The Reinvention of Love

writing. When I fell in love with Victor, I attached my ambitions to his own, craved his successes, wished for him to be a great artist. My own desires fell away when we married, when I became pregnant, when I had my four sweet children.
    I didn’t think they would ever come back.
    But somehow my ambitions have returned as a single drive, as the force that compels me to love Charles and Charlotte and not Victor.
    When I rush towards Charles along the gravel path of the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I ran out into the meadow as a girl, chasing after my sister through the long grass, I am not in flight. I am hurtling headlong, with no way to stop the momentum I’ve gathered.
    And what I want, what I long for, is not to escape so much as simply to arrive.

CHARLES

    THE HUGOS HAVE MOVED. I have not seen my beloved in weeks. Despite Victor’s orders that I end my affair with his wife, I have no intention of doing so. The brief notes that Adèle has managed to send me reassure me that she has no plan to end the affair either. But we have encountered great difficulty in seeing one another of late. Victor does not leave Adèle alone for a moment. I have had to write secret letters to her and leave them, under the name Madame Simon, at the Poste Restante. She has sent letters to me by foot messenger, often using the same dim-witted girl who used to board with the Hugos. And despite his avowal that our friendship would not be affected by my love for his wife, Victor always treats me awkwardly when we meet. Thankfully, this is not often, as he has been kept busy with his change of residence and his new book about Cathédrale Notre-Dame.
    In the absence of my beloved Adèle, I write poems for her. I want to document our love. I don’t want to forget a moment of it – not a word, not a touch. The book is to be called
Livre d’amour
, and I have used real names, transcribed things that Adèle has said, noted our meetings in the church and named the hotel, the Saint-Paul, where we rendezvous for sex. I have disguised nothing. It is my heart laid bare.
    But I will never have the volume printed, so I am safe to confess anything I want. The pages are my companion. The words carry my memory of love. They are for me, and for mealone – although I might be persuaded to show some of the poems to Adèle, if she insists.
    It is a tragedy that this secret book contains my best work. I have always wanted to be a great poet, and here I must admit that I think Victor is a great poet. It is only his plays that I object to so strenuously. But his verse is beautiful.
    Still,
Livre d’amour
is a good book. I know it is.
It is my life, in love and stagnant./An absence of pleasure, on a base of happiness
. And it is Adèle’s life. I have complete freedom to do as I please. I not only tell our secrets, mine and Adèle’s, but I tell
her
secrets. Stories of her youth, and stories of her marriage to the “dark husband”. I write hoping “that you will always be this Adèle whom I love”. I write of “our short joy/our long delay”. Sometimes the poems seem as real as though I am living the moments again.
It is the hour when you should be taken back. Here, give me your hand. Let us pretend we have tomorrow.
    I talk about each time we have met, what happened, what was said. I have even written a poem to little Adèle, young Dédé. Since she is so small, she is often the one child who will accompany us on our walks through the orchard. There is no chance that she will relay anything of our meetings back to Victor, and the fact that she is my godchild means that I am more fond of her than I am of Adèle’s other children.
    Delicious child that her mother sends to me,/Last born child of the husband whose joy I broke;/Her face lit up by twenty moons.
    More than once Adèle and I, lost in our passion, have neglected the cries of the child.
    Your mother and I are burning meteors./So many storms have passed since your innocent hour./We cannot be the shelter you need.
    I have ended this poem with a direct address to little Adèle, to a time when she is old enough to read and understand my words because, even though I am showing my book to no one, perhaps I will give this one poem to my godchild. It is not just that she is my godchild that makes me so fond of the girl. Shehas her mother’s name. She was born shortly before our love began, so she has grown with that love. I like her nature and I feel that it resembles mine. Sometimes I even