The Reinvention of Love (3 page)
It 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.
BUT 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 number 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 that 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 up 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, 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.
You never have to look further than a man’s life to understand his work.
Gustave Planche was a literary critic for the
Revue des deux mondes
. Like me, he had been a medical student before entering the world of literature. Later on he would despise Victor’s plays as much as I did. We had a great deal in common, and as a result we ignored each other completely. I was secretly afraid that he was a better version of me.
There we were, a small group of talented men, some of us young, and some of us already in our prime. When Victor brought me into the Cénacle he was the least famous among them, apart from the boy, Alfred de Musset. And yet one day he would be the most famous of all.
I shouldn’t have to point this out, of course, but seeing how things have gone, I have to. When I first met Victor Hugo, it was I who was the more well known. I was the one who had the reputation.
We were such great friends, Victor and I. When the Hugos moved to nearby Notre-Dame-des-Champs, it seemed natural that I follow them there. You have only to look as far as his family to know with what high esteem I was held by him at the time. His first child, a son, was the embodiment of our friendship and was given the marriage of our two names – Charles Victor.
TO UNDERSTAND MY STORY
you must also understand the political turmoil in France at the time. In July of 1830, four years after I met Victor, there was a revolution. It lasted only three days, but it changed the country, and this city.
The infamous 1789 revolution, when we overthrew the monarchy, could still be tasted perhaps, when King Charles X passed two wildly unpopular laws. The first, that a person could be put to death for profaning the Catholic Church. And the second, perhaps more unpopular, that citizens couldn’t rightfully inherit property if they, or those they were inheriting from, had been declared “enemies of the revolution”. The first revolution.
It is never a good idea to remind people that they have rebelled against a king.
The press was outraged, on behalf of the populace, and many vitriolic articles were published. Charles X then restricted freedom of expression for journalists and newspapers, proclaiming that a newspaper’s printing presses could be destroyed if the King decided what it was publishing was treasonous. The
Globe
, of course, was never really at risk of such consequences as we were primarily a literary review. But I helped petition against the censorship. I collected signatures and attended rallies in the public squares.
The King, never a bright sort of man, in my opinion, chose to go boar hunting in the country at the point of greatest unrest in Paris. It was a hot July and the rich were leaving the crowded, unsanitary city if they could.
There was still the taste of insurgence among Parisians. It was no great effort to organize, to fight, to bring down the monarchy in three short days. The shopkeepers closed their doors. The papers printed radical editorials. As their printing presses were being demolished by soldiers, the editors of one newspaper were throwing freshly inked copies from the windows of their offices to the waiting crowd below.
There was the usual violence and destruction of property in the city, but thankfully no works of art were destroyed in the fracas, as had happened in the first revolution. In the end, Charles X abdicated and Louis-Philippe d’Orléans became our king. Restrictions were relaxed. Social reform was in the air. Peace returned.
But let me go back to Victor’s terrible play, which opened five months before the revolution. I can still remember every detail of that evening.
Until this year, no drama of romantic sensibility has ever been presented at the Comédie-Française, the Classicists noisily opposing the utterance of lines that deal with the flesh-and-blood nature of passion. Even the actors in Victor’s play aren’t happy with it. But all the controversy is selling out every house, and making Victor rich. When Adèle and I arrive at the Comédie-Française for the evening performance of
Hernani
, we have to fight our way into the lobby.