Reserved for the Cat

For a moment, she felt a warm glow, and a smile passed over her lips. This was wonderful! This was exactly the sort of adulation that the etoiles enjoyed, and it was a harbinger of more substantial offerings to come. From flowers, the tributes usually rose to flowers and fruit, then flowers and chocolates, then flowers and jewelry . . . or they did, if several men were vying to become one’s benefactor. Of course, there was no telling how rich any of these men were. It was nearly summer, and flowers were not as dear now as they were in winter. She didn’t know enough to tell which were in season in England, and thus inexpensive, and which were not and thus expensive, but these extravagant floral tributes could represent the limits of extravagance of any or all of them. A starving poet could and would spend his last farthing on a bouquet for one whose looks excited his imagination. Poets and other artists were hardly the most practical of creatures. Still! It would be wonderful to have the men that had given her all these flowers crowding her dressing room after the performances, and even nicer if one of them took her out for dinner afterwards. . . .

“I’ll be accepting visitors after the show, Ailse,” she said, slowly and carefully, for Ailse did not always understand her heavily accented English.

“Gemmun visitors too, ma’amselle?” the girl asked.

She nodded. The girl nodded, though Ninette thought her face showed a trace of disapproval. That was only to be expected. She had never served theater people before, and likely had no idea that the dressing room of a principle served as a kind of drawing room for the etoile. Or perhaps she did not think that Ninette should be encouraging so many men.

Well, she would have to get used to it. Ninette reckoned that if the maid could get so accustomed to a Brownie living in the pantry that she put out a daily bowl of milk and plate of bread for it, she could get used to Ninette’s admirers, and perhaps, a benefactor. Eventually.

Not that Ninette expected to find the sort of benefactor that La Augustine enjoyed here in this city. That was highly unlikely. It did not seem to run to rich men, or nobles with both titles and money. Nor did she expect to see such men in this sort of theater; she had never yet seen the kind of men she hoped to attract, the sort that became the protectors of etoiles.

Or at least, they would not come here until Nigel’s real show began, if there even were such in this city.

Then . . . well to be realistic, the ones who came would probably not be the nobles with both titles and money, nor the ones whose great-grandfathers had been both wealthy and genteel. Rich men, newly rich, with fast motorcars, who like jazz and ragtime . . . yes, perhaps. That sort had come to the opera now and again, but they tended to favor the dancers at the Moulin Rouge, and then, they did not keep any one woman for very long. Why should they? Dancers at the Moulin Rouge were not devotees of art and culture, they had simple tastes and seldom took thought for the future. A ballet dancer, an opera singer—they knew that their days were numbered on the stage, and they took thought for the future. They looked for men who would give them presents that would support them when they could no longer dance or sing—things like not just a flat, but the entire building the flat was in, or presents of money without asking where that money was going.

The great courtesans understood this, as did their benefactors. Ninette had actually been present one day when some fanatic street preacher had accosted one of those great ladies outside the theater and chided her for her “irregular life.” “My good man,” the lady had said with a laugh, “My life is a great deal more regular than that of your wife.” And everyone had known that was true. The street preacher’s wife could never be sure of what her household allowance would be, nor when it would come. The courtesan, however, had arranged for all such things to be negotiated ahead of time by her factor—often an older female relative. She had a dress allowance, her foodstuffs were charged, her rent was paid, she had an allowance for when she entertained her own friends or went out to the theater alone, she knew that she would be taken once a year to Monte Carlo or some other holiday spot, so many times to the races, so many times to the theater, and so forth. All negotiated very carefully, nothing left to chance. The sort of men that Ninette wanted understood all this.