Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (58 page)

The day of the funeral dawns bright and clear. My bedroom is at the back of the house. Mercifully, Madame Vacquerie saw fit not to put me in a room that overlooks the river. My room looks down onto the gardens and the tops of the fruit trees in the small orchard out back.

I had laid out my mourning dress the night before. A maid comes with a basin and some water. I wash. I dress. I see to my hair. I go downstairs.

Madame Vacquerie’s family have returned. I don’t know where she sent them, but it couldn’t have been far. When I go downstairs, they are all in the foyer. The men bow to me. Monsieur Vacquerie says some words that I forget the moment he utters them. Charles’s brother, Augustus, one of Victor’s most ardent disciples, asks repeatedly after my husband.

“He’s not coming,” I say, with more anger than I mean. Augustus nods and backs away from me.

I have slept later than I wanted. It is mid-morning. The bodies of Charles and Léopoldine were taken away late last night, to be placed in their coffins, to be readied for their burial today at noon.

Monsieur Vacquerie ushers me into the dining room for breakfast. The table that just yesterday held the body of his son now holds cups and saucers, plates of rolls, and steaming jugs of coffee.

Madame Vacquerie is seated at one end of the table. She nods to me as I enter the room.

“Madame Hugo.”

“Madame Vacquerie.”

She is formal with me. She is closed to me now. I can see it in her face. Her family have returned and her grief now belongs to them. Her husband passes behind her, places a hand on her shoulder. She puts a hand up to cover his, and the gesture makes me so lonely.

I eat more than I want to at breakfast, but again I am ravenous and can’t help myself. Death has made me a glutton. Madame Vacquerie, on the other hand, barely touches her food.

Augustus tries to engage me in conversation about Victor, but I ignore him. When I have the opportunity, I take my leave and slink from the room, go back into the library and stand by the table where Léopoldine used to lie, sobbing until a maid comes to tell me that my carriage is ready.

The words are said. The coffins are wheeled out to the open graves. The wind suddenly whips up when we are standing there, and the priest’s vestments fill with air and make him look like a chess piece.

The words are said. The bodies are lowered. The words are said. The dirt hits the wooden coffin lids, like rain lashing at the window on a winter’s night. The words are said. The wreaths are placed. The hands are clasped. The wind subsides.

I stand at my daughter’s grave to the end, after everyone else has left to go back to the house.

It seems impossible that Léopoldine is in this box, in this hole in the ground, and that I will have to leave her here, cold and alone, for all eternity. I can’t believe it. I do believe it. I can’t believe it. And it is hard not to think that this is punishment, that I am being punished by God for my sin of adultery, that Léopoldine was sacrificed because I am a sinner. It is hard not to believe this is my fault.

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 swinging 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.

M
OTHER 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 each other 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.”

T
HE LAST TIME
I
SEE
V
ICTOR
it is by accident. In 1849, we are at the funeral of the once famous actress Marie Dorval, who has died rundown 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’s, 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 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 of 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. 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 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 Église 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 could 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 anymore. 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 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
A
DÈLE,
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 talk them out aloud. When the article is written, I have my secretary read it out to me so that 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.

My secretary leaves in the evenings, before my supper, and often I will walk out with him. We stroll through the Jardin du Luxembourg if the weather is good, tossing around ideas, detailing the tasks for the following day.

On the days when my routine unrolls without disturbance, I rise at five in the morning, shave without a mirror (so I do not have to look at myself), and don a dressing gown. I have become bald in my later years, and so I wear a black skullcap whenever I leave the house, and a black bandana inside the house. I wrap it around my head like a turban, and I must say that in that and my silk dressing gown, I look exactly like my mother. The resemblance is so striking that others have remarked on it as well.

I work from six to eight, and then I dress. If Adèle is awake, she will bring me a cup of chocolate and some bread. My secretary comes just after nine. At noon, I have some tea and brioche, most of which I feed to the cats. In the evenings, after my secretary has gone home, I have a supper of bread and cheese, soup, meat and vegetables. I mix my wine with water. Once in a while, I have a slice of almond cake that I buy from a baker on the rue de Fleurus.

Like my father, I write in the margins of my books. But where he used that space to carry on a conversation with the authors, I make notes that offer a shorthand interpretation of the text so that when I am looking for references, I can see, at a glance, whether there is something I will be able to use on that page.

As I have said, my work habits are orderly and comfortable. But that is not all that goes on in my house.

My cook, Adèle, is a drunk. It took me a while to discover this, and when I did, instead of being outraged at her behaviour and casting her out, I felt sorry for her and despaired that she would ever be able to find another situation, so I have kept her on. Sometimes she is so drunk that she forgets to make my supper, and when I go down to the kitchen to inquire politely as to its progress, I find her passed out at the table, snoring noisily, her head laid down on the bare wood.

She steals my wine. Once I caught her handing bottles of it through the kitchen window to one of her lovers, an omnibus conductor.

I must admit that I admire her unrepentance. On her good days, she fills my house with flowers from the market. She is nice to the cats. Sometimes she sings to them while she cooks. Whenever she returns from the market, they run downstairs to see what little tidbit she has brought for them.

If it were only Adèle in my house, I could probably weather her thieving and her drunkenness. But often there are prostitutes living with me as well. Sometimes there is just one, and sometimes as many as three. Don’t misunderstand—they are in my house not because I want them to service me, but rather because they have fallen on hard times and I feel pity for them. I want to offer them a harbour so they can shelter for a while before venturing back into their calamitous lives. It is Adèle who tells me of these unfortunates, brings them to my house on Montparnasse.

Adèle is one thing; the prostitutes are another. They usually drink. They often fight with one another. Instead of appreciating my kindness, they treat me as though I am an idiot for taking them in and rebuke me at every turn. One of them, a woman who was nicknamed the Penguin and had only one hand, was so rude to my guests that people stopped coming to my house. Even my secretary became nervous about entering. For the month she was there, I kept the Penguin confined to the downstairs. Even so, she would shout up through the floorboards, startling my visitors with her crudeness and insults. In the end, I couldn’t stand her behaviour and I sent her back to the streets, for which she seemed almost grateful.

I suppose I could take advantage of the prostitutes while they are in my house, but I’m always a little afraid of them, and I fear they would laugh at my body when it was revealed to them. I’ve always been a little afraid of prostitutes. I have sometimes hired one to undress for me, but I have never dared do more than fondle her. So I try to treat the women in my house as ladies, although they are always very suspicious of this and respond to my ministrations with open hostility. I have had saucepans hurled at me and vile abuse. My mother’s antiques have been broken. Anything valuable and small enough to carry has been stolen. Still, I persist. On Friday nights, I take them all to the theatre, in the vain hope that it will instil some artistic sensibility in them.