AN INTERLUDE IN
THE SULTANA’S PALACE

Mme. Adélie Tremier.

NOVEMBER, 1908.

“Caw!” Manu shouted. “See? It recognizes me. Caw!”

A thin crow sat hunched on the garden wall, its chest feathers wet and askew as though to demonstrate how its species en masse might benefit from mulled wine and a glowing fire. Manu set his easel down in the gravel path and took a case of pencils from his coat pocket.

“You were right not to bring pastels,” said Adélie, stopping behind him. “Everything’s black and grey out here.” She felt a flush in her cheeks as sweat trickled from her hair onto her temples. “What do you imagine, the trees as well?”

But Manu had already twisted up his face like a nautilus, indicating that he was busy about his work. Two deft strokes on the paper—unmistakably a crow’s beak.

“A work of art,” said his mother. “But I must leave you in ten minutes. There’s an office I’ve yet to visit.”

The boy tilted his head to again study the crow and without glancing at the paper quickly began to sketch the feathers down its chest. Sabine had dressed him in his “garden attire” of brown boots, tan riding breeches and a black woollen jersey, topped with a beribboned straw boater which he’d tugged down to his brow in order to increase the fierceness of his aspect. With a softer pencil he began to sketch black swaths across the bird’s body. Other crows raised a din in the neighbour’s yard—would his model fly o¤? No, it only stamped a wiry foot. A chill breeze rattled brown stems in the beds.

“Do you really think I’ll get into the Académie d’Italie?”

“Nothing definite yet.”

“He’s the most boring bird in the world! I’ll see if he can even fly.”

The gardener had not been lively in his work, for a dozen pears lay mouldering in the grass. Manu picked one up as nimbly as possible so as not to soil his cu¤.

“The Krupp breech-loading cannon!” he cried.

The crow gazed nonchalantly at a passing cloud just as a three-kilogram Prussian shell struck it squarely between the wings. The bird dropped behind the wall without a stray feather to mark its passage.

Manu looked to this mother for applause but instead found her massaging the bridge of her nose, her hand beneath her veil.

“My boy,” she sighed, “you haven’t any notion what a cannonball like that would really do, have you?”

“Now I’ll see if there are frogs!”

Easel beneath his arm, Manu ran for the rain barrel. The crow on its flapping page looked far more dignified than it had in life. Adélie rose to start after him but the blood rushed from her head. She thrust her arms out as though balancing in a rowboat before dropping solidly onto her behind.

Through her veil she watched Manu run back to her. In his open mouth his teeth looked exceptionally white.

“Up,” she said, “up.”

He helped his mother to her feet then let her lean against him while she brushed gravel from the back of her skirt.

“Not a word to your grandma, you remember?”

“A man with crutches is standing at the gate,” said the boy.

Gripping Manu’s shoulder, she stepped carefully along the gravel toward the narrow side entrance. A hawk-faced man with a brown beard peered in at them.

“Good morning,” Adélie called.

“Yes, Madame. I was with the 2nd Foreign Legion Regiment in Algiers.”

“Well, do come in.”

Manu slid the bar across and the veteran hobbled in. A checked trouser cu¤ flapped where his right foot ought to have been.

“Couldn’t you get a wooden one?” asked the boy.

“Hush,” said Adélie. “This way to the kitchen, sir.”

“They strapped one on, son, but it chafed like whipcord.”

With that he hopped ahead of them toward the house; obviously he’d been before, though she couldn’t claim to recognize the soldier. The Battalion of Forgotten Men, she called her veterans, and now it seemed she was forgetting them herself. For years now Isabelle had kept a pot of soup simmering at the back of the stove.

“If it happens that I’m not here,” she said to Manu, “you can let them in yourself.”

“Not here?” He squinted up at her.

NOT UNTIL SHE’D first clad herself in black and peered through a veil did Adélie notice how many women dressed likewise were walking through the streets of Paris. Even now, racing up rue St-Honoré so as not to miss her carriage home, here were a half-dozen climbing up from the Métro. She swam through the mass of shoppers as sweat streamed down her cheeks, stinging the corners of her eyes and ultimately pooling beneath her sti¤ collar. She’d burnt her tongue gulping co¤ee at Le Petit Fumoir—she ought not to have stopped in at all, but it had been months since she’d been so far abroad.

“Ah! Here’s our patroness of the arts,” Sabine told Mauriac. “Find us at the Rivoli exit in fifteen minutes. Don’t stand gaping!”

“Aren’t you going home now?” asked Adélie.

“Nonsense!” smiled Sabine. “Let us enjoy a moment together!”

With a pneumatic hiss the two pushed the revolving door until an overeager shopper trod on the hem of Adélie’s gown, and she seized her mother-in-law’s arm to keep from falling. At least the door was wide enough for their hats.

“Can’t you see through the veil?”

They were disgorged into the store. A pewter-haired concierge with braided epaulettes smiled wryly at them—obviously retired military. Hundreds of shoppers shouted and whistled, the tearing of wrapping paper and ringing of signal bells sounded from all directions, youngsters gazed sparrow-like from the walkways three and four storeys up and escalators rumbled like waterfalls down from Millinery or Silks while their counterparts rose toward Flatware or Furs or Mezzanine Café.

“I require a sideboard for an upstairs corridor,” Sabine told the concierge, who beckoned to the page, a thin lad who’d gnawed his bottom lip bloody. Even working here would be preferable to St-Lucien Military College, thought Adélie. Braving the crowd’s sharp elbows, the boy led them onto an escalator.

“As you have nothing to report,” said Sabine, “I assume they were unresponsive.”

With her great lace ru¤ Sabine resembled an aroused hen. Adélie gripped her clutch-purse and the clattering rail.

“I left a portfolio in case they changed their minds,” she said.

“Though they’ll accept no students younger than twelve.”

“So they continue to maintain.”

“I marvel at your e¤orts, don’t misunderstand me. I suppose it doesn’t matter to these painters that you’ve worked so tirelessly for the downtrodden with the, what is it, the Anti-Penury League?”

“I haven’t time to dwell on that.” Adélie pinched the bridge of her nose. “I must adopt an entirely di¤erent tack.”

Alighting at the next storey, the page led the women to an over-rouged girl with a tremendously tall head of copper hair who in turn led them into the jungle of furniture.

“They certainly know their business at St-Lucien, taking them as young as they do! Honestly, I don’t think either of you will mind so much as you make out—they don’t arm them with bayonets in the first year, you know!”

Adélie smoothed the black veil against her cheek, an old habit by now.

“If there really is no alternative,” she said, “I will take him away and disappear.”

Sabine’s mouth dropped open to reveal her tawny bottom teeth.

“Madame?” asked the copper-headed girl.

Sabine pirouetted and ran gloved fingertips across polished beech and deep mahoganies as though her mind had never been on anything else. She banged drawers and jangled latches as the girl intoned a litany of economical prices.

Adélie dropped gratefully onto the first of a row of piano benches. Three narrow-trousered young men passed without so much as a glance at her boot-clad ankle—there really was only a hair’s breadth between widowhood and actual death, wasn’t there? No, she ought not to even joke about it. Dr. Bonheur had told her to remain positive.

“I’ll have to ask the department manager,” the salesgirl said.

Sabine turned back to her daughter-in-law, lips pursed so tightly as to produce unnatural dimples. Her voice was soothing as a pot of cream.

“I know the modern widow need only wear her veil six months, yet you acquiesced to twelve, as well as a good deal of seclusion. I do appreciate the gesture. After the year is up I won’t begrudge you a party, what do you say to that?”

Adélie rose from the bench as grandly as she was able, steadying herself on a pole-lamp topped with a turbaned Negro in porcelain—Nicolas would have laughed at such a thing. She placidly folded her veil onto the brim of her hat so that, unobstructed, she might meet Sabine’s gaze with one equally candid.

“I will accept your generous o¤er.”

“Splendid!”

“Provided that our agreement still stands that I have until his birthday to find another college. Need I remind you, yet again, that St-Lucien’s entire graduating class of 1869 was killed in a single Prussian advance?”

“Oh, I would never renege,” said Sabine, “though I don’t see how you’ll do it in, what, five weeks—you’ve stained your hands blue writing all of those letters, and the bruise hasn’t gone where that door hit you! Don’t you have another appointment with that Bonheur? See what he thinks of your bruise!”

The copper-haired girl returned with a most accommodating o¤er but Sabine replied that none of the pieces were really suitable after all. The grand lady led Adélie to the escalators but they stepped onto the wrong one and found themselves amongst women in drooping hats pawing through bins of discounted yarn.

“I admire good painting,” sighed Sabine, “but I can’t name one instance when a painter saved a village from cannon fire, can you?”

“No,” agreed Adélie, “artists seldom do anything so grand. But they’ll respond to what is grand, I have no doubt of it. They demand spectacle.”

“My dear, is that a new-found determination I hear?”

“It isn’t new,” said Adélie.

Over the gleaming back of a clockwork elephant they finally glimpsed the exit to rue de Rivoli.

“Mauriac is going to be peevish,” said Sabine. “Time was not with us.”

And never will be, thought Adélie.

ONE MONTH LATER

“Thank you for coming up early, Marie.” Adélie balanced her black hat atop a porcelain head on the vanity. “I can’t imagine how long this might take—trading these weeds for Oriental vestments.”

“I was just trying to sponge the co¤ee stain from your magazine,” said the putty-faced maid, “and I noticed something about these Musical Society grand balls given at the Académie du Palais Royal by, oh, what was the name—”

“Gre¤uhle is head there.”

“Yes, Count Gre¤uhle—and not to presume too much, but I wondered did you think to invite him?”

Since Berenice’s decline Marie had become Adélie’s absolute confidant; Sabine would’ve choked on her tongue to hear how the two carried on.

“He has yet to respond. The name Tremier is too synonymous with military o¤ensives.”

“Sponging your edition did little good anyway.”

Adélie lowered herself to the pink ottoman. Marie pulled the pins from her hair.

“You’re wonderfully pale! All women should be made to wear veils, Madame, you ought to write your magazines to say so— you won’t need powder. Berenice could have had the day o¤ if she’d been here! I asked after her this morning and Madame said the poor creature is a good deal better, if doctors can be trusted!”

“You’re all aflutter!” laughed Adélie. “One would think a ball had never been held in this house!”

She lifted her black cloud of hair and the maid set to work unfastening the buttons at the back of her collar. As the blouse fell open Marie gave a start—there was only a white shift upon Adélie’s back.

“Madame! Did Isabelle not fit your corset?”

“Why should she? I’ve gone thin as a breeze through a keyhole.”

Marie frowned at the back of the mistress’s head then cracked her knuckles mechanically and crossed to the wardrobe, lifting out three muslin-wrapped garments and laying them with a sweeping motion across the chaise longue.

“The sandals too,” said Adélie.

Something crashed in the adjoining room.

“Who’s that?” Marie drew herself up. “Sylvie?”

The designer Lepape appeared in the doorway. He tucked his bowler hat beneath his elbow, unfolded his handkerchief and placed it atop his bald head.

“Only a little vase I ran into,” he panted.

Marie seized his wrist and dragged him from the room.

“We are dressing, sir!”

“And who do you suppose fit her for it, my minx, Franz Lehár? When I create a thing I do it top and bottom!”

“Ask him what his business is!” called Adélie.

“But a dressing room! And now you’re in her bedroom, it’s no better!”

“Here behind the armoire, will that be acceptable, my vixen, just here? Tell Madame that according to the caterer the sherbets will be spoiled utterly if the incense is lit any time prior to eight o’clock, while I maintain the incense ought to be there from the beginning or not at all. If one or the other is to go she must decide.”

“What if we separate the two at either end?” Adélie held the dress to her chest despite the wall between them. “Would the sherbets be all right then?”

“Incense as they enter and sherbet the destination? Genius, Madame! The panther won’t be disturbed either way. Incidentally, those birds flew straight—”

“Out, sir!” Marie shouted. “I’ll shatter your skull if—”

ADÉLIE PUSHED the tall door open and found a battlefield. The governess Sylvie was curled on the couch, sorting pastels on a tray, while every other surface of the bedroom—floor, counterpane, windowsills, desk, shelves, toy boxes, the tops of the wainscotting—was crowded with tin soldiers as well as a single company of intricately folded playing cards. Manu crouched on the seat of his desk chair, patiently positioning canvas tents upon his pillow. With the exception of the crucifix over the bed, every centimetre of wall space was crowded with his artwork, despite dozens of pieces having been moved to the downstairs gallery. Sylvie straightened up but did not venture to put her feet down.

“Oh! Good evening, Madame!”

The girl’s high bun suited her slender neck, Adélie decided, but failed to compliment her enormous ears. Manu affixed a regimental banner to one of his tents.

“I could pretend it was Saarbrücken if I had more artillery to put on the hill. Oh! Maman… what are you dressed as?”

“As a sultana. Do you not think I look terribly artistic?” She passed between battalions, took up a clothes brush and attacked his black wool coat hanging on the wardrobe—but wouldn’t it better serve its purpose daubed with paint?

“You never said it was a costume ball!” said Manu. “Will there be pirates?”

“Well, I believe the nature of pirates lies in their unexpected arrivals.”

Manu’s mouth hung open with his tongue upon his bottom lip—his most common expression, she recalled, from when he was four years old.

“I mean to say I don’t know whether there’ll be pirates,” said Adélie.

“That coat cuts into my armpits!”

“I see the cavalry is making good use of your Mon Journal collection. Have you read the one that arrived yesterday?”

“I like the story about the orphan boy, but the dancing bear isn’t in it anymore.”

“Anything’s preferable to Saarbrücken, I should think.”

“Is the ballroom really full of birds?”

“Five dozen larks, Lepape says.”

“Can they sing ‘The Heavenly Fire’?”

“They cannot sing ‘The Heavenly Fire’ and I wouldn’t want them to if they could—larks are meant to add to the sense of natural splendour. The trilling birdsong of the East.”

“Did they come from the East on a Messageries Maritimes boat?”

“They were most likely caught in a Métro station.”

“See what I found out!” He wrenched a rider from its saddle— the poor man was dreadfully bowlegged. “He looks like he’s wet his trousers!”

“Hush with such things,” muttered Sylvie.

“He does,” agreed Adélie. “Remember, I’ll bring you down when it’s time to meet all those people I mentioned. Can you remember what you’re meant to talk about?”

“Um, yes,” said Manu, an artillery piece between his teeth. “Marc Chagall.”

“Chagall, yes, but what are you meant to say about him?”

“Emotive colour. Rich emotive colour?”

“Certainly, but what movement is he in, what do they say about him?”

“Um. Oh, avant-garde!”

“Finally, yes, avant-garde. You must remember it.”

“But,” asked Manu, “do I paint avant-garde?”

“No, dear, but they wouldn’t want you to. Ninety minutes, Sylvie? We’ll ride up in the cage together but I don’t want dancers stepping on him beforehand.”

“I’ll step on them!” said Manu, scattering a company of infantry across the rug.

“I have your colours ready, Emanuel.” With her tray Sylvie tiptoed between rows of medical tents. “Which part of the battle did you mean to draw?”

The boy looked up attentively. Three nights before he’d awoken with fever and when she’d appeared in her nightdress he’d glimpsed a beguiling stripe of hairy calf.

SEVEN BUTLERS had been engaged to collect hats and overcoats and to usher guests the ten metres from the front door to the ballroom. After the first two hundred people arrived there was a brief lull and the butlers sat in a row at the bottom of the grand staircase, though a conscientious few leaned their elbows on the banister so as to not wrinkle the tails of their hired coats.

“Show me where I can vomit.”

“Is that what incense is?”

“I thought a load of dung was burning in the lady’s furnace.”

“We ought to keep towels over our mouths.”

“You’d look like a brigand.”

“A good sultan needs brigands.”

“Why’s that?”

“To violate the harem.”

“Just keep your head between your knees. That any better?”

“Why shouldn’t he want to violate the harem himself?”

“Takes years to become sultan. The average sultan is a withered old man.”

“Keep a look out for vacancies all the same.”

“Show me where to vomit.”

“On your feet, here comes the lady.”

Adélie had seen an illustration in Fémina of the very scene: a girl in a daring ensemble descending a wide staircase toward a crowd of broad-shouldered admirers, a girl whose only concern, according to the caption, had been to find a husband.

“Have Gre¤uhle and Fouquet arrived?” she called. “Or de Vaux?”

“We were told not to inspect invitations, Madame,” answered the butler with the faint blond moustache.

“Don’t stand staring,” she said. “Attend the door.”

Their fourteen heels clattered across the marble as she passed into the gloom behind the peacock screen that acted as gateway to the Tremier ballroom. Another screen, painted with minarets, stood ahead of her, and in the facing mirrors on either side of the vestibule she seemed to walk abreast an infinite number of Adélies dressed in billowing pantaloons of ochre chi¤on below gold-fringed, wire-hemmed white chi¤on tunics held in place by gold lamé cummerbunds, the heads of those infinite Adélies crowned with gold lamé turbans surmounted by sapphires shaped liked eggs. The turbans’ line across these limitless sultanas’ foreheads accentuated their Provençal brows while kohl made their black eyes seem enormous. No sultana painted by Faléro was ever more beautiful.

She rounded the screen through a pink cloud of incense so pungent she couldn’t draw breath—the trouble reasserting itself—but she was gladly distracted as her eyes took in the torchlit scene. First of all there were the acrobats: olive-skinned, hairy-chested men dressed only in sequined vests and pantaloons. On trapezes strung from the vaulted ceiling they dipped and flew, executing somersaults ten metres above the floor, one man after the other like a whirligig caught in a wind. Cymbals, dulled by the din of voices, crashed in accompaniment. The long room was lined with white-pyjama’d boys who circulated the air with palm leaves far larger than themselves, while above all dangled a gilded cage three metres square and festooned with peacock feathers. Flushed male guests sat on aquamarine cushions around bubbling houka pipes as bare-midri¤ed girls with raven tresses fed them oranges and calves’ sweetbreads from silver trays.

Adélie had had the door removed from the corner cloakroom and a bead-curtain installed, as though the little room were a cave of irresistible allure. The electric lights within threw a triangular corona across the ballroom floor. This was the Emanuel Tremier Gallery which every guest would enter, God willing, inhale sharply at the sight of its diverse framed marvels—pencil sketches of neighbourhood houses; watercolours of irises; a charcoal portrait of poor Berenice at the hearth; Marie with her hair down, glaring at the viewer; a scene in oil of a son and greying mother clinging to floating wreckage; a watercolour study of the Seine’s dappled surface—then let their breath out before gratefully signing the register and reaching for Manu’s visiting card. For the present, however, her guests skirted the entry as though they feared its bright lights would dissolve them. She felt some caustic substance creep up her throat.

A shirtless Negro handed Adélie a goblet of shaved ice infused with mint, and she held it close to her chest. For weeks she’d been clipping the most noteworthy “Gentleman of the Orchestra” columns from Le Figaro—the multitude of cabinet ministers attending the Ballets Russes’ Boris Godunov, for example, had made that performance “a politico-artistic manifestation of the highest importance”—and sending each list verbatim to the printer, though she wouldn’t have known any of those notables to see them. This golden-haired boy at her elbow, however, did look familiar.

“Do you know, is there co¤ee? I came in a bit tipsy to begin with.”

“There’s a service at the far end of the room. Shall I see if a girl is available?”

“Oh!” he said. “Are you not…?”

“I am Madame Tremier, your hostess.” She tipped her head. “Your sultana.”

“I don’t need co¤ee then. I don’t! I can fetch it myself.”

“Nonsense, there must be a girl—but I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Fouquet. François Fouquet.”

“Fouquet of the Académie d’Italie?”

“Have you seen my sculpture at the Colarossi? Did you like it?”

“But you aren’t the new head of that school? Overseeing admissions?”

“Ah, yes, that’s true as well, and somewhere there waits a mountain of unsigned papers as proof—ah, I see that look in your eye, you believe I’m too young! The committee wanted new blood, that’s all, so I said blood was what I’d give them.”

The sultana gripped his arm and he did not resist.

“How new?” she asked. “We have a gallery through that beaded curtain, you see, where a ten-year-old boy of enormous talent—”

“When you said ‘Tremier’ did you mean Nicolas Tremier? You’re the widow?”

“I—I, well, yes.”

“This is remarkable! My father was Fouquet the engineer.”

“The man who… designed the bridge?”

“Ah, the commission of inquiry’s still ongoing! Though he’s passed away now—say, will there be dancing? I’d love to spin you around the floor with that getup on.”

“But the admissions at the Académie d’Italie—surely there’s no need to go onto these lists, if I could show you his artwork you’ll see the genius is there already, he—”

“A genius, yes! Hello, I believe that’s Caroline Uzanne, do you know her?”

With the shaved-ice Negro two new arrivals stood chatting: frog-physiqued Louis de Vaux, portrait painter and vice-chancellor of the École des Beaux-Arts, alongside Caroline Uzanne, much-photographed editor of Fémina, rumoured not to have blinked since childhood. As the Negro moved on with his tray, Adélie was upon them.

“You owe it to yourself, and she’ll never know,” Uzanne was saying, pulling back her coat—a green velvet design embroidered with palms—to indicate her thigh. “Be honest, when was the last time Cecile took a really good look at the top of your leg?”

“With her I shouldn’t think any bit of me was safe,” said de Vaux, and with his fingertips smoothed his thin hair down his forehead.

“Practice on the maid, then, until you never leave a bruise.”

“Mademoiselle,” said Adélie, squaring her shoulders, “Monsieur. Pray allow me to introduce myself: your hostess, Madame Tremier.”

She brought her sapphire down to the marble floor with a flawless curtsy.

“The Sultana Tremier, I should say!” barked de Vaux. “Marvellous a¤air!”

“It is Adélie Tremier, is it not?” asked Uzanne. “They told me at the office you had a grown boy, yet here you’re a slip of a thing! And not lacking for style, eh?”

“It runs in our blood perhaps, perhaps it does—my father founded the Lissner shops. And this boy of mine, well, he’s nine, but without saying too much I must admit I have a better eye for painting than for—what would you call this? Spectacle.”

They both nodded, deeply engrossed.

“With a pencil or brush, the name Emanuel Tremier will loom large in this city, and in a very few years. A guest of ours just lately, and a military man, I must admit, so he has no investment in such things, mistook one of his drawings for a photograph!”

“Of what subject?” drawled de Vaux.

“A woman on a café terrace. He is nine, but his eye is that of a man.”

“That would be worth seeing. I represent the École des Beaux-Arts, Madame, which you may not know—”

“You say you must have protégés, Louis.” Uzanne bumped him with her hip. “This fellow sounds the find of the century! Like little Korngold, that composer in Vienna—only eleven!”

The cymbals were louder now and somewhere a zither played.

“Yes, but where are these drawings?” de Vaux asked, hair fluttering up from his head. “Upstairs? I tell you, before I step into my carriage you will lead me upstairs!”

“You need only put your head through that bead-curtain!” cried Adélie.

A cloud of larks swooped overhead—multiplied tenfold as shadows across the ceiling—and a towering Negro hurried past with a bullwhip in his sash. Caroline Uzanne seized her companions’ hands.

“I should like to see where he goes,” she announced beneath unblinking eyes.

“But the gallery’s just there!”

Adélie followed the pair as they shouldered their way between mauve gowns and dark jackets smelling of wet wool and sweat, between women clad in menswear or in tasselled, uncorseted kimonos. The room smelled of hissing pitch and the acrid pong from the black panther which lay upon the tiled dais, separated from the chattering crowd by a ring of torches. Its urine ran down the side of the dais and across the floor.

“I’m quite overwhelmed!” cried Caroline, her face betraying no such emotion.

“In three hours,” de Vaux called to Adélie, “you may lead me upstairs!”

She passed a hand across her sapphire, in a calculatedly coy response, and noticed men’s heads turning from every direction. If women had abandoned girdles the husbands clearly had not— each waistline resembled the thin end of a chop—while each moustache had been waxed to such ruthless points they might have been instruments of assassination. She lifted her arms and turned so her diaphanous sleeves rose about her in the manner of Salome’s famous veils, and tongues paused mid-word, as she’d hoped, but she found the flow of air against her naked ribs disconcerting. Now to lead them like the Pied Piper toward that bead curtain, and all because St-Lucien’s entire graduating class of 1869 had been killed in a single Prussian advance.

“Madame, er… Adélie?”

A curly-haired man in a brown suit gesticulated with an empty wine glass. She felt suddenly ridiculous in her Oriental garb.

“Doctor Bonheur! I am glad you came!” She lowered her voice. “I thought I would need a friend in the midst of all this.”

“But it’s ridiculous!” he hissed. “You know very well how contagious you are!”

“Sultana Tremier!” someone called.

Adélie turned but saw only a trio of Sabine’s cronies: Major-General La Mestrie, Brigadier Moreau and General Subrégis in their double-breasted tunics with canary epaulettes, each man with a glass of brandy in one hand and the other upon the hilt of his sword. But who were these women who’d set them chuckling? As a tray passed Adélie traded her goblet of ice for a tumbler of gin, which she gulped in a single mouthful.

“Sultana Tremier!” one of the women called. “What a success!”

“What a rattling success!” called the other, raising her glass.

Impossible—Julia Cahen Astruc and Monique d’Anvers, who Le Figaro had labelled “the Great Jewesses of Art,” mingling with the French military under her own blessed roof! A politico-artistic manifestation of the highest importance, true, but what role did either play in academic admissions?

Brigadier Moreau took Adélie’s hand. “I like your hat,” he said.

“Only just now,” exclaimed Julia, smoothing down her great ropes of pearls, “we said that if she’d climb onto that panther it would rival Mata Hari once and for all!”

Two new arrivals joined their little circle as the ostrich plume in Monique’s headband swayed precariously: Count de Choiseul, with crimson earlobes and a nonexistent chin, and Countess Renée, half his age, in a floor-length, skunk-trimmed mustard coat. If Caroline Uzanne set eyes on her she might grace the cover of Fémina.

“We wondered if you expect Madame Sabine to come down,” said the count.

“But it occurs to me,” said Julia, “that for a real Oriental ball you ought to have chosen a man for the sultan!”

If I smile gaily, thought Adélie, perhaps they’ll say no more about it.

Countess Renée ran her tongue over her teeth. “Without a husband, you mean?”

“Quite right,” Brigadier Moreau smiled, brandy upon his lip, “and the sultan ought to have cracked his whip and chased her all about that cage!”

“Oh, my dear.” General Subrégis shook his wattles at Adélie. “There’s no shame in being a widow, there’s glory! I saw that child of yours take tea—what a future for the country, with boys like that! And look here.” He pulled back the corner of his tunic to reveal a pistol tucked into his belt. “I’ve brought him a little gift.”

Major-General La Mestrie clipped the end of a cigar. “A Chamelot Delvigne?”

“Blew some Bantus’ teeth out with this, I should say,” grinned Subrégis.

“You never think of anyone like us being killed like that,” said Countess Renée. “Imagine, a falling bridge! Far worse than coughing to death in one’s garret.”

“Block up your ears, Sultana, this is hardly a learned society!” Julia took up a length of Adélie’s sleeve. “But did Lepape make all this for you?”

“He designed every aspect to my specifications.”

An acrobat yelped not far above their heads.

“As we came in,” Monique said, “Count Gre¤uhle told me your spectacle may yet turn his gaze from Berthier.”

“Gre¤uhle of the Académie du Palais Royal? You know, I was told they admitted a boy of twelve—”

“But Adélie!” a woman screamed over Julia’s shoulder. “How could I have known that a count is the son of a marquis? How could we have ever known that?”

Adélie turned and stared the woman full in the face. Here was that light-headed feeling again. Here stood her Henriette, to whom she had not written in a year, still dressed in the highcollared black gown that even in 1899 had been a decade out of fashion. She threw her arms about Adélie’s neck and knocked the breath from her.

“If I’d known Arabia could be like this, I certainly wouldn’t have come to Paris!”

“Henriette? How did you—”

“So it is a surprise! Your wonderful mother-in-law intercepted my letter, you know, and invited me at a moment’s notice—such a giving soul!”

The Jewesses of Art vanished like shadows.

“But you must understand,” gasped Adélie. “It’s for Manu—”

At the clatter of chains she looked to see the glittering cage begin to drop from the ceiling. Had the dancers begun? Where were her boy and Sylvie? She had better—

“Strawberries soaked in laudanum!” Henriette looped an arm around her waist. “I expected I’d feel sleepy! Ah, Arabia! But you ought to have chosen Indo-China!” She straightened up, fingering her pearl choker. “Did you not see my monograph on temple architecture? Oh, but look how your sleeves blow around!” Henriette grasped the chi¤on between two fingers. “If this is tulle you must be a Rothschild!”

“Excuse me,” said a waistcoated gentlemen, “but are you from Tulle?”

“Certainly not!” Henriette set her fists against her hips. “I’m from Aix!”

The man grinned—the line of moustaches behind him looked more poisonous than ever—and Adélie realized with a start that this was the legendary Poulenc himself, Le Figaro’s “Gentleman of the Orchestra.”

“And is that near Tulle?” he asked.

Adélie scanned the crowd for big-eared maids but none were in evidence.

“Surely you know where Aix is!” cried Henriette. “Why it’s—”

“They don’t,” stammered Adélie. “Trust me, dear, they don’t know.”

Here was her mountain of sophistication reduced to a provincial molehill!

“Goodness, my love, you’re fainting!” said Henriette. “Where’s a chair?”

“I must see the panther’s not agitated,” murmured Adélie.

“Is this the girl?” A copper-bearded, barrel-chested man seized Adélie by the wrist. “Let me kiss your hand, Sultana, and wish you every success! There!”

“Count Gre¤uhle!” said Adélie. “Welcome to—”

“Sultana!” Sabine, resembling a pigeon behind her lace bodice, appeared with Subrégis on her arm. “Is it possible you’ve forgotten to give Manu his introductions?”

“But what the devil’s become of Sylvie? Ah, my mother-inlaw, sir, Madame Sabine Tremier—we discuss my son, who is a protégé in the visual arts. If I could beseech you to look over his work, a gallery’s been assembled a few steps away. Just—do you see the bead curtain? I understand there’s school protocol to be observed,” she shouted above the crowd, “but in this matter, I beg you, time is of the essence!”

“I will visit your gallery,” said the count, “if only to see you into a chair.”

“This mob has worn her out,” said Henriette. “And I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Madame, for down in Aix your daughter-in-law was my dearest friend.”

“Do you mean to say she really is from Aix?” Sabine asked.

“For God’s sake, Maman, go find him!”

“Thank you, Monsieur, Mesdames, a thousand times!” Lepape, in aquamarine caftan and sable hat, bowed with courtly grace. “Sultana, your hand? It is time.”

“You’ll deprive us of her company?” asked the count.

“Not yet!” said Adélie. “He—”

“We have brought down the gilded cage, you see!” Lepape seized her wrist. “The labour of weeks comes now to fruition. She ascends to the heavens!”

Acrobats stood motionless on their trapezes as he led Adélie through the crowd; he ignored her attempts to pull away. The cage stood upon the marble floor within its ring of torches, their light illuminating a hundred expectant faces. But Manu’s face? She recognized no one. Perhaps blond Fouquet, at least, was admiring the gallery. Perhaps de Vaux had meant those things he’d said but would be too drunk to remember—if only he could awake with “Emanuel Tremier” ringing in his brain!

“Manu?” she called.

She would kick Sylvie to death! A Negro led her into the cage and seated her on a pyramid of cushions. The door closed and she found herself swaying a metre in the air, then two. Snatched from the earth, despite all her machinations, and Manu left behind!

“Our grand spectacle!” Lepape proclaimed from below.

She watched the ring of torches widen beneath her, and the raven-tressed serving girls, each with a red scarf in hand, circle within it. The panther’s silver chain reflected the flames; the beast licked its paw and the Negro cracked his whip heroically. A cluster of dark women in shimmering headdresses assembled before Lepape, the witch-master from Pilou’s stories, transforming spiders into women.

With a clang the cage ran against the pulleys as her ascent reached its zenith. In the shadows against the wall she discerned the pyjama’d boys gripping the chains, leaning back, shuffling… the cage was too heavy, the poor lambs! The smoke was su¤ocating there against the ceiling and she wiped her eyes with a chi¤on sleeve. He ought to have been swaying there with her.

Now the cage heaved—the descent! Below her the girls spun one way then the other, their whirling scarves companions to the torches. She watched Lepape spread his arms and the women began their ululation, the staccato ayayayayay that was the very sound of a desert wind cresting the dunes. The crowd swirled beneath her, white faces twisting to take in the whole of the spectacle, wineglasses flashing like rubies on a cave floor. She coughed into the back of her hand. That smoke! A pair of dancers sprang into the ring below her and began to leap all about the poor panther, which flicked its tail. Adélie felt near vomiting; she sought out Lepape’s eye. The dancers spun like dervishes in peacock feathers and silver pantaloons, and the female dancer was lovely even as she flew backward while the man’s simian features made him her ideal ornament, and indeed they were Nijinsky and Karsavina of the fabled Ballets Russes, hired by Lepape to portray a pair of genies. Every guest clapped, whistled, shouted like a schoolchild.

Adélie gazed down at Poulenc, his arm around Henriette, his poisonous visage transformed—his portrait of the evening would shine o¤ Le Figaro’s page!—and Caroline Uzanne and Louis de Vaux, grinning like cats, and that bumpkin Bonheur scowling up at her, and François Fouquet clutching Countess Renée’s breasts through her chemise while they madly kissed. Then furiously waving hands—her Manu! Beaming in his black suit, he bobbed above the throng on the shoulders of General Subrégis while La Mestrie and Moreau each gripped a leg. They laughed together like great chums.

The whip cracked again, the red scarves flashed across the blackness and the panther turned an agitated circle. Adélie could not remain upright on the cushions. She knew she ought to acknowledge her admirers with a wave, but that ayayayayay carried more force than gravity. The cage bumped against the floor. She had to climb to her feet but even without a corset she felt as though her chest were pressed between two bricks. The crowd swarmed around her cage, dragging back its shimmering feathers.

“The Sultana Tremier!” shouted Count Gre¤uhle.

Her guests roared as if a long war had been won. She stretched forward until her hands could grip the bars, then dragged herself up, clinging to the side of the cage as though it were timber after a shipwreck. The peacock feathers smelled rank as a tanner’s yard. Lepape unlatched the door, beckoning, and beyond him stood a Negro holding aloft the fabled lamp— yes, bought just the week before from J. Quille Et Fils. She finally relinquished the bars and set a foot outside the cage.

She would wish. She would wish that Manu grow to have children of his own.

But then the sea of faces became a sea of sideways faces passing before her eyes. She had an idea she might be falling, and felt a dozen hands seize her in mid-air. Now she was set down on her back while firelight danced just beyond her eyelids.

“A faint, perfectly fitting! This, the night of her life, and the family—”

“Oh, but! Do you see?”

“Move away, yes, just—”

“Back away, you see—”

“She’s not injured.” This was Bonheur. “Look her over, there’s no wound.”

“But that blood—” Sabine stammered into her ear.

“All from the mouth,” said Bonheur. “Haemoptysis. She’s hemorrhaged.”

“She injured herself!”

“Tuberculosis, Madame.”

“But just like that she couldn’t have—”

“Doesn’t start with the haemoptysis, not hardly. Now don’t make a face like that, lad, she’s breathing in and out! She’s not dead, you’ll have your Maman yet. There, good! Cover her up and take her out of here.”

Strong hands lifted her to move Adélie through the heat of the crowd. It was a great comfort to feel so warm.

“Gruesome,” someone hissed.