The Velvet Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

the cold of the streets. A world where beautiful women existed smelling of lavender and rose. Where they welcomed men into their smooth, scented arms for a few hours, before their lovers slipped from this world to the next.
    She was aware of this special world even before she had stepped onto the stage of Les Ambassadeurs. At the Gouget Brothers, where she had pinned dresses on women who were not wives, but who nonetheless had an abundance of large, crisp banknotes within the silk lining of their purses. They did not have a gold wedding band on their fingers, but they did have an independence of which she and Camille were envious.
    And within a week of starting at Julian’s theater, Marthe had seen how quickly the embodiment of beauty and illusion was devoured by the men who paid money to see a stage filled with girls as ripe as cherries. Girls whose job was not only to sing and dance, but to provoke dreams and desires, their mere sight inspiring thoughts of sensual possibility.
    But this was how illusion was created on a small scale. Men like Charles, who had money and a title, were able to create their own private world. A world created purely for their comfort.
    They became architects of their own pleasure. They financed apartments near Pigalle, where they could explore their own desires in private. Where the shadows were just as important as the light. Where they could enjoy a woman who was not afraid of their passion, but who, on the contrary, reveled in it as though it were the most delicious meal.
    *   *   *
    It was an undeniable fact that she had always enjoyed pleasure, even before Charles had named her Marthe de Florian, for she had always had a weakness for the sensual and beautiful things in life. She had learned to master sewing early, to avoid the fate of being a laundress like her mother. She had seen her mother lose her beauty in the endless washings, and watched as her hands became dry as ash. The wooden scrub boards that erased a woman’s youth as quickly as if it were a simple stain. And so Marthe had learned to pull a needle and thread early on.
    By the time she was ten, she already knew how to hem and mend. She was quite pleased with herself, to have a skill that enabled her to keep busy and earn some money, rather than spending hours as her mother did, washing other people’s soiled clothes.
    She would never forget the first time she touched silk. It was in an apartment that had curtains the color of the sky.
    Her mother had dispatched her to pick up a client’s basket of laundry. She was barely eight years old, but her mother had sent her proudly in a wool dress and tights to the address she pinned to the clothes.
    Mistakenly, she did not enter through the servant’s entrance of the apartment, but somehow arrived at the main door. The maidhad been kind and neither admonished her nor taken her to the kitchen, but rather let her remain in that splendid foyer for a few moments as she fetched the clothes. Perhaps the maid acted this way because the mistress of the house was not at home, or because she sensed the wonder in Marthe’s young eyes. Or perhaps it was a little of both. But regardless of the reason, as Marthe stood in the foyer waiting, she had marveled at the beauty around her. Realizing that no one was watching, she found herself unable to control her curiosity and reached over to finger the silk.
    There was mystery in that first touch. As wondrous as the first time she remembered snow melting in her hand. She pulled herself closer. First it was her fingers wrapping around the cloth, then she pulled her entire body into the folds.
    She had been so distracted by the sensation of the silk wrapped around her that she had not heard the maid’s footsteps bringing the basket of laundry.
    â€œChild, you must get out of there,” she said kindly, but urgently. “Please . . . you don’t belong there!”
    She had stood frozen from the