Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (55 page)

Victor is in the lobby after the play is over. He is blocking my route to the door, and so I slink behind a pillar and wait for him to leave. But he seems intent on talking to the audience members as they exit the theatre, scanning the crowd for important people. I can only hide behind the pillar for so long. I am getting looks for my skulking behaviour.

“Charles.” He sees me immediately.

“Victor.”

He is still compact and sprightly, always looking so ridiculously healthy that I feel like an invalid in comparison.

“What did you think?” he asks.

There is no point in hiding my honesty. There is nothing left of our friendship to protect.

“Lady Jane was dreadful,” I say, and I watch as the slightest ripple of pain washes over his face. To someone who didn’t know the man, it would not even have been noticeable. I admire his professionalism.

“Ah. Well, yes. I think she might be retiring after this performance.”

“Won’t that affect your relations with her?”

“Not at all, Charles. Not at all.” Victor looks almost sorry for me, and I hate him in the moment. “How have you been, my old friend? You do not look well. I hear you have been on the run from the Garde nationale.”

“I am quite well,” I say, but I do not feel that this is entirely true. “And although I am in hiding, my life is otherwise unaffected.”

“Really?” Victor regards me quizzically, and I have the sense that he knows Adèle no longer meets with me, that he possesses more information about our affair than I do. “Surely being in hiding would change everything about your life.”

It is not a question. Once again, as always in our friendship, Victor has simply pronounced, and there is no arguing with his version of reality. And just as I always do when Victor disregards my feelings, I offer up something else for him to savage instead of defending myself.

“I’m writing a novel,” I say.

“What about?”

“Love.”

“That’s a very ambitious subject.”

We are an island amid the sea of people leaving the theatre, and we are buffeted by the departing audience. Victor grabs my shoulder to stop his drift away from me. For a moment we look into each other’s eyes, without rancour or pretence or boastfulness. I recognize my old friend, and I see something else in his face. I see his happiness. Juliette Drouet may be a bad actress, but she is undoubtedly a good lover. She has made the great poet very happy.

“Come and see me, Charles,” says Victor. “Let us talk more about your novel.” For a brief moment it is as it always was between us, as though Victor has forgotten what happened to our friendship, or forgiven it. But then he remembers my trespasses, drops his hand from my shoulder, and moves away from me, towards the lobby doors. “Yes,” he says, “come and visit us soon. My wife often asks what has become of you.”

I
DO NOT GO
to see Victor. Adèle comes to see me. Madame Ladame delivers the message with my morning coffee. A hastily scribbled note from my beloved, asking me to meet her in the Jardin du Luxembourg at noon.

Who sees love arriving? Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative that they almost seem to be invisible.

Who sees love arriving—but who doesn’t see it leaving?

Adèle is waiting for me when I arrive at the gardens. She is pacing among the statuary, staring at the ground, in much the same way Victor’s mistress was studying the stage floor the night I went to see her disastrous performance in
Marie Tudor
.

I am almost upon Adèle before she notices me. She stops. I stop. It is so long since we’ve seen each other that all the old endearments wither on my tongue.

“Charles,” she says, “you’ve come.”

“Of course.”

She holds out her hand and I take it shyly.

“Walk with me,” she says. “I am too restless to sit.”

It is a cool afternoon. The sun disappears behind clouds, peeks out again. Because it isn’t a fine day, we might be the only people in the orchard. Adèle and I walk along the gravel paths, past the ornamental maze, towards the orchard.

“Victor has a mistress,” says Adèle.

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“It is the talk of Paris.” I decide not to mention going to see Juliette Drouet in Victor’s play.

Adèle stops me with a hand on my arm. “Do you think we were ever the talk of Paris?” she asks.

“I’m not sure. Probably not. I don’t think we’re as …” I search for the right word. “We’re not as blatant as Victor.”

“Boastful, you mean.”

“Confident,” I say. “We’re not as confident as Victor.”

We reach the orchard. I look at the tags on the apple trees without comment. Our game belonged to those halcyon days before I told Victor of my affair with Adèle. There’s no point in even mentioning the apple names now. We walk past the Great Unknown. Both of us look at it, and both of us look away.

“Is that it?” I ask Adèle. “Is that why you haven’t come to see me, or sent word of how you are? Is that why you’re so agitated now?”

Adèle stops on the path. “Victor’s mistress is retaliation for my affair,” she says. “But it’s made him happy.”

“Happier than we were?”

“Were?”

“You haven’t come to see me, Adèle.” I don’t mean to, but I sound as petulant as a child. “I have nothing but memories these days.”

“Isn’t that what we’re left with in the end anyway?”

“No.” I think of my morning routine in the Hôtel de Rouen, the comfort ritual bestows. “We could have a life together reinforced with small gestures, kindness, and tenderness. We could have a life of shared experiences.”

“Could we?” Adèle puts her hand on my arm. “I’ve given you nothing but scraps, Charles.”

But they were beautiful scraps. They were scraps made from the finest lace. I think of her wedding veil, folded and tied with ribbon, kept in my desk drawer with her letters.

There was a time when I would have buried my hands in Adèle’s hair, when I would have begged her to come away with me, but something has happened to me in her absence. I have spent months in solitary confinement, writing my novel. My thoughts have become solitary thoughts, my movements solitary movements. I have been writing about my love for Adèle, and perhaps, in some strange way, the writing has replaced the actual love.

“You can’t do this anymore.” I say it for her.

“No. I can’t do it anymore.”

The sun goes behind a cloud (how appropriate) and the air blows cold across my skin. Adèle’s hand on my arm feels heavy, and I want to throw it off, throw her off and storm down the path, disappear into the trees. But I understand everything. I am weary with the burden of understanding everything.

“It’s not fair to you,” says Adèle. “You could marry.”

“Please,” I say, to stop her from continuing along this line. I am an ugly man. I have a sex the size of a snail. Most people don’t like me, certainly not after they get to know me. I am arrogant and reckless and foolish. Sometimes I change my mind about what I am saying in mid-sentence. I can write moderately well, but that isn’t enough to save me. “I will never love anyone as I love you.”

“Nor I.” Adèle takes her hand from my arm and I already miss her touch so acutely that my eyes tear up. How will I bear it? I am a weak man and not possessed of great strength of character. I am not equipped to handle the abandonment of love. Because of my secret, I will probably never find someone who accepts me as Adèle has accepted me.

Later, of course, I can see that Adèle had no choice. She will be punished for her affair with me all her remaining days, by Victor’s infidelities and his flaunting of them. She cannot leave her children, or the financial security of her marriage. The selfish thing would have been to hang on to me. It was actually an act of generosity to release me.

But now all I feel is the dull smack of grief knocking me to my knees in the gravel.

Adèle kneels beside me, wraps her arms around me.

“Don’t cry, my love,” she says. “I’m so sorry that I’ve hurt you. I will never forgive myself for that.”

My sobs make talking difficult, even if there were something I could bear to say. I lean into her last embrace and shut my eyes.

This is what I’ve learned about life—that things go on as they begin. Adèle and I never had enough time to be together, and in retrospect I can see that it was only going to get worse. The situation was stronger than we were. It was only ever going to end the way it did, with both of us on our knees.

We parted there, in the orchard. I stood up and went one way down the path. She stood up and went another way. The day, ironically, brightened.

But just as animals are restless when they’re ill or anxious, I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t go back to the Hôtel de Rouen and resume my work. Writing requires a certain kind of peace, the reassurance that one can leave this world to enter the world of the book and return to find things more or less the same. I was in too much distress to be able to trust in that.

I walked through Paris. I walked to the little church where Adèle and I used to meet, although I was too heartbroken to enter. I walked to Notre-Dame and circled the outside walls, not daring to go in there either. To venture indoors would be to have my sadness constrict around me. At least when I was outside there was space for it to dissipate, to be carried off by the breeze from the river or burned from me by the heat of the afternoon sun.

I walked to our old houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I stopped only moments outside mine, but I stood for a long time in front of Adèle and Victor’s.

There is the window of Dédé’s room, where Adèle and I first made love.

There is the window to the parlour, where I would sit with the Hugos at night, discussing literature for hours, reading Victor’s poems before they were to be published.

There, through the gate, is the garden, where I would visit Adèle and her children, where I would linger longer than was necessary, wanting never to leave her presence.

There, at the gate, is where she ran after me, the night after the day I fought my duel with Pierre Dubois. “I couldn’t live without you,” she said.

It is an otherworldly feeling to be held by arms that will no longer embrace you, to stand in front of a door that once admitted you but is now barred to you. I felt as though I were already dead.

Places exist as monuments to the feelings that were revealed there. The entire Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs is a memorial to my love affair with Adèle Hugo.

Pretty white flowers twist through the garden gate. I pick one and thread it through the buttonhole in my waistcoat. Much later, when I have occasion to look it up, long after it has died, I find out that it is not a flower but only a common weed.

I
HAD THEM PRINTED.
What can I say? My poems were too good to keep to myself. I always considered them to be my greatest achievement.

Their subject was Adèle and my love for her, and in the poems I named names and places. I made no move to hide anyone’s identity. I had the book privately printed in 1843, five hundred copies.

I had meant to keep the copies locked up in a cupboard until Victor died. But Victor seemed as vigorously healthy as ever, and so I distributed a few copies of
Livre d’amour
to my friends. It was the one literary work in which I still felt great pride.

Adèle, of course, had seen some of the poems when we were together. She loved me, so she had not minded them, although she often tired of listening to them. I think she was forced to listen to an abundance of poetry in her life with Victor, and she wanted me to offer respite from that, not additional torment.

I wanted to send Adèle a copy of the book when it was printed, but I feared that it might fall into the hands of her husband, and I could not risk that. Somehow it reached Victor anyway. Word came to me through a mutual friend that Monsieur Hugo was outraged, and that his oldest son, Charles, my namesake, although only seventeen, wished to challenge me to a duel.

Mercifully this did not happen. But suddenly all of Paris loathed me. When I walked in the streets, I had to keep my eyes on the gutter in case I met with an enemy. Even my housekeeper said she heard spiteful talk of me when she went to the market.

Ironically enough, I had moved back in with Mother and was no longer in hiding from the Garde nationale, but I would have been better served if this were still the case.

Can a man not write the truth? Can a man not call his love by name? The gossip that my housekeeper rather delightedly reported back to me was all about my indiscretion and indecency in detailing my love affair with the wife of Victor Hugo. “How it must have shamed him,” one man put it.

But
Livre d’amour
wasn’t about Victor. I didn’t mean to shame him. I wasn’t thinking of him at all, truth be told. This was a book because of, and for, my beloved Adèle. I couldn’t help the fact that she was married to Victor Hugo. I’m sure I would have loved her whatever circumstances she occupied.

But outsiders always see the situation, not the individuals. The literary elite of Paris no doubt thought that I was flaunting my affair with Adèle in Victor’s face, that
Livre d’amour
was nothing more than a boastful taunt to the great man.

I suppose there was a little truth in that, but it was unfair that everyone judged my book on its scandalous content and no one saw its literary merit.

I still have great stacks of the book in a cupboard in my bedroom. Sometimes, late at night, when I am feeling particularly melancholy, I unlock the cupboard and look at the neat rows, the spines so uniform, the yellow paper of the cover so crisp and clean. I run my hands over the volumes, feeling the small indent where one copy ends and another begins. My masterpiece, like the great love that inspired it, is not allowed out in public. It remains hidden. I visit it at night, clandestinely, with the same excitement that I used to rendezvous with Adèle.

I
HAVE BEEN INVITED
into the prestigious Académie française.

Well, actually, it wasn’t really that simple.

Let me explain.

The Académie française was established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 as an institutional body to oversee the use of the French language. There are forty seats. Members are elected for life, and when a seat falls vacant, one may apply to occupy it. There is an election, and the successful candidate must deliver a speech eulogizing the dead man whose seat he will be taking. He is given a green jacket and ceremonial sword, and is then welcomed with a reception speech given by another member of the Académie.

Aside from the prestige, there are practical reasons for my becoming a member of the Académie. First, I will be able to charge more for any articles I write. Second, my book sales will increase. I could also be appointed to the commission that works on the dictionary of the French language. It would be so satisfying not only to use the words of my language, but to control the words themselves.

So when a seat becomes available, I put myself forward as a candidate.

Unfortunately, Victor is already a fellow of the Académie, and he tries to block my membership by nominating Vigny, Dumas, and Balzac. I campaign as best I can, soliciting the other members for their votes, but I fail.

It is deeply humiliating.

But shortly after, another seat becomes available when Casimir Delavigne dies, and I am encouraged to put my name forward again.

This time I am successful.

I am to occupy seat number twenty-eight, which is thankfully nowhere near Victor, who is in seat number fourteen, on the other side of the room. But he is seconded to deliver my reception speech. Although he postpones doing it for the better part of a year, he can’t put it off forever, and on February 27, 1845, we both arrive at the Académie with what, I’m sure, is a mutual feeling of dread.

I wear the green uniform (which I rather like) and even strap on the ceremonial sword, although it bangs against my leg in a most annoying manner when I walk.

The room is crowded—overcrowded, in fact. I have difficulty in securing a seat for George.

“There are so many spectators,” she says, “because everyone in Paris knows that there is no love lost between you and Victor, and we can’t wait to hear what he will say about you.”

I sit down in my seat. Victor stands up in his. The crowd murmurs and hushes. My sword presses against my leg, cutting off the circulation below my knee.

Victor is older and fatter now, as am I. He has a beard and stands with his chest pushed out, clearing his throat before he begins to talk. It is not as I had feared, and I realize now that Victor cannot condemn me in this place. I have been elected a member, and it would be in extremely bad form to insult me in front of the other members. He has his own image to think of. But he does not praise me highly either. While he says some nice things about my work, he lavishes his most passionate oration on the physicality of the books themselves.

“The bindings of Sainte-Beuve’s books are exquisite,” he says. “The best Moroccan leather, and gilt-edged as well. No expense has been spared in bringing his words to the public.”

He sits down. There is tepid applause. Afterwards, he finds me in the lobby outside the meeting room.

“I hope you are happy,” he says. “Taking yet another thing from me.”

“Victor, you don’t own the Académie. Only seat number fourteen.”

In our green jackets decorated with laurel leaves, we look like stout forest people about to scavenge for nuts.

“You ape me,” he says. “You want to be me.”

“No, I don’t. Have you forgotten it was my praise of your poems that made your name?”

There is a flicker of something on Victor’s face. Sympathy, perhaps. No, pity. No, disgust.

“Can’t you see, Charles,” he says, “that I didn’t need your approval? I would have become great without you. It was just a matter of time. You did not grant me any favours. I took what was rightfully mine.”

It was more a matter of opinion than a matter of time, I think, but he has already turned away from me. I want to rush after him and run him through with my ceremonial sword, but I turn away as well.

Because there is some truth in what Victor has said. But I do not want to
be
him. He has that wrong. I want to be better at being him than he is. I want to love his wife with more respect and reverence and tenderness than he is capable of giving her. I want to offer myself to words, not try to bend them to my will. I want to be grateful for my place in the world, not feel that success is my birthright.

It turns out that the Académie is disappointing. What can I say? Everyone talks at once, like schoolchildren without a teacher. I never enjoy the meetings, even though I never stop enjoying the uniform. The meetings are not about what anyone says, but merely about who can speak the loudest.

Surprisingly, Mother is very impressed with my entrance into the Académie française. She faints when she is told the news, and then rushes out with an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of the Virgin in her local church.

So when the small town where I grew up decides to honour me with a reception, she will not be stopped from coming.

I have become the most famous person to have lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer. It is mostly a town of fishermen, of commerce based on the sea. I don’t imagine that anyone there actually reads my writing, but it is kind of them to want to honour me, and I am touched by their kindness.

The mayor has decided to hold the reception in the bakery that occupies the ground floor of the building where Mother and I used to live. I still remember the warm smell of the pies rising up the staircase to our apartment.

“Do you remember, Sainte-Beuve, how you used to stick your fingers in the tarts so they were ruined and would be given to you later for free?” says Mother, much too loudly and in front of the small assembled crowd. Everyone laughs.

“Please,” I say. But Mother, who has never received anything like applause before, finds the laughter of the crowd very stimulating.

“He was such a naughty little boy,” she says. “Ruining the tarts. Keeping secrets. Telling lies. Never doing what he was told. Lazy as a hog. Always lying around reading those tiresome books.”

More laughter. The mayor steps forward and awkwardly drapes a red sash across my shoulders. “For your books,” he says. There is a smattering of applause. Glasses of champagne are offered to everyone. The baker’s wife passes around a tray of tarts. I dare not take one.

I leave Mother in the bakery, go down to the sea to walk along the shingle. The wind blows hard from across the Channel, wraps the red sash around my neck like a scarf.

Across the Channel lies England, a place I went to for a month once. It had excited me to go there. There was English blood in my family. My mother’s mother, whom I never met, was an Englishwoman named Margaret Middleton.

But the actual experience of England was less ecstatic than the imagining of it. I stayed in a country house in Alvescot, near Oxford, having been invited there by two English brothers who were friends of mine at school. The family, unfortunately, was given to exercise, and I was forced to tramp about in the rain and even, on one terrible occasion, to attempt riding. The food was practically inedible. There was an alarming amount of shooting and fishing, and everyone I met seemed to be a parson, although none of them very devout. The one redeeming grace was my introduction to the Lake poets—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Collins—and I decided to translate a few of their poems into French when I returned home.

But my translations are no consolation now. It is ironic that at a point in my life where I feel I have lost everything, I am suddenly being rewarded for my accomplishments.

The fishermen are returning from their day at sea. I stand in the shelter of a cove and watch the boats sailing towards the beach. As a boy I used to come down to this very spot and gaze at them. I liked the shouts of the men as they compared their catches. I liked the intricate lace of the nets, pegged out and drying in the sun.

None of these men will ever wear the green jacket, or be draped in the red sash, but nor will they ever care about these things, or see the merit in them. What is an honour if it means something to only a small group of people? I will never be someone whom these fishermen will want to know.

Mother is jubilant all the way home to Paris in the carriage. She bubbles over with talk. I look out the window, watching the countryside judder slowly past.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there is the feeling of poetry in me, rising as fervently as desire. Even though everything is lost, perhaps something of what is lost is still recoverable. Perhaps, even if I never visit my birthplace again, I can find a way to describe the sound the fishing boats make when they beach on the shingle after a day at sea, and whenever after I read that passage, that image will return to me.

And that is better than any honour I could be given.

The boats heave themselves up out of the sea like strange wooden fish, the hulls hitting the beach with a great booming sound. No, not fish—it is more that the hulls are waves, but heavier than water. The booming sound they make when they are thrown forward from the sea onto the beach is like the sound of a bell. It is deep and sonorous, and the whole fishing fleet plays a madrigal of bells as it comes to shore.

The red sash that the mayor gave me is still wound around my neck. I unwind it, fold it carefully into a small rectangle, and hand it over to Mother.

“I want you to have this.”

“Oh, Sainte-Beuve.” For a moment she is actually speechless, clasping the piece of red satin against her bosom. “What a day!” She carefully puts the folded sash on her lap and fumbles in her bag. “I have something for you too.” She passes me a box.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

I lift the lid, and inside are four tarts from the bakery, nestled in straw to keep them safe from breaking.

I
AM THE LIBRARIAN
at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the Institut de France on the quai de Conti through most of the 1840s, and I have been given rooms to live in at the institute. By day I sit at a desk and enter into a ledger the names of those patrons who come to borrow books from the library. By night I sit up in my rooms, reading and writing. I have arrived at a life entirely circumscribed by literature.

I was offered the job through a rather strange set of circumstances.

It all started when Louise Colet, who is the mistress of both Victor Cousin, the politician, and Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, was savaged by the critic Alphonse Karr in his monthly satirical journal.

Louise Colet did not take kindly to being ridiculed in the press, and she called on Alphonse Karr at his home. When he turned from the door to usher her into his apartment, she took out the kitchen knife she had concealed beneath her skirts and stabbed him in the back.