I worried sometimes that she was reacting to the turbulence in her environment, that it unsettled her to be yanked from place to place. I had hoped that someone so young would readily adapt to what I thought of as an ideal lifestyle. Casimir loved Solange, I loved her, and Jules did, too. Working together, could we adults not make for seamless transitions? Could we not all share in her upbringing in ways that would enhance rather than detract from her life?
One night, shortly after we’d arrived in Paris and I had tucked her in for sleep on the sofa, I asked her, “Are you happy, my sweet?”
She nodded.
“I am as well. I have dreamed for so long of having you here with me. And you know that Jules loves you too, don’t you?”
A smile, and then another nod.
“Is it not wonderful that we all are friends: Papa, me, Jules, and you?”
“Yes,” she said. “But when will Papa come to live here, too?”
It was a three-year-old who revealed my faulty thinking, who exposed my hypocrisy and naïveté, though I could not quite so easily admit to that at the time. The mind has a way of protecting the heart, of turning one’s gaze in a certain direction, away from what it should focus on. One resists admitting to a failure when the consequences of doing so can be so devastating. My only certainty was that I had gone ahead with my plan to leave my husband and to have my daughter with me, and now here we all were.
Eventually it was clear that my dream of having Solange with me was not working out. I endeavored to entertain her, I took her daily for walks in the park and played games with her, but she was bored and restless and, finally, whiny and complaining and insolent nearly all the time.
She liked the bouquets I kept on my desk, and when I once presented her with the same flowers to keep at her bedside, she immediately pulled every petal off every stem. When I took her out for walks, she would often refuse to walk home, and I had to carry her for long distances while she kicked her feet hard against me.
I was finally rescued by a neighbor woman, who brought Solange over to play with other children in her apartment every day and returned her to me in late afternoon. This neighbor reluctantly confided that Solange did not do well playing with others. She would not share toys, and she seemed to delight in making the other children cry. Embarrassed, I said that I would keep her at home, but the neighbor, who was extremely kind and loved children, said no, she would continue to take her. Solange would get better, she said, though I never saw evidence of that.
Then problems with Jules began. He went from affectionate lover to uncommunicative depressive. All my efforts to ferret out the reason were rebuffed. Concerned, I met with some of his friends at a café to talk about it. “What ever do you think is wrong?” I asked. One of them looked level-eyed at me to say, “Can you not see it? Your success has emasculated him.”
That night, as we lay together in bed, I said, “Jules, is this not what we wanted, a literary life for both of us? We had success together for Rose et Blanche; now I have successfully published my own novel. We should both be grateful for how well it has done. You should be not mired in despair but eagerly working on your own book, which has every chance of doing just as well!”
Privately, I doubted that his work would enjoy as much success as mine had, but then I also doubted that my next book would be as successful as Indiana had been. That novel had been a kind of miracle. Sometimes, sitting alone and trying to realize all that had happened, I saw my good fortune as a benevolent gesture from above, proof that God approved of the choices I had made and was aiding me in my quest to realize my potential. No matter what others might say about my mannerisms or morals, I had my own idea of and relationship to God, and it offered me both peace and direction.
I asked Jules, “Can you tell me why my success has made you doubt your own abilities? What do they have to do with one another?”
He sat up in bed and exploded: “Anyone but you would understand this! You, who claim such sensitivity and perceptive abilities, how can you not recognize the way all of this has been a blow to my ability to work? People constantly coming to the door, and when they are not coming, the relentless scritch, scritch, scritch of your quill! You never stop! You are a writing machine!”
He lay back down, exhausted.
A few leaden moments passed. Then I said, “I shall rent you a room. You can write there. Would that suffice?” I did not remind him that he had had difficulties with his job at Le Figaro long before my success. Nor did I remind him that the article for which he’d been most highly praised was in fact a collaboration between the two of us. Jules was a good enough writer, but he was perceived by many as a peevish sort of fellow, one given to a great deal of selfpity. Our friend Duvernet said that he was “a dry creature, eaten up by petty vanities and foolish ambitions.”
But I still very much loved Jules. I was still grateful to him for having changed me from someone who dreaded the future to someone who looked forward to it. And however tangential his help and influence were on my career, he had been part of my becoming the author I now was. One had to forgive him his moods for the times when he was loving and generous and gay. In this, he was much like my mother.
After a long moment of silence, Jules spoke, in a voice devoid of the high emotion he had just displayed. He said quietly, “George, I need to go away. While you are at Nohant, I shall go to visit my parents. As for a room for me…yes. I think it would help. And after I have finished my own novel and received the advance, I shall pay you back whatever you have spent on my behalf.”
After he fell asleep, I lay awake beside him. Then I went to the living room, where Solange lay sleeping on the sofa. I rested my hand upon her small back. I thought about how, lately, Casimir had been so pleasant to me. I thought of how, when he came to Paris when I was there, he took me to dinner and to the theater. I thought of how he did not resent my success at all. Why was that? Because he was not with me any longer?
Solange awakened. “Maman?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I am here.” I sat beside her until her breathing grew deep and even. And then I tiptoed back to the bedroom. A headache was beginning; I hoped it would be gone by morning.
Winter 1813
RUE NEUVE-DES-MATHURINS
PARIS
By the time I was nine years old, my grandmother and I had returned to living in her apartment in Paris for the winter. My mother would come to fetch me and we would go on outings: to the Chinese Baths, for walks along the Seine, to select a sweet from a store where condensation clouded the glass. On Sundays, she brought me to the tiny, low-ceilinged apartment where she and my half sister, Caroline, now lived. The place reminded me of our old garret apartment, where I’d recited my first stories to my mother.
I was struck, particularly as I grew older, by the disparity between the two environments where I spent my time as a child in Paris. In my grandmother’s spacious and exquisitely appointed apartment, one might enjoy a game of catch, should one be permitted such a thing in a place with silk damask wall coverings, crystal and silver at the table, and antiques—which, though much admired, did not invite touch or provide comfort the way my mother’s much humbler furnishings did. The truth is, I preferred my mother’s home always, though its cramped quarters meant that one scarcely had to rise from one’s seat at the kitchen table to help oneself to the rabbit stew on the stove.
My mother did not have the means for the elaborate bouquets that graced the homes of the rich, and so she made cunning paper-flower bouquets, complete with stamens so delicate that they trembled in the heat waves from the fireplace. The dishes we ate from were not translucent china but, rather, the heavy white plates common in less expensive cafés. Still, the food served on them was prepared by my mother, and I believed then, as I do now, that it makes a difference in taste when one’s thoughts and feelings and hands are employed in what one serves.
One relaxed at my mother’s table. One shared stories, one laughed helplessly, one was entertained in
a satisfying way that lifted one’s spirits. Most important, my mother welcomed friends and strangers alike to her table. If you came home with someone you had just met on the street, she would share what she had with them, showing them the same face no matter who they were or where they came from. Her belief was this: No matter their station in life, people were united by virtue of their humanity. “We all rise to the same sun and sleep beneath the same moon,” she often told me. Only if someone was false or haughty or superior did she display her caustic side to them.
A belief in everyone’s equality may have been held in theory by my grandmother, but she failed to demonstrate any adherence in practice. Caroline was still never allowed at Nohant. And then came the day when, at fourteen years old, she tried to visit me at my grandmother’s apartment in Paris.
I was in my room when I heard a knock at the door, then a girl’s voice speaking. I recognized my sister, I heard my name, but I could not make out the rest of what she was saying.
But the response of my grandmother’s maid was all too clear: “That may be so, but I cannot permit you to come in. Run along now.”
Again my sister’s voice, quieter now, pleading.
“I have told you, you are not allowed in here! Go home! And do not return! If you want to see your sister, it will have to be elsewhere. You are not welcome here!”
Then I heard the sound of the door slamming and the maid’s rapid footsteps down the hall.
I saw Caroline infrequently enough that I did not really know her; but that day, when I heard her heart-rending sobs on the way down the stairs from my grandmother’s apartment, I became very distraught. I thought of her pretty face and of her sweetness and her patience with me. We played string games and dolls and hide-and-seek, and we often locked arms and sat back to back, rocking faster and faster until we tumbled over, laughing.
I relished the feeling of a special inclusion I felt around Caroline, knowing that she had the same mother and had known my father. It was sisterhood, that was all—a common enough feeling but one that was offered and then taken away from me so often that it had become rarefied in my eyes. Our lives meant that we usually lived in separate places, but Caroline always did her part to try to stay close.
I thought about how she must have made the journey to see me with such high hopes, only to be humiliated. I wept so hard I vomited, and I vomited so much I began to cough up blood. My grandmother’s reaction to all this was to blame poor Caroline for upsetting our home’s peace and quiet with her unnecessary “demands” to see me. Sorrow and fury vied for the upper hand in me that night, as I thought about how my mother would have embraced Caroline when she heard the story, and that into her eyes would have come a steely hatred. I feared that her disdain would not be for my grandmother alone but would transfer over to me as well, for how was she to know that I was not a willing participant in this awful rejection of her older daughter?
The millinery shop my mother had envisioned as a way to keep us together had not yet come into being, and I feared it never would. I had not become resigned to living apart from my mother, as she had hoped I would; rather, I missed her continuously. Now I vowed to do my part to make it possible for us to live together again.
At Nohant, in my mother’s bedroom, was a corner cabinet. Shortly after she left, I had begun collecting things I thought I could sell in order to pay my way from Nohant to Paris. I intended to walk to the city, but I would need money for food and lodging along the way. At first I collected quite avidly: into a far corner of the cabinet I put a yellow amber necklace my mother had given me—a gift from my father to her when he had been stationed in Italy. I had also hidden a comb decorated with coral, and a ring with a very small diamond, from my grandmother.
After my mother left for good and her visits, then even her letters, began to taper off, I had stopped collecting. I did check often on my holdings, though, fearful that someone might stumble upon them and realize I had plans to run away. Now I resolved to begin my collecting again, as soon as we returned to Nohant.
—
WE HAD BEEN BACK in the country just a little more than a week when my grandmother fell seriously ill. We were sitting at dinner when she had an episode involving a kind of paralysis that lasted in excess of an hour. Deschartres was greatly alarmed and carried her to her bed, where he sat beside her all night.
The next morning, I saw her lying there, pale and silent. My heart opened to the old woman, and I abandoned my plans to leave Nohant, at least for now.
I knew that my grandmother had tried hard to offer me what she thought were the best things, both in the way of material goods and in my education. She had never spoken rudely to me, and she had made a great fuss over my talents and my precocity. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have become less and less interested in me. My grandmother’s illness served as a catalyst for my looking at things in the cold light of reason, and I had to admit it made no sense for me to run from the one who cared most for me.
Life went on for me there. And on.
August 1832
NOHANT
Solange and I left Paris to return to Nohant. Maurice stayed in the city with his father so that he could visit Henri IV military academy in advance of his attending that fall. Though my daughter seemed to have no difficulty transitioning back to life in the country, it took me a couple of weeks to settle into the routine at Nohant, to calm myself from the chaotic pace I was used to.
As ever, I found the estate to be full of delights. In the morning, larks awakened me with their cascading songs, and swallows swooped dramatically in their aerial feeding. In the afternoon, I made picnic lunches for Solange and me to eat on the stone bench outside. We watched the bees gathering nectar from a garden full of flowers whose scent filled the air. There were beautiful yellow-and-black-striped butterflies that often alighted on Solange’s knee or hand, and I had to watch her lest she try to pull their wings off.
Each evening after I put my daughter to bed, I took walks outside alone and beheld the glittering stars, which were mostly obscured in the city. I listened to the sounds of the animals moving about in the underbrush of the forest, and to the hooting of the owls. On hot nights, I went to the river to bathe in the dark water.
Every few days, I took Solange out for expeditions to the woods and along the banks of the river to show her the pink and white stars of anemones amid the blue periwinkles. We stood together before berry bushes, plucking off the warm fruit and eating it. I taught her the names of the birds that came to Nohant and told her about her great-grandfather, how he had also loved birds, and how I believed he had passed on to me the ability to charm them onto my finger.
There was more to Nohant than bucolic pleasure, however. There were servants to mind, and many details I didn’t want to attend to regarding things I didn’t care about. When would madame like her breakfast served? Her dinner? There were menus to be approved, selections of linens, the placements of bouquets, guest lists to be made for obligatory dinners, accounting to be dealt with in my husband’s absence. Finally, though, all was peaceful. Solange seemed content, and the house was running on its own.
I began working in earnest on my second novel, Valentine. I wrote even more feverishly than I had in Paris; oftentimes, I awakened with my head on my desk, the quill in my hand. The work was thrilling, all-consuming.
“Maman, stop working!” Solange would say sometimes, bursting into my room and pulling me out of the drama of a female aristocrat in love with a peasant, and into the world of a little girl. But I enjoyed that, too. If my vivid imagination served me well on the page, it also helped me become a most excellent partner in games with Solange. She remained difficult, in her way, but we often laughed ourselves breathless, and she would pat my arm and say, “You are a good maman.”
When Casimir brought Maurice back to Nohant, I exulted in the presence of my little man. I was also grateful for the fact that now that Casimir was here, I could work all through the night. I started at seven in
the evening and wrote until six in the morning. I went to sleep when Casimir awakened; and this seemed to suit both of us.
I received letters from Jules, back again in Paris and, in my absence, living in the room I had rented for him. In one letter, he told me how much he missed me, how anxious he was for my return to our cozy garret in the fall, where I would once again cook for him the rich stews he favored. Reading the letter made me miss Paris: the theater and the opera, the cafés, even the pigeons who huddled together under the arches of the Pont Neuf. And Jules himself, of course: I missed him most of all. I thought of him arguing playfully with our friends, standing there in his tattered frock coat, his cravat so far off to the side it was nearly under his ear. I thought of our coupling at night, how I would run my hands up and down the long line of his back, how he sometimes kissed me so deeply it felt as though he were transferring the essence of himself into me. I thought of how I watched him in sleep, the beating of his heart steady in his throat. I saw us at breakfast with our bowl-sized cups of coffee, talking excitedly about all we meant to do that day.
I decided to take a spontaneous trip to Paris by myself, telling Casimir that I needed to attend to some details for Le Figaro. Jules and I would have some time together, and the visit would hold us until we could be together again.
When I arrived in Paris, I went to Jules’s room, and had hardly set my valise down before we enjoyed an intense session of lovemaking. The next day, I went out so as to give Jules time alone to write. I came back earlier than we had agreed upon, thinking that I could quietly read the book I’d just purchased and then, when he had finished work for the day, we would go to a restaurant for dinner.
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