CHAPTER 2
The whistling and catcalling began almost immediately in the higher tiers. At first, the majority of the audience paid no heed to the disturbance and pretended it was not happening. But then it became more obtrusive, louder. Voices were heard in the circle and from the stalls also.
Léonie could not quite make out what the protesters were saying.
She kept her eyes fixed resolutely on the orchestra pit, and attempted to ignore each new hiss or whisper. But as the Overture continued, an increasing restlessness seeped through the auditorium from top to bottom, side to side along the rows, sly and insidious. Unable to hold her tongue any longer, Léonie leaned over to her neighbour.
‘Who are these people?’ she whispered.
The dowager frowned at the interruption, but answered all the same.
‘They call themselves the abonnés,’ she replied, behind her fan. ‘They oppose the performance of any but French composers. Musical patriots they would claim. In principle, I have some sympathy, but this is not the way to go about things.’
Léonie nodded her thanks and sat back straight in her seat, reassured by the woman’s matter-of-fact manner even though, in point of fact, the disturbance seemed to be growing.
The closing bars of the Overture were barely dry in the air when the protest proper commenced. As the curtain rose on a scene of a chorus of tenth-century Teutonic knights standing on the banks of an ancient river in Antwerp, a louder commotion began in the upper dress circle. A group of at least eight or nine men leapt to their feet in a cacophony of whistling and booing and slow hand-clapping. A wave of disapproval washed along the rows of the stalls, the upper tiers, countered by other outbursts of objection. Then taunting from the protesters, a chant that at first Léonie could not properly distinguish. A crescendo of noise, and it became unmistakable.
‘Boche! Boche!’
The protest had reached the ears of the singers. Léonie saw darting glances pass between the chorus and principals, alarm and indecision writ large on every face.
‘Boche! Boche! Boche!’
Whilst not wishing for the performance to be disrupted, at the same time Léonie could not deny it was exciting. She was witnessing the sort of event that in usual circumstances she only heard about in the pages of Anatole’s Le Figaro.
The truth was that Léonie was thoroughly bored by the restrictions of her daily existence, the ennui of accompanying M’man to dull afternoon soirées at the drab townhouses of distant relations and former comrades of her father. Having to make painful small talk with her mother’s current friend, an old military man who treated Léonie as if she was still in short skirts.
What a story I shall have to tell Anatole.
But the mood of the protest was changing.
The cast, pale and uncertain beneath their heavy stage make-up, continued to sing. Indeed, they did not falter until the first missile was thrown on to the stage. A bottle, narrowly missing the bass taking the role of King Heinrich.
For an instant, it seemed as if the orchestra must have stopped playing, so deep and suspended was the silence.
The audience appeared to be holding its collective breath as the glass spun, as if in slow motion, catching the harsh white limelight and sending out dazzling green gleams. Then it hit the canvas scenery with a thump, fell, and rolled back into the pit.
The real world rushed back. Pandemonium broke loose, on stage and off. There was an upsurge of noise. Then a second missile soared over the heads of the stupefied audience, bursting on contact with the stage. A woman in the front row screamed and covered her mouth as a foul stench, of blood and decaying vegetables and old alleyways, filtered out over the stalls.
‘Boche! Boche! Boche!’
The smile faded from Léonie’s face, replaced by a look of alarm. She had butterflies in her stomach. This was ugly, frightening, not an adventure at all. She felt nauseous.
The quartet to her left suddenly leapt to their feet as one man and began to clap, perfectly in time, slowly at first, baying like animals, imitating the sounds of pigs and cows and goats. Their faces were cruel, vicious, as they chanted their anti-Prussian leitmotif, now taken up in every corner of the auditorium.
‘In God’s name, sit down, man!’
A heavily bearded and bespectacled gentleman, with the sallow complexion of one who spent his time with inkwell and wax and document papers, tapped one of the protesters on the back with his programme.
‘This is neither the time nor the place. Be seated!’
‘No, indeed,’ agreed his companion. ‘Sit down!’
The protester turned and delivered a sharp and glancing blow across the man’s knuckles with his stick. Léonie gasped. Taken by surprise by the speed and ferocity of the retaliation, the man howled and let drop his programme. His companion leapt to his feet as beads of blood sprang up along the line of the wound. He attempted to grab hold of the protester’s weapon, seeing now that there was a metal pin deliberately lodged in the head, but rough hands pushed him back, and he fell.
The conductor attempted to keep the orchestra to time, but the players were throwing fearful glances all around and the tempo grew ragged and uneven, at once too fast and too slow. Backstage, a decision had been taken. Stagehands in their blacks, their sleeves rolled to the elbows, suddenly swarmed from the wings and began to usher the singers out of the direct line of fire.
The management attempted to drop the curtain. The weights clanged and boomed dangerously as they flew up too fast. The heavy material tumbled through the air, then caught on a piece of scenery and stuck.
The shouting intensified.
The exodus began from the private boxes. In a flurry of feathers and gold and silk, the bourgeoisie made hurried exits. Seeing them, the desire to withdraw spread into the upper tiers, where many of the nationalist protesters were stationed, then to the circles and stalls. The rows behind Léonie also, one by one, were emptying into the aisles. From every part of the Grande Salle, she heard seats snapping shut. At the exits, the rattle of the brass rings on their rails as the heavy velvet curtains were pulled roughly open.
But the protesters had not yet achieved their goal of stopping the performance. More missiles were hurled at the stage. Bottles, stones and bricks, rotting fruit. The orchestra evacuated the pit, snatching up precious music and bows and instrument cases, shoving through the obstacles of chairs and wooden stands, to exit under the stage.
At last, through the half-gap in the curtain, the theatre manager appeared on stage to appeal for calm. He was sweating, and dabbed at his face with a grey handkerchief.
‘Mesdames, messieurs, s’il vous plaît. S’il vous plaît!’
He was a substantial man, but neither his voice nor his manner commanded authority. Léonie saw how wild his eyes were, as he flapped his arms and attempted to impose some sort of order upon the mounting chaos.
It was too little, too late.
Another missile was thrown, this time not a bottle nor some acquired object, but a piece of wood with nails embedded into it. The manager was struck above the eye. He staggered back, clutching his hand to his face. Blood spurted through his fingers from the wound, and he fell sideways, crumpling like a child’s rag doll to the surface of the stage.
At this last sight, Léonie’s courage finally deserted her.
I must get out.
Horrified, terrified now, she threw desperate glances around the auditorium, but she was trapped, hemmed in by the mob behind her and to the side, and by the violence in front. Léonie clutched at the backs of the seats, supposing she might escape by scaling the rows, but when she tried to move, she discovered the beaded hem of her dress had caught in the metal bolts beneath her seat. With increasingly desperate fingers, she bent down and tried to pull, tear herself free.
Now, a new cry of protest filtered through the auditorium.
‘A bas! A bas!’
She looked up.
What now? The cry was taken up from every corner of the auditorium.
‘A bas. A l’attaque!’
Like crusaders besieging a castle, the protesters surged forward, waving sticks and cudgels. Here and there, the glint of a blade. A shudder of terror made Léonie tremble. She understood the protesters meant to storm the stage and that she was directly in their path.
Throughout the auditorium, what little remained of the mask of Parisian society cracked, then splintered, then shattered into pieces. Hysteria swept through those still trapped. Lawyers and newspaper-men, painters and scholars, bankers and civil servants, courtesans and wives, all stampeding towards the doors in their desperation to escape the violence.
Sauvez qui peut. Every man for himself.
The nationalists moved on the stage. With military precision, they marched forward from every section of the auditorium, vaulting the seats and the rails, swarming over the orchestra pit and up on to the boards. Léonie pulled at her dress, harder, harder, until with a ripping of material, she freed herself.
‘Boche! Alsace française! Lorraine française!’
The protesters were tearing down the backcloth, kicking over the scenery. Painted trees and water and rocks and stones, the imaginary soldiers of the tenth century destroyed by a very real nineteenth-century mob. The stage became littered with splintered wood, torn canvas and dust as the world of Lohengrin fell in the battle.
At last, resistance was mustered. A cohort of idealistic young men and veterans of past campaigns somehow came together in the stalls and pursued the nationalists to the stage. The pass door separating the auditorium from the back of house was breached. They charged into the wings and joined forces with the opera house stage crew, who were advancing upon the anti-Prussian nationalists between the flats and the scenery dock.
Léonie watched, appalled yet transfixed by the spectacle. A handsome man, not much more than a boy, in a borrowed evening suit too big for him and with a long waxed moustache, launched himself on the ringleader of the protesters. Hurling his arms around the man’s throat, he attempted to pull him down, but found himself on the ground instead. He shrieked in pain as a steel-capped boot drove into his stomach.
‘Vive la France! A bas.’
Blood lust had taken hold. Léonie could see the eyes of the mob wide with excitement, with frenzy, as the violence escalated. Cheeks were flushed, feverish.
‘S’il vous plaît,’ she cried in desperation, but no one could hear and there was still no way through for her.
Léonie shrank back as another stagehand was thrown from the stage. His body somersaulted over the abandoned orchestra pit and was caught on the brass rail. His arm and shoulder hung loose, twisted and crippled. His eyes remained open.
You must move back. Get back.
But now it seemed the world was drowning in blood, in splintered bone and flesh. She could see nothing else but the twisted hatred on the faces of the men all around. Not more than five feet from where she stood, frozen to the spot, a man was crawling on hands and knees, his waistcoat and jacket trailing open. He left a smear of bloody handprints upon the wooden boards of the stage.
Behind him a weapon was raised.
No!
Léonie tried to call out a warning, but shock stole her voice. Down the weapon came. Made contact. The man slipped, falling heavily on his side. He looked up at his attacker, saw the knife and threw up his hand to protect himself as the blade came down. Metal connecting with flesh. He howled as the knife was withdrawn and plunged again, deep into his chest.
The man’s body jerked and twitched like a puppet in the kiosk on the Champs-Elysées, his arms and legs flailing, then was still.
Léonie was astonished to realise she was crying. Then fear rushed back more fierce than ever.
‘S’il vous plaît,’ she shouted, ‘let me pass.’
She attempted to push through with her shoulders, but she was too small, too light. A mass of people stood between her and the exit, and the central aisle was now blockaded with crimson cushions. Beneath the stage, the gas jets had sent sparks showering down into the sheets of music left abandoned and lying on the ground. A splutter of orange, a hiss of yellow, then a sudden billowing as the wooden underside of the stage began to glow.
‘Au feu! Au feu!’
At this, another level of panic swept through the auditorium. The memory of the inferno that had swept through the Opéra-Comique five years ago, killing more than eighty, took hold.
‘Let me through!’ Léonie shouted. ‘I beg you.’
No one heeded her. The ground beneath her feet was carpeted now with abandoned programmes and feather headdresses, lorgnettes and opera glasses, like dry bones in an ancient sepulchre, splintered underfoot.
Léonie could see nothing, but elbows and the bare backs of heads, but she kept moving forward, inch by painful inch, succeeding in putting a little distance between herself and the worst of the fighting.
Then, at her side, she felt an elderly lady stumble and begin to fall.
She will be trampled.
Léonie shot out her hand and caught hold of the woman’s elbow. Beneath the starched fabric, she found herself gripping a thin and spindly arm.
‘I wished only to hear the music,’ the woman was weeping. ‘German, French, it matters nothing to me. That we should see such sights in our times. That it should come again.’>
Léonie stumbled forward, taking the entire weight of the old lady, staggering towards the exit. The burden seemed to become greater with every step. The woman was slipping into unconsciousness.
‘Not much further,’ Léonie cried. ‘Please try, please,’ anything to keep the old woman upon her feet. ‘We are nearly at the doors. Nearly safe.’
At last she glimpsed the familiar livery of an opera house flunkey.
‘Mais aidez-moi, bon Dieu,’ she shouted. ‘Par ici. Vite!’
The usher obeyed at once. Without a word, he relieved Léonie of her charge, sweeping the old lady up into his arms and carrying her out into the Grand Foyer.
Léonie’s legs buckled, exhausted, but she forced herself on. Only a few steps more.
Suddenly a hand grabbed her wrist.
‘No,’ she cried. ‘No!’
She would not let herself be trapped inside with the fire and the mob and the barricades. Léonie struck out blindly, but connected only with air.
‘Do not touch me!’ she screamed. ‘Let go of me!’
