The Reinvention of Love

They survive. They do not prosper.
    Her husband is a fire who uses all those around him as fuel for his work.
    There is no recovering from Victor.
    “I entrust our love to you, Charles,” says Adèle. “I need some peace. I need to forget. But I would like you to remember. For both of us.”
    When it is time for her to leave, I walk Adèle down the stairs to the front door. Then I walk her out onto the cobblestones. The night is cold, but she insists on going back to her hotel on foot, pushing me away when I try to accompany her.
    “If my daughter can wander the rough-and-tumble streets of the New World,” she says, “then surely I can negotiate the familiar avenues of Paris.”
    She holds out her hand. I take it one last time in my own, and hold on to it for as long as I dare.
    “Goodbye, Charles.”
    “Goodbye, Adèle.”
    When she turns and walks away, I want to run after her, throw myself in front of her, tell her that I love her, that it isn’t too late to leave Victor, that she could still come and live with me. We could still be happy.
    But I let her go without protest. I turn and walk back into my house, close the door solidly behind me, plod slowly back upstairs to my bedroom.
    The room still smells of her – perfumed soap and sweat and the mustiness of age. I sit down in the chair she was sitting in by the fireplace. The fabric is still warm from her body. I close my eyes and imagine it is her embrace.
    When I open my eyes I see, on my desk, the glass of cognac that Adèle the cook has poured for me in my absence, showing a sensitivity of which I had not believed her capable. I cross the room, pick up the glass, and return to the chair by the fireplace to sip the cognac.
    Outside, the night continues, the city continues. Adèle is probably halfway back to the hotel by now. I didn’t have the nerve to ask her where she was staying. It is unlikely to be our old haunt, the Hôtel Saint-Paul – she would have more sense than that – but I like thinking of her there nonetheless. Perhaps she has a room high up, near the roof, with a view out over the city. There would be the lights of Paris below her, and the starlight above.
    I remember making love with Adèle in the room she shared with her daughter. I remember all the times we dragged Dédé with us through the orchard in the Jardin du Luxembourg, how she played in the dust at our feet while we whispered endearments and kissed one another. She would have heard everything, absorbed everything of who we were in those moments. How could she be anything other than our child – Adèle’s and mine? Her hunger for love was our hunger. We have fashioned this longing in her. We have created her despair. She is livingout the torment of her mother’s love for me. There will be no happiness for her, and this is what is impossible for my Adèle to bear – that she sacrificed her own happiness for her children’s future and instead, their future happiness has been compromised by her sacrifice.
    I never see Adèle Hugo again. She dies of heart trouble in Brussels at the end of the summer, and she is buried in the cemetery in Villequier beside her eldest daughter, Léopoldine. Only her brother accompanies her body to the grave. Victor doesn’t attend his own wife’s funeral, preferring to remain in exile.
    I hear this via Paris gossip, not through anyone I know.
    After her death I read again her letters to me. I walk to our old houses on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I sit on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the heat of the day, and weep into my hands. There is no consolation when the walls that hold up one’s world start to give way.
    This should be the end of the story, but some months after Adèle’s death, George Sand comes to see me.
    “Have you heard?” she says, her face flushed from the rush through the Paris streets to my house. Like all of us, she is not as slim as she used to be.
    “Heard what?”
    “Mademoiselle Hugo is back.”
    “Little Adèle?”
    “She followed a soldier to Barbados and was brought back to Paris by a black woman. A former slave, nonetheless.” George collapses into a chair in my drawing room. “They say Mademoiselle Hugo has gone mad. Her father has had her committed to an asylum.”

THE NORTH ATLANTIC

DEDE

    MY BELOVED SISTER ,
    I still wear black for you. Every day since you died, I have dressed in mourning clothes. Every day, for over twenty years now.
    I no longer sleep. I don’t think I have slept for