Portrait of a Modern Christine
Most nights as the Paris Opera during annual Bal Masque were no different from year to year. Flowing dancers, flouncing singers, paint spattered artists, and pompous managers all swirled about the Opera floor in a confused menagerie of color, costume, and mask, rubbing their ever so common elbows with France's most titled blood, the only party in France were sons and daughters of common street musicians and singers could dance with societies glittering bluebloods by virtue of a beautiful voice and talented feet. And so it seemed the panorama of masks would never glide to a stop, the musicians would not cease until the wine ran out. Except for this night.
This night, the crowd stopped for someone as they only had once before, over a century before.
She was not statuesque, not by any means, but her lack of height was made up by her presence, the odd feeling of frozen air and dignified melancholy that overlaid the room as she entered. She walked with casual, assertive grace, locking piercing blue eyes on every pair that met hers as she climbed the darkened steps of the Grand Staircase, her gaze vaguely, innocently feral, causing the former inhabitants of the steps to shrink back from her instinctively, clinging to the stone handrails or, in some cases, to each other. The room's merry buzz of conversation and laughter quickly quieted to a slight, fearful murmur echoing in the sudden silence of the room.
Her ascent was slow, one ghostly pale hand holding the hem of her deep purple dress above the tips of her shoes, the ends of her black velvet frock coat gently trailing on the stairs behind her. She did not look down, stepping up as if it were a climb she'd made a dozen times before, her colorless face staring straight ahead, black-masked gaze riveted on the portrait that now decorated the top landing.
It was old, that portrait, painted in the opera's heyday. The figure was of a young woman, decked in white, the heavy canvas held in place by a gold gilded frame. A small plaque to the bottom gave its name: Christine.
Guests were later to say that the picture had swung out and away from the wall of its own accord, opening like a door on hidden hinges at the slight touch of the masked woman that stood before it. Some fleetingly recall hearing the old echo of a scream.
She approached the painted as if treading on broken glass, reaching gently up to remove a small cord strung with a heavy gate key and a plain gold ring hanging on the wall behind the painting itself. Breaking the cord, she put the gold ring on her left ring finger with aching slowness, before the portrait swung on creaking hinges to resume its normal position on the wall.
The woman stared for several moments at the painting, moving her lips in the ghost of an old song. None present could remember the tune when questioned later. All remembered the shock of her face as she removed her mask.
Though hard pressed to find any guest who would speak of what they'd seen that night, one young man standing on a small balcony in the main room recounted that her face had been that of the woman in the portrait.