The Dream Lover (31 page)

“He is often not well,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears.

My heart opened to her. “Yes, I know that, but I know, too, what seems to make him recover.”

There was a long silence. The horse stomped its hooves and shook its head, pulling restlessly at the reins. The driver spoke sharply to it, and it stilled.

Finally, the
vicomtesse
sighed and took my hands into hers. “I feel I have no choice, for if he is not with you, he will fall into his old ways, which nearly killed him. I wish he would not go so far from his mother, who adores him, but I can see by your coming here that your affection and concern for him are real. Therefore, I give you reluctant permission. Please remind him to write to me as often as he can.”

“I shall have no need to remind him; he adores you.”

We embraced each other, and then she climbed out of the cab.
All the way back to my apartment, I smiled. I was about to embark on a romantic voyage with the man I loved, and the news I would share with him now would make him able to enjoy it as much as I. Solange was being delivered safely back to Nohant; Maurice was safely ensconced in school. I leaned back against the carriage seat and thought,
All will be well
. There was no other time in my life where expectation was such an ill fit against reality.

Spring 1825

NOHANT

I
n the fall, Casimir and I had left Le Plessis and moved to a small apartment on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I thought it would do me good to be near friends and family, but in the spring I fell into a deep depression. At my wit's end, I sought out my old confessor at the convent, and he suggested that a little retreat there could do me good.

What a tonic, at first, was that dearly familiar place. I had once been so sure I wanted to live out my days in that convent, whether as a nun or a boarder. I had relished the communal living, where one was simultaneously alone but with others; now I wondered if I had made the right decision in leaving. It seemed that I had allowed myself to be dissuaded from what had been a true calling, that I had abandoned sublimity for practicality.

Lying once again in a narrow bed and hearing the locks click at night, I felt the calm that came with the implied imperative to pray and to meditate. All around me were minds engaged in the same gentle, soundless practice; all around me was peace. That feeling stood in stark contrast to the doubts and furies and sadness of my marriage.

In confusion, I sought out the nun we had called Madame Alicia, whom I had much admired. After listening to me talk about how I felt I might have made a mistake in leaving the convent, she told me I was blessed to be living the life I was. “Were you really so happy here before?” she asked. “I recall the despair you felt from time to time. I recall your frustration at not being able to achieve what you wanted here. You must remember that the turtle carries his house with him wherever he goes. If you were to return to the convent, if you were to abandon the life you have made for yourself outside these walls, I believe you would soon regret it. You are not
a fickle child any longer, Aurore, with the luxury of being able to run here and there and everywhere, claiming each time that
this
is where you want to be forever. No, you must choose a place to be, and commit fully to it.”

“But how do I discover which place that should be?” I asked.

She put her hand to my cheek. “I believe you know already. It is a matter of admitting to yourself what you love most. And that has less to do with love than with courage.”

I realized I was not fit any longer for the convent. I was a mother, first and foremost; I would stay in my marriage and raise my son.

A
T ONE POINT,
I realized I had not heard from or about Deschartres for some time. After making inquiries at the place where he lived, I learned that he was dead. He had taken a business risk and lost all of his fortune. Not long afterward, he had died.

I heard no fond words about him from anyone. My half brother, Hippolyte, mourned him the way one mourns the passing of anyone who loomed large in one's youth (which is to say that Hippolyte mourned not Deschartres but the loss of his own youth), but he had never liked our tutor, not as a child and not as an adult. My mother's eulogy was to write in a letter to me, “Finally he is gone!” The people in the Berry countryside had respected him, but they'd also feared and ridiculed him.

It was true that he'd been short-tempered and eccentric, and one could easily tire of his dogma. But he'd also been an honest and charitable and trustworthy man.

It was ironic. For all his intelligence, he had failed to grasp a simple truth: he needed some form of love, and he had found it at Nohant. Leaving that place, he lost it. It was my belief that because of the mistakes he had made, he took his own life—stoically, of course. Neatly.

I had always known that I would miss him when he was gone; I had not foreseen how much.

With his death went one who had known my father and who adored my child as I did, one with whom I could still have spirited academic discussions, one whom I might ask questions of and receive an unfiltered answer with no regard as to how I might feel about that answer; and this, it turns out, is more valuable than it might seem.

After my father died, I felt that Deschartres always looked out for me. He might not have felt it his place to comment directly upon the events and people and decisions in my life, but he was a vital witness, one on whom I had depended in many ways since I'd been that wide-eyed four-year-old who had arrived rather unceremoniously at Nohant.

When I learned of his passing, I took a long walk through the grounds that he had so carefully tended. Despite the changes Casimir had wrought, I saw my old friend's hand everywhere. I prayed for a heaven in which he would sit once more playing parlor games with my grandmother, who had loved him best of all.%

June 1825

THE SOUTH OF FRANCE

T
hough I tried not to show it, I was now desperately unhappy with Casimir. And I had no one in whom I could confide and be comforted by. My mother was increasingly a stranger to me. In the letters she sent, she made fun of the ones I had sent to her, telling me I was putting on airs with my language and saying that she prayed I did not begin speaking as I wrote. Yet this woman of the people had adopted a name similar to those of the old countesses she used to make fun of: she asked me to address her letters to “Madame de Nohant-Dupin.”

I did find solace in my child. I read to Maurice. I took walks outside with him and watched him crouch down with his hands on
his knees to gravely inspect grass and rocks and insects. I played hide-and-seek with him, and whenever I found him in his hiding place, he would laugh himself breathless. After I laid him down to sleep, I would stand watching him, full of love.

But the nights came. Or times of idleness in midday, when I pressed my hands and forehead against the windowpanes as if seeking a way out. Or times when Casimir and I sat silently in the parlor together after dinner because he had rebuffed all my efforts at conversation, letting me know by his sour or vacant expression that he preferred not to weary or bore himself by responding to anything I said. At these times, which happened with more and more frequency, I felt a shredding despair so acute I wondered that I did not begin to bleed.

And then I did begin to bleed. I developed a respiratory ailment, a cough that would not go away, and oftentimes I coughed so hard that I brought up blood. I feared I was consumptive, and when I confided this to Casimir, he dismissed me with a laugh. “When will you stop being so dramatic?” he asked.

In late June, we were paid a visit by two young women with whom I had gone to school at the convent. It was a tonic to see Jane and Aimée Bazouin, even though their normal gaiety was dimmed from their having lost their oldest sister to an early death. In order to get all of their minds off that sadness, their father was taking them to the hot springs at Cauterets, in the middle of the Pyrénées Mountains in the south of France. People went there to heal not only physical ailments but spiritual ones as well.

Maurice's birthday was on June 30, and my twenty-first birthday would follow on July 5. It was decided that afterward, Casimir, Maurice, and I would join my friends at Cauterets, then journey on to the Dudevant country house in Gascony. “Perhaps the change in scenery will do something for you,” Casimir said.

It did indeed, though not in a way either of us expected.

—

W
hen the coach pulled up to Nohant, ready to transport Casimir, Maurice, and me to the mountains, I was alone in my room. I made a note in my journal bidding goodbye to Nohant, for I feared that I might never see it again if I was, in fact, consumptive. But then, smiling in the false manner to which I had become accustomed, I climbed in for the four-hundred-mile-long journey, which would take several days.

On the first day, I tried reading the poetry of Ossian, but darkness soon overcame us, and I was resigned to sitting with my thoughts. I closed my book and looked out at nothing, trying to block out the ceaseless complaints of my husband, who found no joy in the journey and could focus only on when we were going to arrive.

When we traveled through Châlus and Périgueux, my heart was aching. But by the time we passed Tarbes, I felt a change in my mood. When we got closer to the mountains, I moved to the top of the coach, where Casimir was, to ride with him and the driver. Casimir was still irritable at how long the trip was taking, and asking imperious questions of the driver, as if the man were trying to deceive him, or as if the trip would be cut in half if only
he
could take the reins.

As for me, I wanted to better see the breathtaking scenery: the poetic undulation of the land and the majestic rise of the snowcapped mountains in the distance, never mind the heat and dust of where we presently were. Those mountains were awe-inspiring not only in their breadth and height and beauty but by the plain fact of them being there, by the mystery of their creation.

After we reached the foothills and began our steep climb up, both Casimir and I were often overcome with fits of a nervous laughter. In those instances, I felt closer to him and began to think perhaps we could find our way back into the kind of happiness we
had once enjoyed. I looked forward to our having a relaxing vacation together.

Outside of Cauterets, we were met by Jane and Aimée, and then we went on to our hotel, where we had a furnished apartment. I felt greatly content to be there.

When I awakened the next morning, we were surrounded by fog. Then, little by little, the landscape began to reveal itself. It seemed an apt metaphor for what I was experiencing, for the way I felt Casimir and I were coming back to life. But then I realized I was to be left alone: Casimir was going hunting; he would be gone until nightfall. “But what am I to do all day?” I asked.

“We are here for your health, are we not? I suggest therefore that you attend to it.” The door closed behind him. He was off to the out-of-doors and to adventure, where he would see the wondrous things we had been told about: waterfalls coming from rock walls that rose straight up several thousand feet and bridges made of snow, crafted by nature, though they looked like the handiwork of skilled stonemasons. Casimir let me know that he meant to go hunting often, if not every day. And starting tomorrow, he would leave at the proper time: so early in the morning that it would still be night.

As for me, I was meant to stay in the hotel and take the cure, which required the charming activity of being doused with water and then wrapped in a blanket for hours. Then I would be surrounded by society people whose attempts at conversation, I knew, would be anything but stimulating to me. They would be an imitation of the many dinners I had been made to endure in Paris. Those people may have been fine for Jane and Aimée, but I was incensed. I soon found a more like-minded friend with whom I could escape, and escape with her I did.

Her name was Zoé Leroy, and she was the twenty-eight-year-old redheaded daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant. She was staying with her family across the street from me. The streets were so narrow in that town that one could carry on a conversation across
them, and that is how Zoé and I began our friendship, each of us looking out our windows one morning, exchanging pleasantries at first about the beauty of our surroundings. But then one day Zoé said, “I must confess that I find it a bit dull here.” With that admission, with which I robustly agreed, we were soon taking excursions on horseback by ourselves, galloping along the narrow mountain roads and, when they got too narrow, walking on them. Rather than lying pale and wan beneath my blanket at the hotel, I was outside, leaping from boulder to boulder in clean air under a turquoise sky, hoping to encounter a bear. My companion had no husband ordering her about or restraining her, and I relished the freedom I, too, enjoyed by being with her.

One day, Zoé and I were joined by a friend of hers, a twenty-six-year-old man named Aurélien de Sèze. He came from a long line of prominent jurists and was himself distinguished as a junior at the Bordeaux Bar. With his thick, dark, curly hair, large black eyes, and oval face, he rather resembled me, I thought. I had no belief in love at first sight, yet upon meeting him I felt an undeniable visceral stirring; and I believed Aurélien when he later told me that love at first sight is precisely what he felt for me. We discovered early on that we were true soul mates, despite the fact that he was a monarchist and a devout Catholic, whereas my beliefs—political and religious—bordered on or were frankly heretical.

Zoé was only too happy to help facilitate Aurélien's and my relationship. In one of our confidential chats, I had told her, “I may have married too soon.”