She was aware of this special world even before she had stepped onto the stage of Les Ambassadeurs. At the Gouget Brothers, where she had pinned dresses on women who were not wives, but who nonetheless had an abundance of large, crisp banknotes within the silk lining of their purses. They did not have a gold wedding band on their fingers, but they did have an independence of which she and Camille were envious.
And within a week of starting at Julian’s theater, Marthe had seen how quickly the embodiment of beauty and illusion was devoured by the men who paid money to see a stage filled with girls as ripe as cherries. Girls whose job was not only to sing and dance, but to provoke dreams and desires, their mere sight inspiring thoughts of sensual possibility.
But this was how illusion was created on a small scale. Men like Charles, who had money and a title, were able to create their own private world. A world created purely for their comfort.
They became architects of their own pleasure. They financed apartments near Pigalle, where they could explore their own desires in private. Where the shadows were just as important as the light. Where they could enjoy a woman who was not afraid of their passion, but who, on the contrary, reveled in it as though it were the most delicious meal.
***
It was an undeniable fact that she had always enjoyed pleasure, even before Charles had named her Marthe de Florian, for she had always had a weakness for the sensual and beautiful things in life. She had learned to master sewing early, to avoid the fate of being a laundress like her mother. She had seen her mother lose her beauty in the endless washings, and watched as her hands became dry as ash. The wooden scrub boards that erased a woman’s youth as quickly as if it were a simple stain. And so Marthe had learned to pull a needle and thread early on.
By the time she was ten, she already knew how to hem and mend. She was quite pleased with herself, to have a skill that enabled her to keep busy and earn some money, rather than spending hours as her mother did, washing other people’s soiled clothes.
She would never forget the first time she touched silk. It was in an apartment that had curtains the color of the sky.
Her mother had dispatched her to pick up a client’s basket of laundry. She was barely eight years old, but her mother had sent her proudly in a wool dress and tights to the address she pinned to the clothes.
Mistakenly, she did not enter through the servant’s entrance of the apartment, but somehow arrived at the main door. The maidhad been kind and neither admonished her nor taken her to the kitchen, but rather let her remain in that splendid foyer for a few moments as she fetched the clothes. Perhaps the maid acted this way because the mistress of the house was not at home, or because she sensed the wonder in Marthe’s young eyes. Or perhaps it was a little of both. But regardless of the reason, as Marthe stood in the foyer waiting, she had marveled at the beauty around her. Realizing that no one was watching, she found herself unable to control her curiosity and reached over to finger the silk.
There was mystery in that first touch. As wondrous as the first time she remembered snow melting in her hand. She pulled herself closer. First it was her fingers wrapping around the cloth, then she pulled her entire body into the folds.
She had been so distracted by the sensation of the silk wrapped around her that she had not heard the maid’s footsteps bringing the basket of laundry.
“Child, you must get out of there,” she said kindly, but urgently. “Please... you don’t belong there!”
She had stood frozen from the words, the material dropping from her fingers.
The silk fell perfectly back into place, but the words the maid had uttered made her grow cold. She took the basket and left the apartment in a hurry, shivering the whole way home.
***
It was a terrible thing to be so cold that you could never feel truly warm. This had been the way Marthe remembered so much of her childhood in the apartment on the Rue Berthe where she had grown up. That wretched place where she had awakened one morning to find her sister’s body lifeless beside her. She had clasped her small body for warmth, but instead found Odette stiff and cold.
She would never forget her mother washing Odette’s only whitedress, the one her sister would be buried in. She watched her mother iron it through her tears. Marthe had shuddered at the sight of the large hole, and then, the soil that engulfed the tiny pine box whole. She had been incapable of erasing the image of the spray of flowers, limp from her hands, having clutched the stems too tightly, on top of the mound of wet earth. And now her heart had broken because they didn’t have enough money to have her sister’s name—Odette Rose—carved in stone.
She remembered the stream of men who came and stayed for only an hour at a time in the months that followed her sister’s funeral. The scent of alcohol and perspiration. Her mother’s desperation that stole what was left of her youth and clouded the light in her eyes.
She could mark the change in her life from the moment that Odette left them. Her mother broke the only mirror in their apartment and never replaced it. For who wanted to see their own face etched in sorrow? A complexion dull as a tin cup. Even Marthe began to look away from her mother’s watery gaze.
But while her mother seemed to shrink into the shadows, Marthe’s radiance began to emerge more and more with each passing day.
She grew from a thin, almost strange-looking child into a beautiful young girl. Her long, coltish limbs began to soften, and her once-concave chest grew full.
She took to adjusting her clothes to accommodate these changes in her body. She learned to taper her blouses to accentuate her waist, and to adjust the buttons to ensure they lay flat.
Every part of Marthe, every contour, every pad of muscle and every stretch of bone, filled with exuberance; an unrestrainable sense of life.
She needed no makeup. Her rouge was the clap of her hands against her cheeks. Her lipstick was the nibble of her teeth against her delicate mouth. She grew her strawberry red hair so long that when she unplaited it, it fell to the small cleft just above her lower back.
When she grew older, she would still recall that winter when she was thirteen, that afternoon when the cold had not stung her cheeks, but rather sent a thrill through her whole body. She thought of the boy who walked her home from school and told her she was beautiful when she flushed. He had offered her his hat and his red wool mittens, but she had refused him shyly. She later wished it were that boy who had been the first to touch her, to cup his hand between her legs. Not the one whose face she couldn’t bear to look at. The one whose eyes burned not brightly with youth, but from the shine of alcohol. The one who offered her five sous to touch her in the dark corner of the alley, but who ended up taking far more from Marthe than a caress.
It had been so cold that night. She had returned home that evening and dropped the coins numbly into her mother’s hand to pay for a few shovels of coal.
But although the fire stoked brightly that evening—for once—she found herself shivering, unable to find any warmth.
***
She now kept her apartment as warm as she possibly could. She had white birch delivered to the fireplaces twice a week, the bark crackling and sizzling in the hearth.
