Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (50 page)

I look over at Mother. She’s finished her food already and is picking at something on the tablecloth. She is a much better eater than I am, altogether more robust. I suddenly feel like weeping and have to dab at my eyes with my napkin.

Luckily, the housekeeper usually comes in to clear when I am having my emotional moment, and I am distracted from my feelings by her rough handling of the crockery and silver.

After the meal is over, I sit with Mother in the sunny front room on the second floor and we have coffee. If Mother can be stopped from commenting on what objects the sun is shining on, or how sore her feet get in winter, or whether Madame Lamarche will recover from her illness, she will sometimes ask after my health, or express concern that I am not dressing warmly enough for the weather, or tell me that someone has told her that it seems I am clever. In these moments everything is forgiven and redeemed, and there is suddenly the desire to do this whole performance over again the very next day.

Sometimes, when I am shrugging on my coat in the foyer and I look back up the stairs, I see Mother standing on the landing, watching me go. She doesn’t wave or call out, and I don’t either. I simply put on my coat and hat, collect my gloves and umbrella, and step out into the Paris afternoon. But it is in these moments that I feel we are most aligned, that Father’s early death shipwrecked us both and we cling to this little raft of habit to stay afloat. It is not the vessel either of us hoped or expected to make our voyage on, and yet here we are and there is the desire, in both of us, to make the best of it.

A
DÈLE AND
I
WALK
through the Montparnasse cemetery. This is not one of our regular haunts, but today there is not enough time to journey to the church or the hotel, and Victor has taken the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, so we cannot risk a visit to the orchard.

The cemetery is close to our houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. It is where I myself will be buried. Mother has already reserved our spaces. Adèle and I walk along the paths between the rows of raised stone tombs, and the thought of my dead self makes me greedy for life.

I grab my beloved, but she twists away.

“Someone might see,” she says. There are indeed other people in the cemetery, and because the graves block their presence, they are apt to pop up suddenly in front of us on the path.

“Passion must have no regrets,” I say.

“Passion is nothing
but
regrets,” says Adèle.

In the beginning, I had fantasized about seducing Adèle. I had thought that with my clever words and my sensitive nature I would slowly persuade her to yield to me. My attentions would ripen her like a fruit, and she would drop easily into my hands. But really, from the beginning, Adèle has controlled the tempo of our love. She is not a ripe fruit. She is not easily swayed by my words. If she does not want my touch while we walk through the cemetery, then she will not have it.

But I am a better man only in my mind. My body simply longs for her, and it is the stronger force.

“We will be dead soon,” I say. “Encased in stone, like all these good people.” I wave my hand over the graves. “I’m sure they all thought they had longer to love.”

Adèle links her arm in mine. “You, dear Charles,” she says, “will have more than just a simple grave. You will have a grand statue.”

“It won’t be as big as Victor’s,” I say.

Adèle laughs at me. “Well,” she says, “perhaps it will be a good deal prettier.”

We walk on in silence.

“Boulanger wants to paint me,” she says after a while.

Louis Boulanger is a friend of Victor Hugo’s. He has already done a portrait of the great poet.

“What did you say?”

“I refused.”

“Why? Boulanger is a good painter. The portrait would be pleasing.”

Adèle stops me on the path. “I want no other portrait,” she says, “than the one engraved on my lover’s heart.”

I always think that
I
am the poet, that it is the power of
my
words that moves our love forward. But really, sometimes I must be honest: Adèle is often a much better wordsmith than I am.

I have not seen the man before. He storms into my office at the
Globe
practically frothing at the mouth.

“Sainte-Beuve, I challenge you to a duel,” he shouts. Not another duel!

“What for?”

“You have rejected my poems.”

He is a very young man, the first flush of youth lighting his face. He stands across from me. We are separated only by my oak desk. I don’t remember his poems.

“Come now,” I say. “If you submitted them for publication, surely you entertained the idea that they might be rejected.”

“I did not.”

“Well, I must have said something encouraging.” I am in the habit of mixing the good with the bad, of turning someone down but letting him know what it is he got right.

“You called them ‘trifling.’ You said they were ‘weak.’” Just the memory of my cruel note causes the young man to mop the sweat from his brow.

Well, then, they must have been truly terrible, I think.

There was recently a much-publicized duel involving a poet. Perhaps this young man has been inspired to take action because of that. The bullet that killed that poet passed through his manuscript, which he had tucked inside his waistcoat. His poems were published posthumously, with a blank space left on each page, in the middle of the words, to show where the bullet had sliced through the manuscript en route to the poet’s heart. Perhaps posthumous publication is what this poet hopes for.

“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I don’t want to fight you. I was entirely within my rights to reject your poems.”

“You have disgraced me,” says the young man. “They were poems to my beloved. They were my most secret thoughts, and you scorned them. Choose your weapon.” He shouts this last part, and I can see, through the open door behind him, the heads of my colleagues turning towards us with interest.

And then I do remember his poems. He compared his love to a fleet of ships setting sail for the New World. He compared his love to a budding tree. In one terrible poem, he compared his love to a wingless dove. I remember that the manuscript itself had bits of food stuck to one of the pages, and that on another page there was a boot print. The grammar was appalling. The word use was juvenile. The whole thing was such an amateur effort that a child of six could have done a better job.

How dare this idiot march into my office in the middle of the day, demanding revenge for my honest criticism!

“If you can’t take rejection, you are no poet,” I say.

“Choose your weapon.”

“All right.” I lean across my desk, looking him in the eye, staring him down. “I choose spelling. You’re dead.”

When I get home that evening, there is a note from Victor summoning me to the house. I am in a panic about what it might mean. I have been avoiding Victor, and he must have noticed. He must have found out about Adèle and me, and he is calling me over to hand me a loaded pistol. We will stomp out to his back garden, and he will shoot me through the heart by the pond.

By the time I get to their house, I am sweating profusely. My hair sticks to my forehead, which sticks to my hat. There are big wet patches under the arms of my waistcoat.

I don’t feel that I can just walk into the Hugo household anymore. My intimacy with Adèle has meant that I compensate for the guilt by becoming more formal with Victor. So I stand on the front step and knock loudly. It takes a while before someone comes, and it is not the maid who answers the door but one of the children.

Victor is in the parlour. Adèle, thank God, is nowhere to be seen. The room is a mess: packing crates sit in the centre of the rug, and the pictures are off the walls.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

“We’re being evicted.” Victor motions me into the room. “We have to move.”

“But why?”

“It seems that our landlord is conservative and was very offended by
Hernani
.”

“But he didn’t have to go to the play.”

Victor waves his hand over an open packing crate, as though he’s about to conjure a rabbit from it. “The talk, Charles,” he says. “The talk of what happens each night at the play is all over town. One doesn’t need to actually go to the play to know what is going on.”

I suppose this is true. I have been so concerned with my own life lately that I have forgotten all about Victor’s play and the controversy surrounding it.

I collapse into a chair. “Where will you go?”

“We’ve taken an apartment on rue Jean Goujon.”

“But that’s on the other side of the river.” Rue Jean Goujon is a small street near the Champs-Élysées, but it may as well be the other side of the world.

“I need to be close to the theatre.” Victor looks at me shrewdly. “And, Charles,” he says, “I have not seen much of you lately. I thought, in fact, you might be avoiding me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Yes, why
would
you do that?”

“You are writing your novel,” I say weakly.

Adèle has told me that Victor has become obsessed with the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, and that he is writing a story set there. He lives in his room and comes out only at night, when he walks to the church. She has told me that he requests his meals in his room, and that he writes standing up at a tall desk, wrapped dramatically in a cloak.

Victor kneels in front of me and takes both of my hands in his, as though he is about to propose marriage. “Charles,” he says, “what is wrong? We have been such good friends, and now I feel that I hardly know you.”

It is the touch that does it. If he had not knelt before me and taken my hands I might have been able to withstand the shock of the Hugos’ move across the river. But the touch undoes me. I feel compelled to confess. I suddenly remember our friendship and I want to tell Victor everything.

“I’m in love with Adèle,” I say. “She is in love with me. We have been seeing each other for some time.”

Victor drops my hands, leaps to his feet. “What do you mean?”

I think of the hotel room where Adèle and I so recently were, how I have not bathed since that afternoon because I do not want to wash her touch from my body.

“I mean,” I say, “that I have been having physical relations with your wife.”

Victor looks shocked, and I realize that he has not suspected us at all. I shouldn’t have confessed.

“You?” he says. “You and Adèle?”

Oh, it is too late to take any of it back. I said it without regret. I said it a little boastfully, and now I can see that it was a mistake to admit it. Adèle and I could have continued on for years without Victor finding out. Why did I grace him with more interest in his wife than I know he has? Victor is happy sequestered in his room, writing his book about the cathedral. That is his world. Adèle and I and his children, we exist at the outer edge of that. There was no need to tell Victor. He would never have discovered us. We could have gone on for years, quite happily.

Adèle will be furious with me. Victor will make her life impossible. Why did I think only of myself and not consider her?

“I’m lying,” I say, desperate to turn this around. “It’s a joke. Ha ha.” I laugh weakly. It comes out sounding like a dog barking. A very small dog.

“No. You’re not lying.” Victor is frowning, probably remembering all the times I have been alone with his wife. He slaps his forehead with his great paw. “I encouraged you,” he shouts. “I believed we were all friends.” A shadow passes over his face as he realizes perhaps the greatest indignity of all. “I sent you to see my play together!”

Victor and I drink a bottle of wine in the parlour, using one of the packing cases as a table for our glasses.

“I have never had a mistress,” says Victor. “I have only ever loved my wife.”

This surprises me. I know that the great Victor Hugo has many female admirers. I would have thought he’d take full advantage of that adulation.

“I’m sorry,” I say, although I am mostly sorry that I have told him.

Victor swirls the wine around the inside of his glass. “Do you know the story of my wedding?” he asks.

“No,” I lie. Adèle has told me of the whole miserable day, has said that she should have taken it as an omen of what was to come and run screaming from the church.

“Adèle and I had played together as children. We had known each other all our lives. It was natural that I would marry her. I loved her, and I know she loved me. But at our wedding, as we were saying our vows, my brother Eugène jumped up and proclaimed
his
love for Adèle.” Victor pours himself another drink. He is drinking at twice the rate I am. “Naturally, I was shocked. I hadn’t known of his feelings, and I can’t think why he chose that moment to disclose them. It was terrible. He had to be dragged from the church and immediately imprisoned in the asylum.”

“Terrible,” I say, nodding sympathetically.

Victor slaps his glass down on top of the packing case, making me jump in my chair.

“Why does this happen to me again?” he cries.

“I’m not insane,” I point out, but he isn’t listening to me. He starts to pace up and down the room.

“Why am I being tested in this way?” he says. “What is the point of this torment?”

I don’t think that torment often has much of a point, but I keep my mouth shut.

Victor is over by the window now. He is shaking the drapes. Great clouds of dust rise from them.

“I must not be destroyed by this tragedy,” he shouts. “I must find a way to do battle with my enemy.”

Here it comes, I think. Here comes the challenge to a duel. Here comes my final hour. But Victor, having finished wrestling with the drapes, strides back over to the packing case, drinks the rest of his wine, and sits down in the chair opposite mine.

“How could you?”

I don’t say anything.

Victor buries his head in his hands and mumbles something I can’t hear.

“What?”

“She was my wife, Charles. My wife.” He raises his head and looks straight at me, his eyes bright with feeling.

I decide not to comment on the fact that he has used the past tense in speaking about Adèle. What can it mean? Is he done with her? Will she be free to live with me now? I am exhilarated by the results of my confession. It was the right thing to do after all!