My father’s name was Maurice Dupin. His great-grandfather was Augustus II, king of Poland; and his grandfather was Maurice de Koenigsmark, later called the Maréchal de Saxe when he was the most exalted field marshal in Napoleon’s army. This maréchal was renowned not only for his cunning and bravery upon the battlefield but for a particular kind of bonhomie he demonstrated in war. For instance, he commonly arranged for women and theater for himself and his men to enjoy after a good day of battle—never, he believed, would they appreciate such things more. All of France knew his name.

And so it was in my father’s blood, his great love of the military, and he joined the army in 1798, when he was twenty years old, never mind his mother twisting her handkerchief. Two years later, he was transferred to Milan, Italy, as an aide-de-camp, and it was there that he met my mother.

She was Antoinette-Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, called Sophie, a courtesan currently living with a general who’d been smitten by her great beauty, her passion, and her gaiety. As was my father. He stole her away from the general, apparently with little ill will, for he was later promoted.

In many letters written to his mother at this time, my father spoke of his love for his fine mistress, and my grandmother worried and fretted, frightened to death that her son might marry someone so far beneath him. She knew that my mother was four years older than Maurice and of a lower class, born to a poor man who sold songbirds on the quays of the Seine, and that in addition to working as a camp follower, she had a young daughter. It was not the match my grandmother had in mind for her beloved son.

There was in this no small measure of hypocrisy. My grandmother may have had illustrious aristocrats in her family, but she came from a long line of illegitimate births, including her father’s. And she herself was illegitimate—her mother, ironically, was a courtesan who had captured the Maréchal de Saxe’s attention.

My father went on to distinguish himself in battle, as his grandfather had, but then he was captured by the enemy and held for two months as a prisoner of war. In May 1801, after his release, he returned home to my grandmother at Nohant. His normally buoyant personality had changed; he had about him an air of melancholy. One would expect such a change after a man is subjected to the ills of imprisonment—vile treatment, near starvation, and only straw upon the ground for a bed. Add to this the mental distress of my father coming to understand that he was perhaps not destined always to be lucky, as he had often told his mother—he was as vulnerable as anyone else. But what beleaguered my father most in those days was the thought that he would have to choose between two women, both of whom he loved.

My grandmother had been my father’s only parent since, when he was nine years old, his father died, leaving the little family enough of a fortune that my grandmother had a comfortable yearly income. In 1793, when the eleven months of the Reign of Terror began and the ruling Jacobins were ordering mass executions by guillotine in order to compel obedience to the state, she had fled her apartment in Paris and bought a peaceful country estate 150 miles south of the city. It was in the Berry region, a gently hilly, largely agricultural area of central France, and the estate lay just outside the little village of Nohant-Vic, population 272. Nohant was situated between the larger towns of Châteauroux and La Châtre.

The house itself, done in the style of Louis XVI, was commodious without being ostentatious. It had once been the site of a fourteenth-century feudal castle, and the bell tower still stood, its dusty, tile-lined belfry serving as a gathering place for doves. On the estate’s acreage were the smaller houses of peasants, tenant farmers who worked the land. With its fields, expansive gardens, acres of forests, and the Indre River running through it, it was a beautiful place in which to grow up.

In the absence of his own father, my father displayed toward his mother the protective attitude that is understandable in such situations. Their correspondence to each other revealed a mutual affection and appreciation as well as a deep level of trust; and oftentimes the language my father used in expressing his longing to see his mother bordered more than a little on the romantic.

But Sophie! Literally from the time my father first saw her, he was obsessed with her. He had had plenty of opportunities to delight in the charms of highborn, beautiful, and cultured women. Sophie offered something different, something more. He—and many others, I might add—found her irresistible. The more time he spent with her, the more his love intensified.

After he’d been released from prison, my father had gone to see Sophie in Paris. At that time, she was again living with a general, but she begged my father to take her with him when he went back to Nohant. Because he was at that point a penniless soldier (he did not then or ever like to rely upon his mother for his support), she even offered to lend him money to fund the trip. My father’s response was that my mother should think carefully and without his influence about whether she truly wanted to be with him, leaving behind a man who kept her in a manner most comfortable. My father’s charm would not buy bread.

It took almost no time for my mother to make her decision: she elected to throw in her lot with my father, the man she truly loved. And so the two of them set out for Nohant.

My father had a plan: rather than introducing the two women right away, he would set Sophie up three miles away in La Châtre, at an inn called the Tête Noire. When the time was right, he would make the introduction.

After he spent a few days at Nohant, my father began disappearing for long stretches of time, telling his mother he was visiting relatives. But she suspected he was seeing a woman and finally confronted her son.

My father admitted that it was Sophie he was seeing, that he was keeping her at the inn. He said, “She has sacrificed everything in order to be with me. I am full of gratitude toward her, full of joy that she has chosen to be by my side.”

My grandmother’s feelings were hardly the same. Bosom heaving, lace cockade trembling at the top of her head, she told her son that she refused to meet Sophie. She berated him for the scandal such a woman’s presence would cause and requested that he immediately send Sophie back to Paris, without him.

“For so many long days and nights I turned away food, I could not sleep, for worry about you,” she told him. “I rejoiced that when you came home on leave you would be with me until you had to return to the service. Now even when you are with me, you are not; your thoughts are always with her. Please, I beg you, send her away; give yourself time to think carefully about your future!”

My father’s response was uncharacteristically strident. “You ask me to turn her away as though she were a vulgar mistress, when I tell you over and over again that in fact I adore her! Was it not you who made me an acolyte of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said that we are all born good and capable of self-improvement? Have you not all your life taught me to appreciate the noble attributes of people regardless of their class?”

My grandmother only stared at him, helpless to explain the difference between what is in a mother’s head and what is in her heart.

They went round and round, each wounded, each hoping the other would come to understand their version of the irrefutable truth. The dinner table, once gay with stories and laughter, was now all but silent, the clinking of silverware and the murmur of the servants the only sounds.

It was Jean-François Deschartres who finally resolved the issue in a bold move, one that came with dire consequences.

Deschartres was my father’s tutor. He was a secularized cleric, having studied for the priesthood without being ordained, and he was under my grandmother’s employ. He was inordinately devoted to both my father and her.

He was an odd man, very thin and tall, pale of skin and eye. He kept his tonsured hairstyle, and he favored wearing knee breeches and stockings and yellow gaiters. In cold weather, he always wore the same ancient brown coat. He had a stutter that was more pronounced when he was nervous, and he was occasionally excitable in the way of an old woman. He had, too, an air of perpetual distractibility, as though he held the Almighty in one hand and you in the other and could never quite decide to whom he should give his complete attention.

But Deschartres was also highly intelligent, an expert in teaching a great variety of subjects. He had no understanding of love or passion, however. He looked upon such emotions as something that must be tolerated in his fellow human beings, a kind of tic of personality he felt fortunate not to be burdened by.

Hearing the arguments between my father and my grandmother must have distressed Deschartres greatly; he had never before seen them behave toward each other in this way. And so early one morning, while the rest of the household was asleep, he went to see Sophie. He intended to persuade her, for the good of all, to leave immediately.

He picked a bouquet of flowers before he left, and on the ride over, he practiced in his mind what he would say to her. When he got to the inn, he quickly climbed the stairs to her room and knocked at the door.

No response.

He knocked again, loudly now, and heard a low voice, sweet in tone, say, “Maurice?”

“It is I, François Deschartres, Maurice’s tutor.” He felt a sudden rush of blood to his head, an outbreak of perspiration. He wiped his upper lip and leaned forward to speak authoritatively into the crack of the door. “I have come with an important message for you.” He put his ear to the crack to listen for her response and heard Sophie walk quickly across the floor. There were sounds of rapid dressing, and then she flung open the door.

Upon seeing her, Deschartres was at first speechless: she had been sleeping, and there was a soft pink flush to the cheeks of her heart-shaped face. Her eyes were wide and dark and very beautiful, direct in their gaze. She was barefoot, and her black hair was not done up but loose around her face, cascading over her shoulders. Her bosom was ample, her waist narrow, and she had about her an air of sultry grace.

He asked if he might come in.

“Bien sûr,” she said, most pleasantly, and stepped aside to let him pass. She was very small in stature, and it must have given even dry-souled Deschartres pause to think about delivering such a stern directive to one so tiny.

He offered her the bouquet, and she took it without looking at it. “Has something happened?”

“Only this,” Deschartres said. “Your presence here has made for a great rift in the relationship between Maurice and his mother, whom, as you must know, he loves more than any person on earth. Every day they argue bitterly, and I can tell you most assuredly that this is not their way; they have always been unusually close. I have come to ask you to go back to Paris. Maurice says you love him; what better way can you prove it than to spare him the terrible pain you are now causing him? Give him distance, give him time, do not subject him any longer to such terrible strain, especially when he has so recently been freed from prison. Surely, without any need for elaboration, you can see that you are not meant for each other. He is in need of peace and care and quiet. Now, if you will kindly collect your things, I shall arrange—”

“Out of my sight, you fool!” Sophie cried, flinging the bouquet to the floor. “Go back to kissing the withered feet of your benefactress! Do not spoil Maurice’s and my happiness with such a ridiculous demand. Do you imagine that I do not know what Maurice needs now? You may rest assured it is not his mother!”

And then, small as she was, she forced Deschartres from the room, slamming and locking the door after him.

An outraged Deschartres knocked again and again, to no avail. Finally, he said, “Have it your way, then, ignorant girl! You leave me with no choice but to call upon the authorities. Then we shall see how long you stay here spinning your web! You are a common prostitute, rightfully worthless in the eyes of respectable people, and you do not belong here!”

“I’ll leave this pedestrian place all right,” Sophie shouted. “And I’ll take Maurice with me, you’ll see! You have no idea how much he loves me. Every day, he begs me to marry him! I’ll take him with me and we will never return!”

The flustered tutor did go to the police, then to the mayor, and to them he made a most dramatic case for evicting the dangerous interloper holed up at the inn who would not listen to reason and go away from a place where she was not wanted. She was causing trouble of the most terrible kind. She was torturing the soul of a decorated officer in the army of Napoleon, a newly released prisoner of war, and this officer’s mother, Madame Dupin, was a gentlewoman and a saint, as surely they knew. Madame was deeply distressed by this interloper’s presence and was spending her days in tears and anguish. Who knew how long her health could withstand such an assault? The wench must be made to leave immediately. Surely some reason for forcing her away could be found. She did not have papers, say; or if she did have papers, something was wrong with them. They must find a way, even if she needed to be imprisoned!

In his heart, I am certain that Deschartres thought he was doing the right thing. He believed Maurice would come to see the wisdom in exiling someone who was an irritant and a distraction and who was, besides, far beneath his station. Once Sophie was gone, Maurice would understand why she had had to leave. All of this would be no more difficult than the days when Deschartres had to force the loudly protesting young Maurice to bed, only to see the boy, once his head hit the pillow, fall asleep immediately.

But when the excited police arrived and demanded that my mother let them in, they found only what looked like a weeping angel, a lovely figure in a white dress, barefoot and seemingly defenseless. Those men were susceptible to my mother’s charms in a way that Deschartres could not be, and they ended up expressing not outrage but pity for her. Upon gentle questioning, my mother told the authorities the truth: she had met Maurice in Italy and they had fallen in love. She had left a wealthy general for him, a poor lieutenant; she had listened to her heart and chosen love over riches and comfort. Was this a crime?

Deschartres, who was waiting outside, agreed to leave only when he was told that the police would persuade my mother to go back to Paris that very day.

Deschartres had just left when my father came galloping up, having learned that his tutor had gone to castigate his true love. Everyone knows this simple truth of the heart: Nothing will bring lovers closer together than people trying to keep them apart. And so my father rushed to Sophie’s defense. He leapt off his steed, raced up the steps to her room, and embraced her. He tenderly dried her tears, kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, and the palms of her hands. He begged her to forgive the behavior of his family, whom he now disavowed. He told her to take the coach back to Paris, promising that he would soon follow her there.

Back at Nohant, a breathless and red-faced Deschartres, nearly choking on his self-righteousness, had been telling my grandmother that she was more than justified in having serious doubts about my father’s lover. “She is the lowest kind of commoner,” he said, pacing back and forth in the dining room. “She is uncouth and selfish, totally without proper upbringing, and you are correct in thinking that the sooner Maurice is separated from her, the better. He cannot think straight around her; she clouds his reason, but he is of course in every way too good for her!”

Into this scene came my father, panting and wild-eyed. When Deschartres started to speak, my father turned his back to him, ignoring him, and stood close to his mother to tell her that he must get away from Deschartres immediately or he would throttle him at the least. My father would go and visit friends in Châteauroux for a few days to clear his head; when he came back, all would be calmer and they could talk.

“But now you leave me yet again,” my grandmother said, weeping. “How it hurts me for you to go away when all I want in the world is to have you nearby!”

My father could engage in fearsome battles with his sword, he rode on when cannonballs were whizzing by him, he could withstand being wounded or made a prisoner of war, but never could he bear his mother’s tears.

His heart softened and he embraced her, kissed the top of her head and rocked her side to side, saying, “Now, Mother, dear Mother, you know that we are all beside ourselves! Let me go for a brief visit and have some time to think. Do not concern yourself with Sophie! Perhaps she will go to Paris and console herself in the arms of another man and I will be shown to be the fool that you suggest I am. But let me go away now, and give me your blessing; I shall soon return to you and even to that reprobate Deschartres in a much better frame of mind.”

My father knew very well he could not stay angry at Deschartres, for above all else, they loved each other. The tutor had helped raise the little boy, and the boy’s mind and spirit were enriched by the odd soul who taught him arts and sciences and took him for long walks in and around Nohant, oftentimes carrying him home, asleep on his shoulder.

My father did go to visit friends, and from there he sent my grandmother a long letter of appeal, which contained these words: “Some women are, to use Deschartres’s vocabulary, mere wenches and harlots. I do not like them or seek them out. I am neither libertine enough to waste my powers, nor wealthy enough to keep women of that sort. But never could these vile words be applied to a woman of feeling. Love purifies everything.” Nonetheless, he assured his mother that marriage was not on his mind, nor on Sophie’s.

After a few days, he returned to the house at Nohant. There he had a tearful reconciliation with Deschartres, who was standing morosely outside arguing with the gardener about the placement of lettuce seedlings. Soon afterward, though, my father went to Paris and stayed there, first on one pretext, then on another. My grandmother suspected correctly that his real reason for being there was to see Sophie. Finally, he returned to Nohant and, while he was there, seemed to make an honest effort to forget Sophie.

It was to no avail. The heart is a small muscle with tremendous strength; it will have its way. Eventually, my father went back to Paris and Sophie. When he became active again in the army, she followed him from camp to camp.

A week before I was born, Sophie decided that she wanted her child to be both legitimate and born on Parisian soil. And so my father was given leave to return to the city, where he and my mother were married in a civil ceremony. My grandmother was not told of this at the time; indeed, she was not told for two years. My father did try, at first: he traveled to Nohant the day after the ceremony to make the announcement, and it must have happened that his nervousness showed. My grandmother must then have suspected the reason for his visit, and before he could utter a word that would make real her deepest fear, she began to weep, saying that my father, by his involvement with a woman of whom she could not approve, had shown that he no longer loved her. Rather than inform her of his marriage to the woman he adored, my father reassured my grandmother of his love for her.

July 1804

RUE MESLAY

PARIS

On the day of my birth, my father was playing his beloved violin at a party given for my mother’s newly engaged sister, my aunt Lucie. My mother, resplendent in a ruffled pink silk dress and matching shoes with pearls at the center of their bows, was dancing a quadrille. She excused herself suddenly and repaired to a nearby bedroom overlooking the garden, where she gave birth to me, reportedly without a sound and also very quickly. It was Lucie who attended my birth, a consequence of my mother having latched onto my aunt’s arm at the moment she realized it was time.

I have imagined the scene of my birth many times. Both my parents and my aunt told me about it, and, along with the details they provided, over the years I lavishly added my own. I saw it unfolding thusly:

I opened my eyes in murky warmth, aware of a squeezing sensation that grew in intensity from all sides and finally thrust me down a narrow passage of flesh and out into a bright light, against which I closed my eyes and wailed. A single spindle of saliva broke as I opened my mouth. There was crust in one eye. I was transferred from one set of arms into another. I heard the lilting voices of women.

After she ensured that mother and baby were stable, Lucie went back to the party to tell my father the news. She made her way through the revelers and approached the small group of musicians, who stood with my father in the corner of the room. She laid her hand on Maurice’s arm, stopping his playing. The other musicians stopped playing as well, and the crowd grew abruptly silent. Lucie said into the stillness, “Come, Maurice, you have a daughter.” This announcement was greeted with a great burst of applause.

“She will be fortunate,” my aunt told the guests, over her shoulder, as she led my father to the bedroom. “For she was born in the time of roses, to the sounds of music.” Now the crowd laughed, and then the music began again. I turned my head toward the sound, drawn to music then as I ever would be.

And then there was my father, holding me in his arms. His tears fell on my forehead, and his long forefinger gently wiped them away; but I, still in possession of the short-lasting but infinite wisdom that is ours in the womb, felt his great joy as well. I was given the name Amantine-Lucile-Aurore, and my father said, “We shall call her Aurore, after my mother, who does not bless her now but, in time, will.”

Surely it tore at his heart to hold me that day, an infant whose weight barely registered in his arms, knowing that his mother would condemn his marriage and, by extension, me. He pulled me closer and rocked me side to side, crooning.

A writer has a most fertile mind, or he is no writer at all. He has an imagination that soars when given the most meager starts: a wet blade of grass, croissant crumbs on a plate, the sight of a woman hurriedly crossing a street. And in the way that the fiction a writer produces can assume a truth of its own, these details of my birth seem less story to me than memory.

—

AFTER I WAS BORN, my father felt there was no more hiding from my grandmother; now he would need to tell her of both his marriage and the birth of his daughter.

My grandmother’s position was always this: she could forgive one’s circumstances at birth. After that, though, came the life one chose to fashion for oneself. She herself, for example, despite being born illegitimate, had conducted herself properly, married well, lived a life of great dignity, and never gave cause for criticism or scorn. She had plans to raise her own (legitimate!) child, my father, in the same way. She could and did turn a blind eye to her son’s dalliances: he had fathered a son with a girl in the village outside Nohant. My grandmother doted on the boy, called Hippolyte, and contributed money to help raise him after he was put in the care of a peasant woman next door to the estate. But to give him the name Dupin, to consider him in any way an heir to her fortune? Certainly not! His last name was Chatiron, after his mother. Whom her son most emphatically did not marry.

My father argued that Sophie’s life experiences had not permitted her to make the same choices as my grandmother and reminded her that Sophie was legitimate, as was her daughter, Caroline. But my grandmother persisted in her complete disregard for Sophie, as well as in her belief that the differences between her and Maurice were too great to sanction a relationship between them. It could not last. It was not proper. My father was an aristocrat: kind, deep-feeling, optimistic, and intelligent. He was also a brilliant artist and gifted in his knowledge of languages and of literature. He was very much sought after to sit at the tables of many important and influential people, for he was a most charming and witty conversationalist. He loved music perhaps most of all, and he was widely praised for both his singing and his violin playing. He acted impulsively, but with the kind of courage and trust that can make rash decisions seem like good ones, even well-considered ones. He loved—and, I daresay, lived for—the beauty in life. He found it everywhere, and he was as glad to give it as to receive it.

My mother was mercurial, a beautiful, dark-complected bohemian with a dramatic way of expressing herself, whatever her mood. She had been cast out of her home in her early teens to work as a dancer in a theater in the hope that she would find a “protector.” She was strong and practical and had, as well, an air of mystery and magic about her; she was one of those charismatic beings who draw the eyes and ears of everyone in the room. Most of all, she was well aware of the uses and power of passion—my father alluded obliquely but clearly to skills she possessed that turned strong men into weak-kneed devotees.

Never mind my grandmother’s concerns about such a mismatch. I learned in time to use each side of my family for my own particular advantage.

—

I AM SORRY TO SAY that in the end, my father lacked the courage to tell my grandmother about his marriage, but he did write to her of my birth. He told her my name was Aurore, after her, in an effort to win whatever goodwill that might bring. But my grandmother had heard rumors of my parents’ marriage, and she wrote to the mayor of the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, where they had supposedly exchanged vows, with the request that he confirm the union, which he did. Soon afterward, she went to the city and set about trying unsuccessfully to have the marriage annulled. She would not stop in her quest to force my parents apart. After her husband’s death, she had turned all her hopes and attentions to her only son. For him to marry a woman like my mother ruined her plans, so carefully conceived and meant to serve as comfort to her in her old age.

But there was something else, too, something of which she may not have been consciously aware: there is always trouble of the worst sort when a widow effectively remarries and the man she weds is her son.

When my father heard that his mother was in Paris, he concocted a plan of his own. He brought me to her apartment building and conspired with the concierge to find a way for my grandmother to see me.

The concierge came to my grandmother’s apartment to show off “her” granddaughter. “Look at her; I can hardly bear to put her down!” she said, then offered me to my grandmother to hold. When I was in her lap and my grandmother saw my eyes, so like my father’s—large, black, and with the softness of velvet—she understood that it was her own granddaughter she was holding. “Who brought her here?” she demanded. The tone of her voice caused me to burst into tears.

The instinct to protect children that lies in the breast of most mothers took hold, and the concierge stepped forward with her arms outstretched. “Ah là là,” she said, “give her back to me. I can see she is not wanted here.”

She started to lift me from my grandmother’s lap, but my grandmother only held on to me more tightly. She raised me to her shoulder and, sighing, began to pat my back. “Poor little mite,” she said, “none of this is your doing. There now, stop your crying; you are safe with me.

“Who brought her here?” she asked again, albeit more gently.

The concierge raised her fingers nervously to her mouth, then clasped her hands before herself. She spoke rapidly, saying, “If you please, madame, it was your son, Monsieur Maurice, who waits downstairs. We thought if only you held the child, you would—”

“Maurice!” my grandmother cried and, with a great deal of emotion, called for my father to be brought up to her. They embraced and wept, my small body between them, but in the end my grandmother would not agree to meet Sophie or to bless the marriage. All she could manage was to take a ruby ring from her hand and press it into my own; she wanted the ring to be given to my mother.

Thus my grandmother made a conciliatory move toward my mother, but with a mediator in between: me. Just like my father, I was caught in the middle.

January 1831

RUE DE SEINE

PARIS

In the predawn dimness, I lay in bed, trying to pinpoint the start of the events that had led to my being here in Paris, on my own. I had no husband, no children with me; it was just I, my valise in the corner of the bedroom not fully unpacked, and my footsteps echoing in the apartment whenever I moved about. The noises outside, even at this early hour—carriages bumping over cobblestones, the night cleaners finishing picking up garbage, the cynical laughter of prostitutes on their way home—did nothing to penetrate the quiet around me.

In many ways, it was a political revolution that had led to my personal rebellion. In the summer of 1830, all of us at Nohant had yearned for news about the neighborhood uprisings in Paris that took place during the July Revolution. There was a great deal of hatred for Charles X, and young resisters armed with not much more than paving bricks had attempted to force the king’s abdication. I had worried about my mother and other relatives living in Paris, of course; but I had also worried about those young laborers I had never met yet fully sympathized with: factory workers and students who put their lives on the line for their beliefs. They were not alone in reviling the Bourbon Restoration; Charles X was maligned not only by the poorest people on the street but also by the wealthiest in their well-appointed mansions.

On July 26, in the midst of a heat wave, workers who had been barred from the factories took to the streets. More than forty journalists from eleven newspapers signed protests against Charles X, and for seventy-two hours there was bloody and chaotic fighting, which left six hundred dead and two hundred wounded. The next month saw the abdication of Charles X; and then Louis-Philippe, whose nickname was “Citizen King,” came back to Paris from London, where he had been in exile.

The ones who brought this news to us at Nohant were a group of young men, students who lived now in Paris but were originally from our Berry district. They returned home now and then, and when they did, they often gathered or stayed at our house. I welcomed them because they caught us up on the news, but also because they were stimulating company, a welcome relief from the usual tedium my husband, Casimir, and I fell into when we were by ourselves.

One day, I went to the nearby Château du Coudray to visit my friends Charles Duvernet and Alphonse Fleury, whom we called “the Gaul.” With them was a man seven years my junior whom I had not met before, a nineteen-year-old recent law graduate from La Châtre named Jules Sandeau. He had an endearingly shy demeanor. I asked if he went hunting with my friends, and he flushed, answering, “I’m afraid I don’t care for loud noises. The truth is, I’m a lazy sort of romantic dreamer whose greatest pleasure is to read and to make up my own stories.”

I found him very handsome. He had a pink-and-white complexion and thick, curly blond hair. His build was rather slight, the kind I preferred, and his confession that he was a “romantic dreamer” did nothing but make me more interested in him.

I told him I had been talking with my other friends about the recent revolution in Paris and had asked them if a new republic had been declared. They hadn’t been sure, and I asked if Jules knew. He did not. I mounted my horse to set off for La Châtre in search of news. Before I rode off, however, I invited Jules to come to dinner at my house the next day and told him to bring the others.

At that dinner, I read a letter to my guests that I had just received from my children’s tutor, who was now in Paris. There had indeed been a new republic declared.

Soon afterward, my husband, Casimir, joined the National Guard. I worried about this, I told Jules and my other friends when I saw them a few days later. I worried about my husband and my mother and my aunt Lucie, who had had a job associated with the previous regime.

Jules shrugged. “When the blood is on fire, there is no room for reason. The citizens will defend themselves.” Later, though, we took a walk by the river, and his approach was more gentle. “I know they will be safe,” he told me.

“How do you know?” It was getting dark outside; I could hardly see his face.

“Because I want them to be. For you.” He looked about, then moved closer to me and offered his arm. “We should go back.”

I didn’t want to go back. Suddenly, I wanted to stay out all night with this young man. My attraction to him had grown stronger in the days since we’d met. He knew literature and politics and history. Though he had studied law, he wanted to become a writer, as did I, and we spent hours talking about our methods and habits in writing stories. In spite of my being so much older than he, I saw that he was equally drawn to me.

Not much more time passed before I fell in love with Jules, and I told him so. He confessed that he felt the same, and finally we gave in to temptation.

There was at Nohant a kind of summer house I had created. It was away from the main house and one could get to it without going through the village, so it was in that respect a very private place. Jules and I met there a few times and indulged ourselves not only in lovemaking but in the sweet talk and tender foolishness all lovers enjoy.

I felt no guilt about this. Like my father, I believed that love purified everything. The only thing wrong in making love was being intimate with one you in fact did not love.

I had no love for my husband. And for almost two years, I had been sleeping in my own room, apart from him. Not long after we were married, I had become aware that he regularly bestowed his affections on others, including our housemaids. In addition to that, because of a secret I would very soon uncover, I would be vindicated in my belief that his feelings toward me resembled hatred more than love.

Divorce had been abolished by Napoleon, and as long as the law still gave husbands the right to manage their wives’ money and assets, I had no thought that I would get an equitable separation, one with a settlement that would allow me and the children to live apart from Casimir. For a long time, I had been trying to make the best of things, at considerable cost to my health.

I felt I’d been drowning, and now love had thrown me a rope. I could refuse it and slowly die or take it and live.

Before Jules left the country to go back to Paris, he begged me to join him there. With tears in my eyes, I said I wished I could, but surely he understood that I could not.

But now here I was, in Paris.

I went to the window of my half brother’s apartment. Morning had broken, and the city was alive with movement and color and sound. I wanted to gobble up everything: the people bustling down the sidewalks, many with dogs as sophisticated-looking as they, the pink-gray light, the tall brick buildings near me and the rounded domes in the distance, the Seine, the stores, the street vendors, the cafés with their beautiful gilt-framed mirrors, the magnificent churches, the gardens with their marble statues, the streets crowded with carriages and coaches and bicycles, the elegant gas streetlamps. I wanted to know everything, do everything, I wanted to leave my provincialism far behind and be part of a city of eight hundred thousand that was growing exponentially. I wanted to immerse myself in a life of writing, the life of an artist. I wanted to be like the bohemians, who cared nothing for the opinions of others. They dressed as they pleased and lived as they saw fit and honored their own ways of thinking. They did what made sense to them, rather than following the restrictive and sometimes ridiculous mandates of the bourgeois.

Equally, I wanted to be in the arms of my lover, into whose rented room I would soon be moving, unbeknownst to my husband. Hippolyte’s apartment would serve only as a place to receive mail until I found an apartment for Jules and me. I was seeking a building with a concierge who would announce visitors, and with a back door that would accommodate a quick getaway, should my husband happen to appear without advance notice.

I dressed quickly, stuffed the heel of a loaf of bread into my mouth, and put on my coat. I was going to buy men’s boots, which were solidly constructed and had iron heels that would not wear down. I had been slipping and sliding on the icy streets. The delicate shoes I’d come here with had cracked almost immediately after my arrival, and I’d found myself tripping in the clumsy overshoes I had bought to replace them. I needed to feel secure on my feet because I wanted to know every part of the city, to walk it from one end to the other until it was as familiar to me as Nohant was. I would buy boots, and then I would make arrangements to meet with the novelist who would help me publish my book.

January 1805

PARIS

By the time I was six months old, rumor and innuendo about my parents’ misalliance was more than my grandmother could bear. People were condemning my father for marrying so far below his station, not in small part because of my grandmother’s disapproval of it. But they were condemning of my grandmother as well, for not supporting her son now that the deed was done. Finally, she agreed to attend a religious ceremony for my parents’ marriage, followed by a small and uncomfortably quiet supper. She would recognize the marriage, if not her daughter-in-law.

In many respects, it was nearly impossible for her to become close to my mother; their personalities were so very different. Whereas my grandmother could not so much as put up an umbrella without following an unwritten law, my mother lived by her own rules. And she did not suffer fools, no matter what their station in life. She felt that in some respects she was superior to aristocrats. “Look at my hand,” she once said. “Do you see how my veins are larger than those nobles’? My blood is redder, too; I have more stamina than they could ever dream of!”

This seemed true. Whereas my grandmother seemed incapable of walking more than a few feet, my mother rarely went to bed before one, and she was up at six, working. She did all her own cooking, sewing, and cleaning. If my grandmother had tried to emulate her for even one day, it would have been the death of her.

Sophie did not enjoy long dinners, evenings out, glittering society balls, or many other things that upper-class people did or aspired to do. What she liked best was being at home, in the company of someone whose heart was sincere, someone she could trust and who could trust her enough to let her be herself absolutely. There was a person whose beliefs were very much like hers, and that person was my father. Despite what my grandmother thought, my parents were exceedingly well matched.

Soon after my birth, my father went back to his duties as an officer in the army. When I was around two years old, my mother joined him at a camp in Montreuil. Seven-year-old Caroline, the daughter born to my mother before my father and she met, and I lived then with my aunt Lucie and her daughter, Clotilde, in a village called Chaillot.

I remember how Caroline and I rode in creaking baskets on either side of a donkey my aunt occasionally rented from a neighbor. She used the beast to carry carrots and cabbages to the market at Les Halles. I remember how I loved both the peace of the country and the garden especially; but I was equally taken by the vibrancy of Paris. Though they were opposites, even as a child, I wanted both.

May 1808

RUE DE LA GRANGE-BATELIÈRE

PARIS

At the age of three, my father was off to war and I was back in Paris, living with my mother in a small garret apartment. My half sister, Caroline, was for the most part away at school. To keep me from running all over the place, my mother fashioned a makeshift playpen from four rush-backed chairs. In the center of the space she put an unlit foot warmer for me to sit on, but I rarely sat. Mostly, I leaned my foreams casually on the seats and chatted on and on, like a grandiloquent patron in a barroom.

It was really here that I began my profession as conteuse. Then, as later, I started with not much, something more feeling than idea, an image or a thought or even a question that flew into my head and perched there. After that, there came quite naturally some sentence followed by another and then another, each building upon the last. I did not think about what should come; I only spoke out what was quite suddenly there. I made what would otherwise have been long, boring hours enjoyable by offering to myself and anyone who cared to listen another place to be, a place as real to me as the chair walls that surrounded me.

My stories satisfied me, if not my exasperated mother, who called them romans interminables. We stayed in the kitchen together for hours on end, the sun shining through the narrow window or rain pattering against it, she with her sleeves rolled up to make her stews and chicken livers, her plum tarts. While she labored, she sang in a beautiful, pure voice. So it was that I learned early on the satisfying combination of food and music and literature. And though my mother was often impatient with my lack of quiet, she was also sometimes drawn into my stories enough to put down her knife, wipe off her hands, and pull me onto her lap, where she then listened to me more closely, and sometimes laughed and kissed me. And so I also learned early the seductive power of words.

Ah, Maman. In later years, when we tore at each other, I kept in mind those kitchen tableaux, times when I sat at her feet and watched as she gamely made soup of bits of onion and potato peels and scant grindings of pepper because she had not budgeted our food allowance properly. She often spent too much money on theater tickets so that we might go out of our grim surroundings and lose ourselves to the glory of the stage. We needed to have something to do besides go to daily Mass. Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I wasn’t sure I saw the point of Mass, anyway: it seemed to me that my mother was as inclined to feel the spirit of God in the beauty of nature or the kindness of friends as much as when a largely indifferent priest placed a white host in her mouth.

My mother told me Bible stories, or stories about herself and her sister, my aunt Lucie, playing dress-up in clothes given to them by the old woman who lived next door, or stories about her father taming his little birds before he sold them, teaching them to sit on his finger, then making smacking noises so that the birds would kiss him. He showed his daughters how to do this; they laughed at the odd feeling of the birds’ beaks pulling gently at their lips and at the sight of the tiny purplish tongues.

There were many nights when my mother fell into bed and wept quietly with longing for her husband fighting in Napoleon’s Peninsular War. After he was transferred from cold and rainy Prussia to Spain, he was promoted to major and stationed at the palace of the deposed prince of Asturias in Madrid, to serve under Joachim Murat, marshal of the empire and imperial lieutenant to Spain.

There, the weather was fine and the women beautiful. And Sophie’s husband was beautiful, especially in uniform, with his gold epaulets and shiny sword, the sabretache that featured an eagle embroidered out of seed pearls. He had a white woolen cape with gold buttons and braiding and a matching pelisse with black fur, which he wore tossed over the shoulder. His trousers were purple with a gold lace overlay. He had red Moroccan leather boots with the seams done just so, and he wore an eighteen-inch yellow plume on his velvet-trimmed shako. He wrote to my mother of his own magnificence in uniform, though it was done in such a charming way one would never accuse him of immodesty: he gave the credit to the clothes and not the person.

So, yes, he was handsome and well-mannered and witty and cultured and easily seduced, as she well knew. Never mind that he wrote to her words meant to be reassuring and romantic: “I’ve had only one ambition since I met you, namely to make up to you for the injustices of society and destiny, to assure you of an honorable life, and to shelter you from unhappiness. Nothing is worth more to me than the modest chamber of my dear wife. Nothing is equal in my eyes to her lovely dark hair, her beautiful eyes, her white teeth, her graceful figure, her little prunella shoes.” Beautiful words, to be sure. But she was here in Paris, in a drafty garret apartment with me, and he was there, with other women with lovely dark hair.

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 without 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.

Eventually, I did fall asleep, though not for long. I was roused by a boy of about nine years old, a big boy with thick black hair and full red cheeks, thrusting a ragged bouquet into my face. “Here, girl, these are for you,” he said.

I raised my eyes to my grandmother, who stood with her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “This is Hippolyte, who has come to meet you, and whose manners I daresay need improving!” She did not tell me at the time, but this was my half brother, from my father’s relationship with the peasant girl.

“Do you want to come outside to play?” Hippolyte asked. He blinked once, twice, then reached his finger up to dig inside his nose.

“Ah là là!” my grandmother said, tsking, and yanked his hand down from his face. She asked me, “What do you think, my dear? Would you like to go outside?”

I nodded, and within the space of a few minutes, Hippolyte and I were out in the beautiful day, the sky nearing sapphire in its depth of blue, clouds moving slowly, nearly hypnotically, above us. I saw acres of black earth, tall trees, and many varieties of flowers, both wild and cultivated. I stood staring at the star-shaped grass-of-Parnassus, which had delicate, veinlike etchings on each petal, until Hippolyte pulled on my arm, impatient to take me elsewhere.

There was a large vegetable garden, a vine arbor, and thick-trunked walnut trees, whose gentle deterioration only added to their great beauty. There were enclaves of little houses where peasants lived, and Hippolyte showed me his, only a few steps away from my grandmother’s house.

The Indre River ran through the land, and Hippolyte brought me to it. He told me he caught fish there with his bare hands. When I looked askance at him, he said, “It is true; I shall show you someday. And then we shall make a fire and cook the poor fellow! I shall pick my teeth with his bones!”

He looked with satisfaction at my face, hoping, I think, that he would see fear. But I was only intrigued and eager to catch a fish myself.

“And now we shall play war,” Hippolyte said, picking up a long stick that I thought would serve as a sword. “I shall be Napoleon.”

“No,” I said. I had had quite enough of war.

“Very well—then I shall be a dog, as I was in a previous life. You will be a cat, and I shall chase you.” He tilted his chin to the sky and barked, then waved his hand imperiously, giving me a head start. “You must run with your tail straight in the air and your back arched. You must be very afraid. You might spit at me a little.”

I considered this, then said, “I shall be a dog as well.”

“Don’t be silly. Only boys can be dogs. Girls are cats.”

I stood taller and spoke with great authority: “I am a dog because that is what I want to be, never mind that I am a girl! We shall find a squirrel to be a cat.”

After about half an hour, I came back inside. My grandmother was playing the harpsichord in the drawing room, and I stood shyly at the threshold of the room, watching her. When she saw me there, she called me over to sit beside her on the bench. “Do you play?” she asked. I shook my head. “Never mind,” she said. “You will learn. For now, just listen.”

I sat still, listening, enraptured. After a while, I slid off the bench and lay on the floor beneath the instrument so that I could feel completely enveloped by the music. I closed my eyes and soon fell asleep. I was awakened by my father’s laughter as he gently pulled at my ankles, then stood me up. “You must offer your apologies to your grandmother for being inattentive to her wonderful performance!”

“No apology is necessary,” my grandmother said. “She is still tired, and anyway, you used to do the same thing, Maurice, you used to lie there in that same spot to listen—do you remember?”

He looked down at me, smiling, a light in his black eyes. “Are you feeling better, little cabbage?” He put his hand to my forehead. “No fever!”

“I am cured!” I said.

Not so for my baby brother, who mostly lay in my mother’s lap, crying in a reedy wail so very different from the robust cries I’d heard from him before. He was like a little animal in a trap who despaired of any help arriving, whose only solace was to make sound out of his suffering.

That night, I awakened in my grandmother’s bedroom. I was for a moment completely disoriented. Then I remembered where I was and tried to be glad of my soft bed, to appreciate the beauty of the bright stars I could see out the window. But I missed the presence of my parents. I tiptoed to their room and stood watching as they slept, my mother with my father’s arm about her, my baby brother silent in his cradle nearby. I tiptoed over to my brother’s cradle and started to lie down on the floor beside him. My mother sat up in bed.

“Aurore!” she whispered.

“Yes, Maman.”

“What are you doing here?”

I didn’t answer, merely hung my head.

“Come here,” she said.

When I got to the bed, she moved over to make room for me. I climbed under the covers and nestled close to her. “There,” she said. “Better?”

“Better.”

From that night on, I let myself be put to bed in my grandmother’s room, then snuck into my parents’ bed. Downstairs, my grandmother slept on a bed made up for her in an otherwise empty space that my father dreamed of turning into a billiards parlor. She would not have approved of my sleeping in my parents’ bed. She herself had lived a life largely devoid of passion or even touch. She reportedly had never had relations with her first husband, who died quite suddenly very early in their marriage. She adored her second husband, my father’s father, whom she married when she was just over thirty and he sixty-two, but naturally he was more like a father to her—he even asked her to call him “Papa.” My grandmother, ever on the side of being coddled and cared for, only too readily acquiesced. In addition to that, she was a rationalist, closer to Deschartres in that respect than to her quite romantic and sentimental son. So the kind of natural warmth and openness that was for my parents second nature was to my grandmother something both foreign and distasteful.

But for me, sleeping with my parents was blissful. Oftentimes, before I drifted off, I heard my parents talking about their hopes for my father to quit the military in favor of staying home and pursuing music and theater. I would try to imagine what that would be like. To be able to see both my father and my mother every day!

My mother was in much better spirits when my father was with us, and at those times I suffered far fewer slaps and admonishments from her. As for my father, he never was anything but gentle and loving with me; he had not been shown the rough examples for child rearing that my mother had.

Sometimes my parents lay in bed and talked about me. They praised my intelligence and my inquisitiveness, the way that I charmed my grandmother, even my occasionally imperious attitude toward Hippolyte and the other children from the village with whom we played. My parents also enjoyed it immensely when I irritated Deschartres, fond as my father was of him.

Lying in bed with my parents, I naturally heard, as well, their worries about my brother, but when they started talking about Louis failing, I let myself fall asleep. There was nothing I could do about it.

February 1831

QUAI DES GRANDS-AUGUSTINS

PARIS

I stood looking out at the city from the room that Jules and I were sharing. The view was of the Pont Neuf, the towers of Notre Dame, the rows of little houses on the Île de la Cité. But I was not really seeing any of those beautiful things. My arms were tightly crossed, and my foot tapped against the floor so relentlessly I feared the neighbors below might complain. The sky was dark, full of rapidly moving clouds, and I was as unsettled as the weather.

I had just finished reading a letter I had picked up at my half brother’s apartment, one he had written to me. In it, he told me that the most admirable thing I had done in my life was to have given birth to Maurice, and that my son loved me with all his heart. Hippolyte warned me that staying away from Maurice for such long intervals would test that love, and it was likely that it would soon go away entirely.

When I had left Nohant, two-year-old Solange had been reassured by the fact that her father was there, and by my telling her that I would see her soon. Maurice, at seven, was more anxious, and I had finally made him smile by promising him that I would send him a uniform just like the policemen in Paris wore. Then, when I watched him walk away from me that morning, my heart ached so hard I nearly canceled my plans.

But I had come to see that a life not lived in truth is a life forfeited. I believed that what I intended to do for myself in Paris was ultimately better for all of us than my staying home and trying to pretend that I was content sewing and cooking and overseeing dinner parties, all the while turning a blind eye to my husband’s cruelty and betrayals.

Had I had known what passion would be born in me around living the life of an artist, had I known what absorption and dedication it would require, I might never have married and had children. But I had married. I had borne children. One could not retract the birth of a child or the love for them that came with it. Now I needed to think of the best way to manage all of our needs.

If letters from the children’s tutor and even from Casimir could be believed, Maurice and Solange were not suffering at all but thriving. Hadn’t my own life served as evidence that the love one had for one’s mother could survive her absence?

In contrast to my mother, I wrote to my children every day. But letters did not pull a blanket up higher before a good-night kiss, or listen to progress in reading, or ferret out hiding places in a game of hide-and-seek, or soothe the fears brought on by a nightmare.

Hippolyte’s letter, in which he had, as usual, felt so free to criticize me, burned in my hand.

Did he ever tell Casimir that his frequent absences from our children—his vaguely described “business trips”—would threaten their love of him? I knew the answer to that: of course not. It was men’s privilege and pleasure to travel away from home whenever they wanted to, so long as they could afford it (and sometimes when they could not). It seemed a woman never had a good enough reason to leave her post. It was another part of the great hypocrisy that existed between men and women that was held as a natural law. But it was not a natural law; it was man-made.

I would stay with the plan Casimir and I had formulated. In April, I would be back with the children. Until then, I would hold them in my heart and write to them daily but remain here, where I had real business to attend to.

I resolved to approach another man of letters. Hyacinthe Thabaud de Latouche, called Henri, had been a friend of my father’s. He had just taken over as publisher of a satiric journal called Le Figaro. He was forty-five years old, quite overweight, and arrogant, I was told; and he had a reputation for being very difficult. But he was a great admirer of Rossini, and the first Frenchman to embrace the genius of Beethoven and Berlioz. In addition, he had introduced Goethe to French readers, which in itself was enough for me to overlook the criticisms I had heard.

I sent him my manuscript, asking him to read it and let me know if there was any way he could help me.

The next morning, I got a note from him, inviting me to meet with him in his office in Montmartre that very afternoon.

September 1808

NOHANT

My parents and I had been back at Nohant for several weeks, and the three of us had regained our health. But my baby brother, Louis, continued to decline. For weeks, my mother had tried valiantly to nurse her son back to health. She ate so well she embarrassed herself, but my grandmother seemed to understand the reason for Sophie’s apparent greed and often put more on my mother’s plate without her asking. My mother ate between meals, as well: thick slabs of bread spread with pale yellow butter and red jam, raw vegetables she pilfered from the kitchen when the cook’s back was turned, fruit she pulled from the branches of trees, pastries she kept wrapped in hankies in her pockets. She ate and ate and ate, and all of it was an apology to her son for the neglect he had suffered on our wartime travels—my mother feared her inadequate diet then had affected her milk—and all of it, too, was a prayer for him not to leave her.

She took walks and she spent long stretches of time working on a children’s garden she was cultivating beneath a pear tree. Nearby, Louis lay in a basket silently staring up, his tiny hands motionless. I used to kneel beside him and stare at him, trying to will him back to good health.

At night, my mother held Louis close and rocked him and rubbed his back and sang to him, but as he continued to lose weight and decline, she stopped doing that. It was as though just being held required more energy than he had to give, as though he were too fragile to bear any touch at all. Once I came upon her tenderly bathing him as he lay in her lap, and the sight of his prominent rib cage made for a stab of pity in my heart. I saw what my mother had not yet accepted: Louis was not going to recover. He was going to die.

Finally, on September 8, came the awful moment when Louis started growing cold and mottled before my mother’s eyes. It was just after dinner; she had been on her way upstairs to nurse him to sleep. Instead, she rushed back to the dining room and sat by the fireplace, imploring my father to build a fire as quickly as he could. This he did, and then he kept stoking the flames as the baby grew colder and colder to the touch. My mother moved as close to the fire as she safely could and wrapped Louis in more and more blankets. She was wild-eyed with panic; she kept calling his name, kissing the top of his head, massaging him through the blankets, rocking him faster and faster. My father knelt beside his wife and son, trying to comfort both of them, wiping at his tears. My grandmother and I stood silently a fair distance away, and I remember that she wrapped part of her long skirt around me in a way of which she seemed unaware.

After a short while, Louis stopped breathing. My mother cried out, one sharp cry, and then began to keen. My grandmother ran for Deschartres, to see if there was anything to be done.

There was nothing he could suggest. Not yet three months old, the baby was dead. Deschartres lifted him from my mother’s arms, gave him the briefest of examinations, and nodded at her. “My condolences,” he said.

“No!” my mother screamed, lunging for Deschartres in a violent way, as though he were the cause of Louis’s death.

My father reached for her, and she turned to sob in his arms. I crept closer but did not attempt to touch either of my parents.

“I have killed him,” my mother sobbed. “I have killed our son!”

“No, Sophie. Shhhhh,” my father said. I saw him squeeze his own eyes shut, and I saw the resolve pass over his face. He would comfort my mother now; later, he would tend to his own wounds.

My mother wept, the sounds so loud and heartrending it seemed to me that the house would collapse around us. Finally, my grandmother convinced us all to sit again at the table, where the remains of dinner still were; the servants had not dared to enter the room. My mother had stopped crying by then, but every breath she took was a shudder. She sat blankly staring, her hands open in her lap as though something had just flown out of them. Finally she looked at my grandmother and asked dully, “Where is he?”

“He is dead, my dear,” my grandmother said, her usually clear voice thick with pain.

“But where is he?”

“Deschartres has buried him,” she said. “And now we must endeavor to move forward.”

My mother rose so abruptly she knocked over several glasses. “Buried him! So soon? But I have not prepared him!” She meant washing him, perfuming him, then binding him, as was the custom.

“It is best this way,” my grandmother said.

My mother looked quickly over at my father, who only stared into his plate. Then she ran upstairs to their bedroom and slammed the door. My father followed her.

“Come to me,” my grandmother said, patting her lap, and I went to sit with her. “Shall I sing you a little song? Are you still hungry?”

I said nothing. A song, a bite of food, the moon and the stars—what difference did it make what she offered me? But she sang. And eventually, I closed my eyes and leaned back against her. From upstairs came the voices of my parents: my mother screaming, raging, weeping; my father calmly responding.

When I was put to bed, I had no thought to give my parents privacy. I went to them as usual; as usual, they let me in.

In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sounds of my parents arguing in loud whispers. My mother was pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly. My father sat at the side of the bed, his head hanging low. “But we didn’t see him before Deschartres took him away!” she said. “How can we be sure? Ah, Maurice, he was persecuted from the moment he was born. I swear to you I saw that Spanish doctor press hard against Louis’s eyes with his thumbs, I heard him say, ‘Here’s one who will never see the Spanish sun.’ I heard it, I tell you! And now he has been taken from his mother’s arms and put in the cold ground, and we are not even sure he is dead!”

“I am sure!” my father said. “It wounds me as it does you to think that we have lost our son, but he is dead! There is no doubt! You saw it yourself, Sophie, you saw him grow cold, you saw him stop breathing. He is dead! Do not make me say it again and again; each time I do, he dies once more.”

She wept, with the smallest of sounds now, and my father went to her and knelt on the floor before her. I kept my eyes mostly closed so that they would not see that I was awake.

“Sophie,” my father said, weeping himself, pushing his face into her legs.

My mother abruptly stopped crying. “I want to see him. You must bring him to me. I must be certain he is dead. He might merely have lapsed into a coma. As you well know, people have been buried alive! What if he is out there in the blackness and the cold, all alone and still alive?”

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 individual 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 wife 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.

My mother wept and railed; she was both furious and heartbroken, and nothing my grandmother said seemed to have any effect on her whatsoever. But then my grandmother began to speak of what happened to a woman’s skin when she wept so hard and slept so little, how her looks could be damaged when she did not care for herself in the way a woman was meant to. My mother, who was then thirty-five, was aware of the fact that, beautiful though she still was, she could not return to the life she had been living when she met my father. She needed him. More important, she loved him.

My father was right in thinking that a little separation would make my mother appreciate him again; he had only just left, and it was plain that already she missed him. Add to this the sober reminder from one beautiful woman to another about the need to hold a husband’s interest, lest he stray, and a plan was set in motion. My mother decided that she would go to bed early and, in the morning, would meet her husband with a new outlook. They would begin again.

After my mother and I retired, my grandmother stayed up late, playing a card game called piquet with Deschartres. She had not wanted to tell my mother that she, too, was worried about her son riding out on such a night; his wild horse moved in restless caracoles even when he was tightly reined in. She disliked my father’s pride in taking what control he could over such a headstrong animal; she thought it foolish to allow ego to overrule common sense.

When my grandmother expressed her fears to Deschartres, he pooh-poohed them. “Maurice is an excellent rider,” he said. “And surely he deserves time away from this trial he has chosen as wife; she is enough to make anyone want to go out in a storm. Don’t worry, nothing will happen. And even if it does, Maurice has Weber with him.”

Weber, my father’s valet, was a much-admired man: loyal, strong, and willing to do whatever his master bade him. He had about him a rather awful smell, and his language was a German-accented French that was hard to understand. But my father was fluent in both tongues, thanks to Deschartres, and he and Weber got along famously.

Thus assured, sometime after midnight, my grandmother began her preparations for bed.

Not long afterward, Weber came galloping up to the house, hollering, and was met by the servant Saint-Jean, who had rushed outdoors in his nightwear to see what the commotion was about. Weber told him what had happened: my father had crossed the bridge outside La Châtre at a full gallop, and was rounding a bend onto a dark road lined with poplar trees. Just as his horse made the turn, it stumbled in a pile of stones that had been left at the side of the road. The horse reared, sending my father flying, and the fall broke his neck. Weber raced up behind, leapt off his horse, and ran to my father, whom he heard say, “Come to me; I am dying.” While locals helped move my father to a nearby inn, Weber galloped to Nohant. He told Saint-Jean to tell Deschartres what had happened, then raced back to La Châtre.

Deschartres took my grandmother’s coach and set out immediately for the inn. My grandmother learned from the servants that Maurice had been seriously injured and was at the Lion d’Argent in La Châtre. She never walked more than a few feet without distress, but on this night, absent transportation, she walked the entire three miles to the inn, wearing her delicate silk shoes and with nary a shawl for protection from the rain. When she got there, she entered the room where her son lay and fell upon his body. She would not allow anyone to separate her from him. She held my father’s still form in the carriage all the way home, and if she wept, no one heard it. It was much later that I came to see that as there is a grief for which tears will not stop, there is also a grief for which tears will not come.

A few hours later, at six o’clock in the morning, my mother was awake and performing her toilette, dressed in a white camisole and a long skirt. I was already up; she had helped me get dressed first. Her mood was fine: all would soon be well; she would reconcile with my father, whom she believed to be downstairs. She would also speak to him about going back to our apartment in Paris; they had been here long enough.

Deschartres burst into the room. My mother turned to look at him and understood immediately that something terrible had occurred. “Maurice!” she cried. “What is it, what has happened to him?”

Deschartres stumbled and stuttered, but my mother made out that her husband had had an accident. “Where is he?” she asked.

“No, you cannot go to him now,” Deschartres said.

“But is it serious?” my mother asked.

“Yes, it is serious,” Deschartres said. “He was thrown, and it is very serious.” Then he abruptly shouted, “He is dead!” He began to laugh hysterically and collapsed onto the floor, sobbing.

My mother screamed, then began to sob herself. She fell back into a chair, put her hands over her face, and rocked back and forth, moaning. I ran to her, patted her bare arm and kissed it, saying, “Maman! Maman!” She ignored me. It was as if she could neither hear nor see me. I kissed her arm again and again and tried to get in line with her vision. She only continued to weep.

Deschartres rose and spoke firmly to my mother: “Attend to your daughter! You must live for her now.” Then he left the room. My mother kept loudly sobbing, and I tried over and over again to console her. Nothing worked: my stroking and kissing her, my crawling into her lap and holding tightly on to her neck, even, finally, my own terrified sobbing. She wanted only my father.

I wished then with all my heart that I were a boy. I had felt many times before that if I had been born a boy, I would have been just like my father, and I wanted to be like him now more than ever. On and on my mother wept, she who had so recently lost her infant son, and now her husband. Finally I simply sat still at her feet, waiting.

—

WHEN THERE ARE NO apparent consolations for certain kinds of grief, the mind can nonetheless create some. What I eventually came to is that the death of my father meant my parents would never come to the end of their love. Circumstances dictated that they would never have to discover if their feelings for each other would wane, if their passion would fade. Despite the hardships thrust upon them or brought about because of disagreements, they had never fallen into despair about being together or even settled into a comfortable ennui. Now they never would. When my father was killed, they were still deeply, romantically, wildly in love. What I witnessed between them seemed a love of epic proportions.

I was grateful for the memory of their love and their relationship. I was happy that my father, once he found the love of his life, never had to live without her. But I was sorry that my mother had to live for so long without him. It was never easy for her, after he died. I do not believe her pain ever went away, or even lessened.

April 1831

NOHANT

However much I missed my children, it was difficult to leave Paris for Nohant for the three months I would be caring for them. I was in thrall to my work, passionate about my nights with Jules, and emerging into the self I wanted to be.

Yet when I arrived, I was overwhelmed with love, both that which I felt for two-year-old Solange and seven-year-old Maurice and that with which they showered me. They scarcely noticed when Casimir left for his family’s hunting lodge in Guillery, and his brusque goodbye to me made me not miss him, either. I had expected to be affected greatly in one way or another upon seeing him again, but the experience was oddly empty. His tone of voice when he spoke to me was flat; his eyes were absent of any emotion.

But the children could not get enough of me; it was as though I had grown two new limbs, the way they kept themselves anchored to my sides virtually all day.

I had been away from them for so long, it was a luxury for me not to separate from them at night, either, but rather to look down and see their lashes dark against their cheeks as they slept, their small chests rising and falling, and to hear the sounds they sometimes made: Maurice’s emphatic grunts, Solange’s mewls and deep sighs. I could see their eyelids flutter with the drama of their dreams, and when they turned onto their sides, I could gently stroke the soft indentation at the base of their skulls.

I reveled again in the company of ones so young. I loved their honesty and inquisitiveness, their spontaneity, their outsized joy at the smallest of things, their sense of wonder and gratitude. I climbed trees with my children, chased them through the woods, supervised their rides on the pony, read them Homer’s stories of gods and goddesses made human, which I had loved as a child, and encouraged them to make up their own stories. We put on plays for one another and for any audience we could gather. Sometimes, as evening fell, I sat on the steps at the side of the house and watched them play. I laughed along with their laughter, that purest and most infectious of sounds. I congratulated myself and Casimir for having done a good job thus far in raising them, our problems with each other notwithstanding. At night I lay still and looked out the windows, which I had left uncovered so that I might see the rising of the moon and the humbling grandeur of the stars, and I gave thanks.

And then, just like that, it was over. One night Maurice balked at sleeping with me, saying it was too crowded in the bed. Then Solange said that she didn’t want to sleep with me either, because she was not a baby anymore. In the daytime, they began wandering off by themselves, not so eager to involve me in their play. One afternoon, I found Solange sitting in the lap of one of the kitchen maids, a pretty young blond girl named Odette, who was reading to her. “Solange, come with Maman,” I said, holding my hand out to her. “I will read to you.”

“I don’t want you,” Solange said, and it was both embarrassing and painful to hear those words of clear dismissal.

Color rose in the maid’s face as she rushed to my defense. But I held up my hand and with a nod indicated that she should go on. If one is going to praise children’s honesty when their words please, one must tolerate it when the words do not.

I went in search of Maurice and was reminded that my son had gone to La Châtre with one of the servants to help shop for supplies needed by the groundskeepers. Apparently Maurice took seriously the fact that Casimir had told him that he was assistant master of Nohant, the one in charge when his father was away.

I retired to my writing room, but the passion I had felt in Paris for working on the first volume of Jules and my novel eluded me here. I still wrote, but I got only about a third as much done; and the work lacked original turns of phrase as well as the urgency and sense of discovery that had come so easily before.

I spent hours sitting at my desk, trying to think of what I might want to say. Repeatedly, ink dried on the quill before I had written one word. I walked to the window and looked out at the land, but mostly I was dreaming of Jules on the streets of Paris. I wondered whether he missed me, whether he would take good care of himself, for without me he tended not to eat well and to fall into a kind of defeatist mentality. Our friend Émile Regnault had found us a new place to live, something much better than the single room we had been occupying. It was a sixth-floor garret apartment in a large corner house on Quai Saint-Michel, near the Pont Neuf. There were three small rooms and a balcony, from which we would be able to see Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. I loved that part of Paris—not too modern, still picturesque and poetic—and in July, Jules and I would be living there together.

In the meantime, here I was at Nohant, worried about him and worried about myself, too. My time here, which at first had seemed so fleeting, now felt interminable. Nohant began to feel like the prison I had escaped in Paris. I was bored, restless; then, finally, ill. I wrote to friends in Paris, who suggested I simply come back early and bring the children with me. But how could I do that? I had committed to an arrangement I was bound to honor: three months in the city, three months at Nohant. And in any case, how could my children fit into the bohemian lifestyle I had developed for myself there? No, my fate was to be in Paris, wildly alive but missing my children, or at Nohant, nurturing my children the way I wanted and needed to but with a great emptiness gnawing at me until my stomach and my head ached. I wrote to my mother about my conflicted feelings, saying, “The freedom to think and act is the most important right. If one can join with this the little cares of a family, this freedom is infinitely sweeter, but where do you find that? One way of life always undermines the other.”

My mother’s response was that I was being selfish. She said I was too wild and was not paying attention to my children the way I should, that I was abandoning them. Well. If I were indeed abandoning my children, I had learned how to do so at the hands of a master.

October 1808

NOHANT

It was several weeks after my father’s death when I wandered outside and found my mother in the children’s garden she and my father had built. She was sitting on the ground with her back to the trunk of the pear tree, her eyes closed. It was an unseasonably warm day, more summer than fall.

I crept closer to my mother, who looked so small beneath the pear tree. “Maman?”

She opened her eyes and smiled at me, then held out her arms, and I went gratefully to her. It felt as though this was the first time she had really seen me since that horrible night of my father’s death. All of the household—all of the village, in fact—was still mourning my father; he’d been beloved by so many for his wit and his charm, for the way their love for him was so exuberantly returned.

I lay still in my mother’s arms, deeply appreciative of the feel of her arms about me, of the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Her comfort had been a long time coming, after our grievous loss; I exulted in it now.

After a while, I asked, “What are you doing?”

She pushed my hair off my forehead and kissed the top of my head. “What am I doing? Well, I am having a little dream of when we were all together.”

“When shall we be together again?”

She hesitated, then said, “What do you mean, Aurore?”

“When will they be through being dead, Papa and Louis? When will they come back?”

I could see her struggling to formulate an answer. Whereas my grandmother believed in setting down the unvarnished truth, my mother was more respectful of the vulnerable mind of a child. She had heard the servants talking of seeing my father’s ghost sitting at the dining room table with his head in his hands and had admonished them not to speak of it in front of me; she had also forewarned my grandmother not to tell me that death was the absolute end.

At first she attempted diversion, saying, “What about Caroline, whom I am also dreaming of? Is she not part of our family, too? Surely you have not forgotten your sister, Caroline, with her charming smile, she who plays with you and your dolls so nicely when she is home from school—she who, in fact, tries to grant your every wish!”

“Yes, I love Caroline very much. But when will Papa and Louis come back?”

“Ah, Aurore.” She sighed and shook her head. “It will be a very long time, and we must be patient. You must be a good girl and please your father. For even though we cannot see him now, he is nonetheless keeping watch over us. Do you agree?”

“Yes, and I have been good, Maman.”

She raised an eyebrow. It was true that I had not been perfect, that I had fallen into the habit of demanding that I get my way, and was often given it by people too taken up with mourning to discipline a young child. But there was one area in which I was unfailingly cooperative.

“I do my lessons every day.”

“So you do.”

There was some bitterness in my mother’s tone. Deschartres had begun teaching me Latin, the natural sciences, penmanship, and reading. My grandmother taught me to read music and play the harpsichord, but she also taught me manners and voice modulation, and for those things my mother had a great deal of disdain. Sometimes we giggled together in private over my grandmother’s insistence on the proper way to hold a fork, the level at which one’s chin should be kept, how to bend to pick up something one dropped, should there be no one there to do it for you.

There was one thing I never told my mother, for even at age four, I knew it would wound her. That was the way my grandmother spoke disparagingly of my mother’s father. We were outside walking one day, and I had stopped in my tracks to listen to birdsong. My grandmother pulled at my hand, but I would not move until the bird had flown away.

“Your grandfather was a bird fancier, was he not?” she asked. “I suppose this accounts for your preoccupation with them.”

“Yes,” I said, “he sold birds, and he tamed them, too. They would sit on his finger and on his shoulder, and they would come to him right out of the air when he whistled. He knew all the birdcalls, and he taught them to Maman.”

“Ah. Well, that’s very nice, but no way to distinguish oneself, I think. Isn’t it true?”

I didn’t answer. My thoughts on this subject were too big for me at the time. I could not then express what I came to articulate later, which is that the most superior creation in all of nature is birds. What human could build something as ingenious and perfect, not to say comfortable, as a nest? Their ability and form in flight are awe-inspiring, and their songs are études of extraordinary clarity and quality. Most impressively, they are able to do what humans cannot: birds make harmonious marriages, where both sexes share equally in family duties. Even at this early age I had begun regarding feathered beings as a kind of patron saint.

But on that day, I could only look at the ground and wish that I could kick my grandmother’s finely turned ankle. Finally I reiterated that I wanted to have one of the birds that lived in the woods of Nohant as a pet. My grandmother found the idea preposterous. Later in my life, though, I did just that: I kept birds on branches on my desk. They were free to leave and often did—they would go outside, and then they would come back again. Oftentimes, they would perch upon my pen, and in their insouciance they were so charming I could not bear to brush them off. On more than one occasion, I blamed a failed deadline on a barred warbler.

—

There are times when tragedy can bring about a kind of goodness that would not have occurred otherwise. A few months after my father’s death, my two mothers, as I came to regard my mother and grandmother, began to cooperate with each other in ways they had not before. They could easily have blamed each other for his death, but it seemed they did not. They were not friends, but they were not enemies, either. Most evenings after dinner, they played parlor games and took tiny sips of sherry from pastel-colored, etched glasses. They played with Deschartres, who was a most disagreeable loser, especially when he lost to my mother. He had superior skills—at least to hear him tell it—but she had all the luck. One night he reacted so badly upon losing that my grandmother coolly suggested that she would have to slap him hard, and as he sputtered and fussed, I saw an intimate look pass between the women, something friends might share, and then the two of them burst into laughter.

My grandmother had begun to admire my mother. She saw how Sophie made all our clothes, even our hats; and if she was too impatient to always take the tiny stitches one was meant to in embroidery, she was quick and marvelously stylish in what she created. She once embroidered a dress from top to bottom for my grandmother in only two days; and when the old woman broke her sewing box, my mother shut herself away to make her a new one. Even Deschartres expressed his admiration for this latter creation; he bent his heronlike frame over the new sewing box for some time, after which he offered what was for him high praise: “Not bad.”

In addition to that, without ever having been taught, my mother could tune the harpsichord by ear, replace its strings, and reglue its keys. “Your mother will attempt anything, with great confidence and verve!” my grandmother told me.

She also came to see that my mother was an artist who had never been given opportunities to develop what were considerable talents in drawing and painting and singing. And she praised the letters my mother wrote, calling them lively and “very pretty.”

“However, you must work on your spelling, my dear,” she said, and rather than rising up in sharp-tongued affront, which I feared she would, my mother did attempt to improve not only her spelling but her penmanship. She also began to read voraciously, a habit that stayed with her until her death.

Despite her many gifts, my mother’s only vanity was about her beauty, but even then she was more matter-of-fact than boastful. She could never recognize her own intelligence, not in small part because she was genuinely unaware of it—here, in fact, is where her insecurity came out for the way she envied the society women their education and mental abilities. I occasionally saw women dismiss her with a glance, and I always thought at those times that they had no idea whom they were silently denigrating. My mother was a true Parisienne with a gift for savage wit and mockery; those haughty women were lucky she did not take them on, for they would have been sorry piles of crinolines and jewels when she finished with them.

She could also be extremely irritable and at those times seem to become emotionally untethered. She was free with slapping, too; but in the end there was in her such poetry and heart that one could never get enough of her, no matter what. There were times when she beat me and sent me to bed, and as soon as I was allowed up again, I would run to her and embrace her. And she would cover me with kisses, as though it were someone else who had effected our separation, someone else who had left red handprints on my bottom or my legs or even my face. I cannot say too many times that my mother was the most emotionally volatile, charismatic woman I have ever known. It was she who first aroused passionate love in me. And so it was soul-ripping when the time came that she abandoned me. Or, more to the point, sold me.

July 1831

25 QUAI SAINT-MICHEL

PARIS

I was finally back in Paris, and Jules and I were in our new apartment. We both loved it and our view of the Seine. On calm days, the river shone like flat metal, but on stormy ones, the restless current made it appear that waves were eating waves. We had rooftop greenery there, and a wonderful sense of airiness. Most important, there were two exits.

My husband still did not know that Jules and I were living together and I saw no reason to tell him. It was, first of all, no longer his business what I did with my life. But I also feared him cutting off funds, even though the allowance I received was from my own fortune. Luckily, I had been granted retention, if not control, of what I had inherited from my grandmother, and that was only because of my mother’s intervention at the time of my marriage. Though at the time I had worried that her demands might make a bad impression on my in-laws, now I was very grateful to her.

The interior of the apartment was charming. It came with no furniture, however. Jules had no money, and so I bought everything on credit: rugs, furniture, linens, dishes, draperies. I asked Casimir to secure a loan for me so that I might pay off everything when it came due.

When he failed to act, I wrote to my brother, asking him to get me a loan. When Hippolyte also failed to respond, I sent a nearly hysterical letter, telling them both that if they persisted in punishing me in this way—saying that my children were suffering in my absence, withholding from me the money I needed, refusing to respond even to deny my request—I would kill myself, and my blood would be on their hands. I was so distraught I almost believed I would do this, but in the end I reasoned myself out of guilt and despair and went into action. I borrowed five hundred francs from François Duris-Dufresne, a man for whom I had given parties at Nohant in an effort to help him get elected to a political office in Berry. I got another two hundred as an advance from my editor, Latouche. I signed for the loans myself, then wrote to Casimir, telling him that I expected him to cover the payment. Finally, he sent me a brief note saying that he would comply.

For one moment, when I looked at his familiar script—the t’s crossed high up, the slant leaning overly far to the right—I let myself think back to our earlier days, wondering how what had happened to us had. We were once a reasonably content couple. I had touched his shoulder affectionately as I passed behind his chair; we had held each other in the night. But it was pointless to look back. I tore his note in half and threw it away.

September 1831

NOHANT

I returned to Nohant from Paris in the fall, for another three-month stay with the children. When I arrived, Casimir was harvesting grapes and so stayed on for a while. At first, I held out hope that we would finally be civil to each other. My hopes were dashed at our first dinner together, when Casimir pointedly directed his conversation to the children and not to me. When once I asked him a question, he ignored me. Solange didn’t notice; she was singing to the peas on her plate. But Maurice, always sensitive to the feelings of others, said, “Papa? Did you hear Maman?”

Casimir looked at him. “No. I no longer hear her.”

Maurice turned to me. “You must speak louder, Maman.” His eyes were hurt and imploring.

“I shall, from now on,” I told him. I raised my voice and said, “I shall speak very loudly! Like a giant!”

Maurice laughed, he and Solange both, and they imitated me in loud voices of their own. The incident was forgotten so far as they were concerned. Not so for me, who sat watching my husband eat, his eyes focused on his plate, chewing, chewing, chewing. The air grew dense around me; I put down my fork.

The next day, I was finishing up some last details on Rose et Blanche. I had worked hard and had completed what I needed to in only five days. I had not seen any of my Paris friends who were also in Berry. It seemed odd to be without my comrades, whom I normally saw so often—I felt lonely and disconnected.

There was a knock on my door, and I opened it to my maid, who held a small, cream-colored envelope addressed to Madame Aurore Dudevant. From the handwriting, I knew it was from Jules, and my face must have betrayed me; the maid’s bland expression changed: her mouth tightened, and one eyebrow lifted.

“Merci,” I said, and she said nothing, just turned on her heel and walked away.

I closed my door and read the brief message; it set my heart racing. Jules, missing me terribly, had made a hasty trip from his parents’ home in western France to Château d’Ars, the home of our friend Gustave Papet, which was a mere mile and a half up the road.

Late that night, I sat in the upstairs bedroom I had taken, longing to have an opportunity to see him. As if in answer to a prayer, I heard a light tapping at my window. It was Jules, my own Romeo, standing on a ladder he had carried from the orchard, pleading with me to let him in. He had seen the light in my window, had seen me pacing back and forth.

I let him in, laughing, crying, and covered his face with kisses.

Then: “Are you insane?” I whispered. “Casimir is here! If he finds you, he will fill you with buckshot!”

Jules put his hands to either side of my face and regarded me tenderly. “I would happily die for this moment. Anyway, we are protected: Gustave has volunteered to lie in a ditch in the garden directly beneath your window. He will throw a stone if he sees or hears anything.”

As it happened, there was no cause for worry. The whole time Jules was in my bed with me, Casimir lay in his bed, snoring, and there was a nearly comical aspect to it. It also enlivened our lovemaking, the thought that perhaps Casimir might awaken.

We were already in a rush—we had missed each other’s minds and bodies—but this secrecy added a kind of wild excitement we had not enjoyed before. We bit and pinched each other, he pulled on my hair until I gasped; and in the pain there was a low-down pleasure. We kept whispering to each other that we must hurry and then must part, poor Gustave out there lying in the dirt; but every time we gave each other a farewell kiss, it led to more and more, until our dear friend ended up spending the entire night outside, relieved of his duty only as dawn broke. I was deeply grateful to Gustave and later sent him a letter saying so, calling our friendship nothing less than holy and imploring him to find a way for Jules and me to repay him.

But first, after Jules had made his escape, I sat at my desk, still tingling, to write a letter to Émile Regnault, a medical student I loved as a brother. I wanted to tell someone of Jules and my adventuresome lovemaking; it had made me feel distinctively alive and powerful—and apparently in need of a bit of braggadocio, as well. I wrote, “I am covered with bites and bruises; so weak I can hardly stand I’m in such a frenzy of joy. If you were only here, I’d bite you too until blood flowed, just so you could share a little of our savage raptures.”

Then I began to make edits on the pages Jules had given me for our novel. It was due to be published in December. People were saying that no doubt Jules would contribute next to nothing. I hotly defended my lover but those rumors were true. With the exception of a few bawdy (and, in my opinion, tasteless) scenes that appealed to the juvenile aspects of Jules’s character—and apparently to our publisher’s as well—the book was mine.

Not for many years did it occur to me that there was another side to that evening of stolen pleasure with Jules, a way of looking at it that revealed me not as an independent and freethinking woman who had the right to live her own life but as one blind to the needs of her children. For my lover and I would be warned in the event that my husband’s lamp got lit and he began coming toward Jules and me. But what about Solange and Maurice, who, though they now slept in their own beds, still occasionally came to me? What would I have said to them should they have knocked at my locked door, knowing they had heard the sounds within?

July 1810

NOHANT

It was just after I had turned six years old that I came into my mother’s room one afternoon to present her with a bouquet of wildflowers. She was packing; her open suitcase lay upon the bed. I dropped the flowers: the day had come. In the morning, she would go to live in Paris. Now I would only see her when she visited me.

Following my father’s death, my grandmother had not gone to Paris for the winter, as usual, but had stayed at Nohant. My half sister, Caroline, my mother’s now eleven-year-old daughter, was not received there. My grandmother made a point, with a kind of faux, powdered-bosom generosity, of saying my mother was welcome to see her own daughter, of course she was! Just not there at Nohant. Never mind that my father had embraced Caroline as his own child; such sentiments clearly were not shared by his mother. So if my mother wanted to see her other daughter, she had to take a three- or four-day trip to Paris. Naturally, this began to wear on her.

Around this time, in a way that seemed at the time innocent and even fortuitous but that I later came to regard as calculated, my grandmother received a visitor, her half brother and my great-uncle, an unapologetic ladies’ man named Charles-Godefroid-Marie de Beaumont. He was absurdly handsome and had about him an irresistible air of gaiety. He missed my father, as we did, but his nature was such that he would always turn to the sunny side, and with his arrival he lifted the gloom for all of us. Now every evening was filled with laughter and lively conversation.

My mother, used to the attention and admiration of men, was drawn to Beaumont. It was not only because of his appreciation for her beauty and charm; he served, my mother thought, as a steady and objective presence who could help her decide the best thing to do with her life now that Maurice was gone. With my great-uncle she weighed the pros and cons of taking me with her to Paris. If she did, we would be poor again, for with Napoleon’s defeat came the end of a pension my mother had expected to receive annually from my father’s military service. But she would have both of her daughters with her, and after all, as she told Beaumont, it was not wealth that brought contentment.

Beaumont gained enough of my mother’s trust to make her feel that agreeing to the arrangement my grandmother had offered was the right thing to do. My mother would be given a sum that equaled the amount she would have received as a pension, plus an additional one thousand francs annually, which was a generous bonus. In return, she would forsake her rights to me with the exception of visits at her own discretion. In other words, my grandmother would be entirely responsible for my upbringing. I overheard my mother agreeing to sign a contract to make her promise legal and binding. To me, it meant that my mother was trading me for money.

The night that contract was signed, I lay with my mother on her bed, inconsolable, despite her reassurances that I truly would be better off, that she would come and visit me in the summers at Nohant; and that in the winter, when I lived in my grandmother’s apartment in Paris, my mother would fetch me to spend time with her and Caroline in our old apartment. But I could only hear that the time would come when she would leave me entirely. And now that time was here. I burst into tears.

My mother pulled me onto her lap and kissed me. “Please take me with you,” I said. “Don’t leave me here without you.”

Her voice was full of pain, but she tried to calmly explain again why I could not come with her. Finally, she said, “If I take you away from your grandmother, she will reduce my income to fifteen hundred francs.”

The news, rather than helping me resign myself to the fact that I must stay there, only made me think that there was no reason for me not to come with her. In my child’s mind, fifteen hundred was a large number indeed, and I told my mother so. In my head, I was already packing my own things.

“No, Aurore,” my mother said. “It would not be enough. Half of that amount goes to pay for Caroline’s school. I wouldn’t have enough to clothe and feed us. Soon you would be begging me to send you back to the comforts of your life here, and who knows if your grandmother would take you back!”

This was a consideration. My grandmother had suffered some small strokes that had made her personality change; she was no longer as even in temperament as she had been.

“But I don’t care!” I said. “I never want to come back anyway! It doesn’t matter what we eat, we’ll have marrow bone soup every night and I will love it because I will be with you! Maman, we will be happy, and so everything will be all right.”

She said nothing, and I pressed her further.

“You know I am right. You always say that love and happiness are not for sale, that what is on your back and on your plate is second to what is in your heart. You believe this, just as Papa did!”

She laughed. “You are too intelligent for your own good.”

She grew quiet, thinking. Then she said, “Perhaps I would be happier poor with you than I am here, where I live a life wanting nothing in the way of material goods but where my heart cries out for a freedom and liveliness that will never be here. I suppose you long for the same.”

“Yes!” I said. “I am just like you!”

Her face changed. “No.” She lifted me off her lap and stood me straight before her. “Aurore, listen to me. You don’t fully realize what you would be giving up in terms of education and security and the promise of a good match. I would be remiss as a mother if I did not consider these things for you.”

“My education here is not good, it is airless! They want me to be a puppet. As for a good match, I can find that on my own, just as you did! I love my grandmother, I will continue to visit and care for her, I will continue to sing for her and put on my plays, but must I live with her to do that? I tell you, Maman, and you must believe me, I do not care about her money or her house or her fine things.”

“You can say that because you have had such things! But I know what it means to be a young girl with no money. Poverty is what shaped my life, and I had to struggle hard to overcome my circumstances. I was forced to do terrible things. I want better for you!”

“I know what is best for me! And that is to live with my mother! Look into my eyes and tell me you do not agree.”

For a long time, she did look at me. Then she said, “All right, all right! I have thought of a solution. You know I can make charming hats and that I used to be a milliner. I’m going to save some money and open my own shop. Why not? It will not be in Paris—that would be too expensive. Instead, I’ll start my place in Orléans, where I worked before. You and Caroline can help me. We will have many customers; we will make enough money to keep ourselves comfortable. In time, you will have enough of a dowry to marry a worker like yourself, who no doubt will make you happier than the namby-pambies your grandmother would pair you with. You are full of passion, like me; you should marry your equal in that respect.”

“A hat shop, yes, the most wonderful hat shop!” I cried, and my mother put her fingers to her lips to silence me.

“You must tell no one,” she said. “And you must be patient—can you do that for me? For us!”

“I can. But how long before I can come with you? How many days?”

She frowned. “Is this your display of patience? Starting right now, show me what forbearance is in you. Trust in me. Be a good girl for your grandmama, do all she says, and soon you will no longer have to listen to her at all.”

I was enormously relieved and spent the rest of the day happily amusing myself, imagining days at the store, evenings in the small but charming place where my mother, my sister, and I would live.

But that night, while I lay in bed listening to the voices below, doubt crept in. My mother had displayed a great deal of sadness when she’d kissed me good night, and I feared she had changed her mind and would not honor her words; instead, she would go away and gradually forget about me. I rose from bed and by the light of my candle wrote her a letter that was an outpouring of my feelings. I asked her to come to my room and tell me again that she would do all that she had promised.

After I had finished, I crept into the hall and down to her bedroom. Hanging on the wall of that room was a pencil drawing of my grandfather, and as it was not a very flattering portrait (it had been done in his old age, when he was fat and jowly), it had been put in a place where, when the door was open, it was hidden. I put my letter behind it. Included in it was a request that my mother leave her response here as well. Then I found her nightcap, put a note in it telling her to move the portrait to look for a note from me, and put her nightcap on her pillow.

After that, I could not sleep, and when I heard my mother go into her bedroom, I went there. She was sitting at the edge of the bed with my letter in her hands, and her eyes were full of tears. I ran into her arms, fearful of her telling me that my suspicions were correct: she was leaving me forever. It was not as bad as all that, but she did confess to feeling a terrible sense of ambivalence. Once again, I employed all my gifts as an orator—even at six years old, I knew I could be quite persuasive—and begged her to follow through on her plans for taking me with her. Finally, she agreed again to our plan.

“Put it in writing,” I said. Not for nothing had I heard the negotiations that had gone on when my mother signed the contract giving up her rights to me. I wanted something binding as well, and I also wanted something I could read and reread to boost my spirits while I waited for her to come for me.

“I shall write it,” my mother said, “but not now. It is late—you should be asleep. Come, I will tuck you in and kiss you good night and you will have beautiful dreams.”

When she tucked me in, she sat for longer than usual at the side of my bed. She was quiet, holding my hands in hers.

“Don’t forget to write the letter,” I said.

“Yes, yes, in the morning.”

“Promise me with all your heart.”

“I promise,” she said and kissed me once more, then crept out of my room. I lay awake for some time, then closed my eyes, certain I had done all I could.

In the morning, I missed her leave-taking; I had slept through it. I ran to her room, where there was still the indentation of her head on the pillow of her unmade bed. I lay down and put my head where hers had been, my heart aching. Then I remembered the letter she had promised to write: there would be her words, her inviolable promise.

I went to the portrait and, with my heart banging in my chest, moved it slightly to the side. Nothing there. Perhaps it had fallen? I looked on the floor: nothing. I looked everywhere in the room, but there was no letter.

Rose, my mother’s maid, came in to clean the room. I sat dry-eyed in a chair and watched her strip the bed, air out the mattress, and then close the shutters.

I dressed and had breakfast, and then I heard my grandmother in the parlor, clapping her hands, which is how she signaled to me that it was time for my lessons. I turned to go to her obediently but with a heart full of bitterness.

January 1832

PARIS

In winter, when I returned again to Paris, it was with the novel I had produced without Jules while I was at Nohant. I wrote Indiana all of a piece, in a kind of trance, from a place deep within me. I had no outline; I had no idea where I was going. It was only when I was finished that I saw what I had been about: I wanted to speak of my horror of enslavement, and the way I chose to do it was to write a domestic novel, a novel of manners.

The story centers on Indiana, a woman who is sold into marriage, and her unhappiness with a husband who essentially uses and then ignores her, then a lover she takes who does the same. It featured passionate encounters and suicidal pacts and a woman who drowns herself in her despair after a love affair gone wrong. The material was weighted with feelings I had about love and marriage—and Casimir—that I had been loath or unable to articulate. But in the form of fiction, those feelings revealed themselves clearly.

Characters who had been vague suggestions before I began writing—who had revealed themselves only as shadows behind a screen, whose voices were indistinct murmurs in my ears—came alive upon the page. Contrary to accusations that were leveled against me after the book’s publication, however, those characters were not anyone I knew. Parts of Indiana were like me; other parts were not. Some of the other characters were inspired by people I knew but were filled out in ways that were not like people I knew at all. The story had gone its own way.

Once I began opening myself to the truth of one idea through the steady stream of ink upon the page, there was nothing for it but to open myself to all the secrets of my unconscious. Night after night, I wrote steadily for long hours; pages fell to the floor and covered the carpet like snow. It was typical for me to write twenty pages at a session.

When at last I finished the book, I gathered up the pages and stacked them into a neat pile whose height surprised me. Outside, the sun shone and the birds were singing; I had written all night. My fingers were stiff, my back ached, my shoulders, too. Yet I felt awakened from a deep sleep, energized, right with the world, and fully birthed into the proper profession. It might have pleased me if I had known at that time that, between the years of 1832 and 1835, I would have ten novels published, and in my lifetime, more than eighty.

But that day I left my study and called for my children, and when they came running to me, they embraced me with joy. I bent to kiss the tops of their heads and thought, There, you see? You make yourself happy, and they are happy, too.

April 1832

OFFICES OF J.-P. RORET ET H. DUPUY

PARIS

I had sold Indiana to the publisher Henri Dupuy, and it was soon to be released. I needed a new pen name, and now I sat with Dupuy to talk about what that name should be.

I could not use my married name, but neither could I use my maiden name. My mother feared shame coming to the family if I did so, and to herself in particular. It was very common for women who were relaxed about their own morals to want the heroines in their novels to cleave to another standard. My mother, the former courtesan, wanted the books she read to be “clean.” I had shown her the manuscript, and she had taken dramatic exception to the risqué passages. “Of course you must not entertain any thought of using the name Dupin!” she said, and I did not argue.

I sat in my publisher’s office trying to think of possibilities, all men’s names. I knew full well the value of not using a woman’s name—the work would not be taken seriously, for one.

“The name Sand is recognizable now,” Dupuy said, “because of the success of your Rose et Blanche. You would do well to keep it; it could help sales. Why not simply change the first initial?”

My editor at the paper, Henri Latouche, had suggested the same thing.

I got up and moved to the window to look out at the busy street below. The sound of English rose up; a man was speaking rather loudly to the woman on his arm. I turned around suddenly with an idea.

“G,” I said.

“G for…?”

“George.”

“Good. Georges it is.”

“No, George. The English spelling.”

“Why English?”

“I like it.” In truth, it was a nod toward the English spoken in the convent school my grandmother had sent me to, hoping for a refinement of my manners. George was also the name of my favorite poet, George Gordon, called Lord Byron. And george was the Greek word for “farmer,” and so in that way I could honor Nohant.

“Very well: Indiana, by G. Sand.” He looked over at me, squinting. “George. It suits you.”

I bowed. “I agree.”

When the first copy of the book arrived at my apartment, Latouche happened to be there. We were out on my balcony, appreciating the unusually warm day. There was a knock on the door. I answered and found a package tied with string.

I tore the paper off the book and, breathless with joy, examined it: the front, the back, the spine, the endpapers, the even lines of print upon the pages. Then I inscribed it to Latouche and went out to the balcony to hand it to him with a flourish.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“My novel!”

He flipped through a few pages, then a few more. He read with his eyebrows furrowed, a scowl on his face. “But this is nothing more than a pastiche!” he said. “I must say, you owe a great deal to Balzac.”

His words stung, but I said nothing. I appreciated the fact that he was always honest.

The next day, however, he sent a note telling me something altogether different. He had stayed up all night to read my book. He praised my originality and even went so far as to say that Mérimée and Balzac suffered in comparison to the author of Indiana.

As for Balzac, he had become a friend to Jules and me; and after I mailed him a copy of the book, he sent a note saying he had read the preface and found it “well written and full of sense, but as I had to work, I wanted to hold out against my pleasure, and to judge by the samples I have read, I considered it very dangerous for my imagination.”

This ran counter to his behavior when he came huffing and puffing up the stairs to see us. He would boldly pick up pages of whatever Jules and I were working on and, without asking permission, read them. Then he would launch into a long-winded discussion of whatever he was writing. But he ended his note by adding, “It has given me great pleasure to see my friend G. Sand launched, and I shall give him my opinion about the book once read.” I knew Balzac read very few other books because he was so busy with his own, and so I found this very flattering.

The arrival of the book into stores brought me overwhelming success literally overnight. It was astonishing. For several weeks, I could barely take in all that had happened—one critic called my book “the masterpiece of the century,” which prompted none other than a jealous Victor Hugo to ask, if my book was a masterpiece, “what did that make his Notre-Dame de Paris, a whore?” Hugo was a god to me; to be noticed by him even to be insulted was more than I ever could have hoped for.

No matter that we were in the midst of a cholera epidemic; people flocked to bookstores to buy Indiana. It sold out time and again, even after multiple printings.

The critics (all male) gave me favorable reviews. Gustave Planche, who was called Gustave the Cruel for the contempt with which he treated writers, praised my “eloquence of the heart,” my limpid style. Some critics took exception to my portrayal of marriage as a union that turned women into “domestic animals,” but I was also compared to Balzac, for my unstinting way of showing the reality behind the illusion. And to think that before we became friends and colleagues, I had once said that I would walk ten miles just to see Balzac pass by!

There was a kind of androgynous quality in my work that was commented upon: it was said that I had feminized the hero but that certain harsh passages revealed a masculine mind at work. At first, I took umbrage; then I laughed at this observation. It was, after all, not so surprising that when a woman had written a book completely by herself, men were still given credit for it.

For the most part, women were galvanized by reading the book. They seemed to intuit what a man’s intellect could not let them fully understand, something I had tried to explain in the preface:

Indiana is a type. She is woman, the weak creature who is given the task of portraying passions repressed, or, if you prefer, suppressed by the law. She is desire at grips with necessity; she is love dashing her blind head against all the obstacles of civilization. But the serpent wears out his teeth and breaks them when he tries to gnaw a file. The powers of the soul become exhausted when they try to struggle against the realities of life.

Naturally, I was grateful for my success. But aspects of it were strange and uncomfortable. I did not like the reporters who sought me out and often came to my door—I could not speak the way I could write, and to be peppered with questions made me wish I were a tortoise who could withdraw into a built-in hiding place. And it was not just reporters but admirers who came as well. One woman asked what I thought about as I wrote the novel. I said that I thought about it. “Ah,” she said. “So you cannot think when you are writing?”

Anyone in Paris who achieved a great deal of success could not maintain their privacy. Many people knocked on my door asking for money, and some of them came up with stories far better than I ever could for why they needed it. At first, I fell for many of the ruses; later I learned to be more discerning. But I would often worry that I had missed one who legitimately deserved my help.

It was also discomfiting to be approached on the street by a stranger as though he or she were a friend. When I had read the philosophers and poets who seemed to have a clear sight line into my heart and soul, I used to think that if I could meet them, we would admire each other; we would be companions, we would want to spend time together.

Now I saw the error of that kind of thinking. Now I understood that a poet whose words sent me into a kind of rapture was also a man whose soup dripped from his beard. A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.

There was nothing I wanted to say about Indiana; I had already said it in the book. But in keeping with my publisher’s wishes, I did speak about it, to the best of my ability.

I was able to parlay my success with my first novel into a contract with another publisher, François Buloz, which would oblige me to make a contribution every six weeks to his Revue des Deux Mondes. This was originally a travel and foreign affairs journal with a mild and inoffensive tone. With Buloz in charge, though, it was to become a link between France and the United States, and it would now focus on culture, politics, and economics. I would earn four thousand francs a year, and I could continue to write novels, as well. In fact, I had a contract for my as yet unfinished second novel, one of many books I would set in the Berry countryside, to which I gave the fictional name Black Valley. I negotiated it myself, and it gave me twice the amount I had received for Indiana—three thousand francs. I was suddenly wealthy from money I had earned myself, and it was exhilarating. I decided that, henceforth, I would use my full pen name on my books: George Sand. And I would use it not only for my books but in my personal life.

With a guaranteed salary, I could now afford to bring my children to live with me in Paris. Casimir had decided upon military school for Maurice, who would soon be turning nine. I didn’t like the idea; I wept until my eyes were red over it because I did not believe that a boy as sensitive as Maurice belonged there. But even though Maurice begged to live with me, Casimir exercised his legal authority and said no; it was military school for our son. My rage was buried beneath the dull weight of helplessness. What could I do? It was only three-year-old Solange who would be joining me.

Though I was happy to have her, I knew that my life would change when she was there. I knew it might be difficult to give her the attention she was entitled to and do my work as well. But it had taken hold of me now, the trade of authorship; there was no going back. I hoped both my children would come to understand what I was doing—if not now, in time.

—

LIVING WITH ME IN PARIS, Solange, I had thought, might become someone my artist and journalist friends would find enchanting, amusing, someone they might help me raise. Jules did help raise her: he adored Solange and delighted in telling me stories about what she had said and done. Once, when he took her on a walk to the Jardin des Plantes to see the giraffe, she told him straight-faced that there were many giraffes at Nohant and that they ate from her hand. He found that fabrication utterly charming. Other friends played children’s games with Solange, coddled her, spoiled her with treats of one sort or another.

She was a very different child from Maurice. Already I could see how they would develop: Maurice would be like a strong woman, resembling me much more than Solange did; she would be like an unsuccessful man. She did not have the sensitivity of Maurice, nor did she profit from his powers of observation or his natural tendencies toward kindness and patience. She was extremely willful and seemed to take a perverse delight in hurting people’s feelings. No matter our love for each other, no matter the times I missed her only moments after she had gone out with Jules or another friend; from a very early age Solange was a child at war within herself and with me.

I worried sometimes that she was reacting to the turbulence in her environment, that it unsettled her to be yanked from place to place. I had hoped that someone so young would readily adapt to what I thought of as an ideal lifestyle. Casimir loved Solange, I loved her, and Jules did, too. Working together, could we adults not make for seamless transitions? Could we not all share in her upbringing in ways that would enhance rather than detract from her life?

One night, shortly after we’d arrived in Paris and I had tucked her in for sleep on the sofa, I asked her, “Are you happy, my sweet?”

She nodded.

“I am as well. I have dreamed for so long of having you here with me. And you know that Jules loves you too, don’t you?”

A smile, and then another nod.

“Is it not wonderful that we all are friends: Papa, me, Jules, and you?”

“Yes,” she said. “But when will Papa come to live here, too?”

It was a three-year-old who revealed my faulty thinking, who exposed my hypocrisy and naïveté, though I could not quite so easily admit to that at the time. The mind has a way of protecting the heart, of turning one’s gaze in a certain direction, away from what it should focus on. One resists admitting to a failure when the consequences of doing so can be so devastating. My only certainty was that I had gone ahead with my plan to leave my husband and to have my daughter with me, and now here we all were.

Eventually it was clear that my dream of having Solange with me was not working out. I endeavored to entertain her, I took her daily for walks in the park and played games with her, but she was bored and restless and, finally, whiny and complaining and insolent nearly all the time.

She liked the bouquets I kept on my desk, and when I once presented her with the same flowers to keep at her bedside, she immediately pulled every petal off every stem. When I took her out for walks, she would often refuse to walk home, and I had to carry her for long distances while she kicked her feet hard against me.

I was finally rescued by a neighbor woman, who brought Solange over to play with other children in her apartment every day and returned her to me in late afternoon. This neighbor reluctantly confided that Solange did not do well playing with others. She would not share toys, and she seemed to delight in making the other children cry. Embarrassed, I said that I would keep her at home, but the neighbor, who was extremely kind and loved children, said no, she would continue to take her. Solange would get better, she said, though I never saw evidence of that.

Then problems with Jules began. He went from affectionate lover to uncommunicative depressive. All my efforts to ferret out the reason were rebuffed. Concerned, I met with some of his friends at a café to talk about it. “What ever do you think is wrong?” I asked. One of them looked level-eyed at me to say, “Can you not see it? Your success has emasculated him.”

That night, as we lay together in bed, I said, “Jules, is this not what we wanted, a literary life for both of us? We had success together for Rose et Blanche; now I have successfully published my own novel. We should both be grateful for how well it has done. You should be not mired in despair but eagerly working on your own book, which has every chance of doing just as well!”

Privately, I doubted that his work would enjoy as much success as mine had, but then I also doubted that my next book would be as successful as Indiana had been. That novel had been a kind of miracle. Sometimes, sitting alone and trying to realize all that had happened, I saw my good fortune as a benevolent gesture from above, proof that God approved of the choices I had made and was aiding me in my quest to realize my potential. No matter what others might say about my mannerisms or morals, I had my own idea of and relationship to God, and it offered me both peace and direction.

I asked Jules, “Can you tell me why my success has made you doubt your own abilities? What do they have to do with one another?”

He sat up in bed and exploded: “Anyone but you would understand this! You, who claim such sensitivity and perceptive abilities, how can you not recognize the way all of this has been a blow to my ability to work? People constantly coming to the door, and when they are not coming, the relentless scritch, scritch, scritch of your quill! You never stop! You are a writing machine!”

He lay back down, exhausted.

A few leaden moments passed. Then I said, “I shall rent you a room. You can write there. Would that suffice?” I did not remind him that he had had difficulties with his job at Le Figaro long before my success. Nor did I remind him that the article for which he’d been most highly praised was in fact a collaboration between the two of us. Jules was a good enough writer, but he was perceived by many as a peevish sort of fellow, one given to a great deal of selfpity. Our friend Duvernet said that he was “a dry creature, eaten up by petty vanities and foolish ambitions.”

But I still very much loved Jules. I was still grateful to him for having changed me from someone who dreaded the future to someone who looked forward to it. And however tangential his help and influence were on my career, he had been part of my becoming the author I now was. One had to forgive him his moods for the times when he was loving and generous and gay. In this, he was much like my mother.

After a long moment of silence, Jules spoke, in a voice devoid of the high emotion he had just displayed. He said quietly, “George, I need to go away. While you are at Nohant, I shall go to visit my parents. As for a room for me…yes. I think it would help. And after I have finished my own novel and received the advance, I shall pay you back whatever you have spent on my behalf.”

After he fell asleep, I lay awake beside him. Then I went to the living room, where Solange lay sleeping on the sofa. I rested my hand upon her small back. I thought about how, lately, Casimir had been so pleasant to me. I thought of how, when he came to Paris when I was there, he took me to dinner and to the theater. I thought of how he did not resent my success at all. Why was that? Because he was not with me any longer?

Solange awakened. “Maman?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I am here.” I sat beside her until her breathing grew deep and even. And then I tiptoed back to the bedroom. A headache was beginning; I hoped it would be gone by morning.

Winter 1813

RUE NEUVE-DES-MATHURINS

PARIS

By the time I was nine years old, my grandmother and I had returned to living in her apartment in Paris for the winter. My mother would come to fetch me and we would go on outings: to the Chinese Baths, for walks along the Seine, to select a sweet from a store where condensation clouded the glass. On Sundays, she brought me to the tiny, low-ceilinged apartment where she and my half sister, Caroline, now lived. The place reminded me of our old garret apartment, where I’d recited my first stories to my mother.

I was struck, particularly as I grew older, by the disparity between the two environments where I spent my time as a child in Paris. In my grandmother’s spacious and exquisitely appointed apartment, one might enjoy a game of catch, should one be permitted such a thing in a place with silk damask wall coverings, crystal and silver at the table, and antiques—which, though much admired, did not invite touch or provide comfort the way my mother’s much humbler furnishings did. The truth is, I preferred my mother’s home always, though its cramped quarters meant that one scarcely had to rise from one’s seat at the kitchen table to help oneself to the rabbit stew on the stove.

My mother did not have the means for the elaborate bouquets that graced the homes of the rich, and so she made cunning paper-flower bouquets, complete with stamens so delicate that they trembled in the heat waves from the fireplace. The dishes we ate from were not translucent china but, rather, the heavy white plates common in less expensive cafés. Still, the food served on them was prepared by my mother, and I believed then, as I do now, that it makes a difference in taste when one’s thoughts and feelings and hands are employed in what one serves.

One relaxed at my mother’s table. One shared stories, one laughed helplessly, one was entertained in a satisfying way that lifted one’s spirits. Most important, my mother welcomed friends and strangers alike to her table. If you came home with someone you had just met on the street, she would share what she had with them, showing them the same face no matter who they were or where they came from. Her belief was this: No matter their station in life, people were united by virtue of their humanity. “We all rise to the same sun and sleep beneath the same moon,” she often told me. Only if someone was false or haughty or superior did she display her caustic side to them.

A belief in everyone’s equality may have been held in theory by my grandmother, but she failed to demonstrate any adherence in practice. Caroline was still never allowed at Nohant. And then came the day when, at fourteen years old, she tried to visit me at my grandmother’s apartment in Paris.

I was in my room when I heard a knock at the door, then a girl’s voice speaking. I recognized my sister, I heard my name, but I could not make out the rest of what she was saying.

But the response of my grandmother’s maid was all too clear: “That may be so, but I cannot permit you to come in. Run along now.”

Again my sister’s voice, quieter now, pleading.

“I have told you, you are not allowed in here! Go home! And do not return! If you want to see your sister, it will have to be elsewhere. You are not welcome here!”

Then I heard the sound of the door slamming and the maid’s rapid footsteps down the hall.

I saw Caroline infrequently enough that I did not really know her; but that day, when I heard her heart-rending sobs on the way down the stairs from my grandmother’s apartment, I became very distraught. I thought of her pretty face and of her sweetness and her patience with me. We played string games and dolls and hide-and-seek, and we often locked arms and sat back to back, rocking faster and faster until we tumbled over, laughing.

I relished the feeling of a special inclusion I felt around Caroline, knowing that she had the same mother and had known my father. It was sisterhood, that was all—a common enough feeling but one that was offered and then taken away from me so often that it had become rarefied in my eyes. Our lives meant that we usually lived in separate places, but Caroline always did her part to try to stay close.

I thought about how she must have made the journey to see me with such high hopes, only to be humiliated. I wept so hard I vomited, and I vomited so much I began to cough up blood. My grandmother’s reaction to all this was to blame poor Caroline for upsetting our home’s peace and quiet with her unnecessary “demands” to see me. Sorrow and fury vied for the upper hand in me that night, as I thought about how my mother would have embraced Caroline when she heard the story, and that into her eyes would have come a steely hatred. I feared that her disdain would not be for my grandmother alone but would transfer over to me as well, for how was she to know that I was not a willing participant in this awful rejection of her older daughter?

The millinery shop my mother had envisioned as a way to keep us together had not yet come into being, and I feared it never would. I had not become resigned to living apart from my mother, as she had hoped I would; rather, I missed her continuously. Now I vowed to do my part to make it possible for us to live together again.

At Nohant, in my mother’s bedroom, was a corner cabinet. Shortly after she left, I had begun collecting things I thought I could sell in order to pay my way from Nohant to Paris. I intended to walk to the city, but I would need money for food and lodging along the way. At first I collected quite avidly: into a far corner of the cabinet I put a yellow amber necklace my mother had given me—a gift from my father to her when he had been stationed in Italy. I had also hidden a comb decorated with coral, and a ring with a very small diamond, from my grandmother.

After my mother left for good and her visits, then even her letters, began to taper off, I had stopped collecting. I did check often on my holdings, though, fearful that someone might stumble upon them and realize I had plans to run away. Now I resolved to begin my collecting again, as soon as we returned to Nohant.

—

WE HAD BEEN BACK in the country just a little more than a week when my grandmother fell seriously ill. We were sitting at dinner when she had an episode involving a kind of paralysis that lasted in excess of an hour. Deschartres was greatly alarmed and carried her to her bed, where he sat beside her all night.

The next morning, I saw her lying there, pale and silent. My heart opened to the old woman, and I abandoned my plans to leave Nohant, at least for now.

I knew that my grandmother had tried hard to offer me what she thought were the best things, both in the way of material goods and in my education. She had never spoken rudely to me, and she had made a great fuss over my talents and my precocity. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have become less and less interested in me. My grandmother’s illness served as a catalyst for my looking at things in the cold light of reason, and I had to admit it made no sense for me to run from the one who cared most for me.

Life went on for me there. And on.

August 1832

NOHANT

Solange and I left Paris to return to Nohant. Maurice stayed in the city with his father so that he could visit Henri IV military academy in advance of his attending that fall. Though my daughter seemed to have no difficulty transitioning back to life in the country, it took me a couple of weeks to settle into the routine at Nohant, to calm myself from the chaotic pace I was used to.

As ever, I found the estate to be full of delights. In the morning, larks awakened me with their cascading songs, and swallows swooped dramatically in their aerial feeding. In the afternoon, I made picnic lunches for Solange and me to eat on the stone bench outside. We watched the bees gathering nectar from a garden full of flowers whose scent filled the air. There were beautiful yellow-and-black-striped butterflies that often alighted on Solange’s knee or hand, and I had to watch her lest she try to pull their wings off.

Each evening after I put my daughter to bed, I took walks outside alone and beheld the glittering stars, which were mostly obscured in the city. I listened to the sounds of the animals moving about in the underbrush of the forest, and to the hooting of the owls. On hot nights, I went to the river to bathe in the dark water.

Every few days, I took Solange out for expeditions to the woods and along the banks of the river to show her the pink and white stars of anemones amid the blue periwinkles. We stood together before berry bushes, plucking off the warm fruit and eating it. I taught her the names of the birds that came to Nohant and told her about her great-grandfather, how he had also loved birds, and how I believed he had passed on to me the ability to charm them onto my finger.

There was more to Nohant than bucolic pleasure, however. There were servants to mind, and many details I didn’t want to attend to regarding things I didn’t care about. When would madame like her breakfast served? Her dinner? There were menus to be approved, selections of linens, the placements of bouquets, guest lists to be made for obligatory dinners, accounting to be dealt with in my husband’s absence. Finally, though, all was peaceful. Solange seemed content, and the house was running on its own.

I began working in earnest on my second novel, Valentine. I wrote even more feverishly than I had in Paris; oftentimes, I awakened with my head on my desk, the quill in my hand. The work was thrilling, all-consuming.

“Maman, stop working!” Solange would say sometimes, bursting into my room and pulling me out of the drama of a female aristocrat in love with a peasant, and into the world of a little girl. But I enjoyed that, too. If my vivid imagination served me well on the page, it also helped me become a most excellent partner in games with Solange. She remained difficult, in her way, but we often laughed ourselves breathless, and she would pat my arm and say, “You are a good maman.”

When Casimir brought Maurice back to Nohant, I exulted in the presence of my little man. I was also grateful for the fact that now that Casimir was here, I could work all through the night. I started at seven in the evening and wrote until six in the morning. I went to sleep when Casimir awakened; and this seemed to suit both of us.

I received letters from Jules, back again in Paris and, in my absence, living in the room I had rented for him. In one letter, he told me how much he missed me, how anxious he was for my return to our cozy garret in the fall, where I would once again cook for him the rich stews he favored. Reading the letter made me miss Paris: the theater and the opera, the cafés, even the pigeons who huddled together under the arches of the Pont Neuf. And Jules himself, of course: I missed him most of all. I thought of him arguing playfully with our friends, standing there in his tattered frock coat, his cravat so far off to the side it was nearly under his ear. I thought of our coupling at night, how I would run my hands up and down the long line of his back, how he sometimes kissed me so deeply it felt as though he were transferring the essence of himself into me. I thought of how I watched him in sleep, the beating of his heart steady in his throat. I saw us at breakfast with our bowl-sized cups of coffee, talking excitedly about all we meant to do that day.

I decided to take a spontaneous trip to Paris by myself, telling Casimir that I needed to attend to some details for Le Figaro. Jules and I would have some time together, and the visit would hold us until we could be together again.

When I arrived in Paris, I went to Jules’s room, and had hardly set my valise down before we enjoyed an intense session of lovemaking. The next day, I went out so as to give Jules time alone to write. I came back earlier than we had agreed upon, thinking that I could quietly read the book I’d just purchased and then, when he had finished work for the day, we would go to a restaurant for dinner.

I let myself in quietly and found Jules in bed with his laundress, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a mole situated just so at the corner of her mouth. When I’d first met her, I had remarked on how pretty she was. “Her?” Jules had asked.

Now I stood frozen in place, the key in my hand.

The girl pulled the covers up over herself and stared.

Jules leapt to his feet. “Aurore! This means nothing!”

“To whom?” I asked, and then, before walking out, I turned to him to say, “And my name is George.” My heart was breaking, but by the next day I had traded despair for resolve. I would find a place to live alone. I had the means, now, to make a decision about where I wanted to be without having to ask anyone’s permission. It was something I had aspired to, but how ironic that now that I had such freedom, it felt more sorrowful than anything else.

November 1832

QUAI MALAQUAIS

PARIS

Latouche had begun spending all of his time in a little country house he had purchased, and so I asked him if I might take over the rental of his apartment. He agreed gladly. We had become very good friends; in fact, there were rumors that we were lovers. One is helpless in the face of such idle gossip. If one denies the charge, one fans the flames; if one ignores it, one is complicit in suggesting it is so. Well, now that I was to be a woman on my own, I supposed the rumors would fly more furiously than ever before.

In my new place, there were fewer stairs to climb, which meant that it was not light and airy. Nor did it have the views I had enjoyed in the apartment I had shared with Jules. But it was peaceful there. Below were the gardens of the École des Beaux-Arts; across the river was the Louvre.

After a time, I saw Jules again; I never was one to hold grudges. But he was only a friend. My true love became my pen, my beautiful apartment, and the pages I stacked up on my desk each night. If I could not fill my days with the kind of affection I still longed for, I would fill them with another, more reliable kind of love, one that engaged my heart, my mind, and my spirit completely, and one that did not betray me.

October 1817

NOHANT

I was thirteen years old when there began to be episodes of violence that escalated among the household staff at Nohant. My grandmother, who had suffered damage from the last stroke she had had and who, in any case, had never excelled in management, deferred more and more to Deschartres, essentially assigning him care of the entire estate. She turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the arguments and flung plates in the kitchen, even to the abuse that an aging Deschartres suffered at the hands of the cook, who would try to beat him with a broom while poor Deschartres held his arms crisscrossed before him in outraged defense. As for me, I was ignored by the servants, with whom I’d formerly been friendly, for soon after my mother’s departure, my grandmother forbade me to talk with them or to spend time lingering in the kitchen. And I was actively despised by Julie, my grandmother’s maid.

When my mother was at Nohant, I could see that Julie’s hostilities toward both of us burned in her breast; now, whenever I was not with my grandmother, she released the venom she felt—she thought I was fair game. Sometimes she told me that things at the estate had been spoiled since the moment my mother and I arrived; other times she allowed that it had been all right until my father’s death. My mother and I were never meant to be there long-term, I understood. Now my mother had been gotten rid of, but I lingered, like a burr stuck in the hem of her petticoat. I began to take solace in the out-of-doors; I was inside only when I had to be. With this I established a pattern that stayed with me all my life: whenever unhappy circumstances unraveled me, nature knit me back up.

In 1816, Hippolyte had joined the army, and so I was the only child living with Grandmama, Deschartres, and the servants. Julie’s animosity toward me I have described; but then my own maid, Rose, began displaying moments of great cruelty toward me as well. I was no longer the little girl she had coddled; now I was older and more complicated. I was not often overtly willful, but there was a reason I was called stubborn: if my obstinacy did not show in complete noncompliance, it certainly did in the disdainful expression on my face and in the halfhearted way I did certain things I knew full well how to do better. Rose would beat me for this as well as for the most minor infringements: forgetting my hankie, dirtying my dresses, smacking my lips at the dinner table. But she never hit me in front of my grandmother or my mother, when she was visiting.

If I had reported Rose, she would have been punished, yet I did not tell either my mother or my grandmother how her behavior toward me had changed. It was by then a deeply ingrained habit to tolerate such behavior, and even to be comforted by its familiarity.

One cold day, when a slate-gray sky hung oppressively low, I went out for a walk in the nearby village. In the street, I saw a small family walking along, handsome parents and their two young daughters talking and laughing. They were carrying parcels and hurrying toward home, I imagined, where they would soon be warm and together for the evening. They would enjoy supper and the companionship of one another, and at night they would go to bed full of a kind of assurance that tomorrow they would all be together again. As I stood watching them go, heavy drops of rain began to fall.

I hoped it would not turn into a storm, for then I would be trapped inside with old people who had no tolerance for the restlessness of the young. I occasionally lost myself in reading, but there was otherwise little joy for me in that house. The studies I’d initially found so stimulating now bored me; the only pleasure I took in the writing assignments I was given was when I padded the narrative with my own fiction. Music had been ruined for me when my grandmother’s arthritic fingers prevented her from teaching and she turned those duties over to the greasy-lipped organist from the church at La Châtre. He had technical ability but no feeling for the music; we could not communicate, and I began playing without passion or nuance as he did, just to get the lesson over with.

I walked in the rain toward the woods, remembering the gaiety and romance of my parents together, their and my happiness. Everything had been spoiled, first by my baby brother’s death and then my father’s; and now I felt effectively orphaned. I gave myself over to what I saw as my own personal tragedy, to the sort of melancholy adolescents are so good at submerging themselves in.

At only thirteen years of age, I had lost so much! And to whom could I turn for comfort? My mother, so many miles away in Paris? My father, deep in the ground? My grandmother, who understood very little about me at all and, in any case, was fading away? God, when I had so little of the faith that seemed to sustain others?

When my mother and I had first lived in Paris, I had gone to Mass with her. She believed in a child’s way: she embraced her religion without questions. But my grandmother, who, in my mother’s absence, was becoming more and more influential to me, taught me that Jesus was an admirable historical figure, nothing more. The villagers, who also influenced me, were more pagans than Christians; they brought out modern religion only on certain occasions, as if it were party clothes or their best dishes. Day to day, they were governed by superstition and belief in things like werewolves, witches, and humans possessed by demons. This was their religion, something from the Middle Ages, where mythology was vividly personified. I had heard that they had visions and hallucinations, too, and a strong belief in previous lives. So when I had first met Hippolyte and he’d told me he had been a dog in a previous life, he had been serious.

It was greatly confusing, trying to adopt a theology. But finally my own version of God came to me in a dream, complete with a name: Corambe. He was a warm and compassionate being with a tender and unwavering regard for me. He had the humanity of Jesus and the radiant beauty of the angel Gabriel. He was graceful and poetic and ever attentive to my feelings. And though he was a male, he nonetheless dressed oftentimes in women’s clothes.

In the woods near my grandmother’s house, I created an altar to Corambe. I built it in a clearing gotten to by going deep through young trees that had at their bases hawthorn and privet, and whose denseness prohibited much traffic. There was moss covering the ground in the clearing that both looked and felt like lush carpeting. Long shafts of light fell through breaks in the foliage to dapple the earth.

At the base of three joined maples, I made an altar, using pebbles, rocks, and leaves. I made wreaths from ivy and other natural materials and placed them here and there. I hung small pink-and-white shells from the boughs of the trees; in a breeze, they made a sound that reminded me of the castanets I had heard dancers use in Spain.

I would often go and kneel before Corambe’s altar in the dim light, with my hands in the prayer position and my eyes closed. Though no words came to me, a rich feeling of peace did.

Sometimes, the best times, I would feel removed from the aching, lonely side of myself and instead part of a greater whole. I was equal to, related to everything around me: the ground I lay on, the animals rustling in the woods, the leaves stirring in the breeze, the sky high above me.

But on this cold and bleak day, I found no comfort in the idea of going to the altar. I had no idea where to go, what to do. I heard owls asking the same question I was: Who? Who? Who?

When I arrived home, I sat outside the front door. I was cold and wanted to go in; but I was loath to give up the freedom I felt outdoors. I put my forehead to my knees and began to weep, releasing long, wailing sobs, and I spoke to the dirt below me, saying the words I longed to say to my grandmother: “You chide me for failing in my studies. I want to fail! You have no idea how I feel or what I have planned, which does not in any way have to do with the ridiculous, old-fashioned things you try to force upon me. Soon enough I shall show you why I have no need of you or of what you teach. I shall be rid of all of you forever!”

I spoke with a passion and fury that contained in it a great deal of truth but mostly reflected my loneliness, confusion, and despair. I was like anyone who seeks a place to put his pain; I blamed my grandmother for all that ailed me. I also spoke as one who believed no one could hear, but in fact Julie was standing just inside the door, in the hallway, and she heard every word.

She jerked open the door and spit out, “You ingrate! How dare you speak this way about the woman who has done so much for you! You would deserve her sending you back to your mother!”

“I want to go back to my mother!” I said. “It is all I dream of, to escape this place and live where I belong!”

Julie’s eyes narrowed. She stepped forward and leaned down to hiss into my ear, “Quiet yourself! You are having a tantrum, and the truth is, you don’t know what you want. I only hope for your sake that your grandmama has not heard your diatribe, for she might just take you at your word and send you away!”

“She need not have heard me, Julie. You know full well you will tell her what I said.”

At this, Julie’s mouth dropped, and I stood to face her, my hands clenched at my sides, and let go with all the rage that still burned in me. “Do you think I don’t see through you? Do you think I don’t know that you are kind to me only to try to ferret out information that you can then use against me? Go and tell my grandmother everything; tell her now! I hope it will make her decide to let me go to my mother at once!”

Julie spun on her heel, and I knew she was going straight to my grandmother. I was filled with a great sense of righteousness and hastened to my bedroom, where I slammed the door and then sat on my bed, reviewing all the reasons why I had been justified in lashing out at what I saw as my keepers. Despite my own clearly expressed wishes, I had been left in the care of an old woman whose methods and predilections were foreign and irksome to me: the way I was made to wear gloves and to curtsy before my grandmother’s dour countess friends, the way I had to practically whisper when I was inside. I was made to address my grandmother not even in the formal vous but in the third person, as in, “Will Grandmama permit me to go outside now?” My mother may have punished me freely, but she always made up for it afterward; and there was honesty in her behavior. I could be intimate with her, not only calling her tu, but easily and quite naturally giving my innermost self to her: my stories, my thoughts, my fears, my dreams. She asked me to; and in return, she showed me herself.

It seemed to me that by virtue of her nature, my grandmother had inhibited me from being my true self day after day, year after year. I often thought of the animals that roamed free, wishing I could be one of them rather than a human being subjected to such a dull and regimented environment. No one shushed the birds singing in the trees; no one cautioned the dogs not to run too far from home or the horses not to sleep outside in the sun. The pigs could roll in mud; I could not even remove my shoes and stockings for the feel of green grass beneath my feet.

Whenever we traveled to Paris in the big berlin, the many pockets of the coach would be stuffed with all my grandmother needed, and she needed everything: her perfumes and powders and pillboxes and her maid sitting erectly beside her. She needed coverlets against a draft, parasols against any ray of sun. As I saw it, she did not enjoy life so much as protect herself from it.

When we walked in the garden, I was forced to move slowly, along with her, rather than run down the paths, as I longed to do. Because of her, I had to take my lessons with Deschartres in his overly neat room, which reeked of lavender soap; being there gave me a headache. I felt I needed a younger person to keep up with and inspire me, not an old woman to constrain me and fill me with despair. I needed my mother, whose blood ran hot like my own, whose heart knew my own heart’s desires.

Now, with all that I had shouted out, I had made my feelings clear. I was aware that in my pain, I had made no effort to acknowledge the good side of my grandmother: her offerings of praise and sweets when I did well with my lessons; her attempts at affection, stiff-backed though they were; her good-hearted intentions to refine me. No, I had only poured out my frustrations.

Because of my outburst, I would soon be released to live in poverty with my mother, my opportunities for education taken from me. So be it. It was the truer, more honest life! But even as I justified what I had said, I was beginning to feel regret for the pain I would cause the old woman. She had not asked to raise me any more than I had asked that she do it; but here we were, stuck with each other, and she was only trying to make the best of it.

Still! Shouldn’t she understand that a daughter would want her mother, first and foremost? And shouldn’t she have accepted Caroline as one of her beloved son’s children and let us all live happily together here? No! She had insisted upon her own way.

I sat for some time, waiting for Julie to call me to my grandmother’s side. I intended to express my appreciation in my leave-taking; and my love as well, for the longer I sat there, the more I realized that I did love the old woman.

When Julie finally came to my room, however, it was to say that I was barred from seeing my grandmother. In a prim and self-righteous way that made me want to strike her, she said, “Knowing now that you are so full of hatred for her, your grandmother has decided that you will not have to see her again. She is letting you go, as you desire. In three days, you will leave for Paris.”

“I do not hate my grandmother, as you well know,” I said. “I am sorry not to be given the opportunity to say goodbye. But I am glad to be returning to my mother. And so I thank you.”

Over the next few days, I was indeed kept from my grandmother. I was given my meals after she had taken hers, and dishes were placed and removed by servants whose steely countenances and absolute silence let me know what they were feeling about me. I was allowed out in the garden only after Grandmama had retired. She was in a weakened condition at that point and had been spending much of her time away from me anyway, but now I noticed her absence more.

I was full of a mix of shame and defiance and confusion. I spoke with Corambe about my feelings and was assured by my personal god that I was indeed in the right and was following a noble course. I looked upon this time of estrangement as my martyrdom, which I suffered sweetly: I all but saw myself with a blood-red banner flying above my head, torn and battered but proudly displayed. But after two days passed and I noticed no preparations being made to send me to Paris, I wondered if my grandmother had changed her mind.

On the third day my maid, Rose, told me to go to my grandmother, who she said was suffering. She assured me that Julie would let me into the old woman’s chambers; she had already asked Julie to do so. By then, I had had enough time to realize that I had been strikingly unfair in not assigning any blame at all to my mother for her complicity (if not initiation!) in leaving me behind. I had made her into a hapless victim when she was anything but. Nor had I considered the fact that I, too, had played a role in my own unhappiness.

And Julie was right: I was lucky indeed to be living amid the beauty and privilege and peace of Nohant, taking with both hands the gifts I was offered daily.

I was thoroughly ashamed and remorseful and eager to apologize most profusely. I came into a darkened room, where my grandmother lay in bed under her lacy scented sheets and down-filled coverlets, her eyes closed. “Grandmama?” I said, my voice high and tentative, and then I rushed to her side. I fell to my knees and began crying and kissing her, saying, “Forgive me, I never meant—”

She held up a trembling hand, and I stopped talking. I sat back on my heels and waited. There followed an ominous quiet.

Then she turned to look at me, and the warm light that was always in her eyes was gone. Instead, there was a flatness there, worse than anger. “You have come hoping to fall upon my mercy and by so doing return things to the way they used to be. This is impossible. The things you said have pierced my heart, and there is no snapping one’s fingers and undoing the damage. For three days, I have considered your assertions and accusations and the feelings behind them. I have slept little and agonized much over what to do. And now I find that I have some things I want to say to you, Aurore. Some of the things I wanted never to reveal to you but now realize I must; other things I have been meaning to say for some time. I would ask that you listen and not interrupt. May I rely upon you to do me that one favor?”

“Yes, Grandmama.”

“Very well, then. Bear in mind that I am telling you this for your own good and not to avenge myself. I offer this to you rather than simply ridding myself of you, which would be the easier thing to do.”

I felt an eerie coldness at the back of my head. It was a shock for me to understand that my grandmother had despaired of me, too. I was still enough of a child to think that I would be pardoned for virtually anything.

My grandmother drew in a deep breath. “Now, then. First I shall speak to you about myself and the way I was brought up. Then I shall tell you about my beloved son. I want you to know about the way he was raised and about the relationship we enjoyed, at least until he met your mother. And then I am going to tell you the truth about her.”

I sat unmoving, my eyes on the floor.

Almost half an hour later, she said, “You may go now; I am tired.”

It was with great difficulty that I rose up from my knees. I felt myself to be a leaden mass, empty of feeling. I curtsied and wordlessly took leave of the woman who had told me things I had not known, and that she never should have told me, at least not without mentioning the desperate measures that are taken by poor people that rich people will never understand. My grandmother had coldly told me that my mother was a whore when my father met her and that she had gone back to her old profession in Paris. That if I intended to resume my relationship with her, I would forfeit any benefits my grandmother had intended to give me, not because of my own merits but on behalf of her son. Worst, my grandmother told me that it was entirely likely that my father was not my father at all. According to calculations my grandmother had made long ago, my father was many miles away from my mother, fighting in the war, at the time she would have been impregnated.

That night, I sat for a long while at the edge of my bed, staring out the window at the darkness and the cold pinpricks of the stars. I was trying to comprehend all I had wrought in my outburst to Julie only a few days ago. Up until now, my mother had never been directly criticized, and there had been moments of accord and what seemed like mutual respect between my grandmother and her. Now, because of what I had said, I had been told things about her I would never be able to forget, including the fact that she may have created me with someone I would never know.

I felt a rush of defiance. I went to the mirror and looked for evidence of my father in my face. There! Did I not have his black eyes, his curly black hair? And then I wept, because I could no longer be sure that those things came from him. I stood trembling, telling myself that whether my father gave my mother his seed to make me or not was irrelevant; he gave her his heart. And he gave it to me, as well. He had been present at my birth and had made his mark upon me in raising me from the very beginning. Even in his absence, I breathed him in and breathed him out; he was my true father.

And then I lay on the bed and wept most disconsolately, for I realized I could not be sure of anything anymore. What I regretted most profoundly was my loss of any vestige of home. I myself was the only home I had.

January 1833

QUAI MALAQUAIS

PARIS

My novella La Marquise came out in serial form in the Revue de Paris just after I returned to the city from another stay at Nohant. It again featured a young woman sold into marriage, but this time, she is an aristocrat, and her husband dies. All around her expect that she will remarry, or at least have lovers. She does neither. Her feeling is that she has had quite enough of men until, at the theater one night, she falls instantly in love with an actor named Lélio. How embarrassing for her, that one of her station should be enamored of one so low! And not even an irresistible specimen but, rather, one frail and weak-seeming. To add to that, his voice is high and screechy, his mannerisms effeminate. But the marquise is besotted by the young man. She confides her feelings for him to a friend, who warns her never to let anyone else know. And so the lovesick woman dresses in men’s clothes so as to be unrecognizable and to have the opportunity to go to the theater and see the object of her desire every night. They eventually become lovers, and when they end their relationship, it is because the marquise finds herself unworthy of him.

This novel was inspired by the first time I saw the actress Marie Dorval perform upon the stage, in 1831, not long after I had first arrived in Paris. The play was Victor Hugo’s tragedy Marion de Lorme; it was based on Alfred de Vigny’s novel Cinq-Mars. Vigny was currently Marie Dorval’s lover. She was rumored to have had many lovers, some of them women, actresses with whom she had worked.

The night I saw her, when I stood beneath the gaslights dressed as a man and watched a performance of such simplicity and grace, I understood immediately why Marie was known as the sensation of the romantic theater, the brightest star of the Comédie-Française. I saw why she was the muse of great playwrights: Hugo and Vigny and Alexandre Dumas.

“Love has given me a new virginity,” she said from the stage that night, and the line seemed directed to me.

I more than admired her, I felt irretrievably caught by her. I wanted to know her, to spend time with her, to be a valued friend of hers; but I felt as helpless in that desire as any unknown who longs to make an impression on someone so renowned.

When my own reputation began to grow, I thought perhaps I would write to her and see if anything came of it. I sent her a letter that was lighthearted in tone, yet carefully calculated to impress.

The next morning, Jules came to see me, and we were having coffee. There was a knock on the door, and when I opened it, Marie Dorval catapulted into my life. “It’s me; here I am!” she cried, rushing to embrace me. In a brilliant shift all the world became a vessel for her support; all but Marie and her golden curls and her narrow waist and her remarkable lightness in movement dropped away. That throaty voice! Here it was at my table, and those blue eyes, now directed only at me!

“I received your letter, and I came straightaway, as you see.” She was out of breath, and she took a moment to remove her ermine muff and heavy mantle. Beneath it, she wore a dark green velvet morning dress accented at the shoulder and down the center by a lighter green silk, and the fichu pelerine draped over her shoulders had the delicacy of a dusting of snow. She sat at the table, placed a hand upon her breast, and smiled radiantly. But then her face changed, and she stared into her lap and spoke in a low, almost tremulous voice: “I will tell you, as an unknown, I myself once wrote to a great actress, my heart in my palm. Her reception was ice. I was full of shame. I pulled at my hair and pounded my bosom, I wanted to reel in time and snatch my letter back. Fool! I said to myself, over and over. Imbecile! I imagined the pages I had so long deliberated over flung aside, wadded up and thrown in the rubbish. Thus did I vow that if ever it was my turn, I would rush to the one so full of longing, take hold of that hand, and say, ‘Yes, I have heard your words! I have taken them with great care into my heart, they are enshrined at my very core!’ ”

She looked up at me. “Have you no coffee for me?”

In my haste to accommodate her, I rose too quickly and knocked my own coffee over. My face reddened as I offered an apology, as I moved my napkin quickly to keep the spill from advancing onto her lap, where she had laid a most fetching feather bonnet; the satin ribbon ties hung nearly to the floor. She reached out to grab hold of my wrist and told me with her eyes that it mattered not in the least. With this conspiratorial glance, she confirmed what I’d suspected the first time I’d seen her upon the stage: we knew each other. Even before meeting, we knew each other. At that moment, what little light I had left for Jules went out.

Marie explained that my letter had had a deep effect on her—Incroyable! said she—and she said as well that she knew it had been written by someone with the heightened sensibilities she shared. She waved her hands about when she spoke; they flew like little white doves around her face.

Even now, I cannot account for the immediate reaction I had to her. In principle, I sought to gain for women the rights they were due and denied, but in practice I did not want to spend much time with them. I found women too often hysterical, too complaining of things that merited no real complaint, too weighted down by their petty concerns to see, much less engage in, the larger world. For the most part, I felt they did not use their God-given intellect but subjugated it. Probably my infatuation, and then my abiding love for Marie was because of her adherence to her own character: both on and off the stage she projected a burning naturalness, a sense of true and vital self.

I knew the cost of such uncompromising ways. As there were ceaseless rumors about me, there were stories of Marie and the multiple lovers she took without apology, without any effort at disguise—in fact, oftentimes her husband was in the adjoining room. But she walked with her head up, moving at the pace she desired, impervious to the vultures. I very much admired this.

She invited Jules and me to dine with her on Sunday night. I accepted for both of us, but in truth I was speaking purely for myself, imagining only Marie and me at that table, by candlelight, in solidarity, at the precipice. It seemed to me that everything in my life that had preceded her had prepared me for her. And it seemed, too, that everything I had longed for and not yet found was in her.

—

WHEN JULES AND I went to dine with Marie Dorval, her husband, and her lover, Alfred de Vigny, I dressed with some care. I now wore men’s clothes almost exclusively, and that night I decided to wear a new single-breasted purple surtout that reached to my ankles, made warm by padding from shoulders to chest. It had black velvet trim and silver buttons. Beneath, I wore my usual close-fitting trousers, my waistcoat, a frilled shirt, and a black silk cravat tied waterfall-style. My boots were high and tasseled.

Marie wore a low-cut silk gown of midnight blue, stiffened blond lace trimming the back as well as the tops of the beribboned beret sleeves. The bodice was draped à la Sévigné, featuring horizontal bands with a boned divider, and so it showed the devastating beauty of her shoulders and bosom. She wore drop pearl earrings and a pendant brooch and had tucked small white silk flowers into her hair, which was parted down the center and fashioned into a version of the Apollo knot. Blue was a color I thought she should always wear, and I told her so.

“Ah, but if I am always in blue, you will never see me in yellow, or pink, or white, which also suit me.” The expression on her face when she said this was self-mocking, but she was serious, too: she was ever a woman keenly aware of all of her gifts, and if beauty was among them, so be it.

What we ate I cannot recall. In fact, had you asked me while I was eating what it was, I would have been loath to answer, for it would have taken my attention from the dazzling subject at hand—the only subject, so far as I was concerned, though our lively conversation covered theater, the books of the American James Fenimore Cooper, the subjectivity of memory, and the relative merits of the divas at the Théâtre des Italiens.

I was curious to see if what I remembered about her from our brief earlier visit remained true, if each of her emotions was made physical. It was. She seemed passionate about everything—her opinion, your opinion, the taste of the food, the rush of wind outside the window—and all of it was made manifest by a body that truly was an instrument. I had not known how nuanced the lifting of an eyebrow could be until I met Marie; nor had I realized the many variations of a smile, or the language of fingers, or what invitation or admonishment could be issued by the briefest of looks. The modulations in her speaking voice rivaled those of an opera singer’s.

There are people one meets in life whom one wants to please, inadvertent kings and queens in the various societies in which we live. And they do not demand this for themselves; rather, it is we admiring subjects who demand it for them by virtue of who they simply are and cannot help being. I wanted to please Marie Dorval. I wanted to hear every story about herself she deigned to tell, and I wanted her to hear all of mine. I felt a great sense of urgency in her presence, and I was impatient with the other guests, who, to my way of thinking, interfered most annoyingly with what was nascent between us.

It took me a long time to see that there were striking similarities between Marie and my mother, even after she told me the circumstances of her upbringing, which resembled my mother’s. I suppose I did not want to recognize the similarities. I suppose I wanted a new start in an old game, no matter the cost to me.

Marie-Thomase-Amélie Delauney, a child of actors, was born out of wedlock in 1798. She was put onto the stage as soon as she could talk; she was a beautiful child and even at that age had a charismatic presence. When she was fifteen, she married an actor named Allan Dorval. He died only a few years later, but by then Marie had three daughters. She then married a man she did not love but liked well enough, and trusted: one Jean-Toussaint Merle, director of the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. What mattered most about him, she later told me, was that he understood her. Which was to say, he would look the other way when she did what she needed to do. He entered into his relationship with her with his eyes wide open, knowing that she would have lovers of either sex whenever she was moved to.

That night at dinner, I sat like a tightly wound clock, the hours ticking away, hoping for a time when she and I could be alone and without distraction. I sensed this was why she had invited me in the first place.

She was then and always a gracious hostess, dividing her attention among everyone gathered there, even acquiescing to her husband in a way that I thought was beneath her. Weren’t the revolutionary times we were living in an imperative to stand up for yourself? Did this not require women to change their attitudes not only toward their husbands but, indeed, all men?

It was only as I was taking my leave that Marie spoke in confidence to me. She gripped my hand tightly and stood so close that I could smell the after-dinner anise on her breath. “To think of all that we shall do!” she said, and before I could answer she drew nearer still to say, “Everything about you is exciting to me. You are what men should be.”

Jules came over to me then, flinging his cloak about himself, taking my arm, and we went out the door together. At first, we did not speak, and then Jules laughed and said, “A bit excessive, is she not? Such people are best enjoyed from theater seats.”

I stepped away and turned to face him. “Such people,” I said, “are luminosities we are privileged to enjoy.”

“You exaggerate and romanticize,” he said. “As is your habit.” To which I responded, “And you see like a blind man. As is yours.”

—

I thought I had seen Vigny’s disapproval of me at dinner. A few days later, thanks to the relentless chain of Paris gossip, my suspicions were confirmed. I learned that this lover of Marie’s had told others that what he called my “manlike ways” were very unappealing: my dress, my clumsy gait, my low voice, my forthright manner. I was not so much bothered by this; and it did not keep me from liking him. But I feared that his opinion might change Marie’s response to me. And so I sent her a note:

Do you really think you can endure me? That is something you cannot know yet, nor I. I am such a bear, so stupid, so slow to put my thoughts to words, so awkward and so dumb just when my heart is fullest. Do not judge me by externals. Wait a little before deciding how much pity and affection you can give me. I feel that I love you with a heart rejuvenated and altogether renewed by you. If that is just a dream, like everything else I have ever wanted in my life, do not wake me from it too soon. It does me so much good. Goodbye, you great and lovely person.

She never answered that letter, and later I worried at the way I had opened myself to her. But I believed that speaking the truth was more honorable than obfuscating it. I waited with hope and even assurance for our next visit, which came soon.

November 1817

NOHANT

After my grandmother’s dark revelations, I lived in a kind of limbo. I was not gone from Nohant, but I was not really there anymore, either. I paid little attention to my studies in favor of running wild with the children of the village, and I spent long hours alone in my room, ignoring the lessons I’d been asked to do. My grandmother’s words, so heartlessly delivered, changed my idea of myself. If my mother was contemptible, then I, her daughter, must be as well. I no longer loved life. I cared nothing for myself, and my future seemed bleak. I considered suicide, but it was an adolescent’s romantic idea of that desperate act; it did not have the weight or gravity that times of such desperation would assume later in my life. An abiding consolation at this time was my black dog, Phanor. Seeming to sense my despair and wanting to ameliorate it, he did not leave my side. His exuberant acceptance of any attention I showed him was my only joy.

But no matter what pain I endured, it was always my habit to gravitate back to hope, and to the idea that I must live for someone or something. Whatever her wrongdoings, I forgave my mother, and I continued to love her.

The same went for my grandmother, though I had decided that I would passively reject what she desired for me: a formal education followed by a marriage that she would arrange. I had seen enough of society marriages to know that they were nothing I desired.

At thirteen, I had grown enough in size and strength that when I failed in my studies or in my behavior, my maid was no longer able to discipline me with blows. She knew that she would be likely to get back what she gave. She described me as an enfant terrible, and I suppose from her point of view, she was right. From my point of view, I was only starting to claim what was my due.

After some time, my grandmother called me to her for another talk, which I’d known in my heart had been coming.

“First,” she said, “I shall tell you that I have been increasingly disappointed in you—in your care of yourself, both physically and mentally. Where once you showed yourself to be a charming and clever girl, now you display a kind of dullness and lack of interest in your studies. Deschartres tells me your work is careless and rarely completed; when he asks questions of you, your response is a yawn. You seem unconcerned about becoming attractive, as you could be, if you tried. Your hands are ill cared for, and your gait is clumsy—in part because you persist in wearing peasants’ shoes that deform your feet. Your complexion is too dark because you will not stay out of the sun; day after day you come home filthy as a potato digger. You seem uninterested in or unable to learn any social graces; you either speak not at all, as though you are above everyone around you, or you chatter on endlessly, boring everyone and leaving no room for the comments and observations of anyone else. I am exhausted by having to constantly tell you to take your elbows off the table, to eat slowly, to cut your meat into smaller pieces, to arrange your silverware properly to signal to the servants that you have finished your meal. You should by now know how to engage in lively and pleasant conversation, rather than sit silent or, worse, sit staring fixedly at nothing, as though you had half a brain. All of this should be second nature by now! I do believe your heart is good, but you must put time and effort into developing your mind in order to be a person of any worth at all.

“I have given up thinking I am the one who can help you achieve what I believe you are capable of. Therefore, in January, you will go to Paris, to the convent of the Dames Augustines Anglaises. It is a school run by the English, comparable to Sacré-Coeur or Abbaye-aux-Bois. Their students are well taught, and the tutors of the social graces there are renowned. Perhaps they can offer you something I cannot; I pray they can persuade you to use yourself and your gifts in a way that is appropriate.”

The community of English Augustines was the only surviving convent of its age, having been established in Paris at the time of Cromwell, and its housing had come through various revolutions without suffering much damage. In fact, during the 1793–94 uprising, the so-called Terror, which had preceded my grandmother’s move to Nohant, both she and my mother had coincidentally spent time behind its protective walls. I knew that the school’s reputation was excellent. But all I could think of was one thing.

I looked happily into my grandmother’s face to say, “I shall see my mother again!”

My grandmother nodded and spoke bitterly: “Yes. You will see your mother again. And then you will be separated from us both.”

It grew quiet, each of us caught up, I supposed, with our respective ideas about what my meeting with my mother might bring. I was sure she would immediately take me to live with her, at last.