The Reinvention of Love

trolling my fingers along the spines of the books, the way I would ripple my hand down the iron fences when I was a boy. The spines of the books are like the bars of a fence, like the bars of a cage.
    I stand before my own books and think of all the hours and days and years that have gone into these small volumes. How inconsequential it all seems. To what purpose have I given my life away?
    And if I am feeling in a particularly melancholy mood, I will go and stand in front of Victor’s books, which occupy the better part of one whole shelf. They are like a small wall in front of me. A barricade, like the barricades the revolutionaries build in the streets these days, and crouching behind them to throw rocks at their enemies.
    Victor, of course, has become the hero of the new revolution, the one that started four years after we met. He has so much public sympathy that he will probably run the country one day. Such is his need for admiration. I understand his desire to be famous, but not the fact that he
is
famous. Why? His books are no better than anyone else’s. He is not set apart by his peers as the best writer of the day. This honour probably belongs to Flaubert, or God help me, that fat braggart, Balzac.
    What is it that makes Victor’s ascension so swift and sure? Is it luck? Is it timing? Surely, if one did not know of his reputation and read one of his novels alongside my own, the under-appreciated
Volupté
, there would not be much difference in the quality of the books. Why then do I languish in obscurity as a novelist while Victor continues to rise to glory? Why do I have to spend my days being a librarian?
    Before going to bed I stand by my window in my night-shirt, looking down into the little courtyard below my rooms. Sometimes I can hear the rattle of the death carts carrying the new cholera victims from the neighbouring streets. I try to ignore that terrible sound, and look instead at the small fountain that protrudes from the courtyard wall. I like the murmur of the water, and the figures on the fountain – Eros playing with a butterfly. It is such a lighthearted scene that I am grateful it is there for me to gaze upon.
    I always leave the window open when I sleep, just a fraction, so that I can feel the cool night air on my skin, and so that sometimes, if I wake in the dark, afraid and alone, I can let the whisper of the fountain rock me back to sleep like a lullaby.
    I mention revolutionaries and death carts. The 1840s have brought more political change to France. The population of Paris has doubled since 1800, leading to overcrowding,unemployment and disease. In the end, cholera will kill over 19,000 people in two years.
    One day I was walking near the Place Vendôme when I came upon a crush of men armed with paving stones and sticks. I ducked down a side street, but there were more of the revolutionaries there. Luckily I spotted my old acquaintance, Alphonse de Lamartine, coming out of the back door of the Hôtel de Ville. He was now one of the revolutionary leaders, having traded his pen for politics. And he was very popular among the people.
    The mob saw Lamartine at the same time as I did. They pushed towards him. I pushed towards him.
    “
Vive Lamartine!
” they shouted. And then one of them spied me and yelled out to the others. “A priest! A priest in disguise!”
    I could feel their hands upon me, and I swear they would have torn me to pieces like a pack of wolves if I hadn’t reached the safety of Lamartine, who ushered me into his carriage and drove me away from the mob. But next time there might be no one there to save me and I could be killed by the members of a cause to which I have actually given my support.
    Best to stay indoors for a while.
    Because, aside from the mobs, there is also the cholera. In time, Napoleon III will widen the streets and create huge new boulevards to replace the warren of medieval Parisian alleys of the 1840s. But for now, those narrow streets, airless and sunless and burdened with heavy traffic, cause so much disease. Gutters at their sides are intended to carry the garbage and raw sewage to underground viaducts, but this happens only when it rains. The rest of the time the garbage and excrement lie open to the air, and in the evenings the gutters are overrun with rats and mice, feasting greedily on the vile soup.
    George has fled to her country house. During the 1832 epidemic she had lived across from the morgue on the Ile de la Cité, and had