April 1873

COUNTRY ESTATE AT NOHANT

CENTRAL FRANCE

In the dining room, the men are eating roses. The small bouquet I placed at the table’s center will soon be naked stems. A wreath of cigar smoke hangs in the air above my guests’ heads, moving ever upward toward the Venetian glass chandelier, where the pink and turquoise colors will give in further to the dimming of their clarity.

The men—Gustave Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, Alexandre Dumas fils, and my darling son, Maurice—are pushed back in their velvet chairs, sated; and the conversation has gone languorous. But not for long! Soon we will be dancing, singing, playing at charades, and making a great deal of noise, though Gustave will no doubt sulk and complain that we have too quickly turned our attentions away from literature, his raison d’être. The rest of us—Ivan especially—greatly enjoy the kind of raucousness that takes us back to the easy pleasures of childhood. I love doing my work and the reverie it requires, but too much contemplation turns to melancholy, and gaiety must then come to the rescue.

Before we begin our evening’s amusements, our puppet show and readings and bagatelles, I have sought the out-of-doors and a temporary reprieve from my role as hostess. I stand now in a mantilla of shade, beneath a tree here so long its mere presence dwarfs the idle happenings or musings of those who seek out its shelter.

The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them.

I sense the beginning of my end. At random moments I find myself in sudden need of an intense privacy. Then I excuse myself from my own table, from the trilling conversation in the bookshop, from the darkened theater or the street market, with its bins of fish and chard. I stand somewhere alone to calm myself, to draw breaths past the knot in my chest. I lose focus of my surroundings in order to accommodate a more compelling vision in which I undress my life, searching for the vital place, the beating heart of what I most truly was and am.

I am in agreement with Goethe, who said that every day one ought to “hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” I would add to this the need to love. Without it, the rest is dust.