Sunday morning again. The applause last night. The slippery satin sheet under her. Hers at home were cotton. These had the monogram of l’Hôtel Crillon. Still feeling the delicious lassitude of having been loved nearly to death, tumbling on a high cloud, she didn’t want to move, didn’t want to breathe except in time to the rise and fall of his chest with the black curls so close to her. She ran her hand over his arm. He rolled onto his side toward her and she threaded her fingers through the springy hair.
He leapt out of bed. “We have to decide on a date.”
He reached into his coat pocket and found his small engagement calendar. She steered him clear of her rehearsals and costume fittings. They settled on the second Friday in August, less than two weeks away, at a village outside Pontoise where they were unknown. They could get there and back to Paris in a day and no one would be the wiser, and Joseph-Paul would tell his father at the right moment that it was a fait accompli, and Monsieur Lagarde would just have to get over it in time for a grand winter wedding in Paris. After all, Joseph was doing what the old man wanted, taking his place on the Exchange even though he loathed it, so he could live out his father’s obsession of wearing a diamond lapel pin and salting away cash.
“I’ve been creeping up on the subject with my father,” Joseph-Paul said. “He still carries on about actresses.”
“What does he say?”
“‘Comédiennes have been excommunicated for appearing in certain roles. You know what that means, don’t you? If they die without absolution, their children are condemned to hell.’”
The way he told her was as though it were his opinion too.
“That was in 1815!”
“What happened to Mademoiselle de Raucour could happen again.”
“You can’t be serious, Joseph.”
“She was refused absolution—”
“Until all the players in Paris threatened to become Protestants.”
She had to do something quickly to get him to shake off his father’s declaration.
“Just imagine,” she said. “Actors and actresses going from theater to theater, gathering more members until the troupe became a mob, spouting lines from Tartuffe. From Phèdre. Imagine the mob singing arias in the streets, shouting, ‘We will never play again, or sing again unless Mademoiselle de Raucour is granted absolution! This will be the last time the streets of Paris will ring with lines from Racine or Corneille!’” She was shouting now. “‘Le Cid will become unknown. The French stage will die!’”
Joseph-Paul was laughing, so she pushed her advantage, stood up on the bed, arms pumping, and sang, “Marchons, marchons!” to spur on the mob. She thumbed her nose at the archbishop and shouted, “No more Molière! No more Racine!” She bounced to the chant until they had wrung themselves out laughing at the absurdity, laughing down the powers of social control and outmoded institutions, and declaring the reign of la vie moderne.
Out of breath, she said, “I wish I could have been one of them.”
She had won him over, and had done so in the spirit of Molière himself. He’d said to his king that the duty of comedy was to correct men by entertaining them, and she had. The issue was closed, at least for today. She bounced down onto the bed, breathing hard.
After some time of silence, he brushed her hair back from her face and took her hand in his. With only a touch of sadness but with gravity, he said, “Someday, you just might have to give up theater.”
Stunned. Her lungs empty, yet she couldn’t inhale.
Monday morning she opened her upstairs window and leaned out over Avenue Frochot. She hadn’t slept well. She had lost her edge yesterday. Lost the chance to pose for Auguste. She had been victorious once, but at a cost too great to pay each Sunday.
Some little bird sang its four-note tune over and over—tum, ta-ta, twee—the two middle notes low and quick and the last one high and long. Poor thing, that’s all he knew.
Joseph-Paul hadn’t said she had to stop performing now. It was only a warning of things to come. She picked up her script. She could memorize her lines outside as well as in. Downstairs she passed her father working out a composition on the piano, the same three bars over and over, and then a bit more, and then more, making something out of silence. She opened the wrought-iron gate to the avenue, and passed Madame Galantière’s ornamental pear tree. Molière could wait. A little walk would clear her mind from yesterday.
The shutters were open in number eight, Gustave Moreau’s reddish stone house. Peering through one of the pointed arched windows, she saw him standing before an enormous canvas on his easel.
There was Eva Gonzalès in her garden at number four, painting to Papa’s rhythm. She was surrounded by orange puffs of marigolds, and behind her, yellow honeysuckle trailed down the garden wall like a veil. “You look like a painting yourself,” Jeanne said.
“A glory of a day. I couldn’t stand to work inside.”
At the base of the crescent, near the iron gate separating avenue Frochot from rue Laval, she listened awhile to a soprano voice pouring out of Victor Massé’s window at number one, auditioning, perhaps, for a new opera. She thought how she had grown up singing the “Song of the Nightingale” from his opera The Marriage of Jeannette.
The tapping of the playwright’s writing machine made her go back to Madame Galantière’s bench in front of her ivy-covered cottage and open the script, Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. She underlined all of Nicole’s lines. Papa played the same three bars, adding the bird’s tum, ta-ta, twee, tripping deftly up the scale. Then he switched instruments and tried it out on the violin. How dear he was, working so methodically. Avenue Frochot beat with creative life more passionately, it seemed, knowing it would soon lose its actress. By Christmas, she would be gone.
That made her grip the bench where she’d fallen in love for the first time, with Molière when she’d read her first play, and had said some of the lines aloud. It was his School for Wives, a silly play, she’d thought at the time, yet she’d loved how that old fool, Arnolfe, had gotten his just deserts for imprisoning his would-be wife, body and soul, and the girl, Agnès, had outwitted him in spite of his attempts to keep her ignorant. A simple comedy targeted at the stuffy, rigid bourgeoisie. She was only fifteen when she’d read it, and Madame had said in astonishment, “My dear, you ought to be an actress.” And three years later, she played Dorine in Tartuffe at the Comédie-Française. Audacious for one so young, the reviewers said.
She felt a pang, thinking that on this bench Madame had opened to her a future. She would have to leave this street she loved in order to live in an apartment above a grand boulevard and go to parties with stockbrokers and bankers and their boring wives.
And leave theater too? Unthinkable. Unspeakable. This would require all the artfulness of Agnès. To Joseph-Paul, esteem was the higher aim. To her, it was admiration for creation. He had to assert himself over a woman more popular and better known than he was, for the sake of esteem. She had to find a way to work around his assertions.
There was that bird again, peeping out his four notes. She tried to whistle it. It came out too breathy, but identifiable. She could whistle it in her new role at inappropriate moments. Better yet, she could try to whistle it and just blow air, even blow air in a coarse way, but concentrate so hard on it, so innocently, and screw up her face so comically. She practiced it now until she burst out laughing at herself. Yes, it did sound like a particular, unfeminine thing. She hoped no one heard it. She could get a laugh that way as Nicole, earnestly trying, only to have it sound like something unmentionable. Amusing, that one little bird could have an influence on music and theater.
“A wife in our social position needs to exhibit a certain level of decorum,” Joseph-Paul had said, sounding for all the world like the character Arnolfe delivering one of his pedantic maxims for good wives. “She should have Wednesday afternoon salons, not Wednesday afternoon rehearsals.”
And certainly not Monday morning practices of unmentionable sounds.
What about modeling? Would he try to curtail that too?
She had to plant her feet in what she knew to be her being, and learn to say no, cleverly, firmly. I love you, Joseph, I can’t live separate from you, but no. She had set a bad precedent yesterday by bending to his demands and not showing up for Auguste. She practiced a line. In all other ways I will honor you, Joseph, but not in this. I must have theater and I must have art.
She went inside, changed into her dark blue dress, and took the script to memorize on the train. In the foyer, Maman waved her arms to Papa’s music. “He hasn’t told me, but I think that will be your wedding waltz.”
Jeanne went into the music room and circled around Papa with his bow raised, waited an instant so she wouldn’t be impaled by it, and aimed a kiss on his temple. “I love it, Papa. It’s lovelier than birdsong.”
“I’m going out,” she told her mother, putting on her gloves.
“Black gloves on a summer day? To the theater or to lunch with Joseph-Paul?”
“To pose.” Looking in the hall mirror, she positioned her felt bonnet with the maroon feathers. “For Auguste.”
Maman’s hands flew up. “Ah, wait a minute.” She hurried into the kitchen and cut an enormous piece of cake. “Chocolate, just like he likes.” Maman grasped her wrist. “If it had been him instead of Joseph-Paul, I would have been just as happy.”