Goddess (14 page)

T
HE CURTAIN RISES
in less than an hour. Again.

Each night, the singers sigh with relief after it’s all over. Before the applause has even finished, they kick off their shoes, start unpinning their wigs. Thévenard kisses Julie goodnight, his moustache damp on her face.

The women of the Opéra crowd into the dressing-rooms, shouting and laughing at the evening’s mistakes and glories, wipe their faces clean, throw sweaty costumes on the floor, and sweep out to get good and drunk or laid or rested before they have to do it all over again.

The next day, they’re back. Every time. Except once, when they all came down with the squits and had to cancel. Something in the water. Or the air. Francine was furious, but then he wasn’t squatting over a pot somewhere shitting out his gizzards like everyone else.

They arrive one by one, even the sisters Desmatins, and assemble slowly. The noise in the dressing-room builds as each woman arrives. Le Rochois and Julie arrive first. Le Rochois always has, through her whole career. She arrives on time, leaves immediately after the show. Julie watches how Le Rochois behaves and tries to do the same. Everything Le Rochois does is correct. Always. She greets the dressers by name, asks after their health, their children. She brushes her own hair—always fifty strokes—and smooths olive oil on her skin so that the face paint will come off more easily.

Julie does the same. The paint is thick and greasy as goose fat. A layer of powder on top, black rims around the eyes, perhaps some colour in the cheeks. For one show, Julie is painted gold every night—face, throat, arms. She glimmers in the candlelight. But it takes an hour to scrape off.

But not tonight. It’s the third week of
Didon
. Julie is not playing a goddess this evening, but a magician, a sorceress. White paint will do.

Le Rochois sits alone before the looking glass and paints her lips a deep red, not the carmine shade favoured by the younger women.

Fanchon Moreau arrives next, with an entourage, as usual—four young men and some woman they picked up near the river. Fanchon waves them away at the door, but they won’t go; they hover and giggle and stagger a little, until Le Rochois turns in her chair and stares at them. They vanish. Anyone would. Tonight she is Didon, Queen of Carthage. She will not be crossed. She maintains her regal face until she’s sure the drunks have gone, and then the three women, the three singers, laugh until their paint cracks.

Julie loves these times, these sisterly moments in front of the mirrors, when the rest of the world is a hush outside, and the Palais-Royal is filling with people, filling with anticipation, filling with noise.

The Desmatins sisters and all the others—dancers, chorus—arrive eventually and crowd in. There are other dressing-rooms, but they prefer to be together in the hour before the curtain. It’s a tradition.

Julie teases Marie-Louise Desmatins about her dancing. She watches as Fanchon seeks out a young dancer who is crying softly into her cloak, puts an arm around her shoulders and whispers, ‘He never deserved you. Forget him, the bastard.’

Julie watches for a moment longer than is tactful then looks away, to listen as Le Rochois advises her dresser on how to avoid catching a cold in the coming winter. Garlic. Swallowed whole. Swears by it. As nobody has ever known Le Rochois to lose her voice for a single performance, they all take note. Garlic it is.

By the time they hear the first notes of the orchestra tuning up, they are in costume—mostly—squeezing blistered feet into dance slippers, and ready for the wigs to be pinned to their hair. Fanchon slumps in a corner, fanning her face with peacock feathers. Le Rochois pins paper flowers in a dancer’s hair. The younger Desmatins tells a long and complicated story about a ball she once attended in Lyon.

Julie sits and watches them all—her found family, her rivals, her friends.

She wanders out into the wings. The smallest boys from the ballet corps are being hoisted up into the flies, where they will wait, hanging, for a quarter of an hour before they swing down at the climax of the Prologue. She’s not sure, exactly, what they’re supposed to be—sprites, perhaps, or messengers from Jupiter—but the audience loves it.

Two men clatter past with armfuls of gilded pikes and swords. Then another, with a stuffed peacock for Act Two.

The stagehands light the candles. The orchestra is almost ready. The runner clatters down the stairs to fetch the cast.

Julie glances across the empty stage to see Thévenard standing there amid sandbags and coiled ropes. He’s not in this show, shouldn’t be here. But he can’t keep away. He winks. She grins.

They are the masters of Paris.

Y
OU MUST UNDERSTAND
, the Académie in those days was still fuelled by the brightness of Lully, the incorruptible genius, the King’s favourite. He’d only been dead a few years—died the year I ran away with Séranne. I remember the fuss. Louis, they said, was crazed with grief. The whole city went a bit silly.

Lully, dead. And what a way to go. You know the story, I’m sure.

Eh?

Save me, Jesus, from ignorant priests. All right. Pay attention. It’s an instructive tale for musicians everywhere. One evening, poor old Lully was happily banging away on the floor with his conducting staff, as they do. His
Te Deum,
I think it was. In the church of the Feuillants in rue Saint-Honoré. People still leave flowers there in his honour. But on that day, he flew into a fury with the harpsichordist and flattened his own toe with a thump of the staff. Gangrene set in and off he popped. Embarrassing, I know, but people have died of simpler things. Look at me.

Mad bastard he was, and greedy, but his was the only music Paris wanted to hear, the only performances the King would attend. New composers came and went, some of them dogs, some of them could have been better than Lully if anybody had ever given them the chance. But no.

Instead, we trotted out the old master’s work each year and the crowds wept with happiness. Knew every word—some nights we couldn’t hear one another over the audience singing along happily out of tune, even during the heartbreaking arias.

There’s nothing like trying to inject a spirit of compassion and pity into a death scene when you’ve got a thousand punters bellowing at you from the
parterre
. Maybe that’s one reason they liked me. I simply sang even louder. Some of the others couldn’t do that, you see. They didn’t have the lungs for it. But it turns out that a military education is quite good training for a singer. People don’t realise—you don’t need to pretend that you care about music, Father, just look interested, please—it takes a lot of strength just to wear the costume sometimes, let alone have enough puff to make yourself heard above the mob.

Le Rochois, of course, could calm them with the slight lift of one eyebrow, without missing a beat. Thévenard once stopped singing—in the middle of
Psyché
, I think it was—and shouted at a man in the closest box: ‘Shut the fuck up, you imbecile!’

Of course, everyone roared with laughter, including the imbecile, who sang even louder.

Even I, divine as I am, got fed up one night and climbed out of my machine, jumped right out of it—can you imagine? Nobody knew what was going on. I can picture Duménil’s stupid face even now. I’d had enough. Really, what can you do? I’m an artist. Above interruptions. I could hear some fool shouting out the words—no tune at all—and all kinds of insults and trying to make a joke of everything. Of me. Of Fanchon. Even of Le Rochois. Nobody had come to listen to him. Then he whistled at Fanchon. Called her a whore. Threatened—

I know! Incredible, isn’t it?

So it had to stop. Someone had to teach him a lesson and it was, inevitably, left up to me. I imagine it was a lesson he will never forget. Whoever he is. Some people are just … Anyway, I leapt off the stage and up over three benches to the Cardinal’s box, grabbed a cane out of some fellow’s hand, and clobbered him across his loud mouth. Not the Cardinal, you understand. Some young drunk.

Everyone cheered and bellowed until I got back into position. The wonder is that it didn’t happen more often.

That was the marvellous thing about singing a new work—nobody knew the words but us. They had no choice but to listen, to follow the story, to be surprised. At least for a few weeks, until they’d all bought their copies of the book and knew every word—if not the notes.

To be sure, sometimes they felt a little too surprised. So did we. I could never predict which new music would meet with their approval. Too derivative? Too new? Too outlandish? Too staid? Too Italian? Too English?

I heard about a glorious piece I would’ve loved to sing: a
Dido and Aeneas
by an Englishman whose name escapes me now. Couperin dug up the score from somewhere. Lyrical. Gorgeous. Pathos dripped from the page. Apparently. I never did master the reading of music. But I was assured it would have been perfect for me, for my tone. Fanchon would have been brilliant, too, but I’d have wrung every tear out of the eyes of Paris. Those words!

‘When I am laid in earth … with drooping wings.’

I can see it now. Hear it, almost.

We talked about it, planned a three-week season. A preview at Versailles. But you can’t present something with only three acts. They’d tear you limb from limb. None of that English muck here, none of that Italian nonsense—unless, needless to say, your Italian is called Lully.

Pity.

I did play Dido once, in Brussels—not that English work but another, beautiful and sad, by a German fellow. They are much less parochial about these things in Brussels. They have to be.

I won’t pretend I ever approached the majesty of Le Rochois or the versatility of Fanchon. But I can stand there, rigid as a statue and dressed like a goddess or a magician or a river nymph, and belt out an air as fiercely as any old slapper. I can act and sing at the same time—so can Thévenard. You wouldn’t think it’d be so difficult, but plenty of the others can’t manage it at all. They can do one thing or the other—not both at once, let alone anything complicated. Like walking. Or smiling. Or pretending to weep. They just sing and make all the prescribed gestures as precisely as possible.

But you remember, Father, what I told you—that my singing apprenticeship had been in the taverns and the fairgrounds, among the drunkards and the freaks, a tougher crowd than ever crammed into the Palais-Royal—more exacting, and more intimate. I learned to feel the temperature of the audience, if you like, its mood, its fever—Thévenard was the same—and in time we learned to adjust not only the noise that came from our throats, but also the emotions—the rage, the sorrow—whatever our roles demanded. Well, I did. That, I realised, is as important as the voice and the air in your lungs.

The idea of the
tragédie en musique
—Lully’s idea it was first, and we’ve been regurgitating it ever since—is to excite pity and terror. If all you bring to your audience is wooden faces and stolid singing, there will be no pity, no terror, no consorting with the gods, with the angels. That’s what Le Rochois does—did—what I do, and a handful of others in the entire world. We feel. You feel. We stand on the stage and wail and weep and are not ashamed. You—well, not you perhaps, but other, normal people—take us into their hearts, and in comforting us, they find comfort themselves. That, truly, is my gift. My other gift. As I am blessed, so is—was—all of Paris.

They loved me, the people in the streets. That’s the only way I can explain it. Perhaps they knew me as one of them, always only a misstep away from dry crusts and smallpox. The others, the nobles in their wigs and their pretty, sharp-faced women, they dared to love me as well.

For years I believed they loved me for my voice, my stage presence, my courageous life. ‘Incomparable,’ they said. ‘Divine.’ I am the goddesses on the ceilings of the antechambers at Versailles, the statues in the gardens. That’s what they see in me. The huntress. The peacemaker. The Amazon. The Muse. Victory. Glory. War. I am divine.

But now I wonder if I was anything more than some exotic creature in the King’s pleasure gardens—not a lion, and surely not a baboon, but perhaps—yes—a giraffe. Unlikely. Ungainly. Unique. Beautiful in parts but not particularly attractive as a concept. Alien. But compelling, nevertheless.

You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you, Father? I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a giraffe. Or a lion. Or a baboon. Or even a pleasure garden.

Hell’s teeth! Why did they have to send me some dolt from the provinces? How can you even begin to comprehend me?

Be that as it may, I will resume my recitative.

Where was I? Ah, yes. That’s right. I was loved.

They loved my voice and my face. They hated, I realise now, my body and its desires. They thrilled at my adventures, cheered my duels, but despised the essence of me. No doubt they tittered and gasped behind my back. I didn’t notice it in those early years—I thought I was surrounded by people who wished me nothing but good. I heard the whispers and shrugged off the notoriety, the half-hidden glances and smirks.

I felt as if I had taken in all of Paris—the whole world—with my talents and charm. I read about myself in the broadsheets and believed it to be true.

I was the sun.

I was a monster.

Both were true.

I am a goddess.

I am a sinner.

Both are lies.

They never loved me—not really. They wanted to be close to me; perhaps they envied me. The women envied my freedom, my sheer nerve. The men were jealous of my women, my skill with the blade. But there’s not much difference between envy and hatred. In the end.

They cheered at my high notes—oh, the clear sustained thrill of that tender A minor; the astounded applause exploding out of the dark—and especially the low. They’d never heard the like.

I was light. I was a tiny pool of candle-glow and all around me there was darkness, waiting.

They whispered it in the night—into my ear when they thought nobody was watching, or behind my back when they were sure everybody was. The blade of slander between the shoulder blades—that secret, noisome assassin—was the only wound I suffered at their hands.

Otherwise, they flung flowers at my feet and, if they were very lucky, I would stoop and pick up the stems in one perfectly gloved hand. They shouted for me, revered me.

I was an idol.

I was an iconoclast.

I never took it seriously, any of it. How could I?

So I contradict myself—what of it? Consistency was never my forte. Believe what you will of me; change your mind every hour, every minute. God knows, I do.

You wanted to hear my story. Naturally. It’s fascinating. But whatever made you imagine there would be only one version? All of the world’s greatest myths are told and retold—there are patterns in the telling, but sometimes the dénouement differs. We all long for Médée to stay her hand, for Hector to survive his wounds—just once.

In opera there are rules. Conventions. The gods never speak with lesser mortals. We—they—intervene in human affairs only through our instruments, the lesser deities. Say, Cupid. Always willing to meddle.

There must be a happy ending. A wedding is best, or perhaps a triumphal march. Deliverance. Redemption. Not in
Phaëton
, I grant you, but in most other works, we end on a high, happy note.

Quinault, especially, always wrote such lovely endings. Juno turns Io into a goddess. Minerve unravels the evil wrought by Médée. Renaud escapes Armide. There may be torture, poison, war, sorrow. But in the end, justice is done—divine or otherwise.

This is not one of those. Perhaps it never could be. Not my luck.

The
tragédies en musique
are stories of legends, of the great myths, on occasion the stories of mortals—of history—of those romances Louis so dearly loved. Even then, there is a divine intervention—a metamorphosis. Salvation.

All horribly pagan of us, isn’t it? But it gives hope, after all, that Heaven hears us, that those saints who now play the roles of Aphrodite or Mercury or even—God help us—Cupid will grant us our fondest hopes, release us from grief, find our lost loves, carry us away—sound the trumpets for the finale, the processional, the full orchestra announcing our exit.

But look.

Look at me!

I’ve served those divinities all my life—the demigods of Versailles and the Palais-Royal—of history. The Muses. But they have abandoned me now, finally.

I don’t blame them. Not really. I’ve demanded a great deal of them over the years. They’ve granted me redemption—absolution—any number of times. If I were someone else, a lesser being, I might still hope for Pallas Athéna to sweep down from the clouds in her chariot, her intricate machine.

But I look to the skies and see only myself. Alone. Hair down around my shoulders. Not smiling. Not even holding out a hand. I am truly forsaken.

Sometimes there is truth in a tale. Sometimes there is a dream.

Now—dear God, I must indeed be dying—I see both, darkly, clearly.