I paused. My diatribe was garnering some nervous chuckles and an occasional tut-tutting from Madame Hugo. The three ladies in front of me seemed unsure of how they should react – whether this was a performance intended to amuse or injure. Once again I heard a distant plea from Auguste: ‘Charles, please stop this nonsense.’ But when in this sort of mood, I cannot help myself.
‘There are no women in this country. No women and no love – no gallantry among the males and no modesty among the females. The women are physically comparable to sheep, pale and yellow-haired, with enormous, tallow legs – not to mention the horrors of their ankles. They appear unable to smile, due no doubt to some congenital muscular recalcitrance and the structure of their teeth and jaws –’
‘Enough!’ This time it was Charles Hugo who interjected, throwing his chair back as he rose to his feet, his face scarlet, his clenched fists visibly trembling with rage. ‘I will not have my guests humiliated thus!’ He threw his napkin on his plate and strode out of the room, which was left in a frosty quiet. The three ladies were blushing crimson, and two of them had tears in their eyes.
‘Charles,’ said Auguste, ‘please, let us take our leave.’
Auguste offered to accompany me to the Grand Miroir. I expected him to berate me for once again humiliating the both of us with my antics, but instead he packed tobacco into his pipe and smoked it quietly as we walked arm in arm over cobblestones rendered slick by the foggy evening. My nerves were soothed by the closeness of my friend, the fragrance of the burning tobacco and the night’s icy stillness.
As we walked, I put my free hand, tingling with cold, into my coat pocket and felt it rub against soft, thick paper. I stopped and took it out and held it up to the light of a gas lamp. It was a note for no less than one hundred francs, presumably slipped into my pocket by Madame Hugo as we were bidding each other farewell. I was delighted: I would be able to buy more laudanum in the morning. I suggested we go to a tavern and have a drink to warm ourselves. Auguste stopped walking and considered me with an odd look on his face, a look at once loving and sorrowful. ‘No, my friend,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll go home to my wife and children.’ Home. Wife. Children. The words cut me to the quick. If only I was worthy of uttering such a simple phrase. He embraced me and walked away without another word, huddled over in cold and worry. As his silhouette retreated and faded into the dim fog, I saw for the first time the extent to which he, too, was a defeated man, this lifelong friend of mine, my publisher and protector, my staunchest ally and closest confidant. It was evident that he had, without my even noticing it, perhaps without even noticing it himself, joined me among the ranks of the vanquished. There is a mysterious alchemy that overtakes a man when he tastes the bitterness of one of life’s definitive routs: a shrinking and a stooping, a seeping away of vital energies, a realisation that the best is behind him. While I had been prophesying my own demise my whole life, anticipating it, relishing the foretaste of it, his defeat was still new and unfamiliar to him. His palate was not yet habituated to its flavour. Worse still, I was partly to blame. He’d lost a small fortune publishing my poems, defending them in court when the censor deemed several among them on the subject of sapphic love to be indecent, and then pulping the lot when the trial was lost. As his silhouette slinked away in the pale lamplight of that frigid Brussels night, even the hat on his head seemed smaller, and his shoulders disappeared under the scarf he’d wrapped around his neck.
With Auguste gone, I headed down the Rue des Paroissiens in the direction of the Grand Miroir, turning my collar up against the drizzle. The streets were empty and silent, except for the sigh of burning gas in the lamps and an occasional flurry of footsteps behind me. I slipped on a paving stone and landed with both feet in water up to my ankles.
As I turned a corner to face the railway station, wading miserably through one ankle-deep puddle after another, I heard the echo of a stately carriage in a nearby street ahead of me. It turned the corner and was suddenly careening towards me. In my rush to remove myself from its path, my left ankle twisted on a protruding paving stone and, thrown off balance, I landed face-first in the slush with the two horses bearing down on me. Intending to dive towards the gutter, I was getting back to my feet when a wheel collided with my right shoulder, throwing me askance once more and spinning me around, so that I landed – this time on my back – in yet another puddle. Needless to say, the carriage continued on its way, turning left into Rue des Colonies, the driver in all likelihood oblivious to the fact that he had just now bowled over, and very nearly finished off, the greatest lyric poet of the age.
Lying on my back in the filth, icy water seeping through my coat, I was convinced my life was finally nearing its pitiable conclusion. It occurred to me that I ought to have jumped in the other direction, under the horses rather than away from them. As I lay there in that puddle, on those slick paving stones, in that strange city, on that icy evening, all my hopes extinguished, I found the prospect of my imminent demise unexpectedly consoling. In the cold and the damp, I began to shiver with a violence that would not be brought into abeyance. Presently the pain of my injuries began to recede, the wild beating of my heart slowed and my breathing became less frantic. I realised I would not be dying there and then. My accursed existence would continue, at least for now. At the dawning of this thought, I began to scream, abusing that tenacity of life that seems to override every wiser instinct. And once I had begun, I continued, wholeheartedly cursing, stringing beads of curses together to make garlands of curses, which I hurled at Victor Hugo and Madame Hugo, at her sons and her guests. I cursed the Grand Miroir and Brussels and Belgium and the Belgians. I cursed the King of Belgium and for good measure I cursed the Emperor of France. I cursed men and women, mankind and womankind too. I cursed poetry and literature and art and love, and when I had finished cursing all those things I cursed life and God Himself. And it was while I was cursing God that I noticed, standing above me, the silhouette of a man’s body, wearing a round hat and a cape. A gaunt whiskered face leaned down to study me closer. ‘Are you in pain, monsieur?’
‘I hardly know,’ I said, ‘but it seems I cannot raise myself.’
‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me help you to your feet.’ He bent down and put his gloved hands behind my shoulders and under my arms. He smelled of black soap. ‘On the count of three,’ he said, ‘un, deux, trois.’ I was lifted to my feet and the stranger released his grip slowly so that I might bear the weight of my body. I felt a sharp pain in my left ankle and let out a strangled cry. The stranger had to catch me to stop me from falling again. ‘You are injured, sir, and your wounds must be treated. Allow me to take you back to my mistress’s quarters so that you may receive the rest and medical attention you require.’
Naturally, my first inclination was to refuse him, to insist on continuing to the tavern. But a wave of weariness descended upon me, and all I wanted to do was sleep. ‘Yes,’ I said, swaying on my feet until I sank into his arms, ‘rest and attention. That is precisely what I need.’
{175}
A Touching Reunion
EVER SINCE I WAS a young man, I have been prone to bouts of a kind of nocturnal dementia, awoken by the terrors of my dreams, finding myself sitting upright in the dark, my entire body moist with perspiration. As soon as I open my eyes, the offending dream invariably retreats, leaving only the subtlest traces – the white sand of a distant tropic, a great volcano, a storm-tossed sea, overripe flowers, a ship under full sail . . . And, above all, eyes. Eyes the colour of obsidian, eyes I have dreamed of so often I can see them with perfect clarity even when I am awake. Normally this occurs while sleeping in my own bed and, quickly recognising my familiar surrounds, I can pull myself together, light a candle, perhaps open a book or write until I am lulled back into the arms of Morpheus. In a bygone time, I would have found Jeanne lying beside me, her beguiling black eyes open, awoken by my commotion, and she would have asked me what I had dreamed, and once I’d told her, she would have interpreted my visions according to some far-fetched, pagan mythology of her own devising, in which she and I were the reincarnated souls of an ancient bird-god, until I would once again sink into sleep.