Visions of Isabelle (20 page)

How marvelous
, she thought,
to find a fantasia in Paris
. And then she thought:
how false!

She stood in line for an hour, finally ascended to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, and from there gazed down at the extraordinary scene below.

Paris glitters
, she thought,
money flows in the streets, and literature is supreme. Here I shall make a success, take whatever I can get and disappear back into the dunes.

Though the "City of Light" amazed her, it depressed her, too. Despite the wonders of its streets glowing with electricity, and the lavish displays in shops of all the things made by men from all the corners of the globe, despite the swirling mobs that pressed her on the boulevards, despite all of these things and a thousand things more, she became sad when she thought of the desert so far away. Then she longed for the solitude of empty sand, a night aglow with stars, the subtle sound of gently blowing wind, the warmth of a naked sun. Better, she thought, the fevers of that empty wilderness than the smugness of this city of a thousand dreams.

Her daytime walks back and forth across the Champs de Mars were followed by lengthy strolls at night. She would pass through the crowds that thronged the boulevards and mingle with the mobs outside the theater where Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac had been playing for three years. Here desperate men fought for tickets to performances months away. She watched and scoffed at them for pursuing vicarious sensation because they were too cowardly to fling themselves into an adventurous life.

It was the vanity of Paris that struck her at these moments, the meaninglessness of all the efforts being expended on the gaining of wealth, the pursuit of power, the conquest of stunning lovers. She knew then that for her there would always be more satisfaction in beginning a long journey down an unknown road than in bringing this light-filled city to its knees.

Nevertheless she had come for a reason, and so set out on a spring afternoon for the offices of the newspaper
La Fronde
, where she presented herself to its editor, the noted Dreyfusard, estimable friend of the trod-upon and oppressed, formidable heroine of European feminism, Séverine.

She was received in a small office cluttered with letters, manifestos, tracts. The walls were covered with drawings and cartoons which depicted the huge bosomed woman who bustled before her, a person with a classic Roman head surrounded by a halo of wild iron locks. Isabelle waited on a narrow sofa while this frowzy bull paced about issuing orders, scribbling her signature on scraps of paper and commanding an assistant, who appeared at her door like a jack-in-the-box, to "rip up this trash and write it again." Isabelle was amused until she caught sight of Séverine's eyes. Then she was stunned. They were slate-gray, and, when she squinted, they flashed fiercely like a pair of finely honed blades.

These eyes inspected her closely before the two settled down to talk.

"I approve of women who dress for comfort," she said, indicating Isabelle's trousers and blouse. "I'm only disappointed you didn't come to me in your desert robes."

"I've thought of wearing them," Isabelle replied, "if only to make a sensation. But with the Exposition, Paris is already too full of people in peculiar dress."

"Quite right, my pet. How very astute!"

She rifled through the papers that were piled on her desk, finally extracted a purple folder.

"I have read your desert sketches, and though I find them talented, I must tell you frankly they are of no possible use to me."

Isabelle lowered her eyes. For an instant she felt crushed. She'd worked hard her last weeks in Tunis, bringing her slender sheaf of writings to a high polish.

"Now you mustn't be hurt. You describe the terrain very well, and the characters certainly come alive. But these are personal reflections, better perhaps for a volume of sensitive essays than a journal like mine that's engaged. My readers want to know about the scandals, the outrages, nepotism, corruption, who's taking the bribes. I need documentation of conditions in the prisons and the whole stinking Algerian mess."

She was excited now, pacing her small office, pounding her fist into her palm.

"If you can write about those things we can make a good arrangement."

The plump woman studied Isabelle again.

"You do cut quite a figure, my pet. I think it's especially daring that you don't wear scent."

Isabelle laughed.

"My father was in the business," she said, "so, naturally, I loathe perfume."

"How fascinating! And how Russian you look! Those Tartar eyes! I'm sure you'll have a great success in Paris."

"I have many letters. People are kind. But sometimes I feel lost in the salons."

"Ah, but you will catch on quickly to that little game. It's the 'real' Paris, of course. Not what happens in the streets–oh no!–but the talk and manners of a dozen drawing rooms. Unfortunately that's what's wrong with the 'real' Paris, and why I've decided to become the conscience of this cowardly town."

They talked on for a while, and Isabelle found herself intrigued by the quick wit and cunning irony of this impressive woman. As their interview ended, and she rose to leave, Séverine took her arm.

"Would you like to come on one of my weekends? A few close friends, good talk, country food."

She placed her fingers against Isabelle's ribs.

"Yes, my sweet–you could use some fattening up."

Grateful and touched, Isabelle accepted, even agreed to come in her burnoose.

S
he'd been busy since her arrival making calls. The secretary at the Societé Géographique had been particularly kind, agreeing that her Saharan expedition entitled her to membership. But then he set her back when he told her the entrance fee was one hundred fifty francs.

She tried but failed to see the great explorers, Prince Roland, Count Leontieff, Prince Henri d'Orléans. And at the door of the residence of the Prince of Monaco she stood helpless before a footman who refused to accept her letter unless she could first present him with a card.

There was, however, one salon where she was politely received–the home of Maria Laetitia Bonaparte-Wyse, on the third story of a vast mansion on Boulevard Poissonnière.

This woman was known in Paris as "La Ratazzi," for though she was a grandniece of the emperor, she had been married to a minister of King Victor Emmanuel after turning down a match with Napoleon the Third. Now an old lady, deaf as a pot, she received in a series of boudoirs draped in blue satin, the walls and tables covered with Empire memorabilia which included everything from tattered Corsican handicrafts to gold plate bearing the imperial arms. She looked slightly Oriental, like an aging mustachioed Cleopatra wrapped in lacy garments, a poor shriveled old thing who welcomed absolutely everyone and thus had gained the reputation of running a "salon of junk."

Her visitors were not all undistinguished. The American, Isadora Duncan, who was then creating a sensation with her Grecian dances, came by several times. Maurice Ravel occasionally touched the keys of her piano. And a portly sad-eyed man with a pale complexion, who wandered in one day, was, Isabelle gathered from the whispers that greeted his entrance, none other than the infamous though failing Oscar Wilde.

Among the more scrofulous of the regulars was a young curly-headed poet who struck languid poses, wore powder on his face and edited the review
L'Hercule
. His name was Paul Durand and his magazine was a wastebasket for whatever refuse writers such as Daudet, Lout's or Anatole France happened to have unpublished in the back drawers of their desks. It was a standing joke that he would pant at the merest mention of a baron, and would fawn before a duke. He would do anything for money, including sleeping with rich old ladies, but he never paid his contributors, and had a nasty habit of "borrowing" their writings and publishing them without consent.

Isabelle knew she was failing to make an impression until one day this creature presented her with a long-awaited chance. She overheard him describe her as a "Slavic hermaphrodite," and without thinking of the consequences marched up to him and emptied her coffee cup onto his lap.

He shrieked, stood up, called her an "awkward moose" and bellowed that he would send her a bill for the cleaning of his suit.

Suddenly the room became still. Everyone was waiting for her reply.

"It'll be the first time that stinking thing's been cleaned," she said, and turned her back.

At once she was surrounded, for such coarseness as she'd displayed was then in great repute. And since there were scores of writers chez Ratazzi, she revelled, for a while, in the literary life.

The Count and Countess de Triche pursued her. Fabrice de Triche, a facile journalist, had a swarthy complexion and the cruelest face Isabelle had ever seen. For years he had worked on a novel about his ancestors, but was more notorious for his rudeness than anything he ever wrote. His American wife, Clarissa, was an untalented poet, and bore the scars of nightly beatings at the count's vicious hands. She tried hard to win Isabelle's friendship, took her to lunch and confided that her husband, inspired by her example, wanted to change his name, too. Later, when Isabelle ventured the notion that he wanted to do this because he had come to loathe himself, both Triches began to tell terrible lies about her and to turn their backs whenever she came close.

There was a Dutch journalist who wrote with great concern about Great Social Issues, but who could speak of nothing but treacherous servants, false friends and the expenses of constructing his house. Isabelle preferred him to his companion, a simpering, balding creature whose specialty was the literary crucifixion. This man would pretend to be kind in order to entice people to reveal their inner miseries, and then would skewer them in ironic short stories in which they would appear as fools, and he, the literary bystander, would be depicted as compassionate and wise. She learned wariness from these two and also an important truth: that some men who love men despise women more than anything else.

These regulars and the many other writers who dropped in at La Ratazzi's caused her finally to be disillusioned by the literary life. They were competitive, vicious, malicious toward one another and had nothing in common with her ideals. Writers, she learned, were likely to have ugly souls, the degree of ugliness often in direct proportion to the beauty of the prose. They were as mean about money as the most avaricious tradesmen and were quite pleased to forfeit all honesty for the sake of a cutting line.

The villa of Séverine was full of slopes and curves, art nouveau grills, embracing sweeps. The center section was set back so that the two wings of bedrooms reached out to hug the visitor, pull him to the heart. This was a splendid salon filled with bowls of flowers and soft cushioned sofas covered with warmly colored fabrics of floral design. The light, dappled by vines outside the windows, filtered through the branches of chestnuts giving everything inside a coating of sheen.

The grounds, too, were warm, embracing. Mysterious lanes meandered out of a lawn to secret nooks hidden be-hind ferns. In the center of the lawn two charming swans glided on a small lake. As the women strode toward it, Séverine told how in summer she liked to hire musicians to sit on the grass and play Chopin.

"Then," she said, "I can feel that I've actually escaped, left behind all my political burdens, my imprisoned anarchists and long-suffering Jews, to become the sensual being I truly am."

The garden had an aspect of a maze, but one without menace, built not to imprison or confuse, but to coddle, to assuage. Isabelle felt that around each corner she would find some sweet aroma or fragrant bush. The house and grounds were one long symphony of fabulous scents, and, as Séverine led her, Isabelle found herself becoming drowsy, and was reminded of the gardens outside her house in Tunis that flooded her room at night with the dizzying fragrances of roses.

There were a number of attractive persons in various places around the house and grounds–reading in the drawing room, playing badminton on the lawn or just toying with a bilboquet while reclining in one of the garden's hidden naves. As they strolled, Séverine made introductions. Isabelle was presented as "Si Mahmoud," and the others by their first names, too: "Evelina," "Natalie," "Odette," "Gilberte," "Lucie," "Albertine," "Eugénie" and several more.

All these young ladies were extremely elegant, with long blonde or auburn hair, in one case so long it reached to the girl's knees. Each comported herself with a regal, swanlike gracefulness, and wore a warm engaging smile that lingered upon the lips. In the end it was their eyes that struck Isabelle the most–grayish, steely, with the same cutting severity as Séverine's.

She was eventually shown to her room, and here, for the first time in ages, lay down upon a luxurious bed. She dozed off and only awoke when a servant rapped gently at the door. The guests were assembling; Madame requested her presence downstairs. She dressed in her finest outfit–red boots, Arab cloak, scarlet fez–and descended to the salon.

As she approached she could hear the chiming of silvery laughter, a soothing glossy sound that suggested pleasure. She entered to find the others already there, some in black "smokings" leaning against the mantel where they puffed on slender cigars, others, more daintily attired, ensconced in chairs or perched on cushions on the floor. All were arranged in a pattern around Séverine who, stunning in a riding habit, stood apart, turning this way and that, occasionally swishing for emphasis at the sides of her boots with a horn-handled crop. Her young audience responded to her monologue with glances of shared knowledge, for her subject was the vulgarity and ineptitude of men.