Disclaimer: Moulin Rouge belongs to Baz Luhrmann, Craig Pearce, 20th Century Fox, and tons of other people who aren't me. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's Note: A bit . . . well, I can't quite find the words to describe it. I blame it on having an idea wobbling around in my head that decided to finally emerge around four in the morning. For Black Tangled Heart, who suggested I should write something about Harold and Marie in the first place. Also, while I know there was historically a Charles Zidler . . . well, look at this from a fictional 'movie-verse' point of view, since I'm not sure any effort was really made to make the character historically accurate (aside from preserving his love of electricity in scenes that were cut out).
Remember the words we used to speak,
The promises made have turned to all apologies.
The weight of a storm, our memories,
Still you fly to fight the force of gravity...
– BT, "Force of Gravity"
He used to buy her flowers, when they were young and in love and such romanticism seemed sensible. She had a pretty little vase in robin's egg blue that she arranged them in, but she always threw them away when they first began to wilt, because she never liked to look at dying flowers and think of how wasted the once-beautiful things had become. Every day for the first year they were married, he kept bringing her flowers. And she always put them in that same vase, on an unsteady three-legged table beneath the window.
He told her that he loved her and that she was lovely, and though she had never thought herself a great beauty, he believed her. They lived a simple life, but they were happy in their little flat with its eyelet curtains and peeling rosebud wallpaper. Yet it did not last long. He had always been a dreamer, and while she was content with the simpler things, he always felt the need for more. At first his intentions were good; he wanted to give her more of a life than just that, though she always argued she was perfectly fine with the way things were.
Then his dreams grew to expand that small garret and the daily flower bouquets. He would buy her diamonds and clothe her in silk and warm her with fur, he said, though she wanted nothing more than to have him beside her, something that happened all too little as his ambition turned and slowly began to transform into greed. The flowers came less and less frequently, until they stopped altogether. When it happened, she took a single bloom from that final bouquet and pressed it in her Bible, between the thin pages of Psalms with a fervent prayer that he might someday return to being the man she had married.
Those same prayers she spoke for him every night, when he came home later and later and smelling of perfume or incense or with his voice slurred by a touch of absinthe. And still his dreams expanded. He wanted to save money, he said, he wanted to open a nightclub. It would make them rich, he told her, his eyes lighting up at the prospect the way they used to light up when she told him she loved him.
They began to disagree; disagreements turned into arguments; arguments turned into fights. The morning after he left a bruise on her cheek he brought her flowers again. And she arranged them in the little blue vase on the rickety table and told herself that he had finally seen the error of his ways. His burst of violence had snapped him out of it all, and now he would go back to being the man she fell in love with.
Yet it did not stop there. He had plans and dreams and would not, could not sacrifice them, no matter what she said. She did not see, of course, that he only wanted the best for her. She deserved more than their nearly impoverished lifestyle. She deserved to be made a queen. He did not realise that the sacrifices made would break them in the end.
He finally found the financiers and procured the loans to open his nightclub, and in his top hat he frolicked beneath the spinning red windmill wings in the spotlight powered by the electricity he was so enamored of, while she watched sadly as her own dreams became more and more insubstantial. She thought that once he finally fulfilled this silly, lofty wish, he would go back to his old temperament. But he only became more of a stranger, easily angered as profit was not being turned to properly stave off his debtors.
It was not long before he began to sell their personal possessions, little things at first that he insisted were little necessary. The silver that had been their dowry fetched an adequate sum, and after that the pearl earbobs he gave her on their anniversary, with the promise he would replace them with new, larger ones later. Their wedding bands were sacrificed and she felt a hollow place growing in her heart; she gave her gold rosary that had been an heirloom and reached the realization that she would not have a daughter of her own to pass it on to.
He continued until there was nothing left, until he had only one last thing to sell: her. And she let him, because she loved him and he needed her. One night with his financier, a thankfully mild old man, and he managed to clear a month's debt. She could not even find the bitter tears to cry when it was over, and so he took it as a sign that she did not mind. He gave her roses for her grand performance and pretended that he had not given away her dignity and her pride, while she wondered how they had come to this.
Soon he began to take in other girls. Not just women, but little girls he said they would raise as if they were their own, until they were old enough to join the 'family' of courtesans that now supported and brought in a profit for the Moulin Rouge. So they finally prospered with the selling of sacred things and they moved out of that little flat with eyelet curtains and into a large house of plaster and too much varnished wood and she told herself she was happy.
The little girls they took in off the street soon became her joy in life. She took care of them and pretended they were her own, and that when her husband went off to spend time at the club, he was merely working very hard at a normal job as normal people did. But even her little unruly angels grew up eventually, and they moved on to lose their innocence at the oldest profession in the world.
She tried to watch over them, but they were young and beautiful and felt they knew everything . . . and she had grown old and tired and thought herself too much a fool to give advice she had not possessed the will to follow. Her loveliness slipped away as she dyed her hair and applied too much rouge to give colour to hollow cheeks; she smiled less as her teeth became stained yellow from cigarettes and too much strong coffee.
Sometimes he remembered the promises he had made. He gave her new dangling pearls for her ears and a wedding band with a diamond in it. Once he even recalled the days when they were young and in love and he gave her flowers. And she took them and placed them aside, and let them wilt without a word. She had not the heart to tell him that twenty years ago that little blue vase she once cherished had tilted off its unsteady table and shattered on the floor, along with her dreams.