The Reinvention of Love

entertain the fantasy that she is our child.
    Once, when we were all sitting in the garden and Adèle was afraid that Victor would come out to join us at any moment, she was holding little Adèle tightly on her lap when what she really wanted was to embrace me. The little girl cried out, “Mother, why do you love me so much today?” as though she knew, as though she felt what her mother was really feeling.
    Love your mother, child – but here is the bitter thing./The fire which we crave also devours us.
    I am fond of particular lines, particular images. I have described the bat as
the swallow of the night
. I have said,
When wisdom is painful, it is wiser to be unaware
. And I have returned again and again to the lovers, to Adèle and me – comparing us to Orpheo and Eurydice, lamenting our separation, rejoicing in our union.
    Other lovers had, in their walk, more flowered paths, the happier trance./And made around them, better singers of the birds.
    It makes sense that my great love would yield a great work. How could it be otherwise? It would be an insult to Adèle to write mediocre poems about her, to find her only mildly inspiring as a muse. I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.
    I sit in my room, late into the night, with sheaves of paper and pots of ink. The drips from the guttering candle seal my words with wax. The breeze blows in from the open window and ruffles the pages. I think of my love, streets away now, and I write to bring her close again. Words are the rope with which I haul memory back.
    Doesn’t everyone have a book of love to write? I look up from my desk and see, through the crack in the drapes, the flickering candlelight in the houses across the way. What ifeach of those people in each of those rooms is engaged in the writing of a
Livre d’amour
?
    And then another thought occurs to me. What if my book of love is just too good to keep private?

ADÈLE MEETS ME in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She has Dédé with her, is dragging the girl along the path to where I wait for them on a chair in the shade. If I was another kind of man I might leap up when I see her hurrying through the grove of trees, rush out to meet her. But it is one of my great pleasures to watch my lover come towards me, and so I sit and relish the full moment, listen to the scuff of her feet on the gravel path, the birdsong in the air around her.
    We don’t embrace. She flops onto the chair beside mine, letting go of Dédé’s hand. The girl slumps down onto the dusty ground.
    “I can’t stay long,” says Adèle. “Victor is watching my every move. He might even have followed me here.” She scans the avenue of trees anxiously, and I do the same, fully expecting to see the compact figure of Victor Hugo crouching there.
    “I’m so sorry,” I say. “Telling Victor of the affair is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done.”
    “I don’t blame you,” says Adèle, and I think (not for the first time) how she is a much better person than I am. If the situation had been reversed, I would definitely have blamed her.
    “I don’t blame you,” she continues. “It just makes everything more difficult.”
    “But if I hadn’t told him?”
    “The fact of Victor would remain,” says Adèle. “Whether he knows about us or not, he’s still an impediment to our happiness.”
    “He insisted we would remain friends.”
    “He calls you a twisty little cheat.”
    I look down at Dédé. She’s playing in the dirt by our feet with a stick and a beetle.
    “Come away with me.”
    “Where to? You have no money. I have no money. And then there’s the question of the children.” Adèle also looks down at her daughter, and Dédé, feeling our gazes upon her, looks up and smiles at us both.
    “And besides,” says Adèle, “Victor is making plans for us to go away.”
    “Where?” That shrewd versifier. It is a pre-emptive move to take his family on a holiday.
    “Some friend has a château in Bièvres and he has made arrangements for us to go there for the rest of the summer.”
    Bièvres is not that far away from the city. It is a small town about an hour south of Paris. But it is small, and if I followed the family there I would be noticed.
    The rest of the summer is a very long time.
    “Well, I will go away too,” I say. “To Belgium.” It’s the first place that comes into my head, and the truth is that I can ill afford to go anywhere at the moment. I must remain chained to my desk