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The Poetic Voice of Charles Sainte-Beuve

An Essay by Helen Humphreys

Charles Sainte-Beuve wanted to be a great poet, but despite his best efforts, this dream never properly materialized. The little volume that he wrote about his affair with Adèle Hugo,
Livre d’amour
, became moderately famous after it was published because of the scandal attached to his writing so boldly about the affair, not because of the literary merits of the poems themselves.

This book was the starting point for thinking about my own novel. I was lucky enough to find an unread copy—pages still uncut—through a Parisian bookseller, and I spent a winter reading the poems and loosely translating them into English. Even with my rather weak French, I was able to get a real feel for Sainte-Beuve’s voice, and it was this voice that propelled me forward into my novel.

“I was lucky enough to find an unread copy—pages still uncut—through a Parisian bookseller, and I spent a winter reading the poems.”

Charles Sainte-Beuve was a man of devotion rather than a man of action, and this character trait made him look to the past instead of to the future. His poetry was in service to other, older poetry that he admired, and this is one of the reasons, I think, why he did not achieve the popularity he so desperately wanted. Many of his contemporaries were embracing new subjects and forms in their poetry, while he was aligning his work with what already existed. While his passion for literature inspired younger writers such as Matthew Arnold, his poems were discounted, both in his own lifetime and in ours, as being old-fashioned.

But what I like about Sainte-Beuve’s poems is the voice of the man—–a voice that is emotional and mockingly self-aware. I find this voice to be more contemporary than those of some of his peers who were a great deal more famous in their time, including Victor Hugo himself. Sainte-Beuve was at his best when he was in service to a higher purpose—to his love for Adèle, or to the great writers who had come before him. When he was in an attitude of devotion, he could keep his troublesome boastfulness in check, and his wit and honesty could take centre stage.

“Sainte-Beuve was at his best when he was in service to a higher purpose—to his love for Adèle, or to the great writers who had come before him.”

The following is my favourite among the poems I translated, even though it came with the fussy instruction “To be read while listening to the music of Gluck” (in particular the score of the opera
Orphée et Eurydice
). I like the sentiment and the refrain, and Sainte-Beuve’s way of looking at human despair through identification with the natural world. It is not a bad poem at all, and in some ways, like much of Sainte-Beuve’s writing, I think it is better in our time than his. He benefits from being read by people who didn’t know him personally and who weren’t judging him harshly for his affair with Adèle Hugo or his compunction to write about it afterwards.

Leave me! All has fled. The spring starts again
.
The summer becomes animated, and desire has found me
.
The furrows and the hearts agitate their seed
.
Leave me! All has fled
.

Leave me! In our fields, the solitary rocks
,
The thick wood calls to my troubles
.
I want, at the edge of the lake, to contemplate its mystery
,
And how all has fled me
.

Let me be lost with the city crowd
.
I love these people and their delighted noise;
It doubles the sadness of my exiled heart
,
And for which all has fled
.

Leave me! Midday reigns, and the sun without
Relief has dazzled my eye
.
Leave me! It is the evening, and the hour of the stars:
What hope? All has fled
.

Oh! Leave me, without comfort, to tend my wounds
,
I like my suffering and want its company
.
That in which I believed, that which tasted of me …
Leave me! All has fled!

Sainte-Beuve’s Paris

An Essay by Helen Humphreys

One of the most exciting parts of researching
The Reinvention of Love
was travelling to Paris to see where Charles Sainte-Beuve had lived and worked and loved. Because Paris hadn’t been bombed during the Second World War, not only was everything still standing, but also some of the buildings were more or less in the same state that they had been in almost two hundred years earlier. In fact, the hotel where Charles and Adèle used to meet to have sex is still the same kind of cheap hotel it was in 1836.

I stayed around the corner from where Sainte-Beuve had lived on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I walked his routes, timing how long it took to get to his various locales: the Luxembourg Gardens, the church where he would rendezvous with Adèle, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Victor Hugo’s house, the Magny restaurant. I spent a week on the Left Bank and then a week on the Right Bank visiting Victor Hugo’s apartment in Place des Vosges, the Comédie-Française, and Sainte-Beuve’s quarters in the Hôtel de Rouen.

“I stayed around the corner from where Sainte-Beuve had lived. I walked his routes, timing how long it took to get to his various locales.”

Some things, of course, were a great deal changed. Paris is much larger in the twenty-first century than it was in the nineteenth. And it has cars, which change everything about the way a city is used. Sainte-Beuve’s Paris had a labyrinth of twisty alleys, sewage running in the streets, plagues, and riots; but it also had more greenery, birds other than sparrows, silence, and true darkness. Even though many of the buildings were original to Sainte-Beuve’s time, what surrounded them had altered utterly, and I had to use all of my powers of imagination when I stood in front of Sainte-Beuve’s house on rue de Montparnasse to try and block out the car exhaust, the constant traffic noise, the drone of the planes overhead, and to think of him living there, sitting at his desk quietly upstairs above a lush and fragrant garden humming with bees.

“I could stand at the window, looking down into Place des Vosges … and imagine Adèle leaning her forehead against the glass.”

The past is not unreachable, but real glimpses of it are almost impossible. I came closest in Victor Hugo’s apartment in Place des Vosges, where the interior had been preserved from the days when Victor and Adèle resided there. I could wander through the rooms, over the worn wooden floors, and imagine Victor striding across them, his energy barely contained within his brisk movements. I could stand at the window, looking down onto Place des Vosges, itself very little changed since Hugo’s time, and imagine Adèle leaning her forehead against the glass, gazing down onto the same square of grass and trees, the same strict lines of brick apartment fronts and roads. Because the people I was writing about were real, it helped to be where they had been, to occupy, even for a few days, the geography of their lives.

The last place I went to visit in Paris was the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Sainte-Beuve is buried. There is a sculpture on his grave, atop a large plinth. The sculpture is of his head, and his dead stone face is twisted and ugly. (There is a much gentler, more pleasing study of his head in the Luxembourg Gardens.) There are many famous Parisians (and others) buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Émile Durkheim, Jean Seberg, Susan Sontag, Chaim Soutine—and their graves are covered with admirers’ mementos and flowers.

There was nothing on Sainte-Beuve’s grave. I took some photographs. I left him some roses.

“There was nothing on Sainte-Beuve’s grave.”

Book Club Questions

In what ways did Charles and Adèle “reinvent” love?

How were Charles and Adèle each constrained by gender or sexuality? In what ways might each have seemed to the other to be the one with more freedom?

What scenes do you feel most vividly capture the sensuality of their relationship?

How did the various settings in this novel—Paris, the Channel Islands, and Halifax—contribute to the story?

Charles’s and Victor’s interactions—as friends, colleagues, and lovers of the same woman—were complex and surprising. Can you imagine a similar scenario between two men today?

In the end, is the story of Charles and Adèle a great love story or a great tragedy?

With which of the main characters in
The Reinvention of Love
would you most like to sit down and chat?

Read On: Suggested Reading and Listening

Volupté: The Sensual Man
by Charles Sainte-Beuve, translated by Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Sainte-Beuve’s controversial novel is about his affair with Adèle Hugo.

Adèle Hugo: La Misérable
by Leslie Smith Dow

This book tells the tragic story of Adèle (Dédé), daughter of Victor and Adèle Hugo, who travelled to Halifax and then to Barbados in pursuit of a sailor who did not return her love.

Sainte-Beuve
by Harold Nicolson

The best biography of Sainte-Beuve, in my opinion. This is an excellent examination of the man’s life and work.

“Sainte-Beuve” by Augustine Birrell: readbookonline.net/readOnLine/62554/

In this great essay, Birrell talks about Sainte-Beuve’s criticism and also describes his writing methods.

The Baroness
by Sarah Slean (CD released March 11, 2008, on the WEA label)

Slean, a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and occasional actress, composed these songs when she was living in Paris, and I listened to this disc almost exclusively while writing the first draft of
The Reinvention of Love
. (I also listened to a lot of Chopin.)

Web Detective

www.victorhugo.gg

All about Victor Hugo’s time on Guernsey, this website features excellent images of Hauteville House and a history of the Hugos’ time on the Channel Islands.

www.pariscemeteries.com/pagemap/montparmap.html

On this map of Montparnasse Cemetery, you’ll find the location of the graves of various famous authors, musicians, and artists.

www.historywalksparis.com/19_walk.html

History Walks Paris features self-guided walking tours of the old city, with detailed maps and guides.

www.halifaxpubliclibraries.ca/research/topics/local-history-genealogy/literary-walking-tour/tour-stop-15.html

This Halifax walking tour includes the story of Adèle and Victor’s daughter Adèle (Dédé), and it points out the hotel where she lived while she was in pursuit of Albert Pinson.

www.archive.org/stream/Hernani/hernani_djvu.txt

On this site, read an English translation of Victor Hugo’s play
Hernani
.

Copyright

The Reinvention of Love
Copyright © 2011 by Helen Humphreys.
P.S. section © 2012 by Helen Humphreys.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40917-9

A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
in a hardcover edition: 2011
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2012

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Humphreys, Helen, 1961–
The reinvention of love : a novel / Helen Humphreys.
“A Phyllis Bruce Book”.

ISBN 978-1-55468-444-1

1. Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 1804–1869—Fiction.
2. Hugo, Victor, 1802–1885—Fiction. 3. Hugo, Adèle, 1806–1868—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8565.U558R45 2012 C813’.54 C2012-903356-1

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Author

HELEN HUMPHREYS is an acclaimed author of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Her last novel,
Coventry
, was a
New York Times
Editors’ Choice, a
Globe and Mail
Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. She won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for
Afterimage
and the Toronto Book Award for
Leaving Earth
, and
The Lost Garden
was a Canada Reads selection.
The Reinvention of Love
has been shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction. In 2009, Humphreys was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence. She lives in Kingston, Ontario. Visit her online at
hhumphreys.com
.