Authors: Elizabeth Berg
I wanted to sit by myself for a while. Then I would change out of my white dress and black shoes and into the simple blue dress Casimir favored. I would fold the beautiful shawl so that I might return it to Zoé.
Soon, though, I heard a light tapping at my door, and when I opened it I found Zoé and Aurélien standing there. I ushered them in, and all three of us wept, then laughed together. Aurélien said we would maintain an innocent correspondence and, in that way, our platonic love; Zoé had persuaded him to do so.
When Casimir and I departed to go back to my in-laws', I left the white dress hanging in the armoire. I vowed to make every attempt to change my attitude toward what I saw as my fate, to live out my life with a man I did not love.
B
ACK IN
G
UILLERY,
I endeavored with all my heart to love my child and my husband and married life, even the little hunting lodge in which we were living. It was not the kind of countryside I was used to, with its sandy soil and dark woods of evergreens and cork trees, their deep shadows unrelieved by shafts of light. But the weather had warmed, and I followed winding paths beneath the saplings and found small streams running alongside gigantic ferns. The babbling sound of the water delighted both Maurice and me. Occasionally, when the air was right, one caught sight of the Pyrénées, which lay ninety miles away. They presented themselves in a kind of pink haze with a silver overlay, and whenever I saw them I had to steel myself against a kind of crushing melancholy. But I did that. I also made efforts to get along better with my mother-in-law, and Casimir and I went to parties and visited people who lived in the grand manors nearby. I did not turn away from my husband in bed. Still in all, it is a lie for me to say I truly cared for anything there but Maurice.
To Zoé, I wrote of my frustration at not being able to say in letters to Aurélien all that was in my heart, to find a place for passion at least upon the page. I had made a promise to Casimir that he was free to read the letters that passed between Aurélien and me, and so I was careful to keep them neutral in tone. Zoé, ever practical, and ever on the side of true love, freed me with a single question:
Did you promise Casimir that you would let him read your journal?
Delighted, relieved, I began pouring my heart and soul onto the pages of a journal that I would eventually pass on to Zoé to give to Aurélien. It was a perfect way to honor my promise and still express to Aurélien everything I wanted to. I wanted him to know me as completely as possible, and so I shared with him memories of growing up at Nohant as well as things about my day-to-day life in Guillery. I took particular pains to describe the way my flesh longed for the touch of his.
On the rainy morning of November 6, Casimir was on his way to Nohant, where he was going to check on things. He was looking for some papers regarding our property in the desk in our room, and he found my journal pages, meant for Aurélien. From the tone of his voice when he called me into our bedroom, I suspected what had happened.
“Sit down,” he told me, and I sat at the edge of the bed, trying to keep my face impassive, though my heart was racing. I laced my fingers together to keep my hands from shaking. He reached into a drawer, pulled out the pages, and waved them before me.
“What are these?” His face was florid; he struggled to keep his voice low.
“I gather you already know,” I said. What defense could I offer? I waited for him to mete out some sort of punishment.
But he only flung the papers to the floor and left the room, then the house. He was off to Nohant as planned, and I sat in a hunting lodge where I did not want to be, the pages in disarray at my feet.
After a while, I picked the pages up and put them in order. I
would not destroy them. They were only the truth. I put them back in the desk drawer and left the bedroom to tend to my son.
I found him sitting with his grandfather, who was regaling him with a story about when he'd gone out riding through the woods to visit a friend, and by the time he arrived at the gate of the house, fourteen wolves surrounded him. Fourteen! Yes, he counted all the tails, and that's how many there were. Fourteen. This was a story I had heard many times, and I was glad to see my father-in-law was telling it in a way that served to amuse and not frighten my son.
I sat down a distance away and listened to the ending, the part where one of the wolves leapt up and snapped at the hem of my father-in-law's cloak. There was nowhere to run. So my father-in-law coolly confronted the danger head-on. He dismounted, removed his cloak, and snapped it in the faces of the wolves, scaring them all away. “A mere waving of a cloth, and they ran home to their mothers, their tails between their legs,” he said. “They climbed into their beds and pulled the covers over their heads. âOh, I am so frightened, wee wee wee!' So you see? Sometimes the things we fear are as afraid of us as we are of them!”
Maurice beamed, then said, “Again!”
My father-in-law smiled at me over the top of Maurice's head, and I smiled back.
Then the sun suddenly pushed through the windows, a welcome bit of warmth and light. The rain had stopped, and my father-in-law told Maurice to come with him; they would go outside for a bit of roughhousing. I was very glad of this, for I had just gotten an idea for something I wanted to do, and I did not want to be interrupted.
In the bedroom, I laid out paper on the desk and began a letter to my husband. I would not offer my throat to the wolf. I would stand up and defend myself.
Soon afterward, I received a letter back from Casimir, one full of love and hope. He had read certain demands I had made and found
them fair. He had wandered about at Nohant, and when he stood in the library, he was full of regret for the way he had never made any real attempt to read the books there. He saw that he had taken me for granted and had not ever really understood who I was. But he would no longer be so blind; he would cooperate with me in trying to revitalize our marriage.
I recall reading that letter, my head bowed over the page, my heart full of hope. Easy to say I should have known better.
Fall 1826
NOHANT
L
ess than one year after we had vowed to repair our marriage, I sat with Casimir in the parlor after dinner, trying not to let anger overtake reason. I had just learned that he had lost thirty thousand francs of my marriage settlement by investing it in a nonexistent merchant ship; he had been swindled. Casimir's father had died the past winter, and his stepmother had not seen fit to give my husband anything. He was totally reliant on my fortune, and now he had lost a significant amount of it.
A number of things came to my mind, but in the end I elected to say only this: “We are finished with you running this place. Starting now, I will take over.”
I expected an argument, but I did not get one. Instead, Casimir rose heavily from his chair and walked out of the room. Then I heard the front door slam, followed by the pounding of his horse's hooves. He would be going to Château de Montgivray to see my brother, I was sure of it, and he and Hippolyte would drink themselves into oblivion. Or at least that is what he would tell me. In fact, it was more likely that he would be going to see Hippolyte's wife's maid, a young and beautiful Spanish woman who had once
worked at Nohant, and with whom I knew Casimir was intimate. I had found her in bed with him on a day when I returned home earlier than expected from one of my shopping trips to Paris. I fired her immediately, fired her as she stood in the middle of the room weeping, a sheet wrapped hastily around herself. Later that night, Casimir tried to persuade me to take her back. “Be reasonable,” he said. “You know these things happen.” I would not take her back, and so Hippolyte hired her.
Most of the time, my marriage felt like trying to hold on to fog. Worse, at least so far as I was concerned, there was little to Aurélien and me any longer, either. His letters had cooled markedly in tone; I felt sure that he had found someone with whom his passions need not be sanitized or relegated to black lines on a white page.
A year passed this way. My health began to suffer; I had frequent chest pains and migraines. I resolved to go to Paris for medical consultations and found someone willing to accompany me there. That was Jules de Grandsagne, the brother of Stéphane, the young man with whom, as a girl, I had delved into the mysteries and glories of the body when he had instructed me in my room at Nohant. I would go in late December, and Jules said he was sure Stéphane would like to see me. As I would him.
December 27, 1827
PARIS
“
A
urore!” Stéphane de Grandsagne stepped aside from the door and gestured to the interior of his apartment. I came in and moved a pile of books from a tattered gold velvet settee so that I could sit there. Then I took full measure of a man who had lost none of his attractiveness, despite his gauntness and the dark circles beneath his eyes. His muttonchops made still more pronounced the
height of his cheekbones. His dark hair was still thick and curly, his nose straight, and his lower lip full. Nor had he lost a way of looking at me that was thrilling.
“How goes the collection?” I asked. On the way to Paris, his brother had told me of the efforts Stéphane was making toward building a people's library. “He's working himself to death!” Jules had said. Stéphane wanted to provide at least two hundred books, on every subject, so that working men and women who were otherwise denied access to advanced schooling could educate themselves. I had come to visit Stéphane to congratulate him on his enterprise and to see if there was anything I might do to help. But I also came because I remembered him as someone to whom I could speak intimately and openly, a true friend.
“We have made great progress, and I am pleased,” Stéphane said. “But you, Aurore, I see that you areâ¦Are you unwell?”
To my chagrin, tears began to stream down my face.
He pulled me up from the settee and into his arms, and kissed me.
I protested not at all. Not in the slightest. And a full hour later, when I arose from his bed, I observed with wonder that nothing in my body or soul hurt; it was as though Asclepius had laid his hand upon my brow and offered me his mythical cure.
But the next day, on the way back to Nohant, I stared out the window of the coach and was overwhelmed with remorse. I knew immediately, as I had known with Maurice: I was pregnant.
When Solange was born, I saw that Stéphane's features were unmistakably in her face: she looked nothing like Casimir and not even like me. Yet the only one who directly questioned me about this was Aurélien de Sèze, who happened to visit us at the time of Solange's birth. Casimir bore him no jealous grudges any longer.
As Aurélien sat alone with me in my room and Solange lay sleeping on my breast, he gently laid his hand on the top of the
baby's head and stroked her hair with his little finger. I was reminded of the softness of his touch.
“She is beautiful,” he said. Then he sat back in his chair and regarded me seriously. “Behind your back, people are saying that the child is Stéphane de Grandsagne's.”
“Yes. I know they are.”
“Is it true?”
I didn't answer.
“Do you love him?” he asked, and I heard the pain in his voice.
My eyes filled. “It's you I love,” I whispered. “Still.”
Now it was his turn to be silent. I didn't know if it was because his own feelings had changed or if he simply had not heard me. I did not repeat myself. He stood, started to speak, but then did not. He kissed my forehead gently and left the room. I continued to stare at the chair where he had been sitting and quietly wept, until Solange awakened and I turned all of my attention to her. Never mind that it was someone else who had conceived her with me; Casimir was her father and my husband. I would persevere. I would overcome. This deception would be woven into Casimir's and my life together; after a while, we would not notice it. We were civil enough. But from now on, Casimir and I would have separate bedrooms. That much truth I had to allow.
December 1830
NOHANT
T
he writing I did in my little room at nohant was progressing. What once had been random observations and journal entries were becoming pieces of fiction that took on a kind of authority of their own. I learned that wind informed, that memory informed, that hopes and dreams did. So, too, a fork on a plate, an unopened
letter, the shine of wet on cobblestoned streetsâall of these could help shape a story.
Solange was now two, an imperious toddler who at bathtime inspected her belly button with the gravitas of a field marshal sizing up his troops. She offered me toys with an emphatic thrust that on occasion nearly knocked me down.
Maurice was a young philosopher who told me on his seventh birthday, “Now I have entered my first old age.”
Together, they ran and shouted and played all day; at night, when I tucked them into bed, I was grateful for the fact that they had both a mother and a father here with them.
Sometimes, when there was peace between Casimir and meâif, say, we sat together in the parlor while the wind lashed the trees and rain drummed hard on the roof and thunder boomed and lightning lit up the sky so brightly one needed to close one's eyes against it, or if one of our children did something that made us smile at each otherâat such times, I would chastise myself for ever wanting anything more, or for having made declarations and demands one moment that I only regretted making the next. From the time I'd been a child, I had wanted to probe and comprehend the mysteries of life. I had wanted an elemental loneliness to be taken away by an abiding and comprehensive love; I had wanted, too, to know an ecstasy that would last forever.