Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (54 page)

I must be free of this torment. I must kill off Madame de Couaen.

What I do like are the rituals: the morning shave in room number twenty, the coffee delivered by Madame Ladame. I like the sound of the stairs creaking as she climbs slowly up with cup in hand. I drink the coffee. I look out the window. I pace around the room, working myself into a state of restless agitation that I now recognize as the creative state. Then I march next door to room number nineteen, stride across to the desk, and fling myself down wretchedly. My pen lurches over the first few sentences, but then it moves swiftly and fluently. After I have killed off Madame de Couaen, the words release from me as though they were water flowing from a pump. I cannot keep up with my thoughts. My hand races to pin down what seems desperate to flee. I must make tame what wants to remain wild, although sometimes there is much lost in this translation from feeling to meaning.

But sometimes too I will write something that I didn’t realize was true until I’d secured it to the page. I write, “Men’s destinies do not correspond to the energy in their souls,” and I have to push my chair back from the table while I think about the truth of this. For this is how it is in me. My outward life at the moment is fairly placid—boring, even—but my internal life rages with feeling. They are not reconciled, or perhaps even reconcilable. And isn’t this also the fate of the writer? To write is the most passive of acts. There is more excitement to be found in observing someone asleep. And yet what surges through the writer’s veins while he is writing is thrilling and wild. The more sedate a writer’s life appears to be on the outside, the more imaginative he is able to be inside himself, and the more extraordinary work is possible.

My hero (me) is good on horseback. When emotions are too much for him, he simply rides off. Later he rides back. Once he says, in all seriousness, “Can a man keep a flame burning in his breast without his clothes catching fire?”

It is something to consider. My love for Adèle must be visible to all who see us together. In some ways it is a relief to be in exile at the Hôtel de Rouen. I am not in danger of being discovered making love to Adèle in my novel.

When my hand is tired and cramped from writing, or when I must open another bottle of ink or replenish my sheaf of paper, I pause from my work and look out the window, across the river, out over the countryside that borders the outer edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I like this view. I like being so high up, as though I am on the topmast of a ship.

My hero (me) narrates the second part of the book from on board a ship. He has to periodically put down his pen to attend to the duties of sailing.

When I write about our love, I realize how unsettled it has made me. I now depend on my morning ritual of shaving, coffee, pacing, writing. I can lean on it, and on the bad days, the unsteady days, it will hold me up. There was nothing to lean on in my love for Adèle. We did not have the luxury of routine. Every time we met, it was fraught with stored-up emotion, with the fear that we would not be able to meet up again soon.

My hero (me) goes to the monastery at Port-Royal. He decides to undergo training for the priesthood and spends his days praying, reading, going for long walks, eating simple meals with the monks. His small cell is sparsely furnished, and he does not want for more. Occasionally there is singing at a meal. More occasionally there is cake. The time passes blessedly, uneventfully.

After he is ordained, he leaves the monastery, riding off on horseback to visit Madame de Couaen. When he gets to her house, he finds her on her deathbed. She is, of course, overjoyed at seeing him, and she asks him, with her husband’s blessing, to take her last confession and deliver her the sacraments. He does this, with great feeling. She is grateful. She dies.

I put down my pen. I feel drained of words, empty of emotion. By killing off Madame de Couaen, I have preserved the love she felt for my hero (me) without having to consider its future. It has met a logical end. The love has transcended from a physical plane to a spiritual one, but it has remained constant. I fear there will be nothing so convenient for Adèle and me. Our future is, unfortunately, beyond the control of my pen.

I
HAVE MADE
a new friend.

Even though I am in hiding from the militia, I am still reviewing for the
Globe
. It was my good fortune to be assigned two novels by the same author. Excellent books, both of them, and I say as much in my reviews. I also write to the author, conveying my admiration and asking if I can meet with him.

He agrees, and so I put on a hat to disguise my face, puff up the steep stairs to his apartment, and knock on his door.

“Ah, Sainte-Beuve. Welcome.” The door opens to allow me admittance, but I remain in the hallway, confused.

“George?”

“The same.”

I almost burst into laughter, but that would be rude, so I restrain myself (barely) and walk into the apartment of the young, brilliant Parisian author.

George Sand is a woman. Despite her masculine pen name and her male dress and her cigarette smoking—she is very much a woman. She sports male dress in order to have more freedom in society.

Friendship is best when it is founded on mutual respect or when there is a sameness of character, and George and I are full of admiration for each other’s work. We were also born in the same year. But what binds us most closely together is love, and the torment it offers us.

Once, George, despairing of her many unsatisfactory affairs, asked me, “What is love?”

“Tears,” I replied. “If you weep, you love.”

“I have asked this question of many people,” she said, “and you are the only one who has answered honestly.”

There are no women allowed in the Hôtel de Rouen, but George Sand, dressed as a man, passes by the inscrutable Madame Ladame without a glance. We sit in room number nineteen and read our novels aloud to each other. Her book,
Leila
, is further along than my
Volupté
, but this does not bother me. She writes faster. Every night, from midnight to dawn, she pens twenty pages. Sometimes, she confesses, she is able to complete a book in as little as thirty days. I admire her industry and her passion. We both believe that one must be moved by what one has written in order for the reader to be moved in turn. Passion is everything.

George’s real name is Aurore. As Aurore, she was married to a man who was unfaithful, and she has left him and her two children. The loss of the children pains her and she hopes to be reunited with them soon, but I am heartened by her example of desertion. Perhaps it could serve as a model for Adèle?

When George and I meet in the Hôtel de Rouen, we always start out by talking about writing, and we always end up by talking about love. One day we are sitting by the open window. It is hot in the room and there is only a tepid breeze to cool us. We have removed our waistcoats. George mops her forehead with a pocket handkerchief.

“Charles,” she says, “I need a new lover. My independence is a cage that imprisons me.”

I think hard for a moment, running through the tally of writers I know.

“What about Mérimée?” I ask. Prosper Mérimée, the novelist, is a bit of a rake, but he is a strong character, and George’s will needs to be matched with a strong character.

“Can you arrange a meeting?”

I have dropped out of Victor’s Cénacle, but I am still friends with Mérimée and Émile Deschamps.

“I can.”

“Done,” says George, as though we have just completed a business transaction.

A week later she is back in my room.

“It was awful,” she says. “He was arrogant and a terrible womanizer. He tired of me and even had the gall to toss me a five-franc tip on his way out the door.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is there no one else?” George puts her hand on my arm. “I’m fairly desperate, and you’re the only one who will help me. I asked Liszt to advise me on love, and he said that the only love worth having was the love of God.” George smiles at me, knowing in advance that I will agree with what she is about to say. “But if one has loved a man, it is very hard to love God.”

I envy her assurance and her brilliance, and I know that
Leila
will make her famous. It is a wonderful novel. I anticipate a future for her that is full of lovers and full of books. I tell her so.

It strikes me that if the situation were reversed, she would probably have women to put forth to me as possible lovers. But even the thought of this makes me feel guilty. I still love Adèle, and have told George as much. How could I even think of anyone else? And more important, with my secret, how could anyone think of me? Although I’m half tempted to ask. What if it was someone very beautiful?

“What about Alfred de Musset?” I ask, ridding myself of treasonous thoughts and getting back to the task at hand. “He’s very handsome.”

“And very young,” says George.

“Full of passion,” I say.

That’s the magic word, for both of us. George nods her head slowly in agreement, and it is done.

They become lovers practically from their first meeting. She writes to me from Venice, where they have gone together, telling me of their fights, of Alfred’s rashness and accusations. He is jealous of her night writing and leaves her to that while he attends violent orgies, returning to her in the mornings full of remorse, then flying into a rage and charging her with wanting to have him committed to an insane asylum.

“I should have known from the beginning,” she says when we see each other again. “I should have known by the names we called each other that the relationship was doomed.”

“What were the names?”

“I called him ‘My poor child.’” George sighs. “It’s embarrassing,” she says.

“What did he call you?”

“‘My big George.’”

I’m not sure George will come to me for advice on love again.

Later, George writes to me, “I think right now I am incapable of love, but I am capable of friendship.”

I tell George about Charlotte. I tell her about my condition. I have never told anyone other than Adèle, but George is more sympathetic than I would have guessed.

“Poor Charles,” she says. “No wonder you mourn the loss of Adèle.”

It is a relief to confide in someone, but it does not really change anything fundamental. I still suffer because of my strange body. I still fear that I will never find another lover. And there is a limit to what someone can understand from the outside. I remain as alone as ever inside my skin.

I
DO REMEMBER
G
EORGE
in love again, years later. I remember sitting with her and the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is spring. We are sitting on chairs in the sun near the orchard where Adèle and I used to walk so long ago. Frédéric and George are lovers. I have come to meet them, to walk out with them, but as Chopin is sickly and tires easily, we have settled on these chairs in the spring sun so he can rest.

For a while we talk, and then we don’t, just listen to the wind in the trees overhead. Chopin coughs occasionally, a sharp retort, like a rifle. The wind drags the branches of the trees across the blue patch of sky. The noise is like the sea on the shingle, a noise I remember from my childhood.

My memories, as I write this down, are often out of sequence, out of time. It does not matter to me that events have slipped their chronology. There is a natural order to things, and I am following that now. Recollection is exactly that, a re-collection. And so I have added this later memory of George and Frédéric because it belongs to the group of memories that encompass my friendship with her.

By the time we sat together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, George and I had known each other a long time. Our companionship was an easy one. Old friends are as easy with each other as new lovers.

The wind in the trees was the whisper of water on stone. It was the breath of blood in the veins. It was a place where two novelists—George and I—felt perfectly comfortable. A place we had worked hard to get to—in our individual work, and in our friendship. A place entirely without words.

V
ICTOR HAS A LOVER.
She is an actress. Her name is Juliette Drouet, and Victor met her when she was playing the part of Princess Négroni in his play
Lucrèce Borgia
.

I did not get this information from Adèle, whom I still have not seen since I went into hiding, but from George Sand, who says it is the talk of Paris. She tells me that Juliette has become Victor’s mistress, and that they are very much in love. No mention of my Adèle and how she must be feeling about this. But I can guess that she will not be happy, and I can hope that this new situation might inspire her to finally leave her husband and be with me.

It is too late to see Juliette Drouet in
Lucrèce Borgia
, but Victor, who is alarmingly prolific these days, has written a new play,
Marie Tudor
, in which his mistress appears with Mademoiselle George, the famous actress who was once the mistress of Napoleon.

I buy a ticket for opening night.

It is hard not to think of that other night, it seems like ages ago now, when Adèle and I went to see
Hernani
at the same theatre. How excited I was, setting out on that evening’s adventure. How my hands shook as I shaved and dressed in anticipation of seeing my beloved.

Now I shave and dress slowly, sluggishly, in my little room at the top of the Hôtel de Rouen. The Hotel of Ruin. There is nothing to hurry my heart along the streets to the Comédie-Française. Nothing to spark my blood as I squeeze along the row and take my seat in the middle of the first balcony. Adèle is not beside me, and although I scan the seats in front of me and down in the dress circle, I do not see her. Why would she come to see her husband’s mistress on the stage? But I look for her anyway. It is a force of habit at this point, to look for her, to hope she is nearby.

Marie Tudor
is a play about the British monarchy. There are only three characters: Queen Mary of England; Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for just nine days; and the executioner who beheads her. Juliette Drouet plays Lady Jane, and it is clear from the first few moments she is on stage that she is not a good actress. She mumbles her lines and keeps her head bowed, as though she’s looking for something she has accidentally dropped on the floor of the stage. It doesn’t help her cause that Mademoiselle George, despite being a woman of middle years, is still vibrant and beautiful and such a magnificent actress. I almost feel sorry for the hapless Juliette. But then I remember Adèle and take delight in the bad performance, and in the hisses the audience delivers to the young woman.