We are waiting, all of us—Jesus, Mary, and I—for the moment when the heavy church door lurches on its hinges and opens to reveal Adèle.
As Charlotte, I am free from my own history. I can sit in the church and not think about my uneasy alliance with faith. I do not have a past. All I have is this moment of waiting for Adèle. It is so simple and so pure. It must be what true religion feels like.
The doors to the church are oak. The hinges are medieval, black iron straps and studs. They are the doors of a fortress and seem designed to keep people out, rather than to invite them in. When Adèle lifts the latch and swings the right-hand door open, it is the weight of centuries that she shifts.
The door opens. The light behind it is the real light of this day, not the eternal light of God that sifts through the stained-glass window at the front of the church. The real light always seems harsh, makes me blink my eyes and turn away.
Conversely, when Adèle first steps into the church, she is not used to the darkness and can’t see anything. She often stumbles on the threshold. It takes the full moment of the door swinging shut before she is able to distinguish objects inside the building.
When I ask her what she is thinking of in the moment when she enters the church, she always says, “Nothing. I’m just trying to find you.”
In our arrangement, I am the one who waits, and she is the one who seeks me out. It is partially a result of our circumstances, in that she is restricted by her marriage, so she is in control of the time we spend together—but it is more than that. Our natures are thus, I think. I am more comfortable waiting. She is more comfortable seeking. Our situation, although frustrating in terms of our being able to be together, is in perfect accordance with who we are.
Adèle’s heels are sharp on the stone floor, like the hoofbeats of a small horse. They knock and echo as she walks up the aisle, so that by the time she gets to my pew, the church rings with the sound of her steps.
I have watched her hurry up the aisle. She has seen me sitting in the pew. When she slides in beside me, we are looking only at each other.
She is always impatient. As she manoeuvres herself into the pew, she invariably bangs her knee on the upright at the end of the bench or her elbow on the back of the neighbouring pew. It is this I adore—her regard for her comfort and safety swept aside by her need to get to me as quickly as possible.
And what do I do as she tumbles along the bench? I sit perfectly still and wait for her to reach me. It is the most exquisite of pleasures.
Adèle’s hair is out of place, and sometimes there are leaves stuck through it. Her face is red from her frantic journey. She breathes like a man after sport. When she puts out her hands to grab me, they are damp with perspiration.
“Charlotte.”
I love how she says my name, as though it is the last word she will ever utter. I love how she takes my face in her hands and kisses me with such abandon.
But here I go too fast again. This is the trouble with love. It has its own momentum, skips ahead like a fast heartbeat. It is hard to slow the words down enough to properly examine the moment.
When Adèle slides into the pew beside me, I forget about the rest of the church. Everything I was thinking about, everything I was looking at, is easily replaced by the joy of being next to my beloved. The world shrinks to her body, then to her face, then to her lips. I wouldn’t notice if the church was entirely full of people, or if the stained-glass Jesus was suddenly sitting on the other side of me.
When I was a boy, standing on the top of that hill to watch Napoleon review his troops, I had this same feeling. When I am pulled through the early morning by a line of words—when I move further and faster along them, so that I forget myself completely—I have this feeling again. The feeling, when Adèle takes my face in her hands and kisses me, is one of surrender. No, it is more than that. It is wanting, with every part of myself, to give myself away, to spend myself, to be, finally, empty.
When Adèle and I meet at the hotel, I invariably arrive first. I stand outside, preferring this to waiting in the lobby, where I will be regarded with suspicion by the proprietor.
Adèle is rarely on time. It is always harder to escape from her life than she imagines it will be. One or other of the children has hurt himself and needs her maternal attentions. The person who has been pressed into looking after the children has not shown up at the correct hour. There is a shortage of cabs and she has to walk. When she is walking, she trips over a piece of wood near the gutter and twists her ankle.
Whatever keeps Adèle from arriving means that I often spend a long while loitering outside the Hôtel Saint-Paul.
I walk up and down in front of the hotel. I stand against the wall, gazing fixedly at my shoes, much as the Virgin Mary does in her alcove in the church. If Adèle is taking an especially long time, I will cross the narrow street and wait there, where I have a good view of the front of the hotel but am not so obviously lurking.
Adèle arrives eventually and we clutch each other in the street, stagger up the steps and into the lobby of the hotel. We are always desperate to get to our room, and the whole business of signing the register with false names seems designed as a torture to test our resolve. It always takes an infuriatingly long time to do such a simple thing as sign our names in a book.
Of course, everyone in the hotel employ knows why we’re there. No one is fooled by our pretence as man and wife. For, honestly, what man and wife are so desperate to have each other in the middle of the afternoon?
None come to my mind.
These remembered afternoons in our room are a perfect balance of the satisfactions of the flesh and the spirit and the mind. Because they are so perfect, I feel inadequate describing them. There is nothing to hang on to, no sharp edges. Everything swims away from me. I cannot separate myself enough from this experience to capture it for someone else. I suppose this is what happiness is—a wholeness that cannot be pried apart. The more an experience can be fractured, perhaps, the more miserable the event.
It is a lie to say that I remember my mouth on Adèle’s skin, or how she tasted, or how her body closed around my hand when I was inside her. The feelings of those moments are gone forever. They were gone the instant after they happened.
So what am I remembering?
Perhaps I am not remembering; writing is not a memorial.
This is just what lives in me.
I walk through the streets of Paris. It is winter. A cold wind funnels down from the north. I have dressed inadequately. By the time I get to the asylum gate, I am freezing. I should have taken a cab. I’m too old for this.
I ring the bell, stamp my feet, ring the bell again.
The attendant comes out of his hut and stands on the other side of the heavy iron gate, not bothering to open it.
We regard each other for a moment.
“I’ve come to see one of your inmates,” I say.
“Which one?”
“Adèle Hugo.”
The guard eyes me suspiciously. “It’s not the usual visiting hours,” he says.
I reach into my pocket for some coins, pass them through the bars of the gate. “For your trouble,” I say.
The asylum is a tumble of voices. It reminds me of the Académie française. A nun leads me up a stone staircase. “Her father pays for her to have her own room,” she says. “Such a generous man.”
I say nothing. Little Adèle would never have been put into an asylum if her mother were still alive. This is Victor’s generosity. This is how Victor takes care of his children. He is still living in the Channel Islands, but he is as powerful as ever. I am not surprised that he has thought Adèle’s actions insane, that he has no sympathy for her obsession with Albert Pinson.
Love, to Victor, is insanity.
We stop before a locked door.
“I will wait outside,” says the nun. “Knock on the door when you are done.” She produces a large iron key from a belt around her waist and unlocks the door for me.
The room is small. There is a barred window at one end, a bed along the wall, a wash basin against the other wall. The sparse furnishings remind me of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, and I have to work hard to suppress a memory of Adèle lying naked on the bed there.
Little Adèle resembles her mother. She has the same dark hair and strong features. She sits in a rocking chair by the window, her head bent over a book. She looks up when the door closes behind me.
“Adèle,” I say, “I am Charles. Your godfather.”
She stares at me blankly. I move towards her and she shrinks away.
“Keep to your side of the room,” she says.
I do.
“Charles,” I say again. “I used to come to your house. I knew you when you were a little girl. I was a friend to your mother.”
At the mention of her mother, Adèle’s face brightens. “Maman,” she says. “What will we do today, Maman?”
“I’ve brought you some things.” I carefully hand over a copy of Livre d’amour. “This is a book of my poetry. Some of the poems are about you.” As Adèle takes the volume, I see, on the floor by her chair, a pile of small pieces of paper and the empty covers of another book. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
“I look forward to them,” she says, quite lucidly, giving no clue as to whether she plans to read my poems or shred them.
“And I have this for you.” I reach into my coat pocket and bring out the square of lace, untie the ribbon, and shake out the veil. “It was your mother’s. She gave it to me once. I wanted to bring it for you. I thought you should have it.”
Adèle takes the wedding veil, carefully examining the lacework with her long, slender fingers. She has her mother’s hands, but her concentrated gaze is entirely Victor’s. How could he ever have doubted that she was his?
Adèle arranges the veil over her head, making sure there is an equal length of lace hanging down both sides of her face.
“Am I pretty?”
“Very.”
My legs are tired from the walk and the climb up the asylum stairs. I have been trying to present a calm demeanour to Adèle, but I suddenly feel overwhelmed.
“May I sit?” I ask. “I have come a long way.”
Adèle waves a hand towards her single bed, and I perch on the edge of it. I can feel the metal frame through the thin mattress.
“Is Maman coming soon?” she asks.
I don’t know what to say, so I lie. “Yes. Soon.”
“And are you really Charles?”
“Yes.”
Adèle closes her eyes and rocks in her chair for a moment. “Charles,” she says. “Charles is coming to see me. Let’s open the windows, children, so that I can hear his little footsteps on the pavement.” She opens her eyes, looks straight at me.
I think of myself hurrying towards the Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs, tripping over the cobblestones in my rush to get to Adèle. And I think of her waiting, perfectly still, by the open window in the drawing room, listening for the slightest scuff of my shoes on the street.
I cannot help myself. I weep into my hands.
The rocking chair stops whispering against the floor. I hear Adèle’s footsteps, then the creak of the bed frame as she sits down beside me. Her tentative hand finds mine.
“Will you take me to the orchard again?” she says. “As you did when I was a little girl?”
Her skin feels cool. I hold on to her hand like a drowning man.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course.”
I don’t know if this is possible, but I will try. I will talk to the matron on my way out, see if I can arrange this for the next time I come to visit Adèle.
“You remember the orchard?” I ask.
“You would sit with Maman,” says Adèle, “on the bench by the trees. Holding her hand, just like this. I would sit on the ground by your legs. And we were all very happy. The end.”
I walk home from the asylum through the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg. They are changing the way they grow the fruit here. The trees are now espaliered, each one trained carefully to grow its fruit in straight lines.
An apple tree lives roughly as long as a man. The trees that Adèle and I walked through are now nearing the end of their lives. They are twisted and gnarled, their leaves gone from the winter winds, their limbs crashed to the ground. The orchard is littered with these broken branches. The limbs of the old apple trees grow straight out, eventually becoming too heavy for the trunk to bear. They have dropped off and lie beneath the trees intact. It seems more like an amputation than a natural winnowing.
The new trees, with their perfect controlled shapes, grow among the old, wild trees.
The ground is cobbled with fallen fruit. But high up in one of the trees, high up in the branches, a single winter apple still clings tightly to the bough.
Acknowledgements
FOR THEIR BELIEF in this book, and their work and help to make it better, I would like to thank my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Phyllis Bruce. I am more than grateful for their wisdom, acumen, and guidance—not to mention patience—during the writing of this novel.
I would like to thank Mark Siemons at Altair Electronics for computer triage above and beyond the call.
Martine Bresson translated the letters from George Sand to Sainte-Beuve. The translations of Sainte-Beuve’s poetry are my own.
Professor Julie Kane generously let me read her translations of Victor Hugo’s poems to his daughter, Léopoldine.
Special thanks to my former agent, the late Frances Hanna, who was the first reader of this novel.
A portion of this novel first appeared in the journal Queen’s Quarterly in 2008.
The title of the novel is a translation of the following quote from Rimbaud: “Il faut réinventer l’amour.”
So much of the novel, and my life, has been made possible by the following people: Mary Louise Adams, Tama Baldwin, Megan Boler, Elizabeth Christie, Craig Dale, Carol Drake, Sue Goyette, Elizabeth Greene, Anne Hardcastle, Heather Home, Cathy Humphreys, Frances Humphreys, Michelle Jaffe, Paul Kelley, Hugh LaFave, Walter Lloyd, Susan Lord, Eleanor MacDonald, Bruce Martin, Jennie McKnight, Daintry Norman, Joanne Page, Anne Peters, Mike and Suzanne Ryan, Su Rynard, Glenn Stairs, Ray and Lori Vos.
Thanks to Mary Louise Adams for her abiding friendship and unfailing optimism.
Thanks to Elizabeth Christie for coming to my rescue; and to Sue Goyette and Joanne Page for keeping the faith.
Before we knew he was dying, my brother, Martin, came with me on a research trip to Paris, for which I will always be grateful.
And lastly, I would like to thank Nancy Jo Cullen, who has reinvented love for me.
More Praise for The Reinvention of Love
“Compelling and poignant…. This is a novel that’s authentic to the point of feeling raw.”
—Calgary Herald
“Humphreys has never written about love with such ferocity…. Her poetry is still on full display in rhapsodic sequences about desire, spectacular descriptions of Paris … and her account of the heartbreaking restrictions of 19th-century social convention.”
—NOW magazine (Toronto)
“Reverberates with beautiful language and Humphreys’s trademark knack for balancing surprising notes of humour and lightness with poignant descriptions of hardship, loss, and suffering.”
—Quill & Quire”
A compelling and emotionally rich new historical novel.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“An engaging novel, told with wit and imagination.”
—Financial Times
Also by Helen Humphreys
Coventry
The Frozen Thames
Wild Dogs
The Lost Garden
Afterimage
Leaving Earth
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SAINTE-BEUVE DIED ON OCTOBER 13, 1869, from complications following bladder surgery. The physical condition that defined his love affair with Adèle—first ide
ntified while he was at medical school, and later written about in his diaries—helped bring about his death.
Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, outliving both his sons by more than a decade. Adèle Hugo remained in the Paris asylum for over forty years, dying there at the age of eighty-five, in 1915, the last surviving child of Victor and Adèle.
With few exceptions, the events in my novel mirror actual events. Where possible, I have used the words of Sainte-Beuve, Adèle, and George Sand.
Of the many original and secondary sources that were used in the writing of this book, I would like to especially acknowledge Harold Nicolson’s biography of Sainte-Beuve, and I express my gratitude to the archivists at Princeton University for allowing me access to the notes he made while at work on this book.
P.S. — Ideas, interviews & features
Meet Helen Humphreys
How did you become interested in writing historical fiction?
History was my favourite subject in school. I was, and still am, fascinated by the story behind something, the origins of objects and events. It seemed a natural fit to combine my interest in writing with my interest in history. I like the educational aspect of writing about the past, the fact that the learning curve is quite intense, that there is always something more to learn.
I liked those contradictions in his character, how he was his own worst enemy.
Do you usually begin a novel with a character, or a time period, or a question?
It depends on the book. I have begun with a question more often than not, but for The Reinvention of Love I began with the character of Charles Sainte-Beuve. I was interested in him partly because he was such a complex man and had, within him, many contradictory traits. He was, for example, devoted and loyal, and yet he also possessed a boastful nature. Those two aspects often didn’t work very well together and got him into trouble. I liked those contradictions in his character, how he was his own worst enemy.
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 55
