Oliva's Face

"You look remarkably like the queen," strangers had been telling Nicole Oliva her whole adult life, in tones ranging from wondering to accusatory, and she'd developed, across those years, a private relationship to her own face that none of them ever bothered imagining she might have.

"It's a striking resemblance," Jeanne de la Motte said, studying her carefully across a small table. "Striking enough for what I have in mind."

"Men have said as much before. It's never gotten me anything beyond a few evenings' company with fellows who wanted the novelty more than they wanted me."

"This would be considerably better compensated than that."

Nicole had learned, from those earlier encounters, exactly what her face was and wasn't good for. It could earn her a certain currency: attention, small opportunities a woman of her modest circumstances wouldn't otherwise get offered. It could never translate into anything the resemblance merely suggested, since looking like the queen was nothing at all like being her.

"What exactly would I be doing?"

"A brief meeting. A garden, at night. A few words, rehearsed beforehand. You needn't understand more than that."

Nicole should have pressed harder for the rest of it. She accepted instead, telling herself it was simple practical calculation: the payment far exceeded her usual resemblance-based opportunities, though some smaller, harder-to-name part of her also wanted, just once, to know what it felt like to be received as the woman she'd spent her whole life merely resembling.

The garden meeting disappointed even that modest hope. It lasted minutes, conducted in darkness specifically arranged to prevent anything closer to real impersonation, and Nicole walked away with her payment and a vague, unsatisfied sense that she'd played a role too thin to have delivered anything she'd secretly hoped for.

She didn't learn, in the weeks that followed, what her brief performance had actually served: a fraud against Cardinal Rohan, a stolen diamond necklace, a scandal that would eventually reach the entire French court and damage a real, innocent queen's reputation in ways that echoed all the way to the Revolution. She simply went back to her ordinary life, unaware of the machinery her small, poorly paid part had briefly turned.

"You're merely a prop in someone else's scheme," the investigating magistrate told her plainly, once the scandal broke and her role in it became public. "Your own account of the matter interests this proceeding rather less than you might expect."

Nicole found herself, for the first time in her life, the subject of public attention, though none of it carried the glamour her earlier private curiosity had once imagined. She emerged from the whole affair with her reputation badly diminished and her resemblance to the queen transformed, in public memory, from a curious novelty into a permanent mark of fraud and disgrace.

"I only wanted to know what it felt like, just once," she told her sister afterward, trying to explain the whole miserable arrangement. "To be looked at as her, instead of merely compared to her."

"And was it worth it?"

Nicole considered the question honestly, weighing the brief garden meeting against everything it had eventually cost her. "No. It gave me nothing I actually wanted, and it took far more than I understood I was risking when I agreed to it."