The Dream Lover (10 page)

October 1808

NOHANT

I
t was several weeks after my father's death when I wandered outside and found my mother in the children's garden she and my father had built. She was sitting on the ground with her back to the trunk of the pear tree, her eyes closed. It was an unseasonably warm day, more summer than fall.

I crept closer to my mother, who looked so small beneath the pear tree. “Maman?”

She opened her eyes and smiled at me, then held out her arms, and I went gratefully to her. It felt as though this was the first time she had really seen me since that horrible night of my father's death. All of the household—all of the village, in fact—was still mourning my father; he'd been beloved by so many for his wit and his charm, for the way their love for him was so exuberantly returned.

I lay still in my mother's arms, deeply appreciative of the feel of her arms about me, of the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Her comfort had been a long time coming, after our grievous loss; I exulted in it now.

After a while, I asked, “What are you doing?”

She pushed my hair off my forehead and kissed the top of my head. “What am I doing? Well, I am having a little dream of when we were all together.”

“When shall we be together again?”

She hesitated, then said, “What do you mean, Aurore?”

“When will they be through being dead, Papa and Louis? When will they come back?”

I could see her struggling to formulate an answer. Whereas my grandmother believed in setting down the unvarnished truth, my mother was more respectful of the vulnerable mind of a child. She had heard the servants talking of seeing my father's ghost sitting at
the dining room table with his head in his hands and had admonished them not to speak of it in front of me; she had also forewarned my grandmother not to tell me that death was the absolute end.

At first she attempted diversion, saying, “What about Caroline, whom I am also dreaming of? Is she not part of our family, too? Surely you have not forgotten your sister, Caroline, with her charming smile, she who plays with you and your dolls so nicely when she is home from school—she who, in fact, tries to grant your every wish!”

“Yes, I love Caroline very much. But when will Papa and Louis come back?”

“Ah, Aurore.” She sighed and shook her head. “It will be a very long time, and we must be patient. You must be a good girl and please your father. For even though we cannot see him now, he is nonetheless keeping watch over us. Do you agree?”

“Yes, and I have been good, Maman.”

She raised an eyebrow. It was true that I had not been perfect, that I had fallen into the habit of demanding that I get my way, and was often given it by people too taken up with mourning to discipline a young child. But there was one area in which I was unfailingly cooperative.

“I do my lessons every day.”

“So you do.”

There was some bitterness in my mother's tone. Deschartres had begun teaching me Latin, the natural sciences, penmanship, and reading. My grandmother taught me to read music and play the harpsichord, but she also taught me manners and voice modulation, and for those things my mother had a great deal of disdain. Sometimes we giggled together in private over my grandmother's insistence on the proper way to hold a fork, the level at which one's chin should be kept, how to bend to pick up something one dropped, should there be no one there to do it for you.

There was one thing I never told my mother, for even at age
four, I knew it would wound her. That was the way my grandmother spoke disparagingly of my mother's father. We were outside walking one day, and I had stopped in my tracks to listen to birdsong. My grandmother pulled at my hand, but I would not move until the bird had flown away.

“Your grandfather was a bird fancier, was he not?” she asked. “I suppose this accounts for your preoccupation with them.”

“Yes,” I said, “he sold birds, and he tamed them, too. They would sit on his finger and on his shoulder, and they would come to him right out of the air when he whistled. He knew all the birdcalls, and he taught them to Maman.”

“Ah. Well, that's very nice, but no way to distinguish oneself, I think. Isn't it true?”

I didn't answer. My thoughts on this subject were too big for me at the time. I could not then express what I came to articulate later, which is that the most superior creation in all of nature is birds. What human could build something as ingenious and perfect, not to say comfortable, as a nest? Their ability and form in flight are awe-inspiring, and their songs are études of extraordinary clarity and quality. Most impressively, they are able to do what humans cannot: birds make harmonious marriages, where both sexes share equally in family duties. Even at this early age I had begun regarding feathered beings as a kind of patron saint.

But on that day, I could only look at the ground and wish that I could kick my grandmother's finely turned ankle. Finally I reiterated that I wanted to have one of the birds that lived in the woods of Nohant as a pet. My grandmother found the idea preposterous. Later in my life, though, I did just that: I kept birds on branches on my desk. They were free to leave and often did—they would go outside, and then they would come back again. Oftentimes, they would perch upon my pen, and in their insouciance they were so charming I could not bear to brush them off. On more than one occasion, I blamed a failed deadline on a barred warbler.

—

T
here are times when tragedy can bring about a kind of goodness that would not have occurred otherwise. A few months after my father's death, my two mothers, as I came to regard my mother and grandmother, began to cooperate with each other in ways they had not before. They could easily have blamed each other for his death, but it seemed they did not. They were not friends, but they were not enemies, either. Most evenings after dinner, they played parlor games and took tiny sips of sherry from pastel-colored, etched glasses. They played with Deschartres, who was a most disagreeable loser, especially when he lost to my mother. He had superior skills—at least to hear him tell it—but she had all the luck. One night he reacted so badly upon losing that my grandmother coolly suggested that she would have to slap him hard, and as he sputtered and fussed, I saw an intimate look pass between the women, something friends might share, and then the two of them burst into laughter.

My grandmother had begun to admire my mother. She saw how Sophie made all our clothes, even our hats; and if she was too impatient to always take the tiny stitches one was meant to in embroidery, she was quick and marvelously stylish in what she created. She once embroidered a dress from top to bottom for my grandmother in only two days; and when the old woman broke her sewing box, my mother shut herself away to make her a new one. Even Deschartres expressed his admiration for this latter creation; he bent his heronlike frame over the new sewing box for some time, after which he offered what was for him high praise: “Not bad.”

In addition to that, without ever having been taught, my mother could tune the harpsichord by ear, replace its strings, and reglue its keys. “Your mother will attempt anything, with great confidence and verve!” my grandmother told me.

She also came to see that my mother was an artist who had never been given opportunities to develop what were considerable
talents in drawing and painting and singing. And she praised the letters my mother wrote, calling them lively and “very pretty.”

“However, you must work on your spelling, my dear,” she said, and rather than rising up in sharp-tongued affront, which I feared she would, my mother did attempt to improve not only her spelling but her penmanship. She also began to read voraciously, a habit that stayed with her until her death.

Despite her many gifts, my mother's only vanity was about her beauty, but even then she was more matter-of-fact than boastful. She could never recognize her own intelligence, not in small part because she was genuinely unaware of it—here, in fact, is where her insecurity came out for the way she envied the society women their education and mental abilities. I occasionally saw women dismiss her with a glance, and I always thought at those times that they had no idea whom they were silently denigrating. My mother was a true Parisienne with a gift for savage wit and mockery; those haughty women were lucky she did not take them on, for they would have been sorry piles of crinolines and jewels when she finished with them.

She could also be extremely irritable and at those times seem to become emotionally untethered. She was free with slapping, too; but in the end there was in her such poetry and heart that one could never get enough of her, no matter what. There were times when she beat me and sent me to bed, and as soon as I was allowed up again, I would run to her and embrace her. And she would cover me with kisses, as though it were someone else who had effected our separation, someone else who had left red handprints on my bottom or my legs or even my face. I cannot say too many times that my mother was the most emotionally volatile, charismatic woman I have ever known. It was she who first aroused passionate love in me. And so it was soul-ripping when the time came that she abandoned me. Or, more to the point, sold me.

July 1831

25 QUAI SAINT-MICHEL

PARIS

I
was finally back in Paris, and Jules and I were in our new apartment. We both loved it and our view of the Seine. On calm days, the river shone like flat metal, but on stormy ones, the restless current made it appear that waves were eating waves. We had rooftop greenery there, and a wonderful sense of airiness. Most important, there were two exits.

My husband still did not know that Jules and I were living together and I saw no reason to tell him. It was, first of all, no longer his business what I did with my life. But I also feared him cutting off funds, even though the allowance I received was from my own fortune. Luckily, I had been granted retention, if not control, of what I had inherited from my grandmother, and that was only because of my mother's intervention at the time of my marriage. Though at the time I had worried that her demands might make a bad impression on my in-laws, now I was very grateful to her.

The interior of the apartment was charming. It came with no furniture, however. Jules had no money, and so I bought everything on credit: rugs, furniture, linens, dishes, draperies. I asked Casimir to secure a loan for me so that I might pay off everything when it came due.

When he failed to act, I wrote to my brother, asking him to get me a loan. When Hippolyte also failed to respond, I sent a nearly hysterical letter, telling them both that if they persisted in punishing me in this way—saying that my children were suffering in my absence, withholding from me the money I needed, refusing to respond even to deny my request—I would kill myself, and my blood would be on their hands. I was so distraught I almost believed I would do this, but in the end I reasoned myself out of guilt and
despair and went into action. I borrowed five hundred francs from François Duris-Dufresne, a man for whom I had given parties at Nohant in an effort to help him get elected to a political office in Berry. I got another two hundred as an advance from my editor, Latouche. I signed for the loans myself, then wrote to Casimir, telling him that I expected him to cover the payment. Finally, he sent me a brief note saying that he would comply.

For one moment, when I looked at his familiar script—the
t
's crossed high up, the slant leaning overly far to the right—I let myself think back to our earlier days, wondering how what had happened to us had. We were once a reasonably content couple. I had touched his shoulder affectionately as I passed behind his chair; we had held each other in the night. But it was pointless to look back. I tore his note in half and threw it away.

September 1831

NOHANT

I
returned to Nohant from Paris in the fall, for another three-month stay with the children. When I arrived, Casimir was harvesting grapes and so stayed on for a while. At first, I held out hope that we would finally be civil to each other. My hopes were dashed at our first dinner together, when Casimir pointedly directed his conversation to the children and not to me. When once I asked him a question, he ignored me. Solange didn't notice; she was singing to the peas on her plate. But Maurice, always sensitive to the feelings of others, said, “Papa? Did you hear Maman?”

Casimir looked at him. “No. I no longer hear her.”

Maurice turned to me. “You must speak louder, Maman.” His eyes were hurt and imploring.

“I shall, from now on,” I told him. I raised my voice and said, “I shall speak very loudly! Like a giant!”

Maurice laughed, he and Solange both, and they imitated me in loud voices of their own. The incident was forgotten so far as they were concerned. Not so for me, who sat watching my husband eat, his eyes focused on his plate, chewing, chewing, chewing. The air grew dense around me; I put down my fork.

The next day, I was finishing up some last details on
Rose et Blanche
. I had worked hard and had completed what I needed to in only five days. I had not seen any of my Paris friends who were also in Berry. It seemed odd to be without my comrades, whom I normally saw so often—I felt lonely and disconnected.

There was a knock on my door, and I opened it to my maid, who held a small, cream-colored envelope addressed to Madame Aurore Dudevant. From the handwriting, I knew it was from Jules, and my face must have betrayed me; the maid's bland expression changed: her mouth tightened, and one eyebrow lifted.

“Merci
,
”
I said, and she said nothing, just turned on her heel and walked away.