Chapter 5
I am not proud to say it, but those next few months proved a happier time for me.
In Paris, I found a place in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—an apartment suitable to my station in life—and I hired a housekeeper and assigned her to find a cook and whatever else was needed.
Since I would not be in residence there, I had reduced the number of Thornfield’s servants to a minimum, just enough to provide for Bertha and Grace, and I arranged for Ames to send regular reports on the estate and my business holdings.
I had at the time some vague idea of seeking out in Paris a good and intelligent woman who would be my companion, someone who, knowing my position with Bertha, would understand and love me anyway.
I imagined that if I made myself known, sooner or later a suitable match would appear.
To that end, I made the acquaintance of my neighbors: on the one side, a widowed woman of great class whose recently deceased husband had been a general under Bonaparte, with whom I hoped to enjoy conversation about that great military mind.
But I soon learned that she recalled little.
On the other side lived a vicomte and his wife, the vicomtesse, who was much younger than her husband and a perennial flirt.
Through them, I became acquainted with the younger, fashionable set with whom Madame la Vicomtesse de Verteuil socialized.
With them, or occasionally by myself, I went to nightly entertainments: the opera, the ballet, the bouffons, and again a theater for a play or two.
I went to fetes at the Prado and balls at the Odéon.
With my new acquaintances, I learned to order the finest dishes and to drink vermouth and cassis, to speak about the finer points of an opera or ballet, to catch a woman’s eye and smile at her over the rim of my glass, and I learned, too, that if one has money enough there is no limit to what one may do.
Perhaps this was the kind of life Rowland had sought, and I was enjoying it thoroughly.
I stayed out most nights and slept through the mornings and half the afternoons, and on sunny days, paraded in my carriage on the Champs-élysées, or I walked in the Jardin des Plantes with a woman on my arm.
And again in the evenings I went to entertainments and gambled and danced.
I could enjoy myself in ways I had never imagined: I was talking politics and business with the men, and flirting and writing my name on women’s fans at balls and having affairs with one and then another.
If all of that brought me no closer to the woman I had imagined meeting, I told myself it was no matter.
In short, unlike at Thornfield, in Paris I felt free, and if my life there did not bear close inspection, it was certainly more enjoyable than remaining at Thornfield would have been.
One cold night in March I found myself standing in the Grand Foyer of the Paris Opéra, disappointed at the notice board announcing that Lise Noblet had taken ill and would not be performing the title role in La muette de Portici.
I would have left the theater in disgust, for Noblet was an exquisite dancer and had already become a particular favorite of mine, but Monsieur Roget sidled up to me and said, “You must see this new dancer. She is a marvel.”
Roget was a man who made it his business to know all the performers at the Opéra.
He held court every night at the Café d’Or after the performances, and if he said a dancer was worth watching, then she surely must be.
So I stayed, having no alternate plan in mind, and I suppose I thought I could spend the evening critiquing her.
Instead, however, from the moment the mute Fenella first appeared onstage I was entranced.
She danced like a feather floating on air, her blond curls barely contained, her hands and feet as graceful as the wings of a butterfly.
Watching her, I was mesmerized; I could not get enough of this petite marvel.
The opera felt dull each time she left the stage.
On the one hand, I wished the evening would go on forever, and yet on the other I could barely wait until it was over, so anxious was I to find her in the Foyer de la Danse, where the dancers met with their admirers.
I barely waited for the curtain calls, dashing down the stairs, running to buy camellias from a flower girl, hurrying to the foyer.
I did not yet even know her name. I pushed myself as close as I could to the front of the waiting crowd, and when she finally appeared I shoved the others away until I stood right before her, and I placed the bouquet into her hands, kissing her fingers as I did so.
Her face was as porcelain, lightest cream.
She smiled at me and nodded at the flowers, and I placed my card into the bouquet before I was jostled away by another admirer and another, and when I turned back her arms were burdened with flowers, and all of them seemed more glorious than the ones I had given her.
I left and walked back to my apartment in a spitting snow.
Despite my anticipation I heard nothing from the dancer—by then I had learned her name was Céline Varens—and the next evening Noblet returned to the stage.
I attended anyway, searching the dance company for the luminous Varens, but did not see her.
For days after that, I waited for a message from her, or for her name on another playbill or for any word at all of her, but there was none.
And then one day I was on my way to the Palais-Royal for a solitary stroll in its gardens.
Solitary? You may wonder, and rightly, but sometimes I did so, for I am not ashamed to say that sometimes the best conversations one can have are with one’s own self, and that had more and more frequently become my situation.
That day, the sun was warm on my back and the sky was blue and I could not have been more content in anyone’s company, when a carriage suddenly pulled up beside me, and the passenger inside opened the door.
Curious, and not a little annoyed, I imagined some acquaintance interrupting my reverie. But when I glanced inside, there was the golden nymph I had so wanted to see again: Céline Varens herself.
She smiled as I stepped inside, the aroma of her scent enveloping me—it was the fragrance of camellias. “I have been searching for you,” she said.
“And I you,” I responded, hardly able to breathe. “How did you find me?”
Rose-colored lips parted into a perfect smile. “Silly,” she said. “I found you walking toward the Palais-Royal. God must have sent you to me.”
No, I thought; he sent you to me. “But I gave you my card,” I said.
“There were so many cards, so many flowers.”
So many other men, I thought. But her dimpled smiles and her fluttering hands entranced me. “Where were you going just now?” I asked her.
“Silly,” she said again. “I was going to find you, since you did not find me.”
“But no one knew where you lived. I tried everything—”
“Ah, mon petit chouchou, you did not know where to look, did you?”
It came to me then: someone kept her—some man other than I, luckier than I—and I should not have been surprised. “Does he know what you do when you are not with him?” I asked.
She laughed lightly, and her hands took my face and drew it close and her lips met mine and her tongue came into my astonished mouth, and I could have ravished her there, right there, in her carriage, but she gently pushed away from me. “You are a gentleman, no?” she whispered.
“Of course I am.”
“You have another card, no?”
I drew a card from my pocket and she gazed at it, as if appraising me. “I will send for you,” she said, “and you will come?”
“Indeed, I will.”
She smiled again, her perfect lips, her perfect teeth, her little tongue. I could have stayed with her forever, but she motioned toward the door, and I understood and left her, though it was as if I had awakened from a dream. The carriage pulled away, leaving me in the roadside, watching.
Within a week, she sent for me twice. Her apartment was not far from mine, and I wondered that I had not been able to find her, that she had instead found me nearly by chance. I never knew the man who kept her there; he was a wealthy merchant of some sort who traveled often.
Céline was a delight. She was childlike without being childish; she was quicksilver; she could listen.
She was not well educated, but it was clear she had an active, lively mind.
Her merchant-lover was old, she said, emphasizing the word, and it soon became obvious that she was looking for someone younger, with whom she could attend the theater and balls.
But we did not go anywhere those first few times, perhaps because she was known to be attached and it would not have done for her to be seen with another man.
I was insanely jealous of her merchant, though I had no real cause.
Although I could go to her only when he was away on business, when I was with her I was the center of her attention: I was in heaven.
She sent for meals from a nearby café, and sometimes she fed me as if I were her child, and sometimes we ate together from the same plate, and sometimes the food grew cold while we made love.
Before autumn I had moved Céline out of the merchant’s apartment and into another that I provided for her.
She had not wanted to move in with me, as I had hoped, and I could not force her, for I knew that in the world of Paris, one was lucky to have such a woman at all, under any circumstances, and that I was even more fortunate that an angel like her could give her heart to someone like me.
When she danced, I went to her every performance, most often at the Opéra, but sometimes elsewhere.
I installed a piano in her apartment and played for her while she danced for me.
Sometimes she urged me to sing, and, flattered, I held her in my arms and sang love songs into her ear.
We ate dinners at our favorite restaurants and we often went to the theater or to a ball, but sometimes we stayed home by ourselves, which was my preference, though her choice would have been to go out every night.
That was her life: to see and be seen in the most fashionable of company.
I bought her things: the finest gowns of silk and cashmere, jewels for her lovely throat and arms and for her hair, even a full equipage, complete with matching horses and a coachman and footman, and she rewarded my gifts with love and attention, calling me her chouchou.
I entreated her to call me by my given name, as no one ever had, but she pouted that Edward was a hard name—like feet stamping, she said—and instead whispered chouchou into my ear, licking my earlobe, giggling softly, her breath against my cheek.
I could not deny her anything. Because her very name—Céline—meant heavenly, I called her ma petite ange.
Amid our bliss, I did not confide in her the burden I carried.
I told myself it was because of fear that she would leave me, but that surely was not the full truth; in Paris, especially with Céline, I had simply found for myself a refuge where I could forget Bertha, and her long-lost child, and all that I had left at Thornfield-Hall.