1
For Marie, her father's library in Gournay was an escape from her
present and from her preordained future. She slipped through the
dark panelled door at every moment of the day and night, whenever
she could escape being tutored how to be someone's wife, some house's
keeper, some child's mother. Jeanne or one of the servants only
had to take their eyes off her for a second, and she was gone. And
strangely, although they called out her name in mounting aggravation,
and climbed the stairs breathing heavily in search of her, they
only ever opened the library door, called out her name once again,
paused for the briefest moment before crashing the door behind them,
and giving up the search. Marie was invariably there. She sat half-curled
or flat out on the floor behind the table with a book or manuscript
in front of her, unsighted from the door. They entered, called out
her name, and then left. And yet they surely knew she was there;
that the library was her home in the world, her particular place,
where she spent her free time. Certainly they knew: 'What is in
that roomful of words that you like so much?' her mother often demanded,
without waiting for her daughter to formulate an answer. It was
her mother's question, to which she required no answer, that first
made Marie wonder what actually it was that she liked so much. For
the first few years, she could barely read, but she manhandled the
volumes she could reach down to the floor and turned their pages,
heard the creak and crackle, smelt the papery, cottony smell, almost
like her newly laundered chemise but more acrid, and the warm, spiced
scent of leather, like a wild horse tamed. She ran her fingertips
over the calf bindings and the embossing, catching the ridges and
smoothness. Turned the pages, stiff woven paper heavy with inked
markings that gradually became separated and recognisable as words,
then sentences, until eventually the full existence and meaning
of a book came clear to her. So at first it wasn't a roomful of
words as her mother had delightfully suggested, it was a roomful
of objects that had no other place in the world. Two hundred, once
she could count that far. The bindings were pored over, the pictures
gazed at, the pages turned. First they were objects that gave pleasure
to her all her senses. Toys. And then more. Objects with a function.
A room full of words, a room full of sentences, a room full of meaning
if she could only interpret them. The library became the world she
chose to explore. Gradually, as she associated the books with more
than sensual pleasure. She pulled down books and when she found
one written in the French she had by now been taught, she began
to read them, at first in a scattered way as a bee dances over a
flowering bush, and then reading on in a single book, getting the
idea of each being a discrete entity devoted to an interest of its
own. And finally, coming to understand that behind each entity was
a mind. That a book was an object filled with the thinking of a
mind which belonged to a single person, alive or once alive. Thoughts
bound between leather and kept forever ready for another mind to
explore. Her thoughts came and passed and went she could never know
where. But a book held a person's thoughts so that someone else
could entertain them, borrow them, enjoy them and then come back
another day, month, year and consider them all over again. Books
were boxes of thoughts, held fast by writing, made by a new breed
of beings called writers. Eventually, the answer to her mother's
question was so detailed that it was impossible to articulate. Simplified,
she would have said: writing…no, writers was what she liked
so much about that room full of words. But by the time she got the
answer Marie also knew that her mother did not want to know it and
would have been profoundly unimpressed with the one her daughter
had devised.
Many of the books were incomprehensible, even once she had learned
to read. Opening volume after volume, she found the letters danced
as meaninglessly as they had when she was an illiterate baby. Her
shock was physical, and her anger at discovering that there were
still secrets the library withheld from her was sharp. She did not
know Latin. No one thought it a necessary skill for a female child.
She spelled out a title: Aeneid. One day, on another shelf she discovered
a second copy called Aeniad and wondered why there were two.
When she got it down, she saw that only the title was in Latin and
that the text was in French. She read it, and instead of leaving
it at that and allowing the Latin version to rest on its shelf,
she had another thought. Translation was a unknown idea to her,
but if it was possible to take a book and turn its words into another
language then each word must have its counterpart in that language,
in every language. She imagined Latin as a code, like the codes
she and her siblings sometimes devised for keeping things from the
adults. Latin was a secret writing to which she believed she may
have found the key. If the two books were the same, apart from their
language, then if she read them side by side, word by word, sentence
by sentence, she might learn Latin all by herself. She scoured the
shelves and discovered several books in both languages. The child
may not have had domestic skills or god-given good looks, but she
possessed tenacity, and a dogged desire to understand everything
that was written or printed between covers. She had no idea of the
difficulty of the solitary task she set herself so she simply got on with it, and on and on until very slowly and after years of work
she was quite fluent in reading and even writing Latin. It was a
game, an assignment, a marvellous never-ending puzzle to be solved,
as producing succulent meals, intricate embroidery, and a perfectly
run household might be to another girl. Marie lived in her father's
library in every possible way. It was her breath, her heartbeat,
and, when she moved permanently to Gournay, it became her Paris,
with all its hopes and dreams.
2
The stolen library hours of Marie's youth in Gournay were a preparation,
though it was fifteen years before she knew for what. Apart from
her bookish explorations in her father's study, nothing of any moment
had happened to her by the time she was eighteen. It looked very
much as though nothing was going to happen to her – so her
mother feared. Neither marriage nor piety appeared to hold any interest
for her and she remained practically useless at the only possibility
left for a useful life: to be domestically competent enough to take
over the household duties from Jeanne as she got older. So far as
Jeanne was concerned, at eighteen her eldest child might as well
still have been eleven for all the progress she had made toward
a functioning worldly existence. She had become a woman in the sense
that her body was ready for its duties: she bled regularly each
month and her awkward, angular childish limbs and torso had softened
and rounded somewhat. The narrow, pointed chin and fleshier cheeks
gave her a heart-shaped face which just avoided the sharpness of
her childhood severity, and looked in some lights if not pretty,
then striking at least. But her beady black eyes were too prominent,
her nose too emphatic and her mouth too small and tight for most
lights. She was far from beautiful, though her plainness was alleviated
by the momentary succulence of her perfect youth. She looked tense,
always. Even when she smiled there was a tightness around her eyes,
and an ambiguity in the curve of her lips that could easily be read
as anxiety. When she wasn't smiling, which was most often, her features
contracted into a clouded concern that hovered on the verge of crossness.
Jeanne had no illusions that Marie would find a husband without
an enormous and continuous effort at style and manners, or at least
a greatly improved interest in household matters, neither of which
seemed to be her daughter's inclination. Preparations were already
in hand for Madeleine's betrothal to the Lord of Bouvray, a more
than satisfactory alliance, though it was a test to find the dowry,
and Marthe, two years younger than Marie, but far more personable
and accomplished, would not be looking for a husband for long. So
for her oldest daughter, as for her youngest, Léonore, it
would have to be the convent.
Few of her father's book were left unread now, not even those in
Latin. Marie's progress with Greek was slower (her Uncle Louis had
helped her understand the unfathomable characters), but there seemed
to be very little hurry. The more books she read and the more Latin
she learned, the more it seemed to Marie that a good life might
be spent in the company of books. Everything else would be an interruption
to her reading. To become a nun would be a continual interruption.
Nuns were, she knew, less free than children to secrete themselves
in a corner and read whatever took their fancy. Marriage would be
an interruption. What time did her mother have to read, even when
her father was alive, even if she had thought it a decent use of
time? Taking care of a household and children took up all the hours
in a day, and a living husband might interrupt a wife even more.
She resolved to be neither a nun or a wife. She could see nothing
wrong with just reading books. But could a grown woman, by definition
with no formal education, have a life that was devoted to reading?
That is, did such a life exist in the world to be lived? According
to her mother, even reading in one's spare moments was a waste,
and she had never heard of anyone who could live only by reading
books. If such a one existed – she could barely imagine it
– it was certain it would not be a woman. Yet, the more she
thought, the less reason there seemed to be why she shouldn't. Except
for the matter of money. Only a too limited income might prevent
such a life. Money was very short these days, with the preparations
for her sister's marriage and the dowry. Marthe would need one also.
Charles was already costing a good deal in his military career in
Italy, and Augustin was still a baby whose future would have to
be paid for. After upkeep for the chateau, there would be very little
left over from their dwindling resources to keep a single woman
in a life of reading. But what would she require? Food, clothes,
a roof over her head. She had no interest in elaborate garments
or fine food; she could forgo any unnecessary travel if she was
in the right place to start with. Why should she not live a frugal
life, reading books, translating them, thinking about them? Of course,
she was not, and if she remained in Gournay without marrying she
never would be, grand enough to have a salon of her own, nor even
to attend one like those in Paris she had heard tell of, where the
thinkers of the day came to discuss and share their thoughts. Uncle
Louis spoke to her about the learning of Catherine de' Medici and
Marguerite de Valois, and the salons they kept where everybody went.
Mary Stuart had composed a Latin prayer and recited it to the entire
court when she was just fourteen. Women could be learned and spend
time in their libraries. They were great queens and princesses,
of course, with retinues and vast wealth, but surely, if she determined
to want very little and was content to read and think, rather than
discuss ideas with the elite of Paris, there would be enough money
left over from her sisters' dowries and the cost of supporting her
brothers for her to lead a modest, quiet life, her only expenditure
books, in some small corner of Paris, uninterrupted by domestic
or religious duties. Why shouldn't she? Because it was just a dream
of a life. There was no precedent that she could think of in any
corner of the social world into which she had been born. She knew
not to mention the idea to her mother, who would have reiterated
– horrified – Marie's fears that such a life was not
available to be lived, and doubtless made immediate arrangements
with the local convent.
There were few visitors to Gournay, but from time to time her uncle,
Louis le Jars, visited from Paris and brought with him the scent
of the sophisticated literary world Marie increasingly ached for.
He was a secretary at the court of Henri III, but also a playwright,
one of those, it gradually dawned on Marie, who was recognised and
even justified in the world for the words he put down on paper.
His plays were performed. People paid for tickets to watch them.
There were, she came to understand, people who not only lived a
life reading, but who also wrote what others read, for a living.
It dawned on her over time that some of the books she read were
written by actual, living, breathing persons, and that these persons
were what might be called writers, as other were called wives or
nuns, some of whom, she supposed, must be paid for their efforts.
Books cost money to buy – she knew that only too well –
so were those who wrote them in receipt of payment? Aristotle and
Ronsard, Plutarch and Erasmus wrote, were writers, just like Uncle
Louis. Writers by profession. They had spent, and did spend their
time poring over manuscripts and writing down their ideas. What
they wrote was published. People bought their books and discussed
what they read in them, waited even, from the living ones, for the
next volume to come out. Behind the words between the covers of
the books she read, people actually existed. And one of them, Christine
de Pisan, writing over a hundred years ago, was neither a man nor
a nun.
Louis liked his niece and her oddness. He always brought her a book
of poetry or the newest romance when he came to visit, to Jeanne's
disgust. 'A household manual would be more useful,' she would snap
at him. Uncle Louis took some pleasure in telling Marie stories
of his life in Paris; she responded to them with a rare excitement.
He was actually a friend of Ronsard and other members of the Pléiade
and brought her the latest volumes of their poetry. And quietly,
when his sister-in-law wasn't nearby to scold them both, he would
tell her who was saying what, in which salons they were saying it,
and what they were wearing when they said it. Marie listened and
took in every nuance she could grasp, like a young animal learning
the scents on the air, but there was also an anguish in knowing
that she could not be there among them, in the streets and salons
of Paris, nodding to d'Aubigné and passing the visiting Giordano
Bruno on the street, attending Garnier's latest play, buying the
new collection of de Baïf's verse. Aged eighteen, and as removed
from nodding, attending and buying as it was possible to be, she
hated Gournay, in spite of the life-enhancing library. It was her
prison, her tower, where no prince would ever come to her rescue.
Often at night she lay in bed and imagined returning to Paris with
Uncle Louis, but for all her uselessness at home, it was out of
the question that she would be allowed to leave, or that, in truth,
he would want to take responsibility for an unmarriageable niece
who was not even able to make his life more comfortable.
In the spring of 1584 Louis came to stay for a few weeks and brought
Marie two volumes of a work which he told her had been gathering
momentum among the most discerning sections of society for the past
two years. Louis explained that the books contained what were called
by their author 'essays': attempts, tryouts, testings – it
was hard to define this word in its new literary coining. The writings
that made up the two volumes were not poetry, not polemic nor rhetoric,
but whatever they might be, they were really remarkably interesting,
and not quite like anything else – not to say in parts, Louis
whispered with a collusive smile, quite unsuitable for the delicate
mind of a young unmarried girl. Marie thanked him with her awkward
smile which though genuine she knew failed to convey her pleasure
and gratitude. There seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between her
feelings and what her face managed to express. In the presence of
another human being, even Uncle Louis, her body tightened, her shoulders
rose and her eyes glared and slid away from contact even when she
meant them to express warmth. She could feel the inaccuracy of her
body as it took instruction from her intentions and then continued
on its own jerky, withdrawn way. Yet behind her clumsily polite
acceptance of the gift, the fact that Uncle Louis, the playwright
from Paris, the bosom companion of the great Ronsard, considered
her someone who would want to read what everyone with discernment
was reading made her heart thunder with pride.
Marie rushed the two small volumes to the library to wait for her,
before her mother could take them and tell her that she might read
them when she had unpicked the mess of her last embroidery effort
and satisfactorily completed another attempt. She would save up
Uncle Louis's gift for when he had left and there were no more stories
of Parisian life to divert her. Who knew when he would come again
with more books and tales? Lately, Marie had begin to imagine, though
she tried not to, a moment arriving when all the books in her father's
library had been read, twice, three times. Could a time come when,
after who knows how many readings, the idea of beginning all over
again filled her with the same deadly tedium as the need to organise
the following evening's dinner? At present it seemed impossible
that she would ever have enough of her books, but it seemed a little
less impossible with every volume she finished and returned to the
shelf. A new book extended the possibility of her reading life so
that she could avoid the idea of using up her library. Of course,
new books could be ordered from Paris, but the cost was immense
and her mother would never permit it, though Marie would have been
happy to spend her wedding or convent dowry on books rather than
a husband or that other secure place in the world. She worked hard
at suppressing panicky thoughts about a time when she would no longer
want to re-read the books she had, and persuaded herself that she
could not help but be content so long as she had her place in the
library (she still curled up on the floor behind the table, for
all her eighteen years) and there were pages to turn. A new book was the greatest of treasures.
In the world beyond Paris and the chateau in Gournay, the wars between
the believers in the old and new religions had reignited after a
lull. Towns were laid to siege, battles devastated the countryside,
impoverishing and killing citizens of both, but miraculously, at
least for now, Picardie was calm in the midst of the troubles. It
was unlikely to be immune, however, to a season of plague which
was beginning to sweep through Southern France and work its way
north. All the more reason for staying where one was, living inside
the protective, provincial walls of the chateau and keeping oneself
to oneself. Marie had started to make translations of Virgil. Jeanne,
harried and getting older, fretted about Madeleine's forthcoming
marriage arrangements, encouraged Marthe to refine her domestic
and social skills before her presentation in Paris once the danger
of plague had died away, and permitted Léonore to spend all
the time she wanted with the nuns of the local convent even if it
did mean a certain risk in breathing the air of the outside world.
There was little she could do about Marie except insist on her practising
household duties enough to prevent an actual deterioration in her
limited abilities. Louis returned to Paris, the court, the salons,
the theatres, the writers, rested but enthused to be back in the
real world in spite of its dangers. It was time for Marie to attend
to the books on the library table and find out what the discerning
Parisians were finding so interesting. It was time, also, to discover
what all the years of her reading and devotion to the library had
been preparing her for.
The two small volumes waited for Marie on the library table, side
by side. Louis had had them nicely bound. Nothing elaborate, no
tooling, just plain tanned calfskin, quite smooth to the eye, soft
to the touch, though with a light stroke her fingertips could discern
the natural undulations of the leather. Marie picked up one of the
books and held it in her hand. It was thick and quite weighty, but
no more than the height and width of her prayer book and lay comfortably,
barely overlapping her palm. Closing her hand around the bulky volume,
solid in her grasp, she brought it up close to her face and with
both hands she opened it and snapped it closed several times, causing
puffs of air, as if from the life's breath inside the covers, to
blow coolly on to her skin. She opened it and lifted it to her nose
to inhale the smell of new leather and freshly produced rag. The
sharp scent of paper hit the back of her throat, then deepened and
darkened into the complex smell of treated hide, both animal and
chemical, and finally she caught the special high note of newness.
None of the books in the library smelled quite like this any more.
The perfume of a new book was like nothing else. After she had read
these volumes and they lived on the shelves beside or beneath the
other books, they would take on their smell. Old library. A much
more intricate scent than newness which included the indefinable
odour of having been read. These days, being herself an integral
part of the library, a hint of Marie mingled with leather and rag,
wood, dust and time. She hoped too that the aroma of books had merged
permanently with her own personal smell so that she carried it with
her everywhere. She never opened the windows of the library, fearing
that its perfume would escape, or that the scent of bright spring
or autumn, icy winter or torrid summer would enter and be incorporated,
detracting from the precious aroma of stale bookishness. The library
had become a living, developing entity to Marie. It had a creatureness
into which she hoped to become inextricably merged. It breathed
and brooded, waited, and once when she was younger, had expressed
itself to her directly. One stiflingly hot, dry day, as she crouched
on the floor behind the table leafing through a hefty book of maps,
there was a sudden commotion on the other side of the room that
made her jump up in fright. A snap like a whip being cracked and
then a loud slap of an object landing heavily. When she got the
courage to go across the room and investigate, she saw an octavo
edition of Plutarch's Lives in French lying open, face down on the
wooden floorboards, several feet away from where it had been shelved.
Unless there were ghostly others in the room (an idea she considered
and set aside to think about later), it had leapt out and away from
its place of its own accord. Made a bid for freedom. Had it wanted
to be read? A book that jumped from its shelf, a wilful book that
desired to make itself known to her. An army of ghostly others could
not have excited her imagination more. She let the ghosts out of
her mind to go their way, picked up the book, and acceding to its
wishes, took it back with her to her place on the floor behind the
table, marvelling at the life it contained, even before she discovered
the life of the words she read between the yellowish vellum binding. |
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