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with joy at the thought of what I was leaving behind—the squealing and wriggling amid the glissades and entrechats, the hair pulling and scuffles amid the grands jetés and pirouettes, the squabbles over the watering can, just whose turn it was to dampen the floorboards. But that was not all. There would be no more Charlotte whispering corrections to me at the barre and butting ahead of me in line and sniveling that so-and-so called her Madame Fine Airs. And one last sweetener, my first week up with the older girls, Madame Dominique took us into the theater to watch a dress rehearsal of the ballet divertissement slotted into act four of Monsieur Gounod’s new opera, Polyeucte.
    You could have knocked me over upon seeing the stage—a columned temple; a scarlet, tasseled canopy; statues in marble, bronze and gold; a gilded chariot drawn by four stallions; magistrates, nobles and Roman soldiers, nine hundred costumes all told. Most stunning of all, though, was Rosita Mauri, brought from Barcelona by way of La Scala in Milan, to dance as Venus in the divertissement. Madame Dominique told us she was less refined, less classically correct than the French étoiles, but that no one matched her in strength, in swiftness crossing the stage, in quickness of footwork. I never saw such batterie, Rosita Mauri’s legs beating, her feet quivering midair. I never saw such pirouettes, sharp, brisk, never once dropping from the tips of her toes. The mouths of the corps de ballet hung open. Eyes glinted bitterness. I wanted to dance as Rosita Mauri did—like a man in fierceness and strength, like a woman in lightness and grace. Afterward, she made a low curtsey, and when she looked up, her face was aglow with joy. It was a pleasure I knew, something I had touched once or twice in the practice room, the pleasure of having become music, the pleasure of being filled up head to toe.
    I am figuring out the rules of my new class, how a girl called Blanche always gets the first spot at the barre and the front row once we move to the center of the room for the second part of class, the way Madame Dominique picks her to show the proper positioning of the knee in an attitude, the ankles in a cabriole. I see the other girls whispering and Blanche off by herself, stretching with her leg upon the barre if we are awaiting our turn to show a string of grands jetés, or practicing coupés if it is a chain of piqué pirouettes. At the end of class Blanche packs up her bag and is fast as a rabbit on the stairs. It is better than stalling, hoping that just once one of the laughing, arm-linking girls will say, “You’ll walk home with us today, no?” The girls were nicer to me in the beginning, gathering around and asking where I lived and did I think Marie Sanlaville was furious that Rosita Mauri was picked to dance as Venus in Polyeucte. I said she probably did not mind, at least not so much when the newspapers started calling Gounod’s score unbearable in its monotony. I felt a little proud of my quick thinking, how each of the gathered girls, after the question, knew I could read. Then, after a week, Madame Dominique shifted me to the second spot at the barre, and at first I was sure I was moved only because always I was botching exercises and Madame Dominique wanted me standing behind Blanche, who never did. But the girls turned sour, and soon enough it was not just Blanche off by herself, making her muscles long, her coupés sharp.
    With me up front Madame Dominique is always lifting my drooping elbow, tapping my rising-up shoulders, catching my leg high in a grand battement and further arching my foot. It did not take long to figure out that the days she lavished attention on me were days when I found myself taking the stairs alone after class. I started keeping a tally of her attentions, no different from the rest of the whispering girls, and maybe the tallying was something better not begun because now I cannot stop.
    Today, like every day at the