The Dream Lover Read Free Page B

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
    O n 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