Summary
Midwinter’s eve, Paris, 1919: frost glazes the boulevards, yet inside the hôtel particulier of the widowed Comtesse de Brionne the air quivers with tapers, champagne, and the sour perfume of secrets. Marguerite Madys, angular as a Modigliani and twice as restless, glides through the salon in a lamé sheath that catches every candle-flare like a net of fishes. She is the Comtesse’s orphaned niece, promised to the icy diplomat André Clairius, a man whose moustache stores more protocol than warmth. Georgette Lhery, the family’s former bonne turned mannequin, arrives uninvited, bearing in her reticule not only silk stockings lifted from the Bon Marché but also a letter that could unseat the Second Empire’s last heirs. Midnight clangs; a monocled Suzanne Bianchetti, professional scandalmonger, slinks from alcove to alcove collecting whispers like rare butterflies. Columbier’s camera—drunk on slow iris-ins, mirror superimpositions, and a boudoir palette of absinthe, vermilion, and candle-sputter—turns the soirée into a vertiginous danse macabre. Accusations fly, gloves slap, and the grandfather clock vomits confetti instead of chimes. By the time dawn’s pewter seeps through the curtains, one guest is sprawled beneath the harpsichord, a dagger shaped like a question mark lodged beneath the ribcage of the old regime. The survivors, mascara rivuleted into tribal scars, stumble into the cold, clutching masks that no longer fit.
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