Spring 1824
NOHANT
Early on in the marriage, Casimir had procured for me a new piano, which we could ill afford, and I had looked upon it as a great act of love. I loved music, and thanks to my grandmother’s tutelage, I played well. I also knew a great deal about harmony and theory. I played regularly in the evenings, and I thought that my husband enjoyed it. When I played for friends who visited, they complimented me enhusiastically.
But then, in an odd turn, Casimir began abruptly leaving the room whenever I began playing the piano. I knew that his turning away from me then had to do with something other than notes upon the page. Nonetheless, for him and for the sake of our marriage, I gave up my music, which caused me great pain.
And that was not the only thing troubling me. Under Casimir’s direction, that spring Nohant underwent a number of changes that others would call improvements but that I saw as a removal of the rustic things that had made it so charming. The serpentine garden paths, so lovely and wandering, were straightened. Dogs and horses who had gotten old were put to death; no more was I calmed by the sight of old Phanor at the fireside, his graying muzzle resting on his paws. There was a peacock at Nohant, a rascal who raided the strawberries, but he also ate most gently from my hand. When I mentioned to Casimir one evening that I had not seen the peacock that day, he looked up from his soup and with some irritation said, “I told you I was getting rid of him.” He also got rid of dead trees and enlarged the courtyard. In so doing, he destroyed the dark alcoves that had so enchanted me in my youth.
Gradually, Casimir, flexing invisible muscles, renovated virtually everything, most often changing things simply for the sake of change. For me, it was not much different from dogs marking territory. I could not argue with him; he was my husband and so, by law, the care of Nohant was up to him. But after he had finished his “improvements,” I walked outside not with familiar pleasure but with a sense of disorientation and deepest sorrow.
One morning, I sat down at the breakfast table and burst into tears. It surprised me as much as it did Casimir. “What ever is the matter now?” he asked, and I saw that the patience he had shown for me and what he called my moodiness had come to an end.
I calmed myself and tried to speak reasonably: “I think it is probably only springtime and the way it affects me sometimes. I am often made melancholy at this time of year.”
Casimir sighed and shook his head, then resumed eating.
I straightened in my chair and spoke louder: “But also, I am no longer happy living here. Nohant no longer feels like home.”
Casimir put down his fork and leapt up in exuberance. “Thank God you feel this way, for I would live anywhere but here!”
If our reasons for wanting to leave Nohant were not the same, we could at least agree that we wanted to find another place to live; and having that goal in common helped us get along better than we had been. In later years, when I thought of how content other couples were to stay at home with each other, I realized I should have known that our constant moving here and there was only a way of distracting us from what neither of us wanted to face.
It was a life of constant deception that we had come to. When Casimir left me alone for his various excursions into Paris or to other places, I wrote him letters telling him how much I missed him and longed for him to come home. Then, when he came home, I wished that he would go away. For his part, it was the same: in letters, he called me his angel; in person, he scorned my company. We had not gotten, either of us, what we had bargained for, and our only true affection was for a false persona that each of us created on paper.
When we changed residences, we became busy with the myriad details that moving always involves, and we did not have to think about all that was wrong between us. And so we frequently changed residences.
—
CASIMIR WANTED TO GO TO LE PLESSIS, but I was reluctant to wear out our welcome there. And so we arranged with our hosts to contribute to the household costs and stayed with that delightful family for four months.
As always, I loved playing with the children, all kinds of organized games that even included young Maurice, who was still crawling. We marched around the gardens and the immense grounds and chased each other across the lawn. Such simple and pure antics revived my spirit.
Casimir did not see it that way, however. I believe that for him, the children were competition, and his ego was already challenged by my inability to respond to his brusque advances at night. Unable to confess to a jealousy of rosy-cheeked innocents, he converted his feelings to rage and aimed it at me.
One morning, as I was playing with the children on the terrace, I accidentally got sand in Casimir’s coffee cup. “Do that again, and I shall slap you,” he said.
“No, you won’t,” I said, and, in a way I blush now to say I thought was charming, I dropped a few more grains in. He reached over and slapped my cheek, never mind the presence of others—adults as well as children.
Everyone fell silent, embarrassed. I put my hand over the stinging redness and walked away. I was sure that Casimir would follow me, and I did not want him to. I vowed that if he did, I would slap him back and admonish him for his treatment of me.
Yet when he did not follow me, I sat forlorn at the base of a tree and bawled like a calf. I wept because I missed the Nohant of my youth. I wept because of my naïveté in getting married, at the ideas I’d had about the lovely life I would lead. And I wept because I had been taught to hold my tongue and not challenge authority and because Casimir, as my husband, had authority over me. There was nothing for me to do in retaliation except what I did do: that night, when we went to bed, I completely rejected Casimir’s advances. I told him I was in the bed with him only because I had to be. “If we were at Nohant,” I said, “I would be in my little room, in my hammock, and all the better for it.”
“Be my guest,” said my husband. “Go to your hammock.”
I laughed. “And how would I get there?”
“For all I care, you can walk.” He turned away from me. In a few moments, he began to snore. I lay wide awake, thinking of the rumor I had heard that he had a mistress in Paris, and how I had offered only the mildest of reproaches. In a letter, I’d told him to sleep well but alone, in a nearly jocular way. I wanted to let him know that I knew and did not approve. That was as far as I could go. I couldn’t divorce him for adultery—the law was infuriating and unfair for the way it permitted a man to divorce his wife for infidelity, but not the other way around.
And so I lay there and listened to him snore.
August 1833
PARIS
Alfred de Musset and I returned from Fontainebleau to Paris happy and well rested. The day after, I met Marie for coffee and told her that she had been right to suggest a getaway for Alfred and me. “What did I tell you?” she said. “It is refreshing to have a different view out your window, and of your beloved.” She leaned forward, her eyes flashing. “And it spices things up, am I right?”
I looked down into my cup.
“Yes, I can see that I am right. I am happy for you, my darling. And what welcome news for Alfred to come back to!”
The August 15 issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes had just been published. In it was a long poem of Alfred’s that took up twenty-five pages and had been wonderfully well received. His public acclaim spread far and wide. One night, as we went up the steps to the Opéra, Alfred flung aside an unfinished cigar he had been smoking, and it was eagerly snatched up by a young woman, who wrapped it in her handkerchief and then called out to him. He ignored her, blushing; I gave her a little wave and playfully chided Alfred for his coolness toward his adoring fan.
At the end of August, the children left for Nohant, and Alfred moved into my apartment with me. I relished the presence of him there, as well as the routine we developed: I worked all night while he slept; then, in the morning, when I slept, he worked until I arose. We would spend the late afternoons and evenings together: walk out, dine, r
ead aloud to each other, make love; and then I would all but tuck him into our bed and go to the desk in my dressing gown.
There was no more coming home to a darkened room with a ticking clock the only sound therein, a single cigarette put out in a saucer the only evidence of someone having been there. Alfred loved me. And being loved let me breathe, let me work, let me live.%
December 1833
PARIS
Alfred and I decided to go to Italy for the winter. He had not been working well, and he hoped that a place so inspiring to other poets would reawaken his creativity.
I was extremely disciplined, and I knew I would have no trouble taking up my pen every night, no matter where I was. I got an advance from Buloz for what was to be my “Italian novel,” which I was certain would be inspired by our trip, and I promised to deliver it by June.
I had Solange with me at that time, and I made arrangements for my maid to bring her back to her father at Nohant. Maurice was in school in Paris and would be able to go to my mother’s for his days off. There was one last thing to do before we left, a visit I felt compelled to make.
Alfred’s mother, the vicomtesse de Musset, had reportedly rather coldly tolerated our living together. Then, when Alfred told her of our plans to travel to Italy for such a long time, she became greatly agitated.
It had not bothered Alfred or me when his friends protested our going. They predicted our trip would be a disaster. But then they would: his friends had never embraced me. For one thing, I was an impediment for him living the kind of wild life he had enjoyed with them before he moved in with me: the drinking, the opium, the prostitutes.
His mother’s protests were another story. He was very close to her, and whatever grief she suffered tore at his own heart. As a mother myself, I understood the nervous concerns of a woman who had lost two of her children in infancy; and there was the added sorrow of having lost her husband so recently. Alfred, her youngest child and reportedly her favorite, suffered frequent bouts of ill health. I could imagine what might be going through her head: What if something happens when he is so far away from me? Who will care for him? I knew from experience that one worried about one’s children as a matter of course, but when one was separated from them, the worries became magnified.
On the day of our departure, I told Alfred I would go to see his mother in order to reassure her face-to-face that he would be well looked after.
“It isn’t necessary,” Alfred said.
But I told him, “I shall be back shortly,” and went downstairs to secure a carriage. I soon arrived at the townhouse at 59 Rue de Grenelle and asked the driver to go to the door and request that madame come out to speak with me briefly. After several minutes, Alfred’s mother exited the house and climbed into the carriage to sit opposite me.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.
She merely nodded. Her mouth was set, her chin trembling.
“I want to assure you that I love your son with all my heart and I will look after him while we are away.”
“He is often not well,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears.
My heart opened to her. “Yes, I know that, but I know, too, what seems to make him recover.”
There was a long silence. The horse stomped its hooves and shook its head, pulling restlessly at the reins. The driver spoke sharply to it, and it stilled.
Finally, the vicomtesse sighed and took my hands into hers. “I feel I have no choice, for if he is not with you, he will fall into his old ways, which nearly killed him. I wish he would not go so far from his mother, who adores him, but I can see by your coming here that your affection and concern for him are real. Therefore, I give you reluctant permission. Please remind him to write to me as often as he can.”
“I shall have no need to remind him; he adores you.”
We embraced each other, and then she climbed out of the cab. All the way back to my apartment, I smiled. I was about to embark on a romantic voyage with the man I loved, and the news I would share with him now would make him able to enjoy it as much as I. Solange was being delivered safely back to Nohant; Maurice was safely ensconced in school. I leaned back against the carriage seat and thought, All will be well. There was no other time in my life where expectation was such an ill fit against reality.
Spring 1825
NOHANT
In the fall, Casimir and I had left Le Plessis and moved to a small apartment on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I thought it would do me good to be near friends and family, but in the spring I fell into a deep depression. At my wit’s end, I sought out my old confessor at the convent, and he suggested that a little retreat there could do me good.
What a tonic, at first, was that dearly familiar place. I had once been so sure I wanted to live out my days in that convent, whether as a nun or a boarder. I had relished the communal living, where one was simultaneously alone but with others; now I wondered if I had made the right decision in leaving. It seemed that I had allowed myself to be dissuaded from what had been a true calling, that I had abandoned sublimity for practicality.
Lying once again in a narrow bed and hearing the locks click at night, I felt the calm that came with the implied imperative to pray and to meditate. All around me were minds engaged in the same gentle, soundless practice; all around me was peace. That feeling stood in stark contrast to the doubts and furies and sadness of my marriage.
In confusion, I sought out the nun we had called Madame Alicia, whom I had much admired. After listening to me talk about how I felt I might have made a mistake in leaving the convent, she told me I was blessed to be living the life I was. “Were you really so happy here before?” she asked. “I recall the despair you felt from time to time. I recall your frustration at not being able to achieve what you wanted here. You must remember that the turtle carries his house with him wherever he goes. If you were to return to the convent, if you were to abandon the life you have made for yourself outside these walls, I believe you would soon regret it. You are not a fickle child any longer, Aurore, with the luxury of being able to run here and there and everywhere, claiming each time that this is where you want to be forever. No, you must choose a place to be, and commit fully to it.”
“But how do I discover which place that should be?” I asked.
She put her hand to my cheek. “I believe you know already. It is a matter of admitting to yourself what you love most. And that has less to do with love than with courage.”
I realized I was not fit any longer for the convent. I was a mother, first and foremost; I would stay in my marriage and raise my son.
—
AT ONE POINT, I realized I had not heard from or about Deschartres for some time. After making inquiries at the place where he lived, I learned that he was dead. He had taken a business risk and lost all of his fortune. Not long afterward, he had died.
I heard no fond words about him from anyone. My half brother, Hippolyte, mourned him the way one mourns the passing of anyone who loomed large in one’s youth (which is to say that Hippolyte mourned not Deschartres but the loss of his own youth), but he had never liked our tutor, not as a child and not as an adult. My mother’s eulogy was to write in a letter to me, “Finally he is gone!” The people in the Berry countryside had respected him, but they’d also feared and ridiculed him.
It was true that he’d been short-tempered and eccentric, and one could easily tire of his dogma. But he’d also been an honest and charitable and trustworthy man.
It was ironic. For all his intelligence, he had failed to grasp a simple truth: he needed some form of love, and he had found it at Nohant. Leaving that place, he lost it. It was my belief that because of the mistakes he had made, he took his own life—stoically, of course. Neatly.
I had always known that I would miss him when he was gone; I had not foreseen how much.
With his death went one who had known my father and who adored my child as I did, one with whom I could still have spirited academic discussions, one whom I mig
ht ask questions of and receive an unfiltered answer with no regard as to how I might feel about that answer; and this, it turns out, is more valuable than it might seem.
After my father died, I felt that Deschartres always looked out for me. He might not have felt it his place to comment directly upon the events and people and decisions in my life, but he was a vital witness, one on whom I had depended in many ways since I’d been that wide-eyed four-year-old who had arrived rather unceremoniously at Nohant.
When I learned of his passing, I took a long walk through the grounds that he had so carefully tended. Despite the changes Casimir had wrought, I saw my old friend’s hand everywhere. I prayed for a heaven in which he would sit once more playing parlor games with my grandmother, who had loved him best of all.%
June 1825
THE SOUTH OF FRANCE
Though I tried not to show it, I was now desperately unhappy with Casimir. And I had no one in whom I could confide and be comforted by. My mother was increasingly a stranger to me. In the letters she sent, she made fun of the ones I had sent to her, telling me I was putting on airs with my language and saying that she prayed I did not begin speaking as I wrote. Yet this woman of the people had adopted a name similar to those of the old countesses she used to make fun of: she asked me to address her letters to “Madame de Nohant-Dupin.”
I did find solace in my child. I read to Maurice. I took walks outside with him and watched him crouch down with his hands on his knees to gravely inspect grass and rocks and insects. I played hide-and-seek with him, and whenever I found him in his hiding place, he would laugh himself breathless. After I laid him down to sleep, I would stand watching him, full of love.