The Reinvention of Love

in the parlour. Adèle, thank God, is nowhere to be seen. The room is a mess, packing crates sit in the centre of the rug and pictures are off the walls.
    “What’s happening?” I ask.
    “We’re being evicted.” Victor motions me into the room. “We have to move.”
    “But why?”
    “It seems that our landlord is conservative and was very offended by
Hernani
.”
    “But he didn’t have to go to the play.”
    Victor waves his hand over an open packing crate, as thoughhe’s about to conjure a rabbit from it. “The talk, Charles,” he says. “The talk of what happens each night at the play is all over town. One doesn’t need to actually go to the play to know what is going on.”
    I suppose this is true. I have been so concerned with my own life lately that I have forgotten all about Victor’s play and the controversy surrounding it.
    I collapse into a chair.
    “Where will you go?”
    “We’ve taken an apartment on rue Jean-Goujon.”
    “But that’s on the other side of the river.” Rue Jean-Goujon is a small street near the Champs-Elysées, but it may as well be the other side of the world.
    “I need to be close to the theatre.” Victor looks at me shrewdly. “And, Charles,” he says, “I have not seen much of you lately. I thought, in fact, you might be avoiding me.”
    “Why would I do that?”
    “Yes, why
would
you do that?”
    “You were writing your novel,” I say weakly.
    Adèle has told me that Victor has become obsessed with Notre-Dame Cathedral, and that he is writing a story set there. He lives in his room and only comes out at night, when he walks to the church. She has told me that he requests his meals be delivered to his room, that he writes standing up at a tall desk, wrapped dramatically in a cloak.
    Victor kneels in front of me, takes both of my hands in his, as though he is about to propose marriage. “Charles,” he says. “What is wrong? We have been such good friends and now I feel that I hardly know you.”
    It is the touch that does it. If he had not knelt before me and taken my hands I might have been able to withstand the shock of the Hugos’ move across the river. But the touch undoes me. I feel compelled to confess. I suddenly remember our friendship and I want to tell Victor everything.
    “I’m in love with Adèle,” I say. “She is in love with me. Wehave been seeing one another for about a year.”
    Victor drops my hands, leaps to his feet. “What do you mean?”
    I think of the hotel room where Adèle and I so recently were, how I have not bathed since that afternoon because I do not want to wash her touch from my body.
    “I mean,” I say, “that I have been having physical relations with your wife.”
    Victor looks shocked, and I realize that he has not suspected us at all. I shouldn’t have confessed.
    “You?” he says. “You and Adèle?”
    Oh, it is too late to take any of it back. I said it without regret. I said it a little boastfully, and now I can see that it was a mistake to admit it. Adèle and I could have continued for years without Victor finding out. Why did I grace him with more interest in his wife than I know he has? Victor is happy sequestered in his room, writing his book about the cathedral. That is his world. Adèle and I, and his children, we exist at the outer edge of that. There was no need to tell Victor. He would never have discovered us. We could have gone on for years, quite happily.
    Adèle will be furious with me. Victor will make her life impossible. Why did I think only of myself and not consider her?
    “I’m lying,” I say, desperate to turn this around. “It’s a joke. Ha ha.” I laugh weakly. It comes out sounding like a dog barking. A very small dog.
    “No. You’re not lying.” Victor is frowning, probably remembering all the times I have been alone with his wife. He slaps his forehead with his great paw. “I encouraged you,” he shouts. “I believed we were all friends.” A shadow passes over his face as he realizes perhaps the greatest indignity of all. “I sent you to see my play together!”

    Victor and I drink a bottle of wine in the parlour, using one of the packing cases as a table for our glasses.
    “I have never had a mistress,” says Victor. “I have only ever loved my wife.”
    This surprises me. I know that the great Victor Hugo has many female admirers. I would have thought he’d take full advantage of that adulation.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, although I am mostly sorry that