Still, Livre d’amour is a good book. I know it is. It is my life, in love and stagnant. / An absence of pleasure, on a base of happiness. And it is Adèle’s life. I have complete freedom to do as I please. I tell not only our secrets, mine and Adèle’s, but her secrets. Stories of her youth, and stories of her marriage to the “dark husband.” I write hoping that you will always be this Adèle whom I love. I write of our short joy / our long delay. Sometimes the poems seem as real as though I am living the moments again. It is the hour when you should be taken back. Here, give me your hand. Let us pretend we have tomorrow.
I talk about each time we have met, what happened, what was said. I have even written a poem to little Adèle, young Dédé. Since she is so small, she is often the one child who accompanies us on our walks through the orchard. There is no chance that she will relay anything of our meetings back to Victor, and the fact she is my godchild means that I am more fond of her than I am of Adèle’s other children.
Delicious child that her mother sends to me, / Last born child of the husband whose joy I broke; / Her face lit up by twenty moons.
More than once, Adèle and I, lost in our passion, have neglected the cries of the child.
Your mother and I are burning meteors. / So many storms have passed since your innocent hour. / We cannot be the shelter you need.
I have ended this poem with a direct address to little Adèle, to a time when she is old enough to read and understand my words, because even though I am showing my book to no one, perhaps I will give this one poem to my godchild. It is not just that she is my godchild that makes me so fond of the girl. She has her mother’s name. She was born shortly before our love began, so she has grown with that love. I like her nature and feel that it resembles mine. Sometimes I even entertain the fantasy that she is our child.
Once, when we were all sitting in the garden and Adèle was afraid that Victor would come out to join us at any moment, she was holding little Adèle tightly on her lap when what she really wanted was to embrace me. The little girl cried out, “Mother, why do you love me so much today?” as though she knew, as though she felt what her mother was really feeling.
Love your mother, child—but here is the bitter thing. / The fire which we crave also devours us.
I am fond of particular lines, particular images. I have described the bat as “the swallow of the night.” I have said, “When wisdom is painful, it is wiser to be unaware.” And I have returned again and again to the lovers, to Adèle and myself—comparing us to Orpheo and Eurydice, lamenting our separation, rejoicing in our union.
Other lovers had, in their walk, more flowered paths, the happier trance. / And made around them, better singers of the birds.
It makes sense that my great love would yield a great work. How could it be otherwise? It would be an insult to Adèle to write mediocre poems about her, to find her only mildly inspiring as a muse. I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.
I sit in my room, late into the night, with sheaves of paper and pots of ink. The drips from the guttering candle seal my words with wax. The breeze blows in from the open window and ruffles the pages. I think of my love, streets away now, and I write to bring her close again. Words are the rope with which I haul memory back.
Doesn’t everyone have a book of love to write? I look up from my desk and see, through the crack in the drapes, the flickering candlelight in the houses across the way. What if each of those people in each of those rooms is engaged in the writing of a Livre d’amour?
And then another thought occurs to me. What if my book of love is just too good to keep private?
ADÈLE MEETS ME in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She has Dédé with her, is dragging the girl along the path to where I wait for them on a chair in the shade. If I was another kind of man I might leap up when I see her hurrying through the grove of trees, rush out to meet her. But it is one of my great pleasures to watch my lover come towards me, and so I sit and relish the full moment, listen to the scuff of her feet on the gravel path, the birdsong in the air around her.
We don’t embrace. She flops onto the chair beside mine, letting go of Dédé’s hand. The girl slumps down onto the dusty ground.
“I can’t stay long,” says Adèle. “Victor is watching my every move. He might even have followed me here.” She scans the avenue of trees anxiously, and I do the same, fully expecting to see the compact figure of Victor Hugo crouching there.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Telling Victor of the affair is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done.”
“I don’t blame you,” says Adèle, and I think (not for the first time) how she is a much better person than I am. If the situation had been reversed, I would definitely have blamed her.
“I don’t blame you,” she continues. “It just makes everything more difficult.”
“But if I hadn’t told him?”
“The fact of Victor would remain,” says Adèle. “Whether he knows about us or not, he’s still an impediment to our happiness.”
“He insisted we would remain friends.”
“He calls you a twisty little cheat.”
I look down at Dédé. She’s playing in the dirt by our feet with a stick and a beetle.
“Come away with me.”
“Where to? You have no money. I have no money. And then there’s the question of the children.” Adèle also looks down at her daughter, and Dédé, feeling our gazes upon her, looks up and smiles at us both.
“And besides,” says Adèle, “Victor is making plans for us to go away.”
“Where?” That shrewd versifier. It is a pre-emptive move to take his family on a holiday.
“Some friend has a château in Bièvres, and he has made arrangements for us to go there for the rest of the summer.”
Bièvres is not that far away from the city. It is a small town about an hour south of Paris. But it is small, and if I followed the family there, I would be noticed.
The rest of the summer is a very long time.
“Well, I will go away too,” I say. “To Belgium.” It’s the first place that comes into my head, and the truth is that I can ill afford to go anywhere at the moment. I must remain chained to my desk at the Globe, writing my reviews.
Adèle squeezes my thigh. “I love it when you’re petulant,” she says. “You get such a haughty look.”
I reach across and squeeze her thigh and feel, through my fingertips, the shock of desire beginning its crawl along my nerves.
“Damn him,” I say.
“I’ll write to you in Belgium,” says Adèle. “I should be able to manage that.”
Now, because I mentioned it in a moment’s rashness, I’m actually going to have to travel to Belgium. Why do I do these things? Why can’t I be stopped?
“I’ll leave word of where I am at the Poste restante in Bièvres,” I say, resigned to my ridiculous fate. I suppose I can convince the Globe editor to let me do my reviews from some cheap hotel in Brussels for a week or so.
“Has Victor finished his book about Notre-Dame, then?” I ask.
“What?”
“Well, he wouldn’t be prepared to travel away from his working routine if he was still writing that book.”
“Yes, he’s moved on to thinking about a new play.” Adèle looks away from me, but I have seen the shadow of something cross her face. Victor must have told her that they were to make a change of residence because he wanted to revive their marriage, not because he had just finished a book and was waiting to fill up with inspiration for the next one. Victor must have told Adèle this, and Adèle must have actually believed him.
MY HOTEL ROOM IN Brussels is horrid. It is cramped and has bedbugs. The view from the window is down into an alley. I sit in the room all day, trying to pen my wretched reviews, and in the evenings I slouch along the streets looking for an inexpensive place to dine. The only thing that keeps me from utter desolation are the letters that Adèle writes to me from Bièvres. They are letters
of reassurance, proclaiming her love for me, telling me what a bore Victor is being. But I only half-believe her. A small worm of doubt has wriggled its way into our love.
I lie on the hotel room bed, with its litter of books and papers, and read Adèle’s letters over and over, looking for a word out of place, a word that can be pried loose, letting down an avalanche of betrayal.
But I don’t find this, and after a few days of re-reading the letters, I relax and trust again that all is well between us.
And then I receive another letter, one not from Adèle but from Monsieur Hugo himself. I don’t like to think how he has found my address—discovering his wife’s letters to me, or forcing her to confess—and I slit open the envelope with great trepidation.
Victor writes to me in a mood of bonhomie that reads as false. I skip over the first few sentences, the friendly greeting and inquiry into my health and well-being. I skip down to the second paragraph. In my experience, what someone really wants to say is never in the beginning of a letter. It is in the second or third paragraph.
And there it is, in Victor’s second paragraph, where he boasts that Adèle is doing well, that he has never known her to be so happy, that it was such a good idea for them to get away together. He writes that Adèle seems positively radiant with happiness.
This is more than I can bear. I throw open my trunk and begin to toss in my clothes and books.
After a brief stop in Paris to rid myself of certain belongings and pick up other items, I take a coach south to Bièvres. It is easy to find accommodation in a local inn, and easy to find the château where Adèle and Victor are staying. Everyone knows the famous author.
The château is surrounded by a forest, and for the first day, I flit like a bird through the trees on the edge of this forest, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adèle leaving the grounds. But this proves futile, and the forest is just a little too distant from the château to get a good look without a spyglass, so I change my plan.
I change my clothes and go as Charlotte to the local church. I know my Adèle. It will only be a matter of time before she feels a need to pray or confess.
I go to the church and sit in a pew at the back, and I wait.
On the third day, the doors open and I watch as Adèle walks up the aisle of the church. Because she isn’t expecting me, she isn’t looking for me, and she walks right past me to sit in a pew several rows up. I wait until she has her head bowed in prayer, and then I slip out of where I am and move up to her pew. She raises her head when I enter the row and immediately knows who I am.
“Charlotte. My love.” Her face lights up. She is, as her husband said in his boastful letter, positively radiant with happiness. All my doubts evaporate. She has not returned her heart to Victor. She is still mine.
We meet in the church. We meet in the forest. I lurk among the trees like a madman. We kiss in the choir loft. I fondle her by a waterfall. She takes flowers home to press with the children. She runs back to the château with twigs in her hair and grass stains on her dress.
We are being foolish and we know it.
“It is only a matter of time,” says Adèle at the end of the first week, “before Victor finds us out.”
We are lying in the forest in the middle of a gorse bush where I have hollowed us out a lair. It is how I spent my morning while waiting for Adèle to leave the château. I fear I am going feral. We are living like rabbits.
“What can we do?” I am trying to untie her stays, but I keep getting poked by sticks. “These are desperate times.” The need to keep our love even more secret has intensified the passion. I run my hand up the inside of her thigh. She shivers in delight.
“I have never been happier,” I exclaim. “I want to live like this forever.”
“In the shrubbery?”
“No.” I bend to kiss her. “Like this. With you. Near you.”
Adèle struggles up onto her elbows. “Charles,” she says, “I don’t want to get caught. You have to go back to Paris.”
I feel as though I have been run through with a sabre, as though the ground beneath Adèle and me is already soaked with my blood.
“You can’t mean that.”
“But I do. I do.” Adèle strokes my cheek. “My treasure,” she says, “I just can’t risk it.”
“But weren’t you hoping that I might arrive?”
“Yes, I was.”
“And how will it be when I leave?”
Adèle sighs, lowers herself back down onto the dirt. “Unbearable,” she says as she pulls me down on top of her. “I would die without you.”
I have been turned out of the inn where I was staying because the proprietress thought I was bringing prostitutes there. I was careless one afternoon and returned to the inn still dressed as Charlotte. This woman shamelessly went up to my room and entered and presumably pleasured me, and now I have been thrown out of my lodgings.
When I go to another inn seeking accommodation, the innkeeper looks at my name as I sign the register.
“We’re full up,” he says.
“But you just told me I could have a room.”
He snatches the register away from me. “I lied.”
“Why would you do that?”
He shrugs. “I don’t want you here.”
Bièvres is a small place. The townspeople probably know about Adèle and me, and view our love as scandalous. Even this lowly innkeeper thinks I am an enemy of decency. I should challenge him to a duel for his insolence, but I can’t be bothered and I pick up my bags.
It is time to go back to Paris, back to my love poems.
WHILE I WAIT for Adèle to return from the country, I have taken to coming to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame every evening after supper. Not to the church where I usually meet my lover, but to the church, the great cathedral, the heart of the city.
I read Victor’s book, and I have to admit I liked it. I did wonder briefly if the horribly disfigured hunchback who lives in the bell tower, Quasimodo, was modelled on me, but mostly I’ve been impressed by the beautiful descriptions of the church, by Victor’s intent to raise the public’s awareness of the building’s neglect. It was damaged during the first revolution and badly needs repair. Victor’s story is set in the church, but the church is really the main character. I admire my old friend’s desire to save such a monumental part of Paris’s history. It is a noble gesture.
And the book is selling very well.
It is not far to walk from my house to where the church rests on the Île de la Cité, the small island in the middle of the Seine that used to be the entire city of Paris. Now, that island is anchored to the city proper by five bridges, like ropes mooring a ship to the shore.
The summer evenings are long and there is still considerable light outside when I enter the building during the last mass of the day. If it is crowded, I sit in a pew near the back, under the vaulted ceiling, which was made, as all church ceilings were made, to imitate the vastness of the heavens.
An entire army could march through the arches and still seem diminutive in relation to the church. Victor is right. It is too grand, too important to fall into decay. The broken statuary deserves to be repaired. The ruined pavement needs replacing. I wish I’d thought about writing a book about Notre-Dame myself. But I don’t have the same sentimental touch as Victor. I cannot move the masses to action, sound the right romantic chord in people’s hearts. My prose is drier. My poetry is too specific.
I sit in the belly of the cathedral and imagine Victor coming here every night after a fevered day’s writing. I envy him that experience of holy purpose. He would have walked along the aisles feeling entirely supported in the writing of his book—supported by the church itself. He would have felt chosen. He would have felt blessed. I am more of a believer than Victor, but God loves Victor for helping Notre-Dame, and God hates me for loving Victor’s wife.
Religion has its images and codes—arches are hands clasped in prayer, the lily is the flower of the Virgin Mary, the peacock app
arently does not decay when it dies and so symbolizes immortality and the resurrection. Every part of every church is like a page in a book. It can be read. Some evenings this is all I do—select a particular piece of wall or window and try to remember what everything means, try to read the interior of the cathedral.
The columns inside Notre-Dame have leaves carved into the stone at the top. They are meant to resemble trees, to remember trees, to remember that the first churches would have been in the forest.
When I sit at the back, the church is long and narrow ahead of me. Sometimes I look straight along it, to the curve of stained glass behind the altar. Sometimes I gaze down at the black-and-white-tiled floor or up at the high vaulted ceiling.
In the centre of the ceiling is a round painting of the Madonna and child encircled in a gold frame. The painting is dark, and there are gold stars decorating the ceiling around it. From where I sit at the back of the church, the medallion looks like a porthole in the ceiling.
This church took two hundred years to build. I marvel at that, how a man could pass four full lifetimes and never see the finished structure.
I enter the cathedral while there is still light in the sky, and I leave when it is dark, when the candles have been lit inside the church and the lamps have been lit on the bridges outside. I move from one world back to another world.
At first when I go to Notre-Dame, I think of Victor and his book. Then I think of how I would wait for Adèle in our little church, how impatient I would be for her to arrive, to see her. But after the third or fourth night of coming to the cathedral after supper, I realize that I am coming for myself, that I am not imitating anyone or waiting for anyone. I have entered this building not to worship another, but rather to please myself.
I HAVE DECIDED to move in with my mother on rue du Montparnasse. It is a small house and I will have to make do with less privacy, but it will be a savings for me to throw in my lot, temporarily, with Madame Sainte-Beuve. My income is dependent on work that comes my way, and when there isn’t much of this, I cannot eat or pay my rent. Now that I am embarked on serious literary pursuits, it seems prudent to save money where I can.
The Reinvention of Love Page 7
