The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (8 page)

“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.

Fabrizio’s Mistresses

Fabrizio’s mistress was intelligent and beautiful; he could not get over it. “She
shouldn’t understand herself!” he groaned. “Her beauty is spoiled by her intelligence.
Could I still be smitten with the Mona Lisa whenever I looked at her if I also had
to hear a discourse by even a remarkable critic?”

He left her and took another mistress, who was beautiful and mindless. But her inexorable
want of tact constantly prevented him from enjoying her charm. Moreover she aspired
to intelligence, read a great deal, became a bluestocking, and was as intellectual
as his first mistress, but with less ease and with ridiculous clumsiness. He asked
her to keep silent; but even when she held her tongue, her beauty cruelly reflected
her stupidity. Finally he met a woman who revealed her intelligence purely in a more
subtle grace, who was content with just living and never dissipated the enchanting
mystery of her nature in
overly specific conversations. She was gentle, like graceful and agile animals with
deep eyes, and she disturbed you like the morning’s vague and agonizing memory of
your dreams. But she did not bother to do for him what his other two mistresses had
done: she did not love him.

Countess Myrto’s Female Friends

Of all her friends, Myrto, witty, kind-hearted, and attractive, but with a taste for
high society, prefers Parthénis, who is a duchess and more regal than Myrto; yet Myrto
enjoys herself with Lalagé, who is exactly as fashionable as she herself; nor is Myrto
indifferent to the charms of Cléanthis, who is obscure and does not aspire to a dazzling
rank. But the person Myrto cannot endure is Doris: her social position is slightly
below Myrto’s, and she seeks Myrto out, as Myrto does Parthénis, for being more fashionable.

We point out these preferences and this antipathy because not only does Duchess Parthénis
have an advantage over Myrto, but she can love Myrto purely for herself; Lalagé can
love her for herself, and in any case, being colleagues and on the same level, they
need each other; finally, in cherishing Cléanthis, Myrto proudly feels that she herself
is capable of being unselfish, of having a sincere preference, of understanding and
loving, and that she is fashionable enough to overlook fashionableness if necessary.

Doris, on the other hand, merely acts on her snobbish desires, which she is unable
to fulfill; she visits Myrto like a pug approaching a mastiff that keeps track of
its bones: Doris hopes thereby to have a go at Myrto’s duchesses and, if possible,
shanghai one of them; disagreeable, like Myrto, because of the irksome disproportion
between her actual rank and the one she strives for, she ultimately offers Myrto the
image of her vice. To her chagrin, Myrto recognizes her friendship with Parthénis
in Doris’s attentiveness to her, Myrto.

Lalagé and even Cléanthis remind Myrto of her ambitious dreams, and Parthénis at least
has begun to make them come true: Doris talks to Myrto only about her paltriness.
Thus, being too irritated to play the amusing role of patroness, Myrto feels in regard
to Doris the emotions that she, Myrto, would inspire precisely in Parthénis if Parthénis
were not above snobbery: Myrto hates Doris.

Heldémone, Adelgise, Ercole

After witnessing a slightly indelicate scene, Ercole is reluctant to describe it to
Duchess Adelgise, but has no such qualms with Heldémone the courtesan.