Archive of Our Own

He knew her first as Noraïme. She stepped on the stage and he saw her through a wafting exhalation of smoke from the gentleman in the seat before him. Her hair was loose and therefore wild. It was decorated with gold. As the smoke rose, so did her gaze, and Bossuet froze in his seat. 

Joly nudged him with an elbow and lifted an eyebrow.

Her eyes were on him, brutally dark and hot like coals taken from a fire. Her voice carried on, sweet and intricate; conversational. This charming contrast of hot and cold seemed to create and describe her.

“Her name,” he told Joly as they left, “is Musichetta.”

“Noraïme? Yes, la Musichetta, it’s certainly what she calls herself.”

“Seeing her has given me Stendhal’s syndrome. I can’t see straight. My heart races. If I fall over, what say you to carrying me home?”

“Stendhal’s syndrome isn’t real,” said Joly, without irony or self-awareness. 

“I must be fainting, I am hearing my friend Joly deny the existence of -- and therefore his own proximity to! -- a very serious condition. I feel cold, I cannot breathe, oh --”

“It’s about as real as Werther syndrome. I’m a medical student, you know, not a mystic or stupid. She came from the Conservatoire like everyone else, she is quite human,” said Joly. And then, to needle him or discern if he was paying attention, added: “It’s said she is close with Prévost. Perhaps he could introduce you.”

“Prévost!” exclaimed Bossuet, who had been at school a bit ahead of the year’s prix de Rome honoree, and hated him. “I’d lie in front of a horse-cart before I asked Prévost the time, let alone -- !”

“I pray you don’t find yourself in Rome without a pocket watch,” said Joly, and tapped at Bossuet’s knees with his cane to trip him. Bossuet snatched the cane out of his hands retributively, and began to spin it in circles. 

The streets were loud, and the weather cold after a warm day, and his heartbeat calmed so he no longer felt it. The world returned to its usual appearance, but when he blinked he still saw the afterimage of her eyes.

Their friends had not enjoyed the new incarnation of Les Abencérages, and when Bossuet told them how he had spent the evening, they began to air their opinions. 

Courfeyrac had been at the opening, in the box of a beautiful marchioness. The performance had moved him to such boredom that, he reported, he had spent all his money on wine and eventually fell asleep at the lady’s side, and he was considerably disgraced:

“I begin to suspect I am tone-deaf,” he confided. 

“You might be,” said Joly. “You might dislike music. You might dislike Cherubini. All things are possible. The latter is even probable.”

“For my part I am cheerfully indifferent to Cherubini,” said Bossuet, and a few people interjected that indifference was not acceptable. He spoke over them: “But I am passionate about music. Never more so, now that I have seen la Musichetta, met her eyes across the gallery.”

“She has talent. But can’t overcome what she sings! No voice can disguise that the work is a confection, base and decorative, or that although Cherubini is beneath the Théâtre de l’Opéra, he is clearly quite the right color on the ‘Académie Royale de Musique,’” said Prouvaire, entering the conversation as he usually did, punta supramano. 

“I beg you,” said Bossuet. “Not to wander far from the point. It is this: I have been struck down by love. I must speak with her. But how? Come, one of you must have a plan, a solution, an idea, a set of climbing spikes, or a disguise.”

Joly laughed. “Where would you be infiltrating? She doesn’t live at the opera.”

Bahorel said: “I can get you a disguise,” but did not elaborate.

“And anyway,” said Courfeyrac. “Prouvaire is a good friend of hers, aren’t you, Jehan?”

Prouvaire shrugged, still not willing to let Cherubini go with so little insult. “She has literary tastes. I see her at an occasional --” he waved a hand vaguely, encompassing anything from an occasional salon to an occasional orgy. 

“And you weren’t going to tell me?” Bossuet asked, in a quieter voice to limit the conversation to two people.

“I do not keep track of your friends,” said Prouvaire, looking at Bossuet, and then looking at the ground, probably thinking of apologizing. 

“None of my friends are new-fallen angels -- are muses -- are sirens -- none of my friends are so beautiful, or so beguiling,” Bossuet felt his voice rise, (at the same time Courfeyrac was calling out, “Make these judgments more gently, Grantaire here is in tears,”) and said: “I told you about her, Prouvaire, the heat in her gaze -- her voice like -- a meaningful sorbet --”

“A meaningful sorbet,” Prouvaire repeated, his eyes widening with horror. 

Grantaire was the first to actually laugh, and then there was no stopping any of them.

In the end, Prouvaire was moved to pity and took Bossuet with him to the parlor where he often saw Musichetta. The talk was more poetry than literature. Many there were translators. A few were librettists, and they sought Musichetta’s advice which she denied them, saying she did not know enough on the subject. 

Bossuet felt the Stendhal syndrome again when he came up to greet her, while Prouvaire said, “Madamina, meet my dear friend,” with a playful smile that she shared -- they were better friends than he’d implied, Bossuet thought briefly. And then he became stupid:

She wore a dress that was either gray or pink without real fidelity to either; the warm and discreet color of a turtledove, with a froth of white point d’Alençon whispering on the floor. Her black openwork gloves exposed her fingers, tipped with gleaming pink nails and always held in a graceful and unconscious attitude, like she was thinking of some action or caress -- holding a silk ribbon, or taking a strawberry from a bowl. 

Bossuet looked up, and wished he could look back at the floor. 

Her dark hair had been pressed and parted, looped in plaits at the back and curling at the sides of her face, carefully done but providing the impression that chaos was only a minute away. The ferroniere that dipped to a point on her forehead was a gold chain like a thread.

Her eyes met his directly, large and shadowed, frank and secretive, eyes like a fortune teller who saw an exciting future for him. Her cheek was so like a peach that he could have bitten it. Her lips were red, and she was laughing at him. He looked at the floor, and her slippers were red as well. 

He looked safely at his own gloves, and finally Prouvaire manhandled him out of danger. 

“What’s the matter with you,” he hissed tautly, dragging Bossuet over to a wall and propping him up on it. “I hadn’t told anyone that my friend was an idiot because I didn’t think you were, but obviously I’m wrong and you are. We should leave, don’t speak to anyone and eventually you’ll be forgotten,” he seemed finished, but in fact had only needed to draw a breath. He went on: “Staring for half an hour like a provincial! And you from Meaux. You realize you did not actually say anything, not a word; the mortifying silence dragged on.” 

“Were there pearls in her hair?” Bossuet asked him, having ridden out the lecture without hearing any of the specific words. 

Prouvaire took him by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “Bossuet. Lesgles. My friend; my brother, I cannot discuss this any longer. Goodnight!”

He put his hat on and left, and Bossuet remained in some surprise leaning against the wall.

 After several weeks working out the elegance of their solution, Joly and Bossuet were in the salon de la danse with Musichetta, laughing at her jokes about the dancers and drinking dry champagne. She pointed out the Taglionis and identified patrons in her quiet, teasing voice.

“You know,” she said. “One hears the most terrific stories of what goes on here. Patrons, dancers, champagne, the eve of a performance -- the math completes itself.”

“No, I’m sorry but it doesn’t,” said Joly, and numbered the list on his fingers: “Patrons, dancers, dry champagne, the eve of the performance; is the answer four?” 

Musichetta tugged his cravat so he leaned in, and she spoke quietly in his ear precisely what she had meant. 

“So the answer is not four,” said Joly, with some strain in his voice.

“Fewer than,” she said. “It is three.”

Bossuet took his pocket watch from his waistcoat and regarded it closely. “We have something like an hour before Musichetta becomes Noraïme for the last time,” he announced. 

Joly raised his glass. “To the end of Noraïme,” he said. 

Musichetta drank from Bossuet’s, and then put her hands on both of their knees. “Let us not commemorate the end of Noraïme. I don’t care the least for Noraïme. Have I told you I am engaged by Meyerbeer for the role of Alice in Robert le Diable? Let us drink instead to the promise that we shall have many more long evenings in the this foyer, and to Joly’s miserable mathematical accomplishments.”

“Meyerbeer!” said Bossuet. “You are quite a loyal fan.”

Musichetta rolled her eyes. “Yes, you have found me out, I am the secret lover of Giacomo Meyerbeer, who is twice my age and lives in Berlin with his wife, for he, you understand, has hair.” 

“I said nothing.”

Joly corrected him. “You said, ‘Meyerbeer! You are quite a loyal fan,’ and you said it very jealously.”

The truth was that Bossuet considered Musichetta’s affection a stroke of genuine luck, and therefore a mistake awaiting correction. 

So he was constantly vigilant of the ways his happiness could evaporate. He listed them once: She could run away with Joly, she could run away with Meyerbeer, she could be seduced by any number of handsome tenors, she could be seduced by any number of compelling baritones, she could be seduced by innumerable combinations of handsome tenors working together with compelling baritones. She could leave Paris. He could leave Paris, likely by accident. 

They’d been walking along the quai d’Austerlitz, and Musichetta had threatened to beat him with Joly’s cane. She came to the point where it was actually poised above his head, and then Joly had disarmed her. 


They became experts at negotiating the first lady’s dressing room, in the way sailors become experts at accomplishing their business aboard moving ships. They knew where to put the chairs and exactly how far to one side Joly had to stand in order to avoid knocking the rosewater jar from the table. 

One night, an anonymous melomane (they all suspected it might have been Bahorel) gifted her with a small parrot which existed in a constant state of bewilderment -- punctuated only by moral outrage when the three of them were together. They learned that if they put a blanket over its cage it fell asleep. 

Eventually this entire process -- moving the chairs, tucking the rosewater bottle in from the edge, lulling the parrot to sleep with the artificial night of the blanket, and a sparing and economical renegotiation of clothing -- was clocked at four minutes. It required coordinated participation and no error.

Bossuet remembered when he first saw her; Noraïme, with eyes like a fortune teller, the right moment between hot and cold, and he rebuked himself. 

“I’ve been very unfair to you,” he said, one evening. 

“You have hair,” she guessed, “but you keep it hidden?”

“Worse.”

“Worse!”

“I think I’ve behaved badly toward you, I’ve thought of you symbolically. Beauty, mystery, contradiction, inspiration, fear. All of those things I associate with your name and your image, and this is shameful.” 

She frowned. “And you are aware that I exist in reality?”

“I am, and still for so many months I looked at you like a critic, when the truth is, when I am not thinking, Musichetta, she is the hottest and most remote star, she is intangible, she is perfect -- I think that your happiness concerns me not because I like to see you happy, though I do, but because it is my own happiness. I remain in love with you, to be sure, but I also simply love you. To summarize, when I am not writing some pompous poetry in my head about my mistress I am thinking that you are my friend, Musichetta, together with Joly, you are my dearest friends,” saying this, he reflected, and added: “Perhaps you more than Joly, since as you’ve seen he is also my landlord, which makes him petty.”

She had put her head so her cheek rested on his shoulder, and when she smiled at him he felt the movement through his shirt. He knew that smile, glittering, indescribable -- he stopped the thought. She smiled at him, he knew without seeing it, and it made him happy. 

“Well,” she said, “what an odd little declaration, if you mean you love me I’d better write to Meyerbeer tomorrow and tell him I regret it, but the elopement’s off.”

At that moment the door opened and admitted Joly, tired and expressionless from a day of practical observation. He raised his eyebrows at the two of them and asked if they were plotting. 

Musichetta yawned, beckoned him over, and started to unwind his cravat. “Yes,” she replied. “Your death will be very complicated. It will only work if we’ve calculated the physics exactly right. And then we will run off with all your worldly possessions, being, a walking stick, this necktie, and whatever is in your wallet. We have horses waiting under the window. No, L’Aigle was apologizing to me for considering me to be intangible, and we have declared friendship to one another. The effect is this: We will be calling you from now la Musichetta, and I am to be Joly, and consequently you will have to practice quite a few soprano parts to keep the name up to snuff.”

Joly put a hand fondly on the top of her head, and sat beside them. 

“Friendship,” he said. “What a harmonious outcome, isn’t it that, ‘Ohne diese Sympathie ist kein Glück auf Erden?’ And men dressed as parrots are almost never wrong.” 

“I think he means agape, more than the specific devotion of friendship,” said Musichetta, teasing.

“With a touch of eros,” Bossuet reminded her. “I used to wonder what would happen if we were ever parted, now I think that it isn’t possible.”

“Don’t speak too optimistically,” said Joly, “if you plan to keep drinking the water.”

“There is only one thing which parts everyone. This is death. It poses certain questions. How shall it happen? When? Under what circumstances? These questions do not concern me, for love is infinite, and it is shadowed only by a sleep and a forgetting, as Wordsworth writes of what precedes our lives. The remaining question: How, afterwards, shall we know each other? And again this does not concern me. For every morning since I can remember, I have reached by instinct, looking for someone beside me, and in this blundering fashion I have been once successful -- this is enough to say I will be always successful.”

Musichetta was helping Joly navigate his way under her skirt, and they had both stopped listening to him. He laughed, and hit Joly on the back of the head, and proceeded to heckle them.

LA MUSICHETTA È RITORNA, declared the billboard at La Scala’s first foyer. It had been said already in the papers, had evoked comment, criticism, speculation. 

If she hadn’t been killed in an émeute a year ago, where had she been? Resting, in America, in Algeria, in Germany with Meyerbeer? The list went on; it was edited and perfected in Milanese drawing rooms and had rather blown over in the Parisian ones. 

The day after Christmas, in the year 1833, she sang Lucrezia Borgia for the first time. She set the standard, said the critics. She was wild and vengeful and innocent, they said; it was an achievement, from the loggione there was only applause. Her voice was better than it had ever been in Paris. The girlishness and studiousness that had been implied when it was called cold and exact had gone. The tone was darker and it resounded with passion. 

At a certain point during the aria “Com'è bello,” the papers reported, the opera house and casino went quiet:

La Musichetta is better than before. She is divine, her voice has aged in an oak barrel; she expresses at all moments a limitless capacity for feeling. At a certain point Lucrezia is obliged to sing to the sleeping youth Gennaro. What affection, and what sadness! She kneels beside him, she lays her fingers on his closed eyes and caresses his cheek. As she does these things, in her clear, effortless voice, half dolorous and half in hope, she promises to keep watch alone. Even the gamblers were silent!