The Reinvention of Love

fully recover.

IT IS MY FIRST SIGNIFICANT MEMORY, a memory I have carried into adulthood, undisturbed and unquestioned. There is, in this memory, much of what I am experiencing now, as I look back on my life.
    First, let me tell you about my beginnings, some sixty years ago.
    I was born at 9 a.m. on December 23, 1804, at Boulognesur-Mer. My parents were old when they married – my father fifty-one, my mother over forty. I was their only child. In fact, my father died of the quinsy just before I was born. My cradle rested on a coffin.
    My father was an official in the Customs and Excise department, but he had an interest in literature. I have his small library of books, most of them annotated heavily in the margins, as though he were deep in conversation with the authors. He was particularly fond of Virgil.
    My mother was the daughter of mariners. I remember she used to sing me sea shanties to lull me into sleep.
    I am my father – Charles. I am my mother – Augustin(e). But my mother never called me anything but my surname: Sainte-Beuve.
    We lived quietly in Boulogne, my mother and I, in the lower town, mere steps from the busy harbour where my father used to work. When I was eighteen I left for Paris to attend medical school, and I took Mother with me. I have rarely returned to the town of my birth. The sea does not interest me, or haunt me. It is too vast. It is unknowable.
    But this is not a memory of where I first lived. This is a memory of how, when I was six years old, I was taken to see the first Napoleon – Napoleon Bonaparte. My mother had dressed me in a little hussar uniform and I was walked up the hill that overlooked the town, to watch the great general review his troops.
    He was a slight man, such as I used to be, but at the time he seemed magnificent and huge. I remember the flutter of his hands and the white mask of his face, the shiny gold buttons on his uniform, the silence of the soldiers as he paraded up and down in front of them. At one moment I was close enough to reach out and touch his coat-tails, but I did not dare.
    I was raised by my elderly mother and her equally elderly sister. My nickname as a boy at school was “Pussy”. I lived in a house of women. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed by Napoleon. He was a powerful man in charge of other men. He was what I imagined a father might be.
    Four years later, when he met his defeat by the British at Waterloo, I cried myself to sleep in the cold darkness of my bedroom.
    So this is what comes back to me all these years later – the brightness of the day on the hill, the excitement of being so near to greatness and glory, to a famous man I could reach out and touch if I wanted to; and then the tears and loneliness, the scratchy wool blanket on my cheek as I lay face down on my bed and sobbed for the man who had left me again.
    There is something of Napoleon in Victor. The way he strutted up and down in his kitchen the night he had the seating plan for the Comédie-Française, reviewing his troops, planning his battle for control of the theatre.
    Exultation and at the same time despair. That is what I felt with regard to Napoleon, what I have continued to feel all my life with regard to everything else.
    There are so many memories from childhood. Why does onestand out above all others? Perhaps because a few events are not particular to childhood, even though they occur there. Perhaps some memories are more a foretelling than the reminder of an event that belongs entirely in the past. Perhaps what we remember is merely a continuing truth about ourselves.
    The story tastes of the man.

WHO SEES LOVE ARRIVING? Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative, that they are almost invisible.
    It is impossible to watch love arriving, but it is abundantly clear when it has arrived.
    I remember the moment perfectly.
    At first, when I visited the Hugos, I would make sure to go in the evening, when I knew that Victor would be home. In the early days, after I had reviewed his poems so favourably, after I had called him, in print, “a genius”, he had plenty of time for me. I would go to his house after supper and we would talk together long into the evening, about poetry and literature, about the passion we both felt for writing. Adèle was sometimes in the room, sitting sewing by the fire, often silent. Victor is prone to long monologues when he gets excited and though she would sometimes try to