The Reinvention of Love (15 page)

Surprisingly, Mother is very impressed with my entrance into the Académie française. She faints when she is told the news, and then rushes out with an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of the Virgin in her local church.

So, when the small town where I grew up decides to honour me with a reception, she will not be stopped from coming.

I have become the most famous person to have lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer. It is mostly a town of fishermen, of commerce based on the sea. I don’t imagine that anyone there actually reads my writing, but it is kind of them to want to honour me, and I am touched by their kindness.

The Mayor has decided to hold the reception in the bakery that occupies the ground floor of the building where Mother and I used to live. I still remember the warm smell of the pies rising up the staircase to our apartment.

“Do you remember, Sainte-Beuve, how you used to stick your fingers in the tarts so they were ruined and would be given to you later for free?” says Mother, much too loudly and in front of the small assembled crowd. Everyone laughs.

“Please,” I say. But Mother, who has never received anything like applause before, finds the laughter of the crowd very stimulating.

“He was such a naughty little boy,” she says. “Ruining the tarts. Keeping secrets. Telling lies. Never doing what he was told. Lazy as a hog. Always lying around reading those tiresome books.”

More laughter. The Mayor steps forward and awkwardly drapes a red sash across my shoulders. “For your books,” he says. There is a smattering of applause. Glasses of champagne are offered to everyone. The baker’s wife passes around a tray of tarts. I dare not take one.

I leave Mother in the bakery, go down to the sea to walk
along the shingle. The wind blows hard from across the Channel, wraps the red sash around my neck like a scarf.

Across the Channel lies England, a place I went to for a month once. It excited me to go there. There was English blood in my family. My mother’s mother, whom I never met, was an Englishwoman named Margaret Middleton.

But the actual experience of England was less ecstatic than the imagining of it. I stayed in a country house in Alvescot, near Oxford, having been invited there by two English brothers who were friends of mine at school. The family, unfortunately, was given to exercise, and I was forced to tramp about in the rain and even, on one terrible occasion, to attempt riding. The food was practically inedible. There was an alarming amount of shooting and fishing, and everyone I met seemed to be a parson, although none of them very devout. The one redeeming grace was my introduction to the Lake poets – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Collins – and I decided to translate a few of their poems into French when I returned home.

But my translations are no consolation now. It is ironic that, at a point in my life where I feel I have lost everything, I am suddenly being rewarded for my accomplishments.

The fishermen are returning from their day at sea. I stand in the shelter of a cove and watch the boats sailing towards the beach. As a boy I used to come down to this very spot and gaze at them. I liked the shouts of the men as they compared their catches. I liked the intricate lace of the nets, pegged out and drying in the sun.

None of these men will ever wear the green jacket, or be draped in the red sash, but nor will they ever care about these things, or see the merit in them. What is an honour if it means something to only a small group of people? I will never be someone whom these fishermen will want to know.

Mother is jubilant all the way home to Paris in the carriage. She bubbles over with talk. I look out the window, watching the countryside judder slowly past.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there is the feeling of poetry in me, rising as fervently as desire. Even though everything is lost, perhaps something of what is lost is still recoverable. Perhaps, even if I never visit my birthplace again, I can find a way to describe the sound the fishing boats make when they beach on the shingle after a day at sea and, whenever after I read that passage, that image will return to me.

And that is better than any honour I could be given.

The boats heave themselves up out of the sea, like strange wooden fish, the hulls hitting the beach with a great booming sound. No, not fish, it is more that the hulls are waves, but heavier than water. The booming sound they make when they are thrown forward from the sea onto the beach is like the sound of a bell. It is deep and sonorous, and the whole fishing fleet plays a madrigal of bells as it comes to shore.

The red sash that the Mayor gave me is still wound around my neck. I unwind it, fold it carefully into a small rectangle and hand it over to Mother.

“I want you to have this.”

“Oh, Sainte-Beuve.” For a moment she is actually speechless, clasping the piece of red satin against her bosom. “What a day!” She carefully puts the folded sash on her lap and fumbles in her bag. “I have something for you too.” She passes me a box.

“What is it?”

“Open it and see.”

I lift the lid, and inside are four tarts from the bakery, nestled in straw to keep them safe from breaking.

I AM THE LIBRARIAN
at the Mazarine Library in the French Institute on the quai de Conti through most of the 1840s, and I have been given rooms to live in at the Institute. By day I sit at a desk and enter into a ledger the names of those patrons who come to borrow books from the library. By night I sit up in my rooms, reading and writing. I have arrived at a life entirely circumscribed by literature.

I was offered the job through a rather strange set of circumstances.

It all started when Louise Colet, who is the mistress of both Victor Cousin, the politician and Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, was savaged by the critic, Alphonse Karr, in his monthly satirical journal.

Louise Colet did not take kindly to being ridiculed in the press and she called on Alphonse Karr at his home. When he turned from the door to usher her into his apartment, she took out the kitchen knife she had concealed beneath her skirts and stabbed him in the back.

He was not killed, but in an effort to have the whole unpleasant business quietened down, Victor Cousin, who was the Minister of Education at the time, asked me if I would speak to Alphonse and convince him to let the matter alone.

This was more easily done than I had imagined, as I think Alphonse was genuinely shocked and terrified by the stabbing, and by the fact that it had made him afraid. But I argued that to make more of the assault by laying charges would be to
entertain those feelings longer than he wanted. So he decided to let the matter rest, contenting himself with displaying the knife in a glass case inside his home with the inscription: “Received from Louise Colet – in the back”.

As a reward for my part in the case, Victor Cousin gave me the position of librarian in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I receive housing and 4,000 francs a year, all for the trifling inconvenience of sitting at the library desk two days a week. Victor Cousin is very generous with his appointments. He has also given Alfred de Musset a position as librarian for the Ministry of the Interior – which has no library.

So here I sit, at my little desk under the vaulted library ceilings. Footsteps occasionally echo through the passageways, but mostly it is silent in the library. The new outbreak of cholera has kept a lot of the patrons away.

Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Adèle will come to the library, completely by accident, but here my fantasy always has to end for I know that Adèle would have no interest in visiting the Institute de France. She has had enough of books. The literary life has not exactly served her well.

When I am bored with sitting at the desk I walk the library, trolling my fingers along the spines of the books, the way I would ripple my hand down the iron fences when I was a boy. The spines of the books are like the bars of a fence, like the bars of a cage.

I stand before my own books and think of all the hours and days and years that have gone into these small volumes. How inconsequential it all seems. To what purpose have I given my life away?

And if I am feeling in a particularly melancholy mood, I will go and stand in front of Victor’s books, which occupy the better part of one whole shelf. They are like a small wall in front of me. A barricade, like the barricades the revolutionaries build in the streets these days, and crouching behind them to throw rocks at their enemies.

Victor, of course, has become the hero of the new revolution, the one that started four years after we met. He has so much public sympathy that he will probably run the country one day. Such is his need for admiration. I understand his desire to be famous, but not the fact that he
is
famous. Why? His books are no better than anyone else’s. He is not set apart by his peers as the best writer of the day. This honour probably belongs to Flaubert, or God help me, that fat braggart, Balzac.

What is it that makes Victor’s ascension so swift and sure? Is it luck? Is it timing? Surely, if one did not know of his reputation and read one of his novels alongside my own, the under-appreciated
Volupté
, there would not be much difference in the quality of the books. Why then do I languish in obscurity as a novelist while Victor continues to rise to glory? Why do I have to spend my days being a librarian?

Before going to bed I stand by my window in my night-shirt, looking down into the little courtyard below my rooms. Sometimes I can hear the rattle of the death carts carrying the new cholera victims from the neighbouring streets. I try to ignore that terrible sound, and look instead at the small fountain that protrudes from the courtyard wall. I like the murmur of the water, and the figures on the fountain – Eros playing with a butterfly. It is such a lighthearted scene that I am grateful it is there for me to gaze upon.

I always leave the window open when I sleep, just a fraction, so that I can feel the cool night air on my skin, and so that sometimes, if I wake in the dark, afraid and alone, I can let the whisper of the fountain rock me back to sleep like a lullaby.

I mention revolutionaries and death carts. The 1840s have brought more political change to France. The population of Paris has doubled since 1800, leading to overcrowding,
unemployment and disease. In the end, cholera will kill over 19,000 people in two years.

One day I was walking near the Place Vendôme when I came upon a crush of men armed with paving stones and sticks. I ducked down a side street, but there were more of the revolutionaries there. Luckily I spotted my old acquaintance, Alphonse de Lamartine, coming out of the back door of the Hôtel de Ville. He was now one of the revolutionary leaders, having traded his pen for politics. And he was very popular among the people.

The mob saw Lamartine at the same time as I did. They pushed towards him. I pushed towards him.

“
Vive Lamartine!
” they shouted. And then one of them spied me and yelled out to the others. “A priest! A priest in disguise!”

I could feel their hands upon me, and I swear they would have torn me to pieces like a pack of wolves if I hadn’t reached the safety of Lamartine, who ushered me into his carriage and drove me away from the mob. But next time there might be no one there to save me and I could be killed by the members of a cause to which I have actually given my support.

Best to stay indoors for a while.

Because, aside from the mobs, there is also the cholera. In time, Napoleon III will widen the streets and create huge new boulevards to replace the warren of medieval Parisian alleys of the 1840s. But for now, those narrow streets, airless and sunless and burdened with heavy traffic, cause so much disease. Gutters at their sides are intended to carry the garbage and raw sewage to underground viaducts, but this happens only when it rains. The rest of the time the garbage and excrement lie open to the air, and in the evenings the gutters are overrun with rats and mice, feasting greedily on the vile soup.

George has fled to her country house. During the 1832 epidemic she had lived across from the morgue on the Ile de la Cité, and had watched the endless procession of death carts, each one piled high with bodies.

“I couldn’t stop watching,” says George, when she comes to say goodbye on her way to her country estate. “I sat at my window all day. It was so compelling, and I felt obliged to witness this last journey of the poor souls who had died. I just can’t stand to see any more death.”

I worry for Adèle, but I hear no word of her fate.

I HAVE WRITTEN ANOTHER
book of poems. It was completed quite soon after
Livre d’amour
was published privately and borrowed much from that book. In the introduction I have written that friendship is still the main subject of the verses, even if it is not, any longer, a single dominant friendship.

What a convenient word “friendship” is. It is a blanket to throw over one’s more naked feelings.

I have called the little book
Pensées d’août
. The title is literal, as I did write much of the book at the end of a summer. August is the hinge between summer and autumn, a time of bittersweet change. The days are still warm, but there is the awareness that winter is coming, and one day, just in one day, everything changes and one wakes to find that the air has a chill in it, and that a coat is now required in the evenings. I think that this is the natural season for contemplation, and that poetry comes from this spiritual August – this place between loss and arrival. The emotion disappears and the word moves in to take its place. The last flowers of August thrive in the last of the summer heat, but they will not bloom again until spring. When one walks through the gardens and sees them, the joy at their existence is balanced, in equal measure, by the sorrow of their imminent departure.