Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (61 page)

It is not just because Guernsey is full of English people that we do not take part in society. It is because society wants no part of a man who goes into exile with his wife
and
his mistress. They shun us. We are not invited into their homes or to their social functions.

I don’t blame Juliette Drouet. When we first landed in Jersey, she kept a respectful distance back from my family at the docks. She understands discretion. She never comes to the house. I never meet her on the street, or hear a word from her. I know Victor, and this means that I cannot hate Juliette. Often I actually feel great sympathy towards her. She is in exile as well, and she doesn’t have any children to comfort her. All she has is Victor, and having had this myself once, I know what it means. And I do believe that I had the younger, better version of the man. She must be a very patient woman to endure all his present-day demands.

If Victor isn’t working on his biography of an evening, he walks up the street to see Juliette. Sometimes he will have his evening meal there. He doesn’t simply need to have his family around him at the end of a day—he needs to feel loved. And his family cannot give him enough of the love he needs so voraciously—the love he feels entitled to.

The problem with our situation is not that Victor has a mistress, or even that she has come to join us in exile. The problem with our situation is that it is seemingly endless. Napoleon III is still the emperor of France. Victor remains in opposition to him. I don’t see how anything will ever change. We will remain here together on Guernsey, in our uneasy alliance, until we all die.

Charles is lounging on the terrace when I return to the house. He has been sleeping all afternoon, my lazy, fat son. Idleness is destroying him, and a false industry is destroying François-Victor. It is ridiculous to think that he can translate the entire works of Shakespeare! My little Adèle, my poor daughter, is being consumed by spectres. She is giving her life away to ghosts.

This has to end.

“Maman,” says Charles, waving in greeting from his supine position, his feet raised up on cushions. “Where did you get to?”

He should be married, my little Charlot, who is not little at all. He should be married and have a family of his own. It shouldn’t matter to him where his mother was for a few hours on a beautiful day.

I say nothing for fear I will say something hurtful. I just brush past him and storm into the house.

My other children must be in their rooms. Good thing, I think grimly, and head for the staircase. I pass the mirror in the front hall and catch a glimpse of myself in the glass. My hair is loose and frayed, like rope ends that have lost their splice. There is a smudge of dirt across my cheek. My eyes startle, the wild eyes of an animal.

There you are, I think as I pass on by. There you are, Adèle, at last.

I never go up to Victor’s study when he is working. If not actually forbidden, it has certainly been understood all these years I have lived with him that I am not to disturb him during working hours. His genius is delicate and could easily be ruined by interruption.

I take the stairs two at a time and am battling for breath by the time I get to the top.

This room on the third floor was already a generous space before Victor added the glass box. It already had sweeping views of the ocean and sky, but the glass box has the effect of making it seem open to the elements. It is as though Victor stands in the middle of the ether. At night, the stars seen through the glass roof must be dazzling, and oh so close.

Victor writes standing up at a battered, high wooden desk. When I get to the top of the stairs, he has his back to me, and in the moments before he notices that I’m there and turns around to face me, I have a glimpse of what it is like to be Victor.

The sun through the glass roof is brilliant. It illuminates every detail of the room. There is the low-ceilinged library, where my husband keeps his vast collection of books. There is the Raft of the Medusa emergency bedroom, where he beds, or attempts to bed, the succession of young maids who come to work in Hauteville House. There is the glass window cut into the floor in the shape of a porthole, and the mirror positioned above it so Victor can see down into the bowels of the house, can see us walking through the rooms and going about our daily business.

It must be magnificent to be Victor. Even his very name is triumphant. And here he is, at the top of the house, at the top of the world. He has the machinery of the household below him and the infinite horizon in front of him. The ocean is so flat and blue that it seems as if he could hook a finger under an edge and pull the entire sheet of shimmering fabric towards him.

Why would he not feel that he can do anything, take anything? He stands at his desk, a conductor in front of an orchestra, moving the music of the world to his whim. I understand Victor better in this moment seeing him at work than I have ever understood him during all the years we have lived together.

I understand him better, but I still blame him.

“Adèle.” He greets me with surprise. “Are you all right? Has something happened to one of the children?”

“The children are fine,” I say.

He puts down his pen. His fingers are as ink-stained as Dédé’s. I see the lines he has written on the page in front of him as a series of small rivers spidering delicately across the paper.

“Well, no. They’re not fine.” I have recovered from the climb up the stairs, but my breath is still catching in my throat and I realize that I am nervous. I have never confronted my husband before. I’m not sure I can do it. But then I think of Charles, lazing like a fat seal on the terrace; and of François-Victor, eagerly searching out each French word for Shakespeare’s plays; and most of all of Adèle, disappearing day by day into the spirit world. “But the boys are men,” I say. “They have chance and choice, even on this island. It is because of Dédé that I have come to see you.”

“But I am working.” Victor still looks completely surprised at my presence in his study. “Could this not have waited until tonight?”

The light behind Victor outlines him, makes him look like a sculpture. I notice that he even has ink on his beard, this new white beard he has grown since we’ve been here on Guernsey. He thinks it suits a man in exile to have a beard.

I suddenly feel exhausted.

“I have asked for nothing,” I say. “I have done my duty. When you wanted to move to Jersey, I followed you. And when you felt that you had to come to Guernsey, I followed you here. You bought this house without asking me, but I said nothing. I say nothing about the way you decorate it, or about how you spend your time. But I am not the only one who has done her duty to you. Little Adèle has given away her youth to this exile, to
your
exile. She is languishing here, pining after a sailor she barely knows, wasting her days doing embroidery.”

“But I have given her a small garden to cultivate,” says Victor. “I have asked her to help collate my pages.”

“She’s a young woman. That is not enough to fully occupy her. She needs to be out in society. I want to take her back to Paris.”

“Impossible.”

He says it so quickly that I am taken aback. “Won’t you even consider what I have said?” I did not say it easily. I have never said such words to my husband, and he knows this.

“There is nothing to consider. If she leaves this island, it will prove that she does not love me. She must prove her love by staying. I will not be abandoned by my family.”

“Not permanently, Victor. Just for a month or two. I would take her to Paris just for a little while, and then we would return here and continue to do our duty to you.”

But Victor has already turned back to his desk, to his work. He has finished with our conversation.

“She is suffering! You don’t know how she has suffered, how she continues to suffer.” My voice is raised and shaking from emotion. I’m glad that Victor has turned away and is no longer looking at me.

He picks up his pen. “If she really loves me,” he says coldly, “why would she want to leave?”

I mentioned that Hauteville House was haunted. The former resident, a vicar, apparently ran from the house, left in fear for good because of the ghost. But we Hugos are used to apparitions, and we are not worried by the footsteps and the moaning. The ghost is a woman. We have all heard her low keening outside our bedroom doors at night. When we first moved into the house she was very present, but over time she has disappeared. What I think is that our misery has overtaken hers, and that she has effectively been cancelled out by our greater collective woe. I lie awake at nights and no longer hear her timid steps along the hall or her whispery voice on the other side of my door. Instead I hear Adèle tapping on the wall in the room next to mine, trying to rouse her dead sister; or I hear Victor as he rages through the house with a red-hot poker, looking for somewhere to burn his immortal words.

We are the ghosts here now. Charles, busy developing his watery photographs in the dark cupboard under the stairs. François-Victor, frantically trying to find the right echo for each word of Shakespeare’s. We exist in this place as the spirits of who we used to be when we were truly alive.

Victor relented. It didn’t happen immediately. But over time, and with pressure from Charlot and Toto, he allowed me to take Dédé back to Paris each year for a month or two.

But it was too late. The melancholia inflicted by the exile was not easily shaken off. Dédé was withdrawn in Paris, preferring to hole up in our hotel room writing her endless letters to Albert Pinson than to venture out into Parisian society. She had lost the facility for mixing with people. She had lost the desire to be flirtatious and witty with strangers. She saw no point in it.

I could only do so much, and in the end, it turns out that I could do nothing at all.

Pinson was posted to Halifax, Canada. In the spring following this posting, I made my way to Paris, on the understanding that Dédé would be joining me within the week. She packed her trunk on Guernsey and dutifully left the island, not for Paris but for London, where, unbeknownst to anyone, she took passage on a boat bound for Halifax.

This is where she is now. We had word from her that she had arrived safely, and that she was reunited with her sailor. She wrote home to ask for money, saying that she had married Pinson and they were happy, and that she would remain in Halifax with him, waiting for his posting to end. Although we were very upset with this arrangement, we dutifully took out an advertisement in the local Guernsey paper announcing the marriage. She writes to me occasionally, instructing me to be happy for her. She gets angry when I express any concern for her situation.

Victor is furious. She left the island without his permission. Married or not, he wants her to return. He rages around Hauteville House, beating his chest with outrage and self-pity.

I am glad Adèle is safe from her father’s fury. She is on the other side of the world. It took over a month for her to travel by ship to Halifax, and Victor, despite his vitriolic outbursts, is not willing to travel that same time and distance to bring her home. Instead, we all write letters, asking her to return. She writes letters back, ignoring our requests and relating the glories of her married life.

She is lost to us.

I now remain in Paris. I cannot bear to return to Guernsey, to Victor’s fury and his cloying self-pity. I write to Adèle, but I can do nothing for her. She has moved far away from my words and my embrace. She is following her own dark star, and it has pulled her out of my sphere entirely. She always was half in this world and half outside it.

I would travel to Halifax to beg her to come back, but Victor won’t grant me the money for the passage.

“If she truly loved me, she would come home on her own” is all he will say when I ask him to let me go and fetch her.

Paris has changed very little in my absence. It would have been easier for me if nothing was as I remembered. But everywhere I go, I am reminded of little Adèle, of my former life with my young family, of Léopoldine. I cannot walk past our old apartment in the Place Royale without feeling faint at the sight of it, and I weep openly outside the little shop where I used to buy cakes for my children.

It is hard to remember that there was once an ease to my days, or that I ever enjoyed myself.

I stand in the little park opposite our old apartment. Other people walk through those rooms now. A woman in a red dress stops in front of one of the tall windows and looks down at me looking up at her. It is the strangest feeling, as though I am observing the ghost of myself. Or worse, I have become the ghost of myself, standing outside my own life.

I long for the past with a fierce hunger, and there seems nothing to feed it.

Well, perhaps there is one thing.

I will go and see Charles.

H
OW DID
I
BECOME
an old man, a man in his early sixties? I stand in front of the looking glass in my bedroom as I dress for dinner, surveying myself. I am fat and bald. My forehead is twisted into a scowl and my lips are twisted into a sneer. My hands are fleshy, their nails yellow and brittle. My eyes have lost their sheen. I am not a man anyone could love. The admiration I sometimes get from younger writers is the best I can hope for. I can entice these writers to me by revealing the secrets of my contemporaries. I am not ashamed to dine out on the good name of other writers, and I would show anyone’s letters to anyone else who asked. My mother once accused me of keeping secrets when I was a boy. But now, in my old age, I am the opposite. I will tell all. I am not to be trusted. My bland countenance doesn’t betray my wily heart. People confide in me because I appear to be harmless, and they are usually sorry.

I look around—at the long table loaded with books and papers; at the pair of mahogany bookcases against the wall; at the curtainless iron bed, the worn armchair by the fireplace, the two bare windows that overlook the street.

I remember my rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen, how I had one for working and one for sleeping, and how pleasing that arrangement was. It strikes me, as I stand before the looking glass, that those separate rooms were symbolic of my life then; that there was a difference between my life and work, a separation. Now it is all blended together. My life is my work. I have no other.

I used to think that age ripened us; like fruit, we would become mellow as we grew older. We would relax into a version of ourselves that was the whole accumulated truth of our existence, that was the culmination of all our joys and sorrows and intellectual ideas.

But that is not what happens. We do not ripen like a peach. We grow hard in some places, soft in others. We are inflexible where we should yield, and we give way where we should hold fast.

And I wonder if it is added misery or consolation to know that when we depart this world, we take with us the whole order of familiar things that have structured our days and given us comfort. What we have cared for in life and what has bound us most securely to it will no doubt accompany us, or go before us, into death.

It no longer matters much what I do, so long as I have something to do—something to do in the mornings, and somewhere to go at night.

It is fortunate that I have something quite pleasant to do in the evenings these days. I belong to a dining club that meets once a fortnight at the Magny restaurant in rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine. We are all writers who gather there, some old, some young: Gavarni, Flaubert, Turgenev, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Charles Edmond, Eudore Soulié, and Frédéric Baudry. George Sand comes when she is in town.

What makes the dinners memorable and enjoyable is the rule we have for the club. The rule is a simple one: we are permitted to say anything at all during the dinners, but we have made a promise to one another that whatever we say will not leave the room.

What do writers talk about when they can speak freely on any subject?

Well, they don’t talk about writing.

This evening, Flaubert wants to talk about the different headdresses that women wear to bed.

“I am partial to the cap,” he says, “but not the net.”

“The net is for a lower-class woman,” says one of the Goncourts. “The whores I visit wear nets.”

“I have known a lady to wear a net,” says Flaubert.

“Wouldn’t it be a matter of comfort?” I say.

“What do your women wear?” asks the other Goncourt.

“I must confess that I have never spent the whole night with a woman.”

There is shocked silence.

“On account of my work,” I add, which makes no real sense, but no one cares to challenge me on it.

We move on to the mechanics of love.

“I believe,” says Taine, “that women can only be satisfied in love when they are young.”

“I have found the opposite to be true,” says Flaubert.

“Isn’t it our duty, as men, to satisfy a woman no matter what her age?” I say.

“This from a man who has never spent the night with a woman?” says the Goncourt with the moustache, and everyone laughs.

The Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, wrote a book together, a novel called
Madame Gervaisais
, which had the double misfortune to be released on the day in 1852 that Napoleon III staged his coup, and to be reviewed in the press by me.

It has not met with much success.

I am too old to be impressed with the tricks of youth. The brothers’ clumsy attempts at originality seemed so banal, so unoriginal, and I said so in my review.

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 Taine 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.