Authors: Elizabeth Berg
Life went on for me there. And on.
August 1832
NOHANT
S
olange and I left Paris to return to Nohant. Maurice stayed in the city with his father so that he could visit Henri IV military academy in advance of his attending that fall. Though my daughter seemed to have no difficulty transitioning back to life in the country, it took me a couple of weeks to settle into the routine at Nohant, to calm myself from the chaotic pace I was used to.
As ever, I found the estate to be full of delights. In the morning, larks awakened me with their cascading songs, and swallows swooped dramatically in their aerial feeding. In the afternoon, I made picnic lunches for Solange and me to eat on the stone bench outside. We watched the bees gathering nectar from a garden full of flowers whose scent filled the air. There were beautiful yellow-and-black-striped butterflies that often alighted on Solange's knee or hand, and I had to watch her lest she try to pull their wings off.
Each evening after I put my daughter to bed, I took walks outside alone and beheld the glittering stars, which were mostly obscured in the city. I listened to the sounds of the animals moving about in the underbrush of the forest, and to the hooting of the owls. On hot nights, I went to the river to bathe in the dark water.
Every few days, I took Solange out for expeditions to the woods and along the banks of the river to show her the pink and white stars of anemones amid the blue periwinkles. We stood together before berry bushes, plucking off the warm fruit and eating it. I taught her the names of the birds that came to Nohant and told her about her great-grandfather, how he had also loved birds, and how I believed he had passed on to me the ability to charm them onto my finger.
There was more to Nohant than bucolic pleasure, however. There were servants to mind, and many details I didn't want to attend
to regarding things I didn't care about. When would madame like her breakfast served? Her dinner? There were menus to be approved, selections of linens, the placements of bouquets, guest lists to be made for obligatory dinners, accounting to be dealt with in my husband's absence. Finally, though, all was peaceful. Solange seemed content, and the house was running on its own.
I began working in earnest on my second novel,
Valentine
. I wrote even more feverishly than I had in Paris; oftentimes, I awakened with my head on my desk, the quill in my hand. The work was thrilling, all-consuming.
“Maman, stop working!” Solange would say sometimes, bursting into my room and pulling me out of the drama of a female aristocrat in love with a peasant, and into the world of a little girl. But I enjoyed that, too. If my vivid imagination served me well on the page, it also helped me become a most excellent partner in games with Solange. She remained difficult, in her way, but we often laughed ourselves breathless, and she would pat my arm and say, “You are a good
maman
.”
When Casimir brought Maurice back to Nohant, I exulted in the presence of my little man. I was also grateful for the fact that now that Casimir was here, I could work all through the night. I started at seven in the evening and wrote until six in the morning. I went to sleep when Casimir awakened; and this seemed to suit both of us.
I received letters from Jules, back again in Paris and, in my absence, living in the room I had rented for him. In one letter, he told me how much he missed me, how anxious he was for my return to our cozy garret in the fall, where I would once again cook for him the rich stews he favored. Reading the letter made me miss Paris: the theater and the opera, the cafés, even the pigeons who huddled together under the arches of the Pont Neuf. And Jules himself, of course: I missed him most of all. I thought of him arguing playfully with our friends, standing there in his tattered frock coat, his cravat so far off to the side it was nearly under his ear. I thought of our
coupling at night, how I would run my hands up and down the long line of his back, how he sometimes kissed me so deeply it felt as though he were transferring the essence of himself into me. I thought of how I watched him in sleep, the beating of his heart steady in his throat. I saw us at breakfast with our bowl-sized cups of coffee, talking excitedly about all we meant to do that day.
I decided to take a spontaneous trip to Paris by myself, telling Casimir that I needed to attend to some details for
Le Figaro
. Jules and I would have some time together, and the visit would hold us until we could be together again.
When I arrived in Paris, I went to Jules's room, and had hardly set my valise down before we enjoyed an intense session of lovemaking. The next day, I went out so as to give Jules time alone to write. I came back earlier than we had agreed upon, thinking that I could quietly read the book I'd just purchased and then, when he had finished work for the day, we would go to a restaurant for dinner.
I let myself in quietly and found Jules in bed with his laundress, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a mole situated just so at the corner of her mouth. When I'd first met her, I had remarked on how pretty she was. “Her?” Jules had asked.
Now I stood frozen in place, the key in my hand.
The girl pulled the covers up over herself and stared.
Jules leapt to his feet. “Aurore! This means nothing!”
“To whom?” I asked, and then, before walking out, I turned to him to say, “And my name is George.” My heart was breaking, but by the next day I had traded despair for resolve. I would find a place to live alone. I had the means, now, to make a decision about where I wanted to be without having to ask anyone's permission. It was something I had aspired to, but how ironic that now that I had such freedom, it felt more sorrowful than anything else.
November 1832
QUAI MALAQUAIS
PARIS
L
atouche had begun spending all of his time in a little country house he had purchased, and so I asked him if I might take over the rental of his apartment. He agreed gladly. We had become very good friends; in fact, there were rumors that we were lovers. One is helpless in the face of such idle gossip. If one denies the charge, one fans the flames; if one ignores it, one is complicit in suggesting it is so. Well, now that I was to be a woman on my own, I supposed the rumors would fly more furiously than ever before.
In my new place, there were fewer stairs to climb, which meant that it was not light and airy. Nor did it have the views I had enjoyed in the apartment I had shared with Jules. But it was peaceful there. Below were the gardens of the Ãcole des Beaux-Arts; across the river was the Louvre.
After a time, I saw Jules again; I never was one to hold grudges. But he was only a friend. My true love became my pen, my beautiful apartment, and the pages I stacked up on my desk each night. If I could not fill my days with the kind of affection I still longed for, I would fill them with another, more reliable kind of love, one that engaged my heart, my mind, and my spirit completely, and one that did not betray me.
October 1817
NOHANT
I
was thirteen years old when there began to be episodes of violence that escalated among the household staff at Nohant. My grandmother, who had suffered damage from the last stroke she had had and who, in any case, had never excelled in management, deferred more and more to Deschartres, essentially assigning him care of the entire estate. She turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the arguments and flung plates in the kitchen, even to the abuse that an aging Deschartres suffered at the hands of the cook, who would try to beat him with a broom while poor Deschartres held his arms crisscrossed before him in outraged defense. As for me, I was ignored by the servants, with whom I'd formerly been friendly, for soon after my mother's departure, my grandmother forbade me to talk with them or to spend time lingering in the kitchen. And I was actively despised by Julie, my grandmother's maid.
When my mother was at Nohant, I could see that Julie's hostilities toward both of us burned in her breast; now, whenever I was not with my grandmother, she released the venom she feltâshe thought I was fair game. Sometimes she told me that things at the estate had been spoiled since the moment my mother and I arrived; other times she allowed that it had been all right until my father's death. My mother and I were never meant to be there long-term, I understood. Now my mother had been gotten rid of, but I lingered, like a burr stuck in the hem of her petticoat. I began to take solace in the out-of-doors; I was inside only when I had to be. With this I established a pattern that stayed with me all my life: whenever unhappy circumstances unraveled me, nature knit me back up.
In 1816, Hippolyte had joined the army, and so I was the only child living with Grandmama, Deschartres, and the servants. Julie's animosity toward me I have described; but then my own maid,
Rose, began displaying moments of great cruelty toward me as well. I was no longer the little girl she had coddled; now I was older and more complicated. I was not often overtly willful, but there was a reason I was called stubborn: if my obstinacy did not show in complete noncompliance, it certainly did in the disdainful expression on my face and in the halfhearted way I did certain things I knew full well how to do better. Rose would beat me for this as well as for the most minor infringements: forgetting my hankie, dirtying my dresses, smacking my lips at the dinner table. But she never hit me in front of my grandmother or my mother, when she was visiting.
If I had reported Rose, she would have been punished, yet I did not tell either my mother or my grandmother how her behavior toward me had changed. It was by then a deeply ingrained habit to tolerate such behavior, and even to be comforted by its familiarity.
One cold day, when a slate-gray sky hung oppressively low, I went out for a walk in the nearby village. In the street, I saw a small family walking along, handsome parents and their two young daughters talking and laughing. They were carrying parcels and hurrying toward home, I imagined, where they would soon be warm and together for the evening. They would enjoy supper and the companionship of one another, and at night they would go to bed full of a kind of assurance that tomorrow they would all be together again. As I stood watching them go, heavy drops of rain began to fall.
I hoped it would not turn into a storm, for then I would be trapped inside with old people who had no tolerance for the restlessness of the young. I occasionally lost myself in reading, but there was otherwise little joy for me in that house. The studies I'd initially found so stimulating now bored me; the only pleasure I took in the writing assignments I was given was when I padded the narrative with my own fiction. Music had been ruined for me when my grandmother's arthritic fingers prevented her from teaching and she turned those duties over to the greasy-lipped organist from the
church at La Châtre. He had technical ability but no feeling for the music; we could not communicate, and I began playing without passion or nuance as he did, just to get the lesson over with.
I walked in the rain toward the woods, remembering the gaiety and romance of my parents together, their and my happiness. Everything had been spoiled, first by my baby brother's death and then my father's; and now I felt effectively orphaned. I gave myself over to what I saw as my own personal tragedy, to the sort of melancholy adolescents are so good at submerging themselves in.
At only thirteen years of age, I had lost so much! And to whom could I turn for comfort? My mother, so many miles away in Paris? My father, deep in the ground? My grandmother, who understood very little about me at all and, in any case, was fading away? God, when I had so little of the faith that seemed to sustain others?
When my mother and I had first lived in Paris, I had gone to Mass with her. She believed in a child's way: she embraced her religion without questions. But my grandmother, who, in my mother's absence, was becoming more and more influential to me, taught me that Jesus was an admirable historical figure, nothing more. The villagers, who also influenced me, were more pagans than Christians; they brought out modern religion only on certain occasions, as if it were party clothes or their best dishes. Day to day, they were governed by superstition and belief in things like werewolves, witches, and humans possessed by demons. This was their religion, something from the Middle Ages, where mythology was vividly personified. I had heard that they had visions and hallucinations, too, and a strong belief in previous lives. So when I had first met Hippolyte and he'd told me he had been a dog in a previous life, he had been serious.
It was greatly confusing, trying to adopt a theology. But finally my own version of God came to me in a dream, complete with a name: Corambe. He was a warm and compassionate being with a tender and unwavering regard for me. He had the humanity of Jesus and the radiant beauty of the angel Gabriel. He was graceful
and poetic and ever attentive to my feelings. And though he was a male, he nonetheless dressed oftentimes in women's clothes.
In the woods near my grandmother's house, I created an altar to Corambe. I built it in a clearing gotten to by going deep through young trees that had at their bases hawthorn and privet, and whose denseness prohibited much traffic. There was moss covering the ground in the clearing that both looked and felt like lush carpeting. Long shafts of light fell through breaks in the foliage to dapple the earth.
At the base of three joined maples, I made an altar, using pebbles, rocks, and leaves. I made wreaths from ivy and other natural materials and placed them here and there. I hung small pink-and-white shells from the boughs of the trees; in a breeze, they made a sound that reminded me of the castanets I had heard dancers use in Spain.