We are the ghosts here now. Charles, busy developing his watery photographs in the dark cupboard under the stairs. François-Victor, frantically trying to find the right echo for each word of Shakespeare’s. We exist in this place as the spirits of who we used to be when we were truly alive.
Victor relented. It didn’t happen immediately. But over time, and with pressure from Charlot and Toto, he allowed me to take Dédé back to Paris each year for a month or two.
But it was too late. The melancholia inflicted by the exile was not easily shaken off. Dédé was withdrawn in Paris, preferring to hole up in our hotel room writing her endless letters to Albert Pinson than to venture out into Parisian society. She had lost the facility for mixing with people. She had lost the desire to be flirtatious and witty with strangers. She saw no point in it.
I could only do so much, and in the end, it turns out that I could do nothing at all.
Pinson was posted to Halifax, Canada. In the spring following this posting, I made my way to Paris, on the understanding that Dédé would be joining me within the week. She packed her trunk on Guernsey and dutifully left the island, not for Paris but for London, where, unbeknownst to anyone, she took passage on a boat bound for Halifax.
This is where she is now. We had word from her that she had arrived safely, and that she was reunited with her sailor. She wrote home to ask for money, saying that she had married Pinson and they were happy, and that she would remain in Halifax with him, waiting for his posting to end. Although we were very upset with this arrangement, we dutifully took out an advertisement in the local Guernsey paper announcing the marriage. She writes to me occasionally, instructing me to be happy for her. She gets angry when I express any concern for her situation.
Victor is furious. She left the island without his permission. Married or not, he wants her to return. He rages around Hauteville House, beating his chest with outrage and self-pity.
I am glad Adèle is safe from her father’s fury. She is on the other side of the world. It took over a month for her to travel by ship to Halifax, and Victor, despite his vitriolic outbursts, is not willing to travel that same time and distance to bring her home. Instead, we all write letters, asking her to return. She writes letters back, ignoring our requests and relating the glories of her married life.
She is lost to us.
I now remain in Paris. I cannot bear to return to Guernsey, to Victor’s fury and his cloying self-pity. I write to Adèle, but I can do nothing for her. She has moved far away from my words and my embrace. She is following her own dark star, and it has pulled her out of my sphere entirely. She always was half in this world and half outside it.
I would travel to Halifax to beg her to come back, but Victor won’t grant me the money for the passage.
“If she truly loved me, she would come home on her own” is all he will say when I ask him to let me go and fetch her.
Paris has changed very little in my absence. It would have been easier for me if nothing was as I remembered. But everywhere I go, I am reminded of little Adèle, of my former life with my young family, of Léopoldine. I cannot walk past our old apartment in the Place Royale without feeling faint at the sight of it, and I weep openly outside the little shop where I used to buy cakes for my children.
It is hard to remember that there was once an ease to my days, or that I ever enjoyed myself.
I stand in the little park opposite our old apartment. Other people walk through those rooms now. A woman in a red dress stops in front of one of the tall windows and looks down at me looking up at her. It is the strangest feeling, as though I am observing the ghost of myself. Or worse, I have become the ghost of myself, standing outside my own life.
I long for the past with a fierce hunger, and there seems nothing to feed it.
Well, perhaps there is one thing.
I will go and see Charles.
Paris, 1860s
Charles
HOW DID I BECOME an old man, a man in his early sixties? I stand in front of the looking glass in my bedroom as I dress for dinner, surveying myself. I am fat and bald. My forehead is twisted into a scowl and my lips are twisted into a sneer. My hands are fleshy, their nails yellow and brittle. My eyes have lost their sheen. I am not a man anyone could love. The admiration I sometimes get from younger writers is the best I can hope for. I can entice these writers to me by revealing the secrets of my contemporaries. I am not ashamed to dine out on the good name of other writers, and I would show anyone’s letters to anyone else who asked. My mother once accused me of keeping secrets when I was a boy. But now, in my old age, I am the opposite. I will tell all. I am not to be trusted. My bland countenance doesn’t betray my wily heart. People confide in me because I appear to be harmless, and they are usually sorry.
I look around—at the long table loaded with books and papers; at the pair of mahogany bookcases against the wall; at the curtainless iron bed, the worn armchair by the fireplace, the two bare windows that overlook the street.
I remember my rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen, how I had one for working and one for sleeping, and how pleasing that arrangement was. It strikes me, as I stand before the looking glass, that those separate rooms were symbolic of my life then; that there was a difference between my life and work, a separation. Now it is all blended together. My life is my work. I have no other.
I used to think that age ripened us; like fruit, we would become mellow as we grew older. We would relax into a version of ourselves that was the whole accumulated truth of our existence, that was the culmination of all our joys and sorrows and intellectual ideas.
But that is not what happens. We do not ripen like a peach. We grow hard in some places, soft in others. We are inflexible where we should yield, and we give way where we should hold fast.
And I wonder if it is added misery or consolation to know that when we depart this world, we take with us the whole order of familiar things that have structured our days and given us comfort. What we have cared for in life and what has bound us most securely to it will no doubt accompany us, or go before us, into death.
It no longer matters much what I do, so long as I have something to do—something to do in the mornings, and somewhere to go at night.
It is fortunate that I have something quite pleasant to do in the evenings these days. I belong to a dining club that meets once a fortnight at the Magny restaurant in rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine. We are all writers who gather there, some old, some young: Gavarni, Flaubert, Turgenev, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Charles Edmond, Eudore Soulié, and Frédéric Baudry. George Sand comes when she is in town.
What makes the dinners memorable and enjoyable is the rule we have for the club. The rule is a simple one: we are permitted to say anything at all during the dinners, but we have made a promise to one another that whatever we say will not leave the room.
What do writers talk about when they can speak freely on any subject?
Well, they don’t talk about writing.
This evening, Flaubert wants to talk about the different headdresses that women wear to bed.
“I am partial to the cap,” he says, “but not the net.”
“The net is for a lower-class woman,” says one of the Goncourts. “The whores I visit wear nets.”
“I have known a lady to wear a net,” says Flaubert.
“Wouldn’t it be a matter of comfort?” I say.
“What do your women wear?” asks the other Goncourt.
“I must confess that I have never spent the whole night with a woman.”
There is shocked silence.
“On account of my work,” I add, which makes no real sense, but no one cares to challenge me on it.
We move on to the mechanics of love.
“I believe,” says Taine, “that women can only be satisfied in love when they are young.”
“I have found the opposite to be true,” says Flaubert.
“Isn’t it our duty, as men, to satisfy a woman no mat
ter what her age?” I say.
“This from a man who has never spent the night with a woman?” says the Goncourt with the moustache, and everyone laughs.
The Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, wrote a book together, a novel called Madame Gervaisais, which had the double misfortune to be released on the day in 1852 that Napoleon III staged his coup, and to be reviewed in the press by me.
It has not met with much success.
I am too old to be impressed with the tricks of youth. The brothers’ clumsy attempts at originality seemed so banal, so unoriginal, and I said so in my review.
My critique of their writing hasn’t made the Goncourts feel very warm towards me. They often take pokes at me during these dinners at the Magny. But I am too old to be provoked into a public argument.
“And that from a man who sleeps only with whores,” I say in response, and get equal applause.
The evening continues. We move to the next food course and change topics from women’s nocturnal headgear to men’s seminal discharge.
“I must have a discharge every two or three weeks,” says Taine, “or else I cannot concentrate properly on my work. My mind is not clear.”
“You are mistaken,” says Flaubert. “What a man needs is not a seminal discharge but a nervous one.”
“What do you mean?” asks Renan.
Flaubert leans back in his chair. He is in good form tonight, and discoursing on love is his favourite subject.
“What a man needs is the thrill of love. Emotion. The exquisite pleasure of squeezing a woman’s hand. A stolen kiss. That is what I mean by a nervous discharge, and it is so much more meaningful than a seminal one. And so much more necessary to our well-being.”
“Yes,” agrees Taine, “but also so much harder to come by. Many of us have wives, old mistresses, or take our pleasure at the brothel. We cannot experience what you are talking about at any of these stations. Some of us have probably never experienced this nervous discharge.”
All along the table, heads nod in agreement.
“So it is not very helpful, then, to tell us about an experience we might never have,” says Taine.
“But I have experienced this,” I burst out. “I have known this kind of love.”
“I say again,” says the Goncourt with the moustache, “this from the man who has never spent an entire night with a woman.”
“But what I am talking about,” says Flaubert, “does not depend on spending a great deal of time with a woman. In fact, one is better served if this is not the case.” He looks across the table at me. “Tell me about your experience of love,” he says.
The other writers look at me expectantly.
Even though much of Paris probably knows about my affair with Adèle Hugo, and all of us here have promised never to talk about these dinners outside this restaurant, I just cannot bring myself to speak of her as though she were a conquest. I know Flaubert does not require me to describe my affair that way, but inevitably, once I start talking, I will start boasting, and my love for Adèle will become cheapened by my recounting of it.
I also cannot bear to have the Goncourts say anything cruel to me about Adèle, so I distract the group by making myself a pair of earrings out of some cherries. I offer myself up as a clown to save Adèle’s honour. You see, even though I said earlier that I will talk about anything, there is still one subject I keep secret. There is still one thing I hold sacred.
Strangely enough, later in the evening, after a great deal of wine has been consumed, the talk turns to Victor Hugo.
“He wants to be a thinker,” says Flaubert, “but what strikes me about his work is the absence of thought in it.”
“He’s a charlatan,” I say. “A fake.”
“Didn’t I hear you say once that he taught you about poetry?” says a Goncourt.
“Perhaps, but I can’t remember anything he said, so it must not have been particularly useful.” I wiggle my ears with the cherries dangling from them and get a laugh. “Did you know,” I say, “that Victor’s beard is so coarse it damages the razors of the barber where he gets it trimmed? And his teeth are so strong he can crack peach pits with them. He has an amazing constitution. Once I climbed with him to the top of the Notre-Dame towers and he could tell the colour of the dress Madame Nodier was wearing on the balcony of the Arsenal.”
I suddenly remember that perfect evening, after years of never recalling it.
Victor had decided to write his book about the cathedral, but he hadn’t quite started yet. He was full of excitement about the idea, came every evening to ascend the steep stone steps of the tower to the parapet of Notre-Dame to watch the sun go down over Paris. He begged me to accompany him on this particular day. I remember the difficulty of the climb, and how Victor bounded easily ahead of me, not breathless at all. The view was spectacular. The dome of the Pantheon could be seen, and the green splendour of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The sunset was beautiful. We talked about the cathedral, and about literature. Victor demonstrated his eagle-like sight by picking out the blue dress of Madame Nodier on the Arsenal balcony. That was in the days when our friendship was strong and uncomplicated by my feelings for Adèle.
I look around the table at the Magny. None of these men are my friends. We are bound together by a certain prestige, by our position in the literary society of Paris. But none of these men would run through the streets to my house in the early evening, bursting with an idea they couldn’t wait to share with me. The truth is that I have never had a friend like Victor again, a friend so close that it sometimes felt as though we were the same person.
“Hugo said he was fated to write that book because when you stand outside the cathedral, the towers of Notre-Dame make a perfect H,” says Renan.
“Typical,” says Taine, and everyone laughs.
I have waited so many years for a moment like this, a moment when Victor is openly ridiculed by his peers. And yet now that the moment has come, it brings no satisfaction with it. I can say nothing.
If I had never loved Adèle, my friendship with Victor could have continued into my old age. We could have shared so much by then! Our influence on each other’s writing would be profound, our knowledge of each other’s minds unparalleled.
At the end of life, the balance sheet comes out. I can’t stop myself.
I always thought that my love for Adèle eclipsed everything else, that it was the one truly worthwhile thing I have done. But realistically, the time we actually spent together lasted a mere handful of days. What if I had put that against a nurturing friendship that spanned my entire lifetime? What would I really have chosen?
Victor holds open the door for me as I struggle up the last few steps of the cathedral tower. He hauls me out onto the parapet, and the wind chases us right to the edge of the stone wall. I have to hold on to the top of the wall to keep my balance.
There is an overwhelming desire to fling myself off the parapet, and I can see how tempting a death this is, why it is the choice of so many ill-fated literary heroes. In every fall there is a moment of flight. To hurtle through the air would be, for a magnificent instant, the ultimate in freedom. I shake my head to clear the thought, push against the wall to steady myself.
And just at that moment, as though he knows what I’m thinking, Victor puts his arm around me, anchoring me securely to my place on earth. My place beside him.
“Look at that,” he says.
The last of the sun brushes the roofs of the buildings below, each one lit with a lambent glow. Each one beginning in shadow and ending in fire.
“All of Paris, Charles. Just waiting to celebrate us.”
I SUPPOSE I AM a better friend to women than to men. It seems to be with women that I have enjoyed my most successful friendships. And now, late in life, I have made a friendship that will probably be my last.
It is with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the niece of the great emperor and cousin to the man in power at the moment, Napoleon III.
Princess Mathilde is
in her middle forties, at the very centre of her life. She is short and stout, full of fury and enthusiasms. She is much as I imagine her uncle to have been, if one had known him intimately. I love nothing more than to listen to her stories of Napoleon Bonaparte, even though she never met him. At the moment of her birth he was already dying on St. Helena.
No matter. Her blood is his blood, and it runs fiercely through her veins.
Princess Mathilde has a weekly salon in Paris, in her magnificent house on the rue de Courcelles. She is known to all as Notre-Dame-des-Arts. Flaubert attends her salon regularly, as do Taine and Renan and many others of the Magny crowd. The princess is a formidable supporter of all the arts, and she herself is a good painter. She does watercolour copies of many of the great oil paintings in the Louvre, and she works very hard at these. She has the same tireless energy that I recognize from Victor and have always admired.
Her house has a bust of Napoleon in the front hallway, and much of the fabric in the house is decorated with bees, one of the emblems from Bonaparte’s coat of arms. The bee is the sovereign symbol of immortality and resurrection.
Princess Mathilde has as many lapdogs as servants, and it is impossible not to trip over them when one is walking from the front hall into the drawing room. They nip at my ankles and are constantly underfoot. I have to restrain the impulse to kick at them. Needless to say, Princess Mathilde thinks very highly of these spoiled balls of fur, and I have to pretend to admire them whenever I am at the house.
Our friendship started when I began to attend her salons. At first I was just another guest, but I would often stay later than the others, engaging the princess in conversation about her famous uncle. I told her of my early memory of seeing Napoleon, and of how I had a special fondness for Bonapartism and for the genius of the man. This endeared me to her, and Princess Mathilde began to seek my opinion on whom to invite to her salon. She wanted a mix of generations and relied on me to keep her informed as to who among the younger writers was of particular interest. She called me her literary adviser, but soon she began to seek my advice on love as well as literature.
The Reinvention of Love Page 16
