My mother wept and railed; she was both furious and heartbroken, and nothing my grandmother said seemed to have any effect on her whatsoever. But then my grandmother began to speak of what happened to a woman’s skin when she wept so hard and slept so little, how her looks could be damaged when she did not care for herself in the way a woman was meant to. My mother, who was then thirty-five, was aware of the fact that, beautiful though she still was, she could not return to the life she had been living when she met my father. She needed him. More important, she loved him.
My father was right in thinking that a little separation would make my mother appreciate him again; he had only just left, and it was plain that already she missed him. Add to this the sober reminder from one beautiful woman to another about the need to hold a husband’s interest, lest he stray, and a plan was set in motion. My mother decided that she would go to bed early and, in the morning, would meet her husband with a new outlook. They would begin again.
After my mother and I retired, my grandmother stayed up late, playing a card game called piquet with Deschartres. She had not wanted to tell my mother that she, too, was worried about her son riding out on such a night; his wild horse moved in restless caracoles even when he was tightly reined in. She disliked my father’s pride in taking what control he could over such a headstrong animal; she thought it foolish to allow ego to overrule common sense.
When my grandmother expressed her fears to Deschartres, he pooh-poohed them. “Maurice is an excellent rider,” he said. “And surely he deserves time away from this trial he has chosen as wife; she is enough to make anyone want to go out in a storm. Don’t worry, nothing will happen. And even if it does, Maurice has Weber with him.”
Weber, my father’s valet, was a much-admired man: loyal, strong, and willing to do whatever his master bade him. He had about him a rather awful smell, and his language was a German-accented French that was hard to understand. But my father was fluent in both tongues, thanks to Deschartres, and he and Weber got along famously.
Thus assured, sometime after midnight, my grandmother began her preparations for bed.
Not long afterward, Weber came galloping up to the house, hollering, and was met by the servant Saint-Jean, who had rushed outdoors in his nightwear to see what the commotion was about. Weber told him what had happened: my father had crossed the bridge outside La Châtre at a full gallop, and was rounding a bend onto a dark road lined with poplar trees. Just as his horse made the turn, it stumbled in a pile of stones that had been left at the side of the road. The horse reared, sending my father flying, and the fall broke his neck. Weber raced up behind, leapt off his horse, and ran to my father, whom he heard say, “Come to me; I am dying.” While locals helped move my father to a nearby inn, Weber galloped to Nohant. He told Saint-Jean to tell Deschartres what had happened, then raced back to La Châtre.
Deschartres took my grandmother’s coach and set out immediately for the inn. My grandmother learned from the servants that Maurice had been seriously injured and was at the Lion d’Argent in La Châtre. She never walked more than a few feet without distress, but on this night, absent transportation, she walked the entire three miles to the inn, wearing her delicate silk shoes and with nary a shawl for protection from the rain. When she got there, she entered the room where her son lay and fell upon his body. She would not allow anyone to separate her from him. She held my father’s still form in the carriage all the way home, and if she wept, no one heard it. It was much later that I came to see that as there is a grief for which tears will not stop, there is also a grief for which tears will not come.
A few hours later, at six o’clock in the morning, my mother was awake and performing her toilette, dressed in a white camisole and a long skirt. I was already up; she had helped me get dressed first. Her mood was fine: all would soon be well; she would reconcile with my father, whom she believed to be downstairs. She would also speak to him about going back to our apartment in Paris; they had been here long enough.
Deschartres burst into the room. My mother turned to look at him and understood immediately that something terrible had occurred. “Maurice!” she cried. “What is it, what has happened to him?”
Deschartres stumbled and stuttered, but my mother made out that her husband had had an accident. “Where is he?” she asked.
“No, you cannot go to him now,” Deschartres said.
“But is it serious?” my mother asked.
“Yes, it is serious,” Deschartres said. “He was thrown, and it is very serious.” Then he abruptly shouted, “He is dead!” He began to laugh hysterically and collapsed onto the floor, sobbing.
My mother screamed, then began to sob herself. She fell back into a chair, put her hands over her face, and rocked back and forth, moaning. I ran to her, patted her bare arm and kissed it, saying, “Maman! Maman!” She ignored me. It was as if she could neither hear nor see me. I kissed her arm again and again and tried to get in line with her vision. She only continued to weep.
Deschartres rose and spoke firmly to my mother: “Attend to your daughter! You must live for her now.” Then he left the room. My mother kept loudly sobbing, and I tried over and over again to console her. Nothing worked: my stroking and kissing her, my crawling into her lap and holding tightly on to her neck, even, finally, my own terrified sobbing. She wanted only my father.
I wished then with all my heart that I were a boy. I had felt many times before that if I had been born a boy, I would have been just like my father, and I wanted to be like him now more than ever. On and on my mother wept, she who had so recently lost her infant son, and now her husband. Finally I simply sat still at her feet, waiting.
—
WHEN THERE ARE NO apparent consolations for certain kinds of grief, the mind can nonetheless create some. What I eventually came to is that the death of my father meant my parents would never come to the end of their love. Circumstances dictated that they would never have to discover if their feelings for each other would wane, if their passion would fade. Despite the hardships thrust upon them or brought about because of disagreements, they had never fallen into despair about being together or even settled into a comfortable ennui. Now they never would. When my father was killed, they were still deeply, romantically, wildly in love. What I witnessed between them seemed a love of epic proportions.
I was grateful for the memory of their love and their relationship. I was happy that my father, once he found the love of his life, never had to live without her. But I was sorry that my mother had to live for so long without him. It was never easy for her, after he died. I do not believe her pain ever went away, or even lessened.
April 1831
NOHANT
However much I missed my children, it was difficult to leave Paris for Nohant for the three months I would be caring for them. I was in thrall to my work, passionate about my nights with Jules, and emerging into the self I wanted to be.
Yet when I arrived, I was overwhelmed with love, both that which I felt for two-year-old Solange and seven-year-old Maurice and that with which they showered me. They scarcely noticed when Casimir left for his family’s hunting lodge in Guillery, and his brusque goodbye to me made me not miss him, either. I had expected to be affected greatly in one way or another upon seeing him again, but the experience was oddly empty. His tone of voice when he spoke to me was flat; his eyes were absent of any emotion.
But the children could not get enough of me; it was as though I had grown two new limbs, the way they kept themselves anchored to my sides virtually all day.
I had been away from them for so long, it was a luxury for me not to separate from them at night, either, but rather to look down and see their lashes dark against their cheeks as they slept, their small chests rising and falling, and to hear the sounds they sometimes made: Maurice’s emphatic grunts, Solange’s mewls and deep sighs. I could see their eyelids flutter with the drama of their dreams, and when they turned onto their sides, I could gently stroke the soft indentation
at the base of their skulls.
I reveled again in the company of ones so young. I loved their honesty and inquisitiveness, their spontaneity, their outsized joy at the smallest of things, their sense of wonder and gratitude. I climbed trees with my children, chased them through the woods, supervised their rides on the pony, read them Homer’s stories of gods and goddesses made human, which I had loved as a child, and encouraged them to make up their own stories. We put on plays for one another and for any audience we could gather. Sometimes, as evening fell, I sat on the steps at the side of the house and watched them play. I laughed along with their laughter, that purest and most infectious of sounds. I congratulated myself and Casimir for having done a good job thus far in raising them, our problems with each other notwithstanding. At night I lay still and looked out the windows, which I had left uncovered so that I might see the rising of the moon and the humbling grandeur of the stars, and I gave thanks.
And then, just like that, it was over. One night Maurice balked at sleeping with me, saying it was too crowded in the bed. Then Solange said that she didn’t want to sleep with me either, because she was not a baby anymore. In the daytime, they began wandering off by themselves, not so eager to involve me in their play. One afternoon, I found Solange sitting in the lap of one of the kitchen maids, a pretty young blond girl named Odette, who was reading to her. “Solange, come with Maman,” I said, holding my hand out to her. “I will read to you.”
“I don’t want you,” Solange said, and it was both embarrassing and painful to hear those words of clear dismissal.
Color rose in the maid’s face as she rushed to my defense. But I held up my hand and with a nod indicated that she should go on. If one is going to praise children’s honesty when their words please, one must tolerate it when the words do not.
I went in search of Maurice and was reminded that my son had gone to La Châtre with one of the servants to help shop for supplies needed by the groundskeepers. Apparently Maurice took seriously the fact that Casimir had told him that he was assistant master of Nohant, the one in charge when his father was away.
I retired to my writing room, but the passion I had felt in Paris for working on the first volume of Jules and my novel eluded me here. I still wrote, but I got only about a third as much done; and the work lacked original turns of phrase as well as the urgency and sense of discovery that had come so easily before.
I spent hours sitting at my desk, trying to think of what I might want to say. Repeatedly, ink dried on the quill before I had written one word. I walked to the window and looked out at the land, but mostly I was dreaming of Jules on the streets of Paris. I wondered whether he missed me, whether he would take good care of himself, for without me he tended not to eat well and to fall into a kind of defeatist mentality. Our friend Émile Regnault had found us a new place to live, something much better than the single room we had been occupying. It was a sixth-floor garret apartment in a large corner house on Quai Saint-Michel, near the Pont Neuf. There were three small rooms and a balcony, from which we would be able to see Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. I loved that part of Paris—not too modern, still picturesque and poetic—and in July, Jules and I would be living there together.
In the meantime, here I was at Nohant, worried about him and worried about myself, too. My time here, which at first had seemed so fleeting, now felt interminable. Nohant began to feel like the prison I had escaped in Paris. I was bored, restless; then, finally, ill. I wrote to friends in Paris, who suggested I simply come back early and bring the children with me. But how could I do that? I had committed to an arrangement I was bound to honor: three months in the city, three months at Nohant. And in any case, how could my children fit into the bohemian lifestyle I had developed for myself there? No, my fate was to be in Paris, wildly alive but missing my children, or at Nohant, nurturing my children the way I wanted and needed to but with a great emptiness gnawing at me until my stomach and my head ached. I wrote to my mother about my conflicted feelings, saying, “The freedom to think and act is the most important right. If one can join with this the little cares of a family, this freedom is infinitely sweeter, but where do you find that? One way of life always undermines the other.”
My mother’s response was that I was being selfish. She said I was too wild and was not paying attention to my children the way I should, that I was abandoning them. Well. If I were indeed abandoning my children, I had learned how to do so at the hands of a master.
October 1808
NOHANT
It was several weeks after my father’s death when I wandered outside and found my mother in the children’s garden she and my father had built. She was sitting on the ground with her back to the trunk of the pear tree, her eyes closed. It was an unseasonably warm day, more summer than fall.
I crept closer to my mother, who looked so small beneath the pear tree. “Maman?”
She opened her eyes and smiled at me, then held out her arms, and I went gratefully to her. It felt as though this was the first time she had really seen me since that horrible night of my father’s death. All of the household—all of the village, in fact—was still mourning my father; he’d been beloved by so many for his wit and his charm, for the way their love for him was so exuberantly returned.
I lay still in my mother’s arms, deeply appreciative of the feel of her arms about me, of the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Her comfort had been a long time coming, after our grievous loss; I exulted in it now.
After a while, I asked, “What are you doing?”
She pushed my hair off my forehead and kissed the top of my head. “What am I doing? Well, I am having a little dream of when we were all together.”
“When shall we be together again?”
She hesitated, then said, “What do you mean, Aurore?”
“When will they be through being dead, Papa and Louis? When will they come back?”
I could see her struggling to formulate an answer. Whereas my grandmother believed in setting down the unvarnished truth, my mother was more respectful of the vulnerable mind of a child. She had heard the servants talking of seeing my father’s ghost sitting at the dining room table with his head in his hands and had admonished them not to speak of it in front of me; she had also forewarned my grandmother not to tell me that death was the absolute end.
At first she attempted diversion, saying, “What about Caroline, whom I am also dreaming of? Is she not part of our family, too? Surely you have not forgotten your sister, Caroline, with her charming smile, she who plays with you and your dolls so nicely when she is home from school—she who, in fact, tries to grant your every wish!”
“Yes, I love Caroline very much. But when will Papa and Louis come back?”
“Ah, Aurore.” She sighed and shook her head. “It will be a very long time, and we must be patient. You must be a good girl and please your father. For even though we cannot see him now, he is nonetheless keeping watch over us. Do you agree?”
“Yes, and I have been good, Maman.”
She raised an eyebrow. It was true that I had not been perfect, that I had fallen into the habit of demanding that I get my way, and was often given it by people too taken up with mourning to discipline a young child. But there was one area in which I was unfailingly cooperative.
“I do my lessons every day.”
“So you do.”
There was some bitterness in my mother’s tone. Deschartres had begun teaching me Latin, the natural sciences, penmanship, and reading. My grandmother taught me to read music and play the harpsichord, but she also taught me manners and voice modulation, and for those things my mother had a great deal of disdain. Sometimes we giggled together in private over my grandmother’s insistence on the proper way to hold a fork, the level at which one’s chin should be kept, how to bend to pick up something one dropped, should there be no one there to do it for you.
There was one thing I never told my mother, for even at age four, I knew it would wound her. T
hat was the way my grandmother spoke disparagingly of my mother’s father. We were outside walking one day, and I had stopped in my tracks to listen to birdsong. My grandmother pulled at my hand, but I would not move until the bird had flown away.
“Your grandfather was a bird fancier, was he not?” she asked. “I suppose this accounts for your preoccupation with them.”
“Yes,” I said, “he sold birds, and he tamed them, too. They would sit on his finger and on his shoulder, and they would come to him right out of the air when he whistled. He knew all the birdcalls, and he taught them to Maman.”
“Ah. Well, that’s very nice, but no way to distinguish oneself, I think. Isn’t it true?”
I didn’t answer. My thoughts on this subject were too big for me at the time. I could not then express what I came to articulate later, which is that the most superior creation in all of nature is birds. What human could build something as ingenious and perfect, not to say comfortable, as a nest? Their ability and form in flight are awe-inspiring, and their songs are études of extraordinary clarity and quality. Most impressively, they are able to do what humans cannot: birds make harmonious marriages, where both sexes share equally in family duties. Even at this early age I had begun regarding feathered beings as a kind of patron saint.
But on that day, I could only look at the ground and wish that I could kick my grandmother’s finely turned ankle. Finally I reiterated that I wanted to have one of the birds that lived in the woods of Nohant as a pet. My grandmother found the idea preposterous. Later in my life, though, I did just that: I kept birds on branches on my desk. They were free to leave and often did—they would go outside, and then they would come back again. Oftentimes, they would perch upon my pen, and in their insouciance they were so charming I could not bear to brush them off. On more than one occasion, I blamed a failed deadline on a barred warbler.