“Poor Charles,” she says. “No wonder you mourn the loss of Adèle.”
It is a relief to confide in someone, but it does not really change anything fundamental. I still suffer because of my strange body. I still fear that I will never find another lover. And there is a limit to what someone can understand from the outside. I remain as alone as ever inside my skin.
I DO REMEMBER GEORGE in love again, years later. I remember sitting with her and the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin in the Jardin du Luxembourg. It is spring. We are sitting on chairs in the sun near the orchard where Adèle and I used to walk so long ago. Frédéric and George are lovers. I have come to meet them, to walk out with them, but as Chopin is sickly and tires easily, we have settled on these chairs in the spring sun so he can rest.
For a while we talk, and then we don’t, just listen to the wind in the trees overhead. Chopin coughs occasionally, a sharp retort, like a rifle. The wind drags the branches of the trees across the blue patch of sky. The noise is like the sea on the shingle, a noise I remember from my childhood.
My memories, as I write this down, are often out of sequence, out of time. It does not matter to me that events have slipped their chronology. There is a natural order to things, and I am following that now. Recollection is exactly that, a re-collection. And so I have added this later memory of George and Frédéric because it belongs to the group of memories that encompass my friendship with her.
By the time we sat together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, George and I had known each other a long time. Our companionship was an easy one. Old friends are as easy with each other as new lovers.
The wind in the trees was the whisper of water on stone. It was the breath of blood in the veins. It was a place where two novelists—George and I—felt perfectly comfortable. A place we had worked hard to get to—in our individual work, and in our friendship. A place entirely without words.
VICTOR HAS A LOVER. She is an actress. Her name is Juliette Drouet, and Victor met her when she was playing the part of Princess Négroni in his play Lucrèce Borgia.
I did not get this information from Adèle, whom I still have not seen since I went into hiding, but from George Sand, who says it is the talk of Paris. She tells me that Juliette has become Victor’s mistress, and that they are very much in love. No mention of my Adèle and how she must be feeling about this. But I can guess that she will not be happy, and I can hope that this new situation might inspire her to finally leave her husband and be with me.
It is too late to see Juliette Drouet in Lucrèce Borgia, but Victor, who is alarmingly prolific these days, has written a new play, Marie Tudor, in which his mistress appears with Mademoiselle George, the famous actress who was once the mistress of Napoleon.
I buy a ticket for opening night.
It is hard not to think of that other night, it seems like ages ago now, when Adèle and I went to see Hernani at the same theatre. How excited I was, setting out on that evening’s adventure. How my hands shook as I shaved and dressed in anticipation of seeing my beloved.
Now I shave and dress slowly, sluggishly, in my little room at the top of the Hôtel de Rouen. The Hotel of Ruin. There is nothing to hurry my heart along the streets to the Comédie-Française. Nothing to spark my blood as I squeeze along the row and take my seat in the middle of the first balcony. Adèle is not beside me, and although I scan the seats in front of me and down in the dress circle, I do not see her. Why would she come to see her husband’s mistress on the stage? But I look for her anyway. It is a force of habit at this point, to look for her, to hope she is nearby.
Marie Tudor is a play about the British monarchy. There are only three characters: Queen Mary of England; Lady Jane Grey, who was queen for just nine days; and the executioner who beheads her. Juliette Drouet plays Lady Jane, and it is clear from the first few moments she is on stage that she is not a good actress. She mumbles her lines and keeps her head bowed, as though she’s looking for something she has accidentally dropped on the floor of the stage. It doesn’t help her cause that Mademoiselle George, despite being a woman of middle years, is still vibrant and beautiful and such a magnificent actress. I almost feel sorry for the hapless Juliette. But then I remember Adèle and take delight in the bad performance, and in the hisses the audience delivers to the young woman.
Victor is in the lobby after the play is over. He is blocking my route to the door, and so I slink behind a pillar and wait for him to leave. But he seems intent on talking to the audience members as they exit the theatre, scanning the crowd for important people. I can only hide behind the pillar for so long. I am getting looks for my skulking behaviour.
“Charles.” He sees me immediately.
“Victor.”
He is still compact and sprightly, always looking so ridiculously healthy that I feel like an invalid in comparison.
“What did you think?” he asks.
There is no point in hiding my honesty. There is nothing left of our friendship to protect.
“Lady Jane was dreadful,” I say, and I watch as the slightest ripple of pain washes over his face. To someone who didn’t know the man, it would not even have been noticeable. I admire his professionalism.
“Ah. Well, yes. I think she might be retiring after this performance.”
“Won’t that affect your relations with her?”
“Not at all, Charles. Not at all.” Victor looks almost sorry for me, and I hate him in the moment. “How have you been, my old friend? You do not look well. I hear you have been on the run from the Garde nationale.”
“I am quite well,” I say, but I do not feel that this is entirely true. “And although I am in hiding, my life is otherwise unaffected.”
“Really?” Victor regards me quizzically, and I have the sense that he knows Adèle no longer meets with me, that he possesses more information about our affair than I do. “Surely being in hiding would change everything about your life.”
It is not a question. Once again, as always in our friendship, Victor has simply pronounced, and there is no arguing with his version of reality. And just as I always do when Victor disregards my feelings, I offer up something else for him to savage instead of defending myself.
“I’m writing a novel,” I say.
“What about?”
“Love.”
“That’s a very ambitious subject.”
We are an island amid the sea of people leaving the theatre, and we are buffeted by the departing audience. Victor grabs my shoulder to stop his drift away from me. For a moment we look into each other’s eyes, without rancour or pretence or boastfulness. I recognize my old friend, and I see something else in his face. I see his happiness. Juliette Drouet may be a bad actress, but she is undoubtedly a good lover. She has made the great poet very happy.
“Come and see me, Charles,” says Victor. “Let us talk more about your novel.” For a brief moment it is as it always was between us, as though Victor has forgotten what happened to our friendship, or forgiven it. But then he remembers my trespasses, drops his hand from my shoulder, and moves away from me, towards the lobby doors. “Yes,” he says, “come and visit us soon. My wife often asks what has become of you.”
I DO NOT GO to see Victor. Adèle comes to see me. Madame Ladame delivers the message with my morning coffee. A hastily scribbled note from my beloved, asking me to meet her in the Jardin du Luxembourg at noon.
Who sees love arriving? Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative that they almost seem to be invisible.
Who sees love arriving—but who doesn’t see it leaving?
Adèle is waiting for me when I arrive at the gardens. She is pacing among the statuary, staring at the ground, in much the same way Victor’s mistress was studying the stage floor the night I went to see her disastrous performance in Marie Tudor.
I am almost upon Adèle before she notices me. She stops. I stop. It is so long since we’ve seen each other that all the old endear
ments wither on my tongue.
“Charles,” she says, “you’ve come.”
“Of course.”
She holds out her hand and I take it shyly.
“Walk with me,” she says. “I am too restless to sit.”
It is a cool afternoon. The sun disappears behind clouds, peeks out again. Because it isn’t a fine day, we might be the only people in the orchard. Adèle and I walk along the gravel paths, past the ornamental maze, towards the orchard.
“Victor has a mistress,” says Adèle.
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“It is the talk of Paris.” I decide not to mention going to see Juliette Drouet in Victor’s play.
Adèle stops me with a hand on my arm. “Do you think we were ever the talk of Paris?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. Probably not. I don’t think we’re as …” I search for the right word. “We’re not as blatant as Victor.”
“Boastful, you mean.”
“Confident,” I say. “We’re not as confident as Victor.”
We reach the orchard. I look at the tags on the apple trees without comment. Our game belonged to those halcyon days before I told Victor of my affair with Adèle. There’s no point in even mentioning the apple names now. We walk past the Great Unknown. Both of us look at it, and both of us look away.
“Is that it?” I ask Adèle. “Is that why you haven’t come to see me, or sent word of how you are? Is that why you’re so agitated now?”
Adèle stops on the path. “Victor’s mistress is retaliation for my affair,” she says. “But it’s made him happy.”
“Happier than we were?”
“Were?”
“You haven’t come to see me, Adèle.” I don’t mean to, but I sound as petulant as a child. “I have nothing but memories these days.”
“Isn’t that what we’re left with in the end anyway?”
“No.” I think of my morning routine in the Hôtel de Rouen, the comfort ritual bestows. “We could have a life together reinforced with small gestures, kindness, and tenderness. We could have a life of shared experiences.”
“Could we?” Adèle puts her hand on my arm. “I’ve given you nothing but scraps, Charles.”
But they were beautiful scraps. They were scraps made from the finest lace. I think of her wedding veil, folded and tied with ribbon, kept in my desk drawer with her letters.
There was a time when I would have buried my hands in Adèle’s hair, when I would have begged her to come away with me, but something has happened to me in her absence. I have spent months in solitary confinement, writing my novel. My thoughts have become solitary thoughts, my movements solitary movements. I have been writing about my love for Adèle, and perhaps, in some strange way, the writing has replaced the actual love.
“You can’t do this anymore.” I say it for her.
“No. I can’t do it anymore.”
The sun goes behind a cloud (how appropriate) and the air blows cold across my skin. Adèle’s hand on my arm feels heavy, and I want to throw it off, throw her off and storm down the path, disappear into the trees. But I understand everything. I am weary with the burden of understanding everything.
“It’s not fair to you,” says Adèle. “You could marry.”
“Please,” I say, to stop her from continuing along this line. I am an ugly man. I have a sex the size of a snail. Most people don’t like me, certainly not after they get to know me. I am arrogant and reckless and foolish. Sometimes I change my mind about what I am saying in mid-sentence. I can write moderately well, but that isn’t enough to save me. “I will never love anyone as I love you.”
“Nor I.” Adèle takes her hand from my arm and I already miss her touch so acutely that my eyes tear up. How will I bear it? I am a weak man and not possessed of great strength of character. I am not equipped to handle the abandonment of love. Because of my secret, I will probably never find someone who accepts me as Adèle has accepted me.
Later, of course, I can see that Adèle had no choice. She will be punished for her affair with me all her remaining days, by Victor’s infidelities and his flaunting of them. She cannot leave her children, or the financial security of her marriage. The selfish thing would have been to hang on to me. It was actually an act of generosity to release me.
But now all I feel is the dull smack of grief knocking me to my knees in the gravel.
Adèle kneels beside me, wraps her arms around me.
“Don’t cry, my love,” she says. “I’m so sorry that I’ve hurt you. I will never forgive myself for that.”
My sobs make talking difficult, even if there were something I could bear to say. I lean into her last embrace and shut my eyes.
This is what I’ve learned about life—that things go on as they begin. Adèle and I never had enough time to be together, and in retrospect I can see that it was only going to get worse. The situation was stronger than we were. It was only ever going to end the way it did, with both of us on our knees.
We parted there, in the orchard. I stood up and went one way down the path. She stood up and went another way. The day, ironically, brightened.
But just as animals are restless when they’re ill or anxious, I couldn’t settle. I couldn’t go back to the Hôtel de Rouen and resume my work. Writing requires a certain kind of peace, the reassurance that one can leave this world to enter the world of the book and return to find things more or less the same. I was in too much distress to be able to trust in that.
I walked through Paris. I walked to the little church where Adèle and I used to meet, although I was too heartbroken to enter. I walked to Notre-Dame and circled the outside walls, not daring to go in there either. To venture indoors would be to have my sadness constrict around me. At least when I was outside there was space for it to dissipate, to be carried off by the breeze from the river or burned from me by the heat of the afternoon sun.
I walked to our old houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I stopped only moments outside mine, but I stood for a long time in front of Adèle and Victor’s.
There is the window of Dédé’s room, where Adèle and I first made love.
There is the window to the parlour, where I would sit with the Hugos at night, discussing literature for hours, reading Victor’s poems before they were to be published.
There, through the gate, is the garden, where I would visit Adèle and her children, where I would linger longer than was necessary, wanting never to leave her presence.
There, at the gate, is where she ran after me, the night after the day I fought my duel with Pierre Dubois. “I couldn’t live without you,” she said.
It is an otherworldly feeling to be held by arms that will no longer embrace you, to stand in front of a door that once admitted you but is now barred to you. I felt as though I were already dead.
Places exist as monuments to the feelings that were revealed there. The entire Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs is a memorial to my love affair with Adèle Hugo.
Pretty white flowers twist through the garden gate. I pick one and thread it through the buttonhole in my waistcoat. Much later, when I have occasion to look it up, long after it has died, I find out that it is not a flower but only a common weed.
Paris, 1840s
Charles
I HAD THEM PRINTED. What can I say? My poems were too good to keep to myself. I always considered them to be my greatest achievement.
Their subject was Adèle and my love for her, and in the poems I named names and places. I made no move to hide anyone’s identity. I had the book privately printed in 1843, five hundred copies.
I had meant to keep the copies locked up in a cupboard until Victor died. But Victor seemed as vigorously healthy as ever, and so I distributed a few copies of Livre d’amour to my friends. It was the one literary work in which I still felt great pride.
Adèle, of course, had seen some of the poems when we were together. She loved me, so she had not minded them, although she oft
en tired of listening to them. I think she was forced to listen to an abundance of poetry in her life with Victor, and she wanted me to offer respite from that, not additional torment.
I wanted to send Adèle a copy of the book when it was printed, but I feared that it might fall into the hands of her husband, and I could not risk that. Somehow it reached Victor anyway. Word came to me through a mutual friend that Monsieur Hugo was outraged, and that his oldest son, Charles, my namesake, although only seventeen, wished to challenge me to a duel.
Mercifully this did not happen. But suddenly all of Paris loathed me. When I walked in the streets, I had to keep my eyes on the gutter in case I met with an enemy. Even my housekeeper said she heard spiteful talk of me when she went to the market.
Ironically enough, I had moved back in with Mother and was no longer in hiding from the Garde nationale, but I would have been better served if this were still the case.
Can a man not write the truth? Can a man not call his love by name? The gossip that my housekeeper rather delightedly reported back to me was all about my indiscretion and indecency in detailing my love affair with the wife of Victor Hugo. “How it must have shamed him,” one man put it.
But Livre d’amour wasn’t about Victor. I didn’t mean to shame him. I wasn’t thinking of him at all, truth be told. This was a book because of, and for, my beloved Adèle. I couldn’t help the fact that she was married to Victor Hugo. I’m sure I would have loved her whatever circumstances she occupied.
But outsiders always see the situation, not the individuals. The literary elite of Paris no doubt thought that I was flaunting my affair with Adèle in Victor’s face, that Livre d’amour was nothing more than a boastful taunt to the great man.
I suppose there was a little truth in that, but it was unfair that everyone judged my book on its scandalous content and no one saw its literary merit.
I still have great stacks of the book in a cupboard in my bedroom. Sometimes, late at night, when I am feeling particularly melancholy, I unlock the cupboard and look at the neat rows, the spines so uniform, the yellow paper of the cover so crisp and clean. I run my hands over the volumes, feeling the small indent where one copy ends and another begins. My masterpiece, like the great love that inspired it, is not allowed out in public. It remains hidden. I visit it at night, clandestinely, with the same excitement that I used to rendezvous with Adèle.
The Reinvention of Love Page 9