The Reinvention of Love

graves. “I’m sure they all thought they had longer to love.”
    Adèle links her arm in mine. “You, dear Charles,” she says, “will have more than just a simple grave. You will have a grand statue.”
    “It won’t be as big as Victor’s,” I say.
    Adèle laughs at me. “Well,” she says, “perhaps it will be a good deal prettier.”
    We walk on in silence.
    “Boulanger wants to paint me,” she says after a while.
    Louis Boulanger is a friend of Victor Hugo’s. He has already done a portrait of the great poet.
    “What did you say?”
    “I refused.”
    “Why? Boulanger is a good painter. The portrait would be pleasing.”
    Adèle stops me on the path. “I want no other portrait,” she says, “than the one engraved on my lover’s heart.”
    I always think that
I
am the poet, that it is the power of
my
words that moves our love forwards. But really, sometimes I must be honest. Adèle is often a much better wordsmith than I am.
    I have not seen the man before. He storms into my office at the
Globe
, practically frothing at the mouth.
    “Sainte-Beuve, I challenge you to a duel,” he shouts. Not another duel!
    “What for?”
    “You have rejected my poems.”
    He is a very young man, the first flush of youth lighting his face. He stands across from me. We are separated only by my oak desk. I don’t remember his poems.
    “Come now,” I say. “If you submitted them for publication, surely you entertained the idea that they might be rejected.”
    “I did not.”
    “Well, I must have said something encouraging.” I am in the habit of mixing the good with the bad, of turning someone down, but letting him know what it is he got right.
    “You called them
trifling
. You said they were
weak
.” Just the memory of my cruel note causes the young man to mop the sweat from his brow.
    Well then, they must have been truly terrible, I think.
    There was recently a much publicized duel involving a poet. Perhaps this young man has been inspired to take action because of that. The bullet that killed that poet passed through his manuscript, which he had tucked inside his waistcoat. His poems were published posthumously, with a blank space left on each page, in the middle of the words, to show where the bullet had sliced through the manuscript en route to the poet’s heart. Perhaps posthumous publication is what this poet hopes for.
    “This is ridiculous,” I say. “I don’t want to fight you. I was entirely within my rights to reject your poems.”
    “You have disgraced me,” says the young man. “They were poems to my beloved. They were my most secret thoughts, and you scorned them. Choose your weapon.” He shouts this last part, and I can see, through the open door behind him, the heads of my colleagues turning towards us with interest.
    And then I do remember his poems. He compared his love to a fleet of ships setting sail for the New World. He compared his love to a budding tree. In one terrible poem he compared his love to a wingless dove. I remember that the manuscript itself had bits of food stuck to one of the pages, and that on another page there was a boot print. The grammar was appalling. The word use was juvenile. The whole thing was such an amateur effort that a child of six could have done a better job.
    How dare this idiot march into my office in the middle ofthe day, demanding revenge for my honest criticism!
    “If you can’t take rejection, you are no poet,” I say.
    “Choose your weapon.”
    “All right.” I lean across my desk, looking him in the eye, staring him down. “I choose spelling. You’re dead.”
    When I get home that evening there is a note from Victor, summoning me to the house. I am in a panic about what it might mean. I have been avoiding Victor and he must have noticed. He must have found out about Adèle and me, and he is calling me over to hand me a loaded pistol. We will stomp out to his back garden and he will shoot me through the heart by the pond.
    By the time I get to their house I am sweating profusely. My hair sticks to my forehead, which sticks to my hat. There are big wet patches under the arms of my waistcoat.
    I don’t feel that I can just walk into the Hugo household any more. My intimacy with Adèle has meant that I compensate for the guilt by becoming more formal with Victor. So, I stand on the front step and knock loudly. It takes a while before someone comes, and it is not the maid who answers the door, but one of the children.
    Victor is