The Reinvention of Love

that.
    I walked through Paris. I walked to the little church where Adèle and I used to meet, although I was too heartbroken to enter. I walked to Notre-Dame and circled the outside walls, not daring to go in there either. To venture indoors would be to have my sadness constrict around me. At least when I was outside there was space for it to dissipate, to be carried off by the breeze from the river, or burned from me by the heat of the afternoon sun.
    I walked to our old houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I stopped only moments outside mine, but I stood for a long time in front of Adèle and Victor’s.
    There is the window of Dédé’s room, where Adèle and I first made love.
    There is the window to the parlour where I would sit with the Hugos at night, discussing literature for hours, reading Victor’s poems before they were to be published.
    There, through the gate, is the garden where I would visit Adèle and her children, where I would linger longer than was necessary, wanting never to leave her presence.
    There, at the gate, is where she ran after me, the night after the day I fought my duel with Pierre Dubois. “I couldn’t live without you,” she said.
    It is an otherwordly feeling to be held by arms that will no longer embrace you, to stand in front of a door that once admitted you, but is now barred to you. I felt as though I were already dead.
    Places exist as monuments to the feelings that were revealed there. The entire Hugo house on Notre-Dame-des-Champs is a memorial to my love affair with Adèle Hugo.
    Pretty white flowers twist through the garden gate. I pick one and thread it through the buttonhole in my waistcoat. Much later, when I have occasion to look it up, long after it has died, I find out that it is not a flower but only a common weed.

PARIS, 1840s

CHARLES

    I HAD THEM PRINTED. What can I say? My poems were too good to keep to myself. I always considered them to be my greatest achievement.
    Their subject was Adèle, and my love for her, and in the poems I named names and places. I made no move to hide anyone’s identity. I had the book privately printed in 1843, five hundred copies.
    I had meant to keep the copies locked up in a cupboard until Victor died. But Victor seemed as vigorously healthy as ever, and so I distributed a few copies of
Livre d’amour
to my friends. It was the one literary work in which I still felt great pride.
    Adèle, of course, had seen some of the poems when we were together. She loved me so she had not minded them, although she often tired of listening to them. I think she was forced to listen to an abundance of poetry in her life with Victor, and she wanted me to offer respite from that, not additional torment.
    I wanted to send Adèle a copy of the book when it was printed, but I feared that it might fall into the hands of her husband, and I could not risk that. Somehow it reached Victor anyway. Word came to me through a mutual friend that Monsieur Hugo was outraged, and that his oldest son, Charles, my namesake, although only seventeen, wished to challenge me to a duel.
    Mercifully this did not happen. But suddenly all of Parisloathed me. When I walked in the streets I had to keep my eyes on the gutter in case I met with an enemy. Even my housekeeper said she heard spiteful talk of me when she went to the market.
    Ironically enough, I was no longer in hiding from the Garde nationale, and had moved back in with Mother, but I would have been better served if this were still the case.
    Can a man not write the truth? Can a man not call his love by name? The gossip that my housekeeper rather delightedly reported back to me was all about my indiscretion and indecency in detailing my love affair with the wife of Victor Hugo. “How it must have shamed him,” one man put it.
    But
Livre d’amour
wasn’t about Victor. I didn’t mean to shame him. I wasn’t thinking of him at all, truth be told. This was a book because of, and for, my beloved Adèle. I couldn’t help the fact that she was married to Victor Hugo. I’m sure I would have loved her whatever circumstances she occupied.
    But outsiders always see the situation, not the individuals. The literary elite of Paris no doubt thought that I was flaunting my affair with Adèle in Victor’s face, that
Livre d’amour
was nothing more than a boastful taunt to the great man.
    I suppose there was a little truth in that, but it was unfair that everyone judged my book on its scandalous content and no one saw