The Dream Lover (36 page)

But perhaps I needed to think about what I had. And perhaps I needed to understand that one could not look for a constant when life—and people—were ever changing.

January 1831

NOHANT

O
ne morning when I was on my way to Paris to visit my mother, I went into Casimir's study to tell him goodbye. He was not there,
but on his desk was an envelope with my name on it, with instructions not to open it until his death. It was his will, I was sure, and for a moment my heart was full of tenderness for him. I was moved as one always is when considering the death of someone near. Casimir had told me he was writing a new will, so as to include certain provisions for the children.

I opened the envelope, feeling that, since it was addressed to me, it was my privilege. But when I saw what he had written, the blood left my head. It was not a will at all. Rather, it was a letter to be given to me after his death, and it was full of vitriol. He had detailed transgressions fueled by my “perversity.” He had expressed his disgust and total disregard for my person.

I had brought myself to a kind of peace in our marriage. But now I had to admit the truth: we were a couple ill-bound by strained tolerance on one side and hatred on the other. Casimir did not occasionally find me disappointing or irritating or vexing and then return to an abiding affection for me. I saw now that he had stayed with me for my fortune, nothing more.

He lacked the courage to speak the truth to me in life, but he had no compunction about saying it after his death, when his letter, so full of rage and maledictions, would hurt me more—and when he would not have to defend himself against any response of mine. He was cruel, and he was a coward.

It was enough. I thought,
I will leave him
. Whatever sorrow or defeat may have been in that decision, it was overshadowed by relief.

I considered my options. If I told Casimir I wanted the children half of the time, he would fight me. So as a ruse, I would tell him I was going to live full-time in Paris, without the children. This would frighten him into some sort of compromise I would not be able to effect otherwise.

My old habit of optimism took over: I moved quickly to the door and out, the letter in my hand. In the hallway, I came upon Casimir, his cheeks red from the cold, his spirit jaunty. When he
saw what I was holding, he stopped in his tracks. “Aurore,” he began, his tone split between reprimand and apology.

I handed him the letter and said calmly, “I'm leaving you and the children to go and live alone in Paris.”

So it was that the day came when I heard the sound of the carriage wheels crunching on the gravel, and I walked out of the house at Nohant to start a new life, to start living.

September 1834

NOHANT

H
aving left my life in Paris to come to Nohant, I lay by the river, very near the place where Marie and I had bathed the summer when she'd visited. The children were playing in the woods. I had kissed them many times before I'd separated from them that morning, until they'd finally pulled away from me in exasperation. Maurice was eleven, and outgrowing his tolerance for what he saw as excessive maternal affection, and six-year-old Solange was ever in the habit of pulling away from me.

I had kissed my children so earnestly because I was saying goodbye. A melancholy more extreme than any I had ever felt had come upon me. I could find no relief even in writing. The fantasies that had flowed effortlessly from me from the time I sat in my improvised playpen were coming to me no longer. I sat at night before the white pages I used to fill with stories, and nothing came. Nothing.

I was thirty years old and felt old as time. I had failed in every love relationship I had attempted: with my mother, with God, with marriage, with Aurélien, with lovers, with my children. And with Marie, whose light still shone brightest for me, who still seemed the one with whom I might have been enduringly happy. These days, I enjoyed her company in friendship and no longer aspired to anything beyond it; I would have embarrassed myself in attempting it, and I had no doubt that any attempt at rekindling romantic love would have turned her away from me entirely. She had finished with that the day she'd left Nohant, and I knew perhaps better than anyone that it was always easy for Marie to leave behind what no longer engaged or amused her.

Marie was gone. Musset was gone. One is not living when one does not use the parts of oneself that are most vital, most especially the need to love and be loved. In that respect, I was already dead.

I stood and watched the river run past, imagining lying on the silty bottom and letting my lungs fill with water. I imagined the peace of nothingness, a lifting of the weight I found lying across my chest when I awakened every day. I took a step closer to the water's edge.

And then something happened that was as startling as what I experienced in the convent chapel. I heard above me a great and sudden rising up of sound, a euphoric trilling of what must have been one hundred birds in the tree beneath which I had lain. I watched them fly away as though on cue, and the despair I had been feeling seemed to fly off with them. At first I stood immobile, afraid to believe that this had happened. But then I became full of an invigorating resolve and walked quickly back to the house.

At the beginning of October, I would return to Paris and put Maurice back in school. I would enroll Solange at a boarding school I knew of where the classes were small, and where I hoped she would profit from the discipline and the structure. I saw that I had been making that most common mistake of a parent who feels unappreciated: that of being lax and indulgent in an effort to be loved, when it is the opposite behavior that encourages a child's adulation.

That morning, I had received a letter Musset had sent me a few days ago from Baden, where he was trying to cure himself from the effects of his hard living. Over and over again, I had read his grieving lines:

Tell me that you give to me your lips, your teeth, your hair yes, all of them, and that head which I have held between my hands. Say, oh say, that you embrace me—you—me. Oh God! When I think of these things a lump comes into my throat, my eyes grow dim, my knees tremble. It is horrible to love as I love! How thirsty, George, how thirsty I am for you!

I had felt it best not to encourage him and, nearly numb, had written that we must never meet again. Now I would tell him otherwise.

October 1834

PARIS

A
lfred and I met again and very soon afterward resumed our physical relationship. But then he began drinking in excess, and he told me it was because he had learned—from Pagello telling everyone—that the good doctor and I had been intimate before Musset left Italy, not only afterward; I had lied to Alfred. And so I admitted it, thinking that this would be the end of it. Instead, it started a new cycle of abuse.

Without warning, Alfred would go into a sulk and at those times pepper me with questions about the lovemaking between Pagello and me. At first, I tried to remain calm, but then I grew angry. What right, I asked, had he to chastise me about being with another after he had rejected me?

We had been back together for only a few days when I hurled this question to him, and he erupted into one of his famous rages and stood nose to nose with me to scream, “You will never understand me or, indeed, any man! My God, George, your naïveté astounds me! How I regret my time with you—all of it! Again we are come to this: I no longer love you. Who could love such an unfaithful and selfish being whose only thought is for herself and her desires? At least the other whores I see admit to their true natures and professions! I am finished with you. Do not attempt to contact me.”

He slammed out of the apartment. For weeks, I stayed in Paris, hoping we would resolve things. After all, he had done this before: denounced me and then rushed back to me to proclaim his love. I thought Musset did love me, and it was the devils in his nature (and of his acquaintance) who sometimes talked him into pushing me away. I sent him notes of love, then of anguish, to which he made no reply.

For diversion and to lift my spirits, I agreed to sit for the artist
Eugène Delacroix, who had been commissioned to paint my portrait for the
Revue
. I felt an instant bond with that great and handsome man. He seemed leonine to me, with his overhang of brow, his great head of tousled black hair, and the narrow strip of beard he wore directly down the line of the deep dimple in his chin. There was wisdom and compassion in his dark eyes, as well as a kind of knowingness that made one feel seen to one's core. It was a disquieting ability he had. Marie once said of him, “Most men look at me clothed and imagine my body naked; he looks past my body straight to my naked soul.”

Although Delacroix was inordinately perceptive, he had the strength of character not to use what he saw in any sort of manipulative way. I trusted him from the moment I laid eyes upon him, and when I sat for him that first time I began to pour my heart out to him about Alfred. But I had hardly begun my story when he exclaimed, “Ah, yes, Alfred Musset, the poet. An extraordinarily gifted young man, not only in literature but in art. He could make his living as an artist, I have no doubt. Did he ever mention wanting to do so to you? For if he would like, I could take him under my wing.”

“No, he only amuses himself with drawing. He does not want to commit himself to it. His first love…” My throat tightened, and Delacroix looked up from his easel.

“His first love is poetry.” And then, to save myself, I changed the subject: “I should like to invite you to come sometime to my country home at Nohant. I believe you would enjoy painting there in any season.”

“Perhaps this winter, I shall.”

“Do; I shall set up studio space for you.”

I made sure we avoided the subject of Alfred for the rest of our visits, and at the last sitting I secured Delacroix's address so that I could write to him when I was back at Nohant.

A few nights later, I visited Marie in her dressing room. We spoke about Alfred and me. As jilted lovers do, I looked for my
mistakes, wondered aloud about how things might have gone in a different direction
if only
, examined aspects of the relationship from every side.

How many broken women, I wonder, begin sentences with, “But he said…”

When I said that to Marie, she burst out loudly, “ ‘But he
said
,' ‘But he
said
,' ‘But he
said
!' When did he say it? In your arms! Or seeking to be in your arms!

“Ah, George. In this state of arousal men are as wild-eyed as a dog with a steak over his head, and as the dog will do any trick he knows to get his meat, so will a man. He will tell you anything. And when he has spilled himself inside you, you will swear it was his brains that were left there, for he will have little or no memory of the amorous words that sprang forth from him. Or if he does remember, it will be because he has memorized them to use on such occasions.” She laughed. “I tell you, their acting ability at such times makes me look like an amateur! If only I could watch them and take notes. See how he lowers his lids to murmur these words of love! See how he runs his fingers through her hair! And this
growl
, emanating from deep within; how he has perfected the tone so as not to be frightening but exciting!
Regard le tigre!
And now cue the trumpets, here comes the charge of the penis, the wild clenching and unclenching of the buttocks! What exhilaration in the rhythm of the ride, what calculated intensity, how this maestro conducts his little orchestra of body parts!”

I said nothing. She knew what I was thinking; she knew the way a woman in love wants to believe that her man is not anything like the others.

She spoke quietly then: “George. When it comes to the treatment of women, one man is like any other. You don't want to believe it. I don't want to believe it. But it's true. Your poets answer to the call of their groins even as do the peasants in the fields. Women long for words to sear their souls; men offer them the best they can do in that regard and then immediately forget what they have said.
They have their way and then go out to piss against a wall and think about what they might have to eat.”

I sat still, thinking that Alfred did not forget his words of love; he was in thrall to his own utterings at least as much as I was. Then Marie said, “What you must do is ignore him. For another well-known fact is that men want what they cannot have. We have talked about this before, George. My advice to you is that you do not endeavor to see him. Do not write him. Ignore him! Then see how fast he comes scratching at your door.” She yawned and apologized for doing so.

“It is I who should apologize,” I said. “I forget that people do not stay up all night as I do.” I hoped she would beg me to stay; but she did not. Instead, she sleepily escorted me to the door.

I walked out into the empty streets, where the fog lay in a thin blanket over the Seine. I walked with my head down, my hands in my pockets.

Marie had tried to help me, but the only friend's words I had heard and resonated to lately were those of Sainte-Beuve. I had passed him recently on the street on a rainy day, and we had sought warmth and shelter in a café. Over steaming cups of café au lait, we began talking about the break between Alfred and me. “Poor George,” he said. “I must tell you: in some ways, I feel responsible. I should never have arranged for the two of you to meet.”

I shook my head. “Even in pain, I feel grateful that Alfred and I shared our love, though it was so full of strife it makes me wonder if it really was love. I confess that oftentimes I don't think I understand love. How would you define it?”