Reserved for the Cat

“Oh!” cried Madeline Clenceau from the other side of the room. “Listen to this! It’s the reviewer for Le Figaro!” Now everyone took notice, for Le Figaro was universally thought to be the newspaper for artists and thinkers. “The matinee performance of La Sylphide was notable for the substitution of the sujet Ninette Dupond for a suddenly injured La Augustine, and one can only applaud the stroke of fate. Mademoiselle Dupond is far lighter on her feet than La Augustine, and brought to the part the proper air of fragility and otherworldliness that La Augustine lacks. Her Sylphide is innocent and unworldly as a butterfly, she entreats the earth-bound James to come play on the wind with her; La Augustine’s Sylphide seems about to invite him to a Montmarte bistro for wine and sausages. Of particular note is the death scene. La Augustine is well known for drawing this out until one is tempted to rise from the audience and give the Sylphide a mercy stroke to put her out of her misery. Mademoiselle Dupond, however, made the scene heartbreakingly brief. One moment, she is borne on the wings of the zephyr; the next, the cursed scarf has worked its sinister magic, her wings fall away, and she is stricken, and drops lifeless to the ground before we, or James, have quite realized that anything is wrong. The pathos then is all the clearer; like a naughty boy with his first bow and arrow, James has shot at a bird and brought it cold and dead to the earth, destroying with his clumsy touch what he had only wanted to cherish. This is not to say that La Augustine is a poor dancer, but let her be confined to the parts where sensuality is an asset—La Fille Mal Gardee, for instance, or Corsair. And let us hope that this will not be the last time Mademoiselle Dupond graces the stage as the tragic Sylph.”

The chatter in the rehearsal room had stopped dead. Ninette bit her lip. The first thing that struck her was how very wrong the critic had been—he had mistaken her own exhaustion for deliberate art!

But the second thing was this. La Augustine was probably reading the review at this very moment.

And she was not going to be pleased about it.

2

LA Augustine was furious.

Ninette was in hiding; one of the sympathetic teachers, Isabella Rota, a former premier danseur herself, had hidden Ninette in a tiny closet when La Augustine came storming through the ballet school, limping heavily and in the sort of rage where she would snatch objects up and throw them—not actually at anyone, or at least not yet, but certainly doing some damage to walls and the objects themselves.

La Augustine was very popular with the audience. The critic at Le Figaro undoubtedly knew this. He also knew his review would provoke angry letters, and angry letters sell newspapers. The ballet company of the Paris Opera was an established organization, and Le Figaro took the position that anything that had been established for more than a handful of years deserved skewering on a regular basis. The critics of Le Figaro, considered themselves far more intelligent than the general run of an audience, and, being mostly poor, were openly contemptuous of the balletomanes, the rich old men in the private boxes.