The Reinvention of Love

long.”
    The lie makes us both uncomfortable, and just as if it were a bad smell in the room, we wait for it to pass.
    I have no rights to Adèle any more. I can’t act petulantly, burst out with an imagined affront, beg for her affections. I grip the arms of my chair to steady myself.
    “It is as though we have died,” I say, unable to stop myself.
    Adèle smiles at my vehemence. “We have, Charles,” she says. “Don’t you feel it? We have died and this is the afterlife.”
    My cook brings us some wine without my asking her.
    “To warm you up, madame,” she says to Adèle, and then she looks pointedly at me to make sure I haven’t missed the allusion.
    Luckily Adèle isn’t paying any attention to my cook, and I am able to banish her from my room once again.
    I pour a glass of wine for Adèle and take it over to her.
    “Thank you.” She sips at it and looks around my room, examining my desk, the window, the pictures on the wall. My room suddenly feels terribly inadequate.
    “I inherited the house from my mother,” I say. “It is not something I chose for myself.”
    “You are busy, Charles,” she says, nodding towards my desk. “You are a man of industry, not idleness. I am glad.”
    It was all I could do, after the affair ended. I let my work consume me, feed off my bones. I have nothing else. But writing feels entirely fraudulent in comparison to love. The moment one writes about something is the moment one ceases to understand it. To write is to control experience, and to control experience is to lose its meaning. I am not saved by my work. It is just hard proof that I have lost my way.
    “There was a line I particularly liked in
Livre d’amour.
” She waits only a moment before summoning it. “
Time, divine old man, fades all honours
.”
    “So, you read the poems, then?”
    Adèle smiles and does not answer, sips her wine.
    “Why are you here?” I ask.
    “I have something to ask you.”
    “Anything.”
    Adèle takes another sip of her wine. I gulp half of my glass and spill several drops on my trousers.
    “But before I ask you,” she says, “I have something to tell you.”
    She tells me the story of little Adèle’s voyage to Canada.
    “A month at sea, all alone! That is so courageous,” I say.
    “Yes, it would have been courageous if Pinson had loved her,” says Adèle. “But he didn’t, and so it becomes an action more allied to madness than bravery.”
    “How did you discover the lie?”
    “Dédé’s landlady wrote to François-Victor because she was worried about my daughter’s sanity.” Adèle takes a sip of wine and smiles. “She called herself Miss Lewly in Halifax because she was afraid people might recognize her real surname.”
    I cannot stop myself.
    “You mean Victor is famous in Canada as well?” I grind my heels into the carpet with rage.
    “Of course. But his fame has done nothing for his temper. Those years on Guernsey he was a tyrant. No wonder she wanted to escape.”
    “And now she has.” I pour us some more wine.
    “Yes. Walking about a city not her own, using a false name and wearing male dress.” Adèle pauses for a moment. “She does this in imitation of George Sand. She greatly admires her writing. For you see, she wants to be a writer like her father. And you.” She takes another sip of wine, then turns her head to the window where the wind knocks against the glass. It is autumn and the trees are flinging down their leaves, challenging winter to a duel. “She has always remembered you fondly.”
    I had thought of little Adèle as my spiritual child. I regretted deeply that her father saw fit to keep me from her after I had confessed to him my affair with her mother. I missed my godchild. I missed the person she might have become had I still known her, the person I might have become had I been continually graced with her sweet presence.
    “I wish she had been mine,” I say.
    Adèle turns back towards me.
    “Victor always thought she was yours,” she says. “That was part of the problem. He loved her less because of that. He paid her no attention. She suffered from the lack of a father’s affection. I hold him to blame for this whole escapade in Halifax.”
    Once this might have caused me joy, to hear of Victor’s failings – but they have come at the cost of Adèle’s happiness, and so it brings little comfort to know of his neglect. Instead, I wish it had been different. If I had to lose Adèle and Dédé to Victor, then