The Reinvention of Love

these things, or see the merit in them. What is an honour if it means something to only a small group of people? I will never be someone whom these fishermen will want to know.

    Mother is jubilant all the way home to Paris in the carriage. She bubbles over with talk. I look out the window, watching the countryside judder slowly past.
    And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, there is the feeling of poetry in me, rising as fervently as desire. Even though everything is lost, perhaps something of what is lost is still recoverable. Perhaps, even if I never visit my birthplace again, I can find a way to describe the sound the fishing boats make when they beach on the shingle after a day at sea and, whenever after I read that passage, that image will return to me.
    And that is better than any honour I could be given.
    The boats heave themselves up out of the sea, like strange wooden fish, the hulls hitting the beach with a great booming sound. No, not fish, it is more that the hulls are waves, but heavier than water. The booming sound they make when they are thrown forward from the sea onto the beach is like the sound of a bell. It is deep and sonorous, and the whole fishing fleet plays a madrigal of bells as it comes to shore.
    The red sash that the Mayor gave me is still wound around my neck. I unwind it, fold it carefully into a small rectangle and hand it over to Mother.
    “I want you to have this.”
    “Oh, Sainte-Beuve.” For a moment she is actually speechless, clasping the piece of red satin against her bosom. “What a day!” She carefully puts the folded sash on her lap and fumbles in her bag. “I have something for you too.” She passes me a box.
    “What is it?”
    “Open it and see.”
    I lift the lid, and inside are four tarts from the bakery, nestled in straw to keep them safe from breaking.

I AM THE LIBRARIAN at the Mazarine Library in the French Institute on the quai de Conti through most of the 1840s, and I have been given rooms to live in at the Institute. By day I sit at a desk and enter into a ledger the names of those patrons who come to borrow books from the library. By night I sit up in my rooms, reading and writing. I have arrived at a life entirely circumscribed by literature.
    I was offered the job through a rather strange set of circumstances.
    It all started when Louise Colet, who is the mistress of both Victor Cousin, the politician and Gustave Flaubert, the novelist, was savaged by the critic, Alphonse Karr, in his monthly satirical journal.
    Louise Colet did not take kindly to being ridiculed in the press and she called on Alphonse Karr at his home. When he turned from the door to usher her into his apartment, she took out the kitchen knife she had concealed beneath her skirts and stabbed him in the back.
    He was not killed, but in an effort to have the whole unpleasant business quietened down, Victor Cousin, who was the Minister of Education at the time, asked me if I would speak to Alphonse and convince him to let the matter alone.
    This was more easily done than I had imagined, as I think Alphonse was genuinely shocked and terrified by the stabbing, and by the fact that it had made him afraid. But I argued that to make more of the assault by laying charges would be toentertain those feelings longer than he wanted. So he decided to let the matter rest, contenting himself with displaying the knife in a glass case inside his home with the inscription: “Received from Louise Colet – in the back”.
    As a reward for my part in the case, Victor Cousin gave me the position of librarian in the Bibliothèque Mazarine. I receive housing and 4,000 francs a year, all for the trifling inconvenience of sitting at the library desk two days a week. Victor Cousin is very generous with his appointments. He has also given Alfred de Musset a position as librarian for the Ministry of the Interior – which has no library.
    So here I sit, at my little desk under the vaulted library ceilings. Footsteps occasionally echo through the passageways, but mostly it is silent in the library. The new outbreak of cholera has kept a lot of the patrons away.
    Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Adèle will come to the library, completely by accident, but here my fantasy always has to end for I know that Adèle would have no interest in visiting the Institute de France. She has had enough of books. The literary life has not exactly served her well.
    When I am bored with sitting at the desk I walk the library,