The Reinvention of Love (14 page)

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 otherwordly 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.

PARIS, 1840s

CHARLES

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 was no longer in hiding from the Garde nationale, and had moved back in with Mother, 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 being 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, and 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 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.