The Reinvention of Love

will spend eight years in these hotel rooms, but I don’t know that yet, of course. Now, in my thirtieth year, I climb the stairs, puffing my way along the hallway to the rooms numbered nineteen and twenty. One small space in which to sleep. One small space in which to work. I have successfully eluded both the Garde nationale and the police. My mother knows where I am and, even though she disapproves of me at the moment, she will not turn me in. What I know now, when I open the door of the room I will work in, is that I have a desk by a window, and a view out over the Jardin du Luxembourg, out to the fields that lie beyond the orchard. I have ink and paper and ideas. I have left Charles Sainte-Beuve behind. I am now Charles Delorme. I am a free man. And I am a writer.

IT IS THE SILENCE that carries the music.
    It is these long days and nights, hunched over the small desk in my room at the Hôtel de Rouen, that will make my name.
    I have decided to try my hand at a novel. If Victor can do it, surely I can too. My poems are going well, but I need something more than verse to tell the story of Adèle and me. I need to create a world to live in with her. If I cannot live with her in this world, then I will make an imagined shelter for our love.
    But it is harder than I thought, and first I must change some of the identifying details. It is all very well to write my book of love poems for myself, but I desire to be a serious writer and I should try to get this novel published. So I must take liberties to disguise the story of my love.
    I decide to set the tale in the time of the Napoleonic campaigns in the 1790s. My hero (me) shall be a soldier in these campaigns. He will be in love with his friend’s wife, a Madame de Couaen, and the bulk of the story shall be a testimony to that love.
    Well, that certainly sounded good when I thought it up. But writing it down is another matter. The plot falls away quite quickly, as overcooked meat slips from the bone, and the book becomes not so much an exploration of my love for Adèle as the exposure of it. After a day’s work I feel raw and trembling, barely have the strength to stumble down the staircase in search of supper. And on the way back up I must grasp the large brass ball on the landing railing with both my hands to steady myselfbefore proceeding down the hallway, back to my room and the torture that this writing has become.
    I thought there would be peace in the enterprise, but writing the story down just lays it bare again. Writing of Adèle does not offer me any rest. It just makes me miss her more acutely. It just makes me relive all of our moments together and ache for those moments to be repeated.
    I must be free of this torment. I must kill off Madame de Couaen.
    What I do like are the rituals: the morning shave in room number twenty, the coffee delivered by Madame Ladame. I like the sound of the stairs creaking as she climbs slowly up with cup in hand. I drink the coffee. I look out the window. I pace around the room, working myself into a state of restless agitation, that I now recognize as the creative state. Then I march next door to room number nineteen, stride across to the desk and fling myself down wretchedly. My pen lurches over the first few sentences, but then it moves swiftly and fluently. After I have killed off Madame de Couaen, the words are released from me as though they were water flowing from a pump. I cannot keep up with my thoughts. My hand races to pin down what seems desperate to flee. I must make tame what wants to remain wild, although sometimes there is much lost in this translation from feeling to meaning.
    But sometimes too I will write something that I didn’t realize was true until I’d secured it to the page. I write, “Men’s destinies do not correspond to the energy in their souls”, and I have to push my chair back from the table while I think about the truth of this. For this is how it is in me. My outward life at the moment is fairly placid, boring even, but my internal life rages with feeling. They are not reconciled, or perhaps even reconcilable. And isn’t this also the fate of the writer? To writeis the most passive of acts. There is more excitement to be found in observing someone asleep. And yet what surges through the writer’s veins while he is writing is thrilling and wild. The more sedate a writer’s life appears to be on the outside, the more imaginative he is able to be inside himself, and the more