“It’s the ship that’s bound for the Indies,” said Jean Galeas.
Baldassare was unable to distinguish the people waving their handkerchiefs on the pier, but he sensed their thirst for the unknown, a thirst that was parching their eyes; those people still had a great deal to experience, to get to know, to feel. The anchor was weighed, shouts arose, the ship cut across the dark sea, toward the west, where, in a golden mist, the light blended the skiffs with the clouds, murmuring hazy and irresistible promises to the voyagers.
Baldassare had the servants shut the windows on this side of the rotunda and open the ones facing the pastures and the woods. He gazed at the fields, but he could still hear the farewells shouted from the three-master and he could see the cabin boy holding his pipe between his teeth and spreading his nets.
Baldassare’s hand stirred feverishly. All at once he heard a faint, silvery tinkle as deep and indistinct as the beating of a heart. It was the bells pealing in an extremely distant village, a sound that, thanks to the limpid evening air and the favorable breeze, had traveled across many miles of plains and rivers to be picked up by his infallible ear.
It was both a current and ancient voice; now he heard his heart beating to the harmonious flight of the bells, the sound pausing the moment they seemed to inhale it, then exhaling with them in a long and feeble breath. Throughout his life, upon hearing faraway bells, he had spontaneously remembered their sweetness in the evening air when, as a little boy, he had crossed the fields on his way home to the castle.
At that instant the physician beckoned everyone over, saying: “It’s the end!”
Baldassare was resting, his eyes closed, and his heart was listening to the bells, which his ear, paralyzed by imminent death, could not catch. He saw his mother kissing him upon his return, then putting him to bed at night, rubbing his feet to warm them, remaining with him if he could not fall asleep; he recalled his Robinson Crusoe and the evenings in the garden when his sister would sing; he recalled the words of his tutor, who predicted that someday he would be a great musician, and he recalled his mother’s thrilled reaction, which she tried but failed to conceal. Now there was no time left to realize the passionate expectations of his mother and his sister, whom he had so cruelly disappointed. He saw the large linden tree under which he had gotten engaged and he saw the day on which his engagement had been broken, and only his mother had managed to console him. He believed he was kissing his old nanny and holding his first violin. He saw all these things in a luminous remoteness as sweet and sad as the one that the windows facing the fields were watching but not seeing.
He saw all these things, and yet not even two seconds had passed since the physician had listened to his heart and said:
“It’s the end!”
The physician stood up, saying:
“It’s over!”
Alexis, his mother, and Jean Galeas knelt down together with the Duke of Parma, who had just arrived. The servants were weeping in the open doorway.
Violante or High Society
Have few dealings with young men and persons of the upper classes. . . . Do not desire to appear before the powerful.
—THOMAS À KEMPIS: IMITATION OF CHRIST, BOOK I, CHAPTER 8
Violante’s Meditative Childhood
The Viscountess of Styria was generous and affectionate and thoroughly imbued with an enchanting grace. Her husband the viscount had an extremely nimble mind, and his facial features were of an admirable regularity. But any grenadier was more sensitive than he and less vulgar. Far from society, they reared their daughter Violante at their rustic estate in Styria, and she, as lively and attractive as her father and as benevolent and mysteriously seductive as her mother, seemed to unite her parents’ qualities in a perfectly harmonious proportion.
However, the fickle strivings of her heart and her mind did not encounter a will in her that, without limiting them, could guide them and keep her from becoming their charming and fragile plaything. For her mother this lack of willpower inspired anxieties that might eventually have borne fruit if the viscountess and her husband had not been violently killed in a hunting accident, leaving Violante an orphan at fifteen.
Residing nearly alone, under the watchful but awkward supervision of old Augustin, her tutor and the steward of the Styrian castle, Violante, for lack of friends, dreamed up enchanting companions, promising to be faithful to them for the rest of her life. She took them strolling along the paths in the park and through the countryside, and she leaned with them on the balustrade of the terrace that, marking the boundary of the Styrian estate, faced the sea. Raised by her dream friends virtually above herself and initiated by them, Violante was sensitive to the visible world and had a slight inkling of the invisible world. Her joy was infinite, though broken by periods of sadness that were sweeter than her joy.
Sensuality
Do not lean on a wind-shaken reed and do not place your faith upon it, for all flesh is like grass, and its glory fades like the flower of the fields.
—THOMAS À KEMPIS: IMITATION OF CHRIST
Aside from Augustin and a few local children, Violante saw no one. Her sole guest from time to time was her mother’s younger sister, who lived in Julianges, a castle located several miles away. One day, when the aunt came to see her niece, she was accompanied by a friend. His name was Honoré, and he was sixteen years old. Violante did not care for him, but he visited her again.
Roaming along a path in the park, he taught her highly inappropriate things, whose existence she had never suspected. She experienced a very sweet pleasure, of which she was instantly ashamed. Then, since the sun was down, and they had walked and walked, they sat down on a bench, no doubt to gaze at the reflections with which the rosy sky was mellowing the sea.
Honoré drew closer to Violante so she would not feel cold; he fastened her fur coat around her throat, ingeniously drawing out his action, and he offered to help her try to practice the theories he had just been teaching her in the park. He wanted to whisper, his lips approached her ear, which she did not withdraw; but then they heard a rustling in the foliage.
“It’s nothing,” Honoré murmured tenderly.
“It’s my aunt,” said Violante.
It was the wind. But Violante, cooled just in time by the wind and now standing, refused to sit down again; she said goodbye to Honoré despite his pleading. She felt remorse, suffered a hysterical fit, and had a very hard time falling asleep during the next two nights. Her memory was a burning pillow which she kept turning and turning. Two days later Honoré asked to see her. She had her butler reply that she had gone for a walk. Honoré did not believe a word of it and did not dare come back.
The following summer she again thought about Honoré, with tenderness, but also with distress, for she knew that he was a sailor on some ship. After the sun had glided into the sea, Violante would sit on the bench to which he had brought her a year ago, and she would struggle to remember Honoré’s lips held out to her, his green eyes half-closed, his gazes sweeping like rays and focusing a little warm and vivid light upon her. And on tender nights, on vast and secretive nights, when the certainty that no one could see her intensified her desire, she heard Honoré’s voice whispering the forbidden things into her ear. She conjured him up fully, and he obsessively offered himself to her like a temptation.
One evening at dinner, she sighed as she looked at the steward, who sat across from her.
“I feel very sad, dear Augustin,” said Violante. “No one loves me,” she added.
“And yet,” he countered, “a week ago, when I was straightening out the library at Julianges, I heard someone say about you: ‘How beautiful she is!’ ”
“Who said that?” Violante asked sadly.
A vague smile barely and very softly raised a corner of her mouth the way we try to lift a window curtain in order to admit the gaiety of daylight.
“It was that young man from last year, Monsieur Honoré. . . .”
“I thought he was at sea,” said Violante.
“He’s back,” said Augustin.
Violante promptly stood up and almost staggered into her bedroom in order to write Honoré, asking him to come and see her. Picking up her pen, she had a hitherto unknown feeling of happiness, of power: the feeling that she was arranging her life a bit according to her own whim and pleasure; the feeling that she could nudge along their two destinies, spur the intricate machinery that imprisoned them far apart; the feeling that he would appear at night, on the terrace, rather than in the cruel ecstasy of her unfulfilled desire; the feeling that, between her unheard expressions of tenderness (her perpetual
