The Reinvention of Love

need your approval? I would have become great without you. It was just a matter of time. You did not grant me any favours. I took what was rightfully mine.”
    It was more a matter of opinion than a matter of time, I think, but he has already turned away from me. I want to rush after him and run him through with my ceremonial sword, but I turn away as well.
    Because there is some truth in what Victor has said. But I do not want to
be
him. He has that wrong. I want to be better at being him than he is. I want to love his wife with more respect and reverence and tenderness than he is capable of giving her. I want to offer myself to words, not try to bend them to my will. I want to be grateful for my place in the world, not feel that success is my birthright.
    It turns out that the Académie is disappointing. What can I say? Everyone talks at once, like schoolchildren without a teacher. I never enjoy the meetings, even though I never stop enjoying the uniform. The meetings are not about what anyone says, but merely about who can speak the loudest.

    Surprisingly, Mother is very impressed with my entrance into the Académie française. She faints when she is told the news, and then rushes out with an armful of flowers to lay at the feet of the Virgin in her local church.
    So, when the small town where I grew up decides to honour me with a reception, she will not be stopped from coming.
    I have become the most famous person to have lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer. It is mostly a town of fishermen, of commerce based on the sea. I don’t imagine that anyone there actually reads my writing, but it is kind of them to want to honour me, and I am touched by their kindness.
    The Mayor has decided to hold the reception in the bakery that occupies the ground floor of the building where Mother and I used to live. I still remember the warm smell of the pies rising up the staircase to our apartment.
    “Do you remember, Sainte-Beuve, how you used to stick your fingers in the tarts so they were ruined and would be given to you later for free?” says Mother, much too loudly and in front of the small assembled crowd. Everyone laughs.
    “Please,” I say. But Mother, who has never received anything like applause before, finds the laughter of the crowd very stimulating.
    “He was such a naughty little boy,” she says. “Ruining the tarts. Keeping secrets. Telling lies. Never doing what he was told. Lazy as a hog. Always lying around reading those tiresome books.”
    More laughter. The Mayor steps forward and awkwardly drapes a red sash across my shoulders. “For your books,” he says. There is a smattering of applause. Glasses of champagne are offered to everyone. The baker’s wife passes around a tray of tarts. I dare not take one.
    I leave Mother in the bakery, go down to the sea to walkalong the shingle. The wind blows hard from across the Channel, wraps the red sash around my neck like a scarf.
    Across the Channel lies England, a place I went to for a month once. It excited me to go there. There was English blood in my family. My mother’s mother, whom I never met, was an Englishwoman named Margaret Middleton.
    But the actual experience of England was less ecstatic than the imagining of it. I stayed in a country house in Alvescot, near Oxford, having been invited there by two English brothers who were friends of mine at school. The family, unfortunately, was given to exercise, and I was forced to tramp about in the rain and even, on one terrible occasion, to attempt riding. The food was practically inedible. There was an alarming amount of shooting and fishing, and everyone I met seemed to be a parson, although none of them very devout. The one redeeming grace was my introduction to the Lake poets – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Collins – and I decided to translate a few of their poems into French when I returned home.
    But my translations are no consolation now. It is ironic that, at a point in my life where I feel I have lost everything, I am suddenly being rewarded for my accomplishments.
    The fishermen are returning from their day at sea. I stand in the shelter of a cove and watch the boats sailing towards the beach. As a boy I used to come down to this very spot and gaze at them. I liked the shouts of the men as they compared their catches. I liked the intricate lace of the nets, pegged out and drying in the sun.
    None of these men will ever wear the green jacket, or be draped in the red sash, but nor will they ever care about