One morning, over breakfast, Juliet broached the subject. “I hear Montmartre is nice. I haven’t been there.” She eyed him, waiting for his response.
“It isn’t a place for you.” Varnier never looked up from his paper.
“I’m not a doll.”
“No, but you are a lady. The place is filthy.”
“And yet you go?”
Varnier continued to ignore her.
As they stopped at Edmond Bailly’s bookshop on their regular Saturday walk, Varnier found his two friends, the composer and the painter, deep in conversation. Juliet could make out from their conversations that the shorter man was an artist in Montmartre. Montmartre again? The place Varnier kept from her. As she ran her fingers over the leather-bound books on tarot and mesmerism, she heard the men discussing a scandal involving a well-known stage occultist, Philippe Angier, who had been challenged to a duel. Juliet recognized Angier’s name from several articles appearing in Le Figaro over the past few weeks.
As the story went, Philippe Angier, when prodded for a private performance at dinner, had reluctantly predicted the fortunes—or misfortunes as they turned out to be—of his dinner companions, all well-known Parisians. The fates were grim—one of the guests was told he would be imprisoned, another poisoned, and the final two would take their own lives. While the predictions did little more than cause a swift end to the dinner, later accounts, if they were to be believed, indicated that each prediction had actually come true, to the letter, except for one. Now Philippe Angier, who had once been thought to be nothing but a successful stage magician, was being challenged to a duel by the remaining living dinner guest, Gerard Caron, who had declared him not a stage occultist but—a far more serious charge—a Satanist. Caron had so far escaped his predicted fate of suicide, but given that the writer was known to be a terrible shot, the inevitable outcome of the duel might prove to be another one of Angier’s accurate predictions.
Juliet scanned the music section looking for more Erik Satie compositions, her obsession. There were no new compositions and she felt disappointed. The men’s voices raised in discussion. So this was what went on in Montmartre? Gossip?
The dwarfed painter was animated. “I heard Angier ate his children.”
“Non, non,” the composer whispered, taking the tone back down as he stroked his beard. “Those are just rumors. True, he killed them in front of the mothers, but he did not eat them. He got his power that way, they say.” The composer shrugged as though it were a perfectly normal thing to do. It made Juliet think of Paganini with the dead lover imprisoned in his violin. All of it gossip.
“C’est barbare.” The painter shook his head.
“Okay, okay,” said Varnier, but he was clearly engaged in the discussion. “There is a lady present.” He spied Juliet. She gave him an impatient scowl indicating she wanted to leave.
“Our apologies, dear lady,” said the composer. “Are you looking at any of my pieces?”
Juliet held up one of his latest piano works. “I liked the last one.”
“She plays it better than you,” teased Varnier.
“And she looks better doing it,” added the artist.
“Maybe we should be looking for Angier’s missing grimoire here, while we’re at it,” joked the composer.
Varnier waved as the two men began another heated argument about Angier.
“I see what I’m missing in Montmartre.”
“You aren’t missing anything,” said Varnier. “They just love to gossip.”
But Juliet did think she was missing something, so over the next few weeks she plotted carefully. She’d lost so much weight since seeing Marchant that her outfit was easy. She purchased elements of her costume one at a time, hoping Marie wouldn’t notice the packages containing a cap, trousers, and a waistcoat that she’d hidden under the armoire. One night when the entire costume was complete, Juliet tucked her hair under the cap and waited for Varnier to leave. She was down the stairs and out the door as soon as he got to the corner. The omnibus to Montmartre was on time. Pulling her hat down around her face so she wouldn’t be caught, she watched Varnier and noticed how spent and broken he looked when he was out in public. Guiltily, she realized it had to do with her. He had so been vibrant—so alive when they were touring in Italy, showing her around Florence. But now, he seemed as sad as she had been these months, as though their emotions were tied. When she suffered, so did he.
The omnibus stopped and Varnier walked up the steep hill toward the Sacré-Coeur. It was night, and Juliet found it hard to keep up with him as he turned down streets and maneuvered his way at a quick pace through the crowd. Down from the Sacré-Coeur, the street emptied into a square with paintings, thousands of paintings and artists selling them. The sight of the paintings made Juliet sick. She was glad that Varnier was traveling at a quick clip down past the Moulin de la Galette to the Rue Norvins, where she saw him stop to light a cigarette.
Soon he wasn’t alone. From the distance, Juliet saw a woman join him with red rouge on her cheeks and lips, color applied so heavily that her face resembled an artist’s smock after a day of painting. Varnier and the woman spoke, and then she saw them turn a left corner farther down on the Rue Norvins. Hurrying to catch them, Juliet could see them ahead on a narrow street that bent around the back of an apartment building. The woman was laughing loudly and fumbling to open a door. Varnier stood behind her silently, holding the door open for her. Juliet thought the woman sounded drunk, and
as she got to the door, she noticed that the woman had left it open. Juliet assumed this was for her safety. She knew what type of transaction was about to happen here and the dangers that could be associated with what this woman did each night. She wondered if she’d have been dealt a similar fate had she been forced to marry Michel Busson. Juliet could hear Varnier’s voice now, and from the window she could see the faint outlines of them, the woman illuminating the bare room that included a small bed and dresser by lighting a few cheap candles. Perhaps Juliet should have left, but she was frozen in the narrow street as the woman took several coins from him and placed them in a drawer. The woman positioned Varnier on the bed then lifted her skirt and in a swift motion climbed on top of him, reaching for his pants. Juliet did not turn away from the sight nor the intimate sounds that came next. Varnier had been so reserved with her in all their years; there was a joy she took in hearing him reduced to animal sounds. As the noises became more intense, Juliet closed her eyes to recall the sounds of her own lovemaking to Marchant, which were often hushed to prevent his staff from hearing. And then there had been the grunting like pigs from the Busson boy and his friend in the field. She looked back into the room to the final sounds emitting from Varnier, him drawing the prostitute closer for one vital moment before collapsing on the dirty bed that would no doubt be used by another man within the hour. Juliet lingered for a moment, something about Varnier shifting in her mind. So he was a man after all?
Turning, Juliet walked back to the Rue Norvins and down the hill until she saw the windmill above the Moulin Rouge. And in the dark night, she heard the familiar sounds of discordant notes coming from a piano in the open window above her. She knew the pattern that would come next, because she had played it many times with her own fingers. It was Satie’s Gnossienne No. 1. She stood under the window and closed her eyes, taking in the music until the song ended and Juliet thought she heard a heavy bench sliding away from the piano.