We laughed. In order to explain this little joke, I must tell you that, at dinner the evening before, a Russian princess had told us that the Count of Westmoreland, having greatly suffered from seasickness as he was crossing the Channel, and wanting to travel to Italy, turned and started for home at once when he heard mention of crossing the Alps. “I’ve had more than my fill of crossings, thank you very much!” he said. As you must surely understand, Renée, your dour philosophy and my mother’s lesson could not help but reawaken the fears that so plagued us in Blois. The nearer my wedding day drew, the more I screwed up my strength, will, and emotions in view of that fearsome crossing. I recalled all our conversations, I reread your letters, and I found in them a certain hidden melancholy. Those apprehensions had the merit of turning me into the conventional fiancée one finds in engravings and in the mind of the public. Everyone found me very charming and proper the day the papers were signed. This morning, at the city hall to which we had gone without ceremony, only our witnesses were present. My gown is being readied for dinner as I finish these lines. We will be married in Sainte-Valère church at midnight tonight, after a glittering reception. I confess that my fears give me the air of a victim, along with a deceptive modesty for which, though I cannot see why, I will be greatly admired. I am tickled to see my poor Felipe as girlish as I. The crowd of guests torments him, he’s like a bat in a crystal shop. “Fortunately, there is a day after this one!” he whispered in my ear, meaning nothing wicked. He would rather see no one, so timid and bashful is he. The Sardinian ambassador, there to sign our contract, took me aside and gave me a necklace of pearls clasped by six magnificent diamonds, a gift from my sister-in-law, the Duchess de Soria. That necklace is accompanied by a sapphire bracelet, engraved on the underside with the words I know you not, but I love you! Two charming letters were wrapped around those presents, which I did not want to accept until I was sure Felipe would allow it.
“For,” I told him, “I would never want to see you wear something that did not come from me.”
He kissed my hand, greatly moved, and answered, “Wear them for the words and the sentiments, which are sincere. . . .”
Saturday evening
Here then, my poor Renée, are the last lines the maiden will write. After midnight Mass, we will leave for a property that Felipe has gallantly acquired for us in the Nivernais, on the road to Provence. My name is already Louise de Macumer, but I will leave Paris in a few hours as Louise de Chaulieu. Whatever my name, for you there will always be only
Louise
27
FROM LOUISE DE MACUMER TO RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE
October 1825
My dear, I have not written you a line since that ceremony at the city hall, some eight months ago. And from you, not a word! That is a horrible thing, madame.
Here we are, then. We set off by coach for the Château de Chantepleurs, the property Macumer bought in the Nivernais, sixty leagues from Paris, on the banks of the Loire. Apart from my chambermaid, all our servants were there waiting, and we made excellent time, arriving the next evening. I slept from Paris to past Montargis. The only liberty taken by my lord and master was to put his arm around my waist and place my head on his shoulder, on which he had laid several handkerchiefs. The almost maternal attention with which he fought off his own need to sleep filled me with a strange, deep emotion. Having fallen asleep by the fire of his dark eyes, I awoke to their flames: the same ardor, the same love, but thousands of thoughts had traversed them! He kissed my brow twice.
We breakfasted in our coach, at Briare. At seven thirty that evening, after a long talk of the sort you and I so often had in Blois, admiring the same Loire we admired there, we turned into the long, graceful avenue of lindens, acacias, sycamores, and larches that leads to Chantepleurs. By eight we were dining, by ten we were in a charming Gothic bedroom enhanced by all modern luxury’s inventions. My Felipe, whom everyone finds ugly, seemed to me very handsome, thanks to his goodness, his grace, his tenderness, his exquisite sensitivity. Of love’s desires I saw not a trace. All through our journey he behaved like a good friend I’d known for fifteen years. He recounted, as only he can (he is still the same man as the one who wrote that first letter), the violent turmoils he had repressed, which I saw come to his face and then fade away.
“So far, there’s nothing so frightening about marriage,” I said, going to the window and seeing a charming park imbued with heady perfumes, lit by a magnificent moon.
He came to my side, once again took my waist, and said, “And why should you be frightened? Have I ever broken my promises, by word or deed? Will I ever?”
Never did any voice, any gaze hold such magnificent power: the voice stirred the most delicate fibers of my body and reawoke all my emotions; the gaze had the force of the sun. “Oh!” I answered, “how much Moorish treachery there is in your perpetual enslavement!” My dear, he understood me.
And so, my dear doe, if I have gone several months without writing you, you will now understand why. I must remember the girl’s strange past to tell you of the woman. Renée, I understand you today. A happy bride cannot speak of her happy marriage, not to an intimate friend, not to her mother, perhaps not even to herself. We must leave that memory in our souls like one more emotion that is ours alone, one that has no name. How odd that anyone should use the word “duty” to refer to the sweet follies of the heart, to the conquering force of desire! Why should that be? What awful power conceived the idea that we must sully the beauty of longing, the thousand secrets of woman, by transforming those delights into duties? How can we ever owe those flowers of the soul, those roses of life, those poems of the exalted sensibility to one we do not love? The very idea of speaking of rights in such sensations! No, they are born and they flourish in the sunshine of love, or else their seeds die in the chill of repugnance and aversion. Only love can keep such magic alive! Oh my sublime Renée, I find you very great at this moment! I bend my knee before you; I marvel at your depth, your clear-sightedness. Yes, a woman who does not engage in a secret marriage of love hidden beneath the legal, public vows must throw herself into motherhood, just as a soul sundered from the earth launches itself into the heavens! From all that you have written me, one cruel principle emerges: Only superior men know how to love. Today I see why. Man obeys two principles: he has in him need and emotion. Weak or inferior men mistake need for emotion, while superior men conceal need beneath the admirable effects of emotion: by its violence, emotion instills in them an excessive reserve and inspires an adoration for the woman. Sensitivity depends on the force of the inner nature, and so only the man of genius can begin to approach woman’s natural delicacy: he sees her, he hears her, he understands her, he lifts her up on the wings of his tender, respectful desire. And when we are thus swept away by intelligence, by the heart, and by the senses, all equally intoxicated, we do not fall back to earth but ascend into the celestial spheres, where alas we never stay long enough. There, my dear soul, is the philosophy I have acquired in the first three months of my marriage.
Felipe is an angel. I can think out loud with him. I mean no rhetorical flourish when I say that he is another me. He is finer than words can say: he grows more fondly attached to what he possesses, and in his happiness discovers ever new reasons to love. To him I am the finest part of himself. I can see it: years of marriage, far from altering the object of his passions, will heighten his faith, will develop new sensibilities, and will strengthen our union. What a happy delirium!
My soul is made in such a way that pleasures leave a bright glow inside me, they warm me, they imprint themselves on my inner being; the interval that separates them is like the short night of high summer. The sun that gilded the peaks as it set finds them still warm when it rises. By what happy twist of fate should it be this way for me from the start? My mother awakened in me a thousand fears; her predictions—which seemed to me riddled with jealousy, though no bourgeois small-mindedness—have been disproved by the event. Your fears and hers,
and mine, it all faded away! We stayed at Chantepleurs for seven and a half months, like two lovers, one spirited away by the other to flee their parents’ wrath. Our love has been crowned by the roses of pleasure, they fill our life together. One morning when I was more deeply happy than usual, I found myself looking back. I thought of my Renée and her marriage of convenience, and I could imagine your life, I entered into it! Oh my angel, why do we speak two different languages? Your marriage is a purely social affair, mine nothing more than the fullest fruition of love: two worlds that can no more understand each other than the finite can understand the infinite. You are on earth, and I in the heavens! You are in the realm of the human, and I of the divine. I reign by love, and you reign by calculation and duty. I am so high up that I would break into a thousand pieces should I ever fall. But here I must say no more, for I would blush to tell you of all the wonder, the richness, the fresh, glowing joys of such a springtime of love.
For ten days we have been in Paris, in a charming house on the rue du Bac, decorated by the same architect Felipe engaged for Chantepleurs. I have just gone to hear the celestial music of Rossini, which I once heard with an unquiet soul, tormented by the curiosities of love and not even knowing it, but which I now hear with a soul fulfilled by the legitimate pleasures of a happy marriage. I was judged more beautiful than before in every way, and I am like a child when I hear myself called madame.
Friday morning
Renée, my beautiful saint, my happiness always brings my thoughts back to you. I think myself a better friend than ever before: see how devoted I am! I have thoroughly examined your married life by way of the beginning of mine, and I find you so great, so noble, so magnificently virtuous, that I consider myself your inferior, your sincere admirer, and your friend as well. Having seen what my marriage is, I am very nearly convinced that I would have died had it been otherwise. And yet I find you still alive! Living on what sentiment, tell me? And so I will never ridicule you in any way. Alas! ridicule, my angel, is the daughter of ignorance, we mock what we do not know. “A green recruit is always quick to laugh; the seasoned soldier is somber,” I learned from Count de Chaulieu, a poor captain in the cavalry, whose journeys have so far taken him only from Paris to Fontainebleau and back again. I have an inkling, then, my dear, that you have not told me all. Yes, you are hiding more than one wound from me. You are unhappy, I can feel it. I have written whole novels of ideas about you in my mind, striving, from a distance and from the little you’ve told me of your life, to discover the reasons for your behavior: she gave marriage a try, I told myself one evening, and what has turned out to be joy for me, was misery for her. Her sacrifices have cost her dearly, and she wants to limit them. She is disguising her sadness beneath the pompous axioms of societal morality. Ah! Renée, here is a curious thing: pleasure needs no religion, no finery, no grand words, it is everything in itself, whereas men have piled up all manner of theories and maxims to justify the atrocious calculations of our enslavement and serfdom. If your renunciations are beautiful and sublime, does that make of my happiness, protected by the church’s gold-and-white veil and confirmed by the dourest mayor of all time, a monstrous wrong? For the sake of the law’s honor, and for your sake as well, but above all so that my pleasures will be complete, I want you to be happy, my Renée. Oh! Tell me you can feel a little love creeping into your heart for that Louis who adores you so! Tell me the symbolic, solemn torch of the wedding ceremony did not simply reveal all the darkness around you! For love, my angel, is to our inner selves exactly what the sun is to the earth. I cannot stop telling you of the Light that illuminates me, which I fear may consume me. Dear Renée, in your ecstasies of friendship, you used to tell me beneath the bower at the back of the convent garden: “I love you so, Louise, that if God were to appear here before us, I would ask for all the torments of life, and pray that you have all the joys. It’s true, I have a passion for suffering!” Well, my dear, today I turn the tables on you, and cry out to God to divide my pleasures between us.
Listen, now: I suspect that you have become an ambitious woman under the name of Louis de l’Estorade; see to it, then, that he is named député at the next elections, for he will be nearly forty years old, and since the National Assembly will not convene until six months after, he will be exactly the age required. You will come to Paris, what more need I say? You will be a great success with my father and the friends I’ll soon make, and if your aged father-in-law is willing to promise a majorat, then we will have Louis made a count. That will be a start! Not to mention that you and I will be together again.
28
FROM RENÉE DE L’ESTORADE TO LOUISE DE MACUMER
December 1825
My happy Louise, you have taken my breath away. For a few moments I sat holding your letter, the paper glistening with a few teardrops in the setting sun, my arms limp, alone beneath the arid little crag where I have installed a bench. The Mediterranean gleams like a steel blade in the endless distance. That bench is sheltered by a little grove of aromatic trees; I have had an enormous jasmine transplanted there, along with honeysuckle and Spanish broom. One day the wall of rock behind it will be wholly covered by climbing plants. We have already planted Virginia creeper. But winter is coming, and all that greenery is as faded as an old tapestry. No one ever disturbs me when I am there; they know I want to be alone. That bench is known as Louise’s bench, which will tell you that I am never alone there, even though I am.
If I tell you these details, so trivial to you, if I depict the green expectations already bedecking that bare, severe rock, atop which the whimsy of the vegetable kingdom has placed a most beautiful umbrella pine, it is because in that place I have discovered images to which I have grown attached.
As I was rejoicing in your happy marriage, as (why should I not tell you all?) I was envying it with all my might, I felt the first movement of my child, which from the depths of my physical being reacted on the depths of my soul. That vague sensation, at once a warning, a pleasure, a pain, a promise, a reality; that happiness, mine alone in all this world, a secret between me and God, that mystery told me the rock would one day be covered with flowers, that it would ring with a family’s joyous laughter, that my entrails had been blessed and would give life in abundance. I felt I was born to be a mother! This first certainty that I was bearing another life inside me brought me a healing consolation. Deep joy had at last crowned the long days of devotion that had already brought joy to Louis.
“Devotion!” I said to myself. “Are you not greater than love itself? Are you not the deepest pleasure of all, because you are an abstract pleasure, a productive pleasure? Are you not, O Devotion, the one human faculty that is greater than its visible effects? Are you not the mysterious, tireless divinity hidden among the countless spheres in some unseen center, through which all the worlds pass in turn?” Devotion, alone in its seclusion, full of pleasures savored in silence, on which no one casts a profane eye, whose existence no one suspects; Devotion, that jealous, omnipotent god, that strong, triumphant god, inexhaustible because it partakes of the very nature of things and so never weakens, even as it expends all its strength; Devotion, there is the guiding light of my life.
Love, Louise, is an action that Felipe exerts on you, but as my life radiates onto my family that little world will return it, in a never-ending reaction, to me! Your beautiful golden harvest will be fleeting; will mine, delayed though it be, not prove more enduring? For with each passing moment it will begin anew. Love is the prettiest thing Society has managed to steal from Nature, but is maternity not Nature in all its joy? A smile dried my tears. Love makes my Louis happy, but marriage has made me a mother, and I will be happy too! With that, I wandered back to my green-shuttered white bastide to write you these lines.
And so, my dear, the most natural, most astonishing element of a woman’s life has been with me for the past five months, but—to you I can say this, very quietly—it has changed nothing in my heart or mind. I see everyone around me happy. The
grandfather-to-be, encroaching on the rights of his grandchild, has become like a child himself; the father puts on grave, preoccupied airs; both are at my beck and call, everyone talks of the joys of motherhood. Alas, I alone feel nothing, and I dare not speak of my insensibility. I lie a little, so as not to dull their joy. Since with you I may be frank, I must confess that there is no motherhood in my present state but an imagined one. Louis was as surprised as I to learn that I was with child. Is that not to say that this child came along of its own will, summoned only by its father’s impatiently expressed wishes? The god of motherhood, my love, is Chance. Our doctor claims that these chances are attuned to the wishes of Nature, but he does not deny that what are so prettily called “children of love” can only be clever and handsome, that often their existence is in a way protected by the happiness that shone, O brilliant star!, at their conception. Perhaps then, my Louise, you will find in your own motherhood joys I will never know in mine. Perhaps we feel more love for the child of a man we adore as you adore your Felipe than for the child of a husband married in a spirit of reason, to whom we give ourselves out of duty, and so as to be a woman at last! Those thoughts, buried deep in my heart, compound the gravity that is already mine as an expectant mother. But, since without a child there is no family, my desire wishes it could hasten the moment when the pleasures of the family begin for me, as those pleasures will be my only existence.
For now, my life is a life of waiting and wondering, in which nauseous misery no doubt prepares the woman to endure other torments. I observe myself. Despite Louis’s best efforts, despite the constant attention, care, and tenderness his love offers me, I am full of nameless anxieties, compounded by the repugnances, the discomforts, and the singular cravings of pregnancy. If I must tell you things as they are, at the risk of inspiring in you a certain distaste for the business of motherhood, I will admit that I am mystified by the taste I have acquired for certain oranges, an aberrant appetite that seems to me perfectly natural. My husband goes off to Marseille to buy me the world’s finest oranges; he has ordered oranges from Malta, from Portugal, from Corsica, but those oranges I never touch. I hurry to Marseille, sometimes on foot, to devour horrible, cheap little half-rotten oranges in a back street that runs down to the port, just by the town hall. To my eye their blue or green mold shines like diamonds: I look at it and see flowers, I pay no mind to their cadaverous odor and find in them a teasing tang, a warmth like wine, a delectable flavor. Those, my angel, are the first feelings of love I have ever known. Those horrid oranges are my loves. You cannot possibly desire Felipe as much as I yearn for one of those moldering fruits. Sometimes I even slip out of the house and scurry off in secret to Marseille; I quiver with longing as I draw near the street, fearing the fruit lady has no more rotten oranges to sell. I throw myself on them, I eat them, I devour them there in the street. I feel as though they must come from paradise and contain the most exquisite nourishment. I have seen Louis turn away to flee their foul smell. I remembered that awful sentence from Obermann, a somber elegy I wish I had never read: The roots draw their sustenance from fetid water![39] Ever since I began eating that fruit, my nausea has disappeared and my health has returned. There is a meaning behind that madness, since it is an effect of nature, and half of all women feel such cravings, which can sometimes be monstrous. Once my pregnancy cannot go unnoticed I will stop leaving La Crampade; I would not like to be seen in such a state.