The General's Mistress (30 page)

“I do,” I said. “Who wouldn’t prefer to be a man if they could choose? If I could live my entire life as a man, I should.”

I
spent three months with the company in Digne. We barely broke even financially, the old problem with provincial troupes. I got back most of my seven hundred francs in the end, but I did not return to Paris until fall was ending and winter coming. In my absence, Lisette seemed to have become nearly entirely nocturnal. She had acquired an opium hookah and supplemented her income by giving parties that went on and on until dawn.
Most of the young men who came were students or young soldiers. The money was terrible, and the job worse than Lebrun’s had been, but by the middle of the winter I was desperate.

The smell of the opium penetrated every part of the apartment whether I wanted it or not, whether I stayed in my room or not. I might as well go out and join in. A few breaths, and half the time the boys hardly knew if they had me or just sprawled boneless in the cushions that Lisette had gotten to create oriental ambience, and if they suckled a little at my breast in their dreams, it was enough. If it wasn’t, I hardly knew it myself.

It was one of those times. I knew it must have been. I had been very careful, otherwise. Victor had insisted upon it, and I had learned all the ways. I had always insisted on the English letters with Chaptal and Gantheaume and the rest.

My courses had always been regular. Two weeks late, and I knew. I had felt that tenderness in my breasts before, the swell of their flesh and the darkening of my nipples. I knew. After all, I had been pregnant twice before.

I sat among the pillows in the late afternoon, wishing that the rooms were warmer, wishing that I could conquer this panic welling up in me.
I will just sit still,
I thought.
I will just sit still. Nothing bad will happen if I don’t move.
And so I sat while the light crept in the window and across a purple and red brocade pillow beside me.

Lisette knew someone, of course. She swore the woman had done for her last year, and for half a dozen women she knew. “These things happen,” she said practically, flipping back her long red hair. “Madame will put you right in no time.”

She nearly killed me instead. I remembered the blood and the cramping and cramping, lying in a pool of my own blood listening to her talking to Lisette, just out of sight of the bed. I
knew it wasn’t going right. It was so much easier, I thought, to have a child than not to.

I was dying. I hoped Delacroix and Lisette would spring for the pauper’s field. Otherwise, I was sure that my fetus and I would make an interesting lecture at the university. “See, gentlemen, the distention of the uterus? Seven or eight weeks of pregnancy, by my estimation.” Very educational for the medical students, cutting me open.

I tried to scream, but nothing came out. My voice was already not my own.

“She’s delirious,” I heard the old woman say.

“There’s too much blood,” Lisette whispered.

“I am not responsible. Sometimes it goes wrong. . . .” Her voice shook.

I wanted the dreams. I wanted to walk there and never come back. I would not come back to see what happened to my body. Surely I would be somewhere else.

My father had been right: When you die, you simply stop. No heaven. No hell. I would even welcome hell, about this time. I would settle for demons.

Dark. Night. Sticky blood around me. Every limb filled with ice.

I wandered in deep caves, and they were home.
I will stay here,
I said.

—
You can’t,
someone whispered behind me, magnified by the caves, whispering around the walls.
I am not done with you.—

Let me stay,
I whispered.
Let me stay. I am done. There is nothing. Let me stay here with this daughter who will never be. Let me forget.

—
You asked for the gift of memory. Now you will never forget.—

Light grew, and I stood in the half-lit cave. He wore the dark blue coat of the Army of the Republic, a tricolor sash about his
waist, its ends weighted with bullion fringe. His face was plain and beautiful, and behind him wings unfolded in a riot of white feathers, every pinion glittering with imprisoned light.

“Elza,” he said, “and Georg and Jauffre and Lydias and Charmiane and more besides.” His voice was like rain on the trees, like fire whispering in the grate. “You taught me about faith when I had lost hope. Have you lost it now?”

“My lord,” I said, “let me begin again.” I fought back tears. “I am in too deep. There is no way out. Let me go, and begin again. In the name of mercy.”

He shook his head like a soldier who sees danger and must yet go forward. “I can’t.”

I walked toward him across the cave, and I did not know if the face he saw was mine or some other, if the hands I reached toward him had ever belonged to Elzelina. “Why not?”

“I need you too badly, scarred as you are. And there is no time. If you begin again, it will be too late.” His eyes were filled with terrible compassion. “I must use you, and use you I will.” He took my hand, and his touch was like liquid fire in my veins. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” I said, and looked up at him. I thought his eyes were blue, and that they were like some I knew, in some place far distant from this.

He said something that might have been a reason, or a word, or a promise. But it wasn’t. It was simply love.

“Is it so odd that I should love you,” he said, “when I send you to suffer? And can promise nothing, only that it is the best that I can do?”

“No,” I said, and clutched his hand as if I could grasp a brand, or grasp the wind. In this place, it was solid. “I love you too.”

His mouth twisted. I closed my eyes, and felt the world
move. I was a bird in his hand, white-winged and strong, my heart beating fast. A dove?

He laughed. “No doves for you, dear one. A gull. To face the winds far out to sea, and come at last storm-tossed to shore, if you are lucky.” He raised his hand and I took off, spiraling upward toward a circle of light at the apex of the cave, leaving behind the bright angel in the dark.

Grand-Saint-Bernard

T
o my surprise, I didn’t die. It was hard to say that I lived either. Winter wore on, grim and gray. I hardly ever left the apartment, even when I was strong enough to get down three flights of stairs to the street. Sometimes there was food and sometimes there wasn’t, depending on whether or not Lisette’s friends brought enough money with them for food and opium both, and whether or not anyone bothered to go get some.

One day I was hungry and there was nothing, but there was money lying around. I had no idea who it belonged to, but I took some and went down the stairs. It took a long time. The stairs made me dizzy.

It was cold outside, and the skies were leaden. I went across the street to a café and ordered bread and a hard-boiled egg. I ate the egg very carefully. It was good. There was butter, and the bread was nicely crusty, with just a little ash from the oven clinging to the bottom.

Nobody looked at me. It was the middle of the afternoon, I guessed, too early for dinner and too late for lunch. February? March? Could it be March already? I saw my reflection on the inside of the window overlooking the street, and I looked like an opium eater, wan and listless, with lank, tangled blond hair. I ordered a glass of bad burgundy and drank it watching people walking around on the street.

Two men were moving a cartload of furniture. From the printer’s shop a boy emerged with a wrapped bundle, going on
an errand. A young girl in a thin cloak carried a magnificent hatbox, probably delivering a purchase. The night-soil cart went along, the old horse patiently waiting while two men swept the streets in a desultory fashion.

And,
I thought with a curious sense of detachment,
a young prostitute sits in the window of the café, eating bread and an egg and wondering what happens next. If it’s so damned important for me to be here, I’d really appreciate a hint about why. What I’m supposed to be doing that’s worth living for.

Except that, having lived, I could hardly die. Of course, plenty of people killed themselves. My mother had tried often enough. But I had always known that somehow I would never go through with it, never really mean it. It simply wasn’t in my nature to go quietly.

And maybe that’s it,
I thought, sipping the sour wine quietly.
I’m alive because I’m not dead. And I’ve got to find something to do. Because otherwise it’s back to the same old thing, back to Lisette’s friends and her boys, until it all happens again. And I’m not doing this again.

It took me most of the afternoon, stopping whenever I got dizzy, but I found a tobacco shop with paper and sent a message to Isabella Felix.

Dear Isabella,

As you may know from our mutual friends, I have recently been ill, but I am glad to say that I am now fully recovered, and I feel my strength returning every day. I wonder if you have yet engaged a third girl for touring this summer. If not, I would be eager to renew my contract with M. Moiret’s company and to join you on the road wherever you happen to be engaged.

With warmest regards,

Ida St. Elme

I
sabella did better than answering. She sent that she should like to meet me for lunch in the Palais-Royal three days later. I agreed, of course.

It was March 26, 1800, by the old calendar, the one people still thought in and nobody used. I had lost track of time so thoroughly that I’d imagined it could be no later than early March.

I had trouble finding anything to wear. Where had most of my clothes gone? And why was everything dirty? I couldn’t remember the last time I had sent anything to a laundress. The only clothes that weren’t worn or filthy were Charles’s.

I dug out a pair of dove-gray pants, a ruffled shirt with half a handspan of lace on the sleeves, a subdued gray waistcoat, and a dark-blue coat, then put my hair back and looked in the mirror. Not bad. Too thin and too peaked, but not bad. I still looked like Charles. And best to be Charles anyway. None of this had ever happened to Charles. Charles was a man, and he was strong.

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a half smile. “Wages of sin, my dear,” he said sardonically.

Isabella grinned when she saw Charles come into the café. “My goodness!” she said. “I had no idea I would be lunching with such a handsome gentleman!” Isabella looked like a cat in cream, sleek and well groomed, with perfectly painted fingernails. Her dress was new and, if not the most expensive material, it was well cut and fashionable. Her dark hair was swept up with a pair of tortoiseshell pins that she hadn’t had last year.

“Charmed,” I said, bending over her hand and smiling. Charles must pay her due attention. I sat down across from her.

“Sébastien, is it?” she asked.

“Something like,” I said. “Charles van Aylde. I have decided
to be entirely Charles this year. You’re looking well. New man?”

Isabella laughed. “Go right to the point, don’t you? Yes, a new man. He’s an artillery colonel, Auguste Thibault. He’s paying my bills now, and staying with me in a nice little third-floor apartment in Grenelle.”