Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle

by Helen Humphreys

  My critique of their writing hasn’t made the Goncourts feel very warm towards me. They often take pokes at me during these dinners at the Magny. But I am too old to be provoked into a public argument.

  “And that from a man who sleeps only with whores,” I say in response, and get equal applause.

  The evening continues. We move to the next food course and change topics from women’s nocturnal headgear to men’s seminal discharge.

  “I must have a discharge every two or three weeks,” says Taine, “or else I cannot concentrate properly on my work. My mind is not clear.”

  “You are mistaken,” says Flaubert. “What a man needs is not a seminal discharge but a nervous one.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Renan.

  Flaubert leans back in his chair. He is in good form tonight, and discoursing on love is his favourite subject.

  “What a man needs is the thrill of love. Emotion. The exquisite pleasure of squeezing a woman’s hand. A stolen kiss. That is what I mean by a nervous discharge, and it is so much more meaningful than a seminal one. And so much more necessary to our well-being.”

  “Yes,” agrees Taine, “but also so much harder to come by. Many of us have wives, old mistresses, or take our pleasure at the brothel. We cannot experience what you are talking about at any of these stations. Some of us have probably never experienced this nervous discharge.”

  All along the table, heads nod in agreement.

  “So it is not very helpful, then, to tell us about an experience we might never have,” says Taine.

  “But I have experienced this,” I burst out. “I have known this kind of love.”

  “I say again,” says the Goncourt with the moustache, “this from the man who has never spent an entire night with a woman.”

  “But what I am talking about,” says Flaubert, “does not depend on spending a great deal of time with a woman. In fact, one is better served if this is not the case.” He looks across the table at me. “Tell me about your experience of love,” he says.

  The other writers look at me expectantly.

  Even though much of Paris probably knows about my affair with Adèle Hugo, and all of us here have promised never to talk about these dinners outside this restaurant, I just cannot bring myself to speak of her as though she were a conquest. I know Flaubert does not require me to describe my affair that way, but inevitably, once I start talking, I will start boasting, and my love for Adèle will become cheapened by my recounting of it.

  I also cannot bear to have the Goncourts say anything cruel to me about Adèle, so I distract the group by making myself a pair of earrings out of some cherries. I offer myself up as a clown to save Adèle’s honour. You see, even though I said earlier that I will talk about anything, there is still one subject I keep secret. There is still one thing I hold sacred.

  Strangely enough, later in the evening, after a great deal of wine has been consumed, the talk turns to Victor Hugo.

  “He wants to be a thinker,” says Flaubert, “but what strikes me about his work is the absence of thought in it.”

  “He’s a charlatan,” I say. “A fake.”

  “Didn’t I hear you say once that he taught you about poetry?” says a Goncourt.

  “Perhaps, but I can’t remember anything he said, so it must not have been particularly useful.” I wiggle my ears with the cherries dangling from them and get a laugh. “Did you know,” I say, “that Victor’s beard is so coarse it damages the razors of the barber where he gets it trimmed? And his teeth are so strong he can crack peach pits with them. He has an amazing constitution. Once I climbed with him to the top of the Notre-Dame towers and he could tell the colour of the dress Madame Nodier was wearing on the balcony of the Arsenal.”

  I suddenly remember that perfect evening, after years of never recalling it.

  Victor had decided to write his book about the cathedral, but he hadn’t quite started yet. He was full of excitement about the idea, came every evening to ascend the steep stone steps of the tower to the parapet of Notre-Dame to watch the sun go down over Paris. He begged me to accompany him on this particular day. I remember the difficulty of the climb, and how Victor bounded easily ahead of me, not breathless at all. The view was spectacular. The dome of the Pantheon could be seen, and the green splendour of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The sunset was beautiful. We talked about the cathedral, and about literature. Victor demonstrated his eagle-like sight by picking out the blue dress of Madame Nodier on the Arsenal balcony. That was in the days when our friendship was strong and uncomplicated by my feelings for Adèle.

  I look around the table at the Magny. None of these men are my friends. We are bound together by a certain prestige, by our position in the literary society of Paris. But none of these men would run through the streets to my house in the early evening, bursting with an idea they couldn’t wait to share with me. The truth is that I have never had a friend like Victor again, a friend so close that it sometimes felt as though we were the same person.

  “Hugo said he was fated to write that book because when you stand outside the cathedral, the towers of Notre-Dame make a perfect H,” says Renan.

  “Typical,” says Taine, and everyone laughs.

  I have waited so many years for a moment like this, a moment when Victor is openly ridiculed by his peers. And yet now that the moment has come, it brings no satisfaction with it. I can say nothing.

  If I had never loved Adèle, my friendship with Victor could have continued into my old age. We could have shared so much by then! Our influence on each other’s writing would be profound, our knowledge of each other’s minds unparalleled.

  At the end of life, the balance sheet comes out. I can’t stop myself.

  I always thought that my love for Adèle eclipsed everything else, that it was the one truly worthwhile thing I have done. But realistically, the time we actually spent together lasted a mere handful of days. What if I had put that against a nurturing friendship that spanned my entire lifetime? What would I really have chosen?

  Victor holds open the door for me as I struggle up the last few steps of the cathedral tower. He hauls me out onto the parapet, and the wind chases us right to the edge of the stone wall. I have to hold on to the top of the wall to keep my balance.

  There is an overwhelming desire to fling myself off the parapet, and I can see how tempting a death this is, why it is the choice of so many ill-fated literary heroes. In every fall there is a moment of flight. To hurtle through the air would be, for a magnificent instant, the ultimate in freedom. I shake my head to clear the thought, push against the wall to steady myself.

  And just at that moment, as though he knows what I’m thinking, Victor puts his arm around me, anchoring me securely to my place on earth. My place beside him.

  “Look at that,” he says.

  The last of the sun brushes the roofs of the buildings below, each one lit with a lambent glow. Each one beginning in shadow and ending in fire.

  “All of Paris, Charles. Just waiting to celebrate us.”

  I SUPPOSE I AM a better friend to women than to men. It seems to be with women that I have enjoyed my most successful friendships. And now, late in life, I have made a friendship that will probably be my last.

  It is with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the niece of the great emperor and cousin to the man in power at the moment, Napoleon III.

  Princess Mathilde is in her middle forties, at the very centre of her life. She is short and stout, full of fury and enthusiasms. She is much as I imagine her uncle to have been, if one had known him intimately. I love nothing more than to listen to her stories of Napoleon Bonaparte, even though she never met him. At the moment of her birth he was already dying on St. Helena.

  No matter. Her blood is his blood, and it runs fiercely through her veins.

  Princess Mathilde has a weekly salon in Paris, in her magnificent house on the rue de Courcelles. She is known to all as Notre-Dame-des-Arts. Flaubert attends her salon regularly, as do Tain
e and Renan and many others of the Magny crowd. The princess is a formidable supporter of all the arts, and she herself is a good painter. She does watercolour copies of many of the great oil paintings in the Louvre, and she works very hard at these. She has the same tireless energy that I recognize from Victor and have always admired.

  Her house has a bust of Napoleon in the front hallway, and much of the fabric in the house is decorated with bees, one of the emblems from Bonaparte’s coat of arms. The bee is the sovereign symbol of immortality and resurrection.

  Princess Mathilde has as many lapdogs as servants, and it is impossible not to trip over them when one is walking from the front hall into the drawing room. They nip at my ankles and are constantly underfoot. I have to restrain the impulse to kick at them. Needless to say, Princess Mathilde thinks very highly of these spoiled balls of fur, and I have to pretend to admire them whenever I am at the house.

  Our friendship started when I began to attend her salons. At first I was just another guest, but I would often stay later than the others, engaging the princess in conversation about her famous uncle. I told her of my early memory of seeing Napoleon, and of how I had a special fondness for Bonapartism and for the genius of the man. This endeared me to her, and Princess Mathilde began to seek my opinion on whom to invite to her salon. She wanted a mix of generations and relied on me to keep her informed as to who among the younger writers was of particular interest. She called me her literary adviser, but soon she began to seek my advice on love as well as literature.

  Why do women confide in me, confess to me? Do they sense, perhaps, that I have something of the woman in me? It must be so. And as our friendship progressed, I told Princess Mathilde of my secret condition. Later I regretted this, for when I eventually betrayed her, she used this secret to hurt me. I am a real woman, and you are only a half-man. A friendship between us was never possible.

  But the betrayal comes later. For now, my friendship with Princess Mathilde pleases us both. I visit her at her Paris house, and she comes to dine with me in mine. Adèle, my cook, always thrills at seeing the princess’s fancy four-wheeled carriage pull up outside our humble dwelling on rue du Montparnasse.

  Princess Mathilde tells me about her love for the director of the Louvre, a man who has gold buttons on his garters and is a count. He is also utterly unfaithful to Princess Mathilde, which causes her much distress.

  We talk mostly of her struggles with her lover, although once the princess asked me about my heart.

  “What of your loves?” she said.

  “Love,” I replied, “is a box I dare not open.”

  Am I an ambitious man? There are some, like Balzac, who would say that I am, that I insinuate myself with greatness. There is the opinion that my friendship with Victor was about the advancement of my own career. No one, no one at all, seems to remember that it was I who first made Victor famous. This galls me.

  Anyway, I would say that I am not ambitious, but rather that, as is natural in life, the older I get, the more comfortable I wish to be. Having an ease of circumstance when one is at an advanced age is compensation for the burdens of aging.

  I have the ear of one of the most influential people in Paris. I have a direct line to the throne.

  Do I use it to better my situation?

  Of course.

  I do not come from a wealthy family. When Mother died, she left me the house on rue du Montparnasse but little else. The house is really quite small. The income I make from my writing is unreliable. There is no comfort in not being able to depend on one’s salary, in having to struggle constantly to be paid. I am always working with an eye to how I can earn money from what I am writing. And as I get older, the insecurity of this weighs heavily on me.

  So I lobby the princess to lobby the emperor to make me a senator. If I was a senator, I would be paid the fantastic sum of thirty thousand francs a year simply to attend Senate meetings. This would be enough to keep me very comfortably in my old age.

  When I first propose the idea to Princess Mathilde, she suggests that I come to the country house of the emperor at Compiègne and dine with him and Empress Eugénie. She decides it will help my cause if the emperor meets me.

  And so I go, reluctantly. I am not a man used to being presented at court. I do not have the clothes or the manner for such things. But Princess Mathilde loans me a pair of court shoes and a footman to be my valet for the weekend. We travel down together in the same carriage, and I must admit that I do like the feeling of importance the occasion generates.

  I look out the window of the carriage as we drive through the impressive oak and beech forests at Compiègne. The sight of the château at the end of the path through the trees makes me catch my breath. It is really a palace. “Château” is much too humble a word for it.

  “To think that could have been mine,” says Princess Mathilde, noting my reaction. She was once engaged to her cousin, the emperor. “And it would have been,” she adds, “if Louis hadn’t decided to marry for love.”

  The château is even more impressive inside. There is a ballroom with gold pillars, walls of huge windows flanking each side, and several enormous chandeliers. There is a salon decorated entirely in blue—walls and chairs and drapery. My bedroom has gilt on the ceiling and an ornate marble fireplace.

  I had thought that I was the only guest of the emperor and empress, but Mathilde just laughs when I mention this to her.

  “They entertain over a hundred people a week,” she says. “There will be at least forty other guests this weekend.”

  I don’t do well at Compiègne. My court shoes pinch. My borrowed valet rolls his eyes when I get lost trying to find my bedroom after lunch in the dining room. At dinner the first night, I am seated relatively close to the empress. For a while I concentrate on the heavy silver cutlery, but when I do look up, I notice that Empress Eugénie has a watch pinned to her vest, and that the watch does not show the right time. In fact, it does not seem to be working at all, is stuck at four o’clock, an hour long since past. I gather my courage, clear my throat, and address myself to the empress.

  “Pardon me,” I say, “but I can’t help noticing that your watch seems to have stopped. You might want to get it repaired.”

  The empress glowers at me. “I will never get it repaired,” she says.

  From across the table, Mathilde is waving her fork at me. Too late, I realize she’s signalling me to stop talking.

  “But why?” I persist.

  “Because it is my lucky watch,” says the empress.

  “All the more reason to get it fixed,” I say.

  The empress looks over at Mathilde. “I think you need to educate your small friend,” she says.

  After dinner, Mathilde pulls me aside.

  “Eugénie was wearing that watch when she met Louis,” she says. “She was at a garden party and realized her watch had stopped, so she asked him the time. That stopped watch changed her life. She has no desire to have it repaired.”

  I cannot seem to get anything right. After dinner there is the choice of dancing in the ballroom or listening to the mechanical piano in the blue salon. I choose the piano, thinking it will be less complicated than dancing, a pastime of which I’ve never been particularly fond. But the mechanical piano needs to be turned by a crank to play, and the empress, seeing me enter the room, immediately volunteers me for the job. After a few rotations I am exhausted, but I can’t free myself until the empress says so. She has me cranking the piano for ages, perspiration running down my face, my arm feeling as though it is going to drop off from the terrible exertion. Afterwards my arm hurts so badly that I ask my valet to massage it. He laughs and goes out to smoke in the garden.

  The next morning, every man except for me goes hunting. Mathilde asks me to come with her and the empress on a drive to Pierrefonds to see Eugénie’s collection of armour, but I decline. I can only imagine what horrible faux pas I will commit if I spend any more time in the empress’s company.

  I l
ook for the emperor, hoping to have a chat with him about becoming a senator, but he has gone hunting with the male guests. I look for the library, don’t find it, and end up in the magnificent ballroom. But here my luck changes. There is a young lady in the ballroom, a beautiful young lady, and instead of avoiding or ignoring me, she comes up to me. She offers her hand. I take it.

  “Will you take me to dinner tonight?” she says.

  I can’t believe my good fortune.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. “I’ll look for you in the reception room at eight.” And she turns on her delicate heel and is gone.

  I search out my valet, who is chatting to one of the parlour maids in the hallway outside my bedroom.

  “Where is the nearest inn?” I ask.

  “Inn?”

  “Somewhere to dine tonight.”

  “But you’re a guest here,” he says. “Why would you want to go and dine elsewhere?”

  Princess Mathilde finally returns from her tour of the armour. I walk out with her through the garden.

  “I’ve met the most charming young lady,” I say. “And she is enamoured of me also. She has asked me to take her to dinner tonight. Do you know of anywhere nearby where we could go?”

  Mathilde touches my arm and I flinch, as it is still sore from winding the mechanical piano. “You don’t have much experience at court, do you, Sainte-Beuve?”

  “No, I suppose I don’t.”

  “It is customary at Compiègne for a young woman to ask a man to escort her to the dining room. Here,” says Mathilde, squeezing my arm affectionately, “at the château.”

  Napoleon III believes in social reform. He has been impressed with the Industrial Revolution in England, which he witnessed when he was there in exile, and so his new Paris is modelled on the new London. I preferred the old labyrinth of streets to the modern boulevards. It is harder to hide in the new Paris.

  An advocate of science and technology, the emperor seems a lot less interested in literature. My attempts at conversation with him about books at dinner the next night fall flat. He keeps asking me to speak up, then loses interest in my questions about his reading habits and turns to talk to the man on the other side of him about the quality of the dinner wine.