The Dream Lover (11 page)

I closed my door and read the brief message; it set my heart racing. Jules, missing me terribly, had made a hasty trip from his parents' home in western France to Château d'Ars, the home of our friend Gustave Papet, which was a mere mile and a half up the road.

Late that night, I sat in the upstairs bedroom I had taken, longing to have an opportunity to see him. As if in answer to a prayer, I heard a light tapping at my window. It was Jules, my own Romeo, standing on a ladder he had carried from the orchard, pleading with me to let him in. He had seen the light in my window, had seen me pacing back and forth.

I let him in, laughing, crying, and covered his face with kisses.

Then: “Are you insane?” I whispered. “Casimir is here! If he finds you, he will fill you with buckshot!”

Jules put his hands to either side of my face and regarded me tenderly. “I would happily die for this moment. Anyway, we are protected: Gustave has volunteered to lie in a ditch in the garden
directly beneath your window. He will throw a stone if he sees or hears anything.”

As it happened, there was no cause for worry. The whole time Jules was in my bed with me, Casimir lay in his bed, snoring, and there was a nearly comical aspect to it. It also enlivened our lovemaking, the thought that perhaps Casimir might awaken.

We were already in a rush—we had missed each other's minds and bodies—but this secrecy added a kind of wild excitement we had not enjoyed before. We bit and pinched each other, he pulled on my hair until I gasped; and in the pain there was a low-down pleasure. We kept whispering to each other that we must hurry and then must part, poor Gustave out there lying in the dirt; but every time we gave each other a farewell kiss, it led to more and more, until our dear friend ended up spending the entire night outside, relieved of his duty only as dawn broke. I was deeply grateful to Gustave and later sent him a letter saying so, calling our friendship nothing less than holy and imploring him to find a way for Jules and me to repay him.

But first, after Jules had made his escape, I sat at my desk, still tingling, to write a letter to Émile Regnault, a medical student I loved as a brother. I wanted to tell someone of Jules and my adventuresome lovemaking; it had made me feel distinctively alive and powerful—and apparently in need of a bit of braggadocio, as well. I wrote, “I am covered with bites and bruises; so weak I can hardly stand I'm in such a frenzy of joy. If you were only here, I'd bite you too until blood flowed, just so you could share a little of our savage raptures.”

Then I began to make edits on the pages Jules had given me for our novel. It was due to be published in December. People were saying that no doubt Jules would contribute next to nothing. I hotly defended my lover but those rumors were true. With the exception of a few bawdy (and, in my opinion, tasteless) scenes that appealed to the juvenile aspects of Jules's character—and apparently to our publisher's as well—the book was mine.

Not for many years did it occur to me that there was another side to that evening of stolen pleasure with Jules, a way of looking at it that revealed me not as an independent and freethinking woman who had the right to live her own life but as one blind to the needs of her children. For my lover and I would be warned in the event that my husband's lamp got lit and he began coming toward Jules and me. But what about Solange and Maurice, who, though they now slept in their own beds, still occasionally came to me? What would I have said to them should they have knocked at my locked door, knowing they had heard the sounds within?

July 1810

NOHANT

I
t was just after I had turned six years old that I came into my mother's room one afternoon to present her with a bouquet of wildflowers. She was packing; her open suitcase lay upon the bed. I dropped the flowers: the day had come. In the morning, she would go to live in Paris. Now I would only see her when she visited me.

Following my father's death, my grandmother had not gone to Paris for the winter, as usual, but had stayed at Nohant. My half sister, Caroline, my mother's now eleven-year-old daughter, was not received there. My grandmother made a point, with a kind of faux, powdered-bosom generosity, of saying my mother was welcome to see her own daughter, of course she was! Just not there at Nohant. Never mind that my father had embraced Caroline as his own child; such sentiments clearly were not shared by his mother. So if my mother wanted to see her other daughter, she had to take a three- or four-day trip to Paris. Naturally, this began to wear on her.

Around this time, in a way that seemed at the time innocent and even fortuitous but that I later came to regard as calculated, my grandmother received a visitor, her half brother and my great-uncle, an unapologetic ladies' man named Charles-Godefroid-Marie de Beaumont. He was absurdly handsome and had about him an irresistible air of gaiety. He missed my father, as we did, but his nature was such that he would always turn to the sunny side, and with his arrival he lifted the gloom for all of us. Now every evening was filled with laughter and lively conversation.

My mother, used to the attention and admiration of men, was drawn to Beaumont. It was not only because of his appreciation for her beauty and charm; he served, my mother thought, as a steady and objective presence who could help her decide the best thing to
do with her life now that Maurice was gone. With my great-uncle she weighed the pros and cons of taking me with her to Paris. If she did, we would be poor again, for with Napoleon's defeat came the end of a pension my mother had expected to receive annually from my father's military service. But she would have both of her daughters with her, and after all, as she told Beaumont, it was not wealth that brought contentment.

Beaumont gained enough of my mother's trust to make her feel that agreeing to the arrangement my grandmother had offered was the right thing to do. My mother would be given a sum that equaled the amount she would have received as a pension, plus an additional one thousand francs annually, which was a generous bonus. In return, she would forsake her rights to me with the exception of visits at her own discretion. In other words, my grandmother would be entirely responsible for my upbringing. I overheard my mother agreeing to sign a contract to make her promise legal and binding. To me, it meant that my mother was trading me for money.

The night that contract was signed, I lay with my mother on her bed, inconsolable, despite her reassurances that I truly would be better off, that she would come and visit me in the summers at Nohant; and that in the winter, when I lived in my grandmother's apartment in Paris, my mother would fetch me to spend time with her and Caroline in our old apartment. But I could only hear that the time would come when she would leave me entirely. And now that time was here. I burst into tears.

My mother pulled me onto her lap and kissed me. “Please take me with you,” I said. “Don't leave me here without you.”

Her voice was full of pain, but she tried to calmly explain again why I could not come with her. Finally, she said, “If I take you away from your grandmother, she will reduce my income to fifteen hundred francs.”

The news, rather than helping me resign myself to the fact that I must stay there, only made me think that there was no reason for me not to come with her. In my child's mind, fifteen hundred was a
large number indeed, and I told my mother so. In my head, I was already packing my own things.

“No, Aurore,” my mother said. “It would not be enough. Half of that amount goes to pay for Caroline's school. I wouldn't have enough to clothe and feed us. Soon you would be begging me to send you back to the comforts of your life here, and who knows if your grandmother would take you back!”

This was a consideration. My grandmother had suffered some small strokes that had made her personality change; she was no longer as even in temperament as she had been.

“But I don't care!” I said. “I never want to come back anyway! It doesn't matter what we eat, we'll have marrow bone soup every night and I will love it because I will be with you! Maman, we will be happy, and so everything will be all right.”

She said nothing, and I pressed her further.

“You know I am right. You always say that love and happiness are not for sale, that what is on your back and on your plate is second to what is in your heart. You believe this, just as Papa did!”

She laughed. “You are too intelligent for your own good.”

She grew quiet, thinking. Then she said, “Perhaps I would be happier poor with you than I am here, where I live a life wanting nothing in the way of material goods but where my heart cries out for a freedom and liveliness that will never be here. I suppose you long for the same.”

“Yes!” I said. “I am just like you!”

Her face changed. “No.” She lifted me off her lap and stood me straight before her. “Aurore, listen to me. You don't fully realize what you would be giving up in terms of education and security and the promise of a good match. I would be remiss as a mother if I did not consider these things for you.”

“My education here is not good, it is airless! They want me to be a puppet. As for a good match, I can find that on my own, just as you did! I love my grandmother, I will continue to visit and care for her, I will continue to sing for her and put on my plays, but must I
live with her to do that? I tell you, Maman, and you must believe me, I do not care about her money or her house or her fine things.”

“You can say that because you have had such things! But I know what it means to be a young girl with no money. Poverty is what shaped my life, and I had to struggle hard to overcome my circumstances. I was forced to do terrible things. I want better for you!”

“I know what is best for me! And that is to live with my mother! Look into my eyes and tell me you do not agree.”

For a long time, she did look at me. Then she said, “All right, all right! I have thought of a solution. You know I can make charming hats and that I used to be a milliner. I'm going to save some money and open my own shop. Why not? It will not be in Paris—that would be too expensive. Instead, I'll start my place in Orléans, where I worked before. You and Caroline can help me. We will have many customers; we will make enough money to keep ourselves comfortable. In time, you will have enough of a dowry to marry a worker like yourself, who no doubt will make you happier than the namby-pambies your grandmother would pair you with. You are full of passion, like me; you should marry your equal in that respect.”

“A hat shop, yes, the most wonderful hat shop!” I cried, and my mother put her fingers to her lips to silence me.

“You must tell no one,” she said. “And you must be patient—can you do that for me? For us!”

“I can. But how long before I can come with you? How many days?”

She frowned. “Is this your display of patience? Starting right now, show me what forbearance is in you. Trust in me. Be a good girl for your grandmama, do all she says, and soon you will no longer have to listen to her at all.”

I was enormously relieved and spent the rest of the day happily amusing myself, imagining days at the store, evenings in the small but charming place where my mother, my sister, and I would live.

But that night, while I lay in bed listening to the voices below,
doubt crept in. My mother had displayed a great deal of sadness when she'd kissed me good night, and I feared she had changed her mind and would not honor her words; instead, she would go away and gradually forget about me. I rose from bed and by the light of my candle wrote her a letter that was an outpouring of my feelings. I asked her to come to my room and tell me again that she would do all that she had promised.

After I had finished, I crept into the hall and down to her bedroom. Hanging on the wall of that room was a pencil drawing of my grandfather, and as it was not a very flattering portrait (it had been done in his old age, when he was fat and jowly), it had been put in a place where, when the door was open, it was hidden. I put my letter behind it. Included in it was a request that my mother leave her response here as well. Then I found her nightcap, put a note in it telling her to move the portrait to look for a note from me, and put her nightcap on her pillow.

After that, I could not sleep, and when I heard my mother go into her bedroom, I went there. She was sitting at the edge of the bed with my letter in her hands, and her eyes were full of tears. I ran into her arms, fearful of her telling me that my suspicions were correct: she was leaving me forever. It was not as bad as all that, but she did confess to feeling a terrible sense of ambivalence. Once again, I employed all my gifts as an orator—even at six years old, I knew I could be quite persuasive—and begged her to follow through on her plans for taking me with her. Finally, she agreed again to our plan.

“Put it in writing,” I said. Not for nothing had I heard the negotiations that had gone on when my mother signed the contract giving up her rights to me. I wanted something binding as well, and I also wanted something I could read and reread to boost my spirits while I waited for her to come for me.

“I shall write it,” my mother said, “but not now. It is late—you should be asleep. Come, I will tuck you in and kiss you good night and you will have beautiful dreams.”

When she tucked me in, she sat for longer than usual at the side of my bed. She was quiet, holding my hands in hers.

“Don't forget to write the letter,” I said.

“Yes, yes, in the morning.”

“Promise me with all your heart.”

“I promise,” she said and kissed me once more, then crept out of my room. I lay awake for some time, then closed my eyes, certain I had done all I could.

In the morning, I missed her leave-taking; I had slept through it. I ran to her room, where there was still the indentation of her head on the pillow of her unmade bed. I lay down and put my head where hers had been, my heart aching. Then I remembered the letter she had promised to write: there would be her words, her inviolable promise.