“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 were no longer urgent enough to make her change her way of life, to force her to renounce society and realize her true destiny.
She continued to present the sumptuous and woebegone image of a life made for infinity but gradually reduced to almost nothing and left with only the melancholy shadows of the noble destiny that she could have achieved but from which she was retreating more and more each day.
A great surge of far-reaching philanthropy that could have scoured her heart like a tide, leveling all the human inequalities that obstruct an aristocratic heart, was stemmed by the thousand dams of selfishness, coquetry, and ambition. She liked kindness now purely as an elegant gesture. She was still charitable with her money, with even her time and trouble; but a whole part of her had been put aside and was no longer hers.
She still spent each morning in bed, reading or dreaming, but with a distorted mind that now halted on the surface of things and contemplated itself, not to go deeper but to admire itself voluptuously and coquettishly as in a mirror.
And if visitors were announced, she did not have the willpower to send them away in order to continue dreaming or reading. She had reached the point at which she could enjoy nature solely with perverted senses, and the enchantment of the seasons existed for her merely to perfume her fashionable status and provide its tonality.
The charms of winter became the pleasure of being cold, and the gaiety of hunting closed her heart to the sorrows of autumn. Sometimes, by walking alone in the forest, she tried to rediscover the natural source of true joy. But she wore dazzling gowns under the shadowy foliage. And the delight of being fashionable corrupted her joy of being alone and dreaming.
“Are we leaving tomorrow?” the duke asked.
“The day after,” Violante replied.
Then the duke stopped asking her. In response to Augustin’s laments, she wrote him: “I’ll go back when I’m a bit older.”
“Ah!” Augustin answered. “You’re deliberately giving them your youth; you will never return to your Styria.”
She never returned. While young, she remained in high society to reign over the kingdom of elegance, which she had conquered while still practically a child. Growing old, she remained there to defend her power. It was useless. She lost it.
And when she died, she was still in the midst of trying to reconquer it. Augustin had counted on disgust. But he had reckoned without a force that, while nourished at first by vanity, overcomes disgust, contempt, even boredom: it is habit.
The end
