He would send out messengers to find out whether the policeman he had beaten up the previous night was dead, and he would utter obscenities to a person whose hand he thought he was holding. Those exterminating angels called Will and Thought were no longer there to thrust back into the shadows the evil spirits of his senses and the foul emanations of his memory.
After three days, at around five o’clock, he awoke as you wake from some bad dream for which you are not responsible, but which you indistinctly remember. He asked if any friends or relatives had been near him during those hours in which he had presented only the most negligible, most primitive and most lifeless side of himself, and he begged his servants, if he were again overcome by delirium, to show those acquaintances out and allow them back in only when he had regained consciousness.
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
