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encounter with André. At the eleven o’clock pause Elodie handed round cups of coffee and we rested our aching wrists. Along with re-modellings for the
Fée Verte
picture, due to be filmed in a few days’ time, we were making revolutionary outfits for the filming of Hugo’s
Misérables
. A hundred extras were to storm an improvised barricade in the Pathé courtyard that afternoon; blue, white and red strips of fabric were scattered around the room.
    André stepped into the room with his usual deference. ‘Ah, the Uprising,’ he said seriously, reaching for an abandoned tricorn hat. ‘I must tell the other overseers to watch their step.’ I thought he had never looked so handsome than when he positioned the hat on his curls.
    My colleagues tittered like schoolgirls and he doffed the hat to us – I coloured as with its final flourish he met my eyes. Then he dropped the hat onto my desk, and stepped back out into the corridor again. As he closed the door, when nobody else was looking, he winked at me.
    There was a contemplative silence, then: ‘He looks tired,’ said Annick, winding a strip of electric-ginger hair around her finger.
    ‘Well, that’s no surprise,’ Elodie said, ‘considering who he’s married to.’
    The other girls tittered, and I joined in, so as not to stand out. I had guessed from the start that André was spoken for. An air of well-fedness, of being adored – he did not have the lean look of a bachelor. But what other ties he might have had had little bearing on what I was asking from him. Night after night, I asked him to try me in a role.
    The evening before, he had laid on his back next to me, drowsing; I had rolled into the crook of his arm to look up at him.
    ‘Do I get the part?’ I asked playfully.
    He turned onto his elbow to look at me. ‘You’re certainly moving up the shortlist,’ he said. I kissed him again, in triumph. He had almost said it: it was only a matter of waiting for the right opportunity.
    So as Elodie chattered on, I was able to tap my foot on the pedal and listen calmly – I was naturally intrigued to find out the name of my rival. ‘Of course he looks tired,’ she continued. ‘She keeps him busy enough, with all her carryings-on.’
    ‘Poor hen-pecked man,’ said Solange.
    I tossed my hair back for my own benefit. André’s wife was suddenly taking on a form that differed from my idea. Tantrums: that didn’t fit, because he was such a connoisseur of women. Didn’t he tell me, every evening,
you are a beautiful little thing? My mannequin – my doll
? She must be rich by birth, apatroness whom he’d married for her title. Liver-spotted hands chinking with rings.
    Georgette said: ‘They say she sleeps on a mattress made of peacock feathers.’
    Annick said: ‘I heard she employs a poison taster, and the last two died.’
    Elodie stared at her work and said: ‘They say she’s a hermaphrodite.’
    This met a blushing silence.
    Georgette ran her needle along a line of cloth and sighed: ‘But the talent goes with the temperament, doesn’t it? And she can move an audience to tears.’
    My stomach plummeted, my needle stabbed my finger; I pulled it away, sucking the blood off the tip. I felt the others staring: Elodie’s quick, bitter glance and Annick, her mouth hanging slightly open, flushing to clash with her hair. Only Georgette failed to notice. She prattled happily on: ‘At her
Dame aux Roses
, the crowd went quite wild! They say Sarah Bernhardt wept with jealousy!’ She giggled; and then, interpreting the sudden quiet, her face froze and she looked at Annick, Solange, Elodie: me.
    ‘What’s her name?’ I asked her.
    ‘Terpsichore,’ she said.
    Juliette and Adèle
1967
    I say: ‘So that was how you discovered they were married?’
    ‘Yes. Through their pity.’
    ‘Pity?’
    Adèle narrows her eyes. ‘Of course! The girls were trying to help me. They had kept quiet about his wife, out of tact, for months. But when they decided it had