He lifted his eyes, looked around the room, and gazed with a smile at his black cat, which, having climbed onto a china vase, was playing with a chrysanthemum and sniffing the flower with the gestures of a mime artist. He asked everyone to leave and talked for a long time with the priest who was watching over him. Nonetheless, he refused to take communion and asked the doctor to explain that his stomach was no longer in any fit state to tolerate the Host. After an hour, he asked his servant to tell his sister-in-law and Jean Galéas to go home. He said:
“I am resigned; I am happy to die and to go before God.”
The air was so mild that they opened the windows that looked over the sea, yet without seeing it; and because of the rather fresh breeze they left the ones opposite closed, those facing the expanse of pasture and woodland.
Baldassare had his bed pulled over to the open windows. A boat was being launched from the jetty, where sailors were hauling it along by rope. A handsome cabin boy, about fifteen years old, was leaning forward, right at the edge; at every wave he looked as if he were going to fall into the water, but he stood firm on his sturdy legs. He was holding out the net with which he would catch the fish, and a lit pipe was clamped between his lips that could taste the salty tang of the sea. And the same wind that swelled the sail came to cool the cheeks of Baldassare, and made a piece of paper flutter round the room. He turned away his head from the happy image of the pleasures that he had passionately loved and would never enjoy again. He looked at the harbour: a three-master was setting sail.
“It’s the ship leaving for India,” said Jean Galéas.
Baldassare could not make out the people standing on the deck, waving their handkerchiefs, but he could guess at the thirst for the unknown that filled their eyes with longing; they still had so much to experience, to know and to feel. The anchor was weighed, a cry went up, and the boat moved out over the sombre sea to the west, where, in a golden haze, the light mingled the small boats together with the clouds and murmured irresistible and vague promises to the travellers.
Baldassare had the windows on this side of the rotunda closed, and those looking out over the pastures and the woods opened. He gazed at the fields, but he could still hear the cry of farewell from the three-master, and he could see the cabin boy, with his pipe between his teeth, holding out his nets.
Baldassare’s hand fidgeted feverishly around. Suddenly he heard a faint silvery sound, imperceptible and profound like a beating heart. It was the sound of the bells from a village in the far distance, which, thanks to the gracious and kindly air, so limpid this evening, and the favourable breeze, had crossed many leagues of plains and rivers before reaching him and being detected by his faithful ears. It was a voice both present and very ancient; now he could hear his heart beating with the bells’ melodious flight, hanging on the moment when they seemed to breathe the sound in, and then breathing out a long slow breath with them. At every period in his life, whenever he had heard the distant sound of the bells, he had involuntarily remembered the gentle sound they made in the evening air when, still a small child, he would make his way back to the chateau across the fields.
At that moment, the doctor asked everyone to draw near, saying:
“It’s the end!”
Baldassare was resting, his eyes closed, and his heart listening to the sound of the bells that his ears, paralysed by the approach of death, could no longer hear. He saw his mother again – the way she would give him a kiss when she got home, and then put him to bed at night and warm his feet in her hands, staying at his side if he couldn’t get to sleep; he remembered his Robinson Crusoe and the evenings in the garden when his sister would sing; the words of his tutor predicting that one day he would be a great musician, and his mother’s delight at the time, which she tried in vain to hide. Now he had run out of time to realize the passionate hopes of his mother and his sister, hopes that he had so cruelly dashed. He saw the lime tree under which he had become engaged and the day when his engagement had been broken off, when only his mother had been able to console him. He imagined he was hugging his old maidservant and holding his first violin. He saw all of this in the distance, glowing sweetly and sadly like the horizon which the windows facing the fields looked towards and yet did not see.
He saw all of this, and yet two seconds had not elapsed since the doctor, listening to his heart, had said:
“It’s the end!”
He straightened, saying:
“It’s all over!”
Alexis, his mother and Jean Galéas knelt down, together with the Duke of Parma who had just arrived. The servants wept outside the open door.
– October 1894
Violante, Or High Society
1
The Meditative Childhood of Violante
Have little commerce with young people and those in society… Do not yearn to appear in the company of the great.
– The Imitation of Christ, I, 8*
The Viscountess of Styria was noble-hearted and tender, and she charmed all around her with her grace. Her husband the Viscount had a very lively wit, and the features of his face were admirable in their regularity. But the least grenadier was more sensitive and less vulgar than he was. Far from the world, in the rustic domain of Styria, they brought up their daughter Violante, who, as attractive and lively as her father, and as charitable and mysteriously alluring as her mother, seemed to combine her parents’ qualities into a perfectly proportioned and harmonious whole. But the changing aspirations of her head and her heart did not encounter any force of will within her which might, without limiting them, have guided them and prevented her from becoming their charming and fragile plaything. This lack of willpower caused Violante’s mother anxieties that might, in time, have borne fruit, if the Viscountess had not, together with her husband, perished violently in a hunting accident, leaving Violante orphaned at the age of fifteen. Living almost alone, under the vigilant but quite unskilled guardianship of old Augustin, her tutor and the bailiff of the chateau of Styria, Violante, for lack of friends, found in her dreams charming companions to whom she promised to remain faithful all her life long. She would take them for walks along the avenues in the grounds, and through the countryside, and bade them lean with her on the terrace which, bordering the domain of Styria, overlooks the sea. Brought up by them to rise, as it were, above herself, and initiated by them into life, Violante acquired a taste for the whole visible world and a foretaste of the invisible. Her joy was boundless, interrupted by moments of sadness so sweet that they surpassed her joy in intensity.
2
Sensuality
Do not lean on a reed blown in the wind and do not place your trust in it, for all flesh is as grass and its glory passes like the flower of the fields.
– The Imitation of Christ
Apart from Augustin and a few children from the district, Violante never saw anyone. Only a younger sister of her mother’s, who lived at Julianges, a chateau a few hours’ journey away, sometimes came to pay Violante a visit. One day when she was visiting her niece, one of her friends came with her. His name was Honoré and he was sixteen. Violante did not like him, but he came back. As they strolled along an avenue in the grounds, he told her some extremely improper things, which she had never yet guessed at. She experienced a very agreeable pleasure at the thought of them, but immediately felt ashamed. Then, as the sun had set and they had been walking for a long time, they sat down on a bench, doubtless so as to gaze at the reflections of the pink sky, soft and mild on the sea. Honoré moved close up to Violante so she would not get cold, fastened the fur round her neck with an ingenious slowness, and suggested that she try and put into practice, with his help, the theories that he had just been telling her about as they walked through the grounds. He tried to speak softly to her, and brought his lips up to Violante’s ear; she did not move away; but they heard a rustle in the undergrowth.
“It’s nothing,” said
Honoré tenderly.
“It’s my aunt,” said Violante.
It was the wind. But Violante had already risen to her feet and, feeling – just in time – a salutary chill from this gust of wind, did not want to sit down again and took her leave of Honoré, despite his pleadings. She felt remorse for this later, had a fit of nerves, and for two days in succession took a very long time in getting to sleep. The memory of him was a burning pillow which she kept turning over and over again. Two days later, Honoré asked to see her. She sent him a message to say that she had gone out for a walk. Honoré did not believe her, and did not dare return. The following summer, her thoughts returned to Honoré with tenderness, but also with sadness, since she knew he had gone off to sea as a sailor. When the sun had sunk into the sea, as she sat there on the bench to which he had, a year ago, led her, she kept trying to remember Honoré’s proffered lips, his half-closed green eyes, his gaze, roaming here and there like rays of sunshine, and resting on her with a little of their warm and living light. And during the mild nights, the vast and secretive nights, when the certainty that no one could see her aroused her desire, she heard Honoré’s voice murmuring forbidden things into her ear. She imagined him in his entirety – an obsessive memory, proffered to her like a temptation. One evening, at dinner, she gazed at the bailiff sitting opposite her and sighed.
“I’m so sad, my dear Augustin,” said Violante. “Nobody loves me,” she added.
“But,” replied Augustin, “a week ago, when I went to Julianges to sort out the library, I heard someone talking about you and saying, ‘How lovely she is!’”
“Who said so?” said Violante gloomily.
The ghost of a languid smile hardly raised one corner of her mouth, as when you try to lift a curtain to let in the cheerful daylight.
“That young man from last year, Monsieur Honoré…”
“I thought he’d gone to sea,” said Violante.
“He’s back,” said Augustin.
Violante stood up immediately and, almost tottering on her feet, made her way up to her room to write to Honoré and tell him to come and see her. As she picked up her pen, she was filled with an unprecedented feeling of happiness and power, the feeling that she was arranging her life at her own whim and for her own pleasure; she felt that, in spite of the cogs of their two destinies which seemed to keep them mechanically imprisoned far from one another, she could all the same give that mechanism a little flick with her thumb: he would appear at night, on the terrace, quite different in appearance from the way the cruel ecstasy of her unslaked desire represented him; her unheeded affections – the novel perpetually being written inside her – and the force of circumstance really were linked by avenues of communication, and she could rush down them towards the impossible that she would make possible by creating it. The following day she received Honoré’s reply, and took it the bench where he had embraced her, and where she now read it, trembling.
Mademoiselle,
I have just received your letter, one hour before my ship’s departure. We had put into port for just a week, and I will return only in four years’ time. I humbly hope that you will keep in your memory
Your respectful and affectionate
Honoré
Then, gazing out on that terrace to which he would never return, where no one would ever come to satisfy her desire, and on the sea also that had stolen him from her and in exchange suffused him, in the young girl’s imagination, with some of its own great allure, mysterious and melancholy, the allure of things that do not belong to us, that reflect too many skies and wash around too many shores, Violante burst into tears.
“My poor Augustin,” she said that evening, “a great misfortune has befallen me.”
The initial need to share confidences sprang in her case from the first obstacles placed in the path of her sensuality, just as naturally as it usually springs from the first satisfactions of love. She had still not known love. Shortly afterwards, she suffered its pains – which is the only way we ever get to know it.
3
The Pains of Love
Violante had fallen in love: in other words, a young Englishman by the name of Laurence was for several months the object of her most trivial thoughts, and the goal of her most important actions. She had gone out hunting with him and could not understand why the desire to see him again now enslaved her mind, impelled her to go out to meet him and kept sleep far from her, destroying her happiness and peace of mind. Violante was in love: her love was scorned. Laurence loved the world: she loved him and longed to follow him. But Laurence would not spare a glance for this twenty-year-old country girl. She fell ill with resentment and jealousy, and went off to take the waters at — to try and forget him; but her self-esteem was wounded at seeing him prefer to her so many other women who were not her equal – and she was resolved on acquiring all their advantages for herself so that she could triumph over them.
“I’m leaving you, my dear Augustin,” she said, “and going to the Austrian Court.”
“Heaven forbid!” said Augustin. “The poor folks around here will no longer be consoled by your charity once you’re surrounded by so many wicked people. You won’t play with our children in the woods. Who will be our church organist? We won’t see you out painting in the countryside, and you won’t be here to compose songs for us.”
“Don’t worry, Augustin,” said Violante, “just make sure my chateau and my Styrian peasants remain handsome and faithful to me. Society is just a means to an end. It gives you commonplace but invincible weapons, and if I hope to be loved one day, I need to possess them. I am also impelled by a certain curiosity, almost a need, to lead a somewhat more material and less reflective life than the one I lead here. It’s both a rest and an education I’m after. As soon as my position is assured and my holiday over, I will leave society for the countryside, and come back to our good simple folk and what I prefer above all else: my songs. At a precise moment, not too far in the future, I will stop going down that particular path and return to this Styria of ours to live with you, my dear.”
“Will you be able to?” said Augustin.
“One can do whatever one wants,” said Violante.
“But maybe you won’t want the same things,” said Augustin.
“Why?” asked Violante.
“Because you will have changed,” said Augustin.
4
High Society
Society people are so dull that Violante merely had to condescend to mingle with them to eclipse almost all of them. The most remote and lofty lords and the most unruly artists all came of their own accord to pay her court. She alone had wit, taste and a demeanour which awoke the idea of every perfection. She inspired plays, perfumes and dresses. Dressmakers, writers and hairdressers came begging for her protection. The most famous modiste in Austria asked her permission to be called her personal hat-maker, and the most illustrious prince in Europe asked her permission to be called her lover. She felt it was her duty to refuse both of them this mark of esteem which would have definitively put the seal on their elegance. Among the young people who asked to be received in Violante’s home, Laurence drew attention to himself by his persistence. Having caused her so much sorrow, he now inspired in her a certain repugnance. And his fawning made her keep her distance even more than all the scorn for her that he had shown.
“I have no right to get angry,” she said to herself. “I hadn’t loved him out of consideration for his greatness of soul, and I sensed perfectly clearly, without admitting it to myself, that he was a base fellow. That didn’t stop me loving him, but it did stop me loving greatness of soul as much as I should have done. I thought it was possible to be both base and lovable at the same time. But once you’ve fallen out of love, you go back to preferring people with a bit of feeling. How strange it was, my passion for that wretch – it was entirely cerebral, and didn’t have the excuse of being led astray by the
senses! Platonic love doesn’t amount to much.” We shall see that she would shortly come to the conclusion that sensual love amounted to even less.
Augustin came to see her, and tried to persuade her to go back to Styria with him.
“You have conquered a veritable kingdom,” he told her. “Isn’t that enough for you? Why don’t you turn back into the old Violante?”
“Yes, I have indeed just conquered a kingdom, Augustin,” replied Violante. “At least let me enjoy my conquest for a few months.”
An event that Augustin had not foreseen meant that Violante could dispense for a while with any thought of retirement. After having rejected twenty most serene highnesses, the same number of sovereign princes and a man of genius who had asked for her hand, she married the Duke of Bohemia, who had the most dazzling charm and five million ducats. The announcement of Honoré’s return almost caused the marriage to be broken off the day before it was due to be celebrated. But an illness to which he had succumbed had disfigured him and made his familiarities appear hateful to Violante. She wept over the vanity of her desires which had once winged their ardent way to the flesh that had then been in its first bloom and was now withered for ever. The Duchess of Bohemia continued to charm everyone just as Violante of Styria had done, and the Duke’s huge fortune merely served to set the work of art that she now was within a frame worthy of her. Having been a work of art she became a luxury item, by virtue of that tendency, natural to things here below, which makes them sink down to the lowest level unless some noble effort maintains, so to speak, their centre of gravity above themselves. Augustin was astonished at all the things he heard about her.
Pleasures and Days Page 5
