Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (53 page)

“You can’t mean that.”

“But I do. I do.” Adèle strokes my cheek. “My treasure,” she says, “I just can’t risk it.”

“But weren’t you hoping that I might arrive?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And how will it be when I leave?”

Adèle sighs, lowers herself back down onto the dirt. “Unbearable,” she says as she pulls me down on top of her. “I would die without you.”

I have been turned out of the inn where I was staying because the proprietress thought I was bringing prostitutes there. I was careless one afternoon and returned to the inn still dressed as Charlotte. This woman shamelessly went up to my room and entered and presumably pleasured me, and now I have been thrown out of my lodgings.

When I go to another inn seeking accommodation, the innkeeper looks at my name as I sign the register.

“We’re full up,” he says.

“But you just told me I could have a room.”

He snatches the register away from me. “I lied.”

“Why would you do that?”

He shrugs. “I don’t want you here.”

Bièvres is a small place. The townspeople probably know about Adèle and me, and view our love as scandalous. Even this lowly innkeeper thinks I am an enemy of decency. I should challenge him to a duel for his insolence, but I can’t be bothered and I pick up my bags.

It is time to go back to Paris, back to my love poems.

W
HILE
I
WAIT
for Adèle to return from the country, I have taken to coming to the Cathédrale Notre-Dame every evening after supper. Not to the church where I usually meet my lover, but to
the
church, the great cathedral, the heart of the city.

I read Victor’s book, and I have to admit I liked it. I did wonder briefly if the horribly disfigured hunchback who lives in the bell tower, Quasimodo, was modelled on me, but mostly I’ve been impressed by the beautiful descriptions of the church, by Victor’s intent to raise the public’s awareness of the building’s neglect. It was damaged during the first revolution and badly needs repair. Victor’s story is set in the church, but the church is really the main character. I admire my old friend’s desire to save such a monumental part of Paris’s history. It is a noble gesture.

And the book is selling very well.

It is not far to walk from my house to where the church rests on the Île de la Cité, the small island in the middle of the Seine that used to be the entire city of Paris. Now, that island is anchored to the city proper by five bridges, like ropes mooring a ship to the shore.

The summer evenings are long and there is still considerable light outside when I enter the building during the last mass of the day. If it is crowded, I sit in a pew near the back, under the vaulted ceiling, which was made, as all church ceilings were made, to imitate the vastness of the heavens.

An entire army could march through the arches and still seem diminutive in relation to the church. Victor is right. It is too grand, too important to fall into decay. The broken statuary deserves to be repaired. The ruined pavement needs replacing. I wish I’d thought about writing a book about Notre-Dame myself. But I don’t have the same sentimental touch as Victor. I cannot move the masses to action, sound the right romantic chord in people’s hearts. My prose is drier. My poetry is too specific.

I sit in the belly of the cathedral and imagine Victor coming here every night after a fevered day’s writing. I envy him that experience of holy purpose. He would have walked along the aisles feeling entirely supported in the writing of his book—supported by the church itself. He would have felt chosen. He would have felt blessed. I am more of a believer than Victor, but God loves Victor for helping Notre-Dame, and God hates me for loving Victor’s wife.

Religion has its images and codes—arches are hands clasped in prayer, the lily is the flower of the Virgin Mary, the peacock apparently does not decay when it dies and so symbolizes immortality and the resurrection. Every part of every church is like a page in a book. It can be read. Some evenings this is all I do—select a particular piece of wall or window and try to remember what everything means, try to read the interior of the cathedral.

The columns inside Notre-Dame have leaves carved into the stone at the top. They are meant to resemble trees, to remember trees, to remember that the first churches would have been in the forest.

When I sit at the back, the church is long and narrow ahead of me. Sometimes I look straight along it, to the curve of stained glass behind the altar. Sometimes I gaze down at the black-and-white-tiled floor or up at the high vaulted ceiling.

In the centre of the ceiling is a round painting of the Madonna and child encircled in a gold frame. The painting is dark, and there are gold stars decorating the ceiling around it. From where I sit at the back of the church, the medallion looks like a porthole in the ceiling.

This church took two hundred years to build. I marvel at that, how a man could pass four full lifetimes and never see the finished structure.

I enter the cathedral while there is still light in the sky, and I leave when it is dark, when the candles have been lit inside the church and the lamps have been lit on the bridges outside. I move from one world back to another world.

At first when I go to Notre-Dame, I think of Victor and his book. Then I think of how I would wait for Adèle in our little church, how impatient I would be for her to arrive, to see her. But after the third or fourth night of coming to the cathedral after supper, I realize that I am coming for myself, that I am not imitating anyone or waiting for anyone. I have entered this building not to worship another, but rather to please myself.

I
HAVE DECIDED
to move in with my mother on rue du Montparnasse. It is a small house and I will have to make do with less privacy, but it will be a savings for me to throw in my lot, temporarily, with Madame Sainte-Beuve. My income is dependent on work that comes my way, and when there isn’t much of this, I cannot eat or pay my rent. Now that I am embarked on serious literary pursuits, it seems prudent to save money where I can.

I am fond of Mother, but she is tiresome. We share an emotional sympathy, but she is not much good as an intellectual companion, as I said. Her thoughts are not concerned with symbols and philosophical argument. They are, most likely, dwelling on some lowly gossip she heard on the street that morning or engaged in the never-ending quest to find her sewing basket or her spectacles. Sharing a house with her will be more frustrating than rewarding, but it will also mean that I will not have to work so hard at the
Globe
.

Life with Mother is not easy. The first night we are together under one roof again, I am sitting up in my new bedroom reading when I hear the most appalling sounds coming from Mother’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. Scraping and scratching, the noise of the floorboards being scored as something heavy is pushed over them.

I wait for the noise to stop. It does not. I put my book aside and go and knock on Mother’s bedroom door.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Perfectly well, Sainte-Beuve,” comes her reply from the other side of the door.

“Why are you moving furniture so late at night?”

“I am not moving furniture.”

“But I heard you.” Those sounds could not be anything else. I turn the doorknob, but the door won’t open more than a fraction. “Mother, let me in.”

“I’m afraid I cannot, Sainte-Beuve,” says Mother through the closed door. “You see, I’m barricaded in for the night.”

“Whatever for?”

“So that thieves may not enter my bedchamber and have done with me.”

Mother is afraid of being robbed and murdered. She is afraid of slipping on the cobblestones when it rains. She is afraid to ride in a cab pulled by a black horse, to open her front door at night, to walk in unfamiliar streets. I do not know when she suddenly became so nervous of life. She seemed so robust when I was young.

“Don’t be foolish,” I say to her at least once a day, but she is quick to point out that it is her house and she will conduct herself there exactly as she pleases. And I have no rebuttal for that.

Adèle has returned to Paris, but I have not seen her. I sent word to her under her alias at the Poste restante to let her know that I have moved, but I have had no word back from her to say when we might meet. I am trying not to despair. I am trying to concentrate on the business of moving house and writing my poems. I must put Adèle out of my mind, for to think of her causes me to miss her, and when I miss her, I am incapable of getting anything done.

The Hugos have moved again. All of Paris knows this, knows how famous Victor has become, how well his book about Notre-Dame has sold, not only in France but all over the world. The household has left rue Jean Goujon for Place Royale, where, apparently, they have a magnificent apartment in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéménée.

Love, increasingly, seems more of an affliction than a blessing.

And now, a ridiculous thing has happened. I have been called up to serve in the Garde nationale. I should explain that this is a militia made up of the middle class. When one is summoned to the Garde nationale, one is given a blue uniform and a rifle, and is expected to help keep peace in the streets, stop the vandalism and thieving that seems so much a part of city life.

The idea of the rifle and the uniform is tempting, but having made the great sacrifice of moving in with my mother to conserve time and money, I just cannot afford to add yet another duty to my busy life. I will never get my poems written if I do not give them my full attention. So I have ignored the summons, and now I have been charged with neglecting my civic duty and have been condemned, in absentia, to serve a prison sentence for this offence.

I have gone into hiding. Under the name Charles Delorme, I have rented cheap rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen. The hotel is on the right bank of the river, in the Cour du Commerce, a twisting series of alleys that holds all manner of shops and services. If I am chased into the Cour du Commerce, there are many places to hide. And if I am chased into the Hôtel de Rouen, there are four exits by which I can escape—one door to the south, one to the north, one to the east, and one to the west.

My rooms are on the third floor and look out over the distant Jardin du Luxembourg, out over those perfect days not long ago when I walked through the orchard with Adèle, fully believing that our love was strong enough to bear our circumstances.

I am less convinced now. As I said, she sends no word to me, no reassurance of her love, no promise of meeting.

My two rooms cost only twenty-three francs a month, with morning coffee included. The staircase to the third floor is as steep as a ladder. The hallway is dark and narrow. But when I throw open the door to the small room where I am to write, I feel only liberation at my prospects. The proprietors of the hotel, Monsieur and Madame Ladame, are friendly and courteous. They can be relied upon to warn me if the police should arrive to arrest me.

My mother, however, is unhappy with my arrangement. She was all in favour of my spending time in the Garde nationale. She thought it would be good for my character and for my figure, which has grown a little plumper of late. According to her, the Hôtel de Rouen is not a suitable place for a gentleman. I pronounce the name as
Hôtel de Rohan
, to make it sound more noble, to echo Victor’s prestigious new lodgings, but she is not convinced. She is disappointed in me, in my choices. “I would rather have given birth to a Freemason,” she says.

I will spend eight years in these hotel rooms, but I don’t know that yet, of course. Now, in my thirtieth year, I climb the stairs, puffing my way along the hallway to the rooms numbered nineteen and twenty. One small space in which to sleep. One small space in which to work. I have successfully eluded both the Garde nationale and the police. My mother knows where I am, and even though she disapproves of me at the moment, she will not turn me in. What I know now, when I open the door of the room I will work in, is that I have a desk by a window and a view out over the Jardin du Luxembourg, out to the fields that lie beyond the orchard. I have ink and paper and ideas. I have left Charles Sainte-Beuve behind. I am now Charles Delorme. I am a free man. And I am a writer.

I
T IS THE SILENCE
that carries the music.

It is these long days and nights, hunched over the small desk in my room at the Hôtel de Rouen, that will make my name.

I have decided to try my hand at a novel. If Victor can do it, surely I can too. My poems are going well, but I need something more than verse to tell the story of Adèle and me. I need to create a world to live in with her. If I cannot live with her in this world, then I will make an imagined shelter for our love.

But it is harder than I thought, and first I must change some of the identifying details. It is all very well to write my book of love poems for myself, but I desire to be a serious writer, and I should try to get this novel published. So I must take liberties to disguise the story of my love.

I decide to set the tale in the time of the Napoleonic campaigns in the 1790s. My hero (me) shall be a soldier in these campaigns. He will be in love with his friend’s wife, a Madame de Couaen, and the bulk of the story shall be a testimony to that love.

Well, that certainly sounded good when I thought it up. But writing it down is another matter. The plot falls away quite quickly, as overcooked meat slips from the bone, and the book becomes not so much an exploration of my love for Adèle as the exposure of it. After a day’s work I feel raw and trembling, barely have the strength to stumble down the staircase in search of supper. And on the way back up, I must grasp the large brass ball on the landing railing with both my hands to steady myself before proceeding down the hallway, back to my room and the torture that this writing has become.

I thought there would be peace in the enterprise, but writing the story down just lays it bare again. Writing of Adèle does not offer me any rest. It just makes me miss her more acutely. It just makes me relive all our moments together and ache for those moments to be repeated.