Page 61 of Angel's Mask

“Well, you should have,” Philippe said. “I don’t see why you’re so eager for that little strumpet to humiliate you again.”

Raoul slouched into the seat and glowered out the window. Christine’s laughter still echoed in his head. It snuck up on him in quiet moments; the cruel, alien sound a slender knife, stabbing him again and again. But it didn’t torment him nearly as much as the memory of the other voice he’d heard: the man in her dressing room who had told her to love him, who had been given her very soul. How Raoul hated the fiend.

“I only wish to speak with her,” Raoul muttered. “There’s surely been a misunderstanding. I know she wouldn’t forget me, nor would she avoid me without some reason.”

“I do admire your high opinion of yourself, dear brother, but I must remind you of the dead-end that path leads to.”

“The same one you’re headed towards with that dancer of yours?”

Philippe rolled his eyes. “Sorelli makes good dinner conversation and when dinner is over, she’s limber and amenable. But I will never marry her, nor do I pretend to love her. We both know this because that’s the way it’s done. And if I thought you just wanted to dip your wick with this songbird of yours, I’d say have at it, but I know you and I know you think you can just take up with this peasant like you’re seventeen again.”

“We don’t call them peasants anymore,” Raoul shot back.

“Maybe we should,” Philippe said grimly as they rambled past thePlace de la Concorde. “Less than a hundred years ago our kind were taken to the guillotine right here by those entitled nobodies who thought they could rewrite the world. The same mongrels who think they can make some law now and erase our titles and ignore the way of things.”

Raoul squirmed. Philippe would never stop calling himself Comte de Chagny, no matter how meaningless the appellation was in the new world of the Third Republic. Raoul on the other hand had savored his last two years at sea where no one cared he was born a vicomte. He had just been Raoul and it had been enough. Just as he had been to Christine, years ago.

“I know she’s not the right class but...”

“She’s not even the rightspecies, dear brother.”

Raoul continued to stare out the window as the rolled down theRue Royaleand turned right at the grand Madeline church, which soured his mood even more. Raoul had always disliked the Madeline. It was wrong to build a Catholic church to look like a pagan temple, but that decision had been made by men four regimes ago.

“You don’t know her,” Raoul muttered as they rode up theBoulevard des Capucines.

“Neither do you, that’s my whole point!”

Raoul couldn’t argue. He didn’t know Christine, not anymore. But hehadknown her, and loved her, and he knew that she simply could not be the kind of girl who spoke ardently to mysterious men alone in her dressing room without reason. (No matter what Philippe insisted about the moral character of artists or what the papers theorized about her.) The girl he had known had been good and pure, and so too had been Christine as Marguerite on that stage. Her soul had to have remained as pristine as before...despite that she claimed to have given it to another.

The carriage came to a stop at the patron’s entrance, the one that had initially been planned as a pavilion for Emperor Napoleon III, who had commissioned a new opera house after that anarchist had tried to throw a bomb at him in the old one. Irony of ironies that the man had been deposed before a single note was ever sung from the stage, but men like Raoul and Philippe still benefitted from his grand monument.

The building was honestly too large, in Raoul’s estimation. It looked like a train station on the outside, bright and shining, but within it was dark and labyrinthine. It gave him a thrill to finally be there, closer to her and closer to answers, but there was something else about the place that made his skin crawl.

“Please, try to remain composed,” Philippe muttered as they turned a corner and found themselves in an absolute madhouse.

They were in a foyer, respectable and not as ornate as the rest of the Opera. At the end stood a pair of carved double doors, before which a bespectacled mouse of a man stood, trying to speak over the crowd of at least half a dozen well-dressed men trying to be heard.

“Good heaven, this is chaos,” Philippe said. “What on earth is going on?”

“Did you think it would be quiet for these fools on their first day?” The brothers turned to a familiar voice and Philippe let out a laugh as he saw Antoine de Martiniac leaning on a column.

“We didn’t thinkeveryonewould be here,” Philippe scoffed. “Surely they’re not making patrons wait?” Antoine shrugged in reply, louche and useless as always.

“What areyoudoing here?” Raoul asked, narrowing his eyes at the man.

Antoine was tall and slender, with light blonde hair and piercingly cold blue eyes. He was handsome, older than Raoul but younger than Philippe. His smile always had a cruelty behind it that Raoul had grown to detest in the months he’d known the man. Or perhaps he detested that he had returned home to find a scoundrel with a failing estate had insinuated himself into Philippe’s life.

“Adèle encouraged me,” Antoine replied. (His tone implied something untoward, Raoul was sure of it.) “She said no one’s even seen these two and everyone is getting restless. Hasn’t your ballerina said as much?”

“She might have,” Philippe answered. “Whenever she starts in on Opera gossip, I must admit I start to drift off.”

“Can’t the artists come themselves?” Raoul asked, and Antoine gave a scoff of derision that was almost as offensive as Philippe’s condescending sigh.

“This place is for the ones who pull the strings, not the marionettes,” Antoine replied. “And pulling they all are.”

Raoul’s attention followed Antoine’s gaze back to the crowd. Upon better inspection, Raoul recognized a few of them from visits and dinners over the past few months, and perhaps even before. They all looked alike in their top hats and dark winter coats; clearly all patrons.

“Please! Gentlemen!” The little man in front cried, his voice straining. “Messieurs Richard and Moncharmin will be happy to take your concerns about the Opera by letter if you would be so kind. But they are quite busy today with new business.”

---