Émilie is one of several children of a Perigeux de Bergerac and their courtesan consort, who in a lesser branch with sprigs too numerous were offered to the Night Court and largely expected to make their own way thereafter.
Not only classically lovely, but an obedient child who never raised her voice or broke a rule, who was fastidiously clean and tidy and preferred the conversation of grown-ups to playing with others her own age, Émilie was accepted into Camellia House. In that elegant and protective and orderly atmosphere, she bloomed. She was bent upon keeping everything just so, and she adored to please the adults around her; she was regarded as an exemplary novice, whose chief fault — a certain lack of flexibility and unwillingness to admit that there might be more than one correct way for something to be done — masqueraded as a love of perfection.
As her 16th natality approached Émilie seemed in some ways mature for her years, being cautious and reliable and given to moments of frankly alarming intelligence. Remarks she made in her rare unguarded moments could be not only novel but insightful— uncannily so.
But some instinct, some sense that the girl hadn’t grown far enough yet into her womanhood, prompted the Camellia Dowayne to hold back her debut until she was nearly seventeen. It was frustrating and humiliating at the time— but in retrospect Émilie feels grateful to have had that extra time of learning and preparation, rather than being rushed into adulthood.
Her petals were just slow to open. From a pillar of reserved perfection at seventeen she became by the age of twenty, when her marque was made, a popular ornament of the house in which she elected to remain as a full courtesan. She had by then gained, at her own slow but sure pace, the confidence she needed to relax from time to time the impeccable façade every young Camellia learns to construct, and to be more open and spontaneous with those patrons who wished it. But most Camellia patrons, of course, are seeking a flawless physical form allied to a fanatical care for even the tiniest details of appearance, behaviour, and occasion. A beautiful doll to be worshipped, or else toppled from her pedestal. Some are allured by perfection and others passionately irritated by the challenge it presents: Émilie’s inclination was always toward the former kind of patron, the ones who admired and enjoyed her keen eye, her forethought, and her mastery of minutiae, rather than seeking to dirty her gowns and rattle her composure and smudge her paint with too many kisses. She was particular, as Camellias often are, reluctant to accept on mere financial grounds assignations with those who didn’t meet some ideal of her own — this was usually opaque to others in the house, but sometimes she would concede some such remark as, “I didn’t like the scent of his skin.”
Her senses are indeed preternaturally keen and her discernment acute. Show her twenty shades of pale pink silk and she’ll winnow them down to the one she feels will blush best against her skin — and she’ll be right, of course. Being trained to sense, anticipate, and correct flaws — and living in a world so full of terribly flawed persons — she has the usual Camellia abhorrence of a picture hanging crooked on a wall, or an object out of place on a table. The truth is that she depends upon her sense of control of her body, her environment, and her circumstances: without such control she’s apt to go to pieces, though less so now than when she was a young girl whose façade was supported by weaker scaffolding.
Her morning routine is as ritualised as the donning of knightly armour. She wakes at the same hour (no matter how late she was kept up), takes the same modest breakfast (half a grapefruit, for instance, not the whole), and pursues the same refined and sacrosanct beauty routine — each gesture perfectly timed, unvarying until the final arrangement of her hair to suit her gown. (Which is not of course improvised: she’d never risk a new style or ensemble until she’d given it an extensive private trial.) The house would have to be on fire — not just a casual little fire, but the leads on the roof melting and everybody else jumping out the windows — for her to leave her chamber before she has arranged her appearance to her own satisfaction and mentally prepared herself meanwhile to go forth as a true Camellia, unruffled and pristine.
Her first appearance of the day in the salon of Camellia House sufficed for everyone else there to tell what time it was, so narrowly and reliably was it measured — and so were her years measured out too, scarcely perceptible to she herself — in refinement and in routine, in the most delicate and incremental improvements of all that was within her sphere.
Her clientele was winnowed along with her silks, and her assignations were steady but comparatively few. It isn’t the worst thing for a Camellia to have a reputation for being hard to get — and that, Émilie certainly enjoyed during her last years in Elua, when she was seen about the city enough to be coveted but not enough for the capital’s socialites to grow tired of the sight.
The invitation to move to Marsilikos as the new Camellia Second of the Salon de Lis d’Or came unexpectedly and in part as a consequence of Siovalese nepotism.
The Rose Sauvage is headed by a Verreuil and the Glycine by a d’Albert wed (distantly) to a Perigeux, and both of them visit Elua often enough to have met and noticed, over the years, just the one outstanding Camellia from Siovale. Praise of her name found its way to the ears of Philomène nó Lis d’Or when she was already considering only two candidates, Émilie and another. Other salons may promote from within but infusions of talent and prestige from the capital are vital to the health of an establishment which depends upon its reputation as Marsilikos’s most sophisticated, most glittering, most exquisite. And whatever her private ambivalence, Émilie is an exemplary Camellia who brings those qualities in plenitude, in exchange for a position she hadn’t the personal ambition to achieve on Mont Nuit.