I am fond of Mother, but she is tiresome. We share an emotional sympathy, but she is not much good as an intellectual companion, as I said. Her thoughts are not concerned with symbols and philosophical argument. They are, most likely, dwelling on some lowly gossip she heard on the street that morning or engaged in the never-ending quest to find her sewing basket or her spectacles. Sharing a house with her will be more frustrating than rewarding, but it will also mean that I will not have to work so hard at the Globe.
Life with Mother is not easy. The first night we are together under one roof again, I am sitting up in my new bedroom reading when I hear the most appalling sounds coming from Mother’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. Scraping and scratching, the noise of the floorboards being scored as something heavy is pushed over them.
I wait for the noise to stop. It does not. I put my book aside and go and knock on Mother’s bedroom door.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Perfectly well, Sainte-Beuve,” comes her reply from the other side of the door.
“Why are you moving furniture so late at night?”
“I am not moving furniture.”
“But I heard you.” Those sounds could not be anything else. I turn the doorknob, but the door won’t open more than a fraction. “Mother, let me in.”
“I’m afraid I cannot, Sainte-Beuve,” says Mother through the closed door. “You see, I’m barricaded in for the night.”
“Whatever for?”
“So that thieves may not enter my bedchamber and have done with me.”
Mother is afraid of being robbed and murdered. She is afraid of slipping on the cobblestones when it rains. She is afraid to ride in a cab pulled by a black horse, to open her front door at night, to walk in unfamiliar streets. I do not know when she suddenly became so nervous of life. She seemed so robust when I was young.
“Don’t be foolish,” I say to her at least once a day, but she is quick to point out that it is her house and she will conduct herself there exactly as she pleases. And I have no rebuttal for that.
Adèle has returned to Paris, but I have not seen her. I sent word to her under her alias at the Poste restante to let her know that I have moved, but I have had no word back from her to say when we might meet. I am trying not to despair. I am trying to concentrate on the business of moving house and writing my poems. I must put Adèle out of my mind, for to think of her causes me to miss her, and when I miss her, I am incapable of getting anything done.
The Hugos have moved again. All of Paris knows this, knows how famous Victor has become, how well his book about Notre-Dame has sold, not only in France but all over the world. The household has left rue Jean Goujon for Place Royale, where, apparently, they have a magnificent apartment in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée.
Love, increasingly, seems more of an affliction than a blessing.
And now, a ridiculous thing has happened. I have been called up to serve in the Garde nationale. I should explain that this is a militia made up of the middle class. When one is summoned to the Garde nationale, one is given a blue uniform and a rifle, and is expected to help keep peace in the streets, stop the vandalism and thieving that seems so much a part of city life.
The idea of the rifle and the uniform is tempting, but having made the great sacrifice of moving in with my mother to conserve time and money, I just cannot afford to add yet another duty to my busy life. I will never get my poems written if I do not give them my full attention. So I have ignored the summons, and now I have been charged with neglecting my civic duty and have been condemned, in absentia, to serve a prison sentence for this offence.
I have gone into hiding. Under the name Charles Delorme, I have rented cheap rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen. The hotel is on the right bank of the river, in the Cour du Commerce, a twisting series of alleys that holds all manner of shops and services. If I am chased into the Cour du Commerce, there are many places to hide. And if I am chased into the Hôtel de Rouen, there are four exits by which I can escape—one door to the south, one to the north, one to the east, and one to the west.
My rooms are on the third floor and look out over the distant Jardin du Luxembourg, out over those perfect days not long ago when I walked through the orchard with Adèle, fully believing that our love was strong enough to bear our circumstances.
I am less convinced now. As I said, she sends no word to me, no reassurance of her love, no promise of meeting.
My two rooms cost only twenty-three francs a month, with morning coffee included. The staircase to the third floor is as steep as a ladder. The hallway is dark and narrow. But when I throw open the door to the small room where I am to write, I feel only liberation at my prospects. The proprietors of the hotel, Monsieur and Madame Ladame, are friendly and courteous. They can be relied upon to warn me if the police should arrive to arrest me.
My mother, however, is unhappy with my arrangement. She was all in favour of my spending time in the Garde nationale. She thought it would be good for my character and for my figure, which has grown a little plumper of late. According to her, the Hôtel de Rouen is not a suitable place for a gentleman. I pronounce the name as Hôtel de Rohan, to make it sound more noble, to echo Victor’s prestigious new lodgings, but she is not convinced. She is disappointed in me, in my choices. “I would rather have given birth to a Freemason,” she says.
I will spend eight years in these hotel rooms, but I don’t know that yet, of course. Now, in my thirtieth year, I climb the stairs, puffing my way along the hallway to the rooms numbered nineteen and twenty. One small space in which to sleep. One small space in which to work. I have successfully eluded both the Garde nationale and the police. My mother knows where I am, and even though she disapproves of me at the moment, she will not turn me in. What I know now, when I open the door of the room I will work in, is that I have a desk by a window and a view out over the Jardin du Luxembourg, out to the fields that lie beyond the orchard. I have ink and paper and ideas. I have left Charles Sainte-Beuve behind. I am now Charles Delorme. I am a free man. And I am a writer.
IT IS THE SILENCE that carries the music.
It is these long days and nights, hunched over the small desk in my room at the Hôtel de Rouen, that will make my name.
I have decided to try my hand at a novel. If Victor can do it, surely I can too. My poems are going well, but I need something more than verse to tell the story of Adèle and me. I need to create a world to live in with her. If I cannot live with her in this world, then I will make an imagined shelter for our love.
But it is harder than I thought, and first I must change some of the identifying details. It is all very well to write my book of love poems for myself, but I desire to be a serious writer, and I should try to get this novel published. So I must take liberties to disguise the story of my love.
I decide to set the tale in the time of the Napoleonic campaigns in the 1790s. My hero (me) shall be a soldier in these campaigns. He will be in love with his friend’s wife, a Madame de Couaen, and the bulk of the story shall be a testimony to that love.
Well, that certainly sounded good when I thought it up. But writing it down is another matter. The plot falls away quite quickly, as overcooked meat slips from the bone, and the book becomes not so much an exploration of my love for Adèle as the exposure of it. After a day’s work I feel raw and trembling, barely have the strength to stumble down the staircase in search of supper. And on the way back up, I must grasp the large brass ball on the landing railing with both my hands to steady myself before proceeding down the hallway, back to my room and the torture that this writing has become.
I thought there would be peace in the enterprise, but writing the story down just lays it bare again. Writing of Adèle does not offer me any rest. It just makes me miss her more acutely. It just makes me relive all our moments together and ache for those moments to be repeated.
I must be free of this torment. I must kill off Madame de Couaen.
What I do like ar
e the rituals: the morning shave in room number twenty, the coffee delivered by Madame Ladame. I like the sound of the stairs creaking as she climbs slowly up with cup in hand. I drink the coffee. I look out the window. I pace around the room, working myself into a state of restless agitation that I now recognize as the creative state. Then I march next door to room number nineteen, stride across to the desk, and fling myself down wretchedly. My pen lurches over the first few sentences, but then it moves swiftly and fluently. After I have killed off Madame de Couaen, the words release from me as though they were water flowing from a pump. I cannot keep up with my thoughts. My hand races to pin down what seems desperate to flee. I must make tame what wants to remain wild, although sometimes there is much lost in this translation from feeling to meaning.
But sometimes too I will write something that I didn’t realize was true until I’d secured it to the page. I write, “Men’s destinies do not correspond to the energy in their souls,” and I have to push my chair back from the table while I think about the truth of this. For this is how it is in me. My outward life at the moment is fairly placid—boring, even—but my internal life rages with feeling. They are not reconciled, or perhaps even reconcilable. And isn’t this also the fate of the writer? To write is the most passive of acts. There is more excitement to be found in observing someone asleep. And yet what surges through the writer’s veins while he is writing is thrilling and wild. The more sedate a writer’s life appears to be on the outside, the more imaginative he is able to be inside himself, and the more extraordinary work is possible.
My hero (me) is good on horseback. When emotions are too much for him, he simply rides off. Later he rides back. Once he says, in all seriousness, “Can a man keep a flame burning in his breast without his clothes catching fire?”
It is something to consider. My love for Adèle must be visible to all who see us together. In some ways it is a relief to be in exile at the Hôtel de Rouen. I am not in danger of being discovered making love to Adèle in my novel.
When my hand is tired and cramped from writing, or when I must open another bottle of ink or replenish my sheaf of paper, I pause from my work and look out the window, across the river, out over the countryside that borders the outer edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I like this view. I like being so high up, as though I am on the topmast of a ship.
My hero (me) narrates the second part of the book from on board a ship. He has to periodically put down his pen to attend to the duties of sailing.
When I write about our love, I realize how unsettled it has made me. I now depend on my morning ritual of shaving, coffee, pacing, writing. I can lean on it, and on the bad days, the unsteady days, it will hold me up. There was nothing to lean on in my love for Adèle. We did not have the luxury of routine. Every time we met, it was fraught with stored-up emotion, with the fear that we would not be able to meet up again soon.
My hero (me) goes to the monastery at Port-Royal. He decides to undergo training for the priesthood and spends his days praying, reading, going for long walks, eating simple meals with the monks. His small cell is sparsely furnished, and he does not want for more. Occasionally there is singing at a meal. More occasionally there is cake. The time passes blessedly, uneventfully.
After he is ordained, he leaves the monastery, riding off on horseback to visit Madame de Couaen. When he gets to her house, he finds her on her deathbed. She is, of course, overjoyed at seeing him, and she asks him, with her husband’s blessing, to take her last confession and deliver her the sacraments. He does this, with great feeling. She is grateful. She dies.
I put down my pen. I feel drained of words, empty of emotion. By killing off Madame de Couaen, I have preserved the love she felt for my hero (me) without having to consider its future. It has met a logical end. The love has transcended from a physical plane to a spiritual one, but it has remained constant. I fear there will be nothing so convenient for Adèle and me. Our future is, unfortunately, beyond the control of my pen.
I HAVE MADE a new friend.
Even though I am in hiding from the militia, I am still reviewing for the Globe. It was my good fortune to be assigned two novels by the same author. Excellent books, both of them, and I say as much in my reviews. I also write to the author, conveying my admiration and asking if I can meet with him.
He agrees, and so I put on a hat to disguise my face, puff up the steep stairs to his apartment, and knock on his door.
“Ah, Sainte-Beuve. Welcome.” The door opens to allow me admittance, but I remain in the hallway, confused.
“George?”
“The same.”
I almost burst into laughter, but that would be rude, so I restrain myself (barely) and walk into the apartment of the young, brilliant Parisian author.
George Sand is a woman. Despite her masculine pen name and her male dress and her cigarette smoking—she is very much a woman. She sports male dress in order to have more freedom in society.
Friendship is best when it is founded on mutual respect or when there is a sameness of character, and George and I are full of admiration for each other’s work. We were also born in the same year. But what binds us most closely together is love, and the torment it offers us.
Once, George, despairing of her many unsatisfactory affairs, asked me, “What is love?”
“Tears,” I replied. “If you weep, you love.”
“I have asked this question of many people,” she said, “and you are the only one who has answered honestly.”
There are no women allowed in the Hôtel de Rouen, but George Sand, dressed as a man, passes by the inscrutable Madame Ladame without a glance. We sit in room number nineteen and read our novels aloud to each other. Her book, Leila, is further along than my Volupté, but this does not bother me. She writes faster. Every night, from midnight to dawn, she pens twenty pages. Sometimes, she confesses, she is able to complete a book in as little as thirty days. I admire her industry and her passion. We both believe that one must be moved by what one has written in order for the reader to be moved in turn. Passion is everything.
George’s real name is Aurore. As Aurore, she was married to a man who was unfaithful, and she has left him and her two children. The loss of the children pains her and she hopes to be reunited with them soon, but I am heartened by her example of desertion. Perhaps it could serve as a model for Adèle?
When George and I meet in the Hôtel de Rouen, we always start out by talking about writing, and we always end up by talking about love. One day we are sitting by the open window. It is hot in the room and there is only a tepid breeze to cool us. We have removed our waistcoats. George mops her forehead with a pocket handkerchief.
“Charles,” she says, “I need a new lover. My independence is a cage that imprisons me.”
I think hard for a moment, running through the tally of writers I know.
“What about Mérimée?” I ask. Prosper Mérimée, the novelist, is a bit of a rake, but he is a strong character, and George’s will needs to be matched with a strong character.
“Can you arrange a meeting?”
I have dropped out of Victor’s Cénacle, but I am still friends with Mérimée and Émile Deschamps.
“I can.”
“Done,” says George, as though we have just completed a business transaction.
A week later she is back in my room.
“It was awful,” she says. “He was arrogant and a terrible womanizer. He tired of me and even had the gall to toss me a five-franc tip on his way out the door.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is there no one else?” George puts her hand on my arm. “I’m fairly desperate, and you’re the only one who will help me. I asked Liszt to advise me on love, and he said that the only love worth having was the love of God.” George smiles at me, knowing in advance that I will agree with what she is about to say. “But if one has loved a man, it is very hard to love God.”
I envy her assurance and her brilliance, and I know that Leila will ma
ke her famous. It is a wonderful novel. I anticipate a future for her that is full of lovers and full of books. I tell her so.
It strikes me that if the situation were reversed, she would probably have women to put forth to me as possible lovers. But even the thought of this makes me feel guilty. I still love Adèle, and have told George as much. How could I even think of anyone else? And more important, with my secret, how could anyone think of me? Although I’m half tempted to ask. What if it was someone very beautiful?
“What about Alfred de Musset?” I ask, ridding myself of treasonous thoughts and getting back to the task at hand. “He’s very handsome.”
“And very young,” says George.
“Full of passion,” I say.
That’s the magic word, for both of us. George nods her head slowly in agreement, and it is done.
They become lovers practically from their first meeting. She writes to me from Venice, where they have gone together, telling me of their fights, of Alfred’s rashness and accusations. He is jealous of her night writing and leaves her to that while he attends violent orgies, returning to her in the mornings full of remorse, then flying into a rage and charging her with wanting to have him committed to an insane asylum.
“I should have known from the beginning,” she says when we see each other again. “I should have known by the names we called each other that the relationship was doomed.”
“What were the names?”
“I called him ‘My poor child.’” George sighs. “It’s embarrassing,” she says.
“What did he call you?”
“‘My big George.’”
I’m not sure George will come to me for advice on love again.
Later, George writes to me, “I think right now I am incapable of love, but I am capable of friendship.”
I tell George about Charlotte. I tell her about my condition. I have never told anyone other than Adèle, but George is more sympathetic than I would have guessed.
The Reinvention of Love Page 8
