by Stefan Zweig
Instinctively, and with horror, I tried to free my arm. But as he felt my resistance to his unhappiness, he suddenly fell on his knees in the middle of the road and embraced my feet.
“I beg you, sir … you must speak to her … you must, or … or something terrible will happen. I’ve spent all I have looking for her, and I won’t … I won’t leave her here alive. I’ve bought a knife … I have a knife, sir … I won’t leave her here alive, I can’t bear it … Speak to her, sir …”
He was rolling about on the ground in front of me like a madman. At that moment two police officers came down the street. I violently wrenched him up and to his feet. He stared at me for a moment, astonished. Then he said in a dry and very different voice, “Turn down that side-street, and you’ll see your hotel.” Once more he stared at me with eyes whose pupils seemed to have merged into something terribly white and empty. Then he walked away.
I wrapped my coat around me. I was shivering. I felt nothing but exhaustion, I was in a confused daze, black and devoid of any emotion, a darkly moving slumber. I wanted to think all this over, but that black wave of weariness kept rising inside me, carrying me away. I staggered into the hotel, fell into bed, and slept as soundly as a brute beast.
Next morning I didn’t know how much of it all had been a dream and how much was real, and something in me didn’t want to know. I had woken late, a stranger in a strange town, and I went to look at a church where there were said to be some very famous mosaics dating from the days of classical antiquity. But I stared blankly at them. Last night’s encounter rose more and more clearly before my mind’s eye, and I felt an irresistible urge to go in search of that alley and that house. But those strange alleys come to life only at night; by day they wear cold, grey disguises, and only those who know them well can recognise them. However hard I looked, I couldn’t find the alley. I came back tired and disappointed, pursued by images of something that was either memory or delusion.
The time of my train was nine in the evening. I left the town with regret. A porter fetched my bags and carried them to the station for me. On our way, I suddenly turned at a crossing; I recognised the alley leading to the house, told the porter to wait, and—while he smiled first in surprise, then knowingly—went to look at the scene of my adventure once more.
There it lay in the dark, as dark as yesterday, and in the faint moonlight I saw the glass pane in the house door gleaming. Once again I was going closer when, with a rustling sound, a figure emerged from the darkness. With a shudder, I saw him waiting there in the doorway and beckoning me to approach. Dread took hold of me—I fled quickly, in cowardly fear of getting involved here and missing my train.
But then, just before I turned the corner of the alley, I looked back once again. When my gaze fell on him he pulled himself together and strode to the door. He quickly opened his hand, and I saw the glint of metal in it. From a distance, I couldn’t tell whether the moonlight showed money or a knife gleaming there in his fingers …
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
These two stories by Stefan Zweig appear superficially very different in theme, yet both examine a subject which clearly fascinated him: the human mind in extremis, working its way through a situation of intense personal crisis. Twilight, the longer novella, also reflects Zweig’s interest in French history and literature. He was a noted Francophile who felt that France was in many ways his spiritual home, and wrote a number of historical biographies, including one of Marie Antoinette. His studies of literary figures include several French writers and his special affinity with France is evident in this story, along with his knowledge of the country’s history. His central figure, Madame de Prie—who really existed—was the mistress of Louis XV’s prime minister the Duke of Bourbon, and did indeed (as Zweig tells us) help to arrange the young king’s marriage to Marie Leszczynska, daughter of the exiled king of Poland. Madame de Prie’s portrait was painted by the French artist Louis Michel van Loo, and as Zweig also mentions, she had a play dedicated to her by Voltaire no less. It is also historical fact that she committed suicide in 1727, after being exiled to her country estate. I think we may assume that the details of her psychological decline in this story are Zweig’s, as he traces the career of a woman used to pulling the strings of power who disintegrates once they are snatched from her grasp. From a hopeful belief that she may yet be back in favour at court some day, his heroine passes to a state of hysterical desperation in which she clutches at emotional straws, and then elaborately stages her own suicide with delusional elation. At the same time Zweig presents a vignette of high society in the France of the early eighteenth century, a century which was of course to end with the French Revolution.
By way of contrast, Moonbeam Alley is a shorter tale of purely private passions, yet is equally tense and anguished. The narrator of the framework story, delayed for an extra day in a small French seaport, is nostalgically reminded of his native Germany by hearing a woman singing an aria from Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz, and as a spectator becomes drawn into the heavily charged atmosphere of a human tragedy. As in several of Zweig’s other novellas, for instance Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman and Amok, the narrator’s function is to elicit confidences from the real protagonist of the story, in this case a man whose thrifty (or avaricious) instincts have lost him the love of the wife he plucked from poverty, yet whom he still loves. Their doomed relationship is disclosed to the delayed traveller who has been drawn to the bar where the woman now works as a prostitute, while she rejects all attempts at reconciliation from her husband, who has followed her there. In only a few pages, Zweig depicts all the pent-up tension of their complex situation, which looks as if it can and will be resolved only by violence.
The framework device is a favourite of Zweig’s; the narrator, usually anonymous, is not personally involved in the story, or only very distantly so, but hears the central character recount his or her own tale. Alternatively he may, as in Fantastic Night, be the recipient of papers which he is to publish. The protagonists themselves, however, recount tales of acute moral or emotional dilemmas. Zweig was extremely interested in Freudian psychology, and much as Freud recorded case histories which he made literary works in themselves, Zweig employs the most meticulous of language to tell his fictional tales of characters in states of heightened emotional awareness.
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Copyright
Pushkin Press 71-75 Shelton Street London WC2H 9JQ
Original text © Williams Verlag AG. Zurich Twilight first published in German as Geschichte eines Unterganges in 1910
Moonbeam Alley first published in German as Die Mondsckeingasse in 1922
Translation copyright © Anthea Bell 2005
This ebook edition published in 2012
ISBN 9781908968845
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Cover Figure in the Moonlight by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–93)
Jeanne Agnes Berthelot de Plémont, Marquise de Prie Attributed to Louis Miche
l van Loo Musée du Louvre Service d’etude et de documentation du département des Peintures
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