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
