The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  I HAVE BEEN INVITED into the prestigious Académie française.

  Well, actually, it wasn’t really that simple.

  Let me explain.

  The Académie française was established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 as an institutional body to oversee the use of the French language. There are forty seats. Members are elected for life, and when a seat falls vacant, one may apply to occupy it. There is an election, and the successful candidate must deliver a speech eulogizing the dead man whose seat he will be taking. He is given a green jacket and ceremonial sword, and is then welcomed with a reception speech given by another member of the Académie.

  Aside from the prestige, there are practical reasons for my becoming a member of the Académie. First, I will be able to charge more for any articles I write. Second, my book sales will increase. I could also be appointed to the commission that works on the dictionary of the French language. It would be so satisfying not only to use the words of my language, but to control the words themselves.

  So when a seat becomes available, I put myself forward as a candidate.

  Unfortunately, Victor is already a fellow of the Académie, and he tries to block my membership by nominating Vigny, Dumas, and Balzac. I campaign as best I can, soliciting the other members for their votes, but I fail.

  It is deeply humiliating.

  But shortly after, another seat becomes available when Casimir Delavigne dies, and I am encouraged to put my name forward again.

  This time I am successful.

  I am to occupy seat number twenty-eight, which is thankfully nowhere near Victor, who is in seat number fourteen, on the other side of the room. But he is seconded to deliver my reception speech. Although he postpones doing it for the better part of a year, he can’t put it off forever, and on February 27, 1845, we both arrive at the Académie with what, I’m sure, is a mutual feeling of dread.

  I wear the green uniform (which I rather like) and even strap on the ceremonial sword, although it bangs against my leg in a most annoying manner when I walk.

  The room is crowded—overcrowded, in fact. I have difficulty in securing a seat for George.

  “There are so many spectators,” she says, “because everyone in Paris knows that there is no love lost between you and Victor, and we can’t wait to hear what he will say about you.”

  I sit down in my seat. Victor stands up in his. The crowd murmurs and hushes. My sword presses against my leg, cutting off the circulation below my knee.

  Victor is older and fatter now, as am I. He has a beard and stands with his chest pushed out, clearing his throat before he begins to talk. It is not as I had feared, and I realize now that Victor cannot condemn me in this place. I have been elected a member, and it would be in extremely bad form to insult me in front of the other members. He has his own image to think of. But he does not praise me highly either. While he says some nice things about my work, he lavishes his most passionate oration on the physicality of the books themselves.

  “The bindings of Sainte-Beuve’s books are exquisite,” he says. “The best Moroccan leather, and gilt-edged as well. No expense has been spared in bringing his words to the public.”

  He sits down. There is tepid applause. Afterwards, he finds me in the lobby outside the meeting room.

  “I hope you are happy,” he says. “Taking yet another thing from me.”

  “Victor, you don’t own the Académie. Only seat number fourteen.”

  In our green jackets decorated with laurel leaves, we look like stout forest people about to scavenge for nuts.

  “You ape me,” he says. “You want to be me.”

  “No, I don’t. Have you forgotten it was my praise of your poems that made your name?”

  There is a flicker of something on Victor’s face. Sympathy, perhaps. No, pity. No, disgust.

  “Can’t you see, Charles,” he says, “that I didn’t need your approval? I would have become great without you. It was just a matter of time. You did not grant me any favours. I took what was rightfully mine.”

  It was more a matter of opinion than a matter of time, I think, but he has already turned away from me. I want to rush after him and run him through with my ceremonial sword, but I turn away as well.

  Because there is some truth in what Victor has said. But I do not want to be him. He has that wrong. I want to be better at being him than he is. I want to love his wife with more respect and reverence and tenderness than he is capable of giving her. I want to offer myself to words, not try to bend them to my will. I want to be grateful for my place in the world, not feel that success is my birthright.

  It turns out that the Académie is disappointing. What can I say? Everyone talks at once, like schoolchildren without a teacher. I never enjoy the meetings, even though I never stop enjoying the uniform. The meetings are not about what anyone says, but merely about who can speak the loudest.

  Surprisingly, Mother is very impressed with my entrance into the Académie française. She faints when she is told the news, and then rushes out with an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of the Virgin in her local church.

  So when the small town where I grew up decides to honour me with a reception, she will not be stopped from coming.

  I have become the most famous person to have lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer. It is mostly a town of fishermen, of commerce based on the sea. I don’t imagine that anyone there actually reads my writing, but it is kind of them to want to honour me, and I am touched by their kindness.

  The mayor has decided to hold the reception in the bakery that occupies the ground floor of the building where Mother and I used to live. I still remember the warm smell of the pies rising up the staircase to our apartment.

  “Do you remember, Sainte-Beuve, how you used to stick your fingers in the tarts so they were ruined and would be given to you later for free?” says Mother, much too loudly and in front of the small assembled crowd. Everyone laughs.

  “Please,” I say. But Mother, who has never received anything like applause before, finds the laughter of the crowd very stimulating.

  “He was such a naughty little boy,” she says. “Ruining the tarts. Keeping secrets. Telling lies. Never doing what he was told. Lazy as a hog. Always lying around reading those tiresome books.”

  More laughter. The mayor steps forward and awkwardly drapes a red sash across my shoulders. “For your books,” he says. There is a smattering of applause. Glasses of champagne are offered to everyone. The baker’s wife passes around a tray of tarts. I dare not take one.

  I leave Mother in the bakery, go down to the sea to walk along the shingle. The wind blows hard from across the Channel, wraps the red sash around my neck like a scarf.

  Across the Channel lies England, a place I went to for a month once. It had excited me to go there. There was English blood in my family. My mother’s mother, whom I never met, was an Englishwoman named Margaret Middleton.

  But the actual experience of England was less ecstatic than the imagining of it. I stayed in a country house in Alvescot, near Oxford, having been invited there by two English brothers who were friends of mine at school. The family, unfortunately, was given to exercise, and I was forced to tramp about in the rain and even, on one terrible occasion, to attempt riding. The food was practically inedible. There was an alarming amount of shooting and fishing, and everyone I met seemed to be a parson, although none of them very devout. The one redeeming grace was my introduction to the Lake poets—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Collins—and I decided to translate a few of their poems into French when I returned home.

  But my translations are no consolation now. It is ironic that at a point in my life where I feel I have lost everything, I am suddenly being rewarded for my accomplishments.

  The fishermen are returning from their day at sea. I stand in the shelter of a cove and watch the boats sailing towards the beach. As a boy I used to come down to this very spot and gaze at them. I liked the shouts of the men as they compared their catches. I liked the intricate l
ace of the nets, pegged out and drying in the sun.

  None of these men will ever wear the green jacket, or be draped in the red sash, but nor will they ever care about these things, or see the merit in them. What is an honour if it means something to only a small group of people? I will never be someone whom these fishermen will want to know.

  Mother is jubilant all the way home to Paris in the carriage. She bubbles over with talk. I look out the window, watching the countryside judder slowly past.

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there is the feeling of poetry in me, rising as fervently as desire. Even though everything is lost, perhaps something of what is lost is still recoverable. Perhaps, even if I never visit my birthplace again, I can find a way to describe the sound the fishing boats make when they beach on the shingle after a day at sea, and whenever after I read that passage, that image will return to me.

  And that is better than any honour I could be given.

  The boats heave themselves up out of the sea like strange wooden fish, the hulls hitting the beach with a great booming sound. No, not fish—it is more that the hulls are waves, but heavier than water. The booming sound they make when they are thrown forward from the sea onto the beach is like the sound of a bell. It is deep and sonorous, and the whole fishing fleet plays a madrigal of bells as it comes to shore.

  The red sash that the mayor gave me is still wound around my neck. I unwind it, fold it carefully into a small rectangle, and hand it over to Mother.

  “I want you to have this.”

  “Oh, Sainte-Beuve.” For a moment she is actually speechless, clasping the piece of red satin against her bosom. “What a day!” She carefully puts the folded sash on her lap and fumbles in her bag. “I have something for you too.” She passes me a box.

  “What is it?”

  “Open it and see.”

  I lift the lid, and inside are four tarts from the bakery, nestled in straw to keep them safe from breaking.

  I AM THE LIBRARIAN at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the Institut de France on the quai de Conti through most of the 1840s, and I have been given rooms to live in at the institute. By day I sit at a desk and enter into a ledger the names of those patrons who come to borrow books from the library. By night I sit up in my rooms, reading and writing. I have arrived at a life entirely circumscribed by literature.

  I was offered the job through a rather strange set of circumstances.

  It all started when Louise Colet, who is the mistress of both Victor Cousin, the politician, and Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, was savaged by the critic Alphonse Karr in his monthly satirical journal.

  Louise Colet did not take kindly to being ridiculed in the press, and she called on Alphonse Karr at his home. When he turned from the door to usher her into his apartment, she took out the kitchen knife she had concealed beneath her skirts and stabbed him in the back.

  He was not killed, but in an effort to have the whole unpleasant business quiet down, Victor Cousin, who was the minister of education at the time, asked me if I would speak to Alphonse and convince him to let the matter alone.

  This was easier done than I had imagined, as I think Alphonse was genuinely shocked and terrified by the stabbing, and by the fact that it had made him afraid. But I argued that to make more of the assault by laying charges would be to entertain those feelings longer than he wanted. So he decided to let the matter rest, contenting himself with displaying the knife in a glass case inside his home with the inscription “Received from Louise Colet—in the back.”

  As a reward for my part in the case, Victor Cousin gave me the position of librarian in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I receive housing and four thousand francs a year, all for the trifling inconvenience of sitting at the library desk two days a week. Victor Cousin is very generous with his appointments. He has also given Alfred de Musset a position as librarian for the ministry of the interior—which has no library.

  So here I sit, at my little desk under the vaulted library ceilings. Footsteps occasionally echo through the passageways, but mostly it is silent in the library. The new outbreak of cholera has kept a lot of the patrons away.

  Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Adèle will come to the library, completely by accident, but here my fantasy always has to end, for I know that Adèle would have no interest in visiting the Institut de France. She has had enough of books. The literary life has not exactly served her well.

  When I am bored with sitting at the desk, I walk the library, trolling my fingers along the spines of the books, the way I would ripple my hand down iron fences when I was a boy. The spines of the books are like the bars of a fence, like the bars of a cage.

  I stand before my own books and think of all the hours and days and years that have gone into these small volumes. How inconsequential it all seems. To what purpose have I given my life away?

  And if I am feeling in a particularly melancholy mood, I will go and stand in front of Victor’s books, which occupy the better part of one whole shelf. They are like a small wall in front of me. A barricade, like the barricades the revolutionaries build in the streets these days, crouching behind them to throw rocks at their enemies.

  Victor, of course, has become the hero of the new revolution, the one that started in 1830, four years after we met. He has so much public sympathy that he will probably run the country one day. Such is his need for admiration. I understand his desire to be famous, but not the fact that he is famous. Why? His books are no better than anyone else’s. He is not set apart by his peers as the best writer of the day. This honour probably belongs to Flaubert or, God help me, that fat braggart Balzac.

  What is it that makes Victor’s ascension so swift and sure? Is it luck? Is it timing? Surely if one did not know of his reputation and read one of his novels alongside my own, the underappreciated Volupté, there would not be much difference in the quality of the books. Why, then, do I languish in obscurity as a novelist while Victor continues to rise to glory? Why do I have to spend my days being a librarian!

  Before going to bed I stand by my window in my nightshirt, looking down into the little courtyard below my rooms. Sometimes I can hear the rattle of the death carts carrying the new cholera victims from the neighbouring streets. I try to ignore that terrible sound, and look instead at the small fountain that protrudes from the courtyard wall. I like the murmur of the water and the figures on the fountain—Eros playing with a butterfly. It is such a lighthearted scene that I am grateful it is there for me to gaze upon.

  I always leave the window open when I sleep—just a fraction—so that I can feel the cool night air on my skin, and so that sometimes, if I wake up in the dark, afraid and alone, I can let the whisper of the fountain rock me back to sleep like a lullaby.

  I mention revolutionaries and death carts. The 1840s have brought more political change to France. The population of Paris has doubled since 1800, leading to overcrowding, unemployment, and disease. In the end, cholera will kill over nineteen thousand people in two years.

  One day I was walking near the Place Vendôme when I came upon a crush of men armed with paving stones and sticks. I ducked down a side street, but there were more of the revolutionaries there. Luckily I spotted my old acquaintance Alphonse de Lamartine coming out the back door of the Hôtel de Ville. He was now one of the revolutionary leaders, having traded his pen for politics. And he was very popular among the people.

  The mob saw Lamartine at the same time as I did. They pushed towards him. I pushed towards him.

  “Vive Lamartine!” they shouted. And then one of them spied me and yelled out to the others, “A priest! A priest in disguise!”

  I could feel their hands upon me, and I swear they would have torn me to pieces like a pack of wolves if I hadn’t reached the safety of Lamartine, who ushered me into his carriage and drove me away from the mob. But next time there might be no one there to save me, and I could be killed by the members of a cause to which I have actually given my support.

  Best to stay in
doors for a while.

  Because aside from the mobs, there is also the cholera. In time, Napoleon III will widen the streets and create huge new boulevards to replace the warren of medieval Parisian alleys of the 1840s. But for now, those narrow streets, airless and sunless and burdened with heavy traffic, cause so much disease. Gutters at their sides are intended to carry the garbage and raw sewage to underground viaducts, but this happens only when it rains. The rest of the time the garbage and excrement lie open to the air, and in the evenings the gutters are overrun with rats and mice feasting greedily on the vile soup.

  George has fled to her country house. During the 1832 epidemic, she had lived across from the morgue on the Île de la Cité and had watched the endless procession of death carts, each one piled high with bodies.

  “I couldn’t stop watching,” says George when she comes to say goodbye on her way to her country estate. “I sat at my window all day. It was so compelling, and I felt obliged to witness this last journey of the poor souls who had died. I just can’t stand to see any more death.”

  I worry for Adèle, but I hear no word of her fate.

  I HAVE WRITTEN ANOTHER BOOK of poems. It was completed quite soon after Livre d’amour was published privately and borrowed much from that book. In the introduction, I have written that friendship is still the main subject of the verses, even if it is not, anymore, a single dominant friendship.

  What a convenient word “friendship” is. It is a blanket to throw over one’s more naked feelings.

  I have called the little book Pensées d’août. The title is literal, as I did write much of the book at the end of a summer. August is the hinge between summer and fall, a time of bittersweet change. The days are still warm, but there is the awareness that winter is coming, and one day, just in one day, everything changes and one wakes to find that the air has a chill in it, and that a coat is now required in the evenings. I think that this is the natural season for contemplation, and that poetry comes from this spiritual August—this place between loss and arrival. The emotion disappears and the word moves in to take its place. The last flowers of August thrive in the last of the summer heat, but they will not bloom again until spring. When one walks through the gardens and sees them, the joy of their existence is balanced, in equal measure, by the sorrow of their imminent departure.