The Reinvention of Love

was in the south of France and read of Léopoldine’s death in a newspaper while he was sitting in a café. He was travelling under an assumed name and never received my urgent messages, but now he is on his way to Villequier and asks me to wait for him. He ends the letter by saying, “My God, what have I done to you?”
    Another woman might be confused by that phrase. Another woman might not wait for him. But I will be here when he arrives. I will greet him warmly. I will accompany him to the cemetery and show him where our daughter now lies. I will put my hand on his arm to steady him, as Madame Vacquerie put her hand on my arm to steady me.
    And I am not at all confused by the phrase at the end of his letter. No, there is no confusion.
    I know exactly what he has done to me.

CHARLES

    MOTHER DIES AT EIGHTY-SIX. Increasingly frail, and increasingly demented, she lives long enough to see her body outlast her mind.
    In the end she was afraid of almost everything. But her loss of memory made us better companions. She no longer cared what I was up to. There was no need to comment on my dress, or my habits. We became strangers under the same roof, but we liked one another better because of that.
    My last good memory of Mother took place a few months before she died. I had come upstairs after lunch to find her standing perfectly still in the hallway. She had lost weight recently and her clothes hung loosely from her frame.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “The street is so busy today,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get across safely.”
    I offered my arm. “I’d be happy to escort you.”
    “Thank you, monsieur. That is very kind.”
    She linked her arm through mine and we walked slowly down the hallway towards her bedroom, her feet shuffling along the polished wood floor. At her doorway she removed her arm from mine. I bowed. She smiled up at me, her face suddenly joyful, an expression of hers I hadn’t seen since I was a child.
    “What good fortune I have,” she said. “To find such an obliging young man to help me.”

    The last time I see Victor it is by accident. In 1849, we are at the funeral of the once-famous actress, Marie Dorval, who has died run down and penniless at the age of fifty-one. During the church service, Victor stands on one side of the aisle, and I stand on the opposite side.
    When I see Victor enter the church, I hope, for a brief moment, that Adèle is with him. But Marie Dorval was a friend of Juliette Drouet and, sure enough, it is Victor’s mistress who accompanies him to the funeral.
    The day is wet and grey. The service is depressing. Mother is dead and my contemporaries have begun to die off while in their fifties. I feel my own mortality advancing rapidly towards me as I stand with head bowed in the cold church.
    George Sand is a few rows ahead of me. She is weeping noisily. Marie Dorval was a great friend of hers, and for a short time, even her lover. Well, that was the rumour anyway. I never did ask George if it was true. If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me herself. But she is weeping with enough feeling for me to believe that it was indeed true.
    The novelist Balzac was the one who circulated the rumour through Paris. Balzac and I are not enamoured with each other because I reviewed him badly once. He hated my novel,
Volupté
, and told mutual friends that he could do a better job of it. Apparently his novel,
Le Lys dans la vallée
, is a rewriting of my book. I will not engage in his pettiness. I will not read it, even though I burn with curiosity. The irony is that, although his theme is stolen, his book sells better than mine.
Volupté
has not had the reception I had hoped for. Even George dismissed it rather cavalierly, calling it simply “vague”.
    But all that is behind me now. There is no more poetry in me. No more novels. I have become relatively famous, though it is not through those pursuits. I write a lengthy weekly biographical sketch in the
Globe
. These sketches appear on Monday and are called, correspondingly,
Lundis
. It has alwaysbeen my opinion that to understand an artist and his work, it is necessary to know his biography. Some people do not agree with me. Marcel Proust, for example, argues that art can transcend the man. I don’t see how he can really believe that art is delivered miraculously through the human vessel and not rooted in its material.
    Others’ opinions are not my concerns. I have my work to