In waking from its slumber, sunrise washing away the last vestiges of the evening’s demimonde, the city beyond the Opera walls bustled with industrious mundanity, with fruit-carts and barrow-boys, booksellers and businessmen, peddlers, pastors, and whores, its sluggish gendarmerie torpidly rousing themselves against corner-quoins opposite the dreary-eyed morning-girls still lingering at their predawn posts. Unsuppressable even by Haussmann’s newlaid attempts to quell the chaos of antiquity, another Parisian morning seeped in eastward through alleyways to climb those towering facades of preternatural white, mantling the smut of urbanity in primordial light.
I sucked in a breath of what was sure to be the day's coolest air. Preceded by that certain effluvium specific to public conveyances, an overladen omnibus clattered past on the rue Auber, stuffed to the windows with workmen leering at ashen-garbed governesses and coquettish, chap-mouthed scullions, its knifeboards snug with those windswept others who clung at the rails. From residences and mercantiles, innumerous postilions poured forth and took flight, on foot and on bicycles, in worn boots and without, their slight, dirtied fingers clutching closed their messenger’s sacks; flanking behind, through the thresholds of carriage-doors and into the avenues came the nursemaids with their charges asleep in perambulators and the milk-eyed senescents guided blindly by their keepers, then lastly, those extraordinary ladies of the unknowable sort, who inhabit the daylight in white lace and walking skirts, toting baskets to market and with letters to post, abstracted, admirable creatures so elusive of Erik’s apprehension—
Until Sophia. A specter both of night and day; an Angel winged in dark and light.
I coughed and spat in the street.
Pre to post-Leroux canon. General tags: Gothic, Horror, Drama, Romance, Historical Fiction
