The Reinvention of Love

accompany him on this particular day. I remember the difficulty of the climb, and how Victor bounded easily ahead of me, not breathless at all. The view was spectacular. The dome of the Panthéon could be seen, and the green splendour of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The sunset was beautiful. We talked about the cathedral, and about literature. Victor demonstrated his eagle-like sight by picking out the blue dress of Madame Nodier on the Arsenal balcony. That was in the days when our friendship was strong and uncomplicated by my feelings for Adèle.
    I look around the table at the Magny. None of these men are my friends. We are bound together by a certain prestige, by our position in the literary society of Paris. But none of these men would run through the streets to my house in the early evening, bursting with an idea they couldn’t wait to share with me. The truth is that I have never again had a friend like Victor, a friend so close that it sometimes felt as though we were the same person.
    “Hugo said he was fated to write that book because when you stand outside the cathedral, the towers of Notre-Dame make a perfect H,” says Renan.
    “Typical,” says Taine, and everyone laughs.
    I have waited so many years for a moment like this, a moment when Victor is openly ridiculed by his peers. And yet, now that the moment has come, it brings no satisfaction with it. I can say nothing.
    If I had never loved Adèle my friendship with Victor could have continued into my old age. We could have shared so muchby then! Our influence on each other’s writing would be profound, our knowledge of each other’s minds, unparalleled.
    At the end of life, the balance sheet comes out. I can’t stop myself.
    I always thought that my love for Adèle eclipsed everything else, that it was the one truly worthwhile thing I have done. But, realistically, the time we actually spent together lasted a mere handful of days. What if I had put that against a nurturing friendship that spanned my entire lifetime? What would I really have chosen?
    Victor holds open the door for me as I struggle up the last few steps of the cathedral tower. He hauls me out onto the parapet and the wind chases us right to the edge of the stone wall. I have to hold on to the top of the wall to keep my balance.
    There is an overwhelming desire to fling myself off the parapet, and I can see how tempting a death this is, why it is the choice of so many ill-fated literary heroes. In every fall there is a moment of flight. To hurtle through the air would be, for a magnificent instant, the ultimate in freedom. I shake my head to clear the thought, push against the wall to steady myself.
    And just at that moment, as though he knows what I’m thinking, Victor puts his arm around me, anchoring me securely to my place on earth. My place beside him.
    “Look at that,” he says.
    The last of the sun brushes the roofs of the buildings below, each one lit with a lambent glow. Each one beginning in shadow and ending in fire.
    “All of Paris, Charles. Just waiting to celebrate us.”

I SUPPOSE I AM a better friend to women than to men. It seems to be with women that I have enjoyed my most successful friendships. And now, late in life, I have made a friendship that will probably be my last.
    It is with Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, the niece of the great Emperor and cousin to the man in power at the moment, Napoleon III.
    Princess Mathilde is in her middle forties, at the very centre of her life. She is short and stout, full of fury and enthusiasms. She is much as I imagine her uncle to have been, if one had known him intimately. I love nothing more than to listen to her stories of Napoleon Bonaparte, even though she never met him. At the moment of her birth he was already dying on St Helena.
    No matter. Her blood is his blood, and it runs fiercely through her veins.
    Princess Mathilde has a weekly salon in Paris, in her magnificent house on the rue de Courcelles. She is known to all as Notre-Dame des Arts. Flaubert attends her salon regularly, as do Taine and Renan, and many others of the Magny crowd. The Princess is a formidable supporter of all the arts, and she herself is a good painter. She does watercolour copies of many of the great oil paintings in the Louvre, and she works very hard at these. She has the same tireless energy that I recognize from Victor, and have always admired.
    Her house has a bust of Napoleon in the front hallway, andmuch of the fabric in the house is