Bonjour, mes amis and welcome to the next chapter. I thought I'd write down the girls' ages, just in case there's any confusion. Marianne/Liberty is sixteen at this point in the story, Christine/Travesty is seventeen going on eighteen, Marguerite/Tattoo has just turned twenty and Cecile/Juno is thirteen. This fic will cover several years of their lives (it ends when the plot of Moulin Rouge would start, so no Christian, sorry guys), so they'll all be a lot older by the end.
Disclaimer: I don't own Moulin Rouge. Also, I realise it's absolutely shameless of me to use two Eliot quotes in a row, but they are from different poems… I don't know the names of the songs Satine sings, but they are sung by the character Ivo Novello in the film Gosford Park. They seemed to suit a younger Satine.
Now that the lilacs are in bloom,
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know,
What life is, you who hold it in you hands';
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.
TS Eliot, 'Portrait of a Lady.'
Elsa said nothing when Cecile returned to their room that night, though she sensed that Elsa had known about Cecile's new position for far longer than she let on. And when Cecile got up the next day to begin working for Satine, Elsa still said nothing. It was as if the German seamstress was trying to sever all ties with her charge, and Cecile felt an odd sort of closure as she made her way to Satine's bedroom, as if she had somehow crossed an invisible boundary, to what, she did not know.
Satine's room was in the apartments occupied by Harold and Marie Zidler, and was one of only two private bedrooms in the Moulin Rouge that actually functioned as a place to sleep. The girls, Cecile knew, had their own rooms where they 'entertained', but none of them seemed to sleep there and all wanted to spend as little time in their rooms as possible. Satine's bedroom, however, seemed to be just that, her own, and for no one's comfort but hers.
Satine was awake when Cecile knocked, which was highly unusual, as most Rouge girls didn't bother getting up before the late afternoon. She was seated at her dressing table wearing nothing but a peach-pink dressing gown, her hair loose and curling around her shoulders. "There you are, angel," she carolled as Cecile entered the room, running a comb through her impossibly red hair. "Help me with my corset, will you?"
As Cecile pulled on Satine's corset strings ("No, tighter, child, do you want it to slip off?"), she took a moment to drink in the surroundings. Satine's room, though small, was a sea of soft creams and pinks, with all old furniture artfully painted to seem new. The colours caused Satine's alabaster skin to take on a faint, peachy glow to match her robe, and made Cecile feel exceedingly shabby.
"You need anything more, mam'selle?" Cecile whispered after Satine was laced and buttoned into a smart, navy day dress.
"Maybe," Satine replied cheerfully, sitting down at her dressing table again. "Stay awhile, I'll tell you if you need something." Cecile, now at a loss for anything to do, settled into a rocking chair in the corner, letting it whip back and forth while Satine brushed her hair.
It became the morning routine from that day on, and Cecile stopped being The Seamstresses' Girl and became Satine's Dresser. After helping Satine into her dress, Cecile would straighten the room or sit in the rocking chair sewing while Satine chattered in her soft, breathy voice about anything from the weather to the book she was currently reading. Satine's purpose at the Moulin Rouge, however, seemed to be a mystery. Satine attended rehearsals but didn't show any interest in learning the dances. A few errands to the cancan dancers' dressing room told Cecile that she wasn't the only one who was wondering.
"Here, Cecile, talk to us for a moment," the girls would say to her whenever she entered. "What about that lady of yours, eh?" Cecile would shake her head and tell them that she knew as little as they did about Satine's future, causing them to give her bribes of sweets, chocolates and bits of ribbon. Some of the more hardened ones noted that Cecile was, as a dancer called Nini put it, 'filling out that corset', and started offering her sips of whiskey and gin instead. The alcohol loosened Cecile's tongue and told them anything she may have picked up, knowing that if anything she was giving them something to gossip about.
With this new routine in place, Cecile continued to get Satine ready for the day, though she began to realise that she served not only as a dresser but someone for Satine to talk to. Despite her beauty, or perhaps because of it, Satine seemed incredibly lonely. She would fill any silence with snatches of music hall songs, sentimental ballads about sad partings and wistful, romantic love. "We shall never find that lovely land of might have been…" Satine sang while getting ready for bed or pinning up her hair. "I shall never be your king nor you shall be my queen… All that I can be… All you ask of me… Music in spring, flowers on a king, all these I bring to you…"
In the rare moments that Satine addressed Cecile directly, for mostly she simply talked, Satine would inquire about the most random of things, such as did Cecile fancy this shade of rouge or did Cecile like roses. Once, upon finding out that Cecile was illiterate, Satine decided to teach her to read, but the lessons were erratic and Satine's teaching impatient, and as a result Cecile never learnt to read more than her own name. Satine commented on the inconvenience, claiming that she would have quite liked to be read to in the evenings like a proper lady, and Cecile shrugged in response and said nothing, there being nothing to say.
Satine still insisted on calling Cecile 'Angel' or 'Cupid', and slowly Cecile began to forget that she had ever been called anything else. Once, on a whim, Satine started calling Cecile Juno, finding the idea of being attended by a Roman goddess to be very droll. Satine seemed to do a lot of things on a whim. "Juno," she would say one day, "wouldn't it be lovely to have a pet bird?" The next morning she would return from the markets, beaming as she displayed two vividly coloured birds in a cage. "Look, Juno," she gushed. "See how pretty they are?"
Cecile thought that keeping birds in cages was cruel, which didn't stop Satine from buying a new pair when the old ones died, and another pair after that. They all had the same names; one Silver, the other Gold. Many years later, when Satine had prettily coughed her way into her grave, Cecile would go back to that room, and let the birds wing their way to an uncertain end.
"Little Juno," Cecile then heard Satine say in her head. "Why did you let them go?"
Cecile would bow her head and say that she did not know. But these things were in the future, and the Cecile of the present day, despite her young years, thought little of tomorrow. In that regard she already was thinking like one of the Diamond Dogs. There was no world beyond the walls of the Moulin Rouge. Why dream of tomorrow when tomorrow will be the same as today?
Even so, it didn't stop Cecile from wondering.
"Mam'selle Satine?" Cecile asked one morning while she was curled up in the rocking chair. "Why do you call me Juno?"
Satine, who was in the middle of brushing rouge onto her face, paused and frowned as if she had never thought about it before. "Well," she said finally, still frowning. "You're too young to be called Venus."
Nini had warned Christine that business would be slow at the beginning, but Christine had underestimated the power of the cancan. As an uninitiated Diamond Dog, Christine was forced to scout around the dance hall and the garden for clients, whereas the cancan dancers seemed to have men simply falling into their laps, sometimes in the most literal sense. By the middle of her first night at the Moulin Rouge, Christine had only managed to snare two drunken customers in the garden, while on the street she could turn over eight tricks a night if the going was good. Christine thanked the gods that she had been born a practical girl. It would have been easy for her to be dazzled by the finery of the costumes and the décor, but Christine could tell that the Moulin Rouge was, above all, a whorehouse, and if she couldn't earn enough she would be out on the street no matter how good her dancing was.
The well paying customers were the ones who would actually dance with a girl before sleeping with her, and even though she hadn't yet learnt the paired dances, Christine figured that now would be as good a time as any. Armed with all the self-confidence and charm she could muster, she strolled through the dance hall towards a young man who didn't look a day older than twenty and seemed to have been dragged to the Moulin by his friends. "You look a little lonely there, sir," Christine breathed coolly, giving him her best, most devilish smile "Let Travesty help." Flicking her skirts the way she practiced in the rehearsals, Christine crowded him onto the dance floor, the young man looking two bewildered to even attempt to refuse her. Christine grinned broadly and twirled so that her petticoats fanned out to reveal her knickers. She had once heard a woman liken whoring to fishing, and if that analysis applied to work at the Moulin Rouge, Christine had just caught herself a carp.
The young carp of a man seemed so nervous that when Christine lead him to one of the entertaining rooms and relieved him of his top hat and tail coat, she was convinced she could have demanded double her price and he would have paid it. In the end she only charged him a few extra sous, just in case one of his friends told him he'd been duped. A beating was not something she needed on her first night.
A few men later and Christine was in possession of more money than she would earn in a week on the streets, even though Nini laughed and called her green when Christine proudly displayed the money in her tray. "Travesty," she said in a way that was both kind and admonishing at the same time. "Learn the cancan and you'll be earning this much in a single fuck."
Christine pouted in a false expression of hurt while she unpinned her curls from their bun. She resented having to take the time to make her hair high and neat enough to fit under her top hat. She was seriously contemplating cutting it short, and she felt very annoyed when Pearly Queen, who was sharing a bottle of whiskey with Dominatrix and an aloof girl called Spanish, recommended that Christine grow it instead.
"Why?" Christine growled, wrestling a comb through her now loose tresses. "I thought I was supposed to be a masher?"
Nini took the opportunity to add her thoughts, breathing out a rush of cigarette smoke in exasperation. "Travesty, m'dear, I thought an ex-stroller such as yourself would know that if a man wants to buy the charms of a man, he will go to a man, not a girl pretending to be one. The fact that you wear a top hat and suit jacket is all the more reason for you to look girlish. 'Specially once the dress comes off. This ain't the streets, where a man will go for anything in skirts. Keep your hair long, pull your corset tight. You're not bad looking, you know."
Christine privately thought that she could land customers no matter how long her hair was, but decided to leave it long for now as she made her way to Zidler's office to hand over the compulsory sixty percent of her earnings. She had to stand in line for a while, as Harlequin was already in the office, being berated for not making as much as usual.
After two weeks Christine received her true costume; a soft grey fitted jacket with matching top hat and a charcoal skirt that, when held or flung up, revealed deep purple ruffles. The Four Whores and Dominatrix's cronies oohed and ahhed, admiring the easy way in which the skirt swished and billowed. Christine herself, who had never been particularly interested in clothes, was more excited about the prospect of joining the cancan line.
She was paired with Circus at first, whose former partner Mermaid had been shifted in order to dance opposite a potential new girl called Liberty. Neither Circus nor Mermaid seemed happy about this change in sequence, and the new girl didn't seem too enthusiastic either, preferring to shrink amongst Antoinette and her eternally giggling henchwoman Harlequin. Undeterred, Christine threw herself into the cancan; despite her Russian dance partner's critical sniffs that Christine had "not pointed her toes enough."
"And one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two…" Nini instructed the other dancers in the absence of an accompanying orchestra. "Three, four, Liberty, are you watching, one two…"
"Yes, thankyou, Nini, that will do," Zidler interrupted, causing the cancan to break off with a unified groan. The groan was one of either disappointment or relief depending on the dancer. "Ladies, individual performances now. Everyone else, amuse yourselves."
Feeling oddly deflated now that she was no longer dancing, Christine fell into a chair beside a slightly newer girl called Tattoo. "Think you'll ever get an act?" Christine asked for the sake of making conversation.
Tattoo shoved a cigarette in the corner of her mouth and brought a match to it. "Nah," she muttered after taking a drag. "Not that keen, myself. Speaking of keen, check out Twinkle Toes over there. Ain't she a sight?"
"Where?" Christine followed Tattoo's line of vision. "Oh! Well, isn't she fancy." The redheaded woman in question was receiving instruction from Chocolat himself while practicing a few basic dance steps. Despite being less well trained in dance than the more veteran Dogs, Christine was able to observe that the redhead's dancing was rather under whelming.
"That's Satine," a voice said bitterly. Christine turned and came face to face with Nini. "She lives with Harold and that wife of his," Nini went on. "But it seems she now wants an act."
Christine raised her eyebrows, even though having an act wasn't so unusual. The Four Whores of the Apocalypse performed several provocative dances and comic songs throughout the night, Spanish and Gypsy had a very exotic double act and skinny Schoolgirl did a rather childish dance with a ball. Even Circus managed to live up to her stage name and perform a short act upon a trapeze and tightrope. No one, however, got these acts without being a cancan dancer first, and the fact that Satine was getting a solo without being one was among the few things that could shock a hardened prostitute.
"What in God's name is so good about her?" Pearly Queen moaned, flopping gracefully onto the table. "Look at her dancing! She shuffles along like a crow on a fence."
Christine exhaled angrily, furious that someone with even less experience at the Moulin Rouge than her could gain so high a status. "In all honesty, I don't know."
Satine struck a pose and started a song Nini had first rehearsed.
And so this chapter was ridiculously short compared to the others… The next chapter might be a while coming, so you have been warned. Anyway, let me rejoice in the fact that I graduate from high school in a mere two weeks.
Au revoir, until we meet again!
