I wrote to Richard—to the last address I had for him in Madeira—asking about Bertha’s child, but a reply never came, only the letter itself, returned to me. And I wrote to Mr. Arthur Foster, my solicitor in Spanish Town, who still kept an eye on business related to Valley View, and though he responded promptly, he, as well, knew nothing. It was what I had half suspected, for in a case like that, would they not have done it all clandestinely, given the infant to someone who was leaving the island, for—for where? Madeira? Saint Thomas? England? The Americas? Or could he have remained in Jamaica somehow, hidden safely away from the family? What if the child had died? It was a mystery I had no idea how to unravel.
As I hit wall after wall in my attempts to trace the baby, I grew increasingly frustrated and tried to put it out of my mind. To what end, after all, was I searching now for this motherless boy, to reveal to him the monster his lost mother had become? Why torment myself this way?
Yet, often I couldn’t sleep, and I paced the floor, roaming around the rooms. Above me, my wife roamed as well, watched over by Grace Poole, trapped inside her head and trapping me there with her, neither of us free. Thornfield-Hall had been my dream since I had left it as a child, but in these months it had transformed into a kind of nightmare. And a prison, for the both of us. I began to realize that there was nothing for me at Thornfield, none of the joy or peace it had once promised, as long as Bertha—poor Bertha—weighed on my soul.
That thought, and the future it promised, pressed upon me those dark nights until I felt that it would pull me under.Have I not a right to a life?I asked myself.Have I not as much a right as the next man?Time and again I had tried to do the moral thing, had I not? And how had that worked out for me?No,I told myself,this stops here.I was done with it, done with Bertha, or as much as I could be. I would start over, and find love on my own terms.
The next morning, I sent for Ames and gave him instructions, and I sent letters of explanation to Everson and Carter, and then I packed a bag and took a coach toward Southampton, leaving Thornfield in my wake.
Chapter 5
Iam not proud to say it, but those next few months proved a happier time for me. In Paris, I found a place in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—an apartment suitable to my station in life—and I hired a housekeeper and assigned her to find a cook and whatever else was needed. Since I would not be in residence there, I had reduced the number of Thornfield’s servants to a minimum, just enough to provide for Bertha and Grace, and I arranged for Ames to send regular reports on the estate and my business holdings.
I had at the time some vague idea of seeking out in Paris a good and intelligent woman who would be my companion, someone who, knowing my position with Bertha, would understand and love me anyway. I imagined that if I made myself known, sooner or later a suitable match would appear. To that end, I made the acquaintance of my neighbors: on the one side, a widowed woman of great class whose recently deceased husband had been a general under Bonaparte, with whom I hoped to enjoy conversation about that great military mind. But I soon learned that she recalled little. On the other side lived avicomteand his wife, thevicomtesse, who was much younger than her husband and a perennial flirt. Through them, I became acquainted with the younger, fashionable set with whom Madame la Vicomtesse de Verteuil socialized.
With them, or occasionally by myself, I went to nightly entertainments: the opera, the ballet, thebouffons, and again a theater for a play or two. I went to fetes at the Prado and balls at the Odéon. With my new acquaintances, I learned to order the finest dishes and to drink vermouth and cassis, to speak about the finer points of an opera or ballet, to catch a woman’s eye and smile at her over the rim of my glass, and I learned, too, that if one has money enough there is no limit to what one may do. Perhaps this was the kind of life Rowland had sought, and I was enjoying it thoroughly. I stayed out most nights and slept through the mornings and half the afternoons, and on sunny days, paraded in my carriage on the Champs-Élysées, or I walked in the Jardin des Plantes with a woman on my arm. And again in the evenings I went to entertainments and gambled and danced.
I could enjoy myself in ways I had never imagined: I was talking politics and business with the men, and flirting and writing my name on women’s fans at balls and having affairs with one and then another. If all of that brought me no closer to the woman I had imagined meeting, I told myself it was no matter. In short, unlike at Thornfield, in Paris I felt free, and if my life there did not bear close inspection, it was certainly more enjoyable than remaining at Thornfield would have been.
One cold night in March I found myself standing in the Grand Foyer of the Paris Opéra, disappointed at the notice board announcing that Lise Noblet had taken ill and would not be performing the title role inLa muette de Portici. I would have left the theater in disgust, for Noblet was an exquisite dancer and had already become a particular favorite of mine, but Monsieur Roget sidled up to me and said, “You must see this new dancer. She is a marvel.”
Roget was a man who made it his business to know all the performers at the Opéra. He held court every night at the Café d’Or after the performances, and if he said a dancer was worth watching, then she surely must be. So I stayed, having no alternate plan in mind, and I suppose I thought I could spend the evening critiquing her. Instead, however, from the moment the mute Fenella first appeared onstage I was entranced. She danced like a feather floating on air, her blond curls barely contained, her hands and feet as graceful as the wings of a butterfly. Watching her, I was mesmerized; I could not get enough of this petite marvel. The opera felt dull each time she left the stage.
On the one hand, I wished the evening would go on forever, and yet on the other I could barely wait until it was over, so anxious was I to find her in the Foyer de la Danse, where the dancers met with their admirers. I barely waited for the curtain calls, dashing down the stairs, running to buy camellias from a flower girl, hurrying to the foyer. I did not yet even know her name. I pushed myself as close as I could to the front of the waiting crowd, and when she finally appeared I shoved the others away until I stood right before her, and I placed the bouquet into her hands, kissing her fingers as I did so. Her face was as porcelain, lightest cream. She smiled at me and nodded at the flowers, and I placed my card into the bouquet before I was jostled away by another admirer and another, and when I turned back her arms were burdened with flowers, and all of them seemed more glorious than the ones I had given her. I left and walked back to my apartment in a spitting snow.
Despite my anticipation I heard nothing from the dancer—by then I had learned her name was Céline Varens—and the next evening Noblet returned to the stage. I attended anyway, searching the dance company for the luminous Varens, but did not see her. For days after that, I waited for a message from her, or for her name on another playbill or for any word at all of her, but there was none.
And then one day I was on my way to the Palais-Royal for a solitary stroll in its gardens. Solitary? You may wonder, and rightly, but sometimes I did so, for I am not ashamed to say that sometimes the best conversations one can have are with one’s own self, and that had more and more frequently become my situation. That day, the sun was warm on my back and the sky was blue and I could not have been more content in anyone’s company, when a carriage suddenly pulled up beside me, and the passenger inside opened the door.
Curious, and not a little annoyed, I imagined some acquaintance interrupting my reverie. But when I glanced inside, there was the golden nymph I had so wanted to see again: Céline Varens herself.
She smiled as I stepped inside, the aroma of her scent enveloping me—it was the fragrance of camellias. “I have been searching for you,” she said.
“And I you,” I responded, hardly able to breathe. “How did you find me?”
Rose-colored lips parted into a perfect smile. “Silly,” she said. “I found you walking toward the Palais-Royal. God must have sent you to me.”
No,I thought;he sentyoutome.“But I gave you my card,” I said.
“There were so many cards, so many flowers.”
So many other men,I thought. But her dimpled smiles and her fluttering hands entranced me. “Where were you going just now?” I asked her.
“Silly,” she said again. “I was going to find you, since you did not find me.”
“But no one knew where you lived. I tried everything—”
“Ah,mon petit chouchou, you did not know where to look, did you?”
It came to me then: someone kept her—some man other than I, luckier than I—and I should not have been surprised. “Does he know what you do when you are not with him?” I asked.
She laughed lightly, and her hands took my face and drew it close and her lips met mine and her tongue came into my astonished mouth, and I could have ravished her there, right there, in her carriage, but she gently pushed away from me. “You are a gentleman, no?” she whispered.
“Of course I am.”
“You have another card, no?”
I drew a card from my pocket and she gazed at it, as if appraising me. “I will send for you,” she said, “and you will come?”
