2.

In our government-issued blankets upon the cold floor, Babette and I spent our first night in the Opéra. We made our first meal of the salted horsemeat sitting at a table of tired, nervous, anxious soldiers. When I said the blessing, I saw Babette's eyelids were drooping; she was too exhausted to take a drink of her wine. It had indeed been a wearying day.

It was October, and already I knew the winter would be a harsh one. With only our utilitarian robes for warmth, Babette and I huddled together in the corner of the singers' foyer, grateful for the lanterns Collier had given us. A stretch of canvas had been hung up over a piece of wire and tacked to the wall, large enough for our comfortable resting.

Babette fell asleep soon enough and I was surprised to find myself following very closely. Hours passed in the deepness of rest. But then I was awake again in the dark of night, and no matter how I struggled, sleep would not come. Peace would not come. Peace would never come . . .

At last I gave up. I let my eyes flap open, perceiving only darkness. Babette's calm, repetitive breathing only caused me more agitation. Blind in the impermeable absence of light, I nevertheless slunk out of our canvas tent, dragging with me my pallet and blankets. The night was very chill and as I struggled to light the tinder, I shivered in the black. I let the flame burn low and quietly, leaving only a tiny firefly light by which to see. There wasn't anything to see, was there? Merely shadow to distort my already shuddering visions.

For weeks I had been waking up in this fashion. For weeks sleep had eluded me. There would be periods of desperate deep slumber and then I would be awake again, staring at the ceiling for unending periods of time. It was not simple restlessness or an expanded, original mind painfully awake.

It was the things I had seen in the last months of my stay in Paris as a nurse. I would be forever examining my fingernails for traces of iron red blood, a crimson banner to the lives that had passed through my hands. It was always their blood, always the dirt and sweat and blood that caked onto my white apron. It, too, was always sloughed again in scrubbing bleaches to remove the endless spatterings. Every patient's reaction came hurtling back and haunted me in midnight hallucinations, like those the prophetic Sibyl saw in her glassy eyes.

Oh, they had clasped my hands while choking in the final stages of consumption, the blood collecting with spittle. In panicked shock I had tried to pull away, but then the other nurses were watching, regarding me with distrust. So I let myself be caught in those icy hands that leapt out of the grave.

There was the first time I had seen the shelling victims. The scars and sores of lepers could not have been worse than the flood of blood, the soaking pool that threatened to drown the victim. From underneath this mass was one streaming eyeball, the other a bloodied socket with sinews hanging grotesquely.

Immediately I had gotten a feeling of sickness in my stomach. But I spilled out the bandages obediently and wrapped up what limbs I could find within the scarlet inflammations. As usual, there was a shortage of doctors, and as the medic passed, eh said, "This one's going to need the fingers cut off."

I looked at the lump of the hand, where the pinky and third finger hung on by a thread of skin. The doctor handed me the surgical knife. I followed his eyes in shock. "Doctor," I cried in rising panic, "shouldn't you--?"

"No time," he murmured.

Biting the insides of my cheeks, I asked, "I haven't any morphine left."

"Then do without."

So off came the two fingers. I was shaking as I bandaged the stump of the hand up again and proceeded to another victim.

Another day another doctor had called me to the bedside of one woman, also caught in a shelling blast. The doctor held her back, as she rose hysterically from the bed, screaming and shrieking gibberish that always mentioned "the children, the children!" I later learned she came from one of the orphanages shelled.

"Nurse!" the doctor cried as I rushed forward. "Morphine, now!" I obediently performed that familiar act of pressing the needle into the liquid and drawing it back. As I pushed back the woman's sleeve, she suddenly turned on me and grasped my apron with both hands. Frightened, I tried to unhook her fingers as she raved at me. At last I managed to slam the needle into her open arm. She fell back, quivered, and disappeared into the brief good feelings I knew the drug would bring.

I have already explained why I chose nursing out of the few careers offered, but there was an added advantage to my choice. The sight of blood had never made me faint. Oh, of course it caused the spittle in my mouth to gather menacingly as my stomach threatened to capsize its meager contents--but I never fainted, as was proper for a true lady to do. Never having known the sentiments of the nobility, who were not required to join the relief effort, I had been brought up in a manner suiting my prospects. Daintiness was replaced with usefulness, and complete femininity with versatility.

But I was punished with a much more insidious ailment. Nearly every time I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts, there they would come again--the images plastered on the inside of my head that mercilessly tormented me. Thus I craved activity, and the idleness that sleep brought could only mean more visions.

In the still of the night, I gathered the blanket about me and sat up, thinking angrily I would get no more sleep that night. Well, neither would I lie around in inefficient inactivity. There was one duty I could perform and now, in the dark, would be the most opportune time to do it.

I had taken my hair down from the strict coronet I wore under my flared cap and spent a moment to brush it out of my face as I got to my feet, holding the lamp in one hand. I scuttled to the door through which Collier had last exited and determined to find what I was looking for as unobtrusively as possible.

Through the corridors I moved slowly, quietly, opening doors and peering with general apprehension in every direction. It was very cold on this October night, and the blanket bundled up around me created a prosaic swishing of cloth as I moved along. Still, my ears were in some doubt that the blanket was the only thing making noise in the night.

Swallowing slowly, I gathered my courage and shone the lantern about me with a shuddering hand. I was slightly near-sighted but my ears made up for it, so as I held my breath, I was almost positive I heard something moving near me.

My suspicions were confirmed when I felt a swift soft brush on my side as I turned a corner. Momentarily losing all sense, I let out a yelp and dropped the lantern. In the dark my poor eyesight could not immediately discern what had happened. Then Captain Collier's stern voice was crying, "Mademoiselle Lapaine, what are you doing?"

I stumbled the retrieve the lantern, mumbling, "Oh, Captain, pardon me, I--"

"What are you doing?" he repeated breathlessly. Looking at him, I concluded two things: he had been on duty on one of those lonely shifts at the midnight hour; and that he was nearly as startled as I.

"I—well--I beg your pardon. I could not sleep."

Rapidly wonder gave way to fury. "You should not be wandering around at this time of night. Surely you did not do this at the hospital."

I bit my lip. "No, Captain--but I was looking . . ." I stopped. It was one of those matters of delicacy I had proclaimed that day did not exist.

"Yes, Mademoiselle?"

I was silent. Collier made a guttural sound of exasperation. "Tell me, woman, what it is you want!"

"It is a matter of some privacy, Captain," I murmured, flushing, giving him what I hoped was an enlightening look in the midst of my discomfort.

"Oh." He looked quite bemused. "I'm sorry, Mademoiselle. If you will come this way."

And that was how I found the privy in the Opéra!

The next two weeks were full of activity for Babette and I. During a lull in the shelling, we left the shelter of the Opéra to see what had become of the rest of the nurses. I had written a letter, which I posted the first day we left the safety of our new home, to my former Abbess explaining our situation. Some time later we received a reply from an unknown doctor congratulating us for still being alive and advising us to remain where we were. It was true Captain Collier was none too thrilled by the news, for I think he half expected us to never come back the first time we left.

I sent a second letter, this time to my brother Jean, who owned a boarding house on the Left Bank, closer to the shelling. He had reason to be nervous, but I knew he worried more for my safety than his own. I had not seen him for some time before I had been dislodged from the Hôtel-Dieu, but if the news had spread, he would be fearful. So I had prayed my letter would reach him. I cared for Jean deeply, because he was my only living sibling and my only close relative. My mother was still alive and with her third husband--after our father, they seemed to go fast--but I had not seen her for several years. Jean was, in this year of 1870, almost twenty-one--very young, yet strangely mature in his double career as a board-keeper and cartoonist for the paper Charivari. Because of the Siege, Jean and cartoonists like him were given fresh material every day and the strict censoring of French government was lifted. So he was, in a way, happy.

And so was I. The activity, as I said, kept Babette and I constantly busy and allowed me to sleep easier at night. I did not wander the corridors anymore, as afraid of Collier's anger as I was of anything else. While on one outing, Babette and I bought what little we could--warmer clothes for ourselves and more varied food than the horsemeat rations. Collier told me, amused, of the Zoo in the Bois being emptied for the rich. Ah, I thought, only famine could bring the powerful to their knees. Now at the end of October, starvation was gripping all, and a rat was a good night's meal and a horse a feast for several days.

Babette and I were also occupied with sewing the soldiers' uniforms and making them foot bundles to wear when their socks wore out. But aside from a black eye sustained in a fight, we'd had no experience with our calling as nurses.

They came the same day as the first snowstorm. Bitter cold embraced Paris like a sinister bed fellow, and I imagined the population on the streets wrapped in the never-ending torrent of snowdrifts, especially my brother. The Prussians, whom one would think would wait until the snow had passed over them, gathered themselves up to shell the Left Bank once more.

No doubt the cold facilitated the panicked flee toward the Opéra and not closer to one of the field hospitals. Unheated and dark, the building was stilled as Collier took Babette and I from our singers' foyer to the foyer de la danse where three patients waited. Emboldened into action, we quickly moved to play the intricate ballet of what had become almost second nature. The first two men were routine burn victims. We cleaned and bandaged their wounds with almost cold efficiency, and I imagined abstractly how cool the sterile bandages must feel against the hot, bubbled skin on their faces and arms.

The third patient, however, had been struck and pinned under a falling piece of masonry and from the angle from which his arm hung, I knew it was broken. Assessing the half-dazed man's arm, I found the bone was broken near the elbow. Collier, who was watching us anxiously, asked, "What can you do for him?"

"The bone has to be set," I said.

At this, the man began to shake convulsively. Discerning the cause at once, I nodded to Babette to bring the crate. I opened it and pulled out the familiar morphine needle. I reached into the crate to fill the needle with the liquid sedative as Babette grimly held down the man. After the injection he fell calmly upon the bedding and I readied myself for the task of setting the bone in the man's displaced arm.

Then the sudden heady moment of needy insanity was over, and the Opéra staff returned to normal. Collier saw to it the convalescing patients were set up in bunks with the soldiers while Babette and I cleaned up the usual mess of blood and fluid that followed war around like a trained dog. As I folded the clean bandages back up into a neat pile in the crate and gathered the soiled ones for disposal, I noticed the supply of morphine seemed strangely low.

I counted the little vials of the precious stuff and was puzzled to find, instead of one vial missing, there were three! I was absolutely sure of this loss--I had counted the vials the first day we arrived and they now numbered three less than there should have been, after that day's administration to our patient.

Babette was washing her hands in a metal basin. "You didn't take any morphine for the burn victim, did you?" I asked.

She paused, then shook her head. "Why do you ask, Manon?"

"You don't suppose Collier could have taken some?"

"What use would the Captain have for morphine?" Babette asked.

I shook my head. "I must speak to him about this."

Dutifully the tired man paused, looking at me in curiosity. He was a fairly tall man, yet I felt he was wearied by my sobering height. He was required to look down at Babette, who was of an acceptable feminine height, but gazing straight into my eyes seemed a bit much for the poor man. In any case, he took a step backward. "Mademoiselle?"

I sighed. An inquiry into the habits of his men would not be welcome. "It's about . . . the morphine."

For a moment he was silent. Then he burst out in a dry, frightening laugh. "You'll have to be a little more specific, Mademoiselle." He chuckled. "So grave, are we? Is it money you need?"

I felt myself flushing slightly in his nongallant teasing. I should have been accustomed to Collier's capricious humor, but I confess his reactions still baffled me. "I do beg you would be serious," I muttered sharply. "I would like you to investigate among your men if any of them have taken two vials of our morphine. Two vials are missing."

He leaned back slightly, his boots making a hollow sound on the floor. "You believe my men may have taken your morphine?"

I nodded, lowering my eyes. "I hope you are not offended. You must see how narrowed my suspicions must be when we are living in a building with a finite population."

"You forget the ghost," Collier added humorlessly.

"Ghosts have no need of morphine," I said.

Collier looked as though he might dispute this claim, but he only put his hands in his uniform pockets in a gesture of resignation. "I will ask my men, Mademoiselle. I promise you nothing." And away he sped, aloof and distant. For a definite moment, I wondered about that ridiculous ghost Collier kept bringing up. Did he imagine it was going to frighten me? I had my own spirits to contend with. One more specter in the cellars couldn't make much difference.