The Reinvention of Love (18 page)

When I return to the house the reception is under way. I know almost no one, sit by myself in a corner of the drawing room, drinking tea and trying not to eat too much cake.

Madame Vacquerie is seated beside her husband. She sits up straight, talking to a young woman. I can see from her posture that she is holding herself upright, that if she didn’t make this effort, she would collapse. At the graveside of her son, she fell to her knees in the dirt and had to be hauled to her feet by Augustus.

A mother’s grief is not pretty.

I look around the room, at all the strange faces, at the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. I look at the statue, the bust I passed yesterday morning on my way to the library, and I realize with a start that it is a bust of Victor. And I remember how upset he was to lose Léopoldine to marriage. He had sent her this head of himself as a way to assert his continuing presence in her life. Although, this was not how he had described it to me. He had told me that she would be lonely for him. Interesting that Léopoldine put it in a neutral place, the drawing room, rather than placing it in her private chambers.

But Victor did love his daughter. We loved her together. She was ours, and that bond between us will never be broken. From now on, we will be her archive. All the years of her life will be stored in our memories. She will only exist there. Victor and I are the only ones who have known her intimately since the moment of her birth. We will be more united because of her death, not less.

At that instant, a maid comes towards me from across the room. She carries a silver tray, and on that tray I can see there is a letter.

It is from my husband. He was in the south of France and read of Léopoldine’s death in a newspaper while he was sitting in a café. He was travelling under an assumed name and never received my urgent messages, but now he is on his way to Villequier and asks me to wait for him. He ends the letter by saying, “My God, what have I done to you?”

Another woman might be confused by that phrase. Another woman might not wait for him. But I will be here when he arrives. I will greet him warmly. I will accompany him to the cemetery and show him where our daughter now lies. I will put my hand on his arm to steady him, as Madame Vacquerie put her hand on my arm to steady me.

And I am not at all confused by the phrase at the end of his letter. No, there is no confusion.

I know exactly what he has done to me.

CHARLES

MOTHER DIES AT EIGHTY-SIX.
Increasingly frail, and increasingly demented, she lives long enough to see her body outlast her mind.

In the end she was afraid of almost everything. But her loss of memory made us better companions. She no longer cared what I was up to. There was no need to comment on my dress, or my habits. We became strangers under the same roof, but we liked one another better because of that.

My last good memory of Mother took place a few months before she died. I had come upstairs after lunch to find her standing perfectly still in the hallway. She had lost weight recently and her clothes hung loosely from her frame.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“The street is so busy today,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get across safely.”

I offered my arm. “I’d be happy to escort you.”

“Thank you, monsieur. That is very kind.”

She linked her arm through mine and we walked slowly down the hallway towards her bedroom, her feet shuffling along the polished wood floor. At her doorway she removed her arm from mine. I bowed. She smiled up at me, her face suddenly joyful, an expression of hers I hadn’t seen since I was a child.

“What good fortune I have,” she said. “To find such an obliging young man to help me.”

The last time I see Victor it is by accident. In 1849, we are at the funeral of the once-famous actress, Marie Dorval, who has died run down and penniless at the age of fifty-one. During the church service, Victor stands on one side of the aisle, and I stand on the opposite side.

When I see Victor enter the church, I hope, for a brief moment, that Adèle is with him. But Marie Dorval was a friend of Juliette Drouet and, sure enough, it is Victor’s mistress who accompanies him to the funeral.

The day is wet and grey. The service is depressing. Mother is dead and my contemporaries have begun to die off while in their fifties. I feel my own mortality advancing rapidly towards me as I stand with head bowed in the cold church.

George Sand is a few rows ahead of me. She is weeping noisily. Marie Dorval was a great friend of hers, and for a short time, even her lover. Well, that was the rumour anyway. I never did ask George if it was true. If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me herself. But she is weeping with enough feeling for me to believe that it was indeed true.

The novelist Balzac was the one who circulated the rumour through Paris. Balzac and I are not enamoured with each other because I reviewed him badly once. He hated my novel,
Volupté
, and told mutual friends that he could do a better job of it. Apparently his novel,
Le Lys dans la vallée
, is a rewriting of my book. I will not engage in his pettiness. I will not read it, even though I burn with curiosity. The irony is that, although his theme is stolen, his book sells better than mine.
Volupté
has not had the reception I had hoped for. Even George dismissed it rather cavalierly, calling it simply “vague”.

But all that is behind me now. There is no more poetry in me. No more novels. I have become relatively famous, though it is not through those pursuits. I write a lengthy weekly biographical sketch in the
Globe
. These sketches appear on Monday and are called, correspondingly,
Lundis
. It has always
been my opinion that to understand an artist and his work, it is necessary to know his biography. Some people do not agree with me. Marcel Proust, for example, argues that art can transcend the man. I don’t see how he can really believe that art is delivered miraculously through the human vessel and not rooted in its material.

Others’ opinions are not my concerns. I have my work to do.

My
Lundis
are short, well-researched biographies of great artists and philosophers – some living, many already dead. Each one takes a week to construct and write. They are wildly popular. Every so often, when I have written enough of them to be collected into a volume, they are sold as a book. My
Lundis
easily outsell my poetry and my “vague” novel,
Volupté
.

I find George outside the Eglise Saint-Thomas d’Aquin. She walks with me under my umbrella towards the row of waiting cabs. We are to ride to the burial of Marie Dorval in the Montparnasse cemetery.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know you were close to her.”

George hooks her arm through mine. Her face is streaked with rain and tears.

“Marie was so lovely,” she says. “It never occurred to me that she would die. Her beauty should have exempted her.”

George’s comment makes me smile. “If that were true,” I say, “then I would be long dead. If one could be spared death for beauty, then surely one would also be condemned to death for ugliness.”

George squeezes my arm. “Ride with me to the cemetery,” she says. “It has been so long since we’ve been in each other’s company, and I have missed you.”

But when we reach the road there is room for only one person in the first cab in line. It is raining so hard now that I fear George will be soaked to the skin while we wait for
another cab to round the corner.

“I’ll meet you there,” I say, helping her up into the carriage.

I don’t remember much of Marie Dorval except her close association with George. I saw her in several plays, but I cannot remember now what those plays were about. I do recall that in one of them she made a spectacular swoon backwards down a staircase, and the audience gasped in fear for her safety.

Love, I think. That’s what love is – a backwards swoon down a darkened staircase. Well, no more of that for me, and no more of anything for poor Marie Dorval.

I still have the green umbrella with the yellow handle. A few comment on it. Many stare at it when I raise it. But I don’t care. Let them mock me. It still keeps the rain off my body.

The next cab clatters up and I jerk open the door and climb inside. Someone is already in the cab, sitting on the small bench by the opposite window. A man in black, a top hat on his lap. I close my door. The driver flicks his whip at the horse and we lurch away from the church. It takes me a moment to recognize the profile of the man beside me, perhaps the same moment that it takes him to recognize me, for we both stiffen in apprehension at the sudden realization.

It is Victor Hugo who shares my cab. I’m not sure why Juliette Drouet is not with Victor. He must have been uncharacteristically chivalrous and dispatched her to the cemetery in an earlier cab.

I do not see Adèle any more. I do not know how she is, what she feels, what she does with her days. I do not see Adèle, and I blame Victor now for everything. It has not helped that he has become even more famous, that his literary ascension has been swift and sure. He has ended up with everything – fame, a family, a mistress. I do not understand why he should hate me as passionately as I hate him. I have lost our particular battle. But Victor obviously blames me for something. Perhaps his life is not as perfect as I imagine. He stares out of his window in the
cab. I stare out of mine. The rain smears the glass and the streets wash by, each one leaf-strewn and wet, dark as evening.

If I were a younger man I would perhaps have made a pretence of conversation. We could have had a literary banter, or talked about the overwhelming sadness of Marie Dorval’s death. If I were a braver man I might have brought up Adèle and asked after her welfare, told Victor something (what?) to let him know that my love for her remains virtually unchanged.

But as one grows older, one’s character is reinforced by one’s weaknesses, not by one’s strengths, and if Victor plans to remain silent during our carriage ride, I am too much of a coward to break that silence.

The cab rocks along the narrow street, and it strikes me that I am still in awe of Victor Hugo, perhaps more than ever now because of his greatly increased fame. What I want to ask him, more than anything else, is whether he has read my novel, and what he thinks of it.

Pitifully, what I want to ask him is if he liked it.

Oh, how I hate this need in myself. Almost as much as I hate the man who could satisfy it.

The carriage rolls to a stop and Victor gets out without even a glance at me.

I LOSE ONE ADÈLE,
and I gain another.

After my mother’s death in 1850 I inherit the house on rue du Montparnasse. I hire a secretary to help with the research for my
Lundis
, and I hire a cook to keep house for me. The position of secretary has been rotated through a series of polite young men with literary aspirations. The position of cook belongs firmly to a new Adèle.

My work life is ordered; my home life is chaos. And yet they both take place under the same roof.

Once a week I dine out with my editor to discuss the subject of that week’s
Lundi
. The next day my secretary comes to my house in the morning to talk over my new idea. We work in my bedroom. I sit at my desk, which in reality is two tables placed side by side. My secretary sits in a chair by the fireplace. Sometimes he is required to take dictation but usually, in the early stages of an idea, he is sent out to borrow books from the library and verify references, or he is simply there to listen to my thoughts. My ideas formulate more quickly if I am able to speak them out loud. When the article is written, I have my secretary read it out to me so I can adjust the phrasing as necessary. I find that my ear is a better judge of my words than my eye.

While we work, my cats prowl about the room. Only my favourite, Mignonne, is allowed to walk across my desk and disturb my papers. Sometimes she sits there, watching me write, her tail swishing from side to side rather angrily.