Fantôme – Chapter 9, Part 5

Raoul had not been in the mood for La Tour d’Argent, however much Phillippe de Chagny had insisted that their wine cellar held the remedy for his ills. Phillippe – a famed bon vivant – did not understand that his brother’s anxious tears had been quite genuine; he could not understand his brother’s fear for Christine, or how Raoul was reflecting on own impotence in the face of the great and powerful evil he sensed acting all around him, or that a man may feel for a woman as a friend as much as he desired or respected her. Phillippe had an excellent sense of the petty squabbles of the aristocracy, and very little awareness of the greater world.

Raoul had defended Christine’s name to his brother, who called her worse things than ‘sly and coy’ in the company of another man, and did more than insinuate that folksy little Christine wanted his title, that he may yet have his way with her, that a woman of the theatre is not his responsibility. “How can you,” sighed Phillippe, all but shaking Raoul by the shoulders by this time, “be concerned for a woman who has been seen driving in the Montparnasse by the late diners every night this week?”

These words stopped the young viscomte dead. Suddenly, though his eyes welled up still with his work of the past hour, no fresh tears came. His breathing went, in an instant, from heavy and laboured to nothing, held fast in his chest, and he turned those glassy eyes to his brother to plead for  knowledge. It unnerved the Comte somewhat, but on he went.

“Yes – I heard from de Chastellux and Leygues at our club that she has been driving the boulevards at the witching hour, and Chasseloup-Laubat saw her at that same time last night. He said the carriage she rode in was glamour itself, like it was crafted by witchcraft from spiders’ webs. She may love her Angel teacher, my boy, but she will be as pliant and charming as she is able for the aristocracy. When you are married, then you may have a relationship of equals with such a girl – still, though, even then, much of your pleasure will always be found at the exchange of pleasant trinkets.”

“How – how do you know what her guardian doesn’t? What her employers and friends could not tell me?”

A great hearty laugh came from the gentleman, kindly meant. “My boy, let this be a lesson to you that gossip cannot be evaded – the eyes of Paris will always be upon us all! She may lean back in her carriage, peeking from between satin curtains as though she can hide in the shadows. Her companion may wear a mask, but there is no time of day or night when some soldier or servant or doctor or drinker will not see you and know you and keep you on the tip of his tongue the next day. Now, let me buy you a steak and a very fine vintage, and we shall finish with cognac, until in the morning your pounding head has no space to think of duplicitous women that may be purchased.”

So it was that Raoul found himself wined, dined, sung at, and slapped on the back by his brother and all his friends. The gentlemen rallied, the drinks flowed, and by 11 even Raoul, standing magnificently at a slender 190cm and who had cut his teeth with the man at the barracks, was teetering on his feet. As his brother speared a cold potato and focussed quite intently on dabbing it around a dish with some meagre sauce left, Raoul made his excuses and ducked out into the night. Swaying under the gaslamps he turned not towards home, but passed the Luxembourg Gardens and into the Montparnasse. Not knowing even what he hoped to see he lurched around the streets until the clocks were striking 12 and, cold, Raoul began to turn towards home, regretting that he would not be likely see his bed on the inside of this present hour.

Phillippe, though, had told his brother of the witching hour. The darkest hour, the silveriest moon. The echoes of men drinking out of time, in rooms closed off from the streets; a small feather, fallen from the worn-out wrapper of a whores or a middle-class lady brushed Raoul’s face then, carried by the wind, it danced in the air until it came to rest on the grass of the square. In the witching hour, as our Orpheus trudged home by the roadside, as his attention was captivated by a feather, a distant trot began to sound, echoed strangely. Shortly they were joined by the click and whir of carriage wheels, the musical brush and sway a harmony to the tlot, tlot of horses’ hooves in the eerie night. Seemingly from nowhere, from the very street itself, the chaise swung into view, as if the lights had been hidden by fog – but the night was clear and bright, with nothing so much as cloud that might have obscured it. Raoul stepped back to watch it pass, and almost collapsed when he saw the face of Christine – his selfsame Christine, who he had been searching for these three days! – looking out at him from a window curtained with scalloped Spanish lace and black organza.

Her effervescence was gone, vanished, and in its place a harried look. Her hair was thin, her eyes dark, and whilst Raoul was sure she saw him, a spidery hand, hairy and thin, wrapped around her shoulder and she turned to its owner and gave a gay laugh that sounded just a pitch too high. The sound carried. Raoul dropped to his knees involuntarily, clutching one hand to his heart and reaching out to Christine with another. In the meagre seconds as the coach drove past him Christine once again turned to the window and, though she kept her gaze averted from the Viscomte, looking into the windows of Paris around her, she brought her hand to her heart in an imitation of his gesture. Desperate as he was to call her name, his lips remained pursed – his will had to be stronger than the unknowable danger Christine was facing.

Just as quickly as it came, the brougham vanished into nothing and Raoul stood, staring open-mouthed into the silent, gaping void the brougham left behind it.

***

It was two days later, or a-day-and-a-bit if you count the dawn of midnight to be the same day, that a boy brought an envelope. Covered in mud and unstamped, with only Raoul’s name as the clue of where to find him, the ragged boy earned a month’s keep from delivering it. When pressed, he told them it was found on the pavement, as though it had been flung out of a carriage, and as he clutched it to his chest Raoul thanked God for the recent dry nights… and for Christine’s ingenuity.