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
I t 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 todo 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
July 1810
NOHANT
I t 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 todo 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
Similar Books
