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This week's trivia: "The Chorus Girl's Husband" was an actual play, performed in the late 1860s to entertain Napoleon III and his court.
Chapter 8 – The Chorus Girl's Husband
The neat, beautiful hall of the Théâtre des Variétés hummed with polite anticipation, as it did before every performance. In the pit and the stalls, a restless bourgeois crowd attempted to settle in, find its opera glasses, glare at those with unduly tall hairstyles which threatened to block their view, and finally shushed each other into a respectable silence just as the lights dimmed, the conductor bowed, and the orchestra struck up the overture. Only then did the fashionably late aristocratic gentlemen start filing into the boxes, proudly escorting their diamond-studded wives, mistresses or, in the case of the less fortunate, their mothers.
Raoul de Chagny sat in his uncomfortable velvet-upholstered chair, and thought dejectedly that it would have been preferable, indeed, to have escorted his mother here rather than be forced to accompany his father, in a venture neither of them would enjoy but which seemed as unavoidable as the appearance of Mlle Christine Daaé, formerly of the Opéra Populaire in the chorus line of Act I.
"I hardly think this is necessary, Father," he said grimly. "I have seen Christine dance this role before."
"As has every other gentleman in Paris," replied his father in the crisp, matter-of-fact tone which never failed to infuriate Raoul.
The Comte folded a document he had been perusing on the way in and put it away into his breast pocket, making himself comfortable in his chair. He glanced at his fob-watch, but the numbers were invisible in the darkened theatre.
"Whether you consider this to be necessary is currently of small importance. Your mother was adamant that you and I must attend tonight's performance."
Raoul made a bitter noise. "I suppose she intends this as an object-lesson for me?"
"Perhaps she hopes it will be one for both of us." The Comte's mouth quirked beneath his silver moustache with a hint of irony. "It is, after all, my duty as a father to warn you against the mistakes which you will undoubtedly continue to make in spite of anything I tell you."
"So why trouble yourself," Raoul said without bothering to hide his resentment.
"While your duty as a son," the Comte continued over him, "is to listen to my elderly warnings and pretend to take heed. You will agree that this simple arrangement affords both of us a great deal more comfort than another row with your mother. I may benefit from a night away from the depressing reality of the state of our nation's army, while you may spend an evening safely contemplating Mademoiselle Daaé's more... obvious charms."
"May I remind you," Raoul said through his teeth, "That you are speaking of a woman who is to be my wife."
"I am speaking of the future Vicomtesse de Chagny, who will tonight be entertaining no less than eight hundred members of the audience. If this prospect offends you, I would be delighted to report to your mother that she appears to have achieved her purpose in sending us here tonight."
Raoul turned pale with anger, but the Comte went on: "If you insist on following the lamentable course of the Duc de Nevers and his dancer-wife, then that is your business."
"On that at least, we are in agreement."
"I advise you, however, as a man and as your father, that it would be far more sensible and less expensive not to wed Christine Daaé. Besides which, it would also spare me the wearisome arguments with your mother at a time when I am faced with more than enough wearisome arguments at the Assembly."
"I love her," Raoul repeated for what felt like the five hundredth time. He had long since lost hope of this making any impression on either of his parents, but at least his mother had the decency to look upset when he said it. His father merely gave him a look that suggested he had once been a young man too, and had grown out of it. Then he turned his attention to the stage.
The set was not up to the standards of the Opéra Populaire, but like the music and everything else about the Variétés, it made up in vivacious energy what it lacked in grandeur. Raoul had no heart for the bubbly bawdiness of tonight's musical farce, selected quite deliberately for this family outing – a piece playfully and so very subtly entitled, "The Chorus Girl's Husband".
The trouble had started after the ball at the Tuileries. He and Christine had parted terribly after the disaster with the ring, and he had spent a sleepless night berating himself for his stupidity, for his impatience. He had pushed her away and broken the fragile life they had been trying to reclaim, and he was haunted by the memory of her happy, open face as she danced in his arms. That night, he thought he had lost her for good. Yet in the morning he had found Christine waiting for him in the parlour, red-eyed and looking worse than he felt, but smiling – and then he knew she would take the ring, and they would finally, finally, start to live again.
All of that was thrown awry by the chilly reception he got from his parents after he had seen Christine back to her apartment and joined them at the Bois de Boulogne. Christine had mentioned the Variétés to the Comtesse at the ball, and Raoul figured out the rest. He could not blame his parents for being wary after the scandal of the Opéra, but he could and did blame them for the things they had said to him that morning, under the pretence of a civil stroll through a park. He was irresponsible, childish, reckless. He had no self-respect and no regard for his status. He was marrying a woman who was clearly determined to be his ruin, because no respectable girl would follow a scandal by prolonging her engagement and signing on to be a dancer for the amusement of every man of fashion and means. All this was said pleasantly and very quietly, while smiling at the passersby.
"Here she is," his father said, startling Raoul from his thoughts.
Christine was the third in a line of twelve dancers, all anonymous in their little gauze skirts, ballerinas dancing the role of ballerinas. The main characters wandered around this sad little chorus, commenting and selecting and eliciting gusts of appreciative laughter from the audience, some of whom no doubt had mistresses among these same girls.
"Ah. I see you picked the prettiest of the lot."
"Stop it!" Raoul snapped hoarsely, unable to bear any more.
He turned to his father, hating himself for the pain that he knew was in his voice. "You know Christine. You have known her since she and I were children together. You welcomed her to your house when I began courting her, you encouraged me to buy her a ring! How can you do this now, just because she has gone back to the ballet for – for a while? Why do you betray her like this? Or do you merely enjoy humiliating me?"
"If you find it a burden to bear my jibes," the Comte said coolly, "Then think how it will feel to bear the jibes of a nation. And I warn you, they will be more cruel than either your mother or I, and care a great deal less for your tender feelings – just ask the Duc de Nevers. They laugh at this play because it amuses them. The reality amuses them even more."
"So what do you suggest I do? Force Christine to marry me tomorrow?"
"Make her your mistress."
"What!"
"I suggest," his father said calmly, "That you do not marry her at all. Make her your mistress if you must, buy her a few diamonds, bed her and put this nonsense from your head." He tapped the program with an emphatic finger. "This is where she wishes to be."
Raoul gave him a look of pure hatred. "Thank you, Father. I shall be sure to keep that advice in mind."
The Comte ran an impatient hand through his thick hair, silvery at the temples. "Very well. We shall have no more talk of this." His tired tone took Raoul by surprise. "I mean only to spare you pain. You believe you love the girl, very well. But you had best think hard on what your wife will bring you, and I hope, for your sake, that it is not infamy and humiliation. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because Christine Daaé is beautiful, she is also good."
"She is good. And innocent. And where she may not be, it is through suffering and not through any fault of hers."
"The fault is always someone's. In the end, it hardly matters whose."
Raoul sucked in an angry breath, but before he could speak, a man in a hat and street-clothes ducked into the box, opening the curtain, and motioned urgently to his father. He was holding a rolled-up copy of Le Soir. The headline shouted: "Ambassador snubbed at Ems: Prussia mocks French honour!"
Without another word the Comte stood up and left.
Raoul sagged back against the chair, staring at the stage with unseeing eyes. The farce continued, the audience laughed, he sat there and tried to convince himself that he was imagining the curious eyes watching him from the other boxes.
He looked down to the front of the stage, where Christine was miming something terribly amusing at the stalls, and felt an upsurge of loathing for those laughing, distorted faces, for those fancy hats and powdered noses and for the whole of Parisian society. Then he thought of the end of the performance, when he would go backstage to see Christine – and would have to fight through the familiar spectacle of men vying for their chance at the dressing rooms, for their little piece of ballet, all nicely wrapped in gauze and tulle.
He tried his best to pretend that he did not care.
o o o
Christine dumped her satchel on the bench beside Meg's in the busy dressing room, and began to pack her things: spare tights and legwarmers, shoes, ribbons, greasepaint for the stage. She felt faint with fatigue. Somebody jostled her from behind but she ignored it; everyone was in a hurry to go home.
"I ought to take the omnibus," Meg said. She was struggling to roll her long hair up into a chignon. "Pherhapsh... " She removed the hairpin from her mouth. "Perhaps Raoul will want you to join him for supper."
"Here, let me do that."
Christine took the pin and reached over to fix it in Meg's hair. "Don't be silly. If we go to supper, Raoul will simply take the carriage past our building." She rubbed her calves. "He might have to carry me out of it, though..."
"Christine, I would not want to intrude—"
"Who's Raoul?" chirped a girl next to them.
Christine turned around: it was Blanche, another of the Variétés chorus girls, a curious brunette with pretty, wide-set eyes and angular cheekbones that seemed rather popular with her male admirers. She was still in her leotard, but she had removed the gauze skirt and was swinging it from her wrist, playing idly with the string-ties.
Christine saw the girl notice the diamond on her finger, and instinctively covered it with her other hand. Blanche grinned, revealing a row of perfect little teeth.
"He must be pretty rich, anyhow!"
"He's our former patron, the Vicomte de Chagny," another dancer broke in – Helena Weiss, a fellow refugee from the Opéra Populaire. She had inherited her large-boned frame from her German father, and suffered continually because her height kept her out of so many perfectly symmetrical chorus line-ups.
"May I see?" she asked Christine, nodding at the ring.
"Uhh... Of course."
Christine held out her hand obediently, feeling embarrassed as a gaggle of dancers collected around her and Meg, drawn irresistibly by the sparkle of the diamond. She began to wish she had left the thing at home, but that would have hurt Raoul, and she did not want that.
"Is he handsome?"
Blanche's question caused a storm of laughter: she was not known for her discretion, and her own lovers seemed to be as notoriously unattractive as they were rich. Blanche made a face at the others:
"I was only asking! It doesn't matter, the uglier they are the more they'll adore you. And the prettier you'll look beside them."
"Christine should know!" Helena Weiss winked at Christine and Meg, making Meg frown and take a defensive step forward.
"What do you mean?" Christine asked quietly, but she knew exactly what Helena meant. Her lips felt dry.
Meg came to her rescue: "If you must know, yes, the Vicomte is very handsome. Now if you'll excuse us, we have to get our things."
She tried to take Christine's arm, but Christine shrugged her off; she was staring at Helena, who became increasingly more uncomfortable.
"I only meant," Helena stumbled, "I only meant – you know. About the Ghost." She brightened, "God, Christine, you're such a child. Nobody cares if you had him. It's not like we don't understand!"
She gestured around in an appeal to the gathered girls, most of whom were nodding agreement. "Merde – if I had a tutor who could put me up on stage like that, managers or no managers, straight to the top, you can bet I wouldn't care about his face either!"
"Except that he burned down your opera house," said another girl from the back, "and killed those people, no?"
"And left you girls without a job," Blanche picked up, with some sympathy. "Something of a madman, if you ask me."
"She did not ask you," Meg said. "Excuse us." Christine felt her trying to tug her in the direction of their satchels, away from Helena.
"Meg, let me be."
Christine felt bile her mouth with hatred; she could not stop it. All her exhaustion and pain and suffering had been building inside her without her knowledge and now here was this smiling imbecile of a girl who thought she knew the whole story.
"You don't know!" she exploded at Helena's surprised face, hearing the shrill ugly note in her voice, aware of Meg's panicky expression but unable to stop herself now.
"You don't know anything, you never will! How dare you! You think I was the lover of a murderer? You think it was my fault all those people died? As if it were not bad enough that the papers wrote all those lies, now you too believe them! Now you too will spread these things about me and laugh behind my back and call me l'amourette du Fantôme! Do you think I'm deaf? Or stupid? I can hear you, every time, I can hear you! I can hear you!"
"Christine, stop it," Meg was saying, "Stop it right now, please, we have to go!"
"I can hear you..." Christine finished, abruptly feeling drained of all energy. She stared back at the uncomprehending faces around her and wished them all quietly, painlessly dead.
"You're right," Helena said after a moment, without any apparent anger. "You should have been in the opera."
Then she turned around and simply walked off. The others milled around for a while, then dispersed, shrugging and muttering among themselves.
Christine sank down onto the bench and dropped her head in her hands, feeling horrible. In the wake of the dissipating rage there remained only the painful embarrassment of the tantrum, her own words echoing disgustingly in her head. She did not know what had caused the sudden explosion; these things they said about her about had never bothered her, she was not so fragile...
Perhaps that was because before, there had been no truth to their words. Christine Daaé, the Phantom's Whore. Had she not touched his face in the night? With her hands, in her room?
"Christine... Raoul is here."
Christine looked up at the sound of Meg's soft voice, and saw Raoul coming towards her. He looked tired and somewhat harassed, but when he saw her, he smiled.
"I would not call the play a masterpiece – but you were wonderful in it." He nodded to Meg, including her politely, "Both of you."
Christine made an effort to compose herself, returning his smile. "Thank you for coming tonight."
"It was my pleasure."
She thought she heard a tight, pained note in Raoul's voice, but in the next moment he was back to his courteous self, getting their bags and helping them make their way out and asking about the performance.
They fought through the bustling theatre to the stage door; then they were finally outside, in the fresh air. Christine breathed a sigh of relief. She had not realised how suffocated she had felt between the blaze of the stage footlights and the crowded, stuffy dressing-room.
The evening was very warm but pleasant, without the oppressive heat that could sometimes stifle the city in July. The Boulevard Montmartre danced with lights; couples strolled by, arm-in-arm, their chatter mingling with laughter and music, the squeaking of carriage springs and the clack-clack of horseshoes against the paving stones. Christine allowed it all to wash over her, glad to be an observer at last, a mute audience for somebody else's orchestra, anonymous in the night.
"I'm afraid I don't have my carriage," Raoul apologised. "I was obliged to accompany my father, but he, uh... He left. Early."
"He left without you?" Christine tried to keep her tone light, but she had heard the same pained note in his voice again, and knew at once that this had something to do with it.
"I believe he had urgent business to attend to. Something political."
"Oh." Christine's throat constricted with dread. "It was not ... because of the play?"
"No," Raoul said much too quickly. "Just politics. You know my father; Monsieur Ollivier calls and he comes running."
He had never been any good at lying, even as a child, but Christine could not bring herself to question him further. She accepted the excuse with a faint nod.
Meg touched her elbow. "Christine, I should go. The omnibus."
"I thought perhaps we could go to supper here," Raoul said, including Meg in the invitation. "The Café de Suède isn't far. They say it is really quite good."
"Thank you, but I must go home," Meg said. "My mother will be expecting me."
Christine attempted to talk her into staying, but she had to agree it would not do to keep Madame Giry wondering where her daughter was at this late hour. In the end Raoul helped her to hail a cab and the two of them watched Meg wave as the horse trotted off, the painted number of the hansom winking red as it passed a streetlamp. Christine had a fleeting crazy desire to call it back, to go home and collapse into bed and just sleep.
There was an awkward pause as she and Raoul looked at one another, each aware of the rare moment of being together alone, hidden in the peculiar privacy of a busy boulevard. Christine thought he would kiss her, but instead he only offered her his arm and they walked on towards the group of cafés further along the road, the ornate façades nested together like prettily etched volumes on a bookshelf.
"It was the play," Raoul admitted after a few steps.
Christine shuddered once, as with cold. "It is only the ballet, Raoul, in a respectable theatre." She strove to keep the hurt from her voice. "Not the can-can in some filthy guingette."
"I know that."
"I have been a dancer for most of my life, there is nothing else I can do half as well—"
"Except sing."
"No," Christine said quickly. "Not that. No. I dance, that is what I do. Like Meg, like the others."
"But I'm not marrying the others!" Raoul caught her hands, stopping her, looking at her face. "Christine, I don't know what to tell him. I can't fight for you if I don't understand what it is you want! Why are you doing this? This ballet, this self-torture?"
A laugh escaped before Christine could stop it, a nervous sound that was part exhaustion, part surprise. "Self-torture?"
"Isn't it? Why else would you be up on stage every night, under the eyes of all those leering men and God only knows who else, near-collapsing with exhaustion?"
"Because we need to pay rent! Madame Giry and Meg and I, we need to live. Somehow."
She saw the bewilderment in his eyes before he could speak the words: frustration and pity and the promises to give her a life where she would never need to think about rent again.
She stopped him with a wry, sad look. "You think me stubborn. But Raoul... I cannot leave them now. Please understand. Nor can I ask you to give them money to make up for what my dancing brings; you know Madame Giry would never take it, no matter how bad the need."
"That is nothing but bourgeois pride! How long will this continue, Christine? You promised me this was only until November, and then it would be over and we would be married and gone from here! What happened to all that?"
Christine felt a painful stinging in her eyes. "Don't."
"Don't what? You gave me your word!"
"I know I did, Raoul, and I intend to keep it! But I cannot leave them now. Not yet. Don't make me do this, I beg you."
Raoul shook his head, subsiding. He let out a long breath.
"It is July, Christine. What can change between now and November?"
Christine gave him a slow, tremulous smile. "If we are fortunate... Perhaps I can."
The glass-panelled doors of the Café de Suède in front of them flew open, engulfing them in a sudden, complete wave of noise as a torrent of people streaming out of the café blocked their way. There were ladies and gentlemen in elegant theatre clothes, and some others among them carrying newspapers and shouting something incomprehensible in the general din.
"What is going on here?" Raoul asked one of the men, a young bohemian-looking fellow with feverish eyes.
"The bastards have done it!" He thrust a paper at Raoul, the same copy of Le Soir that he had seen earlier. "Bloody Bismarck's work, you can bet on it! This has his stink all over it!"
Others yelled; someone broke into a verse of the Marsellaise.
"What's happening?" Christine caught Raoul's sleeve. "Why are they all shouting? What's going on?"
The bohemian fellow turned to her and yelled, "War, that's what! They've wanted it for years, well now they shall have it – and we're going to see some Prussian blood!"
"Blood?" Christine whispered, staring at the tumult in dismay. "Why do they want war?"
Her gaze stopped on one figure in the crowd.