The Reinvention of Love

to the church. Victor is right. It is too grand, too important to fall into decay. The broken statuary deserves to be repaired. The ruined pavement outside needs replacing. I wish I’d thought of writing a book about Notre-Dame myself. But I don’t have the same sentimental touch as Victor. I cannot move the masses to action, sound the right romantic chord in people’s hearts. My prose is drier. My poetry is too specific.

    Notre-Dame and the River Seine, Paris, c. 1865

    I sit in the belly of the cathedral and imagine Victor coming here every night after a fevered day’s writing. I envy him that experience of holy purpose. He would have walked along the aisles feeling entirely supported in the writing of his book – supported by the church itself. He would have felt chosen. Hewould have felt blessed. I am more of a believer than Victor, but God loves Victor for helping Notre-Dame, and God hates me for loving Victor’s wife.
    Religion has its images and codes – arches are hands clasped in prayer, the lily is the flower of the Virgin Mary, the peacock apparently does not decay when it dies and so symbolizes immortality and the resurrection. Every part of every church is like a page in a book. It can be read. Some evenings this is all I do, select a particular piece of wall or window and try to remember what everything means, try to read the interior of the cathedral.
    The columns inside Notre-Dame have leaves carved into the stone at the top. They are meant to resemble trees, to remember trees, to remember that the first churches would have been in the forest.
    When I sit at the back, the church is long and narrow ahead of me. Sometimes I look straight along it, to the curve of stained glass behind the altar. Sometimes I gaze down at the black and white tiled floor, or up at the high, vaulted ceiling.
    In the centre of the ceiling is a round painting of the Madonna and child encircled in a gold frame. The painting is dark and there are gold stars decorating the ceiling around it. From where I sit at the back of the church the medallion looks like a porthole in the ceiling.
    This church took two hundred years to build. I marvel at that, how a man could pass four full lifetimes and never see the finished structure.
    I enter the cathedral while there is still light in the sky, and I leave when it is dark, when the candles have been lit inside the church and the lamps have been lit on the bridges outside. I move from one world back to another.
    At first when I go to Notre-Dame I think of Victor and hisbook. Then I think of how I would wait for Adèle in our little church, how impatient I would be for her to arrive, to see her. But after the third or fourth night of coming to the cathedral after supper I realize that I am coming for myself, that I am not imitating anyone, or waiting for anyone. I have entered this building not to worship another, but rather to please myself.

I HAVE DECIDED TO MOVE IN with my mother on the rue du Montparnasse. It is a small house and I will have to make do with less privacy, but it will be a saving for me to throw in my lot, temporarily, with Madame Sainte-Beuve. My income is dependent on work that comes my way, and when there isn’t much of this I cannot eat or pay my rent. Now that I am embarked on serious literary pursuits, it seems prudent to save money where I can.
    I am fond of Mother, but she is tiresome. We share an emotional sympathy, but she is not much good as an intellectual companion, as I said. Her thoughts are not concerned with symbols and philosophical argument. They are, most likely, dwelling on some lowly gossip she heard on the street that morning, or engaged in the never-ending quest to find her sewing basket, or her spectacles. Sharing a house with her will be more frustrating than rewarding, but it will also mean that I will not have to work so hard at the
Globe
.
    Life with Mother is not easy. The first night we are together under one roof again I am sitting up in my new bedroom reading, when I hear the most appalling sounds coming from Mother’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. Scraping and scratching, the noise of the floorboards being scored as something heavy is pushed over them.
    I wait for the noise to stop. It does not. I put my book aside and go and knock on Mother’s bedroom door.
    “Are you all right?” I ask.
    “Perfectly well, Sainte-Beuve,” comes her reply from the other side of the door.
    “Why are you moving furniture so late at