—
There are times when tragedy can bring about a kind of goodness that would not have occurred otherwise. A few months after my father’s death, my two mothers, as I came to regard my mother and grandmother, began to cooperate with each other in ways they had not before. They could easily have blamed each other for his death, but it seemed they did not. They were not friends, but they were not enemies, either. Most evenings after dinner, they played parlor games and took tiny sips of sherry from pastel-colored, etched glasses. They played with Deschartres, who was a most disagreeable loser, especially when he lost to my mother. He had superior skills—at least to hear him tell it—but she had all the luck. One night he reacted so badly upon losing that my grandmother coolly suggested that she would have to slap him hard, and as he sputtered and fussed, I saw an intimate look pass between the women, something friends might share, and then the two of them burst into laughter.
My grandmother had begun to admire my mother. She saw how Sophie made all our clothes, even our hats; and if she was too impatient to always take the tiny stitches one was meant to in embroidery, she was quick and marvelously stylish in what she created. She once embroidered a dress from top to bottom for my grandmother in only two days; and when the old woman broke her sewing box, my mother shut herself away to make her a new one. Even Deschartres expressed his admiration for this latter creation; he bent his heronlike frame over the new sewing box for some time, after which he offered what was for him high praise: “Not bad.”
In addition to that, without ever having been taught, my mother could tune the harpsichord by ear, replace its strings, and reglue its keys. “Your mother will attempt anything, with great confidence and verve!” my grandmother told me.
She also came to see that my mother was an artist who had never been given opportunities to develop what were considerable talents in drawing and painting and singing. And she praised the letters my mother wrote, calling them lively and “very pretty.”
“However, you must work on your spelling, my dear,” she said, and rather than rising up in sharp-tongued affront, which I feared she would, my mother did attempt to improve not only her spelling but her penmanship. She also began to read voraciously, a habit that stayed with her until her death.
Despite her many gifts, my mother’s only vanity was about her beauty, but even then she was more matter-of-fact than boastful. She could never recognize her own intelligence, not in small part because she was genuinely unaware of it—here, in fact, is where her insecurity came out for the way she envied the society women their education and mental abilities. I occasionally saw women dismiss her with a glance, and I always thought at those times that they had no idea whom they were silently denigrating. My mother was a true Parisienne with a gift for savage wit and mockery; those haughty women were lucky she did not take them on, for they would have been sorry piles of crinolines and jewels when she finished with them.
She could also be extremely irritable and at those times seem to become emotionally untethered. She was free with slapping, too; but in the end there was in her such poetry and heart that one could never get enough of her, no matter what. There were times when she beat me and sent me to bed, and as soon as I was allowed up again, I would run to her and embrace her. And she would cover me with kisses, as though it were someone else who had effected our separation, someone else who had left red handprints on my bottom or my legs or even my face. I cannot say too many times that my mother was the most emotionally volatile, charismatic woman I have ever known. It was she who first aroused passionate love in me. And so it was soul-ripping when the time came that she abandoned me. Or, more to the point, sold me.
July 1831
25 QUAI SAINT-MICHEL
PARIS
I was finally back in Paris, and Jules and I were in our new apartment. We both loved it and our view of the Seine. On calm days, the river shone like flat metal, but on stormy ones, the restless current made it appear that waves were eating waves. We had rooftop greenery there, and a wonderful sense of airiness. Most important, there were two exits.
My husband still did not know that Jules and I were living together and I saw no reason to tell him. It was, first of all, no longer his business what I did with my life. But I also feared him cutting off funds, even though the allowance I received was from my own fortune. Luckily, I had been granted retention, if not control, of what I had inherited from my grandmother, and that was only because of my mother’s intervention at the time of my marriage. Though at the time I had worried that her demands might make a bad impression on my in-laws, now I was very grateful to her.
The interior of the apartment was charming. It came with no furniture, however. Jules had no money, and so I bought everything on credit: rugs, furniture, linens, dishes, draperies. I asked Casimir to secure a loan for me so that I might pay off everything when it came due.
When he failed to act, I wrote to my brother, asking him to get me a loan. When Hippolyte also failed to respond, I sent a nearly hysterical letter, telling them both that if they persisted in punishing me in this way—saying that my children were suffering in my absence, withholding from me the money I needed, refusing to respond even to deny my request—I would kill myself, and my blood would be on their hands. I was so distraught I almost believed I would do this, but in the end I reasoned myself out of guilt and despair and went into action. I borrowed five hundred francs from François Duris-Dufresne, a man for whom I had given parties at Nohant in an effort to help him get elected to a political office in Berry. I got another two hundred as an advance from my editor, Latouche. I signed for the loans myself, then wrote to Casimir, telling him that I expected him to cover the payment. Finally, he sent me a brief note saying that he would comply.
For one moment, when I looked at his familiar script—the t’s crossed high up, the slant leaning overly far to the right—I let myself think back to our earlier days, wondering how what had happened to us had. We were once a reasonably content couple. I had touched his shoulder affectionately as I passed behind his chair; we had held each other in the night. But it was pointless to look back. I tore his note in half and threw it away.
September 1831
NOHANT
I returned to Nohant from Paris in the fall, for another three-month stay with the children. When I arrived, Casimir was harvesting grapes and so stayed on for a while. At first, I held out hope that we would finally be civil to each other. My hopes were dashed at our first dinner together, when Casimir pointedly directed his conversation to the children and not to me. When once I asked him a question, he ignored me. Solange didn’t notice; she was singing to the peas on her plate. But Maurice, always sensitive to the feelings of others, said, “Papa? Did you hear Maman?”
Casimir looked at him. “No. I no longer hear her.”
Maurice turned to me. “You must speak louder, Maman.” His eyes were hurt and imploring.
“I shall, from now on,” I told him. I raised my voice and said, “I shall speak very loudly! Like a giant!”
Maurice laughed, he and Solange both, and they imitated me in loud voices of their own. The incident was forgotten so far as they were concerned. Not so for me, who sat watching my husband eat, his eyes focused on his plate, chewing, chewing, chewing. The air grew dense around me; I put down my fork.
The next day, I was finishing up some last details on Rose et Blanche. I had worked hard and had completed what I needed to in only five days. I had not seen any of my Paris friends who were also in Berry. It seemed odd to be without my comrades, whom I normally saw so often—I felt lonely and disconnected.
There was a knock on my door, and I opened it to my maid, who held a small, cream-colored envelope addressed to Madame Aurore Dudevant. From the handwriting, I knew it was from Jules, and my face must have betrayed me; the maid’s bland expression changed: her mouth tightened, and one eyebrow lifted.
“Merci,” I said, and she said nothing, just turned on her heel and walked away.
>
I closed my door and read the brief message; it set my heart racing. Jules, missing me terribly, had made a hasty trip from his parents’ home in western France to Château d’Ars, the home of our friend Gustave Papet, which was a mere mile and a half up the road.
Late that night, I sat in the upstairs bedroom I had taken, longing to have an opportunity to see him. As if in answer to a prayer, I heard a light tapping at my window. It was Jules, my own Romeo, standing on a ladder he had carried from the orchard, pleading with me to let him in. He had seen the light in my window, had seen me pacing back and forth.
I let him in, laughing, crying, and covered his face with kisses.
Then: “Are you insane?” I whispered. “Casimir is here! If he finds you, he will fill you with buckshot!”
Jules put his hands to either side of my face and regarded me tenderly. “I would happily die for this moment. Anyway, we are protected: Gustave has volunteered to lie in a ditch in the garden directly beneath your window. He will throw a stone if he sees or hears anything.”
As it happened, there was no cause for worry. The whole time Jules was in my bed with me, Casimir lay in his bed, snoring, and there was a nearly comical aspect to it. It also enlivened our lovemaking, the thought that perhaps Casimir might awaken.
We were already in a rush—we had missed each other’s minds and bodies—but this secrecy added a kind of wild excitement we had not enjoyed before. We bit and pinched each other, he pulled on my hair until I gasped; and in the pain there was a low-down pleasure. We kept whispering to each other that we must hurry and then must part, poor Gustave out there lying in the dirt; but every time we gave each other a farewell kiss, it led to more and more, until our dear friend ended up spending the entire night outside, relieved of his duty only as dawn broke. I was deeply grateful to Gustave and later sent him a letter saying so, calling our friendship nothing less than holy and imploring him to find a way for Jules and me to repay him.
But first, after Jules had made his escape, I sat at my desk, still tingling, to write a letter to Émile Regnault, a medical student I loved as a brother. I wanted to tell someone of Jules and my adventuresome lovemaking; it had made me feel distinctively alive and powerful—and apparently in need of a bit of braggadocio, as well. I wrote, “I am covered with bites and bruises; so weak I can hardly stand I’m in such a frenzy of joy. If you were only here, I’d bite you too until blood flowed, just so you could share a little of our savage raptures.”
Then I began to make edits on the pages Jules had given me for our novel. It was due to be published in December. People were saying that no doubt Jules would contribute next to nothing. I hotly defended my lover but those rumors were true. With the exception of a few bawdy (and, in my opinion, tasteless) scenes that appealed to the juvenile aspects of Jules’s character—and apparently to our publisher’s as well—the book was mine.
Not for many years did it occur to me that there was another side to that evening of stolen pleasure with Jules, a way of looking at it that revealed me not as an independent and freethinking woman who had the right to live her own life but as one blind to the needs of her children. For my lover and I would be warned in the event that my husband’s lamp got lit and he began coming toward Jules and me. But what about Solange and Maurice, who, though they now slept in their own beds, still occasionally came to me? What would I have said to them should they have knocked at my locked door, knowing they had heard the sounds within?
July 1810
NOHANT
It was just after I had turned six years old that I came into my mother’s room one afternoon to present her with a bouquet of wildflowers. She was packing; her open suitcase lay upon the bed. I dropped the flowers: the day had come. In the morning, she would go to live in Paris. Now I would only see her when she visited me.
Following my father’s death, my grandmother had not gone to Paris for the winter, as usual, but had stayed at Nohant. My half sister, Caroline, my mother’s now eleven-year-old daughter, was not received there. My grandmother made a point, with a kind of faux, powdered-bosom generosity, of saying my mother was welcome to see her own daughter, of course she was! Just not there at Nohant. Never mind that my father had embraced Caroline as his own child; such sentiments clearly were not shared by his mother. So if my mother wanted to see her other daughter, she had to take a three- or four-day trip to Paris. Naturally, this began to wear on her.
Around this time, in a way that seemed at the time innocent and even fortuitous but that I later came to regard as calculated, my grandmother received a visitor, her half brother and my great-uncle, an unapologetic ladies’ man named Charles-Godefroid-Marie de Beaumont. He was absurdly handsome and had about him an irresistible air of gaiety. He missed my father, as we did, but his nature was such that he would always turn to the sunny side, and with his arrival he lifted the gloom for all of us. Now every evening was filled with laughter and lively conversation.
My mother, used to the attention and admiration of men, was drawn to Beaumont. It was not only because of his appreciation for her beauty and charm; he served, my mother thought, as a steady and objective presence who could help her decide the best thing to do with her life now that Maurice was gone. With my great-uncle she weighed the pros and cons of taking me with her to Paris. If she did, we would be poor again, for with Napoleon’s defeat came the end of a pension my mother had expected to receive annually from my father’s military service. But she would have both of her daughters with her, and after all, as she told Beaumont, it was not wealth that brought contentment.
Beaumont gained enough of my mother’s trust to make her feel that agreeing to the arrangement my grandmother had offered was the right thing to do. My mother would be given a sum that equaled the amount she would have received as a pension, plus an additional one thousand francs annually, which was a generous bonus. In return, she would forsake her rights to me with the exception of visits at her own discretion. In other words, my grandmother would be entirely responsible for my upbringing. I overheard my mother agreeing to sign a contract to make her promise legal and binding. To me, it meant that my mother was trading me for money.
The night that contract was signed, I lay with my mother on her bed, inconsolable, despite her reassurances that I truly would be better off, that she would come and visit me in the summers at Nohant; and that in the winter, when I lived in my grandmother’s apartment in Paris, my mother would fetch me to spend time with her and Caroline in our old apartment. But I could only hear that the time would come when she would leave me entirely. And now that time was here. I burst into tears.
My mother pulled me onto her lap and kissed me. “Please take me with you,” I said. “Don’t leave me here without you.”
Her voice was full of pain, but she tried to calmly explain again why I could not come with her. Finally, she said, “If I take you away from your grandmother, she will reduce my income to fifteen hundred francs.”
The news, rather than helping me resign myself to the fact that I must stay there, only made me think that there was no reason for me not to come with her. In my child’s mind, fifteen hundred was a large number indeed, and I told my mother so. In my head, I was already packing my own things.
“No, Aurore,” my mother said. “It would not be enough. Half of that amount goes to pay for Caroline’s school. I wouldn’t have enough to clothe and feed us. Soon you would be begging me to send you back to the comforts of your life here, and who knows if your grandmother would take you back!”
This was a consideration. My grandmother had suffered some small strokes that had made her personality change; she was no longer as even in temperament as she had been.
“But I don’t care!” I said. “I never want to come back anyway! It doesn’t matter what we eat, we’ll have marrow bone soup every night and I will love it because I will be with you! Maman, we will be happy, and so everything will be all right.”
She said nothing, and I pressed her further.
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“You know I am right. You always say that love and happiness are not for sale, that what is on your back and on your plate is second to what is in your heart. You believe this, just as Papa did!”
She laughed. “You are too intelligent for your own good.”
She grew quiet, thinking. Then she said, “Perhaps I would be happier poor with you than I am here, where I live a life wanting nothing in the way of material goods but where my heart cries out for a freedom and liveliness that will never be here. I suppose you long for the same.”
“Yes!” I said. “I am just like you!”
Her face changed. “No.” She lifted me off her lap and stood me straight before her. “Aurore, listen to me. You don’t fully realize what you would be giving up in terms of education and security and the promise of a good match. I would be remiss as a mother if I did not consider these things for you.”
“My education here is not good, it is airless! They want me to be a puppet. As for a good match, I can find that on my own, just as you did! I love my grandmother, I will continue to visit and care for her, I will continue to sing for her and put on my plays, but must I live with her to do that? I tell you, Maman, and you must believe me, I do not care about her money or her house or her fine things.”
“You can say that because you have had such things! But I know what it means to be a young girl with no money. Poverty is what shaped my life, and I had to struggle hard to overcome my circumstances. I was forced to do terrible things. I want better for you!”
The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand Page 8
