She tried not to look around too conspicuously as she followed. She was ringing her hands behind her back and her heart was pounding. She was not at all certain how she would steady herself enough to guide a thread through a needle.
Behind the stage, it was a dark and shadowy space even though it was mellowed by the light of day. She smelled the odor of spilled liquor and faded perfume. It was actually a little ominous, she thought, but that made it all the more exciting. As more costumed dancers passed her, coming and going toward the stage, she began to recognize them from the posters that were plastered brightly throughout the city. There was la Mariska the ballet mime, Mado Minty the principal dancer and the beautiful comedienne Louise Balthy, who was both Caroline the Tyrolean Doll and la Négresse. There was Romanus the animal trainer, Monsieur Toul with his comic songs and the troupe of Spanish dancers in their short red bolero jackets and black fringed hats.
Eva had never been sure what she would do if she actually ever saw one of these celebrated performers up close, much less met them. The prospect was frightening and yet thrilling at the same time.
What if Madame Léautaud rejected her now that she had come this close? Would she be forced to return to the city outskirts? No, she would not let that happen. She would not go back to Vincennes. But if she stayed in Paris with no job there would be little else for her. Louis’s proposal that they become lovers, and he would therefore take care of her, might become her only option.
Poor Louis. He had been her second friend in Paris. Sylvette had introduced them. Since he was Polish, and her mother was, as well, and they all lived at la Ruche, their friendship had been quickly cemented. The three of them had been inseparable since.
Eva was with Louis earlier that day when she had to sneak away for her interview at the Moulin Rouge. She had made a weak excuse about having forgotten something she needed to do, just before she left him, and dashed around the corner. He was standing there unfastening his portfolio of watercolors outside the door of Vollard’s shop barely hearing her for anxiety over a fortuitous meeting of his own. Ambroise Vollard was the famed art dealer just up the hill on the cobblestoned rue Laffitte and, after months, he had finally agreed to see some of Louis’s work.
Louis, whose real name was Lodwicz, had been studying at the Académie Julian, painting in the evenings and selling cartoons to La Vie Parisienne to pay his rent. The fact that his wonderful Impressionist-style watercolors did not sell, but his cartoons did, was a source of frustration to him.
Louis had loaned Eva money and regularly bought her dinner this past year to help see her through financially. She did not want him as a lover but she did not want to let him down, either. Loyalty meant everything to her.
Now, Eva stood before Madame Léautaud in the dressing room behind the stage as she examined the hem Eva had just mended.
“I can’t even see the stitches or the rip, your work is so fine,” she exclaimed with a mix of admiration and irritated surprise. “You may begin with us this evening. Be back here by six o’clock and not a moment later. And do not be late this time.”
“Merci, madame,” Eva managed to utter in a voice that possessed only a modest hint of confidence. A group of theater technicians and stagehands walked past, chuckling.
“During the show you will stand in the wings. Sylvette will show you where so you will be out of the way. If one of the performers needs a costume repair you shall only have a moment to mend a hem or reattach a button, cuff or collar. You’re not to tarry, do you understand? Our patrons don’t pay good money to see torn costumes, but they don’t like an interruption in the flow of the acts, either.”
Then Madame Léautaud leaned a little nearer. In a low tone, she murmured, “You see, Mademoiselle Balthy, our wonderful comedienne, has put on quite a bit of weight. We can only draw the corset in so tightly, yet she can be relied upon to split her drawers during one of her exaggerated pratfalls.” Madame Léautaud bit back a clever smile and winked.
A moment later, Eva was back in the grimy alleyway, feeling the utter thrill of victory for the first time in her life. As she hurried back to the rue Laffitte to catch up with Louis, she thought the sensation she had felt was a little like flying.
* * *
Eva took the funicular up the hill and dashed as quickly as she could back to Monsieur Vollard’s shop. It had been wonderful to have a Polish confidant in Paris these past months—someone who understood her thoughts and her goals in ways that did not require French words, and she had no wish to endanger that now by abandoning a friend.
Louis was like a brother to her, though she knew he wished it to be more. But they were too alike to be suited for one another. He was reliable and kind, and since she’d been in Paris, Eva needed that far more than romance.
Poor Louis, tall and pale with dust-blue eyes, living in the shadow of Eva’s potent dreams. He still had not lost his thick Polish accent. Nor did he long for the sense of city style as she did. He still carefully waxed the ends of his beige mustache, wore a stodgy top hat when he went out, his favorite single-button cutaway jacket and two-tone ankle boots, which had all been fashionable a decade ago.
Still, it was Louis who had created the name Marcelle for her and she would be forever grateful because Marcelle had clearly brought her luck. Over wine at a small country brasserie, Au Lapin Agile, tucked cozily on a little hill in Montmartre, Louis had playfully proclaimed her to be thoroughly Parisian by giving her a name that sounded entirely French.
She had giggled at the new incarnation, but she had instantly liked it, too. It felt whimsical and freeing to be someone else, and there was such exciting power in that. Marcelle could possess an air about herself that Eva could not. Eva was cautious and meek. Marcelle would be carefree and confident, even a little seductive. She had even mastered the proper singsong city accent and altered her wardrobe with little touches to reflect some of the newer fashions, like calf-length skirts and high-waist belts.
Louis told her that she had a nose like a button, small and turned up at the end. She knew her blue eyes were bold and big, and that her long dark lashes framed them. She was petite and slim and he told her the overall effect was an alluringly innocent quality. But Eva did not feel innocent at all. Inside she was a powder keg of determination just waiting to experience life.
She longed to be a part of the vibrant new age in Paris, the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère. The famous Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan were both drawing huge crowds at the Trocadéro, and two years earlier, the well-known dance hall performer Colette had kissed another woman so passionately onstage that she had nearly caused a riot. Ah, to have seen that! Paris was positively alive, Eva thought, a place pulsing with brash young artists, writers and dancers, all as eager as she was to make their mark.
Everyone was reading de Maupassant or Rimbaud, for their realistic portraits of life, and also the radical work of two new Parisian poets, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. Eva loved Apollinaire’s work best for how daring and edgy it seemed to a conservative girl from the suburbs. A passage from his poem “The Gypsy” long had contained her fantasy of a wild, exciting life in Paris.
We knew very well that we were damned, But hope of love along the way Made both of us think Of what the Gypsy did prophesy.
In spite of the steady uphill climb back to Montmartre, Eva was skipping past the string of little shops along the cobblestoned rue Laffitte, beaming like a child as she arrived at Vollard’s shop. Louis saw her through the street-front window. A little bell tinkled over the door as he opened it and came outside.
“My meeting is already finished—I couldn’t even introduce you as my good-luck charm. You knew what this meeting meant to me. Where the devil did you go?”
“I found myself a proper