The Reinvention of Love

d’août
and discover that an entire poem has been excised from the book. Well, someone must have loved the poem a great deal to remove it.
    But if he loved the poem so much, then why not keep the whole book?
    The answer lies in the poem. It is the one poem in the volume that directly addresses Adèle. So it is not hard to imagine that it was perhaps Victor, or one of Victor’s friends, who has removed the poem. Not because it was beloved, but because whoever cut it out didn’t want anyone else to read it. A small thrill whistles through my body. Have other copies of the book been purchased for the sole purpose of destroying this poem?
    Perhaps I have a more interested readership than I had originally supposed. Perhaps Victor will buy up all the copies to keep the poem mute, and this sensation will increase my sales tenfold.

I LEAVE TO THE END OF MY recollections of this decade what happened at the start.
    I have dealt with everything else in the 1840s before returning to this because I could not bear to write down the details of the event that has broken my Adèle’s heart forever. You see, even though I believe in the truth, I am, in many ways, a coward, and I sometimes go out of my way to avoid meeting it.
    In the winter of 1843 Adèle’s oldest daughter, Léopoldine, was married to Charles Vacquerie. No one told me of this event, but I saw the notice of the wedding in the newspapers. Léopoldine was nineteen years old.
    I had heard of the groom because his brother was Auguste Vacquerie, an avid supporter of Victor’s. A disciple, really. He was a man with literary aspirations, and he had staged a new production of
Hernani
, probably with the sole purpose of impressing Victor. Why anyone would want to mount that dreadful play again is beyond me.
    I suppose Léopoldine met Charles through the family’s association with Auguste, although I heard a rumour that it was really Auguste who was in love with Léopoldine and that, at the wedding, he was in danger of proclaiming his love.
    Life has a strange way of circling back on itself.
    But Léopoldine was in love with Charles, and they married and moved to his family’s village near Le Havre. Villequier, I think it was called. His mother had a house there.
    In September, Charles and Léopoldine, along with one ofCharles’s cousins, and an uncle, went for a sail on the Seine near the village. It was quiet and peaceful on the voyage out, but on the return journey a gust of wind capsized the boat and everyone aboard was drowned.
    My Adèle must have cried as many tears as the amount of water in the river where her daughter died. It caused me tremendous pain to imagine her pain, and even though she had ended our affair, I felt compelled to go to her and help calm her suffering.
    But this is not so easily done.
    I know where the Hugos live in the Place des Vosges. Victor is so famous now that the apartment has infuriatingly been pointed out to me many times. It is on the second floor at the far end of the long, beautiful building.
    I cannot simply knock on the door and present myself. I must go in disguise. I must go as Charlotte.
    Mother’s nervousness at walking in the Paris streets has resulted in her choosing only the most drab of clothes in which to venture out. I riffle through her wardrobe, trying to find something a little colourful, something that Charlotte would be happy to wear.
    “Sainte-Beuve, what are you doing?”
    I turn with my armload of dresses to find Mother standing in the doorway. I had thought she was out visiting Madame Fontaine.
    I am caught. Mother does not know that I sometimes borrow her clothes, and I do not want her to find out. There would be no way to explain it that would make sense to her. She is a woman with little imagination. I am her son. She is not capable of thinking anything else. And even though she saw me naked as a child, saw the small winkle of my sex, she didn’t think to consult a doctor. “All men are different,” she had said to me, “below decks.”
    I must lie to Mother, and lie quickly. Not a single lie that shecan dispute, but a barrage of lies, all coming so fast and furious that she will be bewildered by the effect and forget the issue.
    “I thought I would have a dress made for you,” I say, “and I was taking these to use as patterns for the dressmaker. There have been bed bugs in my room, so I wanted to have all our clothes laundered. You don’t seem to wear these dresses much, so I thought I might