The Reinvention of Love (2 page)

I can’t breathe. I am starting to perspire. The glass of wine trembles in my hand.

“Charles?” says Victor. He looks over at me and I jerk my knee away from Adèle’s. The seating diagram jumps with the sudden movement.

“What?”

“Would you take my wife?”

“What?” My voice squeaks. I spill some wine on my shoe.

“To the theatre,” says Adèle, evenly. “He means, would you take me to the theatre?”

But the look that Victor gives me is a shrewd one. I know the man well enough to sense that he suspects something. We have not been as careful as we thought. The arrogance that snares all lovers has caught us up. He is testing me with his question.

“I’d be honoured,” I say, with as much aplomb as I can muster. But he is not fooled. He turns away, and he is not fooled.

We manage a moment in the upstairs hallway after Adèle has put the children to bed.

I put my hands in her hair. She buries her face in my neck.

“I love your perfume,” she says.

“I love you,” I say.

Downstairs I hear Victor bellow like a cow being slaughtered. He can be so loud, so coarse. I slide my hands down to Adèle’s breasts and give them a squeeze. She backs up against the wall and we press our bodies together.

“Leave him,” I whisper. “Come away with me. I can’t bear that we aren’t together.”

Adèle looks confused. We are, in fact, only a fraction of an inch apart.

“That we aren’t always together,” I say.

This is our sticking point. Even from his vile plays, Victor makes money. The Hugos are rich. Adèle has four children. I am a penniless critic, an unsuccessful poet.

But the depth of love that I offer Adèle is considerable, and so we sway together in the upstairs hallway of my best friend’s house, until little Adèle calls out in her sleep and the balance shifts away from me and back towards her family.

“Tomorrow,” she says. “We will walk out tomorrow. I will leave the children with my sister.” She kisses me, urgent and sweet, and then goes in to calm her youngest daughter.

Victor is still in the kitchen when I go downstairs. Theo and Luc have disappeared.

“Charles,” he says. “Come and sit with me.”

I do as he says, declining his offer of another glass of wine. The house is quiet now. I can hear the chatter of insects through the open window. A breeze carries the scent of roses into the room. I suddenly feel overwhelmed with hopelessness. Adèle will never leave her family. She will tire of me. I will always be lonely and alone.

“I heard you were in a duel this morning,” says Victor.

“Yes.” I wish I had thought to mention this to Adèle.

“Did you challenge?”

“No. It was a trifling matter,” I say. “An ongoing quarrel between me and the senior editor at the
Globe
.”

“Ah.” Victor spreads out his hands on the table, already bored by my troubles. “What do you think of
Hernani
?” The people who oppose his romantic play are getting under his skin, despite his noisy bravado.

“I have only seen it in rehearsal,” I say, honestly. “And a play can’t be properly judged from a rehearsal. The actors are always holding back.”

“Will you go this week?” asks Victor. “Will you tell me truly what you think of it?”

“I will.”

Victor clasps me to him as fiercely and as passionately as I had clasped Adèle to me in the upstairs hallway.

“You are such a friend to me, Charles,” he says. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Adèle surprises me at the gate. She is wearing white and looks ghostly among the dark trunks of the plane trees.

Every moment that I am in her company is glorious. I forget my despair in the kitchen. We love each other. It will end happily. How could it be otherwise?

“My darling,” she says, “Victor told me that you were in a duel. Were you nearly killed?” She is all shivery with the danger of it.

“The first shot grazed my temple,” I say, “and the second burned off the buttons on my waistcoat.” The lie is delicious and we both savour it for a full moment.

In fact, both of Pierre’s shots were wildly off their mark. One of my shots hit a tree. The other couldn’t even be found. Bernard had brought bread and cheese and jam, and when the rain stopped we all had a picnic under the trees before returning to the office.

“You must not die,” says Adèle. “I couldn’t live without you.”

“I won’t die,” I say, and I mean it.

She kisses me, a different kiss from the one she gave me in the house. This one has a note of desperation to it. This is the kiss for a lover who has almost met his mortal end. It has a mixture of surrender and commitment that I find intoxicating. The insects offer their applause. It strikes me that this is what I have always wanted, from myself, and from another. I want to give myself entirely. I want to pledge myself completely. I want a moment such as this one, a moment from which I might never fully recover.

IT IS MY FIRST SIGNIFICANT MEMORY,
a memory I have carried into adulthood, undisturbed and unquestioned. There is, in this memory, much of what I am experiencing now, as I look back on my life.

First, let me tell you about my beginnings, some sixty years ago.

I was born at 9 a.m. on December 23, 1804, at Boulognesur-Mer. My parents were old when they married – my father fifty-one, my mother over forty. I was their only child. In fact, my father died of the quinsy just before I was born. My cradle rested on a coffin.

My father was an official in the Customs and Excise department, but he had an interest in literature. I have his small library of books, most of them annotated heavily in the margins, as though he were deep in conversation with the authors. He was particularly fond of Virgil.

My mother was the daughter of mariners. I remember she used to sing me sea shanties to lull me into sleep.

I am my father – Charles. I am my mother – Augustin(e). But my mother never called me anything but my surname: Sainte-Beuve.

We lived quietly in Boulogne, my mother and I, in the lower town, mere steps from the busy harbour where my father used to work. When I was eighteen I left for Paris to attend medical school, and I took Mother with me. I have rarely returned to the town of my birth. The sea does not interest me, or haunt me. It is too vast. It is unknowable.

But this is not a memory of where I first lived. This is a memory of how, when I was six years old, I was taken to see the first Napoleon – Napoleon Bonaparte. My mother had dressed me in a little hussar uniform and I was walked up the hill that overlooked the town, to watch the great general review his troops.

He was a slight man, such as I used to be, but at the time he seemed magnificent and huge. I remember the flutter of his hands and the white mask of his face, the shiny gold buttons on his uniform, the silence of the soldiers as he paraded up and down in front of them. At one moment I was close enough to reach out and touch his coat-tails, but I did not dare.

I was raised by my elderly mother and her equally elderly sister. My nickname as a boy at school was “Pussy”. I lived in a house of women. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by Napoleon. He was a powerful man in charge of other men. He was what I imagined a father might be.

Four years later, when he met his defeat by the British at Waterloo, I cried myself to sleep in the cold darkness of my bedroom.

So this is what comes back to me all these years later – the brightness of the day on the hill, the excitement of being so near to greatness and glory, to a famous man I could reach out and touch if I wanted to; and then the tears and loneliness, the scratchy wool blanket on my cheek as I lay face down on my bed and sobbed for the man who had left me again.

There is something of Napoleon in Victor. The way he strutted up and down in his kitchen the night he had the seating plan for the Comédie-Française, reviewing his troops, planning his battle for control of the theatre.

Exultation and at the same time despair. That is what I felt with regard to Napoleon, what I have continued to feel all my life with regard to everything else.

There are so many memories from childhood. Why does one
stand out above all others? Perhaps because a few events are not particular to childhood, even though they occur there. Perhaps some memories are more a foretelling than the reminder of an event that belongs entirely in the past. Perhaps what we remember is merely a continuing truth about ourselves.

The story tastes of the man.

WHO SEES LOVE ARRIVING?
Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative, that they are almost invisible.

It is impossible to watch love arriving, but it is abundantly clear when it has arrived.

I remember the moment perfectly.

At first, when I visited the Hugos, I would make sure to go in the evening, when I knew that Victor would be home. In the early days, after I had reviewed his poems so favourably, after I had called him, in print, “a genius”, he had plenty of time for me. I would go to his house after supper and we would talk together long into the evening, about poetry and literature, about the passion we both felt for writing. Adèle was sometimes in the room, sitting sewing by the fire, often silent. Victor is prone to long monologues when he gets excited and though she would sometimes try to say a few words, to join our discussion, he would talk right over her.

He would do this with the children too, swat them away if he was busy proclaiming – but he would also, if he wasn’t occupied, bend down with them to examine an ant in the grass. It was then that I envied him, when he casually laid a hand on his son’s head, or looked with real interest at the drawing his daughter had brought to him. But he was cavalier with his family. He failed to recognize the gift they were and appreciated them only when it suited him.

One day I walked round after lunch to return a book I
had borrowed and I found Adèle alone with her young ones. She invited me to stay and I sat with her by the pond in the garden while the children buzzed around us. Without Victor’s presence, Adèle was more talkative, and I remember we had a very pleasant discussion about poetry. She invited me to come again, and so I started to visit in the afternoons when I knew Victor would be out, as well as in the evenings, when I knew Victor would be in.

Adèle and I sat in the drawing room, reading to each other, or walked out with the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was mere minutes away from her house. These were very pleasant excursions and I was content to cultivate my friendship with Madame Hugo at the same time that I was enjoying a friendship with her husband. I never thought of my relations with Adèle as anything other than chaste, until one day I came to her house in the afternoon and walked in to find her fixing the combs in her hair. She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren’t staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement – that soft tumble – softer than water falling from a fountain, that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adèle turned and saw me watching her, and it was as though we had just discovered each other for the first time. I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a place of propriety. I was undone. Nothing could be the same.

Later, we sat in the garden, side by side, watching the children play. Adèle was telling me a story about a ring her mother had given her that she always wore on her right hand. I asked to see the ring, thinking that she would allow me to hold her hand while I looked at it, but instead she removed it from her
finger and took my hand in her own. She slid the ring onto my finger. It fitted perfectly. We both looked down at it. After a few moments I took the ring off my finger and gave it back to her. She returned it to her own hand. We said not a word.

I lingered as long as I could that day, but I couldn’t bear to have Victor return while I was there, and so I left well before supper. Adèle walked me to the door, then to the front gate, then out to the pavement. I turned and waved when I was halfway home and she was still standing there, watching me walk down the street.

The next day I woke relieved that I had not declared myself. I valued my friendship with the Hugos and did not want it disturbed. I would simply live with my new feelings for Adèle. There was no need to tell her about them or acknowledge them in any way. Things would remain as they were.

But I could not concentrate on my work that morning, and the moment I knew that the Hugos would be finishing their noon meal, I was hurrying up their front walk.

I found Adèle alone in the drawing room, sitting with her hands folded on her lap, staring out the window. She leapt up when she saw me. I didn’t even have time to announce myself. She was at my side, her hand on my arm.

“The children have gone to the gardens with Victor,” she said. “We don’t have long.” She led me up the stairs and along the hallway towards the bedroom she shared with her youngest daughter, little Adèle.

It felt wrong to lie on the bed where she must have sometimes lingered with Victor, so we lay down on the carpet. The curtains lifted at the window. Adèle put her hands up to my face and traced my forehead, the bones around my eyes, the line from my nose down to my lips. I closed my eyes. I thought that I would die, or that I had already died. I am an ugly man. No one had ever touched me like that.

Adèle rolled on top of me. Her dress rustled like autumn
leaves. I could smell the dust in the carpet.

“My treasure,” she said. “My little one. I have been so lonely.” She kissed me. I opened my eyes.