The Colors of Cold

She paints and powders her face, pins her hair, tightens a corset over her shift, dons petticoats, chemisette, dress, jacket, shawl, elbow-length gloves, turban. She gathers her papier-mâché flowers back into the basket. The much-thumbed blues with the word Voir, Watch, inscribed on their petals, reds with Effleurer, Touch Lightly, and whites with Ressentir, Experience Physically. Her flowers are admission tickets, and the inscriptions, pretty names for three grades of entertainment she offers. Blue, white, red—the three revolutionary, patriotic French colors, they don’t just stand for Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—they are her colors too. She’s known no others. She is twenty-two years old, and the Revolution is twenty-four.

She thinks back to the prior evening. A young man named Julien came to see her. He had purchased a red flower, Touch Lightly. He was a veteran of the Russian campaign. His left leg ended at mid-thigh. When he plunked into the chair in her room, he kept his crutches under his arms, and they angled to the floor on each side like bony, flightless wings. He kept bouncing his good leg up and down, the heel of his boot clacking on hardwood. He asked for her name and she said Constance, the first one that came to her mind. Just another nom de guerre. A day later she wishes she were gentler with Julien, refrained from telling him ghastly stories. Wishes she told him her real name.

Although even that name, Cherie—is it not, after all, another nom de guerre?

She thinks she hears cannons—from the heights of Montmartre, from the plains of Saint-Denis. But perhaps she is mistaken. She picks up her flower basket and walks an unlit passage barely wider than her shoulders, and then a corkscrew of stairs down to her little showroom, where she empties the basket into a tin bowl before the stage, wakes up Marquis, checks the thermometer. It’s the end of March and days are getting warmer. Warmth lingers later into the night, leaches all the way in through the masonry of the Palais-Royal, its plaster, wallpaper, draperies. To keep the air in the room just right she’ll soon need to buy ice, and ice is expensive in summertime. And ice blocks, stealthily placed around the stage, make her feel a cheat. But there is only so much she can do. Spectators warm up the room by their mere presence. Today, she can only accommodate an audience of thirty, though she wonders whether there’d be any attendees at all, what with the war. All the newsstands on the ground floor of the Palais announce that the Coalition armies are drawing in around Paris. All the coffeehouses of the Palais are buzzing with war talk. Will the French army hold? If it does not, will Paris be sacked?

And yet—the boutiques of the Palais are open, pub cellars and gambling rooms too. In the court of the Palais this afternoon, vendors of roasted chestnuts and lemonade were doing brisk business, the prim old lady with musical glasses was dinging out her tunes, and Monsieur Grimacier still contorted his ample face into the wildest shapes and announced them, for the public’s edification, as Righteous Rage, Pang of Remorse, Suppressed Shame. Parisians still need to eat, drink, gawk, and talk, war or not, but will they come to her show, to the act of Mademoiselle Froid?

“Let in no more than thirty people,” she tells Marquis just in case. The old man shakes his head and shuffles to the doors.

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 de Milo by the entrance—another leftover. Even from her vantage point behind the curtain, Cherie can see the gray buildup of thumb grease 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.

She’ll have to have a talk with Marquis after this show. The older he gets, the more he seems to forget that her “act” is not effortless. He slips into believing that she can do what she does at will, and therefore can perform—if only she stopped being so capricious and saw the light of reason—for hundreds of people, every day of the year, anytime after he is done tantalizing the audience. But she can’t; she’s told him over and again that she can’t, and that is why they’ll never make enough money on these shows alone, and the rent for this shoddy room goes up and up, because of the war and—

Finally, Marquis’s speech draws to a climax. Spectacles perched on his nose, his liver-spotted hands fingering a leather tome, he regales the audience with the tale of “a dear friend, the distinguished French scientist Monsieur Pictet,” who discovered—“proving wrong that traitor to the French people, Lavoisier”—the “scientifically advanced, magic radiant rays of frigorific cold,” and taught them to “your humble servant.”

“Cold is not a mere absence of heat, mesdames and messieurs. You are about to see the power of radiant cold with your very own eyes. You will see the birth of the snow maiden, like Venus from sea foam. I present to you my favorite and brightest pupil, the esteemed protégée of the prime minister to the Elector Theodor of Bavaria, the distinguished Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire—the incomparable! Mademoiselle! Froid!”

She is not Count Rumford’s protégée. The Holy Roman Empire no longer exists, and poor Lavoisier had done nothing wrong other than insisting heat is made of particles. Marquis is not Pictet’s friend, a once-upon-a-time acquaintance, at best. But this is the Palais-Royal. What passes for truth here is different.

As she walks out and bows to the applause, he bumbles offstage, picks up his violin, and launches into a sonata.

She steps into a small circle chalked on the floor, which marks the focal point of one of the tin mirrors. Her job is to undress.

She looks into the faces of her spectators, searches for one or two whose stare will make her most uncomfortable. Perhaps this man, the one who’s just said that her act belongs on two floors at once? He looks like a hungry weasel in a man’s body. Or—this old, gaunt woman in round spectacles, poised on the edge of her seat like a lizard on a hunt? They stare, and Cherie stares back, slowly unwrapping her shawl. She wants them to wake a memory in her—no, make her relive the moment from her past: she, a ten-year-old, standing naked on the dissection table of an old anatomy theater. Bawling.

But the memory does not come alive.

She can try another way. She turns her eyes to Marquis, fiddling away his Vivaldi or Pisendel, bouncing on his seventy-year-old knees. He never looks back at her during this, never. He just dips and rocks, bow legs in silk stockings, everything from his coat to wig, to the cross of the defunct Order of the Holy Ghost on his chest—already a twenty-year anachronism. You look like a clown, old man, she tells him in her mind and recalls his reply, I am a clown. A dress of distinction becomes a shroud of doom becomes a clown’s costume. O Clio, so full of mischief.

She reaches out to that memory of the anatomy theater. She feels a kindling of what she calls a red upset, the color of her papier-mâché flower Effleurer. She recalls Marquis in that anatomy theater, his younger self, standing cross-armed, talking with another man, eyeing her over his haughty, aquiline nose.

The red upset grows more acute. Yet treacherously, her mind backflips to another memory: her asking Marquis not so long ago, How did you survive? Twenty years back they used to kill for less than flaunting the Order of the Holy Ghost cross. Weren’t you friends with Philippe Égalité when he was a duke? And they executed him, didn’t they, dragged him through the Palais, tried him and guillotined him in under two days!

She remembers his wry smile. He said, Duke of Orléans thought if he’d open half of his palace to the mob, it won’t gobble the rest. What a fool. How did I survive? By walking away from everything I had before they’d take it from me.

He had been a real marquis before the Revolution. She may have been his bastard child. She can’t be certain. She was too small to remember, and his memory changes with years. Most of the time he’d say, You are a foundling, they dropped you at my door. Sometimes: I ran into you on the streets, Cherie, near the Place Louis Quinze. I was there to watch the beheading of Madame du Barry. It was December 1793. You must have toddled out of some house. You had only your little diaper and bonnet on. There had been massacres. You were so cold my hands ached when I picked you up.

And once, he said, If I was meant to lose everything to find you, I don’t regret it.

She sneaks a glance across the stage, in time to see that a few snowflakes have appeared in the focal point of the other mirror. If someone placed a thermometer in that focal point, as Monsieur Pictet had years ago, it would have registered a dip in temperature: the rays of her cold reflected from one mirror onto another.

The snowflakes—too few, alas—drift, unnoticed by the spectators, to the floor. Her upset is blue. It does make her cold, but not cold enough.

But she still has time, she thinks, and the full attention of her audience. She knows how to be slow, when needed. It took her two minutes to unbutton and remove her jacket. It is a performance, not a denudement. Not yet.

And still. A human being gets used to anything, don’t they say? That is the problem.

Her mind returns to Julien, the one-legged veteran. He must have been about the same age as she. He must have been handsome before he’d left for war. Now his face was a face of misery. Still, he came as a paying patron; so she stepped so close to him she could brush against his leg stump with her thigh, and she told him one of her tales, the one she’s told a hundred times before. It was just a little something for the mood, something that went well with her Touch Lightly flower. “You’ve heard the lore,” she said to Julien, “how, before she met her doom, Louis’s mistress, Madame du Barry, pled to the guillotinemaster, ‘Encore un moment!’ Just one moment please! Well, that night the death mask makers went among the executed, scavenging for heads of the rich and famous. Everyone knew that du Barry’s death mask would sell for a hefty profit. One woman, Tussaud her name, found du Barry’s body lying on the ground, one arm out, another tucked in, bent at the elbow, and wound around that arm was a blood-stained sack. In it was the body’s severed head. Tussaud pulled and pulled at the sack, but the body held on, like it was dear to it.”

She could see misery on Julien. She could smell it. Yet she went on. “The mask maker stopped to catch her breath and then saw that all the mud around the body was covered with scribbles. The same three words, over and over again, ‘Encore un moment.’ Do you want to know what happened next?”

He nodded sharply. She eased his hand out of its grip on the crutch. He shivered. She peeled back his sleeve. His wrist was thin like a girl’s. She turned it vein side up. She said, “As soon as Tussaud noticed that she stood in a halo of writing, surrounded with words on all sides, at once the headless corpse’s hands fumbled to find her arm. When it succeeded, it traced—” She scribed on his wrist with the pointy tip of her gloved nail—over his vein, shaped like a windblown sapling, over his racing pulse, up and up his forearm, Encore un moment.

He sucked in a breath. She kneeled between his leg and his stump. She walked her fingertips back into his palm and curled them in it. Another shiver passed through his arm and hand and broke in her fingers. She squeezed back. “Your flower says Effleurer. Do you want to do what you came here for? Do you want to touch me?”

She makes a slow turn, unbuttoning her dress. She tilts her head like the Venus de Milo, the grimy replica cast of Venus that is over by the entrance. It is tempting to think of herself as a marble nude out on display in a public place, insensitive to eyes and hands, to revolutions and wars. But that is exactly what she cannot afford to think.

That night, Julien said, “I came because I feel freezing cold. Can you help me?”

She was so surprised she laughed out. “Me? Help you get warm? You’ve come to the wrong girl, soldier.”

He shrank back in his chair but did not give up just yet. “No. It’s not like that. Hear me out, please, Constance.”

Below her, Marquis is sawing and slicing through an allegro. Arthritic fingers—he is probably in pain right now, but he never complains. She only knows because she’s seen how he looks when he thinks he is alone; seen his chin tremble when he accepts the medicines she’d bought him. She knows, because his violin adds to the tension that grows with every breath of her spectators; and they must be breathing faster and faster now—that weasel-looking man, that lizard of a woman. She is fighting against them all, one little cold against their billowing warmth—because the warmer the air, the colder she needs to get. This thought alone could’ve made her bright red not so long ago. But not today. She undoes the two upper crisscrosses of her corset’s ties and inserts her finger under the third. She pushes her mind back to the old anatomy theater, its circle of steeply ascending pews and domed ceiling, a skylight full of fleeing clouds, the wall paintings that frightened the child’s mind. There were four men, and Marquis said to them, Messieurs, I now invite you to touch the girl and dispel what doubts you have. She opens her corset and shrugs the straps off her shoulders. She hears Marquis’s younger voice—from twelve years ago—in her mind, I am sorry, Cherie, but we had to upset you. You know you won’t get cold enough unless you are very, very upset. And it will go unnoticed unless we get you out of these warm clothes. Do you want them to believe you, Cherie? Do you want to make miracles?

She remembers nodding, tears on her face. She remembers Marquis holding her, some weeks later, murmuring into her ear, People, you know, they call these things fear, and rage, and shame. But you are not like other people. What you feel—these upsets—they make your magic work. Your cold. They are useful. Necessary. They make you special.

And thus she began calling these things, her feelings, by colors—blue, red, white—because her feelings are unlike anybody else’s. She does not even know what others would call her blue upset, her red upset. She doesn’t care to know.

She thinks of her patrons. Of all those who had come to her boudoir with the white flower Ressentir in their hands, with the requests to “experience her physically.” Whatever names they’d have for her upsets would be wrong, wrong! She peels her shift off her shoulders and begins to free out her arms. She glimpses several more snowflakes in the air across the stage from her. They fall to the floor, they melt. Why is it only the blue upset, only the slightest hint of red, like a fresh bruise, that she feels?

Hear me out, Julien said yesterday night, and she did. “It’s not me. It’s my other leg that feels cold, the one that is missing. I lost it in Russia, during the retreat,” he said.

How could a missing leg feel anything? She backed away from him and sat on the taboret in front of her vanity.

“I thought you of all people will believe me,” he said, breaking a shiver. She kept silent, so he added, “Because of the snow maiden. I’ve seen her. I’ve gone to your performance. Then after the show the old gentleman in a wig was selling those flowers, ‘For a private audience with the snow maiden,’ he said, and I thought—”

She interrupted him. “You thought you’d meet the snow maiden that I conjure?”

He was abashed. “Yes… I don’t know. Maybe—you let me ask the snow maiden for… to undo what was done to me. She was like an angel. And she appeared in snowfall. I thought, maybe—” He looked into her face and blushed.

What she desired most of all that moment was to stamp out his stupid phantasms. To yank him hard and slam him into the ground of her truth. There is no “snow maiden,” it’s just me! And there is no such thing as a cold, missing leg. And I can’t help you. “It’s been a year and a half since 1812,” she said sternly, “your leg, Julien, it no longer exists. It was burned or buried, or both. It’s just no longer there, you understand it, right?”

“It does exist.” He clenched at his stump with one hand, then with both. “Last time I’ve seen it attached to me it was frozen into ice. Trapped in it. I prayed for escape.” He started rocking his upper body back and forth. “Next thing I remember, it was gone. I gave up my leg so I could get out of there, and I accept that. But it’s still frozen into ice. And I can feel it. The pressure. And the freezing cold.” His fingers clasped tight around the stump’s end as if he were making a tourniquet to check the flow of influence from far, far away, from the icy wastes of Russia.

Radiant cold, she thought. If only Monsieur Pictet and those other men from the anatomy theater could hear this! She said, “What about spring? And summer? They have summer in Russia, don’t they? Is your leg cold in summer?”

He nodded.

“So you’re imagining it then,” she concluded. “Ice melts in summer.”

“No, you don’t understand! This ice—that trapped my leg—it will not melt, ever. They store it—someone must have. You know how they harvest and store ice there? They must have taken it, my leg and all, to some cellar and they will keep it there captive forever!” His face glared with conviction, his good leg bounced on the ball of its foot.

Julien the one-legged veteran, you are mad. “Who would do such a thing, freeze your leg in ice and then cut it off and keep it? How did you survive this? Have you not been wounded in battle, attended by a surgeon? Sent to a hospital? Is this not how it really happened?”

“I told you how it went,” he cried out. “I don’t remember anything else!”

He hugged himself, shivering. His eyes teared up and the tip of his nose turned red as if he were truly freezing. He doesn’t want to remember, she thought. Sweet Mary, mother of God, behold what Napoléon has done to these boys. Weep for them. What is this one going to do when they kick him out of Les Invalides? How will he fend for himself if he’s going to shake like this half the time, as if he were out of his mind? What’d happen to him if the Russian army were to enter Paris?

She approached and took his hand softly. “Julien, why don’t you come here and lie down on this ottoman. And close your eyes, and keep them closed no matter what. Then you can ask the snow maiden for help. All right?”

She helped him out of the chair. As he settled on the ottoman, she told him to rest and wait. She tiptoed into the corner and pulled off her gloves and shift. She was upset enough, with blue and white colors of upset. She returned and slipped in next to him, took his hand and placed it on her breast. His fingers twitched over her nipple. She cleared his forehead of the strands of his hair and kissed it. “Make a wish.”

Marquis is the only family she has, and yet she can’t explain it even to him. She wants to tell him, My blue upset, even my red upset, no longer work on stage. She imagines how he smiles absently and shakes his head and says, But, Cherie, you are my powerful magician. You can—

No, listen to me, she insists. There is a white upset that I feel, what is it? The white upset, the strongest, strangest of all, the kind that overtakes her against her will when she lies under a white flower patron—Ressentir, Égalité—it is blazing white before they squirm away from her, exclaiming, some with distress, others with thrill, You really are cold, girl, colder than a corpse. You’re burning my privates, I swear!

The white that rises from the bottom of her belly, and it feels like revolution itself, she thinks, with the terror and with toppling of marble statues and with chasing people out of their homes—only it is all inside her, while she stands, like this, on this stage, right now, naked more absolutely, more hopelessly, than even the armless Venus over by the door, and she wishes—

And she wishes that Julien did not leave, yesterday, the way he did. She told him to make a wish. He hid his face between her breasts. His shoulder jerked as shivers passed through his body. She waited, stroking his hair. She waited for his wish, but above that—for him to admit the obvious—how cold she was, how it had to mean she was the snow maiden, lying next to him. Then, she would say that she granted his wish. Who knows, maybe it would help him.

Instead, his shivers eased off and he said, “Ah, Constance. I am just a fool, aren’t I? A fool’s dream. The snow maiden doesn’t exist anywhere but on stage.”

Still unwitting, still blue and white, she pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and said, “Don’t you feel how cold I am? I am the snow maiden.”

He opened his eyes, pulling back to see her better. “Why do you say that? You’re not cold at all. You are very kind, and lovely, and you pity me, and I am thankful for that, but… you don’t know ice. You can’t speak for it.” He sat up on the ottoman and wiped his eyes.

She asked again, incredulous, “You don’t feel that I am cold?”

“What? No.”

Only then did she let her stunned mind consider what this could mean for her. Hope? She was a girl whose emotions made her cold—the stronger the emotion, the colder—and here was a boy who seemed not to notice it. She let herself be carried away for a few fleeting seconds, forgetting all these years, everything that happened between now and that anatomy theater over a decade ago. And just then, just that very second he heaved a sigh and said, “I know that is how I survived. I traded my leg for a fighting chance. But there are times when I just wish that I could feel the cold the way I used to. Like everybody else. With my fingers. My forehead. But I don’t. You can put ice to my skin, and I won’t know. I’m a cripple. The only cold I ever feel is the ice-trap on my missing leg. I don’t wish my leg back. I just… All I want is to be normal again.”

And this, these words and nothing else, suddenly made her red, so red that she jumped up and shouted, “Go away! Get the hell out!”

He scrambled up, repeating, What’s wrong with you? What did I do? He was reluctant to leave, and so she shouted, I don’t want you! and threw her powder and rouge boxes and stockings and gloves at him, until he collected his crutches and managed to clatter to the door and shut it behind himself.

It is this memory, today, now, on stage, that catches her breath, that makes her clench her hands and stare senselessly at the faces of her audience, at the walls, draperies, lanterns. There will be no miracle. It’s over. There is no point.

Marquis keeps pulling a cantabile out of his violin. Chairs creak. And creak. The weasel-man clicks his tongue.

“That’s it?” somebody mutters. She bows her head. She’ll leave now. She expects catcalls. She hears the chairs scratch the floor as the audience rises to its feet. Then the cantabile peters out. There is a strange movement in the air, half gasp, half breeze, and then she hears Marquis exclaim, “Behold the snow maiden!”

To her left, in the focal point of the other mirror, a ghostly shape is coalescing, a perfect silhouette of her, a reflection, a nude made in her image out of falling, swirling, sparkling snow. She barely gives it a glance, but she is relieved. She has done it, the miracle. Again. It snows. She is so tired. But she’s free to leave the stage now. Another show is over. Everything returns to its tracks.

They will applaud. Then Marquis will sell some papier-mâché flowers out of the tin bowl.

But on this, the twenty-ninth day of March 1814, she looks up and to the back of the room, and forgets she wanted to leave. Snow falls and falls, out of thin air and onto the floor. She stares. She can’t tell when the door cracked open, when he clanked in, but he is standing there now, crutches angling out like bony, flightless wings; he’s come back, and he is looking her in the eyes.

The snow falls thicker and thicker, it piles up, it fills in the silhouette within which it falls, and spreads around it like a shiny halo; and as the ghostly form solidifies, feet to waist to shoulders to head—as snowflakes turn to ice and ice becomes a maiden—Cherie feels red, and blue, and white, but mostly—something else.

It’s not an upset. She doesn’t need to give it a color. “Make a wish, Julien,” she whispers.