"She did one called 'A Spirit-Wreath and Fair Spirit-Hands at a Seance of Hella Lees.' "
"That doesn't sound very hopeful. But maybe the hands were as good as Diirer's, maybe the wreath looked like Fantin-Latour. Only in their own way, of course. Not derivative."
"Do you think so?"
"No, but we should give her the benefit of the doubt. She was a sister." She was.
That night, they sat in Maud's flat and Maud translated Dr Le Minier's letter for Leonora, who said, "I got the generalgist of it OK but my French is primitive. What it is to have an English education."
Maud had unthinkingly sat down in her usual place in the corner of her white sofa under the tall lamp, and Leonora had plumped down next to her, one arm along the sofa behind Maud's back, one buttock bumping Maud's when she bounced. Maud felt threatened and tense, and almost got up, once or twice, but was restrained by an exigent and unhelpful English sense of good manners. She was aware that Leonora knew exactly how she felt, and was amused.
The letter was possibly treasure-trove. Maud, by now slightly more skilled at dissimulation than Blanche Glover with Jane, read it out flatly as if it were a routine scholarly enquiry.
"Dear Professor Stern,
I am a French student of women's writings, here in the University of Nantes. I have much admired your work on the structuresof signification of certain women poets, above all Christabel LaMotte, who is interesting to me also, as half-Breton, and drawing very much on her Breton heritage ofmyth and legend to create a female world. May I say in particular how very just and inspiring I found your remarks on the sexualisation of the landscape elements in The Fairy Melusina.
I am told you are researching materialsfor a feminist life of LaMotteand have come across something I think may perhaps be of interest to you. I am currently working on an almost unpublished writer, Sabine de Kercoz, who published a few poems in the 1860s including several sonnets in praise of George Sand, whom she never met, but for whose ideals and way of lifeshe had conceived a passionate admiration. There are also four unpublished novels, Oriane, Aurélia, Les Tourments de Geneviève, and La Deuxième Dahud, which I am hoping to edit and bring out in the nearfuture. It draws on the same legendof the Drowned City of Is as LaMotte's beautiful poem of that title.
As you may already know, Mille de Kercoz was a relation, through her paternal grandmother, of Christabel LaMotte. What you may not know is that in the autumn of 185c LaMotte appears to have visited her family in Fouesnant. My source is a letter from Sabine de Kercoz to her cousin, Solange, which is amongst the papers - unedited and I believe unexamined since they were deposited here in the University by a descendant of Sabine (who became Mme de Kergarouet in Pornic, and died in childbed in 1870). I enclose a transcript of the letter, and if you find it of interest, I shall of course be delighted to share with you anyfurther informations I may obtain. Mes Hommages.*'
"Sorry about the clumsy translation, Leonora. Now for Sabine de Kercoz.
"Ma chère petite cousine,
Our long and tediousdays here have been enlivened by theunexpected - at least unexpected by me- arrival of a distant cousin, a Miss LaMotte, residing in England, the daughter of Isidore LaMotte, who collected all the French Mythology and also the Breton tales and folk beliefs. Imagine my excitement - it turns out thatthis new cousin is apoetess, who has published many works, unfortunately in English, and is highly thought of in that country. She is unwell atpresent, and keeps her bed, having had a terrible journey from England in the recent storm, andhaving beenforced to remain for almost twenty-four hours outside the harbour walls at St Malo because of a howling gale. And then the roads were almost impassable for flooding water and high winds all the time. She has afire in herroom, and is probably unaware how singular an honour this is, in this austere household.
I liked what I saw of her well enough. She is little and slender, with a very white face (maybe becauseof the sea) and rather large white teeth. She sat up to dinner on the first evening andsaid only afew words. I sat by her side and whispered to her that I had hopes of being a poet. She said, 'It is not the way to happiness, ma fille.' I said on thecontrary, it was only when writing that I felt wholly living. She said, 'If that is so,fortunately or unfortunately, nothing I can say will dissuade you.'
The wind howled and howled that night, all on one wailing note, without remission, so that one ached, body and soul, for just a moment ofsilence, which did not ensue until the early hours ofthe morning, when I waswoken from the -tohu-bohu- hurly-burly - by a sudden dropping of the wind, rather than the more usual way, of waking becauseof sounds. My new cousin did not appear to have slept, in themorning, and myfather insisted she should retire to her room with a tisane of raspberry leaves.
I forgot to say that she has brought with her a large wolf-hound, who is called, if I heard correctly, 'theDog Tray. ' The poor animal has also suffered terribly in thestorm, andwill notcome outfrom under the little table in Miss LaMotte's bedroom where he lies with his ears between his paws. My cousin says that when the weather is better, he can run in theforest ofBrocéliande, which is his natural habitat…"
"That sounds worth investigation," said Leonora, when Maud had finished. "That's more or less what I guessed it said. I might go over to Nantes-where is Nantes exactly?-and take a look at what Dr Le Minier has got there. Except that I don't read old French. You'll have to come with me, my darling. We could have a fun time. LaMotte and sea food and Brocéliande, what do you say?"
"That at some future date that will be lovely, but just now I've got a paper to finish for the York Conference on Metaphor and I've got into a horrible knot with it."
"Tell. Two minds are better than one. What metaphor?"
Maud was at a loss. She had distracted Leonora from Christabel temporarily, only to find herself jounced into discussing a paper which was hardly forming in her mind and which was in fact better left another month to grow in the dark on its own.
"It's vague yet. It's to do with Melusina and Medusa and Freud's idea that the Medusa-head was a castration-fantasy, female sexuality, feared, not desired."
"Ah," said Leonora, "I must tell you about a letter I had from a German about Goethe's Faust, where the chopped-off heads of the Hydra creep about the stage and think they are still something or other-I've been paying attention to Goethe recently-the ewig weibliche, the Mothers, all that, the witches, the sphinxes…"
Leonora talked on. She was never dull, if always breathless. Maud began to feel safe as the conversation moved from Brittany to Goethe, from Goethe to sexuality in general, and from the general to the particular and the peculiar habits of Leonora's two husbands which she was given to deploring, and very occasionally celebrating, in a kind of vehement recitative. Maud always thought that there was no more to be known than she herself knew, about the quirks and foibles, the secret lusts and inconsiderate failures, the smells and funny noises and ejaculations verbal and seminal emitted by the poor sap and the meaty-man. She was always proved wrong. Leonora was a kind of verbal Cleopatra, creating appetite where most she satisfied, making an endless pillow-book out of the new oratory of the couch.