I let myself in quietly and found Jules in bed with his laundress, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a mole situated just so at the corner of her mouth. When I’d first met her, I had remarked on how pretty she was. “Her?” Jules had asked.
Now I stood frozen in place, the key in my hand.
The girl pulled the covers up over herself and stared.
Jules leapt to his feet. “Aurore! This means nothing!”
“To whom?” I asked, and then, before walking out, I turned to him to say, “And my name is George.” My heart was breaking, but by the next day I had traded despair for resolve. I would find a place to live alone. I had the means, now, to make a decision about where I wanted to be without having to ask anyone’s permission. It was something I had aspired to, but how ironic that now that I had such freedom, it felt more sorrowful than anything else.
November 1832
QUAI MALAQUAIS
PARIS
Latouche had begun spending all of his time in a little country house he had purchased, and so I asked him if I might take over the rental of his apartment. He agreed gladly. We had become very good friends; in fact, there were rumors that we were lovers. One is helpless in the face of such idle gossip. If one denies the charge, one fans the flames; if one ignores it, one is complicit in suggesting it is so. Well, now that I was to be a woman on my own, I supposed the rumors would fly more furiously than ever before.
In my new place, there were fewer stairs to climb, which meant that it was not light and airy. Nor did it have the views I had enjoyed in the apartment I had shared with Jules. But it was peaceful there. Below were the gardens of the École des Beaux-Arts; across the river was the Louvre.
After a time, I saw Jules again; I never was one to hold grudges. But he was only a friend. My true love became my pen, my beautiful apartment, and the pages I stacked up on my desk each night. If I could not fill my days with the kind of affection I still longed for, I would fill them with another, more reliable kind of love, one that engaged my heart, my mind, and my spirit completely, and one that did not betray me.
October 1817
NOHANT
I was thirteen years old when there began to be episodes of violence that escalated among the household staff at Nohant. My grandmother, who had suffered damage from the last stroke she had had and who, in any case, had never excelled in management, deferred more and more to Deschartres, essentially assigning him care of the entire estate. She turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the arguments and flung plates in the kitchen, even to the abuse that an aging Deschartres suffered at the hands of the cook, who would try to beat him with a broom while poor Deschartres held his arms crisscrossed before him in outraged defense. As for me, I was ignored by the servants, with whom I’d formerly been friendly, for soon after my mother’s departure, my grandmother forbade me to talk with them or to spend time lingering in the kitchen. And I was actively despised by Julie, my grandmother’s maid.
When my mother was at Nohant, I could see that Julie’s hostilities toward both of us burned in her breast; now, whenever I was not with my grandmother, she released the venom she felt—she thought I was fair game. Sometimes she told me that things at the estate had been spoiled since the moment my mother and I arrived; other times she allowed that it had been all right until my father’s death. My mother and I were never meant to be there long-term, I understood. Now my mother had been gotten rid of, but I lingered, like a burr stuck in the hem of her petticoat. I began to take solace in the out-of-doors; I was inside only when I had to be. With this I established a pattern that stayed with me all my life: whenever unhappy circumstances unraveled me, nature knit me back up.
In 1816, Hippolyte had joined the army, and so I was the only child living with Grandmama, Deschartres, and the servants. Julie’s animosity toward me I have described; but then my own maid, Rose, began displaying moments of great cruelty toward me as well. I was no longer the little girl she had coddled; now I was older and more complicated. I was not often overtly willful, but there was a reason I was called stubborn: if my obstinacy did not show in complete noncompliance, it certainly did in the disdainful expression on my face and in the halfhearted way I did certain things I knew full well how to do better. Rose would beat me for this as well as for the most minor infringements: forgetting my hankie, dirtying my dresses, smacking my lips at the dinner table. But she never hit me in front of my grandmother or my mother, when she was visiting.
If I had reported Rose, she would have been punished, yet I did not tell either my mother or my grandmother how her behavior toward me had changed. It was by then a deeply ingrained habit to tolerate such behavior, and even to be comforted by its familiarity.
One cold day, when a slate-gray sky hung oppressively low, I went out for a walk in the nearby village. In the street, I saw a small family walking along, handsome parents and their two young daughters talking and laughing. They were carrying parcels and hurrying toward home, I imagined, where they would soon be warm and together for the evening. They would enjoy supper and the companionship of one another, and at night they would go to bed full of a kind of assurance that tomorrow they would all be together again. As I stood watching them go, heavy drops of rain began to fall.
I hoped it would not turn into a storm, for then I would be trapped inside with old people who had no tolerance for the restlessness of the young. I occasionally lost myself in reading, but there was otherwise little joy for me in that house. The studies I’d initially found so stimulating now bored me; the only pleasure I took in the writing assignments I was given was when I padded the narrative with my own fiction. Music had been ruined for me when my grandmother’s arthritic fingers prevented her from teaching and she turned those duties over to the greasy-lipped organist from the church at La Châtre. He had technical ability but no feeling for the music; we could not communicate, and I began playing without passion or nuance as he did, just to get the lesson over with.
I walked in the rain toward the woods, remembering the gaiety and romance of my parents together, their and my happiness. Everything had been spoiled, first by my baby brother’s death and then my father’s; and now I felt effectively orphaned. I gave myself over to what I saw as my own personal tragedy, to the sort of melancholy adolescents are so good at submerging themselves in.
At only thirteen years of age, I had lost so much! And to whom could I turn for comfort? My mother, so many miles away in Paris? My father, deep in the ground? My grandmother, who understood very little about me at all and, in any case, was fading away? God, when I had so little of the faith that seemed to sustain others?
When my mother and I had first lived in Paris, I had gone to Mass with her. She believed in a child’s way: she embraced her religion without questions. But my grandmother, who, in my mother’s absence, was becoming more and more influential to me, taught me that Jesus was an admirable historical figure, nothing more. The villagers, who also influenced me, were more pagans than Christians; they brought out modern religion only on certain occasions, as if it were party clothes or their best dishes. Day to day, they were governed by superstition and belief in things like werewolves, witches, and humans possessed by demons. This was their religion, something from the Middle Ages, where mythology was vividly personified. I had heard that they had visions and hallucinations, too, and a strong belief in previous lives. So when I had first met Hippolyte and he’d told me he had been a dog in a previous life, he had been serious.
It was greatly confusing, trying to adopt a theology. But finally my own version of God came to me in a dream, complete with a name: Corambe. He was a warm and compassionate being with a tender and unwavering regard for me. He had the humanity of Jesus and the radiant beauty of the angel Gabriel. He was graceful and poetic and ever attentive to my feelings. And though he was a male, he nonetheless dressed oftentimes in women’s clothes.
In the woods near my grandmother’s house, I created an altar to Corambe. I built it in a clearing
gotten to by going deep through young trees that had at their bases hawthorn and privet, and whose denseness prohibited much traffic. There was moss covering the ground in the clearing that both looked and felt like lush carpeting. Long shafts of light fell through breaks in the foliage to dapple the earth.
At the base of three joined maples, I made an altar, using pebbles, rocks, and leaves. I made wreaths from ivy and other natural materials and placed them here and there. I hung small pink-and-white shells from the boughs of the trees; in a breeze, they made a sound that reminded me of the castanets I had heard dancers use in Spain.
I would often go and kneel before Corambe’s altar in the dim light, with my hands in the prayer position and my eyes closed. Though no words came to me, a rich feeling of peace did.
Sometimes, the best times, I would feel removed from the aching, lonely side of myself and instead part of a greater whole. I was equal to, related to everything around me: the ground I lay on, the animals rustling in the woods, the leaves stirring in the breeze, the sky high above me.
But on this cold and bleak day, I found no comfort in the idea of going to the altar. I had no idea where to go, what to do. I heard owls asking the same question I was: Who? Who? Who?
When I arrived home, I sat outside the front door. I was cold and wanted to go in; but I was loath to give up the freedom I felt outdoors. I put my forehead to my knees and began to weep, releasing long, wailing sobs, and I spoke to the dirt below me, saying the words I longed to say to my grandmother: “You chide me for failing in my studies. I want to fail! You have no idea how I feel or what I have planned, which does not in any way have to do with the ridiculous, old-fashioned things you try to force upon me. Soon enough I shall show you why I have no need of you or of what you teach. I shall be rid of all of you forever!”
I spoke with a passion and fury that contained in it a great deal of truth but mostly reflected my loneliness, confusion, and despair. I was like anyone who seeks a place to put his pain; I blamed my grandmother for all that ailed me. I also spoke as one who believed no one could hear, but in fact Julie was standing just inside the door, in the hallway, and she heard every word.
She jerked open the door and spit out, “You ingrate! How dare you speak this way about the woman who has done so much for you! You would deserve her sending you back to your mother!”
“I want to go back to my mother!” I said. “It is all I dream of, to escape this place and live where I belong!”
Julie’s eyes narrowed. She stepped forward and leaned down to hiss into my ear, “Quiet yourself! You are having a tantrum, and the truth is, you don’t know what you want. I only hope for your sake that your grandmama has not heard your diatribe, for she might just take you at your word and send you away!”
“She need not have heard me, Julie. You know full well you will tell her what I said.”
At this, Julie’s mouth dropped, and I stood to face her, my hands clenched at my sides, and let go with all the rage that still burned in me. “Do you think I don’t see through you? Do you think I don’t know that you are kind to me only to try to ferret out information that you can then use against me? Go and tell my grandmother everything; tell her now! I hope it will make her decide to let me go to my mother at once!”
Julie spun on her heel, and I knew she was going straight to my grandmother. I was filled with a great sense of righteousness and hastened to my bedroom, where I slammed the door and then sat on my bed, reviewing all the reasons why I had been justified in lashing out at what I saw as my keepers. Despite my own clearly expressed wishes, I had been left in the care of an old woman whose methods and predilections were foreign and irksome to me: the way I was made to wear gloves and to curtsy before my grandmother’s dour countess friends, the way I had to practically whisper when I was inside. I was made to address my grandmother not even in the formal vous but in the third person, as in, “Will Grandmama permit me to go outside now?” My mother may have punished me freely, but she always made up for it afterward; and there was honesty in her behavior. I could be intimate with her, not only calling her tu, but easily and quite naturally giving my innermost self to her: my stories, my thoughts, my fears, my dreams. She asked me to; and in return, she showed me herself.
It seemed to me that by virtue of her nature, my grandmother had inhibited me from being my true self day after day, year after year. I often thought of the animals that roamed free, wishing I could be one of them rather than a human being subjected to such a dull and regimented environment. No one shushed the birds singing in the trees; no one cautioned the dogs not to run too far from home or the horses not to sleep outside in the sun. The pigs could roll in mud; I could not even remove my shoes and stockings for the feel of green grass beneath my feet.
Whenever we traveled to Paris in the big berlin, the many pockets of the coach would be stuffed with all my grandmother needed, and she needed everything: her perfumes and powders and pillboxes and her maid sitting erectly beside her. She needed coverlets against a draft, parasols against any ray of sun. As I saw it, she did not enjoy life so much as protect herself from it.
When we walked in the garden, I was forced to move slowly, along with her, rather than run down the paths, as I longed to do. Because of her, I had to take my lessons with Deschartres in his overly neat room, which reeked of lavender soap; being there gave me a headache. I felt I needed a younger person to keep up with and inspire me, not an old woman to constrain me and fill me with despair. I needed my mother, whose blood ran hot like my own, whose heart knew my own heart’s desires.
Now, with all that I had shouted out, I had made my feelings clear. I was aware that in my pain, I had made no effort to acknowledge the good side of my grandmother: her offerings of praise and sweets when I did well with my lessons; her attempts at affection, stiff-backed though they were; her good-hearted intentions to refine me. No, I had only poured out my frustrations.
Because of my outburst, I would soon be released to live in poverty with my mother, my opportunities for education taken from me. So be it. It was the truer, more honest life! But even as I justified what I had said, I was beginning to feel regret for the pain I would cause the old woman. She had not asked to raise me any more than I had asked that she do it; but here we were, stuck with each other, and she was only trying to make the best of it.
Still! Shouldn’t she understand that a daughter would want her mother, first and foremost? And shouldn’t she have accepted Caroline as one of her beloved son’s children and let us all live happily together here? No! She had insisted upon her own way.
I sat for some time, waiting for Julie to call me to my grandmother’s side. I intended to express my appreciation in my leave-taking; and my love as well, for the longer I sat there, the more I realized that I did love the old woman.
When Julie finally came to my room, however, it was to say that I was barred from seeing my grandmother. In a prim and self-righteous way that made me want to strike her, she said, “Knowing now that you are so full of hatred for her, your grandmother has decided that you will not have to see her again. She is letting you go, as you desire. In three days, you will leave for Paris.”
“I do not hate my grandmother, as you well know,” I said. “I am sorry not to be given the opportunity to say goodbye. But I am glad to be returning to my mother. And so I thank you.”
Over the next few days, I was indeed kept from my grandmother. I was given my meals after she had taken hers, and dishes were placed and removed by servants whose steely countenances and absolute silence let me know what they were feeling about me. I was allowed out in the garden only after Grandmama had retired. She was in a weakened condition at that point and had been spending much of her time away from me anyway, but now I noticed her absence more.
I was full of a mix of shame and defiance and confusion. I spoke with Corambe about my feelings and was assured by my personal god that I was indeed in the right and was following a noble course. I looked upon this time of
estrangement as my martyrdom, which I suffered sweetly: I all but saw myself with a blood-red banner flying above my head, torn and battered but proudly displayed. But after two days passed and I noticed no preparations being made to send me to Paris, I wondered if my grandmother had changed her mind.
On the third day my maid, Rose, told me to go to my grandmother, who she said was suffering. She assured me that Julie would let me into the old woman’s chambers; she had already asked Julie to do so. By then, I had had enough time to realize that I had been strikingly unfair in not assigning any blame at all to my mother for her complicity (if not initiation!) in leaving me behind. I had made her into a hapless victim when she was anything but. Nor had I considered the fact that I, too, had played a role in my own unhappiness.
And Julie was right: I was lucky indeed to be living amid the beauty and privilege and peace of Nohant, taking with both hands the gifts I was offered daily.
I was thoroughly ashamed and remorseful and eager to apologize most profusely. I came into a darkened room, where my grandmother lay in bed under her lacy scented sheets and down-filled coverlets, her eyes closed. “Grandmama?” I said, my voice high and tentative, and then I rushed to her side. I fell to my knees and began crying and kissing her, saying, “Forgive me, I never meant—”
She held up a trembling hand, and I stopped talking. I sat back on my heels and waited. There followed an ominous quiet.
Then she turned to look at me, and the warm light that was always in her eyes was gone. Instead, there was a flatness there, worse than anger. “You have come hoping to fall upon my mercy and by so doing return things to the way they used to be. This is impossible. The things you said have pierced my heart, and there is no snapping one’s fingers and undoing the damage. For three days, I have considered your assertions and accusations and the feelings behind them. I have slept little and agonized much over what to do. And now I find that I have some things I want to say to you, Aurore. Some of the things I wanted never to reveal to you but now realize I must; other things I have been meaning to say for some time. I would ask that you listen and not interrupt. May I rely upon you to do me that one favor?”