“You mean radicalism, fighting in the streets.”
“And perhaps more than that.” He grabbed hold of my wrist and spoke quietly but with great earnestness: “Life is difficult enough in and of itself, George. Is it not incumbent on us to create a social order where we do not let the weakest fall and the strongest survive?”
I pushed my empty wineglass away from me, staring into the burgundy residue at the bottom. “I listen in shame to your ideas of revolution and reform. You are right to suggest I have led a life of solipsism. Despite my mother’s blood, which runs in my veins, I have watched from a distance the people’s struggles and have reported their anguish without real understanding. I have allowed romantic passion to rule my life and have committed myself to faithless individuals rather than worthwhile causes.”
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. You remain solipsistic in excoriating yourself for your solipsism! Have done with that, George! You are here and alive, are you not?”
I said nothing, full of a rising hope that prevented speech.
“Your life is not over; it is about to begin! You will never be satisfied with the love of an individual; that kind of love will only disappoint. Turn your gaze outward, away from yourself, and toward a noble goal. It is that kind of purpose that brings lasting content, that speaks to the truest desires of the heart and the needs of the soul.”
I was galvanized by Michel’s words, inspired in a way that seemed superior to the passions I had known before. I committed my writing talents to the cause and then, inevitably perhaps, to Michel himself. For his part, he gave me a ring to serve as a symbol of what we might look forward to when we were both free.
After a few months, though, I began to see that I did not always agree with Michel. I began to think he was similar to those he wished to overthrow: a despot who demanded a slavish loyalty and affection from his followers. It seemed that Michel invoked the name of the people in order to bring glory to himself.
—
CASIMIR HAD INITIALLY AGREED to our separation. Then he changed his mind and fought against it for over a year. But finally Michel secured for me a legal separation that left me with Nohant, with custody of Solange (later, I also obtained custody of Maurice), and with ninety-four hundred francs annually. Casimir received less. My fiery lawyer argued brilliantly for me, Madame Aurore Dudevant, sitting demurely in the courtroom in a white hood and a white dress with a collar of flowered lace.
Michel addressed himself to Casimir with a kind of deadly irony. He looked at a paper in his hand and said, “You list here Madame Dudevant’s many faults. To name a few, you say that she often dressed like a man and smoked cigars. I assume that you found that very…Well, I confess I have a hard time guessing. Was it frightening? Dangerous? Did it break a law of which I am unaware?
“Never mind—we shall move on to the next complaint, which is that she had relationships outside the marriage.” Here he looked up. “Perhaps in imitation of you, who only weeks into your marriage pursued and easily conquered your wife’s maid? Is not imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Or did she perhaps seek comfort with another after episodes such as the time you struck her across the face in full view of others?
“But I digress. We were talking about your wife’s many flaws, not yours. So, let us see what other sins she has committed. Ah, here is a brash demand: she asks for money from her own inheritance! A wonder you waited so long to bring her to court!
“Now, here is a vexing problem. Your wife wrote Lélia, recognized as a work of genius. You poor fellow, I’m sure it is utterly exasperating to be married to an artist whose income pays the bills when one’s own inclination is to not work at all.
“Well. Rather than bore the court with the rest of this long list of grievances, I feel compelled to ask you about something I find very confusing. Perhaps you can enlighten me. With all these faults displayed by that diminutive woman sitting there, why would you go to court to keep her from separating from you?”
He won for me easily, and Casimir moved to his family’s hunting cottage in Guillery.
Despite our differences in politics, I still had feelings for Michel. But after I was free, he began to retreat from me. Mauprat, which was about a wounded beast of a man being subdued—transformed, really—by a woman’s love, after which they marry and live happily ever after, I now saw as the wishful thinking it had been.
I was at odds with myself. On the one hand, I had written to a friend, “I will lift women up from their abject state, both in my life and in my writings.” And yet, embarrassingly, I had also written a letter to Michel begging him simply to let me do all that I could to make him happy. I told him in that gushing missive that he would find me much like a faithful dog, a study in devotion.
What drew me to Michel was a passion grounded in politics. But politics will not forgive what love can; nor will politics endure what love will. Politics will not give a close embrace; it will not press upon a mouth a kiss that satisfies the beggar inside. It will not say to another: I will protect you from what frightens you; I will bring wild strawberries to your bedside; I will not betray you. Never mind that those words are often found to be lies; one longs to hear them anyway, one needs to; and one persists in trying to hear them in order to find a certain peace, without which one feels half of something meant to be whole. Even God was lonely: we, His children, are the evidence.
My affair with Michel lasted less than a year. What followed were several halfhearted love affairs with other men that died for lack of fuel to feed the flames. Finally, I told myself and others that I was too old for the ups and downs of romantic relationships and would henceforth devote myself to things that mattered and upon which I could depend. I could not have been more sincere—or relieved. Or wrong.
May 1836
NOHANT
After all the acrimony in fighting for my separation from Casimir, after all the charges and defenses, all the lies and half-truths—of which, I readily admit, both parties were guilty—I was at last home again, and in rightful possession of the place where I had grown up. I took up permanent residence at Nohant on a day when the bagpipes played and there was dancing under the great elms. This was because it was the feast day of a saint, but I let myself enjoy the fantasy that the celebration was also to welcome me home. Those servants whom I had not fired for their allegiance to Casimir I released to join in the festivities.
I was alone, standing before one of the windows in the dining room. I had toured the great house, I had wandered through every room, and in every room memories had assaulted my senses. I saw myself lying between my parents at night in the bedroom they had shared; I saw my baby brother, Louis, dead in his cradle. I saw Deschartres pacing before me, his hands clasped behind his stooped back; I saw my grandmother dressed in her lace and silk, her cockade trembling upon her head, instructing me on the harpsichord; I smelled her vetiver.
In my old bedroom, I had sat in a chair and spoken to the ghost of my child self, who lay on the floor in her peasant’s play clothes, reading books with a great hunger and appreciation, mouthing the words to herself for the pleasure of their cadence. I’d remembered how it had been my habit to gently flick the corners of the pages back and forth as I read them, and how I had sometimes pressed my face into the folds of the books. Julie, my grandmother’s maid, had once punished me for this.
Now I pressed my forehead to the glass and, with eyes closed, listened to the music being played here in the place where I most belonged. And then I wept copious tears, for all that had befallen me, and all that had not.
—
A FEW MONTHS LATER, I received a letter from Maurice that tore at my heart. He had been made fun of by other boys at his school, who told him of stories written about me in the newspaper:
They said all sorts of things, because you are a woman who writes, because you are not a prude like most of the other boys’ mothers. They call you, I can’t tell you the word because it is too wicked…. You must know what is happe
ning in the heart of a good son and a true friend.
Must history always repeat itself, not only in the larger ways of politics but upon the personal playing field of the self? Of course I knew what was happening in Maurice’s heart; the same feelings had been in me when my own mother was attacked and derided. I vowed to find a tutor for Maurice and pull him from a school where he did not belong, even before such vicious attacks had befallen him. I knew he would not fight back against such cruelty; he would only bear it in an elegant manner completely foreign to his tormentors. In the morning, I would go to Paris to collect my son.
I went outside and wandered among the trees and the flowers, then went to the cemetery to visit the graves of my father and Louis and my grandmother. I wondered, if my father had lived, what he would have thought of my success, as well as my notoriety. I thought he would have been more understanding, more forgiving, than my mother had been.
My father had defended my mother against her accusers, my grandmother among them. He believed that the moral compass of an individual was the true gauge by which one should measure and live one’s life. If that compass was in keeping with what others thought, so be it. But if not, one was meant to answer to oneself: that was the way to come to a true and lasting peace. Perhaps the only way, I thought now.
October 1836
HÔTEL DE FRANCE
RUE LAFFITTE
PARIS
In September, I had taken the children to Switzerland to spend six weeks in the company of Franz Liszt and Arabella and their newly born daughter. I was in high spirits, we all were. In addition to my children, I had brought my maid and some friends; Franz and Arabella had surrounded themselves with a gay coterie as well. We lived in a way that both inflamed my senses and calmed my nerves. I saw how the balance of work, friendship, and family made for a satisfying happiness. Absent the tension caused by my years-long friction with Casimir, I was able to focus on my children in a different way.
Thirteen-year-old Maurice was the soulful artist, the one I found easier to love. A mother wants to love her children equally, but she is human, and she can favor the child who is more like her, or at least who fights less against her.
Solange, now eight years old, had long bedeviled me. Since her birth, there had been a strange kind of dissonance between us. When I smothered her with attention, she pulled away. When I put space between us, she resented me. When I begged for access to her soul, she ignored me. She was rude to my friends. She was unwilling to cooperate with figures of authority, and yet when they became exasperated and used punitive measures, she immediately bent to their will. It was as though she rejected kindness and invited harsh behavior toward herself.
I would have been willing to assume the blame, to think that my temperament and proclivities disallowed my being a good mother, but Maurice dispelled that theory: he adored me, and I him. Being with him was like swimming in a placid pool of water; spending time with Solange was like going over the falls.
There were times when I lay in bed worrying about her, and I would resolve to do all I could to make things better between us. The next day I would approach her with my heart open, and she would hurl insults at me. She would turn her back and walk away, and I would stare after her, my love transformed into a mix of despair and—it must be admitted—a feeling like hatred.
But late that summer, I came to understand something about her. We were out in the mountains climbing one day. I was struck by her beauty: her long blond curls, the pure whiteness of her skin despite the sun. She ran up the steep inclines over and over again, complaining only if any one of us tried to help her. Once she turned to me after I had expressed a great appreciation for everything around us and said, “Don’t worry; when I’m queen, I’ll give you the whole of Mont Blanc.”
I thought, then, that what Solange wanted, what she needed, was to be credited with her own strength and ambition. In this respect, I thought, she was like me. I let go of a kind of wariness and believed that Solange and I would finally be able to love each other openly, freely, lastingly.
—
When I returned to Paris, I gave up my apartment and moved into the hotel where Franz and Arabella lived, to the room below them. We shared a common sitting room, and it was filled with writers and artists and musicians and the wailing of Franz and Arabella’s baby. Our regulars included the radical priest Abbé de Lamennais, the poet Heinrich Heine, the novelist Eugène Sue, and the socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux. So many interesting individuals, all of whom offered a kind of nourishment, both individually and collectively.
On November 5, I was invited to a musical soirée at the home of Frédéric Chopin. It was on the fashionable Right Bank, on Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin. I saw how true the rumors were that he adored the color gray: the wallpaper was a light version of that color, beautiful against the white trim, and the brocade furniture was a shade of oyster. He liked his luxuries: he had a silver tea service displayed against a white silk hanging, and his dinner service was Sèvres, in turquoise and gold. I knew that the fresh flowers he had in abundance were replaced daily. The whole apartment, though small, gave the illusion of airy space and was a study in understated elegance.
That evening was the first time I had heard him play—he almost never gave concerts, preferring instead to earn money by charging outrageous amounts to teach and by selling sheet music of his pieces. That night, I lost my heart to his music before I lost it to the man. He played first a duet with Liszt, a sonata for four hands, then performed an improvisation, something for which he was famous. In its minor chords, I heard what I believed was a mourning for a love that he could not have. I knew about such things, and I understood the lasting melancholy that came with it. My eyes filled with tears. I put down my wineglass, walked over to the piano, and kissed him full on the mouth. The you that I hear in this music, I understand and love—instantly and wholly.
His feelings toward me were not precisely the same. They were, in fact, quite the opposite. After we had become lovers, he told me of the letter he had written to his family after he had first made my acquaintance. “I said you were a coarse and ungainly and crude woman who wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars in public, then expressed my doubt that you were a woman at all. I said I found distasteful your devouring eyes and deep silences, and your frankness about sex I found absolutely unnerving.”
The journey from that point of view to one quite different took two years. In the meantime, my busy life as a free woman went on.
January 1837
NOHANT
Arabella, Liszt’s lover, came to stay with me at NOHANT that winter when Franz was touring. We were not the best of friends. She was under the mistaken assumption, as were so many, that I was ever a fearsomely independent figure who had a well-deserved reputation for bold behavior, the consequences be damned.
I saw Arabella as a person with a cold heart and a suspicious mind who was overly concerned with appearances. She rarely wore the same thing twice, and she spent an inordinate amount of time styling her hair each day. She would mouth the words of others as though they were her own in order to make herself appear intelligent. We tried hard to get along for the sake of Liszt, whom we both loved. But when we embraced, it was with the light of day between us.
One evening, after we had had what I think both of us would have described as a surprisingly pleasant day together, we sat before the fireplace after dinner. The children, exhausted, were in bed. “You know, George, Maurice is a very sensitive young man,” Arabella said.
I smiled. “Yes.”
“And talented; only thirteen, but he could easily make his living as an artist.”
“So I have told him. As has Delacroix.”
“A wonder that Casimir so blithely handed him over to you; he is such a devoted son, such a pleasure to be around.”
“Casimir is one of those lucky individuals who is rarely bedridden. He has no patience for those who suffer from various illnesses, as Maurice does. He thought Maurice
hypochondriacal and all but punished him for his weakness. When he found out his son had an enlarged heart and rheumatism, he took it as an affront to his own masculinity. He was only too happy to give custody of Maurice to me. And I was glad to have it.”
“Of course you were.”
A silence fell. I waited for Arabella to comment on eight-year-old Solange. It had been a tiring day with my daughter, complete with displays of explosive behavior one might see in a toddler. At one point, Solange had flung her hairbrush across her room, nearly breaking a window. I wasn’t sure how much my guest had overheard of all that.
Finally, I said, “I must apologize if you were bothered by any unpleasantness today.”
One finely shaped eyebrow raised. She murmured something I could not hear, then turned to face me and said, “May I speak frankly?”
“Please do.”
“One hesitates to criticize a friend’s child. But I must say that I find Solange to be very difficult. She is a natural and unrepentant rebel, one who seems to delight in extremes of emotions. I doubt that she will ever be able to go along with commonsense rules.”
I flushed, then defended my daughter in a mother’s automatic way, saying, “I should be happy for her if that is so. A woman in a man’s world needs to be rebellious.”
Arabella turned her sherry glass slowly in her hand, and I watched the flames from the fireplace cast colors on the liquid. When she looked back at me, her expression was empty of malice; I saw that she felt genuinely sympathetic. She said, “Perhaps what you say is so. Perhaps what I see as Solange’s faults may turn out to be heroic. Please understand that I know she is not without her virtues. She is also unusually beautiful. But…” She leaned forward. “There is a kind of manipulation she has already mastered. She has a preternatural ability to spot one’s weaknesses. You will have to exercise your own strength against hers.