what was real and what was not. I might be interested to know, he wrote, that the marquis de Chasseloup, Pierre's father, Napoleon III's former naval minister, had been the one to issue this official reversal of France's position.
“And now I am called back to New Orleans.
Matters do not proceed well at home after Vicksburg, and now losses in Tennessee and north Georgia. If you can see me off tomorrow I am your most grateful servant, &c. When I am gone, I hope you will remember me for sending you a sweet—and brief—reprieve from your own battle while we fought ours. I wish you every good luck in your affairs, and await news .
.
 .”

 

My throat was parched. I sat for a long time, until the sun had set and the geraniums disappeared into the dark. From below, evening traffic clattered; iron wheels rumbled over the cobbles. Lamplighters now in their silent progress down the street. Reflections of the lights shimmering in the puddles left by the storm. Sévérine came in on cat's feet and lit the gas; cautiously inquired . . . It was unusual, of course, that mademoiselle was not dining out? There was
soupe,
she said. Just a
bouilli ordinaire.

Clio stalked in behind her and vaulted onto my lap. “Hello, faithless friend, where have you been?” She began to purr. “And why do you love me only when I have a bad day?” I buried my face in her rumpled ginger fur.

D
OES THE STORY,
in the way it is told, open a window into the soul's fortress or place yet another stone to block the view? These events have been related as they unfolded; as accompanied by my feelings at the time or as I remember them to have been. But every life takes on its wrinkles, like lines on the face of an old madame—and who could have foretold her particular destiny in the tracings on a girl's palm?

For a while, when not writing wasted love letters and petitions, I squeezed my own suffering down to an inky fingertip. This effort did not come continuously but in fits and fragments; stained and laden with debris and ill-cut from the start. Slipping like the awl that leaves an inarticulate scratch. Like Madame Récit's finery mender, I brushed, concealed, restitched, and revised; eventually it seemed that even as my life occurred, I had hardly lived it, referring always to an unseen past or future. Forever at an impasse, shot through with doubt; assigning both agency and blame to others and yet my own words formed another kind of betrayal. Writing was intended to burn and to exorcise but its effect was the reverse. For in writing down there is no forgetting; in editing, contouring, shaping a thing, what has been omitted looms in the mind. Recorded with pen and ink, blotted and stacked in unruly sheets, the events, both those presented and left unrecounted, were ever with me, as in a dream in which one never runs hard enough to escape some threat. As ink stains water, billowing out and suffusing it, one substance entirely occupies the other until matrix and infusion are one. Thus is suffering formed and transmuted. But meaning accrues slowly, not in a cataclysm, and always unexpectedly.

For a period on the rue du Mail, while I enjoyed Beausoleil's protection, food in the cupboard, and a maid to walk to the laundress, my days turned into a fury of revision at the little walnut escritoire (a surface too narrow for the task); a feverish search for the logic in a flustered tale of lost loves, ateliers, coal bins, and stone walls; butcher shops and dank corridors. Here was a word from Bovary, a whiff of Balzac; the cesspools of Zola and Huysmans's vinegary indigestion. Madame Sand's trousers and cigar hardly appeared; but very often the tinsel villainesses and heroines of the Seine bookstalls, and all the urgency of uncertainty. Giulia—a different woman in private than in public, came to the rue du Mail to read Veronica Franco aloud, translating from the Italian as she went. Little Giulietta accompanied her beautiful and celebrated mother, played quietly with her doll on the carpet while Giulia read:
“To eat with another's mouth, sleep with another's eyes, to move according to another's will,
rushing toward the shipwreck of one's mind and body .
.
 .”
We both sat on the rug in front of my little balcony and wept. At the disappointments not only of our own lives—but centuries of lives. Franco taught us that.

But finally, my efforts added up to the story of one for whom all stories had failed. Perhaps if any of us live long enough, the skin and bones of life accrue to prove every word false. Every novel and painting; every lover; every war. Storytelling does not stand up to facts. Maybe that is why we do it, to compel the facts away.

 

What I have written here is mostly true, insofar as anything is.

The trip back to La Vrillette and to the rose garden was a fiction to assuage the heroine's honor; the girl I wished I was. In reality there was neither the faith nor will for such a journey, nor could I afford a train ticket, and my better self foundered on life's more withering details. Léonie did not find me there; although if she had seen Berthe in my arms in a garden of roses, perhaps her heart would have been in a different place, at Tours. Perhaps mine would have been.

This Eugénie, in her pages, did for good reason loathe the life thrust upon her, and did not see any part of it as resulting from her own choice. She did (at the
tour
) stand miserably in the rain, with the child for whom she was not prepared. The letters to her old lover—those were burned up in a stove. The one pressed into Léonie's hand at Tours—another story she wove around herself, or tried to. Life rejected them; slapped her with the threat of arrest.

She was angrier than she acknowledged. All around her, arguments bubbled about how a woman's life should be conducted. But the general view, even if it luffed and flapped perilously and shifted with the winds, invariably fastened itself where it had always been. To the female body as container and vessel for all that was denied, despised, left unsaid. And since there was a good deal of that, whether in the gutter or the champagne bucket, it was in that role that our sex was most necessary. Shadow figures, negatives; blank pages, dreams.

 

Soon after Beausoleil departed—I don't remember how long, exactly—a column appeared in one of the papers. An
inscrit
(it was always an
inscrit,
never a girl or a woman), age twenty,
quartier des Martyrs.
Doors of a coal stove ajar; a haze of soot on the walls (and in that terrible heat). Mattress stuffing wedged under the door. Her suicide note was printed. It read,
“I am called Banage. My brother is an actor at the Gaïté.”

Banage: from Deux Soeurs. Bones like a bird, turning over those brass tags, as many as could be fit into the hour. Until that brother got the part he deserved, the starring role, the one that would prove the poor boy was the world's exception.

After that I began to notice them again. Girls with a netherworld pallor beneath their bonnets; with packs of white cards in their hands . . .
MAISON DE SOCIéTé, MAISON DE PLAISIR.
The capital's madames had prevailed upon the Préfecture to allow the doors to open and their indebted captives to leave behind, for an hour, the saturated odors of sweat and perfume and drink. The grimy chandeliers on frayed ropes, ill-concealed by a crumpled, dusty sleeve.
Rope, cord, umbilicus, garotte, noose.
Tourists stood and gaped at the bits of cardboard; know-it-alls nodded and smirked; businessmen pulled their collars up smartly, fooling no one, not even themselves. Their tight, conspiratorial moods, these girls; lofty, vagabond, defiant.

. . . One of them. Installed on a bench near a dry plot of ground; cards stashed behind a bush; her face mushroom-pale. She shifted to catch the sun, lifted her bonnet so light would warm her face. How low were her reserves? Had her guts weakened; did she hover on the verge of fever, malaise, the brink of collapse? With each passing night did she feel the coil tighten, awaken to find her own hands scrabbling at her throat, pulling at what was unseen, what choked off her very breath, what wanted to hang her from the garret beams? Ghost of an emotion, welling up . . .
bitter memory, too-green apricot, skin-split. A dry August, no rain. Sabots in the ruts.
I swallowed hard. Forget me not.
Forget me now.