The Green Muse (4 page)

Now I settled into the work that was before me.

The first step toward developing the pictures in evidence that I had gathered was simply to expose them to what light there was in the darkness. I readied a solution of sodium thiosulfate, which I would then use to fix the exposure to the paper and watched the first image emerge out its hiding place in the glass plate. The woman lay as I remembered her, her face turned away toward the darkest part of the courtyard. I waited, watching as she emerged. The bolero jacket, the pale gloves, the pretty dress. Even though my lady's golden head was turned away, I almost flinched as it crystallized into view. There was the trail of blood that led away from the body, toward the street, the blood that had dripped from my dying lady as she was carried hence. And there was something . . . three dark drops leading away from the body in the opposite direction. I remembered a door that lay that way, a back door to the tenement, most probably.

Another photograph: her face. The strands of loose hair that had so pulled at my heart. And what was that dark object? I had not noticed it when I was looking at her face, her sorrowful hair.

I grabbed the magnifying glass and held it above the picture. A small, dark, rectangular shape. A box? Yes, a matchbox holder, probably of silver, some three feet from my lady's head. I gently released the other photographic papers from their glass plates even as I bathed the first in the solution I had mixed. I would add a toner, either of gold or selenium, in order to stabilize against fading. As my hands performed the familiar actions I wondered what this victim had been to her murderer. Capt. Bezier said that the identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer every time, but it seemed to me that it was the relationship between the two that was important. I applied the gold toner—­this girl deserved gold—­and began cleaning up my workspace. I worked more quickly than usual. I had someplace very important to go tonight. After I had finished I opened my window and saw the last light lingering at the top of the sky. But even if it were pitch when I reached my destination, I was certain of what I would find.

I hurriedly put on my jacket and set off.

 

M
Y MOTHER SAYS
the new telegraph in town is causing this spring's hails, and Papa complains of the rumors that Paris time is to be imposed throughout all the country, saying that he will have himself tied to the face of the old cathedral clock rather than have anyone come and change its ancient hour. I listen to them talk as I boil the morning milk. Maman had to wake me to cook it before it turned, else we would have spoilt milk by afternoon. I could see the worry in her eyes; of late I have been hard to rouse. I have woken before the dawn since I was small. Now I cannot sleep at night, and dream with my eyes open. And in the mornings,I cannot rise.

I do not know what it means. I would like to think it means nothing. But Maman has a sad panic on her pretty face when she looks at me now, and questions. I stir the milk, I listen to them talk. I dream.

I look at myself in the windowpane as the milk cooks. When I live in Paris I will own a mirror. Yvette, the greengrocer's daughter, has one almost as big as her palm. I remember the first time I looked in it; how afraid I was! It was only two months ago, in midwinter. Maman did not like that I looked, she said it fed my vanity; but all I saw in that mirror was a girl with unruly brown hair and eyes far bluer than I thought I had. My nose was quite familiar, with its little uptilt, but my lips pinker than I expected, and my skin darker than I would like it to be. In the windowpane I am not as pretty as in the mirror, but in the mirror I am not as pretty as I would wish. I have to admit that my vanity has been fed and is hungry. I go to look at Yvette's mirror at least once a week now.

But I make faces in the mirror, too, Maman doesn't know that. And Yvette makes faces, , and we pantomime all sorts of emotions into it and pretend we are on the stage. She talks of going on the stage, but I know that she will marry Jean-­Pierre, the baker's son, and have babies and grow fat. But I know that someday I really am going to Paris, and I will act upon the stage. It seems such an ordinary schoolgirl dream, but it's not. One day I will stand at the railway station, next to the clock that keeps Parisian time, with my bag and my secret, listening for the rumble of the locomotive that will come into the station quite precisely at ten after ten, and in the space of three minutes will set me free.

Louis Mouret opened a bookshop in our town eight months ago. It was a brave act, as we are still practically in the provinces and quite unsophisticated. Many of our women still wear the traditional costume of our village, the blue skirt and cornflower-­blue cap, with its characteristic strings at the back, as their daily dress.

Louis' bookstore is not the only innovation. A photographer opened a studio next to the train station last year, and it has been doing a steady business. Papa was even able to persuade Maman to go there to have our family's picture done, for which we stood in front of a great façade of a forest scene complete with waterfall. There was a plaster rock for Maman to sit on; for once she forsook her wooden clogs for leather shoes, and she looked lovely with her hat high atop her hair, which she had had shaped and filled out over a horsehair mold. Her hair is still thick and dark (although not thick enough for fashion, which makes demands few women can meet), and her skin is fashionably fair because she never leaves the house. Papa tells me what a great beauty she was in her youth. In the family portrait she sits with tightened lips. She does not trust this black glass eye that is making magic in front of her. At the breakfast table that morning she asked nervously how far away from these new cameras must we stand, and was there any danger, and what if it stunted my growth? I told her a thousand times, as Papa resolutely read his paper, that cameras are not new, that they have been around longer than she has been, much longer, forty years. But she would worry about the chemicals, and whether the skin on our faces would be burned.

I barely remember standing for the photograph. I was so excited, and it took such little time! We were set up and shot in no time at all.

And when I see the girl in the picture I do not know her at all. I look like a country bumpkin, such a child, with my corset laced so loosely I hardly have a waist, and my skirt so short you can see my ankles even though I am almost fourteen. Maman had almost made me wear my hair down, and I remember how I cried and pleaded with her to put it up, not in a loose, high chignon the way a woman would wear it, but at least off my face, as befitted a young lady. I stand forever fixed in children's garb between my parents, and my father wears a peasant's hat on his head. I showed him a whole page of men's hats from the Bon Marché, the Ladies Paradise that Zola writes about. But although Papa could easily afford one, he brushed away the paper and insisted that the one he wears to church on Sunday was good enough for any portrait. I must say he cut a fine figure, though, in his Sunday suit, looking proudly at the camera, showing for generations to come the great joy and achievement of his life: his women.

I am his only surviving child. He educated me in science so that he would have another mind with which to share his ideas. Both before and after my birth my mother lost children, two to miscarriage, one stillborn, and one after three weeks in this life. She has been subject to nervous prostration since the death of that last babe, the only boy. I would like to think that my father taught me to exercise my mind as you would a muscle, to shape it as you would an arm or a thigh you needed to toughen for strong work because he had progressive ideas about the feminine sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. Papa wanted sons; he got no sons. He wanted strong minds to match his own; he is surrounded by minds naturally incapable of the intricate calculations and minute observations, the abstract reasoning and argumentative abilities to which he feels he must be exposed for his own intellectual sustenance. So he has taught my mind, since I was small, as if it were a boy's mind. He sent me to school and hired a tutor to teach me at home as well: Latin, Greek; the botanical and astronomical sciences; rhetoric and the Scholastic method of argument; the study of electricity and chemical analysis; and, of course, all of the mathematical skills necessary for such work—­and this in addition to my regular round of feminine accomplishment, without which I should surely never marry: dancing, singing, piano; sketching and painting; lace-­making and baking and the entire catalogue of endless household chores. I argue better than I sketch. I can look at a picture of a hat in a ladies' magazine for thirty minutes, but I love to discuss Progress with Papa more than almost anything in the world. I am utterly unsuited to be the wife of anybody in this town.

How can I tell Maman what is wrong with me? She and Father whisper; I hear the word
chlorosis
. Green disease. I am vigorous and well, but I will sigh, or stare at the intricate pattern on the dining-­room wallpaper, for the longest time.

My mother says I have a greenish pallor to my skin. She plans on sending me to Dr. Ronde next week. My womanly sickness came upon me last month, and although I am neither too young nor too old, she is concerned. I laugh when she thinks I should not laugh. I cry, she thinks without reason.

But I have a reason to cry, as I have a reason to laugh. I have my dreams, but it is my reality that encompasses me, suffocates and frightens me, sustains me.

I am in love with Louis. He gives me books to read,
Madame Bovary
and
Against Nature
. I read them because he has touched them. I read them because I know that as he hands one to me, perhaps our hands will touch.

I go to the bookshop on Wednesdays. But she is becoming suspicious of my Tuesday-­night face, of my sulks, as she calls them, which are not sulks at all but the effects of a kind of romantic terror.

I borrow my language from romance novels, but the feelings are real. I do not even know whether I want to see the realization of my fantasies. What I would do if Louis were actually to kiss me!

And what a cruel insistence of Fate to have Louis married! I have even thought of becoming his mistress. It would ruin me; I do not believe he would allow it. (Nor that I could actually do it.) Oh, if only I could escape this place! In Paris I would ride the omnibus and be nobody at all, a girl with a shopping basket. Perhaps I could work in the Bon Marché. I could forget that I was ever Augustine. Augustine who had dreams she could not make come true: the stage, a man. Such trite dreams, so schoolgirlish; I know it even at seventeen. The stage is perhaps an attainable dream; perhaps. My parents will never approve it, for how can they? They would rather have a whore for a daughter. I do not know why: The great ladies of the stage are widely respected, widely imitated. They are the feast of Paris; what they wear today is seen everywhere in six weeks' time; what they say is quoted in all the newspapers the next day.

But I fool myself. Think of Maman, altering her dress to resemble Sarah Bernhardt's! And although Papa reads her the paper assiduously each night, he is quite careful to leave out the ladies' pages, believing as he does that such nonsense corrupts the already fragile female morality. It is all I can do to get the horoscope! I am a Sagittarius. The Archer. The arrow that forever wants to fly.

I
INSISTED
L
OUIS
lend me
Against Nature
. He did not want to do it, but this book is the talk of Paris. I pouted, I cajoled; and he lent it to me. And when I read it! Oh, my, will he ever speak to me again? What have I done? The obscenity of such a book sickens as it excites: It seemed to the hero that a dreadful grandeur must result from a crime carried out, within the very walls of the church, by a believer who, filled with horrible delight and sadistic joy, was desperately determined to blaspheme, to commit outrages upon revered objects . . .

I cannot imagine what Maman would do if she were to discover that I had read such a book. I have heard of girls sent to the madhouse for less.

I sometimes think the madhouse is all there will be for me anyway. No man here has any dream bigger than he can see from his front doorstep. Cows, chickens, a wife, children. In that order. Last week Gérard told me that he loves me. I cannot imagine why. I sat next to him at the theater two months ago, and when I went walking with a group of young ­people after church three weeks ago I ended up walking next to him. What has been nothing to me, things I never thought of, words I forgot the instant I said them, glances that meant nothing to me, must have meant everything to Gérard. Of course he planned to walk next to me. Perhaps he thought about it for the whole week before: Maybe the weather on Sunday will be fine, and I shall suggest a walk. In the meadow behind Gerthe's farm, next to the river. Augustine will be there. Maybe she will wear her white dress. Her calfskin gloves. The soft boot that shows her small foot when she lifts her dress to descend the steps after church. Oh, Gérard, is that an image you live with, as I live with the image of Louis' hands on the spine of a book? I have known Gérard since I was three, he is the greatest blockhead in the village. All the girls blush to see him because he is going to inherit his father's big farm and manor house one day. He looks like a mule. He asked to speak to my father, enacting who knows what cherished fantasy? Oh, Gérard, you would not recognize my heart even if you were to see it. It is perverse, it has been corrupted by love; it is not worthy of a simpleton like you!

Of course I told Gérard he could absolutely not speak to my father. My goodness, my parents would have me married off within the week! And I would spend the rest of my life a glorified servant in the house of Gérard Theirry. Oh, I would be the lady of the house, of course. I shouldn't do a speck of work. But what would I do? I could spend my mornings giving the servants their orders, writing letters, sewing, playing the piano. I could spend my afternoons playing with my children. I could spend my evenings with the biggest blockhead in the village. I could have an easy life. I would never even have to get my hands dirty.

But I don't want an easy life. I want to wear the most elegant dress, and have the most magnificent hair, and perform on the stage, in front of all Paris. I want to suffer. In my love for Louis I suffer. Only then do I really feel that I am living, when I go stand outside the door to his shop with every nerve pulled taut, with a fever in my heart. Sometimes I cannot breathe, just for a moment, sometimes I cannot see clearly. My nerves sing a strange song, and I know that the only thing that can calm me will be the touch of Louis' hand; his skin against my skin; his eyes looking into my eyes. Why must I be a schoolgirl, and stupid, and slow? I want to burst in upon him like a sudden rain, and I stutter and blush. I want to act the coquette, and I stand there looking at the floor. But then he reaches out and his fingers touch my arm, and I am the girl I want to be.

We are wrong always when we think too much of what we think or are. I want to concentrate on the beauty of the words; I see nothing at all but his slender fingers, and I feel his cheek near mine, although I do not turn to see it; I smell something wonderful, something that reminds me of Papa but isn't anything I've ever smelled around Papa. I am suddenly frightened by the force of his masculinity. His hands look strong as well as supple, and I have a sudden urge to turn and bury my face in his neck. Sometimes a lock of his long dark hair almost brushes against my cheek. I am overwhelmed, I feel faint. It is a delicious faintness; I want to swoon into his arms, I want to be just like the girls I see in the magazines Papa doesn't want me ever to see; Louis lends me the magazines, the stories. Where maidens swoon into their lovers' arms. If I were to listen to the tracts my mother gives me to read although she cannot read herself, I would believe that even to desire such things guarantees my eternal damnation, and the damnation of the entire not-­yet-­born generation of French children it is my duty to help produce. Oh, I do want children. But I want other things, too. Romance, and adventure, and evening walks on the Paris boulevards, the chance to lose myself in a poet's words, and speak them so that my audience is transported. I am such a country goose that I am not even sure it is where I want to transport them: maybe just to where they can feel what I feel when Louis' cheek is close to mine: That might be enough.