The Reinvention of Love

I am. “Charlotte. My love.” Her face lights up. She is, as her husband said in his boastful letter, positively radiant with happiness. All my doubts evaporate. She has not returned her heart to Victor. She is still mine.

    We meet in the church. We meet in the forest. I lurk among the trees like a madman. We kiss in the choir loft. I fondle her by a waterfall. She takes flowers home to press with the children. She runs back to the château with twigs in her hair and grass stains on her dress.
    We are being foolish and we know it.
    “It is only a matter of time,” says Adèle, at the end of the first week, “before Victor finds us out.”
    We are lying in the forest in the middle of a gorse bush where I have hollowed us out a lair. It is how I spent my morning while waiting for Adèle to leave the château. I fear I am going feral. We are living like rabbits.
    “What can we do?” I am trying to untie her stays but I keep getting poked by sticks. “These are desperate times.” The need to keep our love even more secret has intensified the passion. I run my hand up the inside of her thigh. She shivers in delight.
    “I have never been happier,” I exclaim. “I want to live like this forever.”
    “In the shrubbery?”
    “No.” I bend to kiss her. “Like this. With you. Near you.”
    Adèle struggles up onto her elbows. “Charles,” she says. “I don’t want to get caught. You have to go back to Paris.”
    I feel as though I have been run through with a sabre, as though the ground beneath Adèle and me is already soaked with my blood.
    “You can’t mean that.”
    “But, I do. I do.” Adèle strokes my cheek. “My treasure,” she says. “I just can’t risk it.”
    “But weren’t you hoping that I might arrive?”
    “Yes, I was.”
    “And how will it be when I leave?”
    Adèle sighs, lowers herself back down on to the dirt.
    “Unbearable,” she says, as she pulls me down on top of her. “I would die without you.”
    I have been turned out of the inn where I was staying because the proprietress thought I was bringing prostitutes there. I was careless one afternoon and returned to the inn still dressed as Charlotte. This woman shamelessly went up to my room and entered and presumably pleasured me, and now I have been thrown out of my lodgings.
    When I go to another inn, seeking accommodation, the innkeeper looks at my name as I sign the register.
    “We’re full up,” he says.
    “But you just told me I could have a room.”
    He snatches the register away from me. “I lied.”
    “Why would you do that?”
    He shrugs. “I don’t want you here.”
    Bièvres is a small place. The townspeople probably know about Adèle and me, and view our love as scandalous. Even this lowly innkeeper thinks I am an enemy of decency. I should challenge him to a duel for his insolence, but I can’t be bothered and I pick up my bags.
    It is time to go back to Paris, back to my love poems.

WHILE I WAIT FOR ADÈLE to return from the country, I have taken to coming to Cathédrale Notre-Dame every evening after supper. Not to the church where I usually meet my lover, but to
the
church, the great cathedral, the heart of the city.
    I have read Victor’s book, and I have to admit I liked it. I did wonder briefly if the horribly disfigured hunchback who lives in the bell tower, Quasimodo, was modelled on me, but mostly I’ve been impressed by the beautiful descriptions of the church, by Victor’s intent to raise the public’s awareness of the building’s neglect. It was damaged during the first revolution and badly needs repair. Victor’s story is set in the church, but the church is really the main character. I admire my old friend’s desire to save such a monumental part of Paris’s history. It is a noble gesture.
    And the book is selling very well.
    It is not far to walk from my house to where the church rests on the Ile de la Cité, the small island in the middle of the Seine that used to be the entire city of Paris. Now, that island is anchored to the city proper by five bridges, like ropes mooring a ship to the shore.
    The summer evenings are long and there is still considerable light outside when I enter the building during the last mass of the day. If it is crowded, I sit in a pew near the back, under the vaulted ceiling, made, as all church ceilings were made, to imitate the vastness of the heavens.
    An entire army could march through the arches and theywould still seem diminutive in relation