The Dream Lover (7 page)

I had just finished reading a letter I had picked up at my half brother's apartment, one he had written to me. In it, he told me that the most admirable thing I had done in my life was to have given birth to Maurice, and that my son loved me with all his heart. Hippolyte warned me that staying away from Maurice for such long intervals would test that love, and it was likely that it would soon go away entirely.

When I had left Nohant, two-year-old Solange had been reassured by the fact that her father was there, and by my telling her that I would see her soon. Maurice, at seven, was more anxious, and I had finally made him smile by promising him that I would send him a uniform just like the policemen in Paris wore. Then, when I watched him walk away from me that morning, my heart ached so hard I nearly canceled my plans.

But I had come to see that a life not lived in truth is a life forfeited. I believed that what I intended to do for myself in Paris was ultimately better for all of us than my staying home and trying to pretend that I was content sewing and cooking and overseeing dinner parties, all the while turning a blind eye to my husband's cruelty and betrayals.

Had I had known what passion would be born in me around
living the life of an artist, had I known what absorption and dedication it would require, I might never have married and had children. But I had married. I had borne children. One could not retract the birth of a child or the love for them that came with it. Now I needed to think of the best way to manage all of our needs.

If letters from the children's tutor and even from Casimir could be believed, Maurice and Solange were not suffering at all but thriving. Hadn't my own life served as evidence that the love one had for one's mother could survive her absence?

In contrast to my mother, I wrote to my children every day. But letters did not pull a blanket up higher before a good-night kiss, or listen to progress in reading, or ferret out hiding places in a game of hide-and-seek, or soothe the fears brought on by a nightmare.

Hippolyte's letter, in which he had, as usual, felt so free to criticize me, burned in my hand.

Did he ever tell Casimir that his frequent absences from our children—his vaguely described “business trips”—would threaten their love of him? I knew the answer to that: of course not. It was men's privilege and pleasure to travel away from home whenever they wanted to, so long as they could afford it (and sometimes when they could not). It seemed a woman never had a good enough reason to leave her post. It was another part of the great hypocrisy that existed between men and women that was held as a natural law. But it was not a natural law; it was man-made.

I would stay with the plan Casimir and I had formulated. In April, I would be back with the children. Until then, I would hold them in my heart and write to them daily but remain here, where I had real business to attend to.

I resolved to approach another man of letters. Hyacinthe Thabaud de Latouche, called Henri, had been a friend of my father's. He had just taken over as publisher of a satiric journal called
Le Figaro
. He was forty-five years old, quite overweight, and arrogant, I was told; and he had a reputation for being very difficult. But he was a great admirer of Rossini, and the first Frenchman to embrace
the genius of Beethoven and Berlioz. In addition, he had introduced Goethe to French readers, which in itself was enough for me to overlook the criticisms I had heard.

I sent him my manuscript, asking him to read it and let me know if there was any way he could help me.

The next morning, I got a note from him, inviting me to meet with him in his office in Montmartre that very afternoon.

September 1808

NOHANT

M
y parents and I had been back at Nohant for several weeks, and the three of us had regained our health. But my baby brother, Louis, continued to decline. For weeks, my mother had tried valiantly to nurse her son back to health. She ate so well she embarrassed herself, but my grandmother seemed to understand the reason for Sophie's apparent greed and often put more on my mother's plate without her asking. My mother ate between meals, as well: thick slabs of bread spread with pale yellow butter and red jam, raw vegetables she pilfered from the kitchen when the cook's back was turned, fruit she pulled from the branches of trees, pastries she kept wrapped in hankies in her pockets. She ate and ate and ate, and all of it was an apology to her son for the neglect he had suffered on our wartime travels—my mother feared her inadequate diet then had affected her milk—and all of it, too, was a prayer for him not to leave her.

She took walks and she spent long stretches of time working on a children's garden she was cultivating beneath a pear tree. Nearby, Louis lay in a basket silently staring up, his tiny hands motionless. I used to kneel beside him and stare at him, trying to will him back to good health.

At night, my mother held Louis close and rocked him and rubbed his back and sang to him, but as he continued to lose weight and decline, she stopped doing that. It was as though just being held required more energy than he had to give, as though he were too fragile to bear any touch at all. Once I came upon her tenderly bathing him as he lay in her lap, and the sight of his prominent rib cage made for a stab of pity in my heart. I saw what my mother had not yet accepted: Louis was not going to recover. He was going to die.

Finally, on September 8, came the awful moment when Louis started growing cold and mottled before my mother's eyes. It was just after dinner; she had been on her way upstairs to nurse him to sleep. Instead, she rushed back to the dining room and sat by the fireplace, imploring my father to build a fire as quickly as he could. This he did, and then he kept stoking the flames as the baby grew colder and colder to the touch. My mother moved as close to the fire as she safely could and wrapped Louis in more and more blankets. She was wild-eyed with panic; she kept calling his name, kissing the top of his head, massaging him through the blankets, rocking him faster and faster. My father knelt beside his wife and son, trying to comfort both of them, wiping at his tears. My grandmother and I stood silently a fair distance away, and I remember that she wrapped part of her long skirt around me in a way of which she seemed unaware.

After a short while, Louis stopped breathing. My mother cried out, one sharp cry, and then began to keen. My grandmother ran for Deschartres, to see if there was anything to be done.

There was nothing he could suggest. Not yet three months old, the baby was dead. Deschartres lifted him from my mother's arms, gave him the briefest of examinations, and nodded at her. “My condolences,” he said.

“No!”
my mother screamed, lunging for Deschartres in a violent way, as though he were the cause of Louis's death.

My father reached for her, and she turned to sob in his arms. I crept closer but did not attempt to touch either of my parents.

“I have killed him,” my mother sobbed. “I have killed our son!”

“No, Sophie. Shhhhh,” my father said. I saw him squeeze his own eyes shut, and I saw the resolve pass over his face. He would comfort my mother now; later, he would tend to his own wounds.

My mother wept, the sounds so loud and heartrending it seemed to me that the house would collapse around us. Finally, my grandmother convinced us all to sit again at the table, where the remains of dinner still were; the servants had not dared to enter the room.
My mother had stopped crying by then, but every breath she took was a shudder. She sat blankly staring, her hands open in her lap as though something had just flown out of them. Finally she looked at my grandmother and asked dully, “Where is he?”

“He is dead, my dear,” my grandmother said, her usually clear voice thick with pain.

“But where is he?”

“Deschartres has buried him,” she said. “And now we must endeavor to move forward.”

My mother rose so abruptly she knocked over several glasses. “Buried him! So soon? But I have not prepared him!” She meant washing him, perfuming him, then binding him, as was the custom.

“It is best this way,” my grandmother said.

My mother looked quickly over at my father, who only stared into his plate. Then she ran upstairs to their bedroom and slammed the door. My father followed her.

“Come to me,” my grandmother said, patting her lap, and I went to sit with her. “Shall I sing you a little song? Are you still hungry?”

I said nothing. A song, a bite of food, the moon and the stars—what difference did it make what she offered me? But she sang. And eventually, I closed my eyes and leaned back against her. From upstairs came the voices of my parents: my mother screaming, raging, weeping; my father calmly responding.

When I was put to bed, I had no thought to give my parents privacy. I went to them as usual; as usual, they let me in.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sounds of my parents arguing in loud whispers. My mother was pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly. My father sat at the side of the bed, his head hanging low. “But we didn't see him before Deschartres took him away!” she said. “How can we be sure? Ah, Maurice, he was persecuted from the moment he was born. I swear to you I saw that Spanish doctor press hard against Louis's eyes with his thumbs, I heard him say, ‘Here's one who will never see the Spanish sun.' I heard it, I tell you! And now he has been taken from his mother's
arms and put in the cold ground, and we are not even sure he is dead!”

“I am sure!” my father said. “It wounds me as it does you to think that we have lost our son, but he is dead! There is no doubt! You saw it yourself, Sophie, you saw him grow cold, you saw him stop breathing. He is dead! Do not make me say it again and again; each time I do, he dies once more.”

She wept, with the smallest of sounds now, and my father went to her and knelt on the floor before her. I kept my eyes mostly closed so that they would not see that I was awake.

“Sophie,” my father said, weeping himself, pushing his face into her legs.

My mother abruptly stopped crying. “I want to see him. You must bring him to me. I must be certain he is dead. He might merely have lapsed into a coma. As you well know, people have been buried alive! What if he is out there in the blackness and the cold, all alone and still alive?”

My father started to speak, but she said, “And in any case, I am his mother, and if it is true he is dead, then I shall prepare him for his grave as he deserves. He had no baptism, no graveside service, no chance for the life he deserved—at least let him have a last kiss. Maurice, you must indulge me in this or I will lose my senses! Please, please, I beg of you, bring him to me for one last time!”

Finally, my father agreed to exhume their son. “Keep watch to make sure I am not discovered,” he whispered to my mother. Then he dressed and went outside.

After what seemed like a very long time, he returned. He had the little coffin in his arms, and it pained me to see smears of dirt on it.

“Is she asleep?” my father asked, about me.

“Yes, thank God,” my mother said, and she went to join my father, who had put the coffin on the floor and was prying open the lid. She knelt beside him, her hands squeezed together in her lap.

“Something very strange happened out there,” my father said.

“Really? What?” They might have been at breakfast, having a gossipy conversation over their coffees.

“I first uncovered the coffin of some poor villager. I accidentally stepped on the corner of it, causing it to rise up and hit me in the head, whereupon
I
fell into the grave! I tell you, my blood ran cold; it was as though an icy finger tapped my shoulder. You never saw a man leap so quickly to his feet. And then I felt my forehead break out in a sweat, as though this was an omen of some kind!”

“No, Maurice. It was not an omen. No.”

They fell silent, and then I heard a little creaking sound as the coffin lid was raised, and my mother gasped. I saw her lift my brother's body out, then hold him close to her breast. She began to rock side to side. My father leaned over to kiss the baby's head.

“I shall prepare him,” my mother said, quietly weeping. “But just for tonight, may we have him back in his little cradle? May we look upon him as though he is only sleeping?”

My father said nothing. Yes, then.

The next day, after I had left their room, my mother prepared Louis's body in the accustomed way. She washed him, perfumed him, wrapped him in linen, and then sprinkled rose petals in his coffin. Just before he was to be put back in the grave, my mother asked if my father would instead bury Louis by the pear tree in the children's garden. It would be a secret, shared only by them.

Louis was buried by that pear tree, and I was told about it only many years later, by my mother, prompted by something I can no longer recall. What I can recall, though, is the pain in my mother's eyes when she told me. I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.

February 1831

OFFICE OF
LE FIGARO

MONTMARTRE

“
P
lease, sit down,” Henri Latouche said, gesturing at a chair set close to his own.

I had come to his office with high hopes about my novel,
Aimée
. Almost immediately, I saw why I had heard another rumor about him, that he had a way with women. This was in spite of—or perhaps because of—a childhood injury to an eye that created a sort of red gleam. His face glowed with intelligence, and he had beautiful manners; and if his voice had a kind of muted quality that made one sometimes strain to hear him, the words he spoke were eloquent. He evinced a dry wit and a gift for self-mockery, but I suspected that his was a tender and generous heart.