$26.

00

Carole DeSanti
Higher in Canada

© sigrid E strada
“As fiercely depicted as the paintings of

L
“Eugénie R. is every girl in a daguerreotype looking over her shoulder, ev- Toulouse-Lautrec.”

D
ery woman with a baby hurrying away from you down a gas-lit street, and — Stephanie Cowell
then, too, she is the first of her kind, a woman who stands at her own bar- author of Claude and Camille
ricades and fights a France determined to render her silent. I would have
followed her down any narrow alley just to know what happened and to
••••
delay coming home.”
— Sarah Blake
author of The Postmistress
The ove and war converge
in this lush, epic story of a young
woman’s coming of age during and after France’s
Second Empire (1860–1871), an era that was
“An unflinching portrait of love and loss against a landscape of Paris-ian Unruly absinthe-soaked, fueled by railway money and
decadence. ‘How does a woman learn to doubt herself?’ Eugénie R. won-
prostitution, and transformed by cataclysmic
ders, but at the conclusion of this satisfying tale, she — and DeSanti — have
social upheaval.
won the reader’s unwavering admiration.” Passions    Eugénie R., born in foie gras country, fol-
— Deborah Harkness lows the man she loves to Paris but soon finds
author of A Discovery of Witches
of herself marooned. An outcast, she charts the
treacherous waters of sexual commerce on a
Carole DeSanti is an editor at the Penguin “Epic times make for epic books . . . Wonderful, suspenseful reading.” journey through artists’ ateliers and pawnshops,
Group, where she is known as a champion of
independent voices in fiction. She has been clan-
— Karen Joy Fowler
author of The Jane Austen Book Club
Eugénie zinc bars and luxurious bordellos. Giving birth
to a daughter she is forced to abandon, Eugé-
destinely writing The Unruly Passions of Eugénie
nie spends the next ten years fighting to get her
R. for over a decade and has been supported “Second Empire Paris, greedy in peacetime and ravenous in war, is so richly  R. back, falling in love along the way with an artist,

D
by the Five College Women’s Studies Research and sensuously drawn one can almost feel it . . . Perhaps if her contem- a woman, and a revolutionary. Then, as the gates
Center and Hedgebrook. Visit www.carolede- porary, Emma Bovary, had possessed the ingenuity, wit, and tenacity of of the city close on the eve of the Siege of Paris,
santi.net. Eugénie R., she wouldn’t have had to take that arsenic.” Eugénie comes face to face with her past. Drawn
— Valerie Martin into a net of desire and need, promises and lies,
©  H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n H a r c o u r t P u b l i s h i n g C o m p a n y

“A magnificent novel in scope and achievement, author of Property she must make a choice and find her way to a life
powerfully written yet delicately evocative . . . that she can call her own.

Carole DeSanti
Death does its worst, passion wears itself out, “Against a carefully re-created landscape of France during the 1860s,
civilization moves a notch forward, and with it,
or because of it, female understanding of what
with the Prussian army heading for Paris, DeSanti brings a twenty-
first-century sensitivity for the plight and passions of women in her ren-
TheUnruly Passions of “Eugénie R.’s story drops us into the dark velvety
centers of sex, sin, and political intrigue, and
it is to be a woman. A book to make you think.” dering of Eugénie.”
E u g é n i e R.
takes us along on her own instinctive journey to
— Fay Weldon — Mireille Guiliano modern womanhood.”
author of French Women Don’t Get Fat
••••
D
— Lynn Hunt
Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, UCLA

Jacket desig n: Michaela Sullivan “This astonishing debut is a panoramic story of

Jacket ar t © Ilona Wellmann / Tre v illion Images war and peace, love and betrayal, innocence and
$26.00 1450801 A N o v e l
Higher in
C a n a da hard‑won wisdom.”
Houghton Mifflin Harc ourt isbn 978-0-547-55309-2
— Lauren Belfer
w w w. hmhbook s . com author of A Fierce Radiance

0312
 Th e U n ru ly
Pa s s i on s
of
Eu g é n i e R .

Carole DeSanti

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

b o s ton n e w yo rk
2012

DeSanti_F.indd iii 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 Copyright © 2012 by Carole DeSanti

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeSanti, Carole.
The unruly passions of Eugénie R. / Carole DeSanti.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-55309-2
1. Self-realization in women — Fiction. 2. France — History —
Second Empire, 1852–1870 — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.E7549U57 2012
813'.6 — dc22
2011016540

Book design by Brian Moore

Printed in the United States of America

doc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

DeSanti_F.indd iv 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 1

To Pa r i s, 1861

he tr ain, nearly empty when I boarded, had filled.

T La Loupe, Chartres, Rambouillet, Versailles — each sta-

tion a fresh roar of voices, a jostling of shoulders and par-
cels and luggage. The car smelled of damp wool and iron, musky
sweat and sour bodies; the windows were grimy with soot and
dusk. In the seat next to me, empty an hour ago, was a stranger
wearing the crumbs of his dinner — bread and Camembert. Once
inside the Porte Maillot the carriage halted suddenly, went black for
an instant of silence, a gasping intake of breath: “Next, Saint-La-
zare!” We shuddered forward. I squeezed shut my eyes, wishing it
all away? And abruptly smacked my head against the rail on the
seat ahead, bone against iron; a wave of dizziness and emotion —
Wait, turn back the clock, is it all a terrible mistake? A charred, acrid
odor.
“PARIS!”
“They’ll be unloading us directly from the station to the hospital
wards soon enough,” muttered the stranger, brushing crumbs off
his waistcoat. “Just drop us off at La Salpêtrière!”
Paris. My aching brow. The bump was already beginning to swell
into an egg.

DeSanti_F.indd 3 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 4 carole desanti

“ . . . A hat, you goose — gloves,” Stephan had said, thrusting into
my hands these unfamiliar items, companions to the soft silk of the
dress I was wearing. “You can’t go about Paris bare-fisted and naked
above the neck!” Now the veil’s decorative flecks swarmed before my
eyes, an irritating nest of spots.
In the cab, scents of horse and leather, musky cologne in the
chilly air; my breath misting the window. Sharp, rolling turn down
an ancient alley with walls close enough to touch. A stairway too
steep to climb, cut into stone; rusted iron loops for handholds and
strips of cloth on a blackened beam for a door. I hung hard to a strap
as the cab took a steep, winding descent.
“Passage Tivoli, rue Saint-Lazare!” came the shout, and I reached
for my handbag. Fat, stuffed to bursting, the fl imsy thing, but I
counted out every last sou of the fare. The driver threw a curse
behind me; I flushed hot under my veil. In my limited experience
of travel, Stephan had paid, and undoubtedly tipped, the cabmen.
Before that, it was the rutted market road to Mirande on the back of
a mule, or we traveled on foot, and not very far.

Dusk had fallen. A double archway led to an arcade divided from

the road by a gutter; suspended lanterns swayed above, with illumi-
nated letters: hôtels: tivoli, no. 1; lisieux, no. 2; vaucluse,
no. 3. Every surface was plastered with placards and signs — gen-
erations of ruined broadsheets and framed notices for salons.
chambres. cabinets. Gaslit signs, lozenge-shaped, glowed above
the hotel entrances, and a dubious gust scattered debris into a cor-
ner. Stephan had said that rooms in Paris were in short supply.
The Tivoli was nearest, and from behind the desk, Madame eval-
uated the scrap of black velvet on my head and its drag of veil; ran
her eye over my smooth, strangled fingers clutching the strings of
my handbag. Her shawl had a fringe of jet beads that clicked like a
patter of rain, or Maman’s rosary when she tackled her penitence
after months of neglect.
Silently, the required envelope crossed the counter, white against
the pitted mahogany. Its edge was sharp, unsullied as fresh linen;

DeSanti_F.indd 4 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 t h e u n ru ly pa ssions of e ugÉ nie r. 5

the seal, red wax like a drop of blood, once hot and now congealed.
I had laughed, the afternoon Stephan dipped his pen, finished, and
dusted the page. We weren’t drinking champagne then, but tingling
bubbles were still in our noses. “You’ll see how things are done in
Paris!”
Madame slipped a knife under the wax and, with great and slow
deliberation, unfolded the document inside, a thick, milky sheet.
Her eyes narrowed and her gaze slipped over the page; then from
the page to me and back again — cataloguing qualities unknown,
the way my cousin cast his eye over the beam of a measuring scale
as he slit open the bellies of the ducks and geese to weigh their livers
for foie de canard, foie d’oie. Now, Madame’s eyes narrowed again
with an opinion, the kind that is a known truth to the rest of the
world. I had an impulse to turn and flee — but where?
“Haussmann is nearly on our doorstep with the tear-down boys,”
she said finally, with a solicitude purchased, perhaps, by Stephan’s
pen. “There’s not a room left on the Passage, but you’re lucky to-
night, Mademoiselle Rigault. Yes? Very well then.” She slid the en-
velope back across the desk; now it showed a pinkish stain where
the wax had been. “Ladies’ curfew at seven, sharp. No gentlemen
above stairs. We have no improprieties here.” She gave me another
beakish, penetrating look. “Candles twenty sous, gas is not piped all
the way up.” Outside, from the bar à vin across the Passage, came
shouts and drunken, echoing laughter.
My throat ached; the lump on my brow throbbed; my belly gave
a hollow stab and a rush of heat rose behind my eyes . . . Paris. City
of light, center of the World. Of civilization; of art. It took several
matches, cheap and smoldering, to ignite a taper that revealed the
attributes of room 12 atop an interminable stair: a scrap of carpet
worn down to the threads, walls spidered with cracks, and a sag-
ging mattress on an iron bedstead. A wooden chair, a candle stand.
Freezing, dusty with neglect; the very walls closing in with a re-
proach.
I wedged the back of the chair under the knob. Then after a while,
lay stiffly on top of the bedcovers in my street clothes and under my

DeSanti_F.indd 5 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 6 carole desanti

cloak, listening to my heart pound and the blood surge in my ears;

crashes and yelps from the alley below. Cold seeped up through the
floorboards.
Of all the damp gloom and dusky shades I had so far encountered,
the void next to me was the most disconcerting and lonely of all. But
Stephan would know, as well as I, this gaping emptiness; my lover
would be feeling my absence just as I felt his. Yes, I had gambled;
exchanged all that had defined me in the world — a rustic life in a
distant province (where anyone who had ever been to the capital at
all was called a Parisien for life) — the rutted road and antique hab-
its of church and village, the goose pens, the obligations of a daugh-
ter — for Stephan’s kisses and his promises, murmured like silk to
my neck and imprinted on every part of me, stamped into the wax
of my being. Yes, I had contoured my life to his since Saint Martin’s
Day last November, with not much to show for it but a promise and
some borrowed finery against the January winds — but still.
“Don’t doubt me, Eugénie,” he had said. “Doubt, you know, is con-
tagious.”
The last echo before I drifted under seemed to be the voice of
my mother, Berthe, mocking behind my ear . . . You think your eggs
are on the fire when only the shells are left . . . ! An old country say-
ing, never-turn-your-back. Maman felt closer, in that instant, than
Stephan, though I had left her farther behind. And in the moment
of collision between what I had imagined and the clamoring con-
sequences of my real actions came the ache of foreknowledge, like
the bump on my head, and the simultaneous etherizing of it deep
within.

I woke to the sound of church bells; insistent, unstopping, pulling

me from the shallow marooning shoals of a dream. Dirty light fil-
tered in through the window; a wafer of ice lay on top of the water
in the pitcher. Paris. Blackened stub of wick in a pool of wax; an ach-
ing head and skirts pulled up and rumpled as though I had been rav-
ished by something unseen in the night. I reached up gingerly, felt
the bump above my eyebrow, glanced toward the door. The chair
was in place. Splash of icy water, skirts pressed smooth with the

DeSanti_F.indd 6 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 t h e u n ru ly pa ssions of e ugÉ nie r. 7

palms of my hands. No maid, no Léonie; no iron nor fire to warm

it; certainly no pot on a silver tray outside the door of number 12.
From below, the dim clink and clatter of crockery held out the
promise of hot coffee, at least, so I followed the sounds down to a
dull, high-windowed room. Four men in coats and cravats pushed
back their chairs; and a kitchen door exhaled a cloud of steam and
the odor of spent coffee grounds. A sullen boy scraped down pink
tablecloths, steering around bud vases containing fabric flowers,
their stems stickily coiled with green tape. Madame had said noth-
ing about breakfast. Was it included with the price of a room?
Over the coming days, I would learn that the help spoke no
French; nor did most of the guests. As unaccompanied ladies never
set foot there, my appearance on that morning set off a ripple of
glances that sent me slinking out to a street cart, an old woman with
a coffee urn, and a tin ladle meant for workmen. She too looked fish-
eyed at my gloves and hat as the wind luffed up. A strangled giggle
rose in my nose and I tossed back the bitter stuff. If Stephan were
here, it would all be a terrific joke — all of this unfamiliarity would
disappear in a puff of smoke. Meanwhile, I must make the best of
it. With the black brew in my hollow guts, I fished out my Nouveau
Plan de la Ville de Paris 1860, with its indigo-marbled covers. My
key to the capital.

By hard frost of that year — now past — the goose-girl from a tiny
village hugging the Pyrenees had tasted defi ance, and with it what
she found she preferred: afternoons in a library sprawled on a car-
pet thick with Turkish flowers; a stack of leather-bound volumes
pulled from the shelves. Cream with chocolate, yolks of eggs; the
meat of the bird and a lover’s attentions. Instead of hoarding coals
in a brazier and poking the ashes on a frigid morning, as the goose-
girl had once done, she enjoyed fires laid by a maid (Léonie). All of
it an extravagant taste of what had, in sixteen years of living, been
skimmed off the top, plucked and gathered, measured and weighed;
priced and packed and sold off down to the bones and renderings.
My new life fit like a tailored bodice, a dressmaker’s creation tossed
my way after the original wearer had cast it off. Indeed, there were

DeSanti_F.indd 7 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 8 carole desanti

corsets dug out of the chests and armoires; petticoats, bonnets, and
stockings; past-fashion dresses belonging to absent relatives. In
short order I learned to delight in foie d’oie rather than sell it; and
soon greeted the rural folk at the Saturday market, the flower girl
and the bread man, and chattered of our domestic affairs to Léonie,
who uttered only murmurs of assent.
My seventeenth birthday had passed just after the New Year. We
had celebrated it in Stephan’s bed — or rather his uncle’s bed, to
which we had made profound claim — dining on brandy plums, foie
d’oie, roast chicken; market cheeses, crusty white bread. The carpets
were littered with corks and bones and plum stones and Bovary, its
binding splayed over a mound past due for the wash. Stephan had
tossed it there.
“In Paris, you know, girls your age are not allowed to read
Bovary.”
“What do they read?”
“Works of moral improvement that encourage them to uphold
the social order!”
He laughed and threw back the bedclothes. Drowsy and efferves-
cent, I slipped into the warm furrow his body had left. The windows
were fogged from the heat of the fire; Stephan shed his robe. Water
slapped gently against the sides of the bath as he stepped in. The
taste of foie d’oie and the musk of his flesh lingered on my tongue,
a touch of salt; champagne tingled through my veins. Our sprig of
Saint Nicholas mistletoe still dangled on the bedpost, its white ber-
ries now dried to husks. Outside, the gardens lay under a glittering
sheen of frost, the last of the roses long gone; the lush foliage of the
borders stripped of color. The day’s diminishing light fell through
the diamond panes of mullioned glass.
“Little goose, wake up! It’s nearly nighttime.” My lover parted
the bed curtain and stood clothed. He picked up Bovary, passing his
fingertips along the spine. Emma, as I had left her, was bankrupt
with dresses, running from lover to lover. I slipped beneath the sea
of linen, awash in a strange irritation. Stephan lounged on the edge
of the bed, picked up a knife from the litter on the carpet, and began

DeSanti_F.indd 8 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 t h e u n ru ly pa ssions of e ugÉ nie r. 9

peeling a winter apple. That knife drew a line between us, as he ran
the blade across the fruit’s surface, flaying it of its rosy skin. Then
he told me a story, better than Bovary because it was our own. It was
set in Paris and there were parties, dances — masked balls in gar-
dens. Ice skating on frozen lakes inside the city; fires with crackling
wood and hot drinks with rum. Horse carriages along the streets,
with bottles of champagne. We would fool them all, delight and
convince them — who? — I did not ask.
He dropped the paring, an unbroken spiral, to the floor. Cut
a thin, perfect slice to the core, a sliver like a new moon. An owl
hooted, a gentle but worrying hoo-hoo, very near. Toast crumbs
from our bed feast pressed uncomfortably into my flesh.
“So, we will be — married?” I ventured. We had discussed it on
our long fl ight from my home province to the chateau — it was not
so much a promise as simply an understanding, clear as the sky was
blue, which it was, once we left the southwest’s clouds and smoke.
“But we must avoid Bovary at all costs, don’t you think? A stifl ing
life, both of us miserable and bored.”
I giggled. “It wouldn’t be; you are nothing like Charles Bovary.
A dull doctor.”
“I’d rather not find out if marriage transforms me, then.” Stephan
assured me that Paris was nothing like a tiny, convention-bound pro-
vincial village; the capital was law unto itself. I hesitated — never
having considered Tillac, the place I was born, in that light. I did
not miss the odor of the goose pens, though.
“Why can’t we just stay here? The days will lengthen soon. The
ice will melt and we can plant a kitchen garden.” Fingers in the dark
soil newborn from the frost, sieving it to breadcrumb size, nestling
tiny seeds — carrots, lettuces — tucking them in a moist, well-aired
bed, and watching for the first pale green shoot. “I’d like to eat some-
thing besides foie d’oie. A radish.” Its taste fresh and sharp, like a
slap of spring wind . . . “And if not married we should be engaged.”
Stephan pulled himself up and gazed into my eyes, and with all the
earnest belief that this slate-eyed scion — heir to difficulties I could
only imagine — could muster, he summoned up what he could.

DeSanti_F.indd 9 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 10 carole desanti

“I will be your protector. It is — you know, how things are ar-

ranged. In Paris.” And then the heavy beat of wings and a flustered
scuffl ing above our heads, and another wavering cry.

The next morning I left for the train with the sheaf of bank notes
that Stephan had laid out on the library escritoire, a cache of bor-
rowed gowns in my traveling bag, and visions of blue silk dresses.
(“Paris skirts are very wide.” ) The bolt of fabric, another New Year’s
gift, did not fit into my luggage; we stood awkward, the cloth be-
tween us, and tears threatening. Finally Stephan promised to bring
it with him when he came. “Our first stop shall be the dressmaker,”
he said, planting a kiss on my brow; rather more like a father, or an
elder brother, and in fact — now that I considered it — in the very
place that had been smacked and was now a bruise.
Flashing, blue-fledged hue of a teal; the last of the wild-breeding
ducks to appear, fast and wary of hunters in the ponds and rain-
filled ruts of southern France .  .  . the fowl’s colored feathers ap-
pear in December, briefly against his mottled brown. After that, he
molts, fl ightless.
In this world, a girl like me, brought up with her knees regu-
larly pressed to the flagstones, the church’s incense mingled with
the pine-needle scent of the forest floor — the oldest daughter of
ambitious parents — such a girl did not dare her destiny, her parent-
age, everything — and lose. The consequences of would be so cata-
strophic, so utterly beyond the imagination — even a rich, rebel-
lious one like my own — that they did not, even for a moment, enter
my waking thoughts. But I had begun, again, to dream.

I stepped past a used-book stall, its offerings stacked like slices of

bread, moldy at the crust. English hymnals, cookery books, cheap
novels, and Bovary in two volumes, bound together with a band
advertising it as banned! censored! Somewhere in those pages
Emma was in midfl ight, but I had lost my appetite for her travails.
The streets spiraled inward and tightened toward Notre Dame
and the city’s beating heart; peddlers hawked chestnuts and tobacco,
coffee and thread, paper and dried fishes, songbirds and window

DeSanti_F.indd 10 1/9/12 10:11 AM

 t h e u n ru ly pa ssions of e ugÉ nie r. 11

glass. Pyramids of dusty wine bottles. Passing the shops I saw signs
of my lover everywhere, tying invisible strings between Stephan
and what he loved: chestnuts in honey syrup; racked bottles in a
wine shop; in a patisserie window, a tower of raspberry tarts. These
stood out like flags, those of the nation to which I belonged. We
had brought home just such oranges in a string bag; those brandied
apricots in a bottle.
Now, choppy January currents ruffled the gray waters of the
Seine. I nibbled chestnuts and sipped at another coffee, bitterer than
the first. Nearby a gang of workers in blue cottes were packing up
their spades and turning their horses. The wind picked up; I shiv-
ered under a paisley cashmere, borrowed warmth. Blisters already
chafed under my boots, very nice kid ones that buttoned up the side,
barely worn, recently white.
Back at the Hôtel Tivoli,with no knife to cut a loaf of bread, peel
an apple, or pare a portion of sausage and cheese so as not to have
to bite off chunks with my teeth like an animal — with no cup nor
table at which to drink from it, I took out a thin sheet of paper from
a fresh, new stationer’s package. With a sharp-nibbed pen atop the
shaky candle stand, I wrote, Dear Stephan, I saw the Seine today, and
a cart full of Seville oranges . . .
In the wavery, pitted mirror of number 12 was a young woman,
myself, certainly — dark hair and pale skin; not so badly off in her
borrowed finery. The soft hair, the curve of cheek and shine of my
eyes — violet-gray (a shade off Stephan’s) — were as they had al-
ways been; but the calluses and rough edges of a faraway province
had been buffed away in recent months by some chemistry of love
and unaccustomed kinds of bathing. Staring, I willed blindness on
myself; insistent, willful ignorance. The holes in the story I told my-
self, pinpricks of truth like the quills sticking through the mattress
ticking of number 12, would become rips as long as those my pet-
ticoats would show in a few weeks’ time. But doubt, smaller than a
tiny seed, sown somewhere deep — had not yet sent its root tendril;
had no thought, yet, of unfurling its leaf.

DeSanti_F.indd 11 1/9/12 10:11 AM