The next day she received Honoré’s response, which she read, trembling, on the bench where he had kissed her.
Mademoiselle,
Your letter has reached me an hour before my ship is to sail. We have put into port for only a week, and I will not return for another four years. Be so kind as to keep the memory of
Your respectful and affectionate
Honoré.
Gazing now at that terrace to which he would no longer come, where no one could fulfill her desire, gazing also at that sea, which was tearing him away from her, exchanging him, in the girl’s imagination, for a bit of its grand, sad, and mysterious charm, the charm of things that do not belong to us, that reflect too many skies and wash too many shores; gazing and gazing, Violante burst into tears.
“My poor Augustin,” she said that evening. “Something awful has happened to me.”
Her initial need to confide in someone arose from the first disappointments of her sensuality, emerging as naturally as the first satisfactions of love normally emerge. She had not as yet known love. A short time later she suffered from it, which is the only manner in which we get to know it.
Pangs of Love
Violante was in love; that is, for several months a young Englishman named Laurence had been the object of her most trivial thoughts, the goal of her most important actions. She had gone hunting with him once and she failed to understand why the desire to see him again dominated her thoughts, drove her to roads where she would run into him, deprived her of sleep, and destroyed her peace of mind and her happiness.
Violante was smitten; she was spurned. Laurence loved high society; she loved it in order to follow him. But Laurence had no eyes for this twenty-year-old country girl. She fell ill with chagrin and jealousy and, to forget him, she went to take the waters at X.; but her pride was wounded because she had lost out to so many women who could not hold a candle to her; so, in order to triumph over them, she decided to beat them at their own game.
“I’m leaving you, my good Augustin,” she said, “I’m going to the Austrian court.”
“Heaven help us,” said Augustin. “The poor in our country will no longer be consoled by your charity once you’re in the midst of so many wicked people. You’ll no longer play with our children in the forest. Who’ll preside at the organ in church? We’ll no longer see you painting in the countryside, you’ll no longer compose any songs for us.”
“Don’t worry, Augustin,” said Violante, “just keep my castle and my Styrian peasants lovely and faithful. For me high society is only a means to an end. It offers vulgar but invincible weapons, and if I want to be loved someday, I have to possess them. I’m also prodded by curiosity and by a need to live a slightly more material and less meditative life than here. I want both a holiday and an education. Once I gain my status, and my vacation ends, I’ll trade the sophisticated world for the country, for our good and simple people, and, what I prefer above everything else, my songs. On a certain and not all too distant day, I’ll stop on this slope, I’ll return to our Styria and live with you, dear Augustin.”
“Will you be able to?” said Augustin.
“One can if one wants to,” said Violante.
“But perhaps you won’t want the same thing as now,” said Augustin.
“Why won’t I?” asked Violante.
“Because you’ll have changed,” said Augustin.
The Sophisticated World
The members of high society are so mediocre that Violante merely had to deign to mingle with them in order to eclipse nearly all of them. The most unapproachable lords, the most uncivil artists sought her out and wooed her. She alone had a mind, had taste, and a bearing that was the epitome of all perfection. She launched plays, perfumes, and gowns. Writers, hairdressers, fashion designers begged for her patronage. The most celebrated milliner in Austria requested her permission to call herself Violante’s personal modiste; the most illustrious prince in Europe requested her permission to call himself her lover. But she felt obliged to hold back these marks of esteem, which would have definitively consecrated their lofty standing in the fashionable world. Among the young men who asked to be received by Violante, Laurence stood out because of his persistence. After causing her so much grief, he now aroused her disgust. And his base conduct alienated her more than all his earlier scorn.
“I have no right to be indignant,” she thought to herself. “I didn’t love him for his spiritual grandeur and I sensed very keenly, without daring to admit it to myself, that he was vile. This didn’t prevent me from loving him; it only kept me from loving spiritual grandeur to the same degree. I believed that a person could be both vile and lovable. But once you stop loving somebody, you prefer people with a heart. What a strange passion I had for that nasty man: it was all in my head; I had no excuse, I wasn’t swept away by sensual feelings. Platonic love is so meaningless.”
A bit later, as we shall see, Violante was to regard sensual love as even more meaningless.
Augustin came for a visit and tried to lure her back to Styria.
“You’ve conquered a veritable kingdom,” he said. “Isn’t that enough for you? Why not become the old Violante again?”
“I’ve only just conquered it, Augustin,” she retorted. “Let me at least exercise my power for a few months.”
An event, unforeseen by Augustin, temporarily exempted Violante from thinking about retirement. After rejecting marriage proposals from twenty most serene highnesses, as many sovereign princes, and one genius, she married the Duke of Bohemia, who had immense charm and five million ducats. The announcement of Honoré’s return nearly broke up the marriage on the eve of the nuptials. But disfigured as he was by an illness, his attempts at familiarity were odious to Violante. She wept over the vanity of her desires, which had so ardently flown to the blossoming flesh that now had already withered forever.
The Duchess of Bohemia was as charming as Violante of Styria had been, and the duke’s immeasurable fortune served merely to provide a worthy frame for the artwork that she was. From an artwork she became a luxury article through that natural inclination of earthly things to slip lower if a noble effort does not maintain their center of gravity above them. Augustin was amazed at everything he heard from her.
“Why does the duchess,” he wrote her, “speak endlessly about things that Violante so thoroughly despised?”
“Because people who live in high society would not like me as much if I were preoccupied,” Violante answered, “with things that, being over their heads, are antipathetic to them and incomprehensible. But I’m so bored, my good Augustin.”
He came to see her and explained why she was bored:
“You no longer act on your taste in music, in reflection, in charity, in solitude, in rustic life. You’re absorbed in success, you’re held back by pleasure. But we can find happiness only in doing something we love with the deepest inclinations of the soul.”
“How can you know that?—you’ve never lived,” said Violante.
“I’ve thought, and thinking is living,” said Augustin. “I hope that you’ll soon be disgusted by this insipid life.”
Violante grew more and more bored; she was never cheerful now. Then, high society’s immorality, to which she had been indifferent, pounced on her, wounding her deeply, the way the harshness of the seasons beats down the bodies that illness renders incapable of struggling. One day, when she was strolling by herself along a nearly deserted avenue, a woman headed straight toward her after stepping down from a carriage that Violante had failed to notice.
The woman approached her and asked if she was Violante of Bohemia; she said that she had been her mother’s friend and that she desired to see little Violante, whom she had held in her lap.
The woman kissed her with intense emotion, put her arms around Violante’s waist, and kissed her so often that Violante dashed away without saying goodbye. The next evening, Violante attended a party in honor of the Princess of Miseno, whom she did not know. Violante recognized her: she was the abominable lady from yesterday. And a dowager, whom Violante had esteemed until now, asked her:
“Would you like me to introduce you to the Princess of Miseno?”
“No!” said Violante.
“Don’t be shy,” said the dowager. “I’m sure she’ll like you. She’s very fond of pretty women.”
From then on Violante had two mortal enemies, the Princess of Miseno and the dowager, both of whom depicted Violante everywhere as a monster of arrogance and perversity. Violante heard about it and wept for herself and for the wickedness of women. She had long since made up her mind about the wickedness of men. Soon she kept telling her husband every evening:
“The day after tomorrow we’re going back to my Styria and we will never leave it again.”
But then came a festivity that she might enjoy more than the others, a lovelier gown to show off. The profound need to imagine, to create, to live alone and through the mind, and also to sacrifice herself—those needs had lost too much strength, torturing her because they were not fulfilled, preventing her from finding even a particle of delight in high society; those needs
