And that is better than any honour I could be given.
The boats heave themselves up out of the sea like strange wooden fish, the hulls hitting the beach with a great booming sound. No, not fish—it is more that the hulls are waves, but heavier than water. The booming sound they make when they are thrown forward from the sea onto the beach is like the sound of a bell. It is deep and sonorous, and the whole fishing fleet plays a madrigal of bells as it comes to shore.
The red sash that the mayor gave me is still wound around my neck. I unwind it, fold it carefully into a small rectangle, and hand it over to Mother.
“I want you to have this.”
“Oh, Sainte-Beuve.” For a moment she is actually speechless, clasping the piece of red satin against her bosom. “What a day!” She carefully puts the folded sash on her lap and fumbles in her bag. “I have something for you too.” She passes me a box.
“What is it?”
“Open it and see.”
I lift the lid, and inside are four tarts from the bakery, nestled in straw to keep them safe from breaking.
I AM THE LIBRARIAN at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in the Institut de France on the quai de Conti through most of the 1840s, and I have been given rooms to live in at the institute. By day I sit at a desk and enter into a ledger the names of those patrons who come to borrow books from the library. By night I sit up in my rooms, reading and writing. I have arrived at a life entirely circumscribed by literature.
I was offered the job through a rather strange set of circumstances.
It all started when Louise Colet, who is the mistress of both Victor Cousin, the politician, and Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, was savaged by the critic Alphonse Karr in his monthly satirical journal.
Louise Colet did not take kindly to being ridiculed in the press, and she called on Alphonse Karr at his home. When he turned from the door to usher her into his apartment, she took out the kitchen knife she had concealed beneath her skirts and stabbed him in the back.
He was not killed, but in an effort to have the whole unpleasant business quiet down, Victor Cousin, who was the minister of education at the time, asked me if I would speak to Alphonse and convince him to let the matter alone.
This was easier done than I had imagined, as I think Alphonse was genuinely shocked and terrified by the stabbing, and by the fact that it had made him afraid. But I argued that to make more of the assault by laying charges would be to entertain those feelings longer than he wanted. So he decided to let the matter rest, contenting himself with displaying the knife in a glass case inside his home with the inscription “Received from Louise Colet—in the back.”
As a reward for my part in the case, Victor Cousin gave me the position of librarian in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I receive housing and four thousand francs a year, all for the trifling inconvenience of sitting at the library desk two days a week. Victor Cousin is very generous with his appointments. He has also given Alfred de Musset a position as librarian for the ministry of the interior—which has no library.
So here I sit, at my little desk under the vaulted library ceilings. Footsteps occasionally echo through the passageways, but mostly it is silent in the library. The new outbreak of cholera has kept a lot of the patrons away.
Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Adèle will come to the library, completely by accident, but here my fantasy always has to end, for I know that Adèle would have no interest in visiting the Institut de France. She has had enough of books. The literary life has not exactly served her well.
When I am bored with sitting at the desk, I walk the library, trolling my fingers along the spines of the books, the way I would ripple my hand down iron fences when I was a boy. The spines of the books are like the bars of a fence, like the bars of a cage.
I stand before my own books and think of all the hours and days and years that have gone into these small volumes. How inconsequential it all seems. To what purpose have I given my life away?
And if I am feeling in a particularly melancholy mood, I will go and stand in front of Victor’s books, which occupy the better part of one whole shelf. They are like a small wall in front of me. A barricade, like the barricades the revolutionaries build in the streets these days, crouching behind them to throw rocks at their enemies.
Victor, of course, has become the hero of the new revolution, the one that started in 1830, four years after we met. He has so much public sympathy that he will probably run the country one day. Such is his need for admiration. I understand his desire to be famous, but not the fact that he is famous. Why? His books are no better than anyone else’s. He is not set apart by his peers as the best writer of the day. This honour probably belongs to Flaubert or, God help me, that fat braggart Balzac.
What is it that makes Victor’s ascension so swift and sure? Is it luck? Is it timing? Surely if one did not know of his reputation and read one of his novels alongside my own, the underappreciated Volupté, there would not be much difference in the quality of the books. Why, then, do I languish in obscurity as a novelist while Victor continues to rise to glory? Why do I have to spend my days being a librarian!
Before going to bed I stand by my window in my nightshirt, looking down into the little courtyard below my rooms. Sometimes I can hear the rattle of the death carts carrying the new cholera victims from the neighbouring streets. I try to ignore that terrible sound, and look instead at the small fountain that protrudes from the courtyard wall. I like the murmur of the water and the figures on the fountain—Eros playing with a butterfly. It is such a lighthearted scene that I am grateful it is there for me to gaze upon.
I always leave the window open when I sleep—just a fraction—so that I can feel the cool night air on my skin, and so that sometimes, if I wake up in the dark, afraid and alone, I can let the whisper of the fountain rock me back to sleep like a lullaby.
I mention revolutionaries and death carts. The 1840s have brought more political change to France. The population of Paris has doubled since 1800, leading to overcrowding, unemployment, and disease. In the end, cholera will kill over nineteen thousand people in two years.
One day I was walking near the Place Vendôme when I came upon a crush of men armed with paving stones and sticks. I ducked down a side street, but there were more of the revolutionaries there. Luckily I spotted my old acquaintance Alphonse de Lamartine coming out the back door of the Hôtel de Ville. He was now one of the revolutionary leaders, having traded his pen for politics. And he was very popular among the people.
The mob saw Lamartine at the same time as I did. They pushed towards him. I pushed towards him.
“Vive Lamartine!” they shouted. And then one of them spied me and yelled out to the others, “A priest! A priest in disguise!”
I could feel their hands upon me, and I swear they would have torn me to pieces like a pack of wolves if I hadn’t reached the safety of Lamartine, who ushered me into his carriage and drove me away from the mob. But next time there might be no one there to save me, and I could be killed by the members of a cause to which I have actually given my support.
Best to stay indoors for a while.
Because aside from the mobs, there is also the cholera. In time, Napoleon III will widen the streets and create huge new boulevards to replace the warren of medieval Parisian alleys of the 1840s. But for now, those narrow streets, airless and sunless and burdened with heavy traffic, cause so much disease. Gutters at their sides are intended to carry the garbage and raw sewage to underground viaducts, but this happens only when it rains. The rest of the time the garbage and excrement lie open to the air, and in the evenings the gutters are overrun with rats and mice feasting greedily on the vile soup.
George has fled to her country house. During the 1832 epidemic, she had lived across from the morgue on the Île de la Cité and had watched the endless procession of death carts, each one piled high with bodies.
“I couldn’t stop watching,” says George when she comes to say goodbye on her way
to her country estate. “I sat at my window all day. It was so compelling, and I felt obliged to witness this last journey of the poor souls who had died. I just can’t stand to see any more death.”
I worry for Adèle, but I hear no word of her fate.
I HAVE WRITTEN ANOTHER BOOK of poems. It was completed quite soon after Livre d’amour was published privately and borrowed much from that book. In the introduction, I have written that friendship is still the main subject of the verses, even if it is not, anymore, a single dominant friendship.
What a convenient word “friendship” is. It is a blanket to throw over one’s more naked feelings.
I have called the little book Pensées d’août. The title is literal, as I did write much of the book at the end of a summer. August is the hinge between summer and fall, a time of bittersweet change. The days are still warm, but there is the awareness that winter is coming, and one day, just in one day, everything changes and one wakes to find that the air has a chill in it, and that a coat is now required in the evenings. I think that this is the natural season for contemplation, and that poetry comes from this spiritual August—this place between loss and arrival. The emotion disappears and the word moves in to take its place. The last flowers of August thrive in the last of the summer heat, but they will not bloom again until spring. When one walks through the gardens and sees them, the joy of their existence is balanced, in equal measure, by the sorrow of their imminent departure.
Is this not the very condition of the human soul? Is this not what people hold within them at all times, this delicate balance of happiness and melancholy?
The difference between this book and Livre d’amour is that the former was written in the midst of love and hopefulness, while Pensées d’août is composed from the ashes of that love. Because of this, Pensées d’août is a very difficult book to write. Every time I sit down before the blank page, I must visit this loss, must experience it anew. It leaves me shaken, and sometimes, at the end of the day, the page on which the poem is written is blotted with my tears.
Sadness is selfish. It wants you all to itself. I shun human company, preferring the quiet consort of books. Every day when I write, I feel that I am using up the words I have in me for that day, and therefore I have nothing left for conversation. My time is spent in this melancholy absorption, and it is not entirely unpleasant. The poems take my sorrow. They take all of it, and they transform it into something tangible.
I believe that poetry is about honesty. Say the thing that can’t be said, and if possible, say it right up front. During the writing of this book, I take my signet ring to my jeweller and have him engrave the word “truth” on it. This is what I will wear on my body until my death—this single, implacable word. In English.
But truth is individual. My truth is not anyone else’s. What I write is not necessarily to be believed, or to be appreciated by the people who read my poems.
So I write about myself, my feelings. My little book of verse does not sell nearly as well as the books by the great champions of the people—Hugo and Balzac—because if you do not care to read about my emotions, then you will not care about my poems.
I am not clever like Victor, who pretends he is not writing about himself but is speaking on behalf of “the people.” Really, his regard for himself is so large that it can be satisfied only by this idea that he is the voice for all humanity.
My book appears, enjoys a few reviews, and then disappears from the public’s interest. One day, in a small used bookshop not far from my old neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, I find a copy of Pensées d’août. I feel terrible that my book has been bought and dispensed with so soon after publication, so I purchase the copy. When I get home, I riffle through the pages, looking for some clue as to why the owner of my little book would want to discard it so callously. There is no name inscribed on the flyleaf, no notes in the margins. The book is pristine and unmarked. But several of the pages have been carefully cut from the middle of the volume. I take down my copy of Pensées d’août and discover that an entire poem has been excised from the book. Well, someone must have loved the poem a great deal to remove it.
But if he loved the poem so much, then why not keep the whole book?
The answer lies in the poem. It is the one poem in the volume that directly addresses Adèle. So it is not hard to imagine that it is perhaps Victor, or one of Victor’s friends, who has removed the poem. Not because it was beloved, but because whoever cut it out didn’t want anyone else to read it. A small thrill whistles through my body. Have other copies of the book been purchased for the sole purpose of destroying this poem?
Perhaps I have a more interested readership than I had originally supposed. Perhaps Victor will buy up all the copies to keep the poem mute, and this sensation will increase my sales tenfold.
I LEAVE TO THE END of my recollections of this decade what happened at the start.
I have dealt with everything else in the 1840s before returning to this because I could not bear to write down the details of the event that has broken my Adèle’s heart forever. You see, even though I believe in the truth, I am, in many ways, a coward, and I sometimes go out of my way to avoid meeting it.
In the winter of 1843, Adèle’s oldest daughter, Léopoldine, was married to Charles Vacquerie. No one told me of this event, but I saw the notice of the wedding in the newspapers. Léopoldine was nineteen years old.
I had heard of the groom because his brother was Auguste Vacquerie, an avid supporter of Victor’s. A disciple, really. He was a man with literary aspirations, and he had staged a new production of Hernani, probably with the sole purpose of impressing Victor. Why anyone would want to mount that dreadful play again is beyond me.
I suppose Léopoldine met Charles through the family’s association with Auguste, although I heard a rumour that it was really Auguste who was in love with Léopoldine, and that, at the wedding, he was in danger of proclaiming his love.
Life has a strange way of circling back on itself.
But Léopoldine was in love with Charles, and they married and moved to his family’s village near Le Havre. Villequier, I think it was called. His mother had a house there.
In September, Charles and Léopoldine, along with one of Charles’s cousins and an uncle, went for a sail on the Seine near the village. It was quiet and peaceful on the voyage out, but on the return journey, a gust of wind capsized the yacht and everyone aboard was drowned.
My Adèle must have cried as many tears as the amount of water in the river where her daughter died. It caused me tremendous pain to imagine her pain, and even though she had ended our affair, I felt compelled to go to her and help calm her suffering.
But this is not so easily done.
I know where the Hugos live, in the Place des Vosges. Victor is so famous now that the apartment has infuriatingly been pointed out to me many times. It is on the second floor, at the far end of the long, beautiful building.
I cannot simply knock on the door and present myself. I must go in disguise. I must go as Charlotte.
Mother’s nervousness at walking in the Paris streets has resulted in her choosing only the most drab of clothes in which to venture out. I rifle through her wardrobe, trying to find something a little colourful, something Charlotte would be happy to wear.
“Sainte-Beuve, what are you doing?”
I turn with my armload of dresses to find Mother standing in the doorway. I had thought she was out visiting Madame Fontaine.
I am caught. Mother does not know that I sometimes borrow her clothes, and I do not want her to find out. There would be no way to explain it that would make sense to her. She is a woman with little imagination. I am her son. She is not capable of thinking anything else. And even though she saw me naked as a child, saw the small winkle of my sex, she didn’t think to consult a doctor. “All men are different,” she said to me, “belowdecks.”
I must lie to Mother, and lie quickly. Not a single lie that she can dispute, but a barr
age of lies, all coming so fast and furious that she will be bewildered by the effect and forget the issue.
“I thought I would have a dress made for you,” I say, “and I was taking these to use as patterns for the dressmaker. There have been bedbugs in my room, so I wanted to have all our clothes laundered. You don’t seem to wear these dresses much, so I thought I might give them to the unfortunate girl who begs in front of the church.”
“Oh.” Mother looks at the clothes as though seeing them for the first time. “What are you doing in my room?”
“I just told you.”
We stare at each other. Mother seems more stupid than usual these days. Perhaps she’s losing what little mind she has left.
“Time for lunch, Sainte-Beuve,” she says. “You should leave those here.”
I bundle the dresses onto her divan and scuttle past her out the door.
I find a boy in the park outside the Hugos’ apartment and pay him to take a note upstairs.
Will she come? I have signed the note as Charlotte so she will know who waits below her window, who paces up and down between the trees. My heart races and my mouth is dry. A small gust of wind pulls at the edge of my skirts.
Adèle is there in a moment. She runs from the door of the building in her mourning dress, my note still clutched in her hand. Because I am not dressed in a way she will expect, she runs right past me and I have to call out to her.
“Adèle!”
“Charlotte?” She comes towards me, looking confused.
“Sister Charlotte,” I say, for I am dressed as a nun. I bought the habit this morning. It was all I could think of to do. I couldn’t risk getting caught by Mother again.
We walk to the far end of the Place des Vosges, out of sight of the apartment. We sit on a bench in the shade.
“I came as soon as I heard,” I say.
Adèle turns to me. Her face is puffy from crying. She turns away again. “It’s hard to talk to you when you’re dressed like that.”
“I’m sorry. It was the best I could do.” I tug at the wimple, which fits a bit too snugly around my face. “It’s very hot in here,” I say. “I had no idea that it was so stifling to be a nun.”
Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 45