Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (46 page)

My mother was the daughter of mariners. I remember she used to sing me sea shanties to lull me into sleep.

I am my father—Charles. I am my mother—Augustin(e). But my mother never called me anything but my surname: Sainte-Beuve.

We lived quietly in Boulogne, my mother and I, in the lower town, mere steps from the busy harbour where my father used to work. When I was eighteen, I left for Paris to attend medical school, and I took Mother with me. I have rarely returned to the town of my birth. The sea does not interest me, or haunt me. It is too vast. It is unknowable.

But this is not a memory of where I first lived. This is a memory of how, when I was six years old, I was taken to see the first Napoleon—Napoleon Bonaparte. My mother had dressed me in a little hussar uniform, and I was walked up the hill that overlooked the town to watch the great general review his troops.

He was a slight man, such as I used to be, but at the time he seemed magnificent and huge. I remember the flutter of his hands and the white mask of his face, the shiny gold buttons on his uniform, the silence of the soldiers as he paraded up and down in front of them. At one moment, I was close enough to reach out and touch his coattails, but I did not dare.

I was raised by my elderly mother and her equally elderly sister. My nickname as a boy at school was Pussy. I lived in a house of women. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by Napoleon. He was a powerful man in charge of other men. He was what I imagined a father might be.

Four years later, when he met his defeat by the British at Waterloo, I cried myself to sleep in the cold darkness of my bedroom.

So this is what comes back to me all these years later—the brightness of the day on the hill; the excitement of being so near to greatness and glory, to a famous man I could reach out and touch if I wanted to; and then the tears and loneliness, the scratchy wool blanket on my cheek as I lay face down on my bed and sobbed for the man who had left me again.

There is something of Napoleon in Victor. The way he strutted up and down in his kitchen the night he had the seating plan for the Comédie-Française, reviewing his troops, planning his battle for control of the theatre.

Exultation and at the same time despair. That is what I felt with regard to Napoleon, what I have continued to feel all my life with regard to everything else.

There are so many memories from childhood. Why does one stand out above all others? Perhaps because a few events are not particular to childhood, even though they occur there. Perhaps some memories are more a foretelling than the reminder of an event that belongs entirely in the past. Perhaps what we remember is merely a continuing truth about ourselves.

The story tastes of the man.

W
HO SEES LOVE ARRIVING?
Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative that they are almost invisible.

It is impossible to watch love arriving, but it is abundantly clear when it has arrived.

I remember the moment perfectly.

At first when I visited the Hugos, I would make sure to go in the evening, when I knew that Victor would be home. In the early days, after I had reviewed his poems so favourably, after I had called him, in print, “a genius,” he had plenty of time for me. I would go to his house after supper and we would talk together long into the evening, about poetry and literature, about the passion we both felt for writing. Adèle was sometimes in the room, sitting sewing by the fire, often silent. Victor is prone to long monologues when he gets excited, and though she would sometimes try to say a few words, to join our discussion, he would talk right over her.

He would do this with the children too, swat them away if he was busy proclaiming—but he would also, if he wasn’t occupied, bend down with them to examine an ant in the grass. It was then that I envied him, when he casually laid a hand on his son’s head or looked with real interest at the drawing his daughter had brought to him. But he was cavalier with his family. He failed to recognize the gift they were and appreciated them only when it suited him.

One day I walked round after lunch to return a book I had borrowed, and I found Adèle alone with her young ones. She invited me to stay and I sat with her by the pond in the garden while the children buzzed around us. Without Victor’s presence, Adèle was more talkative, and I remember we had a very pleasant discussion about poetry. She invited me to come again, and so I started to visit in the afternoons, when I knew Victor would be out, as well as in the evenings, when I knew Victor would be in.

Adèle and I sat in the drawing room, reading to each other, or walked out with the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was mere minutes away from her house. These were very pleasant excursions, and I was content to cultivate my friendship with Madame Hugo at the same time that I was enjoying a friendship with her husband. I never thought of my relations with Adèle as anything other than chaste until one day I came to her house in the afternoon and found her fixing the combs in her hair. She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren’t staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement—that soft tumble, softer than water falling from a fountain—that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adèle turned and saw me watching her, and it was as though we had just discovered each other for the first time. I cannot fully explain it. All I know is that I could not roll my feelings back up, twist them into position and secure them into a place of propriety. I was undone. Nothing could be the same.

Later, we sat in the garden, side by side, watching the children play. Adèle was telling me a story about a ring her mother had given her that she always wore on her right hand. I asked to see the ring, thinking that she would allow me to hold her hand while I looked at it, but instead she removed it from her finger and took my hand in her own. She slid the ring onto my finger. It fitted perfectly. We both looked down at it. After a few moments, I took the ring off my finger and gave it back to her. She returned it to her own hand. We said not a word.

I lingered as long as I could that day, but I couldn’t bear to have Victor return while I was there, and so I left well before supper. Adèle walked me to the door, then to the front gate, then out to the pavement. I turned and waved when I was halfway home, and she was still standing there, watching me walk down the street.

The next day I woke up relieved that I had not declared myself. I valued my friendship with the Hugos and did not want it disturbed. I would simply live with my new feelings for Adèle. There was no need to tell her about them or acknowledge them in any way. Things would remain as they were.

But I could not concentrate on my work that morning, and the moment I knew that the Hugos would be finishing their noon meal, I was hurrying up their front walk.

I found Adèle alone in the drawing room, sitting with her hands folded on her lap, staring out the window. She leapt up when she saw me. I didn’t even have time to announce myself. She was at my side, her hand on my arm.

“The children have gone to the gardens with Victor,” she said. “We don’t have long.” She led me up the stairs and along the hallway towards the bedroom she shared with her youngest daughter, little Adèle.

It felt wrong to lie on the bed where she must have sometimes lingered with Victor, so we lay down on the carpet. The curtains lifted at the window. Adèle put her hands up to my face and traced my forehead, the bones around my eyes, the line from my nose down to my lips. I closed my eyes. I thought that I would die, or that I had already died. I am an ugly man. No one had ever touched me like that.

Adèle rolled on top of me. Her dress rustled like autumn leaves. I could smell the dust in the carpet.

“My treasure,” she said. “My little one. I have been so lonely.” She kissed me. I opened my eyes.

I
T IS AT THIS POINT
in the story that I should tell you my secret. It is a secret I have borne all my life with shame and concealed from almost everyone. It is at this moment in the story, after all, that I would be forced to tell Adèle my secret.

But not yet. Oh, not yet.

Instead, I will tell you something about Victor.

Victor’s father was a general in Napoleon’s army. His mother, like mine, was the daughter of a sea captain. I thought these were romantic beginnings, but they weren’t noble enough for my vainglorious friend. He decided to make his own heraldry, designing a false family crest and having a signet ring made with his invented ancestral motto.
Ego Hugo
. No two words were more perfectly married than those two.

Victor was insatiable in all things, in all ways. And while this worked for him, it was hard on everyone else.

It was proving impossible for Adèle.

So when I did tell her my secret, that afternoon as we lay together on the floor in the room she shared with her youngest daughter, she was not shocked and surprised, as I thought she’d be.

She welcomed it.

B
UT
I
AM GETTING AHEAD
of myself. I am following not chronology but passion, rushing off to Adèle whenever I am able, forgetting that there are events in this love story that must be told.

The beginning of it went like this:

In my early days at the
Globe
, when I was only twenty-two, I was given a book of poetry to review,
Odes et ballades
by a Victor Hugo. There was much in it to admire, but also much that irked. The poet was heavy-handed, leaving nothing to subtlety. He revelled in the grotesque and then, strangely enough, put too much emphasis on the trivial. The balance was off. Sometimes he reverted to laziness, using ellipses instead of furthering a thought. But when he freed himself from his own tricks, the poetry soared. I was temperate in my review, but I did use the word “genius.” And I meant it.

At this time, I was living on the Rive Gauche at 94 rue de Vaugirard. The day after the review was published, I came home to find a calling card with an invitation from Monsieur Hugo in my letterbox. Coincidentally, Victor Hugo turned out to live just two doors away from me, at 90 rue de Vaugirard.

The next day I called on him in the evening. The Hugos resided in a small second-floor apartment above a joiner’s shop. There was the smell of sawdust in the stairwell. Also, the smell of dinner.

“My wife and I are just sitting down,” said Victor when he met me at the door. “Won’t you come in and dine with us?”

I had already eaten, had called at the Hugos purposefully late so I would be certain not to interrupt their meal. But it seemed rude to decline the invitation.

“I’d be delighted,” I said, and allowed him to lead me upstairs.

The apartment was crowded but cozy. A fire burned in the grate and there were pleasing paintings and tapestries on the walls. Victor had married his childhood sweetheart, and this was their first real home together.

Madame Hugo rose when I entered the apartment. She was dark and tall, almost Spanish-looking. I must confess that apart from bowing to her in greeting, I didn’t pay her much attention during the evening. This is partly because she didn’t say anything at all during the meal, or afterwards, when the dishes were cleared and the Hugos and I sat by the fire. During dinner her attention seemed entirely taken up with her own thoughts, and after dinner she worked at her sewing, her head bent over her task, ignoring the spirited conversation between her husband and me.

But the larger truth is that it wasn’t Adèle’s silence that kept me from noticing her that first evening—it was my intoxication with the young poet. He was a few years older than I was but full of vitality and vigour, bounding up the stairs like a mountain goat as I puffed after him, my forehead damp with perspiration.

His dedication to poetry was absolute, and his gratitude to me was touching.

“Until your review,” he said, “I suffered such doubts.”

“But there will always be doubts, will there not?” I do not know of any gifted writer who does not suffer from a constant lack of confidence.

“Yes,” said Victor, reaching over and clasping my hand. “But now there will always be your wonderful review to buoy me up when my spirits are low.”

Even though I had eaten two dinners and felt a little queasy by the time I bid farewell to the Hugos just after midnight, I walked the short distance between our two houses in a state of elation. I had a new friend, and it seemed a perfect friendship. We were bound by common interests, lived a breath apart, and each could help the other to advance. I would publish reviews of Victor’s work, and he could assist me with my own tentative steps towards poetry.

What could be better?

Victor soon introduced me to his circle, a group known as the Cénacle. There were the poets Lamartine and Vigny, the painters Delacroix and Deveria, the young writers Mérimée, Dumas, and Alfred de Musset. And there was another critic, Gustave Planche. The group used to meet fairly regularly in the library of the Arsenal.

I must confess that I did not talk as much to the painters as to the writers, even in the small group at the Arsenal library. It was not that I was less interested in them. It was as it was when I first went to visit the Hugos at 90 rue de Vaugirard. I was not less interested in Adèle. I was just more interested in Victor.

Of the writers, I remember two in particular.

Alexandre Dumas’s father, like Victor’s, had served in the army under Napoleon. The stories of his father’s exploits were the basis for his own popular adventure stories,
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
.

Dumas was fat and loud, alternately breathless and boastful, and frequently chased by creditors. He had a wife and many mistresses, spent money lavishly and foolishly, and made almost as much as he wasted. He was an infrequent participant in the Cénacle, but a chair was always left empty for him, as he was apt to rush in midway through one of our evenings, having just dodged a creditor or two on his way over to the library.