Jeannette stood motionless at the back of the darkened cabaret, ignoring the tray of cigarettes and sweets she was supposed to be selling, still trying to figure out whatever
was behind the magic of Loïe Fuller’s performance.
The diminutive American was every bit as much a conjurer as a dancer, swirling meters and meters of a moonlit silken garment around and above her head, now hiding, now revealing her form. She seemed to grow to the size of a mythical bird—a phoenix—with outstretched fiery wings, all the while turning and turning, the fabric unfurling like a sail, then folding like a rose, lit by a luminescence in otherworldly colors. The lights that revealed her came not only from above and beside the stage but also somehow from the fabric itself. It shimmered, glowed, and transformed the dancer, creating the illusion of an ever-changing storm of fairy-dust raining down from the heavens.
The gentlemen with their top hats and monocles sat as if hypnotized, their aperitifs held motionless mid-air.
There was some element involved in the stagecraft, something physical and yet invisible, that mystified Jeannette. All the waiters and the other cigarette girls had also stopped whatever they were doing, to simply stand there and gape.
When la Loïe rose up from the bow that was a perfect mime of a dying rose—when she unfurled the fluttering silken sails of her sleeves, turned back to ecru silk again—the applause was so great, and the men stamped their boots so hard, that all the glassware on the little wooden tables rang like bells.
This was Jeannette’s seventh time seeing the performance, but it was no less thrilling than it had been the first time. Rumor had it that Madame Loïe concocted whatever it was that made the colors so magically glow with the help of a brilliant and determined young Polish woman, a chemist—some said an alchemist—who’d been spotted in the audience more than once, always in the company of her husband, Monsieur Pierre Curie.
The lights were lit again. Jeannette adjusted her décolletage, ran her tongue over her teeth, and smiled—because this was always the moment when the most generous tips were handed out. She needed to make out well today if she was to earn enough to pay the rent on her little rat-trap of a room. An elderly gentleman pressed a five-franc piece into her palm. A younger man, who didn’t seem very gentlemanly at all, stuffed a note into her bodice, squeezing her bottom with his other hand as he did so. And then a very clean-looking young apprentice, in apron and wooden clogs, turned to her with tears in his eyes—real tears. He ran his hands down her arms as if she were a marble statue of the Virgin. And then he leant forward and kissed her on the mouth, chastely, his eyes half closed. He looked as if he were about to swoon. Jeannette waited a moment before pushing him away.
Looking as surprised as she, he bowed with incongruous elegance. “Forgive me, mademoiselle,” he said. “I was overwhelmed by the sensations of beauty.”
She couldn’t help but smile. She’d been kissed out of the blue before, but never so sweetly. He was about her age, maybe a year older. Looking into his clever brown eyes, she could see something formidable and compelling about him, despite his youth and humble garb. “Who are you?” she asked.
The apprentice rose up to his full height—he was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested but not really very tall. His eyes seemed to sparkle with a remnant of Loïe Fuller’s pixilated light. “At your service, mademoiselle!” he said, sweeping another dramatic bow. “I am Paul Poiret.”