La Broyeuse de Coeur

Paris, 1898: gaslight drips like molten topaz along the boulevards while, inside the velvet cocoon of the Nouveau-Cirque, Ida Bianca’s serpentine limbs sketch forbidden alphabets in the smoky haze. Pierre de Brézieux—heir to a dynastic fortune of slate quarries and racehorses—watches from a gilt loge, monocle fogging, as her every undulation seems to unpick the whalebone stays of his certainties. By morning the count’s crested carriages have been replaced by a single carnation pressed against the dancer’s dressing-room mirror; by nightfall he has pawned a signet ring to buy her a Persian opal the size of a tear. Thus begins a vertiginous descent: from the frost-white salons of Rue de Grenelle, where footmen glide like mute swans, to the rat-pocked basements of Montmartre where absinthe is laced with ether and love is bartered for the price of a ticket. Ida, a siren spun from gutter-gold and newspaper clippings, demands spectacle: a private circus ring flooded with gardenias, a hot-air balloon descending into her bedroom, the theft of a Fabergé egg from his mother’s vitrine. Pierre obliges, hemorrhaging inheritances, while creditors circle like gulls above a bleeding whale. Yet the more he gives, the more the choreography of her affection accelerates—each kiss a pirouette, each promise a entrechat—until the music stops on the night she vanishes mid-performance, leaving only a blood-stained pointe shoe and a postcard addressed to “l’homme qui m’a tout donné.” Ravaged, Pierre combs the demimonde: a morgue where corpses are posed for paying tourists, an opium den wallpapered with rejected marriage contracts, a carnival where a mechanical Ida pirouettes endlessly for centimes. Finally, on a rain-laced pier in Le Havre, he glimpses her aboard a liner bound for Buenos Aires, arms entwined around a sugar magnate whose beard glints with diamonds. Pierre races up the gangway, but the ship whistles away; all he retains is the echo of her laughter—sharp as broken crystal—and the realization that he has been not a lover but an audience, applause still stinging his palms while the curtain has long since fallen.