The Dream Lover (6 page)

Despite this embarrassing setback, I had never felt so alive and happy. I would not give up. There were other people I could ask to read my work, and perhaps one of them would help me. I would not go back now. I could not.

July 1808

NOHANT

I
was four when our little family, having left Spain, arrived at my grandmother's house at Nohant. I had heard my parents speak about my grandmother, sometimes when they knew I was listening and sometimes not. Even when they were saying innocuous or kind things about her, I heard with a child's perception the feeling behind the words. Furthermore, I had heard my mother talk to her sister about the witch who tortured her son because of his love for another woman. I believed that my grandmother was essentially an enemy to us, a presence to be wary of, if not feared.

But here was my father, embracing a diminutive, ivory-complected woman who could not stop smiling. He lifted her off the ground in his enthusiasm, and her little feet dangled in a way that struck me as humorous, though I was careful not to laugh. She had on a brown dress that ignored the empire waistline of the times in favor of a dropped waist, and on top of her head was a little silk cap. She wore a blond wig with a small tuft at the crown, and her face was quite lovely: large eyes, high forehead, straight nose, and a Cupid's bow mouth.

The carrying-on between mother and son lasted for some time, and I heard many variations of expressions for incredulity and joy that we were all finally here. My grandmother at long last separated herself from her son and embraced my mother. Then she bent to kiss the forehead of little Louis, who lay sleeping in my mother's arms. “Poor thing, you are exhausted, I know,” she told my mother, and before my mother could answer, she was whisked away to be cared for by the servants.

Next my grandmother turned to me, and despite her small stature, she seemed very tall and imposing. I stood still and held my breath. She took my face between her hands and said, “You, I myself
will care for.” She grasped my hand and began to lead me off, to where I had no idea. I looked back at my father, and he smiled and nodded, so I let her take me to her chambers. After we passed through the anteroom and into her bedroom, she laid me down on what looked like a kind of chariot. I had never seen the likes of it, not even in the palace where we had stayed in Madrid. It was a high four-poster bed with feathered cornices and double-scalloped curtains. There was a down mattress, and sinking into it made me feel as though I were in a nest. There were lace pillows everywhere, more than I could count.

Just after I had been put into the bed, a tall, thin man came into the room and marched straight to my side. “Aurore, is it?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Very well. Now then, I am Deschartres, and among my many roles here I serve as physician. I am going to examine you.” This he did immediately and quickly, and if not brusquely, then not gently, either. Afterward, he confirmed that I had scabies. “We shall not tell the servants,” he said to my grandmother, who hovered anxiously nearby. “She is almost through it. The baby is infected as well, and of course he is also blind.”

My grandmother gasped, and Deschartres said, “My dear madame, forgive me if I surprise you with this news, but surely you saw that his pupils are crystalline? He is otherwise quite unhealthy as well: listless in manner and quite underweight; he will bear watching.” He pointed at me. “This one will recover in days, if not hours. And now if you have no further need of me…?”

My grandmother nodded, and Deschartres left the room. I could sense that he had not meant to be cruel in telling my grandmother—and me—the things he had. It was simply the unalterable truth: unfortunate but upon us; and so it had to be borne.

My grandmother stood still for a moment, collecting herself. Then she came to sit beside me. “Tell me, child, do you think you can sleep for a bit?”

I nodded.

She fussed with the bed coverings and then left the room: a rustle of silk, the light fall of her footsteps, the residue of her scent, which was then and always vetiver. I heard her pull the door shut, and I took in an enormous breath, then let it go.

At first, exhausted though I was, I could not sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt the rhythm of the carriage and saw again the slow blur of the scenery we had passed, those times I was aware of it, anyway: the villages and fields, the forests, rivers, and churches, the cemeteries with tilting headstones. We had encountered travelers walking on the road who moved to the side to let us pass, staring—peasants, mostly, with their aprons and kerchiefs, but sometimes soldiers, too. Most of the time, I had ridden with my eyes closed, drained of energy and very nearly of feeling, a nonreactive sack of blood and bones; and my poor little brother was even worse off. Every now and then I would hear my mother or father call, “Aurore!” as though from a great distance away. I would open my eyes and look at them; it seemed that was all they wanted, to know that I had heard them. I would keep my eyes open a bit more, my head lolling on my neck, then close them again.

After so long a time on the road, my surroundings here seemed impossibly luxurious. I lay still in the middle of the bed and dared not move for fear it was a dream and would disappear, the bed and the large flowers on the Persian cloth that covered the walls, the finely carved furniture, the high, multipaned windows, the trompe l'oeils in colors of blue and yellow and rose and cream.

It was so cool in that room, and the breeze carried the perfume of flowers. There were no soldiers bumping along in a cart with us, their knees bent high so that they could rest their heads upon them; there was no white-hot sun raising blisters on our flesh; there was no whine of mosquitoes or neighing of weary horses or groan of wooden axles or sounds of distant cannon fire reverberating in one's chest. Instead I heard the call and repeat of the birds, the dim clatter of the kitchen staff preparing a meal. All around me was peace and beauty and a blessed sense of safety. I tried to relax into it, but
in a corner of my mind I kept the memory of the one whose bones we had run over in service of our getting here.

Eventually, I did fall asleep, though not for long. I was roused by a boy of about nine years old, a big boy with thick black hair and full red cheeks, thrusting a ragged bouquet into my face. “Here, girl, these are for you,” he said.

I raised my eyes to my grandmother, who stood with her hand on the boy's shoulder. “This is Hippolyte, who has come to meet you, and whose manners I daresay need improving!” She did not tell me at the time, but this was my half brother, from my father's relationship with the peasant girl.

“Do you want to come outside to play?” Hippolyte asked. He blinked once, twice, then reached his finger up to dig inside his nose.

“Ah là là!”
my grandmother said, tsking, and yanked his hand down from his face. She asked me, “What do you think, my dear? Would you like to go outside?”

I nodded, and within the space of a few minutes, Hippolyte and I were out in the beautiful day, the sky nearing sapphire in its depth of blue, clouds moving slowly, nearly hypnotically, above us. I saw acres of black earth, tall trees, and many varieties of flowers, both wild and cultivated. I stood staring at the star-shaped grass-of-Parnassus, which had delicate, veinlike etchings on each petal, until Hippolyte pulled on my arm, impatient to take me elsewhere.

There was a large vegetable garden, a vine arbor, and thick-trunked walnut trees, whose gentle deterioration only added to their great beauty. There were enclaves of little houses where peasants lived, and Hippolyte showed me his, only a few steps away from my grandmother's house.

The Indre River ran through the land, and Hippolyte brought me to it. He told me he caught fish there with his bare hands. When I looked askance at him, he said, “It is true; I shall show you someday. And then we shall make a fire and cook the poor fellow! I shall pick my teeth with his bones!”

He looked with satisfaction at my face, hoping, I think, that he would see fear. But I was only intrigued and eager to catch a fish myself.

“And now we shall play war,” Hippolyte said, picking up a long stick that I thought would serve as a sword. “I shall be Napoleon.”

“No,” I said. I had had quite enough of war.

“Very well—then I shall be a dog, as I was in a previous life. You will be a cat, and I shall chase you.” He tilted his chin to the sky and barked, then waved his hand imperiously, giving me a head start. “You must run with your tail straight in the air and your back arched. You must be very afraid. You might spit at me a little.”

I considered this, then said, “I shall be a dog as well.”

“Don't be silly. Only boys can be dogs. Girls are cats.”

I stood taller and spoke with great authority: “I am a dog because that is what I want to be, never mind that I am a girl! We shall find a squirrel to be a cat.”

After about half an hour, I came back inside. My grandmother was playing the harpsichord in the drawing room, and I stood shyly at the threshold of the room, watching her. When she saw me there, she called me over to sit beside her on the bench. “Do you play?” she asked. I shook my head. “Never mind,” she said. “You will learn. For now, just listen.”

I sat still, listening, enraptured. After a while, I slid off the bench and lay on the floor beneath the instrument so that I could feel completely enveloped by the music. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep. I was awakened by my father's laughter as he gently pulled at my ankles, then stood me up. “You must offer your apologies to your grandmother for being inattentive to her wonderful performance!”

“No apology is necessary,” my grandmother said. “She is still tired, and anyway, you used to do the same thing, Maurice, you used to lie there in that same spot to listen—do you remember?”

He looked down at me, smiling, a light in his black eyes. “Are
you feeling better, little cabbage?” He put his hand to my forehead. “No fever!”

“I am cured!” I said.

Not so for my baby brother, who mostly lay in my mother's lap, crying in a reedy wail so very different from the robust cries I'd heard from him before. He was like a little animal in a trap who despaired of any help arriving, whose only solace was to make sound out of his suffering.

That night, I awakened in my grandmother's bedroom. I was for a moment completely disoriented. Then I remembered where I was and tried to be glad of my soft bed, to appreciate the beauty of the bright stars I could see out the window. But I missed the presence of my parents. I tiptoed to their room and stood watching as they slept, my mother with my father's arm about her, my baby brother silent in his cradle nearby. I tiptoed over to my brother's cradle and started to lie down on the floor beside him. My mother sat up in bed.

“Aurore!” she whispered.

“Yes, Maman.”

“What are you doing here?”

I didn't answer, merely hung my head.

“Come here,” she said.

When I got to the bed, she moved over to make room for me. I climbed under the covers and nestled close to her. “There,” she said. “Better?”

“Better.”

From that night on, I let myself be put to bed in my grandmother's room, then snuck into my parents' bed. Downstairs, my grandmother slept on a bed made up for her in an otherwise empty space that my father dreamed of turning into a billiards parlor. She would not have approved of my sleeping in my parents' bed. She herself had lived a life largely devoid of passion or even touch. She reportedly had never had relations with her first husband, who
died quite suddenly very early in their marriage. She adored her second husband, my father's father, whom she married when she was just over thirty and he sixty-two, but naturally he was more like a father to her—he even asked her to call him “Papa.” My grandmother, ever on the side of being coddled and cared for, only too readily acquiesced. In addition to that, she was a rationalist, closer to Deschartres in that respect than to her quite romantic and sentimental son. So the kind of natural warmth and openness that was for my parents second nature was to my grandmother something both foreign and distasteful.

But for me, sleeping with my parents was blissful. Oftentimes, before I drifted off, I heard my parents talking about their hopes for my father to quit the military in favor of staying home and pursuing music and theater. I would try to imagine what that would be like. To be able to see both my father and my mother every day!

My mother was in much better spirits when my father was with us, and at those times I suffered far fewer slaps and admonishments from her. As for my father, he never was anything but gentle and loving with me; he had not been shown the rough examples for child rearing that my mother had.

Sometimes my parents lay in bed and talked about me. They praised my intelligence and my inquisitiveness, the way that I charmed my grandmother, even my occasionally imperious attitude toward Hippolyte and the other children from the village with whom we played. My parents also enjoyed it immensely when I irritated Deschartres, fond as my father was of him.

Lying in bed with my parents, I naturally heard, as well, their worries about my brother, but when they started talking about Louis failing, I let myself fall asleep. There was nothing I could do about it.

February 1831

QUAI DES GRANDS-AUGUSTINS

PARIS

I
stood looking out at the city from the room that Jules and I were sharing. The view was of the Pont Neuf, the towers of Notre Dame, the rows of little houses on the Île de la Cité. But I was not really seeing any of those beautiful things. My arms were tightly crossed, and my foot tapped against the floor so relentlessly I feared the neighbors below might complain. The sky was dark, full of rapidly moving clouds, and I was as unsettled as the weather.