Jeannette Dupres was seven years old when her adored maman contracted scarlet fever. Jeannette was sent away, for an unspecified period of time, to live with some cousins from her father’s side. Arriving in a carriage two weeks later, dressed in mourning, Monsieur Dupres brought a new black dress for Jeannette to wear to her mother’s funeral.
Everything good and sweet in Jeannette’s life up till then was buried that year under the rich dark soil of the Pont du Cens cemetery in Nantes. Her father’s eldest sibling—a dour woman who had always seemed faintly repelled by Jeannette, despite her pretty looks and winning ways—came to keep house for them. Jeannette’s papa immersed himself more and more in his work at the Bureau de Change, often dining out and returning home long after Jeannette had cried herself to sleep.
Her aunt, hoping to find a way to distract the child from her grief, enrolled her in the elementary ballet class at the École de Danse Classique.
Jeannette took an immediate liking to the studio, the teachers, and the other girls there, all of them devoted to the study and practice of ballet, to the discipline of training their bodies to move in prescribed ways passed down over hundreds of years by masters of the art. She loved the special clothes required for class—white satin slippers and tights, tunics or frothy tutus—which made her feel like part of a flock of beautiful birds.
Her teacher was pretty and kind. With practiced hands, she gathered Jeannette’s long hair into the requisite chignon and pinned it in place. Jeannette looked on in the mirror, her eyes wide. She loved the mirrors, which lined every wall.
First position, second position, third position—legs turned out, hands and arms shaped just so. One hand on the barre, toe pointed, leg extended—one long line. Back arched, neck long. Fifth position—shoulders back, arms overhead in a perfect oval. Head held high. Posture—she’d never thought about posture before. It was all a revelation.
Flushed and excited after her introductory class, Jeannette seemed, to both her father and aunt, like a changed girl—and she slept beautifully that night. The next day, she informed her papa that she wanted to take as many ballet classes as he would allow—every day, if possible.
She didn’t tell him that the dance world—for she soon realized that’s what it was—conferred on her a greater sense of belonging than anything she felt amongst her cousins or, since her mother’s death, at home.
That world was not without its bitter pills. Although Jeannette had the requisite long legs and short waist just right for ballet, her turnout was poor. Even worse than that, she was told that her long first toe would make it difficult, if not impossible, for her ever to dance en pointe. These disabilities only made her more determined to work her way up from the lowest place in the line, to demonstrate that—although she was now motherless, and her father was cold, and her aunt was scandalized by everything about her—Jeannette would prove herself worthy, after all, of love and admiration.
Alone in her room, she read her school assignments lying flat on her back, her bottom shoved against the wall and her legs spread-eagled, using gravity to remake her body. She devised a set of exercises to increase the rotation of her hips and improve the turnout that seemed to come so naturally to many of the other girls, whose fifth position was perfect—who could drop into splits as if they were made of rubber instead of flesh and bone. The physical pain would sometimes make her cry—and also helped her know that she was making progress. She wiped away the tears impatiently.
At night, or in idle moments at school, Jeannette fantasized about having an operation to cut off the tip of her big toe, giving her the perfect squared-off feet made for toe-shoes.
When she was finally allowed to take classes en pointe, both of her big toes bled, leaving brown stains on the rags and cotton wool she stuffed inside her shoes. She woke up the next day with several of her toenails turned black and blue. She kept the blood a secret. The pain lent a prescient intensity to her dancing.
By the age of fourteen, Jeannette was given leading roles in all the school’s recitals.
Her aunt disapproved, judging the girl’s obsession with dance to be unnatural. Her papa attended the recitals, and applauded at the right times, always judiciously. Once he told Jeannette that he was proud of her hard work and dedication, adding that he hoped she would soon find a worthy goal.
Her goal was to become a professional ballerina, despite her aunt’s protestations that no decent people would ever allow their son to marry such a person. The stage was the realm of the demi-monde.
But only when Jeannette was dancing on stage did she feel fully alive, excited, and happy. She didn’t care if this meant she was a wicked person. She didn’t want what her father and aunt envisioned for her future.
She dreamed of feeling an audience in her thrall—astonishing them with her skill and artistry as a dancer. Moving them. Weaving a web of magic around them.
At home or with her extended family, Jeannette felt a helpless sense of failing again and again to measure up or fit in—or even to be seen. She knew that dance classes would soon come to an end for her, as the school only taught girls up to the age of sixteen. She was offered a place there as an assistant teacher. But what Jeannette wanted, she was quite sure, couldn’t be achieved in Nantes.
In any case, her father told her, not unkindly, Jeannette was at the time in life when she would need to lay the ground for her future—to acquire the skills and charms that would allow her to take her place in respectable society, to have her own home and keep her own table. In a very few years, to start a family.
Her father’s words terrified her.
The day after her sixteenth birthday, Jeannette packed a suitcase, gathered the little bit of money she had—and, choosing a time when she could leave undetected, boarded a train bound for Paris.