The Reinvention of Love (30 page)
Adèle is rarely on time. It is always harder to escape from her life than she imagines it will be. One or other of the children has hurt himself and needs her maternal attentions. The person who has been pressed into looking after the children has not shown up at the correct hour. There is a shortage of cabs and she has to walk. When she is walking she trips over a piece of wood near the gutter and twists her ankle.
Whatever keeps Adèle from arriving means that I often spend a long while loitering outside the Hôtel Saint-Paul.
I walk up and down in front of the hotel. I stand against the wall, gazing fixedly at my shoes, much as the Virgin Mary does in her alcove in the church. If Adèle is taking an especially long time, I will cross the narrow street and wait there, where I have a good view of the front of the hotel, but I am not so obviously lurking.
Adèle arrives eventually and we clutch on to each other in the street, stagger up the steps and into the lobby of the hotel. We are always desperate to get to our room and the whole business of signing the register with false names seems designed as a torture to test our resolve. It always takes an infuriatingly long time to do such a simple thing as sign our names in a book.
Of course, everyone in the hotel employ knows why we’re there. No one is fooled by our pretence as man and wife. For honestly, what man and wife are so desperate to have each other in the middle of the afternoon?
None come to my mind.
These remembered afternoons in our room are a perfect
balance of the satisfactions of the flesh and the spirit and the mind. Because they are so perfect I feel inadequate describing them. There is nothing to hang on to, no sharp edges. Everything swims away from me. I cannot separate myself enough from this experience to capture it for someone else. I suppose this is what happiness is, a wholeness that cannot be pried apart. The more an experience can be fractured, perhaps, the more miserable the event.
It is a lie to say that I remember my mouth on Adèle’s skin, or how she tasted, or how her body closed around my hand when I was inside her. The feelings of those moments are gone forever. They were gone the instant after they happened.
So what am I remembering?
Perhaps I am not remembering; writing is not a memorial.
This is just what lives in me.
I walk through the streets of Paris. It is winter. A cold wind funnels down from the north. I have dressed inadequately. By the time I get to the asylum gate I am freezing. I should have taken a cab, I’m too old for this.
I ring the bell, stamp my feet, ring the bell again.
The attendant comes out of his hut and stands on the other side of the heavy iron gate, not bothering to open it.
We regard each other for a moment.
“I’ve come to see one of your inmates,” I say.
“Which one?”
“Adèle Hugo.”
The guard eyes me suspiciously. “It’s not the usual visiting hours,” he says.
I reach into my pocket for some coins, pass them through the bars of the gate. “For your trouble,” I say.
The asylum is a tumble of voices. It reminds me of the Académie française. A nun leads me up a stone staircase. “Her
father pays for her to have her own room,” she says. “Such a generous man.”
I say nothing. Little Adèle would never have been put into an asylum if her mother were still alive. This is Victor’s generosity. This is how Victor takes care of his children. He is still living in the Channel Islands, but he is as powerful as ever. I am not surprised that he has thought Adèle’s actions insane, that he has no sympathy for her obsession with Albert Pinson.
Love, to Victor, is insanity.
We stop before a locked door.
“I will wait outside,” says the nun. “Knock on the door when you are done.” She produces a large iron key from a belt around her waist and unlocks the door for me.
The room is small. There is a barred window at one end, a bed along the wall, a washbasin against the other wall. The sparse furnishings remind me of the Hôtel Saint-Paul and I have to work hard to suppress a memory of Adèle lying naked on the bed there.
Little Adèle resembles her mother. She has the same dark hair and strong features. She sits in a rocking chair by the window, her head bent over a book. She looks up when the door closes behind me.
“Adèle,” I say. “I am Charles. Your godfather.”
She stares at me blankly. I move towards her and she shrinks away.
“Keep to your side of the room,” she says.
I do.
“Charles,” I say again. “I used to come to your house. I knew you when you were a little girl. I was a friend to your mother.”
At the mention of her mother, Adèle’s face brightens. “Maman,” she says. “What will we do today, Maman?”
“I’ve brought you some things.” I carefully hand over a copy of
Livre d’amour
. “This is a book of my poetry. Some of the poems are about you.” As Adèle takes the volume, I see, on the
floor by her chair, a pile of small pieces of paper and the empty covers of another book.
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo.
“I look forward to them,” she says, quite lucidly, giving no clue as to whether she plans to read my poems or shred them.
“And I have this for you.” I reach into my coat pocket and bring out the square of lace, untie the ribbon and shake out the veil. “It was your mother’s. She gave it to me once. I wanted to bring it for you. I thought you should have it.”
Adèle takes the wedding veil, carefully examining the lacework with her long, slender fingers. She has her mother’s hands, but her concentrated gaze is entirely Victor’s. How could he ever have doubted that she was his?
Adèle arranges the veil over her head, making sure there is an equal length of lace hanging down both sides of her face.
“Am I pretty?”
“Very.”
My legs are tired from the walk and the climb up the asylum stairs. I have been trying to present a calm demeanour to Adèle, but I suddenly feel overwhelmed.
“May I sit?” I ask. “I have come a long way.”
Adèle waves a hand towards her single bed and I perch on the edge of it. I can feel the metal frame through the thin mattress.
“Is Maman coming soon?” she asks.
I don’t know what to say, so I lie. “Yes. Soon.”
“And are you really Charles?”
“Yes.”
Adèle closes her eyes and rocks in her chair for a moment. “Charles,” she says. “Charles is coming to see me. Let’s open the windows, children, so that I can hear his little footsteps on the pavement.” She opens her eyes, looks straight at me.
I think of myself hurrying towards the Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs, tripping over the cobblestones in my rush to get to Adèle. And I think of her waiting, perfectly still, by the open window in the drawing room, listening for the
slightest scuff of my shoes on the street.
I cannot help myself. I weep into my hands.
The rocking chair stops whispering against the floor. I hear
Adèle’s footsteps, then the creak of the bed frame as she sits down beside me. Her tentative hand finds mine.
“Will you take me to the orchard again?” she says. “As you did when I was a little girl?”
Her skin feels cool. I hold on to her hand like a drowning man.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course.”
I don’t know if this is possible, but I will try. I will talk to the matron on my way out, see if I can arrange this for the next time I come to visit Adèle.
“You remember the orchard?” I ask.
“You would sit with Maman,” says Adèle, “on the bench by the trees. Holding her hand, just like this. I would sit on the ground by your legs. And we were all very happy. The end.”
I walk home from the asylum through the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg. They are changing the way they grow the fruit here. The trees are now espaliered, each one trained carefully to grow its fruit in straight lines.
An apple tree lives roughly as long as a man. The trees that Adèle and I walked through are now nearing the end of their lives. They are twisted and gnarled, their leaves gone from the winter winds, their limbs crashed to the ground. The orchard is littered with these broken branches. The limbs of the old apple trees grow straight out, eventually becoming too heavy for the trunk to bear. They have dropped off and lie beneath the trees intact. It seems more like an amputation than a natural winnowing.
The new trees, with their perfect controlled shapes, grow among the old, wild trees.
The ground is cobbled with fallen fruit. But high up in one of the trees, high up in the branches, a single winter apple still clings tightly to the bough.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SAINTE-BEUVE
died on October 13, 1869 from complications following bladder surgery. The physical condition that defined his love affair with Adèle – first identified while he was at medical school, and later written about in his diaries – helped bring about his death.
Victor Hugo died on May 22, 1885, outliving both his sons by more than a decade. Adèle Hugo remained in the Paris asylum for over forty years, dying there, at the age of eighty-five, in 1915, the last surviving child of Victor and Adèle.
With few exceptions the events in my novel mirror actual events. Where possible I have used the words of Sainte-Beuve, Adèle, and George Sand.
Of the many original and secondary sources that were used in the writing of this book, I would like to especially acknowledge Harold Nicolson’s biography,
Sainte-Beuve
, and I express my gratitude to the archivists at Princeton University for allowing me access to the notes he made while at work on this book.
PICTURE CREDITS
Charles Sainte-Beuve, c.1848. Getty Images, Hulton Archive
Victor Hugo, c.1829. Photographed by Paul Gavarni, The Bridgeman Art Library
Madame Victor Hugo. Portrait by Louis Boulanger, Lebrecht Arts & Music
Notre-Dame, Paris, 1865. Getty Images, Science & Society Picture Library
