The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (7 page)

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

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 inner romance) and real things, there were truly avenues of communication,
along which she would hurry toward the impossible, making it viable by creating it.

The next day she received Honoré’s response, which she read, trembling, on the bench
where he had kissed her.

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.