The Dream Lover (18 page)

W
INTER AT THE CONVENT
was difficult for me. I had always fared better in the country at Nohant; the yellow air in Paris never failed to make me sickly. Add to that the severe cold we had the first year I was there, and it made for a miserable specimen who lay
in her cot at night with her teeth chattering like castanets, looking up in the dimness at the low ceiling of the ugly room she shared with about thirty other girls. We had a stove, but it seemed as if its function was to smoke and shimmy rather than provide any significant warmth.

After several months I became quite lively and was known by the nickname “Madcap.” I began to write both prose and poetry, for fun at first—to amuse and entertain my classmates and my teachers. Later, I wrote more seriously, even re-creating a play I had read at Nohant.

I
N
A
PRIL
1819 I moved from the dormitory to my own private cell at the convent. It measured ten feet long, and its width was six feet. I could touch its sloping ceiling as I lay in my bed, and it gave me a child's thrill to do so. One couldn't open the door without bumping it into the chest of drawers, or close the door without pressing oneself into the window's embrasure. Icicles formed from my leaky ceiling in the winter, and in summer I could scarcely breathe for the closeness in the air. But I loved it.

In addition to my bed, I had a wicker chair, an old rug made only more beautiful to me by its faded pastels, and my grandmother's little Louis XV harp, which seemed to anoint the space with a kind of grace and grandeur. The four-paned window did not offer a lovely view: when I looked down, I saw a drainpipe. But if I looked up, I could see parts of Paris.

The church bell was near my cell, and it took some time to get used to its tolling, but I came to love that sound. Rather than keep me from sleep, it lulled me into it. And then I would be awakened by the bells ringing matins, and by the chanting of the nuns, and by the songbirds, who always seemed to welcome the promise of a new day.

It had been a long time since I had sat alone in contemplation. Living in close proximity to the other girls offered many pleasures and comforts, not least among them the giggling fits that young
women are prone to at the slightest provocation. But I paid a price as well: the constant presence of others meant that I could not have the kind of solitude my nature required.

Now I could lie in my bed at night and speak aloud to various people: my long dead father, whose warm hand I could still feel holding mine; my fickle mother, whom I still loved; and my grandmother, who, despite my complaints, I knew loved me. I spoke to Corambe, and I said prayers to the Virgin Mary in English—not only to attempt to master the language but to enjoy the lyricism of the words.

Then, when I was fifteen years old, it happened that I suddenly became very religious.

One evening, I was looking out the window of my cell, and I saw one of the tenants of the convent walking slowly toward the chapel. She was old and bent over, and I watched with a kind of detached pity as she made her way to say her evening prayers with great difficulty. What drew people to such faith? How, lacking any evidence, could they so wholeheartedly accept the precepts handed to them as irrefutable truth? I decided to follow the old woman and take note of all that she did.

By the time I arrived in the chapel, the old woman was nowhere to be seen. There were the dim forms of a few nuns and tenants kneeling in prayer, but gradually they all left. The last to go was a nun who came to the altar and prostrated herself before she went out. All the nuns did this when they came to the altar; I had seen it many times and was always faintly amused by it. It seemed as though they had been shot down from where they had been flying about in the air.

But this time, I was profoundly moved by the gesture, by the wholehearted willingness to submit to such humiliation. And, in fact, I saw it now less as humiliation than as a gesture that one was privileged to feel compelled to make.

We students were not allowed to enter the chapel without permission at that hour, and in any case, the chapel would soon close.
But I stayed there anyway. I moved into one of the polished wooden pews at the front of the chapel and sat very still.

It had grown dark inside; but the silver sanctuary light burned with a soft glow. I could make out the candles on the altar and the gold of the tabernacle, a bit of the whitewashed walls around me. Outside, the stars hung in their places in the sky, and I had the sense that I was being watched by them.

I knelt, bowed my head, and closed my eyes. And then I suddenly felt an immense pressure in my chest and did not know whether it was joy or sadness. I kept quiet, breathing in and out, trying not to move in any other way, giving myself over to whatever mysterious force was upon me as the feeling grew and grew and I began to tremble.

In the chapel was a painting by Titian that was very hard to see at any time of day. It was hung in the darkness of the back of the nave and was itself a dark painting. But I had had occasions to sit near it and look at it and had learned what was depicted there. It was Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, on his knees, having fainted into the arms of an angel. The angel holds Christ's head against his breast, against his heart. The image came to me now, and I began to weep.

Then I thought of the patron saint of the convent, Saint Augustine, who for a long time struggled with whether or not to accept Christ. On a day when he was full of despair at the weakness of his will, he threw himself beneath a fig tree in a garden, where he said, “How long, O Lord, how long? Is it to be tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now?” It was then that a voice came to him, saying,
“Tolle, lege!”
(Take it, read it), referring to the Bible, and he had his conversion experience. In his
Confessions
, he wrote about his long-lasting struggle to accept Christ:

Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved Thee. Thou wast with me and I was not
with you. Thou hast called, Thou hast cried out, and hast pierced my deafness. Thou hast enlightened, Thou has shone forth, and my blindness is dispelled.

I sat gripped by my emotions; then I, too, heard plainly spoken aloud the same words that had been said to Saint Augustine:
Tolle, lege!
I turned, expecting to see a nun who, having intuited the experience I was undergoing, wanted to urge me on. But there was no one: I was alone in the chapel.

Then a bright light surrounded me, and an incredible sweetness flooded my soul.

I could feel that my body was distinctly my own but temporary, and that my soul was eternal. I could feel that there was no need for fearing death. I could feel the place of abiding love and peace from which I had come, and to which I would return.

Tears ran down my face, and I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude and joy.

I wanted to confess all of my sins and begin a new life. I fell to the floor, sobbing, and wept on and on until I heard a nun coming in the door to close the church for the night. I quickly ran out, went back to my cell, and, full of a feeling I could only call ecstasy, slept.

The next Saturday, just after lunch, I sought out a meeting in the sacristy with my confessor, Abbé de Prémord. I told him that whereas before I had offered up only an anemic recitation of “sins” that were copies of what the other girls said, now I wanted to make a sincere and thorough listing of my wrongdoings, and this I did, to the best of my ability.

When I had finished, the abbé spoke quietly: “I most sincerely grant you absolution, and you may receive communion tomorrow. Do not carry remorse for anything in the past; in the end, it is only prideful. Let peace dwell inside you, live your life in joy, and give thanks that God has come to you in this way.”

I received communion the next day—I held the host in my mouth and felt light fill my soul—and in the days that followed, I
burned with my newfound passion. For many months, all through that summer and beyond, I attended Mass with newfound appreciation and understanding. In addition to that, I prayed constantly: on my knees in my cell, sometimes in class, even walking about in the recreation yard, when I pretended to be watching the various games the other girls played. I ate and slept little. I became, to the extent that I could, a mystic, one for whom a scratchy filigree rosary worn around the neck served as a hair shirt. The nuns treated me with great affection, and I felt myself blessed.

One day, talking with Madame Alicia, a nun I particularly liked, I told her about my plans to take the veil.

She listened somber-faced to my words, nodding slowly. Then she said, “You are in no way ready to make such a commitment. I fear that your tendency to overdramatize has come into play, here, and you have—”

“It is not overdramatization!” I said. I could feel the heat rising up into my cheeks, blood throbbing at my temples. “I assure you that I am utterly sincere in my desires.”

“I know you believe that with all your heart,” Madame Alicia said. “But you must at least consider the fact that you might have taken a notion to an extreme.

“Let us examine what has happened. You believe you have suddenly stepped into a luminous maturity, that you have heard a calling; and now you cannot act quickly enough to put things into place. You feel you are reborn into a place you have sought all your life, that you have found your true home.”

She put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. “Now I must tell you what I see from my side. I see a baby grasping at a sunbeam; I believe you are full more of appreciation and desire than understanding.

“For example, you speak of the value of suffering. Look at the lives of the poor that go on outside our walls. They are the ones who suffer nobly and endure. They shiver in the cold, they go hungry, they bury the small bodies of the children they could not keep
alive. They dream of things they know full well they will never have. Of what value is suffering that is self-inflicted? Believe me, life makes for suffering, no matter who you are. But do you not think that God wants us to feel joy as well?

“This is the counsel I would offer you: Live more with this feeling. See how it grows or changes. Then decide what to do. You may find that your gifts are better used elsewhere. Trust in God. He will continue to show you the way. You must not rush ahead of His plan for you nor attempt to predict it; to do so is to dishonor Him. Patience is not only a virtue; it is a form of grace.”

Despite those words, or perhaps because of them (for the devil in me never completely died), I continued to believe I would sign the contract that would make me a nun. I gave up my recreation time entirely in order to have time to help with various chores in the convent, in order to have more time to pray. People later told me that I became stupid during that time, and they were right. I did not care any longer for history or languages or the fine arts; I wanted only to move toward the single-mindedness I saw in people who devoted themselves to their faith.

Then my grandmother heard about my plans.

She made arrangements to abruptly withdraw me from the convent. She cited as a reason her failing health, and it was true that there was a noticeable weakness in her, a fading of the essential qualities that made her who she was. She told me she could not ever forgive herself if she left me unsupported after she was gone. I would, after all, inherit Nohant. Someone would need to help me run it. Therefore, it was time for me to start my search for a husband. Introductions must be made, parties and dinners attended; I would need a new wardrobe.

So it was that I gathered up my few things, said goodbye to my friends, and walked out of my beloved cell for the last time. I abandoned the work to which I had dedicated myself and rode blank-eyed with my grandmother to her Paris apartment to begin another life entirely. I was not yet sixteen.

February 1833

DRESSING ROOM OF MARIE DORVAL

PARIS

“
T
o. My darling George. Tell me a story about yourself.” Marie's speech was rapid, her eyes wide and shiny bright. In her head, I was sure, were still the sounds of the applause and cheering that had met her performance. Minutes ago, she had burst in the door, downed the glass of champagne I had waiting for her, and disappeared behind her screen to change into one of her lacy silk dressing gowns. She was now sitting at her vanity, taking off her stage makeup.

I sat almost shyly at the edge of her chaise longue, holding my top hat, turning it around and around by the brim. “A story,” I said. “What kind of story?”

“Tell me how you came to wear men's clothes.”

“Ah. A story about that! But surely you have seen other women wearing men's clothes.”

“Yes. But not like you do. There is more in it for you. So tell me. And make it a long story. My throat aches; I want someone else to talk.” She wiped under one eye with her finger, removing a bit of kohl she had missed. Bare of makeup, she was even more beautiful.

“All right, then.” I stretched my legs out and rested my hat beside me. “Well, I first wore men's clothing when I was a girl, out of sheer practicality. Deschartres, my tutor, worried about my ability to ride my horse while wearing the fussy dresses my grandmother preferred for me. He suggested I wear pants so that I would have a safe seat in the saddle. Of course, I did not go out in society in such clothes; I was not like Honoré de Balzac, parading around Paris in his dressing gowns—many of them none too clean!—as a point of pride.”

Marie laughed. “And always with his jeweled cane! Oh! He is a
pig, that one, with his sticky rings on his fat fingers and his many chins!”

“Ah, but he is such a divine writer. And he will tell you that his unkempt appearance is
publicity
! Do you know that once after some friends and I dined with him—he had put on one of his usual dinners of boiled beef and melon and champagne cocktails with the irresistible gaiety of a child—he changed into a new
robe de chambre
about which he was most excited. He proposed that he accompany us to the Luxembourg gate wearing that robe. To light our way, he said he would carry his new candelabra. It was a preposterous idea; the streets were deserted at such a late hour, and I worried that on his return home alone, he would be assaulted by thieves or murderers, which I told him out quite plainly. He laughed and said that if he encountered anyone, either they would think that he was insane and be afraid of him or they would think he was royalty and entitled to such eccentricities, and they would bow down before him. And so we went, Balzac carrying an exquisitely engraved silver candelabra with candles blazing, speaking loudly of the four Arabian horses he did not yet have but would.”