“Yes, Grandmama.”
“Very well, then. Bear in mind that I am telling you this for your own good and not to avenge myself. I offer this to you rather than simply ridding myself of you, which would be the easier thing to do.”
I felt an eerie coldness at the back of my head. It was a shock for me to understand that my grandmother had despaired of me, too. I was still enough of a child to think that I would be pardoned for virtually anything.
My grandmother drew in a deep breath. “Now, then. First I shall speak to you about myself and the way I was brought up. Then I shall tell you about my beloved son. I want you to know about the way he was raised and about the relationship we enjoyed, at least until he met your mother. And then I am going to tell you the truth about her.”
I sat unmoving, my eyes on the floor.
Almost half an hour later, she said, “You may go now; I am tired.”
It was with great difficulty that I rose up from my knees. I felt myself to be a leaden mass, empty of feeling. I curtsied and wordlessly took leave of the woman who had told me things I had not known, and that she never should have told me, at least not without mentioning the desperate measures that are taken by poor people that rich people will never understand. My grandmother had coldly told me that my mother was a whore when my father met her and that she had gone back to her old profession in Paris. That if I intended to resume my relationship with her, I would forfeit any benefits my grandmother had intended to give me, not because of my own merits but on behalf of her son. Worst, my grandmother told me that it was entirely likely that my father was not my father at all. According to calculations my grandmother had made long ago, my father was many miles away from my mother, fighting in the war, at the time she would have been impregnated.
That night, I sat for a long while at the edge of my bed, staring out the window at the darkness and the cold pinpricks of the stars. I was trying to comprehend all I had wrought in my outburst to Julie only a few days ago. Up until now, my mother had never been directly criticized, and there had been moments of accord and what seemed like mutual respect between my grandmother and her. Now, because of what I had said, I had been told things about her I would never be able to forget, including the fact that she may have created me with someone I would never know.
I felt a rush of defiance. I went to the mirror and looked for evidence of my father in my face. There! Did I not have his black eyes, his curly black hair? And then I wept, because I could no longer be sure that those things came from him. I stood trembling, telling myself that whether my father gave my mother his seed to make me or not was irrelevant; he gave her his heart. And he gave it to me, as well. He had been present at my birth and had made his mark upon me in raising me from the very beginning. Even in his absence, I breathed him in and breathed him out; he was my true father.
And then I lay on the bed and wept most disconsolately, for I realized I could not be sure of anything anymore. What I regretted most profoundly was my loss of any vestige of home. I myself was the only home I had.
January 1833
QUAI MALAQUAIS
PARIS
My novella La Marquise came out in serial form in the Revue de Paris just after I returned to the city from another stay at Nohant. It again featured a young woman sold into marriage, but this time, she is an aristocrat, and her husband dies. All around her expect that she will remarry, or at least have lovers. She does neither. Her feeling is that she has had quite enough of men until, at the theater one night, she falls instantly in love with an actor named Lélio. How embarrassing for her, that one of her station should be enamored of one so low! And not even an irresistible specimen but, rather, one frail and weak-seeming. To add to that, his voice is high and screechy, his mannerisms effeminate. But the marquise is besotted by the young man. She confides her feelings for him to a friend, who warns her never to let anyone else know. And so the lovesick woman dresses in men’s clothes so as to be unrecognizable and to have the opportunity to go to the theater and see the object of her desire every night. They eventually become lovers, and when they end their relationship, it is because the marquise finds herself unworthy of him.
This novel was inspired by the first time I saw the actress Marie Dorval perform upon the stage, in 1831, not long after I had first arrived in Paris. The play was Victor Hugo’s tragedy Marion de Lorme; it was based on Alfred de Vigny’s novel Cinq-Mars. Vigny was currently Marie Dorval’s lover. She was rumored to have had many lovers, some of them women, actresses with whom she had worked.
The night I saw her, when I stood beneath the gaslights dressed as a man and watched a performance of such simplicity and grace, I understood immediately why Marie was known as the sensation of the romantic theater, the brightest star of the Comédie-Française. I saw why she was the muse of great playwrights: Hugo and Vigny and Alexandre Dumas.
“Love has given me a new virginity,” she said from the stage that night, and the line seemed directed to me.
I more than admired her, I felt irretrievably caught by her. I wanted to know her, to spend time with her, to be a valued friend of hers; but I felt as helpless in that desire as any unknown who longs to make an impression on someone so renowned.
When my own reputation began to grow, I thought perhaps I would write to her and see if anything came of it. I sent her a letter that was lighthearted in tone, yet carefully calculated to impress.
The next morning, Jules came to see me, and we were having coffee. There was a knock on the door, and when I opened it, Marie Dorval catapulted into my life. “It’s me; here I am!” she cried, rushing to embrace me. In a brilliant shift all the world became a vessel for her support; all but Marie and her golden curls and her narrow waist and her remarkable lightness in movement dropped away. That throaty voice! Here it was at my table, and those blue eyes, now directed only at me!
“I received your letter, and I came straightaway, as you see.” She was out of breath, and she took a moment to remove her ermine muff and heavy mantle. Beneath it, she wore a dark green velvet morning dress accented at the shoulder and down the center by a lighter green silk, and the fichu pelerine draped over her shoulders had the delicacy of a dusting of snow. She sat at the table, placed a hand upon her breast, and smiled radiantly. But then her face changed, and she stared into her lap and spoke in a low, almost tremulous voice: “I will tell you, as an unknown, I myself once wrote to a great actress, my heart in my palm. Her reception was ice. I was full of shame. I pulled at my hair and pounded my bosom, I wanted to reel in time and snatch my letter back. Fool! I said to myself, over and over. Imbecile! I imagined the pages I had so long deliberated over flung aside, wadded up and thrown in the rubbish. Thus did I vow that if ever it was my turn, I would rush to the one so full of longing, take hold of that hand, and say, ‘Yes, I have heard your words! I have taken them with great care into my heart, they are enshrined at my very core!’ ”
She looked up at me. “Have you no coffee for me?”
In my haste to accommodate her, I rose too quickly and knocked my own coffee over. My face reddened as I offered an apology, as I moved my napkin quickly to keep the spill from advancing onto her lap, where she had laid a most fetching feather bonnet; the satin ribbon ties hung nearly to the floor. She reached out to grab hold of my wrist and told me with her eyes that it mattered not in the least. With this conspiratorial glance, she confirmed what I’d suspected the first time I’d seen her upon the stage: we knew each other. Even before meeting, we knew each other. At that moment, what little light I had left for Jules went out.
Marie explained that my letter had had a deep effect on her—Incroyable! said she—and she said as well that she knew it had been written by someone with the heightened sensibilities she shared. She waved her hands about when she spoke; they flew like little white doves around her face.
Even now, I cannot account for the immediate reaction I had to her. In principle, I sought to gain for women the rights they were due and denie
d, but in practice I did not want to spend much time with them. I found women too often hysterical, too complaining of things that merited no real complaint, too weighted down by their petty concerns to see, much less engage in, the larger world. For the most part, I felt they did not use their God-given intellect but subjugated it. Probably my infatuation, and then my abiding love for Marie was because of her adherence to her own character: both on and off the stage she projected a burning naturalness, a sense of true and vital self.
I knew the cost of such uncompromising ways. As there were ceaseless rumors about me, there were stories of Marie and the multiple lovers she took without apology, without any effort at disguise—in fact, oftentimes her husband was in the adjoining room. But she walked with her head up, moving at the pace she desired, impervious to the vultures. I very much admired this.
She invited Jules and me to dine with her on Sunday night. I accepted for both of us, but in truth I was speaking purely for myself, imagining only Marie and me at that table, by candlelight, in solidarity, at the precipice. It seemed to me that everything in my life that had preceded her had prepared me for her. And it seemed, too, that everything I had longed for and not yet found was in her.
—
WHEN JULES AND I went to dine with Marie Dorval, her husband, and her lover, Alfred de Vigny, I dressed with some care. I now wore men’s clothes almost exclusively, and that night I decided to wear a new single-breasted purple surtout that reached to my ankles, made warm by padding from shoulders to chest. It had black velvet trim and silver buttons. Beneath, I wore my usual close-fitting trousers, my waistcoat, a frilled shirt, and a black silk cravat tied waterfall-style. My boots were high and tasseled.
Marie wore a low-cut silk gown of midnight blue, stiffened blond lace trimming the back as well as the tops of the beribboned beret sleeves. The bodice was draped à la Sévigné, featuring horizontal bands with a boned divider, and so it showed the devastating beauty of her shoulders and bosom. She wore drop pearl earrings and a pendant brooch and had tucked small white silk flowers into her hair, which was parted down the center and fashioned into a version of the Apollo knot. Blue was a color I thought she should always wear, and I told her so.
“Ah, but if I am always in blue, you will never see me in yellow, or pink, or white, which also suit me.” The expression on her face when she said this was self-mocking, but she was serious, too: she was ever a woman keenly aware of all of her gifts, and if beauty was among them, so be it.
What we ate I cannot recall. In fact, had you asked me while I was eating what it was, I would have been loath to answer, for it would have taken my attention from the dazzling subject at hand—the only subject, so far as I was concerned, though our lively conversation covered theater, the books of the American James Fenimore Cooper, the subjectivity of memory, and the relative merits of the divas at the Théâtre des Italiens.
I was curious to see if what I remembered about her from our brief earlier visit remained true, if each of her emotions was made physical. It was. She seemed passionate about everything—her opinion, your opinion, the taste of the food, the rush of wind outside the window—and all of it was made manifest by a body that truly was an instrument. I had not known how nuanced the lifting of an eyebrow could be until I met Marie; nor had I realized the many variations of a smile, or the language of fingers, or what invitation or admonishment could be issued by the briefest of looks. The modulations in her speaking voice rivaled those of an opera singer’s.
There are people one meets in life whom one wants to please, inadvertent kings and queens in the various societies in which we live. And they do not demand this for themselves; rather, it is we admiring subjects who demand it for them by virtue of who they simply are and cannot help being. I wanted to please Marie Dorval. I wanted to hear every story about herself she deigned to tell, and I wanted her to hear all of mine. I felt a great sense of urgency in her presence, and I was impatient with the other guests, who, to my way of thinking, interfered most annoyingly with what was nascent between us.
It took me a long time to see that there were striking similarities between Marie and my mother, even after she told me the circumstances of her upbringing, which resembled my mother’s. I suppose I did not want to recognize the similarities. I suppose I wanted a new start in an old game, no matter the cost to me.
Marie-Thomase-Amélie Delauney, a child of actors, was born out of wedlock in 1798. She was put onto the stage as soon as she could talk; she was a beautiful child and even at that age had a charismatic presence. When she was fifteen, she married an actor named Allan Dorval. He died only a few years later, but by then Marie had three daughters. She then married a man she did not love but liked well enough, and trusted: one Jean-Toussaint Merle, director of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. What mattered most about him, she later told me, was that he understood her. Which was to say, he would look the other way when she did what she needed to do. He entered into his relationship with her with his eyes wide open, knowing that she would have lovers of either sex whenever she was moved to.
That night at dinner, I sat like a tightly wound clock, the hours ticking away, hoping for a time when she and I could be alone and without distraction. I sensed this was why she had invited me in the first place.
She was then and always a gracious hostess, dividing her attention among everyone gathered there, even acquiescing to her husband in a way that I thought was beneath her. Weren’t the revolutionary times we were living in an imperative to stand up for yourself? Did this not require women to change their attitudes not only toward their husbands but, indeed, all men?
It was only as I was taking my leave that Marie spoke in confidence to me. She gripped my hand tightly and stood so close that I could smell the after-dinner anise on her breath. “To think of all that we shall do!” she said, and before I could answer she drew nearer still to say, “Everything about you is exciting to me. You are what men should be.”
Jules came over to me then, flinging his cloak about himself, taking my arm, and we went out the door together. At first, we did not speak, and then Jules laughed and said, “A bit excessive, is she not? Such people are best enjoyed from theater seats.”
I stepped away and turned to face him. “Such people,” I said, “are luminosities we are privileged to enjoy.”
“You exaggerate and romanticize,” he said. “As is your habit.” To which I responded, “And you see like a blind man. As is yours.”
—
I thought I had seen Vigny’s disapproval of me at dinner. A few days later, thanks to the relentless chain of Paris gossip, my suspicions were confirmed. I learned that this lover of Marie’s had told others that what he called my “manlike ways” were very unappealing: my dress, my clumsy gait, my low voice, my forthright manner. I was not so much bothered by this; and it did not keep me from liking him. But I feared that his opinion might change Marie’s response to me. And so I sent her a note:
Do you really think you can endure me? That is something you cannot know yet, nor I. I am such a bear, so stupid, so slow to put my thoughts to words, so awkward and so dumb just when my heart is fullest. Do not judge me by externals. Wait a little before deciding how much pity and affection you can give me. I feel that I love you with a heart rejuvenated and altogether renewed by you. If that is just a dream, like everything else I have ever wanted in my life, do not wake me from it too soon. It does me so much good. Goodbye, you great and lovely person.
She never answered that letter, and later I worried at the way I had opened myself to her. But I believed that speaking the truth was more honorable than obfuscating it. I waited with hope and even assurance for our next visit, which came soon.
November 1817
NOHANT
After my grandmother’s dark revelations, I lived in a kind of limbo. I was not gone from Nohant, but I was not really there anymore, either. I paid little attention to my studies in favor of running wild with the children of the village, an
d I spent long hours alone in my room, ignoring the lessons I’d been asked to do. My grandmother’s words, so heartlessly delivered, changed my idea of myself. If my mother was contemptible, then I, her daughter, must be as well. I no longer loved life. I cared nothing for myself, and my future seemed bleak. I considered suicide, but it was an adolescent’s romantic idea of that desperate act; it did not have the weight or gravity that times of such desperation would assume later in my life. An abiding consolation at this time was my black dog, Phanor. Seeming to sense my despair and wanting to ameliorate it, he did not leave my side. His exuberant acceptance of any attention I showed him was my only joy.
But no matter what pain I endured, it was always my habit to gravitate back to hope, and to the idea that I must live for someone or something. Whatever her wrongdoings, I forgave my mother, and I continued to love her.
The same went for my grandmother, though I had decided that I would passively reject what she desired for me: a formal education followed by a marriage that she would arrange. I had seen enough of society marriages to know that they were nothing I desired.
At thirteen, I had grown enough in size and strength that when I failed in my studies or in my behavior, my maid was no longer able to discipline me with blows. She knew that she would be likely to get back what she gave. She described me as an enfant terrible, and I suppose from her point of view, she was right. From my point of view, I was only starting to claim what was my due.
After some time, my grandmother called me to her for another talk, which I’d known in my heart had been coming.