Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [85]
You will ask why I did it. You will judge me. But only a saint would have done otherwise, and I am no saint.
I was tired of His endless silence. I wanted noise. I wanted the hurricane swell of applause. Whistles and shouts and ringing bravos. The pattering of roses flung onto the stage.
I did not want His cold love. I wanted human love—clasping, selfish, and hot. I wanted to smell the rank sweat of the men in the pit as they bellowed and stamped and the rich perfume of the high-priced whores in their boxes. I wanted fishwives to bare their breasts and merchants to throw their purses. I wanted love—reeking, drunken, hungry love.
What player ever wanted less?
This is how it was for me before. Before the devil looked my way. Before Orléans made me his own …
I stood alone onstage at the shabby Theater Beaujolais, head down, picking at a callus on my palm. I’d escaped my uncle and his damned puppets to come here. I’d just given Audinot, the owner, lines from Juliet. It was good, my audition. So good that the prompter stopped eating. The stagehands stopped hammering. And up in the rigging, the lantern boy wept. But it didn’t matter. It never mattered.
She is not beautiful, Audinot said. And she has no bosom.
He didn’t even try to keep his voice down. I hated him for it.
She recites well and her expression is most sensitive, said the lackey at his elbow.
The parterre does not pay to see sensitive girls. Only pretty ones, Audinot replied. He smiled at me, oily as a mackerel. Thank you, miss. Next!
And this is how it would be after. In a year, perhaps two. When the revolution was over, the madness ended, the king back at Versailles. This is what Orléans promised me if I would do his bidding.…
A summons would come from the National, addressed to Alexandre Paradis, for Alexandrine was no more. None mourned her, least of all me, for Alexandre made a far prettier boy than Alexandrine had a girl. I would be given small parts at first—servants and soldiers, fools and gravediggers. Then Chérubin in Figaro, and with it a good review. Orléans himself would see to it. Next I would do Shakespeare’s Tybalt. Claudio and Ferdinand. Then Damis in Tartuffe. Rodrigo in Le Cid. Until one night, I would stand in the glare of the footlights, applause breaking over me like thunder for my Romeo. There is stamping, clapping, shouting—and none of it paid for. A man is crushed in the pit. Women faint in the stalls. The next day, a critic writes that my naturalness rivals that of the great Talma himself. Another that my delivery is unmatched in the history of the theater. A third compares me to a young god.
Though it is December, there are flowers in my dressing room. There are cakes and wine. A ring from Boehmer’s. Women and men come to stare at me as I wash off my paint. They press coins into my hand and kiss me. There are proposals of marriage. And of other things, too, but I’ve paid surly Benôit to protect me. He sits in a chair, one leg thrown over the arm. We pose as a pair of bloods and pay the ushers to put about stories of our wenching and fighting. And I, who have been hungry and cold, eat capon and sleep upon a feather bed.
I tried to be goodly. I tried to be godly. But I got so tired of being ignored.
Cry your grief to God. Howl to the heavens. Tear your shirt. Your hair. Your flesh. Gouge out your eyes. Carve out your heart. And what will you get from Him? Only silence. Indifference.
But merely stand looking at the playbills, sighing because your name is not on them, and the devil himself appears at your elbow full of sympathy and suggestions.
And that’s why I did it. Why I served him. Why I stayed.
Because God loves us, but the devil takes an interest.
13 May 1795
The queen did not know me. I barely knew her. Only one year had passed since last I saw her, yet she had aged twenty. Her blond hair was turning white. There was a gauntness in her face and deep lines about her eyes.
I was brought to her apartments by the Tuileries