The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  “There was a line I particularly liked in Livre d’amour.” She waits only a moment before summoning it. “Time, divine old man, fades all honours.”

  “So you read the poems, then?”

  Adèle smiles and does not answer, sips her wine.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “I have to ask you something.”

  “Anything.”

  Adèle takes another sip of her wine. I gulp half my glass and spill several drops on my trousers.

  “But before I ask you something,” she says, “I have to tell you something.”

  She tells me the story of little Adèle’s voyage to Canada.

  “A month at sea, all alone! That is so courageous,” I say.

  “Yes, it would have been courageous if Pinson had loved her,” says Adèle. “But he didn’t, and so it becomes an action more allied to madness than bravery.”

  “How did you discover the lie?”

  “Dédé’s landlady wrote to François-Victor because she was worried about my daughter’s sanity.” Adèle takes a sip of wine and smiles. “She called herself Mademoiselle Lewly in Halifax because she was afraid people would recognize her real surname.”

  I cannot stop myself.

  “You mean Victor is famous in Canada as well?” I grind my heels into the carpet with rage.

  “Of course. But his fame has done nothing for his temper. Those years on Guernsey he was a tyrant. No wonder she wanted to escape.”

  “And now she has.” I pour us some more wine.

  “Yes. Walking about a city not her own, using a false name, and wearing male dress.” Adèle pauses for a moment. “She does this in imitation of George Sand. She greatly admires her writing. For you see, she wants to be a writer like her father. And you.” She takes another sip of wine, then turns her head to the window, where the wind knocks against the glass. It is autumn and the trees are flinging down their leaves, challenging winter to a duel. “She has always remembered you fondly.”

  I had thought of little Adèle as my spiritual child. I regretted deeply that her father saw fit to keep me from her after I had confessed to him my affair with her mother. I missed my godchild. I missed the person she might have become had I still known her, the person I might have become had I been continually graced with her sweet presence.

  “I wish she had been mine,” I say.

  Adèle turns back towards me.

  “Victor always thought she was yours,” she says. “That was part of the problem. He loved her less because of that. He paid her no attention. She suffered from the lack of a father’s affection. I hold him to blame for this whole escapade in Halifax.”

  Once this might have caused me joy—to hear of Victor’s failings—but it has come at the cost of Adèle’s happiness, and so it brings little comfort to know of his neglect. Instead, I wish it had been different. If I had to lose Adèle and Dédé to Victor, then life with him should have made them both profoundly happy. That would have been the only compensation for my loss.

  There is a knock at the bedroom door and Adèle the cook comes in to replace the wine with coffee. She is now on her best behaviour, nods deferentially to Adèle Hugo on her way out of the room. She also seems miraculously sober, probably because she doesn’t want to miss a word. I’m sure she is listening outside the door. For once I wish that she were drinking, that she would stumble downstairs and pass out at the kitchen table as usual.

  “Victor is furious,” says Adèle. “He wants to have her committed to an insane asylum. He says that she has inherited the family trait of madness, that she is like his brother Eugène.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing she doesn’t come home, then,” I say.

  I had forgotten the story of the Hugos’ wedding, how Victor’s brother went insane, screaming out his love for Adèle as he was dragged from the church.

  “Your marriage didn’t start well,” I say.

  “Don’t,” says Adèle. “Please, Charles, leave the past where it is. I can’t stand to go back there. I have made mistakes. We both know what those were. It won’t change anything to bring them up now.”

  I don’t know what mistakes Adèle has made. She’s never said. But it slowly dawns on me that she is referring to the fact that she ended the affair with me, that perhaps remaining with Victor was the mistake. But how was she to know he would go into exile? How was she to know the effect this would have on her youngest daughter?

  With Victor there was always something. He was a volatile character, his ego charging relentlessly ahead, his friends and family trailing in its wake. Obsessively writing his books, always pumped up on his own virility.

  “Do you think Adèle inherited our passion?” I ask.

  “The strength of it?”

  “The futility of it.”

  Adèle lurches from her chair, her body older and slower but still driven by the force of her emotions. She kneels on the floor in front of my chair, rests her head on my lap.

  “Charles,” she says, “our love was the greatest pleasure in my life.”

  It makes me so sad to hear her utter those words, to know that her life after me has been so joyless. I stroke her hair with my hand. It is no longer silken to the touch, but coarse, like the mane of a horse.

  “But if you added up the hours we were together,” I say, “it might not even equal a single week.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  And I suddenly see that she is right. It doesn’t matter. We loved each other. It is the simplest of truths, and it is not tied to a chronology. Time would not have increased what we felt.

  I pat her shoulders awkwardly. Her bones are well padded with flesh. My hand is damp with perspiration and sticks to the fabric of her dress.

  “You have always been with me,” I say. “I have never left you.”

  I suddenly think of Charlotte, of the freedom I felt when I was being her, and of how she was created within my love affair with Adèle and now is shipwrecked there.

  Adèle lifts her head from my lap, struggles to regain her composure. She pushes weakly off from me and drifts slowly back to her side of the room.

  “Adèle?”

  She secures the combs in her hair, smoothes the front of her dress with her hands.

  “I came here to ask for your help, Charles,” she says. “I came here to ask you to lend me the money to travel to Halifax and bring my daughter home.”

  “Of course. I will give you whatever you need. Whatever I have is yours.”

  “But I wasn’t quick enough,” says Adèle. “It seems that Dédé has already left Canada. Her landlady wrote to say that she has sailed from Halifax.”

  “And gone where?”

  “I don’t know.” Adèle looks out the window again. “She is now well and truly lost to me. But you can still help me, Charles,” she says.

  “How?”

  “You can help me not to remember the past. The pain of what I have done is too great.”

  We look at each other. She is still beautiful. She is still my Adèle. I can see it in her face. It flashes up, then disappears again.

  I understand everything. She thought she was making the correct moral choice in staying with Victor. She thought she was protecting her children. But now she has one daughter who is dead and another, her favourite, who is possibly mad and lost on the other side of the ocean. Her sons are well, but their lives too have been made wretched by exile. They survive. They do not prosper.

  Her husband is a fire who uses all those around him as fuel for his work.

  There is no recovering from Victor.

  “I entrust our love to you, Charles,” says Adèle. “I need some peace. I need to forget. But I would like you to remember. For both of us.”

  When it is time for her to leave, I walk Adèle down the stairs to the front door. Then I walk her out onto the cobblestones. The night is cold, but she insists on going back to her hotel by foot, pushing me away when I try to accompany her.

  “If my d
aughter can wander the rough-and-tumble streets of the New World,” she says, “then surely I can negotiate the familiar avenues of Paris.”

  She holds out her hand. I take it one last time in my own and hold onto it for as long as I dare.

  “Goodbye, Charles.”

  “Goodbye, Adèle.”

  When she turns and walks away, I want to run after her, throw myself in front of her, tell her that I love her, that it isn’t too late to leave Victor, that she could still come and live with me. We could still be happy.

  But I let her go without protest. I turn and walk back into my house, close the door solidly behind me, plod slowly back upstairs to my bedroom.

  The room still smells of her—perfumed soap and sweat and the mustiness of age. I sit down in the chair she was sitting in by the fireplace. The fabric is still warm from her body. I close my eyes and imagine it is her embrace.

  When I open my eyes, I see, on my desk, the glass of cognac that Adèle the cook has poured for me in my absence, showing a sensitivity of which I had not believed her capable. I cross the room, pick up the glass, and return to the chair by the fireplace to sip the cognac.

  Outside, the night continues, the city continues. Adèle is probably halfway back to the hotel by now. I didn’t have the nerve to ask her where she was staying. It is unlikely to be our old haunt, the Hôtel Saint-Paul—she would have more sense than that—but I like thinking of her there nonetheless. Perhaps she has a room high up, near the roof, with a lovely view out over the city. There would be the lights of Paris below her, and the starlight above.

  I remember making love with Adèle in the room she shared with her daughter. I remember all the times we dragged Dédé with us through the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg, remember how she played in the dust at our feet while we whispered endearments and kissed each other. She would have heard everything, absorbed everything of who we were in those moments. How could she be anything other than our child—Adèle’s and mine? Her hunger for love was our hunger. We have fashioned this longing in her. We have created her despair. She is living out the torment of her mother’s love for me. There will be no happiness for her, and this is what is impossible for my Adèle to bear—that she sacrificed her own happiness for her children’s future, and instead, their future happiness has been compromised by her sacrifice.

  I never see Adèle Hugo again. She dies of heart trouble in Brussels at the end of the summer, and she is buried in the cemetery in Villequier beside her eldest daughter, Léopoldine. Only her brother accompanies her body to the grave. Victor doesn’t attend his own wife’s funeral, preferring to remain in exile.

  I hear this via Paris gossip, not through anyone I know.

  After her death, I read again her letters to me. I walk to our old houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I sit on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg in the heat of the day and weep into my hands. There is no consolation when the walls that hold up one’s world start to give way.

  This should be the end of the story, but some months after Adèle’s death, George Sand comes to see me.

  “Have you heard?” she says, her face flushed from the rush through the Paris streets to my house. Like all of us, she is not as slim as she used to be.

  “Heard what?”

  “Mademoiselle Hugo is back.”

  “Little Adèle?”

  “She followed a soldier to Barbados and was brought back to Paris by a black woman. A former slave, nonetheless.” George collapses into a chair in my drawing room. “They say Mademoiselle Hugo has gone mad. Her father has had her committed to an asylum.”

  The North Atlantic

  Dédé

  MY BELOVED SISTER,

  I still wear black for you. Every day since you died, I have dressed in mourning clothes. Every day for over twenty years now.

  I no longer sleep. I don’t think I have slept for years. I walk the streets at night when I am on land. Here, on the ship, I pace the decks, the spray in my face. The salt water stings my skin and the decks are slippery. Sometimes I am thrown against the railings by the heave of the ship. The nights have no stars.

  I see you ahead of me on the slope of lawn at dusk on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. You turn and your face has the gold of the sun’s glow behind it. You turn and smile, because you are waiting for me to catch you up. I struggle over the grass, my small legs pumping hard. I am always so grateful when you wait for me, and always so afraid that you will not wait long enough, that you will turn away before I reach you.

  Madame Baa found me shivering on the foredeck. Is that where I was? I thought I was with you.

  Madame Baa is kind to me, Sister. As kind as Maman. You would like her. She took me in when everyone else shunned me, thinking me mad because I walked the streets of the hot place dressed in the heavy clothes of the cold place. But I had no money. Papa had stopped sending me an allowance. If I had no money, how could I have afforded to buy new clothes?

  Madame Baa says, “Quiet, child.” Sometimes when I am writing, it seems that I am also speaking the words out loud, and this is confusing to her. She thinks I will feel better if I am quiet.

  Maman is dead. Do you know this? Her heart gave out. Have you seen her? I know she was buried in the cemetery at Villequier with you. Can you reach out through the cold earth and touch her?

  I agreed to go on this ship, to go with Madame Baa back to France, because I longed to see Maman. But she died just before we boarded, and I could not escape the passage. Now it will be Papa who meets me at the docks. I am afraid to see Papa. I fear he will be very angry with me. He had endless patience with you. With me, he has no patience at all.

  You were so good at everything, Sister. I tried to do one thing with all my heart, and I failed terribly at it.

  I tried to love Albert, but he would not let me. He did not want my love. He has married someone else now, an Englishwoman. Albert is back in England with his new English wife. He probably never thinks of me.

  Madame Baa says, “Come here, child.” She says, “Don’t cry.” Am I crying?

  I must do as she says.

  Halifax was cold. Bridgetown, Barbados, was hot. Albert was posted there without warning, and I followed him within the very week that he sailed.

  I was not prepared for the heat, just as I had not been prepared for the Halifax winter. Bridgetown was scorching. I could feel the heat of the streets through the soles of my shoes. The bonnets I wore had to be peeled from my scalp at night.

  I did not deceive myself that Albert would be pleased to see me, and I was not wrong. But my need to see him was so great that it no longer mattered what he felt about it all. I did not care that he loathed me, that he begged me to leave him alone. I just could not. I did not do it to cause him any pain, but only because I had no other choice. I was drawn to him. My destiny was his destiny.

  There were orders at the garrison to keep me out. I found lodgings nearby, but I had to leave those quite soon because I could not pay the rent. I had taken little from Halifax, just one trunk of clothes and papers. I was allowed to keep the trunk in a shed at the landlady’s house in Bridgetown, and I returned to it daily to collect and deposit papers, and to occasionally change my clothes.

  I was starving, and Madame Baa took me to her small house with the metal roof and fed me a stew that tasted much better than it looked.

  Madame Baa is a slave. She was stolen from her homeland, a place called Trinidad, and forced to work on the sugar plantations in Barbados. She was freed only last year, and even though I ask her continually to tell me about her time as a slave, she will only say that talking about it makes her think about it, and she’d rather not do that anymore. “I am a free woman now,” she says. “And I am going to Paris.”

  Her family are all dead. Sometimes Madame Baa says that I remind her of her daughter, but I cannot see how. I think she desires everyone to remind her of her daughter. I understand that. I know what it is to lose someone and want nothing more than to see her again, to have her turn aro
und at the top of the garden and wait for you to catch her up.

  Albert did not stay long in Barbados. He was waiting for a posting back in England, and when it came through, he sailed away, went home, and married that Englishwoman. I heard no more of him. Papa sent me the marriage announcement from the paper. This was cruel of him, I suppose, but Papa is angry with me for having lied. He says he would have understood if I had just told him the truth. But what is the truth, Sister?

  Albert sailed for home. I was living in the shadows of Bridgetown. The white women who lived in the plantations moved to the other side of the street if they saw me approaching. They seemed afraid of me. I could see it in their eyes. Only Madame Baa felt any sympathy for my position. Only Madame Baa did not judge me.

  I worry that she will be stared at in Paris. I worry that she will be just as much of a curiosity in Paris as I have been in Bridgetown.

  Papa paid for our passage. Madame Baa wrote to him and offered to bring me home. “I have always wanted to see Europe,” she said.

  If Maman is with you, Sister, will you tell her that Madame Baa has looked after me like a mother, and that I would have perished without her kindness? Will you kiss Maman for me and tell her that I wanted so much to see her again, just once more again?

  Madame Baa wants me to stop writing this letter. She says it is upsetting me to think of you, to be writing like this to you. But she does not understand. If I do not think that you are still out there, somewhere, then you will cease to exist at all. And if that happens, you will disappear from my childhood. I will never have had a sister. There will be no one ahead of me on the slope of lawn at dusk.

  It is not that I believe you are alive, but I believe you are somewhere. You are somewhere just out of reach. If I keep writing to you, if I keep calling out to you, then perhaps you will wait for me to catch you up. Perhaps you will hear me.

  Papa was restless with the pain of your dying. Only the sea could console him. Only the sea’s embrace was strong enough for him to feel. He felt that the wrong daughter had died, and he was right. It should have been me, Sister. I didn’t matter as much.