Ten Thousand Francs

Ten thousand francs. Ten thousand francs was the sum demanded by the courtesan who lived along the Champs-Elysées in a palace with an onyx staircase, ten thousand francs for the demimondaine who called Paris and Moscow her home, ten thousand francs for the grande horizontale who was once the white and gold mistress of the Marques de Païva in a coffeehouse liaison. Ten thousand francs: an inordinate, exorbitant, most extravagant, perhaps extortionate, by no means explicable, although easily execrable, exceedingly extreme, exquisitely exemplary, exceptionally extraordinary, at the same time extraordinarily exceptional price!

She had ruined many. The Duc des Tigrieux bankrupted himself on theater boxes and a set of Orlov trotters for her carriage. He then took up gambling, incurred heavy losses despite the clever handywork of his ruffles when shuffling, and finally shot himself in the jaw, like Robespierre, while playing Russian roulette at the Hotel de Carpathay. Vienna was never so cruel to the Graf von Hencklemark who met his end destitute and consumptive once he had furnished her with a pair of diamond bracelets of the finest water and a sable that put the Venus in furs to shame. The Vicomte du Valle became a compulsive, if not pathological, buyer of bouquets, earning himself the designation of "Messire des Marguerites" by the florists who watched him purchase enough camellias and roses to twice cover every corner of her boudoir with plenty left over to feed her Angora that fondly played with a string of pearls given to her as a parting gift from the Baron de Rubempier, suffering from a weak heart, on his deathbed. And what of the unfortunate Chevalier de Saint-Bellmont who died in a duel when a collector offered a prettily-worded discourtesy against her epicurean excesses that dug deep into his pockets and even deeper into his heart? Oui, She was a killer, an expensive, splendid, pampered man-eater.

But for all her charm and captivation, She was not the first nor was her asking price. Non! Before Paris there was Corinth, a journey to which was not for every man, thanks to one woman, Lais, whose habit was to reduce her lovers to the most desperate state of poverty. It was said the orator Demosthenes desired her for a night, but she desired ten thousand drachmas in an instant. He was a much wiser fool than his counterparts in Second Empire France as he turned from her threshold to leave, for he refused to buy disappointment for drachma of ten thousand. Little did Demosthenes know how right he was, or how frivolous disappointment could be. Centuries later, the legacy of Lais inspired the white and gold courtesan of Champagne and cake to play with her lovers and throw away their money.

To return to the matter of the moment, the amount was ten thousand francs. And to return to the moment that gave rise to the matter, it had been at a ball of the Comte d'Églantine where She was scene by her most ardent admirer, a young cadet on leave. She arrived with Monsieur de Perrecleau, posing as his wife, wearing white gardenias in her hair and a choker of amber at her throat. Unlike the Comtesse d'Églantine or grandes dames, She ate only spiced truffles with vermouth and sugared oranges. Somewhere, sometime between the cotillion and gaming room, She had fallen into His arms, giggling and drunk with waltzing and liquor.

"Bonjour," She said, smiling up at Him.

"Good evening, Mademoiselle," He replied, taken aback.

She lifted her head from his chest to gaze at the chandelier above them. "Oh! How handsome you are under the light! A crystal star shines upon you. Come and dance with me. I am so unhappy." But her words were incongruous with the simpering grin on her vermilion lips.

"When may I see you again?" He asked upon finishing the quadrille.

She pulled away from his hold, smirking as He reached out for her. "When the stars fall into the Seine. When you have ten thousand francs," She answered, "and no less."

He was left with a flighty kiss, the rustle of silk, and the scent of gardenias as he watched her rush to the courtyard, laughing. Perrecleau sighed; Églantine smiled, chuckled softly, and winked. Such had been the moment that made the ten thousand francs matter so much.

The cadet was beside himself, besotted, bedazzled, beloved of fancy but, ten thousand francs? He was no aristocrat, no bourgeois gentleman, not even a petty officer in the corps of hussars. The gendarmes of Paris were richer than He, He who had nothing to give away, no epaulet to pawn, nor ribbon to sell. A soldier of fortune, since He was not a soldier of anything else, did not come by ten thousand francs easily. Yet the plebeian private had all the wealth in the world in hope. Dum spiro spero. He put his hope in dice, in starving his horses, in starving himself, in selling his very soul to have the ten, one thousand franc notes, crisp and redolent of the mint, in his hands that shook upon grasping the greatest treasure He had ever beheld. After rubbing shoulders with the soft-spoken Mephistopheles in the dark underworld of the Palace Royale, He had finally done it: Ten thousand francs were his, as was the wish He sent out to the shooting star that plunged into the Seine on the night of a blue moon.

In the meantime, She destroyed d'Églantine. His wife, the jealous variety of course, had discovered his affair upon finding a strange hair ribbon, white satin with gold-wire embroidery, pressed in the pages of a Latin Ars Amatoria in their library, and the next evening, following a soirée, the honorable comte was pronounced dead in his bed, with her ribbon tied perhaps too affectionately about his azure-veined neck. The fate of the comtesse has never been known since, though some say, mere whispers in the drawing rooms of Saint-Germain, that she seduced her guard in prison and fled to Monaco where she became a celebrated white and gold lady of the Monte Carlo opera house, a silver-gilt spirit of box nine, or else a gilded argent phantom of the casino on the Grand-Place where she sported with the likes of a Grimaldi or a Luthumière while watching Roquebrune defeat Château-Porcien at the shell game. Nobody could guess that a simple conch, creamy beige with a hint of a pink blush at the edges, could invite ten thousand francs to the velvet or chase it away. But then again, nobody ever knew how fickle ten thousand francs could be.

But the white and gold courtesan in Paris did. She had asked for them after all. Ten thousand francs, ten thousand diamonds, ten thousand sighs; it made no difference to her. But to the cadet, He believed He was purchasing a piece of heaven, a sliver of eternity in an hour shared in the company of a wingless angel who proclaimed herself Imperatrix Mundi with a glass of Tokay, a Valenciennes scarf, a diadem containing le Régent, and a Swiss guard at her feet--ten thousand francs for a fleeting infinity, for an instantaneous immortality, for a moment in timelessness. Ten thousand francs was but nothing for a piece of forever.

So one moonlit night He presented himself to her marble mansion and was admitted by a maid in pink and white ribbons. Smiling, She soon descended down her famed onyx and gilded staircase arrayed in an evening gown, a chaplet of baby's breath adorning her lustrous curls. her Turkish Angora, supercilious and majestic, advanced before her and rubbed itself against his legs, purring. She laughed upon seeing her cat's display of affection toward the handsome stranger attired as He was in his soldierly uniform. She giggled further when He swooped into a ceremonious bow, held her wrist, and kissed the back of her hand, soft and fragrant with verbena and ylang-ylang. Dressed like an empress, She conducted Him to her dining room where they feasted on those delicacies typically prepared for the Muscovite but which were inspired by the Parisien--Salade Olivier, egg pâté, and lemon tvorozhnik drunk with blueberry nalivka and grüner veltliner. They laughed, cracked jokes, recited anecdotes, and continued to pour the wine into their ready glasses, making toasts that became more and more meaningless as the banquet progressed until the violet hour when early morning is indistinguishable from late night.

It was as they lingered on their rosé and pachlava that He quitted his seat and neared hers. He bent down on one knee, showed off the aquatics of his mouth with the wine shooting up as a jet beside her, and pulled off her satin slipper as an overture to slipping off the rest of her clothes. Comprehending this, She permitted him to remove her gloves but insisted on the baby's breath remaining in her hair. He was encouraged, rose to his booted feet, and led her to her sitting room where a fire blazed, its tawny flames licking the grotesques and arabesques of the carved mantel. There were, in the words of one poet, "by one hand lightheaded Bacchus hung, and with the other, wine from grapes out run. There might you see the gods in sundry shapes, committing heady riots, incest, rapes." And there He emerged from his coat and stood before the recumbent courtesan in breeches and a military shirt of irreproachable whiteness. She turned her head, gazed at him with half-closed, laughing eyes, and beckoned to him with her extended arm with open palm and smirking lips, and soon She had him writhing and seething and moaning on the Persian carpet from whence She rose, her breast illuminated by the orange-yellow fire, and introduced her soft hand into the front of his breeches, her fingers tantalizing him with feather-light caresses. It was there that She located a stiff sheath of bills, the ten, one thousand franc notes redolent of hope and a scion of the mint. She smiled, He gasped, and the fire crackled. Whispering into his ear, She ran those soft hands through his hair and with the other tossed a thousand francs into the blazes.

With every act that thrilled and electrified him, She giggled, the fire light surrounding her face with a golden aura, and He believed ten thousand francs glittered in those dark eyes. She was at his Hessian boots, still on his feet, and toyed with the tassels, after which She tossed a second thousand francs into the warm tongues beyond the petra dura hearth. Another time, He hung from her neck, and She held him to her, sacrificing two thousand francs for the panting, hot ardor that heated her shoulders. Once, He repaid her with his own hands sifting through her silky locks, but when He accidently crushed one of those delicate baby's breath, She called out, whimpered, and, as He attended to her shortlived grief, parted with four more notes, a thousand for each petal ruined by his rude fingers.

When all was said and done, though nothing said and everything done, She was on top of him, looking down on his spent and exhausted face, her head propped up on her palms, her elbows beyond the velvety shells of his ears, and the fire reduced to smoldering embers and glowing ashes. Never was there such a perfect picture of languid gratification, content, and transcendent satiety.

"I love you," He said, the perspiration gleaming amidst his curls.

She laughed.

He shivered. "Forgive me. I'm cold."

"Are you?"

"I--I ... Oui, I am."

"No matter," she replied. And with that, She extracted the final three thousand francs from her breast, and the embers sparked.

Instantaneously, his hand went to his own breast, attempting to still the beating of his heart. "I must ... for your gracious attention ... Please, allow me." She slid off him and sat up regally beside him.

However, his hand, not so soft nor as keen as hers, was unable to find the ten thousand francs. His face, set in tranquil ecstasy, drained of color and took on a deathly pallor, the roses on his cheeks dying to ashes. Gone. Vanished. Ten thousand francs having disappeared in thin air, ten thousand francs lost in the heat of passion, ten thousand francs escaped from the security of his front pocket. Ten thousand francs no more.

Breathing heavily, He shivered again, and then He stared at the fire, its dancing flames, its tawny-gold grotesques and arabesques of warm light, its crackling splendor, its lurid smokiness, its great tongues rising up as they consumed the last of one of those infamous notes painfully acquired from the hand of the soft-spoken Mephistopheles who had his soul now along with those fiery embers. As long as they, the ten thousand securities, were in plenty, the fire of desire and of the marble mantel was stoked. As soon as they were depleted, nothing was left. She placed her hand on his heart, felt it beating, and commenced laughing. He must have died ten thousand times, cried ten thousand tears, and suffered ten thousand agonies, all for ten thousand francs which had been slowly and systematically burned before his eyes though He never saw it. He never knew She had deceived him in ten thousand ways.

"Does the fire not warm you?" She asked, stroking his face. "Tonight the stars have fallen, and the Seine thanks you ten thousand times, once for each franc."

Bliss was not forevermore, and the only always was the descent into ten thousand Hells.