Is this not the very condition of the human soul? Is this not what people hold within them at all times, this delicate balance of happiness and melancholy?
The difference between this book and Livre d’amour is that the former was written in the midst of love and hopefulness, while Pensées d’août is composed from the ashes of that love. Because of this, Pensées d’août is a very difficult book to write. Every time I sit down before the blank page, I must visit this loss, must experience it anew. It leaves me shaken, and sometimes, at the end of the day, the page on which the poem is written is blotted with my tears.
Sadness is selfish. It wants you all to itself. I shun human company, preferring the quiet consort of books. Every day when I write, I feel that I am using up the words I have in me for that day, and therefore I have nothing left for conversation. My time is spent in this melancholy absorption, and it is not entirely unpleasant. The poems take my sorrow. They take all of it, and they transform it into something tangible.
I believe that poetry is about honesty. Say the thing that can’t be said, and if possible, say it right up front. During the writing of this book, I take my signet ring to my jeweller and have him engrave the word “truth” on it. This is what I will wear on my body until my death—this single, implacable word. In English.
But truth is individual. My truth is not anyone else’s. What I write is not necessarily to be believed, or to be appreciated by the people who read my poems.
So I write about myself, my feelings. My little book of verse does not sell nearly as well as the books by the great champions of the people—Hugo and Balzac—because if you do not care to read about my emotions, then you will not care about my poems.
I am not clever like Victor, who pretends he is not writing about himself but is speaking on behalf of “the people.” Really, his regard for himself is so large that it can be satisfied only by this idea that he is the voice for all humanity.
My book appears, enjoys a few reviews, and then disappears from the public’s interest. One day, in a small used bookshop not far from my old neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, I find a copy of Pensées d’août. I feel terrible that my book has been bought and dispensed with so soon after publication, so I purchase the copy. When I get home, I riffle through the pages, looking for some clue as to why the owner of my little book would want to discard it so callously. There is no name inscribed on the flyleaf, no notes in the margins. The book is pristine and unmarked. But several of the pages have been carefully cut from the middle of the volume. I take down my copy of Pensées d’août and discover that an entire poem has been excised from the book. Well, someone must have loved the poem a great deal to remove it.
But if he loved the poem so much, then why not keep the whole book?
The answer lies in the poem. It is the one poem in the volume that directly addresses Adèle. So it is not hard to imagine that it is perhaps Victor, or one of Victor’s friends, who has removed the poem. Not because it was beloved, but because whoever cut it out didn’t want anyone else to read it. A small thrill whistles through my body. Have other copies of the book been purchased for the sole purpose of destroying this poem?
Perhaps I have a more interested readership than I had originally supposed. Perhaps Victor will buy up all the copies to keep the poem mute, and this sensation will increase my sales tenfold.
I LEAVE TO THE END of my recollections of this decade what happened at the start.
I have dealt with everything else in the 1840s before returning to this because I could not bear to write down the details of the event that has broken my Adèle’s heart forever. You see, even though I believe in the truth, I am, in many ways, a coward, and I sometimes go out of my way to avoid meeting it.
In the winter of 1843, Adèle’s oldest daughter, Léopoldine, was married to Charles Vacquerie. No one told me of this event, but I saw the notice of the wedding in the newspapers. Léopoldine was nineteen years old.
I had heard of the groom because his brother was Auguste Vacquerie, an avid supporter of Victor’s. A disciple, really. He was a man with literary aspirations, and he had staged a new production of Hernani, probably with the sole purpose of impressing Victor. Why anyone would want to mount that dreadful play again is beyond me.
I suppose Léopoldine met Charles through the family’s association with Auguste, although I heard a rumour that it was really Auguste who was in love with Léopoldine, and that, at the wedding, he was in danger of proclaiming his love.
Life has a strange way of circling back on itself.
But Léopoldine was in love with Charles, and they married and moved to his family’s village near Le Havre. Villequier, I think it was called. His mother had a house there.
In September, Charles and Léopoldine, along with one of Charles’s cousins and an uncle, went for a sail on the Seine near the village. It was quiet and peaceful on the voyage out, but on the return journey, a gust of wind capsized the yacht and everyone aboard was drowned.
My Adèle must have cried as many tears as the amount of water in the river where her daughter died. It caused me tremendous pain to imagine her pain, and even though she had ended our affair, I felt compelled to go to her and help calm her suffering.
But this is not so easily done.
I know where the Hugos live, in the Place des Vosges. Victor is so famous now that the apartment has infuriatingly been pointed out to me many times. It is on the second floor, at the far end of the long, beautiful building.
I cannot simply knock on the door and present myself. I must go in disguise. I must go as Charlotte.
Mother’s nervousness at walking in the Paris streets has resulted in her choosing only the most drab of clothes in which to venture out. I rifle through her wardrobe, trying to find something a little colourful, something Charlotte would be happy to wear.
“Sainte-Beuve, what are you doing?”
I turn with my armload of dresses to find Mother standing in the doorway. I had thought she was out visiting Madame Fontaine.
I am caught. Mother does not know that I sometimes borrow her clothes, and I do not want her to find out. There would be no way to explain it that would make sense to her. She is a woman with little imagination. I am her son. She is not capable of thinking anything else. And even though she saw me naked as a child, saw the small winkle of my sex, she didn’t think to consult a doctor. “All men are different,” she said to me, “belowdecks.”
I must lie to Mother, and lie quickly. Not a single lie that she can dispute, but a barrage of lies, all coming so fast and furious that she will be bewildered by the effect and forget the issue.
“I thought I would have a dress made for you,” I say, “and I was taking these to use as patterns for the dressmaker. There have been bedbugs in my room, so I wanted to have all our clothes laundered. You don’t seem to wear these dresses much, so I thought I might give them to the unfortunate girl who begs in front of the church.”
“Oh.” Mother looks at the clothes as though seeing them for the first time. “What are you doing in my room?”
“I just told you.”
We stare at each other. Mother seems more stupid than usual these days. Perhaps she’s losing what little mind she has left.
“Time for lunch, Sainte-Beuve,” she says. “You should leave those here.”
I bundle the dresses onto her divan and scuttle past her out the door.
I find a boy in the park outside the Hugos’ apartment and pay him to take a note upstairs.
Will she come? I have signed the note as Charlotte so she will know who waits below her window, who paces up and down between the trees. My heart races and my mouth is dry. A small gust of wind pulls at the edge of my skirts.
Adèle is there in a moment. She runs from the door of the building in her mourning dress, my note still clutched in her hand. Because I am not dressed in a way she will expect, she runs right past me and I have to call out to her.
“Adèle!”
> “Charlotte?” She comes towards me, looking confused.
“Sister Charlotte,” I say, for I am dressed as a nun. I bought the habit this morning. It was all I could think of to do. I couldn’t risk getting caught by Mother again.
We walk to the far end of the Place des Vosges, out of sight of the apartment. We sit on a bench in the shade.
“I came as soon as I heard,” I say.
Adèle turns to me. Her face is puffy from crying. She turns away again. “It’s hard to talk to you when you’re dressed like that.”
“I’m sorry. It was the best I could do.” I tug at the wimple, which fits a bit too snugly around my face. “It’s very hot in here,” I say. “I had no idea that it was so stifling to be a nun.”
Adèle manages a faint smile. “Not that it doesn’t suit you a little,” she says.
We sit in silence. I hold her hand. The wind moves in the trees above us.
“Dédé is only thirteen,” she says after a while. “We didn’t tell her right away, and now she thinks that her sister is speaking to her from the grave. For days we knew Léopoldine was dead, but Dédé still thought her alive. Perhaps this is why she feels her sister talks to her: because at the moment of her death, Léopoldine was still alive to Dédé.” Adèle shifts closer to me. “I don’t know how to comfort her,” she says.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How can I comfort you?”
Adèle leans into me, her plump body slumped against mine, all weight and no vitality.
“There is no comfort for me,” she says. “Just sit with me. For as long as we are able.”
Once, the proximity of her body would have sent me mad with delight. Now my body is simply there to hold up her sorrow, like a bolster on a bed.
What lives and what dies? The body dies, but the spirit of love persists. Love dies, but the body that tasted that love continues, absurdly, to exist. There is no knowing what will leave us and what will remain.
Perhaps this is the most frightening thing of all.
Adèle
THEY LEAVE THE BODY out for me.
Madame Vacquerie meets me at the door.
“Prepare yourself,” she says, her hand on my arm, leading me into the cavernous entrance hall. “She was in the water for a little while before they found her.”
The house at Villequier overlooks the Seine, wide as a lake here where it feeds in from the ocean. The carriage drove along its banks on the way to this house. The water outside the carriage window, a flat, blank sheet of grey and blue. No waves or wind today. A clear sky, and the river looking so picturesque, I had to keep reminding myself that my daughter had drowned there.
It has taken all night to get here, and I did not sleep but sat up in the rocking, darkened carriage, preparing myself for this moment, a moment for which I will never be fully prepared.
Madame Vacquerie does not take her hand from my arm, and I am grateful for this. We do not know each other well, met briefly at the wedding a few months ago. We had spoken warmly to each other then, anticipating years of becoming acquainted, years of meeting up at the various occasions of our children’s lives. In fact, with Léopoldine newly pregnant, we were expecting just such an event in the beginning of the new year.
“We have washed the bodies,” says Madame Vacquerie. “And the graves have been dug in the cemetery. We could bury them tomorrow.”
“Yes, tomorrow.” I stumble on the lip of a doorway and Madame Vacquerie pulls me closer to her. She is practically holding me up at this point.
“A moment,” I say, and I lean against the door frame. “I need just a moment.”
“Of course.”
We pause there. Outside, I can hear the clatter of the carriage as it travels back down the driveway. My luggage must have been unloaded. It will be delivered to the bedroom where I will spend the next few days, a bedroom I have never seen. I wonder what it will be like. How odd to be thinking of that, to be thinking of anything except the fact that my oldest child is dead at the age of nineteen.
“Shall we go on?” asks Madame Vacquerie.
“Yes. I’m fine now.”
We walk through a drawing room lavish with red velvet drapes and two chandeliers, a life-size marble head of a man. There is a large book open on a table. We pass the table. It is a book of maps. An atlas. I can see the blue ink of the ocean.
“We have put her in the library,” says Madame Vacquerie. “Charles is in the dining room.”
It seems strange to have a body in the dining room, but then I realize that it is because of the table. Léopoldine and Charles will be laid out on tables. There would have been a ready table in the library, and another in the dining room.
“The coffins are made,” says Madame Vacquerie, reading my mind. “But we thought you would prefer to see her in a more natural state.”
“Is death natural?” I say.
The sun beaming in the windows of the drawing room fractures on the crystal of the chandeliers. I am momentarily dazzled by the shards of light dancing around the room.
Madame Vacquerie puts her arm around my waist.
“There is nothing worse than this day,” she says. “I have cried so many tears that I feel hollowed out.”
“They were happy. Weren’t they?”
“Yes, they were very happy.”
We have reached the door to the library. The heavy oak door is open, and I can see, in the dim interior—for there are no windows in this room—a white shape beached on a dark table.
Madame Vacquerie slides her arm from about my waist.
“I will leave you here,” she says. “And I will wait in the drawing room for your return.”
I don’t want her to go. I don’t want to have to enter that room and see my dead child. I don’t feel able to make the journey by myself.
But Madame Vacquerie has already gone. She has sidled away, and I am left standing alone on the threshold.
Léopoldine is covered in a white shift. Her long black hair has been brushed out. Both my girls are dark like me. They resemble each other, and myself as a child. The boys take more after Victor.
I touch her hair. It’s soft and dry. Funny, but I had expected it still to be wet, as though she would be preserved in the exact moment of her death, as though she had just been pulled from beneath the waves.
I touch her face. I touch her lips. Her eyes are closed. Her skin is cold and her skull feels hard and fast as rock.
“Sweetheart,” I say. “My treasure. My little one.”
My tears fall on her from above like rain.
She seems like a statue of herself, but not herself at all. The girl who was Léopoldine seems utterly and entirely gone. I touch the stiff curl of her fingers. I touch the curve of her hip, the flat of her stomach through the shift. Her baby, no bigger than a stone, is dead as well.
I bend over my daughter as though I were tucking her in at night.
I touch her shoulders, her long, graceful neck.
“My little swan,” I say.
I put a crucifix around her neck. I cut a lock of her hair with the small sewing scissors I have brought with me specifically for this purpose.
The room is dark. There are several candles flickering on the mantle, but their light is spilled close to them. Where Léopoldine lies is in shadow. In the soft darkness, with the candles nearby, and her white shift, my daughter looks like a moth. Her body looks like the body of a moth, wingless and still.
It would have been dark under water. As dark as this room. There would have been no sounds. She could not have cried out.
Madame Vacquerie is suddenly beside me.
“Come and have some supper,” she says. “You must be hungry after your journey.”
“I’m not hungry. And I don’t want to leave my child. I just got here.”
“You’ve been in here for three hours.” Madame Vacquerie helps me to my feet. I’ve been crouched on the floor beside the library table. I can barely
stand.
“Have I really?” It seems only a moment ago that I first saw Léopoldine, that I touched her face. But my body is sore from being curled up. My face is wet from crying.
I allow myself to be led from the room.
“How are you able to be so strong?” I ask Madame Vacquerie as she guides me back through the drawing room.
“I have had three days to grow accustomed to my grief,” she says. “And I’m not strong at all. But I know how you are feeling right now. I know exactly.”
“Thank you.” It seems an entirely inadequate thing to be saying, but I say it again anyway. “Thank you.”
We eat downstairs in the kitchen. We are served by the cook and sit at the servants’ table in the middle of the kitchen, beside each other as though we were children.
I am unbelievably hungry. I eat the food the moment it hits my plate, although after I’ve eaten it, I can’t even remember what it was I was served.
“Where is everyone?” It suddenly strikes me that we are alone, that Madame Vacquerie’s husband and her other children are nowhere to be seen.
“I sent them all away,” she says. “Just for tonight. They will be back tomorrow for the burial, and we will have a reception afterwards. But for tonight, I thought it would be easier for you if you could be alone with me, and if we could be alone with our children.”
“I would like to see Charles,” I say.
“Yes.”
The cook comes over with a slab of cake and cream. She places it carefully in front of me. “I’m sorry, Madame Hugo,” she says. “I’m truly sorry.”
The Reinvention of Love Page 11
