But the nights came. Or times of idleness in midday, when I pressed my hands and forehead against the windowpanes as if seeking a way out. Or times when Casimir and I sat silently in the parlor together after dinner because he had rebuffed all my efforts at conversation, letting me know by his sour or vacant expression that he preferred not to weary or bore himself by responding to anything I said. At these times, which happened with more and more frequency, I felt a shredding despair so acute I wondered that I did not begin to bleed.
And then I did begin to bleed. I developed a respiratory ailment, a cough that would not go away, and oftentimes I coughed so hard that I brought up blood. I feared I was consumptive, and when I confided this to Casimir, he dismissed me with a laugh. “When will you stop being so dramatic?” he asked.
In late June, we were paid a visit by two young women with whom I had gone to school at the convent. It was a tonic to see Jane and Aimée Bazouin, even though their normal gaiety was dimmed from their having lost their oldest sister to an early death. In order to get all of their minds off that sadness, their father was taking them to the hot springs at Cauterets, in the middle of the Pyrénées Mountains in the south of France. People went there to heal not only physical ailments but spiritual ones as well.
Maurice’s birthday was on June 30, and my twenty-first birthday would follow on July 5. It was decided that afterward, Casimir, Maurice, and I would join my friends at Cauterets, then journey on to the Dudevant country house in Gascony. “Perhaps the change in scenery will do something for you,” Casimir said.
It did indeed, though not in a way either of us expected.
—
When the coach pulled up to Nohant, ready to transport Casimir, Maurice, and me to the mountains, I was alone in my room. I made a note in my journal bidding goodbye to Nohant, for I feared that I might never see it again if I was, in fact, consumptive. But then, smiling in the false manner to which I had become accustomed, I climbed in for the four-hundred-mile-long journey, which would take several days.
On the first day, I tried reading the poetry of Ossian, but darkness soon overcame us, and I was resigned to sitting with my thoughts. I closed my book and looked out at nothing, trying to block out the ceaseless complaints of my husband, who found no joy in the journey and could focus only on when we were going to arrive.
When we traveled through Châlus and Périgueux, my heart was aching. But by the time we passed Tarbes, I felt a change in my mood. When we got closer to the mountains, I moved to the top of the coach, where Casimir was, to ride with him and the driver. Casimir was still irritable at how long the trip was taking, and asking imperious questions of the driver, as if the man were trying to deceive him, or as if the trip would be cut in half if only he could take the reins.
As for me, I wanted to better see the breathtaking scenery: the poetic undulation of the land and the majestic rise of the snowcapped mountains in the distance, never mind the heat and dust of where we presently were. Those mountains were awe-inspiring not only in their breadth and height and beauty but by the plain fact of them being there, by the mystery of their creation.
After we reached the foothills and began our steep climb up, both Casimir and I were often overcome with fits of a nervous laughter. In those instances, I felt closer to him and began to think perhaps we could find our way back into the kind of happiness we had once enjoyed. I looked forward to our having a relaxing vacation together.
Outside of Cauterets, we were met by Jane and Aimée, and then we went on to our hotel, where we had a furnished apartment. I felt greatly content to be there.
When I awakened the next morning, we were surrounded by fog. Then, little by little, the landscape began to reveal itself. It seemed an apt metaphor for what I was experiencing, for the way I felt Casimir and I were coming back to life. But then I realized I was to be left alone: Casimir was going hunting; he would be gone until nightfall. “But what am I to do all day?” I asked.
“We are here for your health, are we not? I suggest therefore that you attend to it.” The door closed behind him. He was off to the out-of-doors and to adventure, where he would see the wondrous things we had been told about: waterfalls coming from rock walls that rose straight up several thousand feet and bridges made of snow, crafted by nature, though they looked like the handiwork of skilled stonemasons. Casimir let me know that he meant to go hunting often, if not every day. And starting tomorrow, he would leave at the proper time: so early in the morning that it would still be night.
As for me, I was meant to stay in the hotel and take the cure, which required the charming activity of being doused with water and then wrapped in a blanket for hours. Then I would be surrounded by society people whose attempts at conversation, I knew, would be anything but stimulating to me. They would be an imitation of the many dinners I had been made to endure in Paris. Those people may have been fine for Jane and Aimée, but I was incensed. I soon found a more like-minded friend with whom I could escape, and escape with her I did.
Her name was Zoé Leroy, and she was the twenty-eight-year-old redheaded daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant. She was staying with her family across the street from me. The streets were so narrow in that town that one could carry on a conversation across them, and that is how Zoé and I began our friendship, each of us looking out our windows one morning, exchanging pleasantries at first about the beauty of our surroundings. But then one day Zoé said, “I must confess that I find it a bit dull here.” With that admission, with which I robustly agreed, we were soon taking excursions on horseback by ourselves, galloping along the narrow mountain roads and, when they got too narrow, walking on them. Rather than lying pale and wan beneath my blanket at the hotel, I was outside, leaping from boulder to boulder in clean air under a turquoise sky, hoping to encounter a bear. My companion had no husband ordering her about or restraining her, and I relished the freedom I, too, enjoyed by being with her.
One day, Zoé and I were joined by a friend of hers, a twenty-six-year-old man named Aurélien de Sèze. He came from a long line of prominent jurists and was himself distinguished as a junior at the Bordeaux Bar. With his thick, dark, curly hair, large black eyes, and oval face, he rather resembled me, I thought. I had no belief in love at first sight, yet upon meeting him I felt an undeniable visceral stirring; and I believed Aurélien when he later told me that love at first sight is precisely what he felt for me. We discovered early on that we were true soul mates, despite the fact that he was a monarchist and a devout Catholic, whereas my beliefs—political and religious—bordered on or were frankly heretical.
Zoé was only too happy to help facilitate Aurélien’s and my relationship. In one of our confidential chats, I had told her, “I may have married too soon.”
“What you did, my dear, was to marry the wrong man,” she said. “He is all dullness to your effervescence. He is crippling you.”
She had had enough of Casimir even before the day he chastised her and me for “making ourselves conspicuous.” This is what he called it when, on a trip from Cauterets to Gavarnie, Zoé and I rode ahead of our party in order to escape their empty chatter and constant complaints.
“What a relief to be without those citizens from the land of banality,” she told me as we waited for them to catch up. “Let us enjoy ourselves before they get here. Let us take in this extraordinary beauty in a conspicuous way!” I laughed, but her face grew serious and she said, “Aurore, you must never apologize for your superior intelligence and your insight. You have so much more to offer than those others who spend their entire lives never having one serious thought! And you deserve so much more than you have!”
I knew exactly whom she thought I deserved.
Aurélien was rich, he was handsome, he was an aristocrat; but what drew me to him was his facility with language and his natural wit. He was the most well-spoken person I had ever known and, like me, adored poetry. He was able to converse with ease and insight on many subjects, including philosophy and reli
gion and literature, subjects that Casimir had no interest in.
Aurélien was engaged to a beautiful young woman named Laure Le Hoult, whom, he soon confided, he had discovered to be uninteresting and cold, with a flatness to her personality that her dazzling good looks had at first obscured. This he told me on a day when Casimir again went hunting and left me to seek my own pleasure, and my pleasure that day was a horseback ride with Aurélien. We had stopped by a stream to let the horses drink when he walked over to stand close to me, a warm light in his eyes. “I hope I will not offend you by telling you that meeting you has convinced me that I have made a mistake in proposing to Laure. Had I known that there was a woman such as you—”
“I am married, Aurélien.”
“As I am aware. And in sharing this with you, I mean only to…”
He sighed and looked into my eyes, and I felt a yearning to step closer that was so strong I had to move away.
But I was pleased by the admission; I could not hide it. After so long a time of feeling unwanted and unloved by Casimir, I found Aurélien’s words wonderfully uplifting. But when he put his arm around me, I gave him a look that made him rapidly remove it.
“Aurélien,” I said, “I believe you may have been as deceived by me as much as by your fiancée. I am not always the gay adventuress you have been spending time with these last few days. I am oftentimes melancholy, full of an unhappiness I cannot explain, and in that state I am seemingly unreachable. So far as I can tell, my future is one of sadness; I have no hope that things can change. I cannot leave my husband, nor do I believe that I will ever achieve any sense of joy with him. I have chosen badly, but I have chosen. And miserable though I may occasionally be, I would feel worse if I were to betray my morals.”
“Then I will console you in your misery,” he said. He moved closer to me and pressed his lips to my neck.
It burned me. Literally. I jumped away from him and chided him, but my words could not convey an anger I did not feel, and he understood me to be glad of his affections. And there we were. Powerless to move forward or back, suspended in a way both agonizing and delicious.
He apologized, shamefaced. “It is exceedingly difficult to keep my ardor in check around you, Aurore. Yet my morals are the same as yours. And so at times when my will is weak and I attempt to make advances, I must ask you to resist me.”
We made a pact, then, to embrace our platonic romance, to find and enjoy in each other the pleasures we could not find in the people we were bound to.
—
WHEN A TRAGEDY OCCURS, one has a moment of innocence upon awakening the day after; one has forgotten the sadness of the day before. But then sorrow lands heavily at the center of the breast and all but steals the breath away. So it is with joy; one awakens having forgotten a happy event, and then remembers, and experiences a feeling like being shot through with light.
The day after Aurélien’s admission to me, I awakened, lay still in the bed, and then laughed aloud. I put my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound, but I had no need for doing so: Casimir was long gone, as usual, and rather than feel abandoned, I was relieved.
It was a very different feeling than when I had first been left to my own devices. Then, I had made a melancholy entry in my diary that spoke of how, when a husband took himself from his wife’s side because of duty, it was a sadness shared and tolerated by the two of them, the sadness mitigated by the expectation of the pleasure they would enjoy when they were reunited. But if a husband needed to be away from his wife in order to live his life more fully, the wife experienced a loneliness made worse by humiliation.
It was not humiliation I was feeling now but a galvanizing excitement. I rose to tend to my toilette, to dress and breakfast, to spend time with Maurice before turning him over to the nursemaid, and then to go outside to find Aurélien.
Cauterets was a small town, and it was easy, not to say inevitable, to run into people again and again. I saw Aurélien often: with his fiancée, with Zoé, and, for brief, exhilarating periods of time, alone.
At one point, we went on a boat ride, and he carved the first three letters of our names into the boat. I had watched him doing it, but when he finished, I looked off into the distance, as if I had been unaware. “Look,” he said. “Even our names begin the same way.”
I made a face that suggested a kind of indifference I did not feel, and it hurt him. This spontaneous and joyful act, inspired by love, he now saw as juvenile and overly revealing; and he probably wished he could snatch the moment back for the sake of his dignity. The color rose in his face, he pocketed his knife, and we spoke very little until we reached the shore again, where we parted ways.
For the next three days, Aurélien did not speak to me. I suffered more in those three days than I ever had with Casimir; I wanted to die. Even the darling antics of little Maurice did not lift my spirits: those times I took him from his nursemaid, I felt I had nothing to offer him. Having enjoyed with Aurélien the brightness of an engaged and loving presence who aroused a sensuality in me that I had despaired of ever finding, now I could not—or at least did not want to—be without it.
The next evening, the sky was dramatically streaked with violet and rose, and I went outside alone to enjoy it. I was walking in the street when I saw Aurélien coming toward me. I went quickly to him and asked if I might have a word.
“I am on my way to meet my fiancée and her family,” he said, in a way so pointed I felt sure it was designed to hurt me. But then, seeing the pain in my eyes, Aurélien took my arm and led me into the shadows. “What is it?”
I stood straight before him, my hands clasped tightly together. “I want to tell you that I did not respond to your romantic and endearing gesture of carving our initials on the boat because I’d promised to resist you. If I had shown you what it meant to me, one thing would have led to another, and we would be engaged in something we would end up regretting. Acting on our love would put an end to it, because we would not survive the pain we would cause innocent others. I must ask again: Given our circumstances, would it not be best for us to be chaste lovers, sharing of each other’s minds and hearts alone? Might we in this way honor our obligations and yet satisfy our deepest desires?”
I knew, asking him this, that men were unlike women, that it was much more difficult for them to be without some sort of physical expression of their ardor. But Aurélien said, “Aurore, I love you for your mind and your soul, your superior intellect. It is not now nor has it ever been my intention to cause you any pain. I am sorry if you suffered on my account, thinking that I would ever ask you to do otherwise. I am, my dearest, quite simply yours; and obliging you is my best happiness.”
I could not speak for joy, and his face was radiant. He took my hand, kissed it, and we walked our separate ways. I felt my life had tipped on its axis toward the proper angle. Even the prospect of Casimir coming home and regaling me for hours with what he believed were scintillating tales of shooting eagles did not mitigate my joy.
—
AURÉLIEN HAD MADE PLANS to take an excursion with Laure and her family to Gavarnie. I asked Casimir innocently if we might join them, and he agreed. On the way there, Aurélien managed to find a way to ride beside me.
“Thank God you have come,” he said. “Behave as though I am extolling the beauty of these cliffs and let me say instead how enchanting I find you, how perfect your exotic eyes, your supple waist. But know, too, that I would love you if you were ugly.”
I laughed, as did he. Then he said, “Soon we will have to part, but I will write to you and in this way attempt to preserve every tender feeling we have. I hope that you will answer me. Zoé has agreed to be our courier.”
The notion was thrilling. “How can you think I would not answer you? You suit me so perfectly. No matter what we are talking about, I find your words delightful.”
“I feel the same. And though I respect the wisdom of keeping our relationship to our minds and hearts, know that I nonetheless do indulge my imag
ination from time to time.” His eyes did not move from mine, yet I felt them travel the length of my body. “Please understand that I say this not to embarrass or dishonor you but to touch you in the only way I can—or will. I mean to find a way to sing the praises of an irresistible woman; being with you, one is helpless not to.”
“Where are you?” Laure called from up ahead, her voice thin and peevish. Aurélien gave me a burning glance before he spurred his horse forward. I watched him go, thinking it did not matter any longer where he was, when his heart belonged to me. I flashed a smile to Casimir, because love from another had made me generous toward him.
—
SOON IT WAS AUGUST, and time to go home. Casimir and I felt that an abrupt descent from the mountains might be difficult for Maurice, so we decided to stop for several days at Bagnères-de-Bigorre. This was a fashionable spa, pleasant enough, with its cheerful clientele and the colorful carriages being pulled through the streets by handsome horses whose high stepping and prancing made Maurice clap and point. Its location in a wide depression in the land made one feel held in the palm of a gigantic hand. But then the heat began to take hold. I looked at the Pyrénées in the distance with longing, but of course it was not just the comfortable climate I missed.
On our last night there, Casimir and I were having dinner when I saw what I thought at first might be a hallucination. Aurélien was approaching our table. And then there he was, as real as my racing heart.
Hearty greetings were exchanged between him and Casimir, while I had all I could do just to speak. “Join us for dinner!” Casimir said, and Aurélien agreed, pulling up a chair and stationing himself at a safe distance from me. Everything about him had grown dear and familiar to me; I watched him cut his meat with an odd kind of proprietary pride. The very way he sat in the chair seemed perfect, artful; and I resonated to the intelligence and charm he displayed in talking about the most minor things.