But there was something else, too, something of which she may not have been consciously aware: there is always trouble of the worst sort when a widow effectively remarries and the man she weds is her son.
When my father heard that his mother was in Paris, he concocted a plan of his own. He brought me to her apartment building and conspired with the concierge to find a way for my grandmother to see me.
The concierge came to my grandmother’s apartment to show off “her” granddaughter. “Look at her; I can hardly bear to put her down!” she said, then offered me to my grandmother to hold. When I was in her lap and my grandmother saw my eyes, so like my father’s—large, black, and with the softness of velvet—she understood that it was her own granddaughter she was holding. “Who brought her here?” she demanded. The tone of her voice caused me to burst into tears.
The instinct to protect children that lies in the breast of most mothers took hold, and the concierge stepped forward with her arms outstretched. “Ah là là,” she said, “give her back to me. I can see she is not wanted here.”
She started to lift me from my grandmother’s lap, but my grandmother only held on to me more tightly. She raised me to her shoulder and, sighing, began to pat my back. “Poor little mite,” she said, “none of this is your doing. There now, stop your crying; you are safe with me.
“Who brought her here?” she asked again, albeit more gently.
The concierge raised her fingers nervously to her mouth, then clasped her hands before herself. She spoke rapidly, saying, “If you please, madame, it was your son, Monsieur Maurice, who waits downstairs. We thought if only you held the child, you would—”
“Maurice!” my grandmother cried and, with a great deal of emotion, called for my father to be brought up to her. They embraced and wept, my small body between them, but in the end my grandmother would not agree to meet Sophie or to bless the marriage. All she could manage was to take a ruby ring from her hand and press it into my own; she wanted the ring to be given to my mother.
Thus my grandmother made a conciliatory move toward my mother, but with a mediator in between: me. Just like my father, I was caught in the middle.
January 1831
RUE DE SEINE
PARIS
In the predawn dimness, I lay in bed, trying to pinpoint the start of the events that had led to my being here in Paris, on my own. I had no husband, no children with me; it was just I, my valise in the corner of the bedroom not fully unpacked, and my footsteps echoing in the apartment whenever I moved about. The noises outside, even at this early hour—carriages bumping over cobblestones, the night cleaners finishing picking up garbage, the cynical laughter of prostitutes on their way home—did nothing to penetrate the quiet around me.
In many ways, it was a political revolution that had led to my personal rebellion. In the summer of 1830, all of us at Nohant had yearned for news about the neighborhood uprisings in Paris that took place during the July Revolution. There was a great deal of hatred for Charles X, and young resisters armed with not much more than paving bricks had attempted to force the king’s abdication. I had worried about my mother and other relatives living in Paris, of course; but I had also worried about those young laborers I had never met yet fully sympathized with: factory workers and students who put their lives on the line for their beliefs. They were not alone in reviling the Bourbon Restoration; Charles X was maligned not only by the poorest people on the street but also by the wealthiest in their well-appointed mansions.
On July 26, in the midst of a heat wave, workers who had been barred from the factories took to the streets. More than forty journalists from eleven newspapers signed protests against Charles X, and for seventy-two hours there was bloody and chaotic fighting, which left six hundred dead and two hundred wounded. The next month saw the abdication of Charles X; and then Louis-Philippe, whose nickname was “Citizen King,” came back to Paris from London, where he had been in exile.
The ones who brought this news to us at Nohant were a group of young men, students who lived now in Paris but were originally from our Berry district. They returned home now and then, and when they did, they often gathered or stayed at our house. I welcomed them because they caught us up on the news, but also because they were stimulating company, a welcome relief from the usual tedium my husband, Casimir, and I fell into when we were by ourselves.
One day, I went to the nearby Château du Coudray to visit my friends Charles Duvernet and Alphonse Fleury, whom we called “the Gaul.” With them was a man seven years my junior whom I had not met before, a nineteen-year-old recent law graduate from La Châtre named Jules Sandeau. He had an endearingly shy demeanor. I asked if he went hunting with my friends, and he flushed, answering, “I’m afraid I don’t care for loud noises. The truth is, I’m a lazy sort of romantic dreamer whose greatest pleasure is to read and to make up my own stories.”
I found him very handsome. He had a pink-and-white complexion and thick, curly blond hair. His build was rather slight, the kind I preferred, and his confession that he was a “romantic dreamer” did nothing but make me more interested in him.
I told him I had been talking with my other friends about the recent revolution in Paris and had asked them if a new republic had been declared. They hadn’t been sure, and I asked if Jules knew. He did not. I mounted my horse to set off for La Châtre in search of news. Before I rode off, however, I invited Jules to come to dinner at my house the next day and told him to bring the others.
At that dinner, I read a letter to my guests that I had just received from my children’s tutor, who was now in Paris. There had indeed been a new republic declared.
Soon afterward, my husband, Casimir, joined the National Guard. I worried about this, I told Jules and my other friends when I saw them a few days later. I worried about my husband and my mother and my aunt Lucie, who had had a job associated with the previous regime.
Jules shrugged. “When the blood is on fire, there is no room for reason. The citizens will defend themselves.” Later, though, we took a walk by the river, and his approach was more gentle. “I know they will be safe,” he told me.
“How do you know?” It was getting dark outside; I could hardly see his face.
“Because I want them to be. For you.” He looked about, then moved closer to me and offered his arm. “We should go back.”
I didn’t want to go back. Suddenly, I wanted to stay out all night with this young man. My attraction to him had grown stronger in the days since we’d met. He knew literature and politics and history. Though he had studied law, he wanted to become a writer, as did I, and we spent hours talking about our methods and habits in writing stories. In spite of my being so much older than he, I saw that he was equally drawn to me.
Not much more time passed before I fell in love with Jules, and I told him so. He confessed that he felt the same, and finally we gave in to temptation.
There was at Nohant a kind of summer house I had created. It was away from the main house and one could get to it without going through the village, so it was in that respect a very private place. Jules and I met there a few times and indulged ourselves not only in lovemaking but in the sweet talk and tender foolishness all lovers enjoy.
I felt no guilt about this. Like my father, I believed that love purified everything. The only thing wrong in making love was being intimate with one you in fact did not love.
I had no love for my husband. And for almost two years, I had been sleeping in my own room, apart from him. Not long after we were married, I had become aware that he regularly bestowed his affections on others, including our housemaids. In addition to that, because of a secret I would very soon uncover, I would be vindicated in my belief that his feelings toward me resembled hatred more than love.
Divorce had been abolished by Napoleon, and as long as the law still gave husbands the right to manage their wives’ money and assets, I had no thought that I would get an equitable separation, one with a settlement that would
allow me and the children to live apart from Casimir. For a long time, I had been trying to make the best of things, at considerable cost to my health.
I felt I’d been drowning, and now love had thrown me a rope. I could refuse it and slowly die or take it and live.
Before Jules left the country to go back to Paris, he begged me to join him there. With tears in my eyes, I said I wished I could, but surely he understood that I could not.
But now here I was, in Paris.
I went to the window of my half brother’s apartment. Morning had broken, and the city was alive with movement and color and sound. I wanted to gobble up everything: the people bustling down the sidewalks, many with dogs as sophisticated-looking as they, the pink-gray light, the tall brick buildings near me and the rounded domes in the distance, the Seine, the stores, the street vendors, the cafés with their beautiful gilt-framed mirrors, the magnificent churches, the gardens with their marble statues, the streets crowded with carriages and coaches and bicycles, the elegant gas streetlamps. I wanted to know everything, do everything, I wanted to leave my provincialism far behind and be part of a city of eight hundred thousand that was growing exponentially. I wanted to immerse myself in a life of writing, the life of an artist. I wanted to be like the bohemians, who cared nothing for the opinions of others. They dressed as they pleased and lived as they saw fit and honored their own ways of thinking. They did what made sense to them, rather than following the restrictive and sometimes ridiculous mandates of the bourgeois.
Equally, I wanted to be in the arms of my lover, into whose rented room I would soon be moving, unbeknownst to my husband. Hippolyte’s apartment would serve only as a place to receive mail until I found an apartment for Jules and me. I was seeking a building with a concierge who would announce visitors, and with a back door that would accommodate a quick getaway, should my husband happen to appear without advance notice.
I dressed quickly, stuffed the heel of a loaf of bread into my mouth, and put on my coat. I was going to buy men’s boots, which were solidly constructed and had iron heels that would not wear down. I had been slipping and sliding on the icy streets. The delicate shoes I’d come here with had cracked almost immediately after my arrival, and I’d found myself tripping in the clumsy overshoes I had bought to replace them. I needed to feel secure on my feet because I wanted to know every part of the city, to walk it from one end to the other until it was as familiar to me as Nohant was. I would buy boots, and then I would make arrangements to meet with the novelist who would help me publish my book.
January 1805
PARIS
By the time I was six months old, rumor and innuendo about my parents’ misalliance was more than my grandmother could bear. People were condemning my father for marrying so far below his station, not in small part because of my grandmother’s disapproval of it. But they were condemning of my grandmother as well, for not supporting her son now that the deed was done. Finally, she agreed to attend a religious ceremony for my parents’ marriage, followed by a small and uncomfortably quiet supper. She would recognize the marriage, if not her daughter-in-law.
In many respects, it was nearly impossible for her to become close to my mother; their personalities were so very different. Whereas my grandmother could not so much as put up an umbrella without following an unwritten law, my mother lived by her own rules. And she did not suffer fools, no matter what their station in life. She felt that in some respects she was superior to aristocrats. “Look at my hand,” she once said. “Do you see how my veins are larger than those nobles’? My blood is redder, too; I have more stamina than they could ever dream of!”
This seemed true. Whereas my grandmother seemed incapable of walking more than a few feet, my mother rarely went to bed before one, and she was up at six, working. She did all her own cooking, sewing, and cleaning. If my grandmother had tried to emulate her for even one day, it would have been the death of her.
Sophie did not enjoy long dinners, evenings out, glittering society balls, or many other things that upper-class people did or aspired to do. What she liked best was being at home, in the company of someone whose heart was sincere, someone she could trust and who could trust her enough to let her be herself absolutely. There was a person whose beliefs were very much like hers, and that person was my father. Despite what my grandmother thought, my parents were exceedingly well matched.
Soon after my birth, my father went back to his duties as an officer in the army. When I was around two years old, my mother joined him at a camp in Montreuil. Seven-year-old Caroline, the daughter born to my mother before my father and she met, and I lived then with my aunt Lucie and her daughter, Clotilde, in a village called Chaillot.
I remember how Caroline and I rode in creaking baskets on either side of a donkey my aunt occasionally rented from a neighbor. She used the beast to carry carrots and cabbages to the market at Les Halles. I remember how I loved both the peace of the country and the garden especially; but I was equally taken by the vibrancy of Paris. Though they were opposites, even as a child, I wanted both.
May 1808
RUE DE LA GRANGE-BATELIÈRE
PARIS
At the age of three, my father was off to war and I was back in Paris, living with my mother in a small garret apartment. My half sister, Caroline, was for the most part away at school. To keep me from running all over the place, my mother fashioned a makeshift playpen from four rush-backed chairs. In the center of the space she put an unlit foot warmer for me to sit on, but I rarely sat. Mostly, I leaned my foreams casually on the seats and chatted on and on, like a grandiloquent patron in a barroom.
It was really here that I began my profession as conteuse. Then, as later, I started with not much, something more feeling than idea, an image or a thought or even a question that flew into my head and perched there. After that, there came quite naturally some sentence followed by another and then another, each building upon the last. I did not think about what should come; I only spoke out what was quite suddenly there. I made what would otherwise have been long, boring hours enjoyable by offering to myself and anyone who cared to listen another place to be, a place as real to me as the chair walls that surrounded me.
My stories satisfied me, if not my exasperated mother, who called them romans interminables. We stayed in the kitchen together for hours on end, the sun shining through the narrow window or rain pattering against it, she with her sleeves rolled up to make her stews and chicken livers, her plum tarts. While she labored, she sang in a beautiful, pure voice. So it was that I learned early on the satisfying combination of food and music and literature. And though my mother was often impatient with my lack of quiet, she was also sometimes drawn into my stories enough to put down her knife, wipe off her hands, and pull me onto her lap, where she then listened to me more closely, and sometimes laughed and kissed me. And so I also learned early the seductive power of words.
Ah, Maman. In later years, when we tore at each other, I kept in mind those kitchen tableaux, times when I sat at her feet and watched as she gamely made soup of bits of onion and potato peels and scant grindings of pepper because she had not budgeted our food allowance properly. She often spent too much money on theater tickets so that we might go out of our grim surroundings and lose ourselves to the glory of the stage. We needed to have something to do besides go to daily Mass. Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I wasn’t sure I saw the point of Mass, anyway: it seemed to me that my mother was as inclined to feel the spirit of God in the beauty of nature or the kindness of friends as much as when a largely indifferent priest placed a white host in her mouth.
My mother told me Bible stories, or stories about herself and her sister, my aunt Lucie, playing dress-up in clothes given to them by the old woman who lived next door, or stories about her father taming his little birds before he sold them, teaching them to sit on his finger, then making smacking noises so that the birds would kiss him. He showed his daughters how to do this; they laughed at t
he odd feeling of the birds’ beaks pulling gently at their lips and at the sight of the tiny purplish tongues.
There were many nights when my mother fell into bed and wept quietly with longing for her husband fighting in Napoleon’s Peninsular War. After he was transferred from cold and rainy Prussia to Spain, he was promoted to major and stationed at the palace of the deposed prince of Asturias in Madrid, to serve under Joachim Murat, marshal of the empire and imperial lieutenant to Spain.
There, the weather was fine and the women beautiful. And Sophie’s husband was beautiful, especially in uniform, with his gold epaulets and shiny sword, the sabretache that featured an eagle embroidered out of seed pearls. He had a white woolen cape with gold buttons and braiding and a matching pelisse with black fur, which he wore tossed over the shoulder. His trousers were purple with a gold lace overlay. He had red Moroccan leather boots with the seams done just so, and he wore an eighteen-inch yellow plume on his velvet-trimmed shako. He wrote to my mother of his own magnificence in uniform, though it was done in such a charming way one would never accuse him of immodesty: he gave the credit to the clothes and not the person.
So, yes, he was handsome and well-mannered and witty and cultured and easily seduced, as she well knew. Never mind that he wrote to her words meant to be reassuring and romantic: “I’ve had only one ambition since I met you, namely to make up to you for the injustices of society and destiny, to assure you of an honorable life, and to shelter you from unhappiness. Nothing is worth more to me than the modest chamber of my dear wife. Nothing is equal in my eyes to her lovely dark hair, her beautiful eyes, her white teeth, her graceful figure, her little prunella shoes.” Beautiful words, to be sure. But she was here in Paris, in a drafty garret apartment with me, and he was there, with other women with lovely dark hair.