The Dream Lover (22 page)

I had no idea what he meant. Finally he got out of bed, dressed quickly, and, without a word, started toward the bedroom door.

“But…where are you going?”

I began to weep, embarrassing myself. I had been false to myself, I had attempted to be someone I was not; and this was the result.

He shook his head. “This has been a fiasco. You behave like a young girl when you have none of her charms; and you put on the arrogance of a marquise without her elegance.” With that, he marched out of the room and then out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

I did not sleep that night, and in the morning I sent over a note asking for another chance; I asked him to come and see me at nine o'clock. He did not come.

“
M
Y DEAR, MY DEAR,
what a catastrophe, I am so sorry for you!” Marie said.

It was two days later; she had come to my apartment and I had told her the whole story. I was weeping, nearly hysterical. “I had
such hope. I thought he might come to love me, and if he came to love me, I would be saved from this ennui, from this pain. Ah, Marie, I must tell you, I no longer relish the freedom I demanded. It is only another kind of jail. I am full of regret. I have made decisions that have changed so many lives for the worse, and I cannot take them back. I cannot do anything but suffer. Last night, I longed to throw myself in the Seine and be done with it. It was only the thought of Maurice and Solange that stopped me.”

“This will pass,” Marie said. “All things do.”

I suppose it might have passed, except that Marie told her lover, Vigny, about what had happened. Then, to make matters even worse, she told her neighbor Alexandre Dumas, gossip extraordinaire, who, with great glee, exaggerated what had happened, saying that I had made fun of Mérimée for being unable to “raise the flag” but that in any case there wasn't much of a flag to unfurl. I thought that for a man like Mérimée to catch wind of this would seal my fate in terms of ever having another opportunity to be his lover. We could not even be friends any longer.

Marie came to my door in tears, begging to be forgiven, saying she never expected such repercussions—though she should have, knowing Dumas. She said that she meant, in relaying the story to both Dumas and Vigny, to obtain for me some measure of sympathy, to cast Mérimée in an unfavorable light. But of course no such thing had happened. I was seen as the groveling fool, begging someone who had rejected me to come back. Mérimée was seen as the man who had been wrongly slandered.

Now Marie fell to her knees, saying, “Forgive me, please forgive me,” and I knelt beside her and embraced her. With great weariness and an abiding affection that had not changed, I told her I did forgive her.

After she left, I sat still before the fire, recalling an incident from my childhood.

Madame de Pardaillan was a friend of my grandmother's, and when I was a very young girl, she was in the habit of calling me
“poor little one.” I always wondered why. One day when I was alone with her, I worked up the courage to ask her. She drew me close and, her voice quivering with great feeling, said, “Always be kind and comport yourself well, my child, for that will be your only happiness in life.”

“You mean that I will otherwise be unhappy?”

“Yes,” she said, “everyone has times of sorrow, but you will have more than most. And also you will have much to forgive.”

“But why?”

“Because it will happen that you will have to forgive the only source of happiness you will know.”

I could not have articulated the exact meaning of her words, yet I felt the truth of them. I recalled her arm about my waist, the way she laid her cheek on top of my head after she made her sad pronouncement, and how, in spite of the great number of years separating us, I had felt a bond with her.

Souls are ageless and care nothing for external circumstances. There are times in life when one soul recognizes something in another, and they touch. This is something beyond the boundaries of normal human discourse, something nearly beyond our understanding, but it is a true phenomenon. That is what happened to me that day; I saw that Madame de Pardaillan had endured terrible heartbreak; and she saw that heartbreak would be my fate as well. Our souls touched, and I knew.

Later on the day of Marie's visit, I received a note from a friend who no doubt thought herself helpful in telling me about Marie Dorval's betrayal. I responded to her in this way:

You say she has betrayed me. I am well aware of that, but which of you, my dear friends, have not done as much? She has betrayed me once only, but you do it every day. She passed on something I told her, but every one of my friends has put into my mouth words I never uttered. Leave me the freedom to love her still. I know her, and what she is worth
.

A few days later, when I tried to contact Marie, I learned that she had gone on tour without telling me. I had no idea where she was. In desperation, I sent a friend to get her address from Vigny. I wrote to her, asking why she had not told me where she was going. I would have gone with her, to be her dresser. I told her I had wept after hearing she had gone. I told her my heart belonged to her:

Nowhere can I find a nature so frank, true, strong, supple, good, generous, great, odd, excellent, and, in a word, so complete as yours. I want to love you always, to cry with you, to laugh with you. If you are sad, I will be sad, too. If you are gay, then long live gaiety! Send me a line and I will come to you at once. Should occasions arise when I might be in the way, you can pack me off to work in another room. No matter where I am, I can always find something to occupy my mind. I have been told more than once to beware of you, and no doubt you have been similarly warned against me. Let the prattlers prattle, you and I are the only persons concerned
.

Answer soon. You need send only the single word “come” and I shall set off at once
.

She did not answer soon, or at all.

January 1822

NOHANT

B
efore my grandmother died, when I was seventeen, my cousin René de Villeneuve had come to spend a fortnight with me. It was in an effort for us to get to know each other better, as he had learned of my grandmother's desire for him to be my guardian. I had always liked him, but being alone with him in this way made us like each other even more. He found me interesting where others found me odd: we shot pistols together and stayed up until the early hours of morning, as had become my preference. We galloped through the countryside on horseback, and he did not chastise but instead applauded me for jumping over ditches. We took long walks and discussed politics and philosophy in ways even more satisfying than when I had had such discussions with Deschartres. He sincerely praised my writing abilities.

When it was time for my grandmother's will to be read, René came to Nohant, followed soon afterward by my mother, who arrived with her sister, my aunt Lucie Maréchal, and her husband.

My mother was overly rouged and rough in her behavior, yet I nonetheless felt a lurching in my heart, a reflexive movement toward her. She descended from the carriage with her chin held high and quickly embraced me. “Now, at long last, we shall see what we shall see.”

The reading of the will did not go smoothly. For one thing, my mother's allowance was to be cut by one-third. Then, when she heard that I had agreed to live with my father's family, she became incensed and carried on hysterically, rising up to shout that my grandmother's wishes did not supersede her rights as my mother, that she would go to court if necessary. With this last, she looked over at me. “Must I remind you of the countless entreaties you made
to live with me? How you wept when I left Nohant, how you begged to leave the convent to be with me?”

I spoke quietly, directly to her. “You hurt me when you did not take me to live with you. Now you go against what my grandmother thought so carefully about and believed to be in my best interests? Can you not see that you are hurting me again by not letting me do what I, too, feel is best?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You have been manipulated by your grandmother and by Deschartres into this way of thinking. You believe yourself too good for me and my way of life—a life, by the way, that your father believed in and adored.”

My parents had been happy together, it was true. But it was always my father's wish that his wife and mother would get along, and he struggled mightily to accommodate both of them in his life; even as a young child I could see that. But I knew, as well, that if he had had to choose between them, he would have picked his wife.

And so in honor of my father and because, despite everything, I still loved my mother, who had collapsed into her chair and covered her face with her small hands to weep, I agreed to do as she wanted and place myself under her authority. However, rather than live with her, I asked if I might live at the convent as a boarder. My mother seemed amenable to this, and I could tell that my father's family saw it as a reasonable compromise. René left me with words of comfort, saying that he himself would see about finding me lodging there.

In the end, though, my mother disallowed my living at the convent or at Nohant. My distress at this decision did not make my mother reconsider.

Instead, we left immediately for Paris, where we planned to stay with my aunt Lucie, until such time as legal matters were settled and we could move into my grandmother's apartment.

So it was that I abruptly left the house and the gardens and the fields, the wildlife, and my excellent horse. I left my room, with its
comfortable bed and afternoon sun and books and papers and guitar and harp. And I left my dear, bereft Deschartres, who watched the carriage drive off with his hands empty at his sides, his hair disheveled, his body leaning to the left, as though he no longer knew how to balance himself.

W
HEN MY MOTHER AND
I lived with her sister, I was reunited with Aunt Lucie's daughter, my cousin Clotilde. She reminded me that one's life is meant to be full of much more gaiety than I had experienced. She loved me as I was, oddities and all, and I was heartened by her cheerful nature and by her belief that matters of the human heart always take precedence over teachings in a book. With her, I was not so studious, and although I missed the richness of contemplation and serious dialogue, I enjoyed the relief of plain fun and girlish laughter, which I had last experienced what seemed like a very long time ago, in the convent. And I enjoyed Aunt Lucie, as I always had: I liked her plainspoken ways and forthrightness, her habit of indulging and praising. And I liked the way she handled my mother: she was not at all intimidated by her, as so many others, myself included, were.

One day when my mother was out, I sat at the kitchen table peeling potatoes with Aunt Lucie; she was making her delicious potato leek soup. “So, Aurore,” she said, “is it not wonderful that you are back with your mother at last?”

I smiled but said nothing.

She leaned in so close to me our foreheads nearly touched. “You know, your approach to her is all wrong. Shall I tell you how to handle her?”

I put down my knife and sat up straighter. “Yes.”

She looked briefly at me and smiled, then resumed peeling. “First of all, it is your nature to be calm and reasonable, which only serves to feed the flames when she goes off on one of her tirades. Instead, scream back at her! It is only in raising her ire to the maximum that
you force her to dispel it; once she is at the top, there is nowhere for her to go but down. Serve her up the same drama she offers you, but do her one better. If she yells, yell louder. If she tears up, then you must sob loudly—pretend you are an actress at the theater. Believe me, if you respond to her in this way, she will quickly exhaust herself, and then you can carry on normally.”

I saw the reason in my aunt's words, but I knew I could never behave like that. It was not in me; nor did I want it to be. As my mother had influenced me, so had my father. And he was, after all, the man who, rather than face up to my mother, rode away from her histrionics on that fateful rainy night, looking for peace—and got more peace than he'd bargained for. I appreciated my aunt's advice, and I told her so; but I think she, too, knew that I could never do as she suggested. I would have to find another way to escape my mother's rages and cruelty. Easier to say than to do, when the one who is cruel to you is the one lodged permanently in your heart.

March 1833

QUAI MALAQUAIS

PARIS

M
y fever was raging; when I coughed, it seemed I rattled the walls. I knew no one would want to be around me, and I did not blame them.

Still, at such times one longs for the comfort of another presence. And so when I heard the door open, I rejoiced to think that one of my neighbors had come by for a visit. But it was not a neighbor; instead, it was Marie Dorval, bright as the sun on this stormy day, stomping the wet off her little boots, dropping her coat to the floor and rushing to my side, never mind my disheveled appearance or flushed face.

“But what have we here?” she said. “Ah,
petite
, I heard you were ill. But look at you, it is worse than I thought. Well, I shall attend to this. But first, a kiss—I must offer a greeting for my wild darling, laid so low!” Not a word from her about her abrupt disappearance, and, as grateful beneficiary of her attentions now, I did not want to bring it up.

I held up my hand in a weak effort to keep her away, but she would have none of it. She kissed my cheeks, my forehead, the angle of my jaw, cooing in sympathy like a turtle dove. She pressed me to her bosom and rocked me back and forth.