The Reinvention of Love

my hand.
    “But now there will always be your wonderful review to buoy me up when my spirits are low.”

    Victor Hugo c. 1829

    Even though I had eaten two dinners and felt a little queasy by the time I bid farewell to the Hugos just after midnight, I walked the short distance between our two houses in a state of elation. I had a new friend and it seemed a perfect friendship. We were bound by common interests, lived a breath apart, and each could help the other to advance. I would publish reviewsof Victor’s work, and he could assist me with my own tentative steps towards poetry.
    What could be better?
    Victor soon introduced me to his circle, a group known as the Cénacle. There were the poets Lamartine and Vigny, the painters Delacroix and Deveria, the young writers, Mérimée, Dumas, and Alfred de Musset. And there was another critic, Gustave Planche. The group used to meet fairly regularly in the library of the Arsenal.
    I must confess that I did not talk as much to the painters as to the writers, even in the small group at the Arsenal library. It was not that I was less interested in them. It was as it was when I first went to visit the Hugos at 90 rue de Vaugirard. I was not less interested in Adèle. I was just more interested in Victor.
    Of the writers, I remember two in particular.
    Alexandre Dumas’s father, like Victor’s, served in the army under Napoleon. The stories of his father’s exploits were the basis for his own popular adventure stories,
The Three Musketeers
and
The Count of Monte Cristo
.
    Dumas was fat and loud, alternately breathless and boastful, and frequently chased by creditors. He had a wife and many mistresses, spent money lavishly and foolishly, and made almost as much as he wasted. He was an infrequent participant in the Cénacle, but a chair was always left empty for him as he was apt to rush in midway through one of our evenings, having just dodged a creditor or two on his way over to the library.
    You never have to look further than a man’s life to understand his work.
    Gustave Planche was a literary critic for the
Revue des deux mondes
. Like me, he had been a medical student before entering the world of literature. Later on he would despise Victor’s plays as much as I did. We had a great deal in common, and as a result we ignored each other completely. I was secretly afraid that he was a better version of me.
    There we were, a small group of talented men, some of us young, and some of us already in our prime. When Victor brought me into the Cénacle he was the least famous among them, apart from the boy, Alfred de Musset. And yet one day he would be the most famous of all.
    I shouldn’t have to point this out, of course, but seeing how things have gone, I have to. When I first met Victor Hugo, it was I who was the more well known. I was the one who had the reputation.
    We were such great friends, Victor and I. When the Hugos moved to nearby Notre-Dame-des-Champs, it seemed natural that I follow them there. You have only to look as far as his family to know with what high esteem I was held by him at the time. His first child, a son, was the embodiment of our friendship and was given the marriage of our two names – Charles Victor.

TO UNDERSTAND MY STORY you must also understand the political turmoil in France at the time. In July of 1830, four years after I met Victor, there was a revolution. It lasted only three days, but it changed the country, and this city.
    The infamous 1789 revolution, when we overthrew the monarchy, could still be tasted perhaps, when King Charles X passed two wildly unpopular laws. The first, that a person could be put to death for profaning the Catholic Church. And the second, perhaps more unpopular, that citizens couldn’t rightfully inherit property if they, or those they were inheriting from, had been declared “enemies of the revolution”. The first revolution.
    It is never a good idea to remind people that they have rebelled against a king.
    The press was outraged, on behalf of the populace, and many vitriolic articles were published. Charles X then restricted freedom of expression for journalists and newspapers, proclaiming that a newspaper’s printing presses could be destroyed if the King decided what it was publishing was treasonous. The
Globe
, of course, was never really at risk of such consequences as we were primarily a literary review. But I helped petition against the censorship. I collected signatures and attended rallies