The Reinvention of Love Read Free

this is what comes back to me all these years later – the brightness of the day on the hill, the excitement of being so near to greatness and glory, to a famous man I could reach out and touch if I wanted to; and then the tears and loneliness, the scratchy wool blanket on my cheek as I lay face down on my bed and sobbed for the man who had left me again.
    There is something of Napoleon in Victor. The way he strutted up and down in his kitchen the night he had the seating plan for the Comédie-Française, reviewing his troops, planning his battle for control of the theatre.
    Exultation and at the same time despair. That is what I felt with regard to Napoleon, what I have continued to feel all my life with regard to everything else.
    There are so many memories from childhood. Why does onestand out above all others? Perhaps because a few events are not particular to childhood, even though they occur there. Perhaps some memories are more a foretelling than the reminder of an event that belongs entirely in the past. Perhaps what we remember is merely a continuing truth about ourselves.
    The story tastes of the man.

WHO SEES LOVE ARRIVING? Who can gauge the movements one person makes towards another? Movements so slight, so tentative, that they are almost invisible.
    It is impossible to watch love arriving, but it is abundantly clear when it has arrived.
    I remember the moment perfectly.
    At first, when I visited the Hugos, I would make sure to go in the evening, when I knew that Victor would be home. In the early days, after I had reviewed his poems so favourably, after I had called him, in print, “a genius”, he had plenty of time for me. I would go to his house after supper and we would talk together long into the evening, about poetry and literature, about the passion we both felt for writing. Adèle was sometimes in the room, sitting sewing by the fire, often silent. Victor is prone to long monologues when he gets excited and though she would sometimes try to say a few words, to join our discussion, he would talk right over her.
    He would do this with the children too, swat them away if he was busy proclaiming – but he would also, if he wasn’t occupied, bend down with them to examine an ant in the grass. It was then that I envied him, when he casually laid a hand on his son’s head, or looked with real interest at the drawing his daughter had brought to him. But he was cavalier with his family. He failed to recognize the gift they were and appreciated them only when it suited him.
    One day I walked round after lunch to return a book Ihad borrowed and I found Adèle alone with her young ones. She invited me to stay and I sat with her by the pond in the garden while the children buzzed around us. Without Victor’s presence, Adèle was more talkative, and I remember we had a very pleasant discussion about poetry. She invited me to come again, and so I started to visit in the afternoons when I knew Victor would be out, as well as in the evenings, when I knew Victor would be in.
    Adèle and I sat in the drawing room, reading to each other, or walked out with the children to the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was mere minutes away from her house. These were very pleasant excursions and I was content to cultivate my friendship with Madame Hugo at the same time that I was enjoying a friendship with her husband. I never thought of my relations with Adèle as anything other than chaste, until one day I came to her house in the afternoon and walked in to find her fixing the combs in her hair. She was standing in front of the big mirror in the drawing room and her back was to me. The combs weren’t staying in place. She was impatiently trying to stab her hair into submission when a comb fell out and her black hair cascaded down her back. It was that movement – that soft tumble – softer than water falling from a fountain, that released something in me. I cried out, just a small noise, as a child might make in her sleep. Adèle