Finally there came a day when she stood leaning against the window jamb, looking out, then turned and announced quite suddenly that we were going to join him—she knew of another army wife who was going that day to be with her husband, and there was room in the coach, which was soon departing. My mother was almost eight months pregnant with my brother then, and the two-week journey would be arduous if not dangerous for her; but when she was determined, she could part the seas.
Hastily, she packed a bag and then held out a hand to me.
“But, Maman.”
“What is it?” she asked, impatient as always, one foot quite literally out the door. I pointed to the table, where she had put out carrots to slice for pot-au-feu, and where she had poured herself a glass of red wine.
She shrugged. “Never mind that. Come quickly! Now!”
“First I must find my doll,” I said, for even then my maternal instincts ran high. But she grabbed my arm and pulled me out the door.
I wept most bitterly as we made our way down the stairs—what would become of my Véronique, when I was not there to care for her? How could I go to sleep without my doll beside me? My mother was unmoved. She kept saying, “There is no room!” But I believe she meant there was no time.
—
WE TRAVELED IN GREAT discomfort to Spain, crammed together in a carriage that bumped and strained along the roads. When we descended into the valley of Asturias, the temperature was exceedingly hot; my mother fanned herself and me uselessly. Everywhere there were signs of wartime desperation: a severe shortage of food, ruts in the road, the gaunt and despairing faces of the people we passed, a burnt smell in the air. At the inns where we stayed, we were sometimes served roasted pigeons for dinner, and that was considered a luxury. When I could, I slept on a table my mother padded with cushions from the coach.
Finally, we arrived at the palace in Madrid where my father was stationed. His quarters were above those of his commander. There was not the usual staff to care for the large and beautiful rooms in which we stayed; they were nearly as dirty as the coach in which we had ridden. But people who love each other and are together make a home, and so although we were not in our apartment in Paris, we were nonetheless content.
Despite the lack of cleanliness, we were surrounded by luxury: silver cutlery, gilt and brocade furniture, high ceilings, mirrored doors, and heavy draperies. Huge oil paintings hung on the walls, the subjects seeming to take haughty note of our presence; and the Oriental carpets that lay on the floors were easily the size of our entire apartment in Paris.
One afternoon not long after we arrived, I was told to go out onto the balcony to play, and the French doors were locked behind me. I amused myself for some time with the magnificent dolls belonging to the infanta that had been left behind. Then I sat daydreaming, and I’m sure that on my face was the look of slack-mouthed “stupidity” my mother and others accused me of when I took my flights of fancy. Eventually, though, I wanted in. It was hot; I was bored; I was in need of a drink of water. I knocked at the glass many times, then called out. Finally, the door was opened to me.
When I came in and my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw my mother lying on a chaise in the corner of the room. She was pale and still, her eyes closed. At first I thought she was dead, and I began to cry. But then she opened her eyes and signaled for me to come to her. In her arms was a bundle, and I walked over slowly to inspect it. My mother turned back the edge of a blanket to reveal a baby, his eyes and his fists squeezed tightly shut. I touched the whorl of hair at the top of his head, then moved my fingers to the place where you could see his heart beating.
“Gentle!” my mother said, her eyes flashing.
She loosened the blanket to reveal more of my baby brother. “Pretend you are a feather when you touch him,” she told me.
My brother took in a shuddering breath, and it made for a peculiar stirring in me. I gently stroked his hand, traced the curling cartilage of his ear, peered at the sucking blister he had already developed at the middle of his upper lip.
“His name is Louis,” my mother said.
The baby opened his eyes and turned toward me. There was something wrong. His irises were a very pale blue, and the pupils seemed made of glass. He appeared unable to see. I looked up at my mother.
“Soon we are going home,” she said.
Very well then, I thought. Louis would be fixed, and I could now attend to getting a drink of water and to settling myself in my father’s lap, my back against his buttons, my small hand tucked within his. We would have dinner and he would do his napkin puppet tricks for me; and soon we would be home.
As it happened, my mother was right. In July, we learned that my father’s commander was being transferred to Naples. My father would be given several weeks of leave and would then join him there.
—
MY MOTHER AND I were once again put into a carriage, this time with a two-week-old baby. My father rode at the head of the departing entourage astride his Andalusian horse, aptly named Leopardo the Untamable. That animal was forever tossing his head, pulling left, then right at the reins, high-stepping and shying at movements at the side of the road. It was a point of pride for my father to be in the saddle and in command of Leopardo. He even managed to control the beast when they came across a snake that lay across the entire width of a narrow mountain road. My father dismounted, cut the snake in half, remounted, and we went on.
The journey home was far more difficult than the journey to Madrid had been. It was blisteringly hot. The only things to eat were raw onions and lemons and sunflower seeds. We saw scorched earth and gutted-out buildings, and smelled the decomposing bodies of the victims of war on the roadsides. There were clouds of flies around the dead, vultures circling overhead. On one occasion, the carriage lurched dramatically, side to side and up and down, and there was an odd crunching sound as we rolled over the obstacle. My stomach knew what it was, but my child’s brain, seeking reassurance, made me ask my mother, “What was that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“What did we just roll over?”
“Tree branches,” she said, but the tears that shone in her eyes told me what I suspected: it was a body we had run over, someone who had once been alive and now was being broken further by people escaping what he could not.
My father journeyed to the back of the line to check on us when he could, and despite the appalling conditions around us, he was in high spirits. We were going to Nohant. He had written his mother to tell her we were coming; he was certain she would receive us now. However hard her heart had been toward us in the past, surely she would not turn away from his wife with a newborn, nor from me, her four-year-old granddaughter, who had grown so thin and whose eyes were now enormous in her face. Surely she would welcome me even though my hair crawled with lice and I had numerous scabs from the scabies I’d contracted. And of course my father knew his mother would not be able to turn him away; she had missed him with an ache she had described to him in a letter as “a dagger in my heart which turns constantly, reminding me of its presence and your absence.” It had been too long: she would embrace him and his family; she would welcome them all with tears of joy, he knew it.
When we got to the Basque foothills, the weather was cooler and the land green again. We lodged at inns and slept on beds with sheets; we ate decent food again, even little cakes. I was bathed and treated with sulfur powder—covered with a paste of it and made to ingest it as well. It had a disgusting smell, against which I was given a bouquet of roses into which to dip my nose for relief.
Early into our journey we had lost our carriage in service to the wounded and had been riding in a farm wagon stuffed with baggage and soldiers who had gotten ill, just as we had: we were all feverish and dehydrated and miserable. My mother begged my father to obtain a boat to take us up the coast to Bordeaux, thinking that the sea air would be good for us. He was able to rent a sloop, and he found a carriage as well, which he tied up on board. We sailed wi
thout incident until we reached the estuary of the Gironde, where, just off the shore, the boat hit a rock and began to take on water. While my mother carried on hysterically, my father used a shawl to fashion a sling, into which he intended to put his children. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll secure them to my back, and I’ll hold you under one arm and swim with the other.” He swung his sword to cut loose our carriage—we could not lose our only means of land transportation. As it happened, he had no need to use the sling or to swim; we were at the last minute rescued just offshore. My father went back into the water for our carriage and all our belongings, much against my mother’s wishes, who did not feel it was worth the risk. As for me, I saved my bouquet: withered, drooping, but still roses.
Our terrible journey ended on July 21. We rode through the village of Nohant, with its little stone church and tall elms, then on through the gates of my grandmother’s estate, where she waited for us.
January 1831
PARIS
The sixty-two-year-old novelist with whom I was to speak about my novel was named Auguste-Hilarion Kératry. He was from the Berry region, and our meeting had been arranged by a mutual friend who was also from there. The meeting took place on a very cold morning. I had elected to wear my best dress, which was not nearly warm enough. I stood shivering on his doorstep until I was let in by his maid and then escorted to, of all places, his bedchamber!
It was clear that Kératry had just arisen and hastily dressed himself. On his bed, a woman who looked to be my age reclined under a silky pink comforter—his wife, I gathered; I had heard that his wife was very young. I nodded awkwardly to her; she nodded back; and then Kératry and I took our places opposite each other at a desk at the side of the room.
After we’d exchanged a few pleasantries, Kératry said, “Well, then, shall we?”
Nervously, I pulled my manuscript out. I had not known how many pages to bring, and so I had brought them all. My hope was that he would listen to me read several pages out loud, comment positively, then ask to keep the rest to read himself. After a few days, perhaps he would let me know what publisher he had given my work to. And after that, I hoped, I would be called into the publisher’s office to be given my advance.
I began reading in a soft voice, and Kératry boomed out, “Louder, I can’t hear a single word!”
I read louder, aware of the fact that not only he but his wife was listening. I could not bear to look up at either of them.
I had just started the fourth page when I heard Kératry clear his throat in a way that was not necessity but statement. And then I did look up.
His expression was pained. He put the tips of his fingers together, stared off into space for a moment, then turned to me to say, “Well. This, my dear, is my advice to you: Make babies, not books.”
I nearly gasped. I was so overwhelmed with humiliation I didn’t know what to do. But then I recalled how this author whom I was asking to judge my work had written a book I had found ridiculous. It was about a priest who violates a woman he believes to be dead.
I put my pages back into the bag with great care. Then I stood and said, “I thank you most sincerely for your time. As for your advice, if you think it is so good, I suggest you follow it yourself.”
I walked out, my head high.
At the first café I came to, though, I sat dejected at a table near a window, my chin in my hands, and watched the people passing by. I thought about the life I had begun to build here: the friends with whom I had pooled resources so that we could rent a warm room in which to read, the modest dinners we shared in one another’s apartments. I loved the theaters and museums, the literary and political events we went to. I enjoyed, as well, the ambience provided by things we could not directly participate in: ballrooms with glittering chandeliers, fine restaurants whose posted menus set our mouths to watering, two opera houses. Most of all, I loved my routine of taking my coffee every day in a café across the street, where I was able to indulge in that greatest pleasure and necessity for one who wants to write: observation.
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.