The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  Her kindness sets me crying again. I drench the cake with my tears, then I gulp it down.

  Charles is dressed only in a long white shirt. His skin is as pale as Léopoldine’s. His fair, curly hair is as soft as a baby’s.

  “Are they pale from being under water?” I ask Madame Vacquerie. We are standing on opposite sides of the dining-room table where her son lies.

  “I think so. And the water has made their flesh a little swollen.” She gestures towards Charles’s feet and I see that they are puffy. They look soft. I cannot see the bones in them.

  “He is so beautiful,” I say.

  “My most beautiful child.” Madame Vacquerie’s voice catches.

  “I had a child before Léopoldine,” I say. “A boy. He died in infancy. We had called him Léopold, after Victor’s father. It seemed natural to call the next child after that first one, but I wonder if it was right to name my daughter after a child who died.”

  Madame Vacquerie is stroking her son’s hair. “We couldn’t have done anything to prevent this,” she says. “Even on the day it happened, I waved them off. They were only going for a sail. The weather was fair. The wind was low. Charles was a good sailor, and they were with his cousin Arthus and his uncle Pierre, who was a retired sea captain and excellent on the water.”

  “They died as well?”

  “Yes, they all died.”

  “What happened?”

  “My husband thinks the boat was top heavy with sails. It was a racing boat, had just won first prize in the Honfleur regatta. It was a fast boat. But the conditions were ideal. I don’t know. The river is very wide there, and those on shore couldn’t get to them fast enough after the boat capsized. Your daughter’s heavy skirts pulled her down into the water and caused her to drown.”

  I am quiet for a moment as I imagine Léopoldine struggling in a tangle of wet petticoats. Dresses do up so snugly at the back. It would have been impossible to wriggle out of one under water.

  It is too painful to think of the moment of my daughter’s death. Every time my mind goes there, I move it forward or backward and away from the event itself.

  “Léopoldine would have felt very confident, going out on the water with such good sailors.”

  “Yes. She was looking forward to the afternoon.”

  Madame Vacquerie puts her hand on her son’s forehead.

  “Charles didn’t die,” she says.

  “What?”

  “He didn’t drown. He surfaced. The rescue boat was close enough to see this. He was always a good swimmer. We live so close to the water that we made sure all our children could swim. People saw him surface, look around for his wife and call her name, and when he realized she was probably dead, he dived down to find her. He was found with his arms around her. They pulled them both from the water in a fisherman’s net. He chose to drown with her rather than to live without her.”

  Charles’s face is empty of feeling. He looks more serene, more calm than Léopoldine, but perhaps I do not know him so well. I do not know what his face is supposed to look like.

  “Foolish, foolish boy,” says Madame Vacquerie. “How was he to know that we grow out of that romance? An older man would never have chosen to drown.”

  My Charles would die for me, I think, and I realize that this is the first time I’ve thought about Charles since I got here, and that it feels wrong to think about him now.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, because it is one thing to know that your child died in an accident and quite another to know that he chose to kill himself in the name of love. I would not have wanted that for Léopoldine. Her death, terrible as it is, will be easier to bear over time. Madame Vacquerie will forever question her son’s decision. “I wish your son had not made that choice,” I say. “I wish he had loved my daughter less.”

  “You don’t mean that,” says Madame Vacquerie. “But thank you. It is kind of you to say it.”

  I don’t mean it. I’m glad my child knew love if she was to leave this earth so soon. I’m glad she was married to a man who loved her, and who proved it in such a dramatic fashion. It can never be doubted. From this moment forward, it can never be doubted that Léopoldine was beloved.

  “When should we have the service tomorrow?” asks Madame Vacquerie. “What time are you expecting your husband to arrive?”

  At last the question I have been dreading.

  “He’s on a walking holiday in Spain,” I say. “He won’t be able to get here in time. We will go on without him.”

  I do not know where Victor is. He said that he was tired, that he had been working too hard and needed a change. So he left for a walking holiday in Spain. Usually, when he goes off by himself, I am relieved at his absence and have no reason to contact him while he is away. But when I tried to find him this time, at the hotel where he was meant to be staying, they said that he’d never checked in, that they had no reservation for him. It seems he is not walking in Spain. God knows where he is, but the lie means he is probably with his mistress, Juliette Drouet. He is with his mistress somewhere, and he has no idea that his eldest daughter has died so tragically.

  Léopoldine was always her father’s favourite. He was more affectionate with her than with the other children. He thought her the most brilliant child of the four.

  “It can’t be helped,” I say. “He will just have to miss the burial.”

  There’s no response from Madame Vacquerie, and when I look over at her, I see that she is weeping. She is holding on to her son’s hand and her head is bowed over his body. I back slowly out of the room without her noticing.

  Léopoldine is as I left her, lying on the library table, still dead. It seems absurd that she should still be dead. I don’t want her to be dead anymore. I want her to get up, to move about, to become herself again. I want her to climb up out of the water and burst into the sunlight, opening her mouth to breathe in the sweet afternoon air. I want her husband to find her there, and to keep her afloat until the fishing boat arrives to rescue them both. I want them to have their child. I want it to be a girl. I want them to name her after Charles’s mother. I want their married happiness to continue. I want there to be other children. I want to die with my eldest daughter as a woman in middle years, sitting at my bedside, holding my hand.

  The candles gutter on the mantle, sputtering and flailing. The room grows darker and darker still.

  It is awkward, but I manage to climb onto the library table. I lie down beside my daughter and pull her into my arms. She is stiff and cold. It is as if I am embracing the sea itself.

  Did she cry out? Was she afraid? Did she know what was happening?

  This was my girl, my first living child, who was talented and beautiful, who could paint and draw and write poetry to rival her father’s, who had all the social graces, who was mischievous and kind and full of light, who had married for love. This was my child, this corpse, this heavy fish, this mermaid.

  The day of the funeral dawns bright and clear. My bedroom is at the back of the house. Mercifully, Madame Vacquerie saw fit not to put me in a room that overlooks the river. My room looks down onto the gardens and the tops of the fruit trees in the small orchard out back.

  I had laid out my mourning dress the night before. A maid comes with a basin and some water. I wash. I dress. I see to my hair. I go downstairs.

  Madame Vacquerie’s family have returned. I don’t know where she sent them, but it couldn’t have been far. When I go downstairs, they are all in the foyer. The men bow to me. Monsieur Vacquerie says some words that I forget the moment he utters them. Charles’s brother, Augustus, one of Victor’s most ardent disciples, asks repeatedly after my husband.

  “He’s not coming,” I say, with more anger than I mean. Augustus nods and backs away from me.

  I have slept later than I wanted. It is mid-morning. The bodies of Charles and Léopoldine were taken away late last night, to be placed in their coffins, to be readied for their burial today at noon.

  Monsieur Va
cquerie ushers me into the dining room for breakfast. The table that just yesterday held the body of his son now holds cups and saucers, plates of rolls, and steaming jugs of coffee.

  Madame Vacquerie is seated at one end of the table. She nods to me as I enter the room.

  “Madame Hugo.”

  “Madame Vacquerie.”

  She is formal with me. She is closed to me now. I can see it in her face. Her family have returned and her grief now belongs to them. Her husband passes behind her, places a hand on her shoulder. She puts a hand up to cover his, and the gesture makes me so lonely.

  I eat more than I want to at breakfast, but again I am ravenous and can’t help myself. Death has made me a glutton. Madame Vacquerie, on the other hand, barely touches her food.

  Augustus tries to engage me in conversation about Victor, but I ignore him. When I have the opportunity, I take my leave and slink from the room, go back into the library and stand by the table where Léopoldine used to lie, sobbing until a maid comes to tell me that my carriage is ready.

  The words are said. The coffins are wheeled out to the open graves. The wind suddenly whips up when we are standing there, and the priest’s vestments fill with air and make him look like a chess piece.

  The words are said. The bodies are lowered. The words are said. The dirt hits the wooden coffin lids, like rain lashing at the window on a winter’s night. The words are said. The wreaths are placed. The hands are clasped. The wind subsides.

  I stand at my daughter’s grave to the end, after everyone else has left to go back to the house.

  It seems impossible that Léopoldine is in this box, in this hole in the ground, and that I will have to leave her here, cold and alone, for all eternity. I can’t believe it. I do believe it. I can’t believe it. And it is hard not to think that this is punishment, that I am being punished by God for my sin of adultery, that Léopoldine was sacrificed because I am a sinner. It is hard not to believe this is my fault.

  When I return to the house, the reception is under way. I know almost no one, sit by myself in a corner of the drawing room, drinking tea and trying not to eat too much cake.

  Madame Vacquerie is seated beside her husband. She sits up straight, talking to a young woman. I can see from her posture that she is holding herself upright, that if she didn’t make this effort, she would collapse. At the graveside of her son, she fell to her knees in the dirt and had to be hauled to her feet by Augustus.

  A mother’s grief is not pretty.

  I look around the room, at all the strange faces, at the chandeliers swinging from the ceiling. I look at the statue, the bust I passed yesterday morning on my way to the library, and I realize with a start that it is a bust of Victor. And I remember how upset he was to lose Léopoldine to marriage. He had sent her this head of himself as a way to assert his continuing presence in her life. Although this was not how he had described it to me. He had told me that she would be lonely for him. Interesting that Léopoldine put it in a neutral place, the drawing room, rather than placing it in her private chambers.

  But Victor did love his daughter. We loved her together. She was ours, and that bond between us will never be broken. From now on, we will be her archive. All the years of her life will be stored in our memories. She will only exist there. Victor and I are the only ones who have known her intimately since the moment of her birth. We will be more united because of her death, not less.

  At that instant, a maid comes towards me from across the room. She carries a silver tray, and on that tray I can see there is a letter.

  It is from my husband. He was in the south of France and read of Léopoldine’s death in a newspaper while he was sitting in a café. He was travelling under an assumed name and never received my urgent messages, but now he is on his way to Villequier and asks me to wait for him. He ends the letter by saying, “My God, what have I done to you?”

  Another woman might be confused by that phrase. Another woman might not wait for him. But I will be here when he arrives. I will greet him warmly. I will accompany him to the cemetery and show him where our daughter now lies. I will put my hand on his arm to steady him, as Madame Vacquerie put her hand on my arm to steady me.

  And I am not at all confused by the phrase at the end of his letter. No, there is no confusion.

  I know exactly what he has done to me.

  Charles

  MOTHER DIES AT EIGHTY-SIX. Increasingly frail and increasingly demented, she lives long enough to see her body outlast her mind.

  In the end she was afraid of almost everything. But her loss of memory made us better companions. She no longer cared what I was up to. There was no need to comment on my dress or my habits. We became strangers under the same roof, but we liked each other better because of that.

  My last good memory of Mother took place a few months before she died. I had come upstairs after lunch to find her standing perfectly still in the hallway. She had lost weight recently and her clothes hung loosely from her frame.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “The street is so busy today,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get across safely.”

  I offered my arm. “I’d be happy to escort you.”

  “Thank you, monsieur. That is very kind.”

  She linked her arm through mine and we walked slowly down the hallway towards her bedroom, her feet shuffling along the polished wood floor. At her doorway, she removed her arm from mine. I bowed. She smiled up at me, her face suddenly joyful, an expression of hers I hadn’t seen since I was a child.

  “What good fortune I have,” she said, “to find such an obliging young man to help me.”

  THE LAST TIME I SEE VICTOR it is by accident. In 1849, we are at the funeral of the once famous actress Marie Dorval, who has died rundown and penniless at the age of fifty-one. During the church service, Victor stands on one side of the aisle, and I stand on the opposite side.

  When I see Victor enter the church, I hope, for a brief moment, that Adèle is with him. But Marie Dorval was a friend of Juliette Drouet’s, and sure enough, it is Victor’s mistress who accompanies him to the funeral.

  The day is wet and grey. The service is depressing. Mother is dead, and my contemporaries have begun to die off in their fifties. I feel my own mortality advancing rapidly towards me as I stand, with head bowed, in the cold church.

  George Sand is a few rows ahead of me. She is weeping noisily. Marie Dorval was a great friend of hers, and for a short time even her lover. Well, that was the rumour anyway. I never did ask George if it was true. If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me herself. But she is weeping with enough feeling for me to believe that it was indeed true.

  The novelist Balzac was the one who circulated the rumour through Paris. Balzac and I are not enamoured of each other because I reviewed him badly once. He hated my novel, Volupté, and told mutual friends that he could do a better job of it. Apparently his novel Le Lys dans la vallée is a rewriting of my book. I will not engage in his pettiness. I will not read it, even though I burn with curiosity. The irony is that although his theme is stolen, his book sells better than mine. Volupté has not had the reception I had hoped. Even George dismissed it rather cavalierly, calling it simply “vague.”

  But all that is behind me now. There is no more poetry in me. No more novels. I have become relatively famous, though it is not through those pursuits. I write a lengthy weekly biographical sketch in the Globe. These sketches appear on Monday and are called, correspondingly, Lundis. It has always been my opinion that to understand an artist and his work, it is necessary to know his biography. Some people do not agree with me. Marcel Proust, for example, argues that art can transcend the man. I don’t see how he can really believe art is delivered miraculously through the human vessel and not rooted in its material.

  Others’ opinions are not my concerns. I have my work to do.

  My Lundis are short, well-researched biographies of great artists and philosophers—some living, many alre
ady dead. Each one takes a week to construct and write. They are wildly popular. Every so often, when I have written enough of them to be collected into a volume, they are sold as a book. My Lundis easily outsell my poetry and my “vague” novel, Volupté.

  I find George outside the Église Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin. She walks with me under my umbrella towards the row of waiting cabs. We are to ride to the burial of Marie Dorval in the Montparnasse cemetery.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know you were close to her.”

  George hooks her arm through mine. Her face is streaked with rain and tears.

  “Marie was so lovely,” she says. “It never occurred to me that she would die. Her beauty should have exempted her.”

  George’s comment makes me smile. “If that were true,” I say, “then I would be long dead. If one could be spared death for beauty, then surely one could also be condemned to death for ugliness.”

  George squeezes my arm. “Ride with me to the cemetery,” she says. “It has been so long since we’ve been in each other’s company, and I have missed you.”

  But when we reach the road, there is room for only one person in the first cab in line. It is raining so hard now that I fear George will be soaked to the skin while we wait for another cab to round the corner.

  “I’ll meet you there,” I say, helping her up into the carriage.

  I don’t remember much of Marie Dorval except her close association with George. I saw her in several plays, but I cannot remember now what those plays were about. I do recall that in one of them, she made a spectacular swoon backwards down a staircase, and the audience gasped in fear for her safety.

  Love, I think. That’s what love is—a backwards swoon down a darkened staircase. Well, no more of that for me, and no more of anything for poor Marie Dorval.

  I still have the green umbrella with the yellow handle. A few comment on it. Many stare at it when I raise it. But I don’t care. Let them mock me. It still keeps the rain off my body.

  The next cab clatters up, and I jerk open the door and climb inside. Someone is already in the cab, sitting on the small bench by the opposite window. A man in black, a top hat on his lap. I close my door. The driver flicks his whip at the horse, and we lurch away from the church. It takes me a moment to recognize the profile of the man beside me, perhaps the same moment that it takes him to recognize me, for we both stiffen in apprehension at the sudden realization.