Read Online Nom de Plume by Carmela Ciuraru - Free Book Online Page A

dabbled in other, more pragmatic attempts at work. Feeling despair over not being able to help the poor in any meaningful way, she became “a bit of a pharmacist,” preparing ointments and syrups for her clients gratis. She tried translation work, but because she was meticulous and conscientious with the words of others, it took too long. In attempting pencil and watercolor portraits done at sittings, she said, “I caught the likenesses very well, my little heads were not drawn badly, but the métier lacked distinction.” She tried sewing, and was quick at it, but it didn’t bring in much money and she couldn’t see well enough close up. In another profitless venture, she sold tea chests and cigar boxes she’d varnished and painted with ornamental birds and flowers. “For four years, I went along groping, or slaving at nothing worthwhile, in order to discover within me any capability whatsoever,” she recalled. “In spite of myself, I felt that I was an artist, without ever having dreamed I could be one.”
    Jules Sandeau would play an integral role in her becoming a “public” writer, as she had already written prolifically in private. He was part of a bohemian circle that Aurore eagerly joined, one that provided stimulating political, artistic, and intellectual discourse. These were people she felt an affinity with (as she most certainly did not with her husband), and they would become her close friends. It was an exciting time, and she took full advantage, throwing herself passionately into the affair with Sandeau.
    The tricky issue of financial independence lingered. In the winter of 1831, Aurore reluctantly arranged an interview, through an acquaintance, with the publisher of Le Figaro , Henri de Latouche. She cringed at the thought of newspaper work, but recognized it as a useful entry point to literary endeavors. Also, she appreciated Latouche’s intensity and fervent antibourgeois sensibility. He offered Aurore a job as columnist—making her the only woman on the staff and paying her seven francs per column. She was more than willing to prove herself. “I don’t believe in all the sorrows that people predict for me in the literary career on which I’m trying to embark,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. But when she called on an author to seek advice about the Parisian publishing world, the meeting was a disaster: “I shall be very brief, and I shall tell you frankly—a woman shouldn’t write,” he said before showing her the door. She recalled in her autobiography that because she left quietly, “prone more to laughter than anger,” he ended his harangue on the inferiority of women with “a Napoleonic stroke that was intended to crush me: ‘Take my word for it,’ he said gravely, as I was opening the outer door to his sanctum, ‘don’t make books, make babies!’”
    Never mind: Aurore was more determined than ever. As she once wrote, in another context, “I was not a coward, and I could not have been if I tried.”
    She continued to immerse herself in her social circle, and she and Sandeau collaborated on their writing. They received enthusiastic support from Balzac, who would drop by Aurore’s flat from time to time. She later described him fondly as “childlike and great; always envious of trifles and never jealous of true glory; sincere to the point of modesty, proud to the point of braggadocio; trusting himself and others; very generous, very kind, and very crazy.” Other notable men she called her friends included Baudelaire, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, Henry James, and Dumas. (John Ruskin, William Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle, however, disliked her work intensely.) Later, Flaubert became a lifelong friend and confidant. Their letters were beautiful and mutually consoling. “There you are feeling sad and lonely, you say, and here I am feeling the same way,”