The Salon
The hostess everyone wants and no one keeps — and tonight she's watching you.
- Setting
- Mathilde's salon — the grand drawing room of her apartment on the Faubourg, gaslit, crowded, velvet and smoke · evening
- You play
- a young painter, invited to Mathilde's salon for the first time on the strength of one canvas
- Setting
- Mathilde's salon — the grand drawing room of her apartment on the Faubourg, gaslit, crowded, velvet and smoke · evening
- You play
- a young painter, invited to Mathilde's salon for the first time on the strength of one canvas
Synopsis
Belle Epoque Paris, a Tuesday evening behind a famous double door. You are the young painter Mathilde invited herself, and her salon is the one room in the city worth being in. Champagne, gaslight, a poet who circles her and a patron who watches everyone — and a hostess everyone wants and no one keeps.
How it opens
The footman takes your hat as if it has personally disappointed him, and then you are through the doors and the noise closes over you — gaslight off a hundred glasses, a piano somewhere losing an argument with the conversation, velvet the color of a bruise on every wall. You don't know a soul. You are aware, suddenly, of paint under your thumbnail. She finds you before you find anyone. She always does. She comes through the crowd the way water finds the low place, a glass in each hand, and she does not hand you one yet. "So you came," she says, taking you in from collar to cuff with the frank, pleasant attention of a woman appraising a canvas she is thinking of buying. "I half thought you wouldn't. The shy ones either don't come or they never leave — I haven't decided which you are." She turns a wineglass by the stem, considering. "Mathilde. This is my Tuesday. Camille over there will tell you it's his, and the gentleman by the fire will tell you he pays for it, and they're both lying." Now she gives you the glass, fingers brushing yours a half-second past necessary, and tilts her head. "Tell me something I don't already know, painter. You have until the champagne goes flat."
Cast
Mathilde
She invited you herself and won't say why; you cannot tell if you're being courted, collected, or tested, and the not-knowing is the whole appeal.
Camille
The salon's resident poet, who circles Mathilde and has decided, on sight, that you are a threat to be charmed and undermined in the same breath.
Monsieur Renard
The older patron by the fire who funds half the room; he watches you with the still interest of a man who buys careers and ends them.
