The Dream Lover Read Online Free Page A

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 herdown!” 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
    I n 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