The Reinvention of Love

apparently playing Beethoven’s funeral march in the salons of Paris. There are funeral processions day and night. I lie in bed and listen to the horses’ hoofs on the cobblestones, the creak of wagons loaded with bodies rolling past my windows.
    It is too dangerous to go out. The Cénacle has suspended its meetings.
    I would risk my life to walk the small distance between my house and the Hugos’, but I cannot risk Adèle’s life. So I wait – two weeks, three – each day a torment, each night an unspeakable agony. I wait, for the epidemic to rise and crest, burst its banks and, finally, subside.

    We use an inexpensive, rather sordid hotel, to avoid the moral judgement of the proprietor, but I fear we suffer it anyway. It has been my observation that people like to feel superior, that it is a natural inclination to want to feel you are better than someone else. So, when we sign the hotel register as man and wife there is invariably a raised eyebrow, or a moment’s hesitation before we are handed the brass fob with the key on it. Our time of assignation doesn’t help. We always come to the hotel in the afternoon and leave in the early evening. Lovers are betrayed by the hours they must keep.
    I ask for a room on a high floor at the back, as far away from the street as possible, because it is quieter and more private. Also, the higher floors are less popular because of the climb up the stairs, so it is unlikely that we will have neighbours.
    The wooden stairs have shallow dents in them from years of footsteps shuffling up and down. Some days I find this a comfort, that some of those feet will have belonged to other lovers, that Adèle and I are not the only ones who have used this hotel to rendezvous. But other days I find this depressing. All those years. All those people moving up and down the staircase, moving through the rooms of this hotel. Their love unremembered.
    Sometimes, when we are lying naked in the bed of our rented room, I think of all the other couples who have been in the room for the same purpose. What happened to them? What happened to their love? I wish there were a private registry of the lovers who frequented each room; a listing of two names – names that were not permitted to be joined together in any other circumstance. At least something would then remain to remind us of the lovers, to remind us that they loved.
    Adèle and I contribute to this private registry by signing our names in each of the rooms we stay in. Our joined signatures, small and discreet, behind a picture, or under the washstand. Charles and Adèle. Invisible, but there nonetheless, if you choose to look.
    Today we have been given a room on the fourth floor. The narrow stairs curl up and up. We have to walk in single file. We struggle up, pausing for breath at each landing. By the time we reach the room we are hot and irritable. I fling the door open. Adèle stumbles across the threshold.
    In the Hôtel Saint-Paul, the rooms on the higher floors have lower ceilings than the rooms on the first and second floor. But the ceilings are timbered, and this makes up for their lack of height. This room, like all the others we have stayed in, has a bed against one wall, a washstand against another, a small desk, and a window that looks down over the roof and courtyard of the Collège Royal Saint-Louis.
    Adèle collapses on the bed, still struggling for breath. It occurs to me, rather meanly, that she’s grown stouter of late. I stare moodily out the window, not feeling very loving. And yet I have waited an entire month for this afternoon in the hotel.
    “Well?” says Adèle. She has propped herself up on her elbows, stares across the room at me. “Are you going to stand there all day?”
    Perhaps I love Adèle better in absentia? There is nothing finer than imagining our time together in this hotel room, but now that we’re actually here I feel paralyzed by my expectations. Why is love so difficult, so changeable? Why am I caught so easily in its tides and currents? Why can’t I steer the craft of my own desire?
    “I am a boat,” I say to Adèle.
    “What?”
    “I am a dark boat cast down the dark length of the river.”
    She giggles. “You are an idiot,” she says. “Do I have to come over there to make you love me?”
    Adèle’s body and my body are similarly plump. We are just over thirty, but our figures are decidedly middle-aged. Adèle’s figure has not been helped by giving birth to five children. (Of