Petite Mort by Beatrice Hitchman

coldly. ‘Most of them,’ I corrected. For what did I know about the individual habits of the stars?
    Camille had waited patiently for Mathilde to stop speaking, and now bent gently to dust powder over her cheeks: I suddenly saw, as she moved into the candles’ range, that she had made herself up. It was no more than a touch of rouge and the lightest shading around the eyes, but she looked
finished.
    ‘So I’m afraid there are no opportunities at present,’ I said.
    Mathilde turned to look at me, bewildered.
    Camille said smoothly: ‘But you could have a word, couldn’t you, Adèle? I thought you and M. Durand were close.’
    I fled to my room, curled up in bed, and held onto my own toes for comfort. The rain continued whispering at the window late into the night, and still the laughter came from the salon, and Camille did not come to bed.
    I thought back to that afternoon.
What on earth were you thinking?
André had asked, grabbing my wrists after I had reached up to try to slap him.
An established actress will take over the Absinthe role. What did you expect?
    He had let me struggle, turning my head away from him.
    ‘Think about it,’ he had said, ‘just think,’ over my tears. ‘Don’t you know how often the assistant becomes the understudy?’
    I had sniffed and hiccuped, caught out.
    ‘Besides, you’d come and live with us. My wife finds it preferable to have someone there all the time. She and I each have our own quarters. You will be in the room just above mine.’
    André smiled and gave my shoulders a little shake, till I began to smile in turn.
    ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Really?’
    ‘You will have your pick of gowns. All the advantages of knowing the studio people. And me, of course. As much of me as you like.’
    I thought of myself, whisking a costume away from my own assistant:
You have not sewn the hem correctly. Take it back, please.
Would I say please?
    André looked at me with narrowed eyes.
    ‘I don’t want to be a costumière for ever,’ I said, trying out the words.
    In the early hours, Camille came to bed. She turned away from me, and soon I heard her breathing steady and slow. Her nightgown fell below her shoulder blade, exposing the newskin growing over her scars. They were healing on their own, without any help from me.
    André had said: ‘I’ll send my driver for you tomorrow evening. Of course you will have to be vetted by my wife. My car will take you to our house in the Bois de Boulogne. All you have to do is be there to meet it.’
    André, v.
    A rainy November evening in 1904: five years after André stepped off the boat from New York to Paris, and into his proper life.
    As usual, he was in the Pathé building long after everyone else had left, reclining and doodling on his sketch pad. He had nothing to do apart from be perfectly himself: there was an invitation, of course, to a gallery opening later in the evening, but he was not obliged to attend. He loved above all things the long hours after dark, when the hum of the human factory workers had subsided. He had his best ideas at night, because it was then that he was left alone with the noises he loved: the clanking of the stage-machinery pistons, the hiss of water in the pipes above his head, on its way to douse down the film-strip laboratory floor.
    Then, mixed with the mechanical sounds, André heard something that should not have been there: footsteps, approaching his door. He frowned: a little flare of temper, and dropped his sketch pad as the knock at the door came.
    ‘Come in,’ he barked. The door opened a crack, and one of the runners poked his head into the space. ‘This came for you, M. Durand,’ he piped, holding out a flat, oblong parcel in trembling fingers.
    André snatched the parcel, tossed it onto the table, and tried to get back to his thoughts. He locked his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. The pitter-patter of the runner’s feet receded, and he sighed and inhaled the factory