They went round and round, each wounded, each hoping the other would come to understand their version of the irrefutable truth. The dinner table, once gay with stories and laughter, was now all but silent, the clinking of silverware and the murmur of the servants the only sounds.
It was Jean-François Deschartres who finally resolved the issue in a bold move, one that came with dire consequences.
Deschartres was my father’s tutor. He was a secularized cleric, having studied for the priesthood without being ordained, and he was under my grandmother’s employ. He was inordinately devoted to both my father and her.
He was an odd man, very thin and tall, pale of skin and eye. He kept his tonsured hairstyle, and he favored wearing knee breeches and stockings and yellow gaiters. In cold weather, he always wore the same ancient brown coat. He had a stutter that was more pronounced when he was nervous, and he was occasionally excitable in the way of an old woman. He had, too, an air of perpetual distractibility, as though he held the Almighty in one hand and you in the other and could never quite decide to whom he should give his complete attention.
But Deschartres was also highly intelligent, an expert in teaching a great variety of subjects. He had no understanding of love or passion, however. He looked upon such emotions as something that must be tolerated in his fellow human beings, a kind of tic of personality he felt fortunate not to be burdened by.
Hearing the arguments between my father and my grandmother must have distressed Deschartres greatly; he had never before seen them behave toward each other in this way. And so early one morning, while the rest of the household was asleep, he went to see Sophie. He intended to persuade her, for the good of all, to leave immediately.
He picked a bouquet of flowers before he left, and on the ride over, he practiced in his mind what he would say to her. When he got to the inn, he quickly climbed the stairs to her room and knocked at the door.
No response.
He knocked again, loudly now, and heard a low voice, sweet in tone, say, “Maurice?”
“It is I, François Deschartres, Maurice’s tutor.” He felt a sudden rush of blood to his head, an outbreak of perspiration. He wiped his upper lip and leaned forward to speak authoritatively into the crack of the door. “I have come with an important message for you.” He put his ear to the crack to listen for her response and heard Sophie walk quickly across the floor. There were sounds of rapid dressing, and then she flung open the door.
Upon seeing her, Deschartres was at first speechless: she had been sleeping, and there was a soft pink flush to the cheeks of her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were wide and dark and very beautiful, direct in their gaze. She was barefoot, and her black hair was not done up but loose around her face, cascading over her shoulders. Her bosom was ample, her waist narrow, and she had about her an air of sultry grace.
He asked if he might come in.
“Bien sûr,” she said, most pleasantly, and stepped aside to let him pass. She was very small in stature, and it must have given even dry-souled Deschartres pause to think about delivering such a stern directive to one so tiny.
He offered her the bouquet, and she took it without looking at it. “Has something happened?”
“Only this,” Deschartres said. “Your presence here has made for a great rift in the relationship between Maurice and his mother, whom, as you must know, he loves more than any person on earth. Every day they argue bitterly, and I can tell you most assuredly that this is not their way; they have always been unusually close. I have come to ask you to go back to Paris. Maurice says you love him; what better way can you prove it than to spare him the terrible pain you are now causing him? Give him distance, give him time, do not subject him any longer to such terrible strain, especially when he has so recently been freed from prison. Surely, without any need for elaboration, you can see that you are not meant for each other. He is in need of peace and care and quiet. Now, if you will kindly collect your things, I shall arrange—”
“Out of my sight, you fool!” Sophie cried, flinging the bouquet to the floor. “Go back to kissing the withered feet of your benefactress! Do not spoil Maurice’s and my happiness with such a ridiculous demand. Do you imagine that I do not know what Maurice needs now? You may rest assured it is not his mother!”
And then, small as she was, she forced Deschartres from the room, slamming and locking the door after him.
An outraged Deschartres knocked again and again, to no avail. Finally, he said, “Have it your way, then, ignorant girl! You leave me with no choice but to call upon the authorities. Then we shall see how long you stay here spinning your web! You are a common prostitute, rightfully worthless in the eyes of respectable people, and you do not belong here!”
“I’ll leave this pedestrian place all right,” Sophie shouted. “And I’ll take Maurice with me, you’ll see! You have no idea how much he loves me. Every day, he begs me to marry him! I’ll take him with me and we will never return!”
The flustered tutor did go to the police, then to the mayor, and to them he made a most dramatic case for evicting the dangerous interloper holed up at the inn who would not listen to reason and go away from a place where she was not wanted. She was causing trouble of the most terrible kind. She was torturing the soul of a decorated officer in the army of Napoleon, a newly released prisoner of war, and this officer’s mother, Madame Dupin, was a gentlewoman and a saint, as surely they knew. Madame was deeply distressed by this interloper’s presence and was spending her days in tears and anguish. Who knew how long her health could withstand such an assault? The wench must be made to leave immediately. Surely some reason for forcing her away could be found. She did not have papers, say; or if she did have papers, something was wrong with them. They must find a way, even if she needed to be imprisoned!
In his heart, I am certain that Deschartres thought he was doing the right thing. He believed Maurice would come to see the wisdom in exiling someone who was an irritant and a distraction and who was, besides, far beneath his station. Once Sophie was gone, Maurice would understand why she had had to leave. All of this would be no more difficult than the days when Deschartres had to force the loudly protesting young Maurice to bed, only to see the boy, once his head hit the pillow, fall asleep immediately.
But when the excited police arrived and demanded that my mother let them in, they found only what looked like a weeping angel, a lovely figure in a white dress, barefoot and seemingly defenseless. Those men were susceptible to my mother’s charms in a way that Deschartres could not be, and they ended up expressing not outrage but pity for her. Upon gentle questioning, my mother told the authorities the truth: she had met Maurice in Italy and they had fallen in love. She had left a wealthy general for him, a poor lieutenant; she had listened to her heart and chosen love over riches and comfort. Was this a crime?
Deschartres, who was waiting outside, agreed to leave only when he was told that the police would persuade my mother to go back to Paris that very day.
Deschartres had just left when my father came galloping up, having learned that his tutor had gone to castigate his true love. Everyone knows this simple truth of the heart: Nothing will bring lovers closer together than people trying to keep them apart. And so my father rushed to Sophie’s defense. He leapt off his steed, raced up the steps to her room, and embraced her. He tenderly dried her tears, kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, and the palms of her hands. He begged her to forgive the behavior of his family, whom he now disavowed. He told her to take the coach back to Paris, promising that he would soon follow her there.
Back at Nohant, a breathless and red-faced Deschartres, nearly choking on his self-righteousness, had been telling my grandmother that she was more than justified in having serious doubts about my father’s lover. “She is the lowest kind of commoner,” he said, pacing back and forth in the dining room. “She is uncouth and selfish, totally without proper upbringing, and you are correct in thinking that the sooner Maurice is separated from her,
the better. He cannot think straight around her; she clouds his reason, but he is of course in every way too good for her!”
Into this scene came my father, panting and wild-eyed. When Deschartres started to speak, my father turned his back to him, ignoring him, and stood close to his mother to tell her that he must get away from Deschartres immediately or he would throttle him at the least. My father would go and visit friends in Châteauroux for a few days to clear his head; when he came back, all would be calmer and they could talk.
“But now you leave me yet again,” my grandmother said, weeping. “How it hurts me for you to go away when all I want in the world is to have you nearby!”
My father could engage in fearsome battles with his sword, he rode on when cannonballs were whizzing by him, he could withstand being wounded or made a prisoner of war, but never could he bear his mother’s tears.
His heart softened and he embraced her, kissed the top of her head and rocked her side to side, saying, “Now, Mother, dear Mother, you know that we are all beside ourselves! Let me go for a brief visit and have some time to think. Do not concern yourself with Sophie! Perhaps she will go to Paris and console herself in the arms of another man and I will be shown to be the fool that you suggest I am. But let me go away now, and give me your blessing; I shall soon return to you and even to that reprobate Deschartres in a much better frame of mind.”
My father knew very well he could not stay angry at Deschartres, for above all else, they loved each other. The tutor had helped raise the little boy, and the boy’s mind and spirit were enriched by the odd soul who taught him arts and sciences and took him for long walks in and around Nohant, oftentimes carrying him home, asleep on his shoulder.
My father did go to visit friends, and from there he sent my grandmother a long letter of appeal, which contained these words: “Some women are, to use Deschartres’s vocabulary, mere wenches and harlots. I do not like them or seek them out. I am neither libertine enough to waste my powers, nor wealthy enough to keep women of that sort. But never could these vile words be applied to a woman of feeling. Love purifies everything.” Nonetheless, he assured his mother that marriage was not on his mind, nor on Sophie’s.
After a few days, he returned to the house at Nohant. There he had a tearful reconciliation with Deschartres, who was standing morosely outside arguing with the gardener about the placement of lettuce seedlings. Soon afterward, though, my father went to Paris and stayed there, first on one pretext, then on another. My grandmother suspected correctly that his real reason for being there was to see Sophie. Finally, he returned to Nohant and, while he was there, seemed to make an honest effort to forget Sophie.
It was to no avail. The heart is a small muscle with tremendous strength; it will have its way. Eventually, my father went back to Paris and Sophie. When he became active again in the army, she followed him from camp to camp.
A week before I was born, Sophie decided that she wanted her child to be both legitimate and born on Parisian soil. And so my father was given leave to return to the city, where he and my mother were married in a civil ceremony. My grandmother was not told of this at the time; indeed, she was not told for two years. My father did try, at first: he traveled to Nohant the day after the ceremony to make the announcement, and it must have happened that his nervousness showed. My grandmother must then have suspected the reason for his visit, and before he could utter a word that would make real her deepest fear, she began to weep, saying that my father, by his involvement with a woman of whom she could not approve, had shown that he no longer loved her. Rather than inform her of his marriage to the woman he adored, my father reassured my grandmother of his love for her.
July 1804
RUE MESLAY
PARIS
On the day of my birth, my father was playing his beloved violin at a party given for my mother’s newly engaged sister, my aunt Lucie. My mother, resplendent in a ruffled pink silk dress and matching shoes with pearls at the center of their bows, was dancing a quadrille. She excused herself suddenly and repaired to a nearby bedroom overlooking the garden, where she gave birth to me, reportedly without a sound and also very quickly. It was Lucie who attended my birth, a consequence of my mother having latched onto my aunt’s arm at the moment she realized it was time.
I have imagined the scene of my birth many times. Both my parents and my aunt told me about it, and, along with the details they provided, over the years I lavishly added my own. I saw it unfolding thusly:
I opened my eyes in murky warmth, aware of a squeezing sensation that grew in intensity from all sides and finally thrust me down a narrow passage of flesh and out into a bright light, against which I closed my eyes and wailed. A single spindle of saliva broke as I opened my mouth. There was crust in one eye. I was transferred from one set of arms into another. I heard the lilting voices of women.
After she ensured that mother and baby were stable, Lucie went back to the party to tell my father the news. She made her way through the revelers and approached the small group of musicians, who stood with my father in the corner of the room. She laid her hand on Maurice’s arm, stopping his playing. The other musicians stopped playing as well, and the crowd grew abruptly silent. Lucie said into the stillness, “Come, Maurice, you have a daughter.” This announcement was greeted with a great burst of applause.
“She will be fortunate,” my aunt told the guests, over her shoulder, as she led my father to the bedroom. “For she was born in the time of roses, to the sounds of music.” Now the crowd laughed, and then the music began again. I turned my head toward the sound, drawn to music then as I ever would be.
And then there was my father, holding me in his arms. His tears fell on my forehead, and his long forefinger gently wiped them away; but I, still in possession of the short-lasting but infinite wisdom that is ours in the womb, felt his great joy as well. I was given the name Amantine-Lucile-Aurore, and my father said, “We shall call her Aurore, after my mother, who does not bless her now but, in time, will.”
Surely it tore at his heart to hold me that day, an infant whose weight barely registered in his arms, knowing that his mother would condemn his marriage and, by extension, me. He pulled me closer and rocked me side to side, crooning.
A writer has a most fertile mind, or he is no writer at all. He has an imagination that soars when given the most meager starts: a wet blade of grass, croissant crumbs on a plate, the sight of a woman hurriedly crossing a street. And in the way that the fiction a writer produces can assume a truth of its own, these details of my birth seem less story to me than memory.
—
AFTER I WAS BORN, my father felt there was no more hiding from my grandmother; now he would need to tell her of both his marriage and the birth of his daughter.
My grandmother’s position was always this: she could forgive one’s circumstances at birth. After that, though, came the life one chose to fashion for oneself. She herself, for example, despite being born illegitimate, had conducted herself properly, married well, lived a life of great dignity, and never gave cause for criticism or scorn. She had plans to raise her own (legitimate!) child, my father, in the same way. She could and did turn a blind eye to her son’s dalliances: he had fathered a son with a girl in the village outside Nohant. My grandmother doted on the boy, called Hippolyte, and contributed money to help raise him after he was put in the care of a peasant woman next door to the estate. But to give him the name Dupin, to consider him in any way an heir to her fortune? Certainly not! His last name was Chatiron, after his mother. Whom her son most emphatically did not marry.
My father argued that Sophie’s life experiences had not permitted her to make the same choices as my grandmother and reminded her that Sophie was legitimate, as was her daughter, Caroline. But my grandmother persisted in her complete disregard for Sophie, as well as in her belief that the differences between her and Maurice were too great to sanction a relationship between them. It could not last. It was not proper. My father was an ari
stocrat: kind, deep-feeling, optimistic, and intelligent. He was also a brilliant artist and gifted in his knowledge of languages and of literature. He was very much sought after to sit at the tables of many important and influential people, for he was a most charming and witty conversationalist. He loved music perhaps most of all, and he was widely praised for both his singing and his violin playing. He acted impulsively, but with the kind of courage and trust that can make rash decisions seem like good ones, even well-considered ones. He loved—and, I daresay, lived for—the beauty in life. He found it everywhere, and he was as glad to give it as to receive it.
My mother was mercurial, a beautiful, dark-complected bohemian with a dramatic way of expressing herself, whatever her mood. She had been cast out of her home in her early teens to work as a dancer in a theater in the hope that she would find a “protector.” She was strong and practical and had, as well, an air of mystery and magic about her; she was one of those charismatic beings who draw the eyes and ears of everyone in the room. Most of all, she was well aware of the uses and power of passion—my father alluded obliquely but clearly to skills she possessed that turned strong men into weak-kneed devotees.
Never mind my grandmother’s concerns about such a mismatch. I learned in time to use each side of my family for my own particular advantage.
—
I AM SORRY TO SAY that in the end, my father lacked the courage to tell my grandmother about his marriage, but he did write to her of my birth. He told her my name was Aurore, after her, in an effort to win whatever goodwill that might bring. But my grandmother had heard rumors of my parents’ marriage, and she wrote to the mayor of the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, where they had supposedly exchanged vows, with the request that he confirm the union, which he did. Soon afterward, she went to the city and set about trying unsuccessfully to have the marriage annulled. She would not stop in her quest to force my parents apart. After her husband’s death, she had turned all her hopes and attentions to her only son. For him to marry a woman like my mother ruined her plans, so carefully conceived and meant to serve as comfort to her in her old age.