My father started to speak, but she said, “And in any case, I am his mother, and if it is true he is dead, then I shall prepare him for his grave as he deserves. He had no baptism, no graveside service, no chance for the life he deserved—at least let him have a last kiss. Maurice, you must indulge me in this or I will lose my senses! Please, please, I beg of you, bring him to me for one last time!”
Finally, my father agreed to exhume their son. “Keep watch to make sure I am not discovered,” he whispered to my mother. Then he dressed and went outside.
After what seemed like a very long time, he returned. He had the little coffin in his arms, and it pained me to see smears of dirt on it.
“Is she asleep?” my father asked, about me.
“Yes, thank God,” my mother said, and she went to join my father, who had put the coffin on the floor and was prying open the lid. She knelt beside him, her hands squeezed together in her lap.
“Something very strange happened out there,” my father said.
“Really? What?” They might have been at breakfast, having a gossipy conversation over their coffees.
“I first uncovered the coffin of some poor villager. I accidentally stepped on the corner of it, causing it to rise up and hit me in the head, whereupon I fell into the grave! I tell you, my blood ran cold; it was as though an icy finger tapped my shoulder. You never saw a man leap so quickly to his feet. And then I felt my forehead break out in a sweat, as though this was an omen of some kind!”
“No, Maurice. It was not an omen. No.”
They fell silent, and then I heard a little creaking sound as the coffin lid was raised, and my mother gasped. I saw her lift my brother’s body out, then hold him close to her breast. She began to rock side to side. My father leaned over to kiss the baby’s head.
“I shall prepare him,” my mother said, quietly weeping. “But just for tonight, may we have him back in his little cradle? May we look upon him as though he is only sleeping?”
My father said nothing. Yes, then.
The next day, after I had left their room, my mother prepared Louis’s body in the accustomed way. She washed him, perfumed him, wrapped him in linen, and then sprinkled rose petals in his coffin. Just before he was to be put back in the grave, my mother asked if my father would instead bury Louis by the pear tree in the children’s garden. It would be a secret, shared only by them.
Louis was buried by that pear tree, and I was told about it only many years later, by my mother, prompted by something I can no longer recall. What I can recall, though, is the pain in my mother’s eyes when she told me. I do not believe the loss of a child is something one ever overcomes. One puts on the faces one needs, but inside, one bleeds and bleeds.
February 1831
OFFICE OF LE FIGARO
MONTMARTRE
“Please, sit down,” Henri Latouche said, gesturing at a chair set close to his own.
I had come to his office with high hopes about my novel, Aimée. Almost immediately, I saw why I had heard another rumor about him, that he had a way with women. This was in spite of—or perhaps because of—a childhood injury to an eye that created a sort of red gleam. His face glowed with intelligence, and he had beautiful manners; and if his voice had a kind of muted quality that made one sometimes strain to hear him, the words he spoke were eloquent. He evinced a dry wit and a gift for self-mockery, but I suspected that his was a tender and generous heart.
He himself wrote novels and poetry and plays, but he was best known for his work at Le Figaro. He published the four-page daily paper out of the spacious drawing room of his Italianate villa in Montmartre. He loved to lampoon King Louis-Philippe and his ministers; and he did not shy away from reporting gossip, either.
His writers—eaglets, he called them, for the way he regarded them as just now learning to fly—all had their own tables on which to work in the drawing room. Latouche would give them a topic and a piece of paper cut to fit the space where it would go in the tabloid.
He was brilliant at finding raw talent. He taught a writer how to improve and then promoted him vigorously. He had discovered Balzac! I thought that if he liked my novel, he might do for me what he had done for others.
But after we had dispensed with the pleasantries, he leaned forward to look into my eyes. “About Aimée, I am afraid I have little to say. It is not in its present form anywhere near publishable.”
Very well, then. I had tried. I mumbled a thanks and stood to leave.
But Latouche laughed and put his hand on my arm. “Wait one moment! I did not say you were without talent, did I?”
I sat down again, wary, and waited for more.
He leaned back in his chair, pursed his lips, and stroked his chin in an absentminded way. Then he said, “Tell me, Aurore. Would you be willing to work like a demon to improve yourself? You are gifted, but raw. There are many things for you to learn. But if you do learn them, I believe you can be a great success.”
I assured him that I was willing to work hard indeed, that it was my nature to work hard. And then, just like that, he offered me a job on the staff of Le Figaro. It was all I could do not to shout out with joy. Instead I offered as dignified a thanks as I could muster.
Among other things, Latouche said, I would be reviewing plays, and I would be obliged to buy my own tickets to see the performances. Box seats, where women had to sit, were expensive. It cost much less to stand or sit on benches under the gaslights, where only men could go. Latouche said that if I went to plays dressed as a man, I would save a great deal of money.
I remembered my mother telling me that she had done this, in the early days with my father; they’d not had the money for box seats, either. She told me she had found disguising herself this way to be great fun.
So it was that I began going out on the town and passing as a man. It wasn’t difficult to do, and I found that I very much enjoyed it. There was an expansive freedom, not to say power, in wearing men’s clothes. And it was a relief to dress in this far simpler way. I had never liked the fuss involved in deciding which earrings to wear, what kind of nosegay to tuck into my bosom, what color might best complement my complexion.
The style then was for men to wear “proprietor’s coats.” They were long—down to the heel—and square, so that a woman’s form could be easily obscured. They were quite comfortable. I had one made of gray cloth, as well as matching trousers and a vest. With them, I wore a gray hat and a wide cravat. I pinned my thick black hair up and covered it with a hat.
My voice was naturally low, and I had always kept it neutral, absent the fluttery tones and frequent exclamations most women used. In addition, I had never developed the coquettish behavior second nature to most women. Nor did I enter into the tittering kind of gossip over teacups that seemed to pass for conversation at the expense of talking about politics, or art, or literature.
I took to going out with groups of men after the plays were over, and in keeping with my disguise, I put my iron-heeled boots up on the small tables of the clubs where we went. Jules had introduced me to smoking, and I puffed on cigars, and talked about the world, and enjoyed a wide sense of groundedness and belonging.
Sometimes we stayed out all night. Then, in the leached light of the very early morning, I would make my way to Le Figaro’s office. I always sat by the fireplace there, the most desirable spot. It was difficult for me to write in the economical way that was necessary. I was used to going on at great length, to luxuriating in digression, and so at first I spent a lot of time on things that ended up in the fireplace.
I reviewed plays, but I also covered politics. I wrote straightforward copy or satire, but privately I wondered what was in a rebel’s heart and soul that gave him such courage—for whatever one’s political persuasion, one has to admit a rebel’s courage. What did those ill-equipped fighters, bricks in their hands, long for most? Were they fighting for themselves or for something larger, and if it was something larger, what kind of value did they assign to their in
dividual lives? Which sentiments bore them most fiercely into battle?
I also wrote short fiction and fillers, sometimes bucolic pieces about the Berry countryside I came from. When Latouche liked what I did, I was deeply pleased, but he just as often called my little pieces too sentimental. In those instances, I set my jaw and resolved to learn from his criticism, not suffer from it.
Things began to move quickly for me in establishing myself as a writer. I had a story accepted by the Revue de Paris. I had introduced Latouche to Jules, and he and I were collaborating on articles for the paper as well as on a novel, for which we had found a publisher. I was starting to see that I really could make my living writing, perhaps eventually a very good living.
Everything about Paris fascinated me, including the politics. After the revolution, things were unstable but hopeful: new movements were springing up everywhere. One of them embraced the socialist ideal that property should be shared; another proposed that God was not a paternalistic figure but, rather, an androgynous one. There was communal living, and communal loving, as well.
Things long taken for granted were held up for a new kind of scrutiny, not only in society but in the church. In February, thousands of artisans and workers—carpenters, blacksmiths, cobblers—ousted the comte de Quélen, the archbishop. Then they took to the streets wearing chasubles and miters, sprinkling onlookers with “holy water” that they carried in chamber pots.
In my articles, I maintained a skeptical view of politics and lampooned the Chamber of Deputies, where I’d obtained a seat in the visitors’ gallery. But I also offered a literary raised eyebrow at Saint-Simonianism. This was the protosocialist movement named after Henri de Saint-Simon that was against inherited wealth and in favor of shared property. It also espoused a belief in equality between the sexes. Easy to put forth that idea, I thought; much harder to achieve. A real equality would require as much respect given to the natural ways of women as that currently afforded men. I did not see it happening soon.
There came a day when the office of Le Figaro was seized by the king for its “seditious tendencies.” I thought I might go to jail, for from my little desk by the fire, I had written a piece about how recent street fighting had been incited not by the guerrilla fighters, whose only defense was a wall of chairs, but by the well-armed National Guard, whose soldiers’ interest was in provocation so that they could have an excuse to fire their weapons and murder with impunity. Then they would go home for dinner and regale their wives with stories of their bravery while they picked chicken from their teeth.
I had also written a parody that ridiculed a panicked government’s efforts to keep the peace. I’d said, “All citizens capable of bearing arms must convene from seven in the morning until eleven at night to guard the Palais Royal. And seven-foot ditches must be dug around every house, and every window fitted with bars, to keep away evil-doers.”
After the raid of Le Figaro, I sat at the kitchen table in the mornings with Jules, telling him excitedly that if I was arrested, it could greatly advance my career. I saw myself holding on to the bars of some dank cell in La Force, where political prisoners went, shouting out demands for my freedom while someone retched in the corner. I saw myself listening to the loud complaints of people caged like animals, of songs of revolution being defiantly sung. I decided I would strike up conversations with everyone around me, gathering material to write an exposé on oppression—and censorship!—in the language of the people of the streets.
When I was freed, I would emerge from prison, blinking in the light. My hair and clothes would be mussed and there would be dirt on my cheeks, but I would hold my head high. My soul would be burning with conviction. I would go straight to the office to write about all I had seen and understood.
Then the government dropped the case. “Ah well,” said Jules, and he kissed my forehead. Later we went out for dinner with our friends. As usual, I was the only woman among our group of journalists and artists, and they soon had me laughing again.
I embraced this life, so different from the one I had been living. At Nohant, I had fussed over a failed soufflé and begged friends to visit and write more often so as to alleviate my boredom. I had organized parties as relief from the silent evenings spent with Casimir in the drawing room, him falling asleep over books I had asked him to read, me doing needlework and puncturing the cloth with the needle with far more energy than was required. Now my life seemed rich beyond measure.
How beautiful to rush home to make love with someone who paid attention to what he was doing, who attempted to include his partner in the act and not just satisfy himself. I was not able to achieve the ultimate climactic experience that Jules did; I still had difficulty translating a passion that burned in my brain into my body; I still could not take leave of myself the way I so desperately wanted to. But I told Jules I was content nonetheless, and it was true. His deep kisses thrilled me. So, too, the slow wandering of his hands and the poetic murmurings of love he whispered to me in the darkness. And when we curled around each other for sleep, I felt a completeness, a home, something I had longed for all my life.
Now that we had secured a publisher for our first novel together, I told Jules about an idea I had for another novel, thinking that he could join me in writing it and we would again publish under the pen name we and our publisher had picked together: J. Sand. But he said, “Why don’t you do that one alone?”
I was relieved, actually. I was finding Jules too slow a writer, a great procrastinator. Despite the fact that Rose et Blanche, our novel about an actress and a nun, was meant to be co-written, it was I who was doing most of the work. I put in strong characterizations, descriptions of the countryside and of the Pyrénées, and scenes of backstage life as well as convent life. Jules spent more time talking about work than doing it, in spite of my constant efforts to champion him, to tell him again and again that I knew he would someday create a work of genius.
“But if I write it alone, shall I use our pen name?” I asked.
“Why not use your own?”
I laughed. Soon after my arrival in Paris, I had been visited by my sour-faced mother-in-law, who, when she ascertained that I meant to make my living as a writer, implored me not to use my married name, Dudevant, and thereby scandalize their family. “I have no intention of doing so,” I had told her. I did not add that so far as I was concerned, Madame Aurore Dudevant had died.
September 1808
NOHANT
Those who say life is a glorious blessing are right. Those who say it is endlessly cruel are also right.
A little over a week after my baby brother, Louis, died, on the rainy night of September 16, my father paced through the rooms of Nohant. He could not comfort his wife. She and my father spent their days tending to the garden by little Louis’s grave. They planted flowers there, including China asters, because those flowers would bloom for at least a month, and they built up a small mound at the base of the pear tree, where I often sat. They made pretty winding paths and set out benches, creating a place of peace and beauty and charm.
But at night, my mother lay silently on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. My parents had begun to argue over what had caused Louis’s death; and my father made my mother cry by suggesting that it was jealousy that caused her to undertake the difficult journey from Paris to Madrid when she was so greatly pregnant, and that if only she had trusted her husband, their son would be alive. Then my mother lashed out bitterly against my father, mostly because she shared that same dark suspicion.
My father was not comforted in his grief by my grandmother; she had become a faint version of herself, afraid of overstepping her bounds by trying to comfort her son. The servants did not speak except when necessary, even among themselves. All was silence and gloom; even I, picking up on the mood of the household in general and my mother in particular, could not be made to smile. My father decided to go out, to dine with some friends in nearby La Châtre; he felt that a little time apart might help him and his w
ife regard each other with tenderness once more.
My mother and I were in my parents’ bedroom, where she had given me a book to look at while she sat in a chair by the window and gazed out at the rain. Deschartres had begun teaching me to read, and I was catching on quickly. Even in that time of weighty sorrow, I wanted to show off to my mother, whose approval I always desired.
When my father told my mother of his intention to go out, she was furious. She leapt to her feet and began to upbraid him. “How can you leave me at such a time? And here, besides, where I have no friends, where the only company is that lunatic Deschartres and your mother, cold as fish on ice?” This was not quite fair, as my grandmother had traveled a far distance from her complete disregard of my mother. But her overtures were not wholly loving, mixed as they were with a kind of begrudging necessity.
My father tried to take my mother into his arms, but she spun out of them. “To say nothing of the weather, and you on that wild horse, which was not so much a gift as an attempt to kill you! That animal does not respect you; you cannot control him!”
This was an insult my father could not bear, and later I thought that if only my mother had risen above her own pain and had tried to gently persuade my father to stay home rather than insult his equestrian skills, he would never have left that night. But after those words, he stepped away from her: I could see the flush that came to his face on those rare occasions when he lost his temper.
“I am going out,” he said.
“And when do you intend to come home?”
He did not answer her; instead, he patted me on the head and left the room.
My mother followed him, shouting after him not to go, to stay with her.
After he went out the door, she stood at the window, watching him mount his horse, then gallop away. My grandmother came to her and tried to console her, telling her that men were this way: they could not sit with sorrow; they needed a way out. She told my mother she would serve him and herself best by letting him go, by not making so many demands on him at a time when he too was fragile and full of despair.