The Colors of Cold

II

People do come (she peeks through the holes in the stage curtain). They file in, all ranks and vocations mingling jauntily; they could be merchants and civil servants, officers and shoeblacks, fruit-girls and matrons. They smell of beer and coffee, and old clothes. They take their seats. The chairs are a vestige of the room’s past life as a café. Two lives ago it was a comedy theater where they ran a puppet show about the wretched Philippe Égalité, the original owner of the Palais. His overindulgent days as Duke of Orléans, his execution. The room’s walls need new wallpaper, the dormant fireplace—a chimneysweep’s attention. There is a small plaster cast of the Louvre’s Venus of Milo by the entrance—another leftover. Even from her vantage point behind the curtain, Cherie can see the gray buildup of thumbgrease on Venus’s feminine parts.

Cherie thinks of Julien, the one-legged veteran. He told her he’d seen her act, and she tries to recall his coming here. When was it? Was it more than once? It’s a long way for him to clomp to the Palais from Les Invalides where he’s been lucky to still have a cot. It seems to her—just as she notices his absence now—that she would have remembered him coming. But she doesn’t.  

Marquis is preparing the audience. He knows showmanship. “This stage is bare as my pate, Mesdames and Messieurs.” He tips his wig, drawing a few snickers. “No undignified trickery. No devices other than knowledge of physics. Nothing unsafe or unsound.”

There are devices, albeit those of physics, not trickery. Two mirrors—man-sized concavities made of polished tin—are recessed into the corners of the stage, facing each other. She needs them for her act.

Marquis thanks the audience for attending the show on “a day as momentous as this.” He refers to the war. “Tonight may well be the eve of a great battle.” She is ready for a cue to step out—but Marquis is not done. “And you’ve come to the right place on a night like this! An Englishman I once met said Paris is a place where nothing is secure or can afford security, least of all the Palais-Royal. A lie, Mesdames and Messieurs, a dirty British lie! This is the safest place in Paris. We are perfectly secure here in the Palais-Royal—” He spreads his arms and makes a dramatic pause. “—as long as we know which floor we are on.”

The audience creaks its chairs, chuckles, amused. She wonders what the old man is up to, even as she agrees that she and Marquis do feel safer here, inside the Palais. This is their home. They’ve hardly gone outside in months. She sleeps in her boudoir up in the garret, Marquis sleeps in what used to be a kitchen adjoining this room. The inner court is where they get their fresh air. They take their meals down a hallway in the Café Montansier. One floor up, the bathhouse Athénien is for washing. 

Her life is in these rooms, she thinks, while Marquis dramatically reviews the topography of the Palais for the audience: “The first floor?”—“It is for arts, attractions, and amusements.”—“The second floor?”—“Is for eating and gambling.”

“The third floor—is for pleasures of love.” Marquis savors the word like a true connoisseur, pinching the air with his fingertips. Still behind her curtain, Cherie is getting impatient: the lanterns are burning, the room air is getting warmer.

He says, “When we know which floor we are on, we know what to expect, and therefore we are safe. It is only the rooms between the floors that are unsafe.” He makes owl eyes and leans forward. “The rooms that belong on two floors at once. Bordello boudoirs that double as ghost shows. Restaurants that reenact the Reign of Terror. Public baths that purport to be ethnographic museums! Which floor are you on, Mesdames and Messieurs, do you know?”

She does not like at all where this is going. She hears sprinkles of laughter. A man says, “First floor?” Another ventures a guess, “First AND third?” A woman titters.