“The House of Air and Powder”
Review by Viola Vorpel, Paris, 1925
It was called Les Femmes de l’Esprit Perdu, though the lost spirit was only sold by the gram. The opera lasted three hours, though some said it began weeks ago in the cafés, where the same women sat rehearsing the part of being seen. Its composer, Jules Chrétien-Boulain, claims he wrote it for an “age of exquisite suffocation.” I find that precise. Suffocation requires discipline.
The curtain opened on a salon much like every Paris apartment I have entered this season. Velvet drawn too tightly. Candles rehearsing their deaths. The heroines entered without sound, as if already aware that music would misrepresent them. They spoke instead. The orchestra imitated speech back at them, politely, like servants correcting inflection. It was unbearable, and therefore true.
The plot: women of intellect arrive from every radiant border—Madrid, Cairo, Moscow, Chelsea—each certain Paris will refine her disorder. They meet in a mirrored house and agree to rewrite the Encyclopédie for modern use, beginning with the word pleasure. They never advance beyond the letter p. By Act II they are dosing one another with powdered courage. They spill it neatly, apologise precisely, and resume.
I saw ‘reviewers’ attempting understanding through the usual mechanical gestures. Pens aligning themselves like bayonets to their programmes. One of them dropped his pencil; no one retrieved it, though six women bent slightly forward as if to. It was the opera’s finest choreography.
There is a rule I have noticed here: each new philosophy begins in the morning and fails by dinner. Paris enforces this by its architecture; nowhere to sit quietly between times. One either debates or dresses. The heroines, like the city, cannot bear the untheatrical hour. Each act dated itself—“Tuesday, after the rain”—but the same Tuesday repeated until it ceased to be temporal and became etiquette.
They sang around a table set for twelve—cups, spoons, absinthe bottles disguised as sugar decanters. One heroine toyed with a teaspoon and whispered, “Truth must dissolve,” and immediately corrected herself: “In company.” I suspect she did not mean sugar.
Meanwhile, a contralto in black gloves recited an invented tract: “The body is an organ of discourse. The mind a polite guest until dismissed.” The harmony arrived a bar late, as though etiquette itself were catching up.
When the soprano—“the English one,” inevitably—took her aria, she repeated a single sentence: “You must wind the clock before it stops on you.” A dull domestic line, useful in houses with indifferent servants. Only after Act III did I notice the line had reversed. The heroines were the clocks, wound by the unseen hands of the house. To forget that is to mistake the hour for your own.
Outside the theatre, Rue de Londres smelt faintly of ether. People call it weather. In salons they call it philosophy. I met the composer at intermission—nervous, handsome, unsalvageable. He said he had abstained from all substances during composition, “except applause.” His wife corrected him: “And ashtrays.” Very fine distinction, that. I admire accuracy even where it ruins health. He asked if I “related personally” to the opera. I replied I related architecturally.
After the second intermission, the décor changed subtly—chairs reversed, door frames exchanged—so that the audience could not tell whether they had returned to their seats or their memories. The servants entered then, black as punctuation, to rearrange the air. No music marked the change. One carried a basin of water and placed it centre stage, never explained, never used. She looked at it once, at the audience once, and left. It became the most reliable object in the opera.
It would be inelegant to speak of the actual drug, though everyone does. They call it “the study,” “the candle’s breath,” “the aristocrat’s friend.” Through it, the heroines found perfect comprehension of themselves—followed by disinterest, followed by postmortems disguised as soirées. I am told genius, like scent, clings most tightly just before it fades.
Half my acquaintances now live half their lives reclining. They call it conversation, though most occurs internally. One American writer—I forget her name, deliberately—declares the city itself addicted to interior monologue. She says all Paris breathes like a single mind inhaling its reflection. Her essays, I note, are best read while half awake.
At supper afterwards, the talk grew slow, as though language itself were subject to morphine. I counted five women wearing veils though no religion required it. One fainted elegantly when the waiter took her coat. The others applauded—it is Parisian to applaud what might otherwise require help.
The opera’s third act began wordlessly—the servants singing under the heroines’ silence. It was the same melody inverted, like sheets turned inside out for laundering. The critic beside me murmured, “Purity reversed is hygiene.” A mistaken idea, but a pleasing one. The heroines, meanwhile, rearranged their furniture, attempting to find a geometry in which understanding might still occur. When they failed, they wrote letters to their husbands, apologising for the inconvenience of intellect. The orchestra played as if through gauze, all flutes and denial.
In the end (though it began), each woman stepped into her own narrative as if retrieving a lost umbrella. The mirrors lifted to reveal the audience. We looked back correctly, as decorum requires. Then the curtain fell half an inch short and trembled indefinitely.
I’m told the production will tour London if censorship can be persuaded that abstraction is safe. It isn’t. Its worst effect is that it might teach a duchess what dependency feels like. Or a maid what intellect looks like when unattended. Every house has its thresholds of thought, beyond which courtesy fails.
This morning, over tea, I found white dust on the saucer of a guest. She explained it away as sugar. I didn’t correct her. The windows were open, the Seine unbearably articulate. Rain softened the pavements until they shone like reasoning itself—plausible, fragile, infinite.
Paris trembles in every surface that tries to reflect it. The heroines of the opera were right, in essence, though they phrased it badly: the mind is not lost; it is absorbed. What was intellect becomes temperature, posture, scent, proof of refinement continued past meaning.
And still, somewhere in a theatre, the servant carries her basin. She does not spill it, and we are all made safe by her silence.
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