The Reinvention of Love

perhaps there is one thing.
    I will go and see Charles.

PARIS, 1860s

CHARLES

    HOW DID I BECOME an old man, a man in his early sixties? I stand in front of the looking glass in my bedroom as I dress for dinner, surveying myself. I am fat and bald. My forehead is twisted into a scowl and my lips are twisted into a sneer. My hands are fleshy, their nails yellow and brittle. My eyes have lost their sheen. I am not a man anyone could love. The admiration I sometimes get from younger writers is the best I can hope for. I can entice these writers to me by revealing the secrets of my contemporaries. I am not ashamed to dine out on the good name of other writers and I would show anyone’s letters to anyone else who asked. My mother once accused me of keeping secrets when I was a boy. But now, in my old age, I am the opposite. I will tell all. I am not to be trusted. My bland countenance doesn’t betray my wily heart. People confide in me because I appear to be harmless, and they are usually sorry.
    I look around, at the long table loaded with books and papers, at the pair of mahogany bookcases against the wall, at the curtain-less iron bed, the worn armchair by the fireplace, the two bare windows that overlook the street.
    I remember my rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen, how I had one for working and one for sleeping, and how pleasing that arrangement was. It strikes me, as I stand before the looking glass, that those separate rooms were symbolic of my life then, that there was a difference between my life and work, a separation. Now it is all blended together. My life is my work. I have no other.
    I used to think that age ripened us; like fruit, we would become mellow as we grew older. We would relax into a version of ourselves that was the whole accumulated truth of our existence, that was the culmination of all our joys and sorrows and intellectual ideas.
    But that is not what happens. We do not ripen like a peach. We grow hard in some places, soft in others. We are inflexible where we should yield, and we give way where we should hold fast.
    And I wonder if it is added misery or consolation to know that when we depart this world we take with us the whole order of familiar things that have structured our days and given us comfort. What we have cared for in life and what has bound us most securely to it will no doubt accompany us, or go before us into death.
    It no longer matters much what I do, so long as I have something to do – something to do in the mornings, and somewhere to go at night.
    It is fortunate that I have something quite pleasant to do in the evenings these days. I belong to a dining club that meets once a fortnight at the Magny restaurant in rue Contreescarpe-Dauphine. We are all writers who gather there, some old, some young: Gavarni, Flaubert, Turgenev, Jules and Edmond Goncourt, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Charles Edmond, Eudore Soulié, and Frédéric Baudry. George Sand comes when she is in town.
    What makes the dinners memorable and enjoyable is the rule we have for the club. The rule is a simple one: we are permitted to say anything at all during the dinners, but we have made a promise to one another that whatever we say will not leave the room.
    What do writers talk about when they can speak freely on any subject?
    Well, they don’t talk about writing.

    This evening, Flaubert wants to talk about the different head-dresses that women wear to bed.
    “I am partial to the cap,” he says, “but not the net.”
    “The net is for a lower-class woman,” says one of the Goncourts. “The whores I visit wear nets.”
    “I have known a lady to wear a net,” says Flaubert.
    “Wouldn’t it be a matter of comfort?” I say.
    “What do your women wear?” asks the other Goncourt.
    “I must confess that I have never spent the whole night with a woman.”
    There is shocked silence.
    “On account of my work,” I add, which makes no real sense, but no one cares to challenge me on it.
    We move on to the mechanics of love.
    “I believe,” says Taine, “that women can only be satisfied in love when they are young.”
    “I have found the opposite to be true,” says Flaubert.
    “Isn’t it our duty, as men, to satisfy a woman, no matter what her age?” I say.
    “This from a man who has never spent the night with a woman?” says the Goncourt with the moustache, and everyone laughs.
    The Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, wrote a book together, a novel called
Madame Gervaisais
which had the double