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Photo via Matthew Henry on UnsplashLook, it’s not like body snatching had been her first choice.
Julie d’Aubigny, fifteen years old and not usually found within Catholic cemeteries, set down her shovel and wiped the sweat from her brow. She listened for any hint of trouble, but the cemetery was as silent as the convent it bordered.
Not that anyone had asked, but Julie’s first choice would have been to spend a happy eternity arm in arm with her beloved, strolling the streets of Marseilles sunburnt and drunk on each other’s company. They had passed one sublime summer just so: her love waiting each evening at the opera door for Julie to come tumbling out, cheeks flushed and still caught between worlds—until a kiss or two brought her back.
Then her lover’s foolish father intervened, locking her in a convent like some tragic Ophelia to Julie’s mad prince Hamlet.
One could say this whole situation was his fault, Julie reasoned, returning to her task. Society’s fault, even, unable to stomach the idea of two women in love—particularly when one had a penchant for challenging men to duals and a notorious preference for breeches over skirts.
God, Julie thought, looking morosely at her now-filthy woolen habit. I miss pants.
Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest time to call on God, in the middle—as she was—of disinterring one of his nuns. But Julie was far too hungry for this world to worry about the next, and frankly had something of a lifelong problem with authority—divine or otherwise.
If she owed her allegiance to any god, she mused, jabbing at a particularly stubborn clump of dirt, it would be one of those delightful trickster lords—clever and dangerous and mad as a fox. A hungry god for a hungry girl, her father would jest.
Gaston d’Aubigny was not a churchgoing man. He put his faith in a quicksilver tongue and a keen blade and thought holy the fire that drove him all his life—a fire he passed to his only daughter. Julie considered it her greatest inheritance, a spark in her blood that warmed her veins and called out for the world, brave and ecstatic and insatiate.
Perhaps if she’d had a different childhood, it might have been snuffed out; starved into submission as so many women of her time were.
But she had her father, and he taught her to burn.
He put a sword in her hand and trained her as he did the palace pages; grinned with pride when she won her first duel and never minded that her clothes were stained with dirt from running feral in the fields of Versailles.
He read to her each evening and nurtured her love of languages, music, history, and art. When he heard her singing as she mucked out the stables, he cradled her face in his hands and kissed her forehead, whispering exactly like your mother into her hair.
So tended, Julie grew into a wildfire.
But for all her sins—and she would admit to a few—Julie wasn’t some infernal creature repelled by hallowed ground, but a too-clever girl with time on her hands and a familial tendency to double down at the word no. She was her father’s daughter, and she could hardly help it if her lover’s family was naïve enough to think God of all things would keep her out.
A hollow thud interrupted her reverie and she grinned, sweeping away dirt to reveal a wooden lid.
Surely it was some kind of divine sign, a nun the approximate size and shape of her love passing away so conveniently. And those exceptionally flammable straw mattresses they gave novitiates? Well, that was simply asking for trouble.
It was everything she needed to orchestrate her very own tragédie en musique: the melancholic moonless night, the beautiful girl, the promising life cut short in a tragic fire.
Julie shook out her tired arms and leaned back against the dirt. Closing her eyes, she raised her arms as if before a phantom orchestra, imagining how the flames would sing at her command: slowly at first, then quickening with her hands to an incandescent crescendo, gunpowder fire igniting the night.
She sighed happily, dropping her hands. It would be her masterpiece.
But only if she finished retrieving her star.
Humming a few bars of her favorite aria, Julie picked up her shovel and went back to work.
In 1689, at the age of sixteen, Julie d’Aubigny was pardoned by King Louis XIV for the crimes of kidnapping, body snatching, and arson. She went on to great celebrity with the Paris Opera and set pre-revolutionary France on its ear by dressing flagrantly in men’s clothing, winning a great many illegal duels, and falling spectacularly in and out of love all her life.
About Emma St. Lawrence: Emma St. Lawrence (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in media research and practice at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work considers the many ways stories can serve as invitations, drawing boards, and doorways through which to imagine and explore new realities.
About Stories Matter: Stories Matter, a mentoring program for young female writers founded by ENTITY Mentor and writer Leslie Zemeckis, nurtures the next generation and inspires them to tell their stories. Co-sponsored by the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) and ENTITY Mag, published female authors give their time to emerging talent to encourage greatness and share their writing process. “The recent group, whose assignment was to write about ‘A Woman You Should Know,’” noted Leslie, “was exceptionally talented and a joy to work with.” ENTITY Mag is thrilled to showcase the work of these gifted young writers.
