Occasional Prose (34 page)

The difference in birth between her and Manon is significant. It contributes to making her a girl of her time. She never says where she comes from or how she got where she is. All we know is that she is completely alone in the world, without parents or relations; she must have envied the fictional Manon her army-officer brother, even though he is a bad lot. She might have been a flower-seller, a theatre-usher, or a seamstress with a smart dressmaker when she attracted the notice of her first “protector.” Her good heart seems to testify to simple origins (though the equation is not always correct); most women of her kind at the time—like Chanel, later—came from poor farms and villages. Violetta reads; she is literate. This is a tribute to the conquests of the French Revolution, thanks to which primary and even secondary education became more than middle-class privileges. Despite her education, Violetta has retained a certain innocence, the mark perhaps of her origins, and even in her dissipations there is something high-minded, abstract, almost principled.

She is not, strictly speaking, a demi-mondaine; that implied somebody half in good society and half out of it. Violetta is not a well-nurtured girl who has made a misstep (had an illegitimate child, say) and thus
fallen
into vice; she is not déclassée (a term designating once upon a time a married woman no longer received socially and the title of a movie of my girlhood starring Corinne Griffith); nor is she exactly a demi-rep (an eighteenth-century term for a person of dubious reputation), though she may come closer to that. She differs from a Greek hetaera in that she is part of a social revolution in which those from below have been rising to the top. She is a ripple on the surface first unsettled by the French Revolution fifty or so years before; when we come to know her, it is around 1845, the apogee of her delicate ethereal type.

By the eighteen-forties, France has undergone the Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Bourbon restoration, the insurrectionary “July days” ending with the installation of the Orléanist branch of the Bourbon family in the form of the moderate, pear-shaped Louis Philippe. It can be said that under that relatively easygoing monarch the French Revolution finally “took,” like a vaccination: as with a vaccination, the body politic experienced a mild form of the dread disease of social leveling or equality—slight, feverish symptoms which, it was hoped, would insure against a recurrence of the real, virulent thing. By and large, that hope was not mistaken. Although Louis Philippe was overthrown in 1848, by the uprising that inspired the
Communist Manifesto
(“A specter is haunting Europe”), his reign nevertheless had been the heyday of mild, reformist progress. Once the ’48 revolution was bloodily put down, Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Bonaparte, calling himself the Emperor Napoleon III, inaugurated a permissive, coarsely acquisitive society well characterized by Emile Zola in novels picturing real-estate speculation, meat-packing, art, prostitution, alcoholism, coal mines, and the new department-store business.

If Zola was the inspired chronicler of the corrupt Second Empire with its vulgar, driving businessmen and their debased clothes-horses, the
poules de luxe
, it was Balzac and Victor Hugo who described the ebullient and still sometimes generous ruling class of newcomers and former aristocrats of Louis Philippe’s time. This is evident in the treatment of the kept-woman figures of Balzac, so often tender-hearted, but also in Victor Hugo’s touching picture of Fantine (
Les Misérables
), the orphaned grisette from “M. sur M.” who goes wrong with the leader of a gay band of Sorbonne students, themselves provincials, and thus becomes the mother of Cosette. Sweet unworldly Fantine, tubercular, eventually reduced to streetwalking, is wholly altruistic, sacrificing her beautiful hair and her very teeth for her child, and even Balzac’s courtesans, who know their way around, far from demanding a luxurious scale of living for
themselves
, are bent on maintaining their poor young lovers in style. Their ideal is to be kept by an old, indulgent (or preoccupied) man who visits once or twice a week and has the further privilege of escorting his cocotte to the theatre, where he will be seen by the
beau monde
with her charms on his arm: when her Pantalon returns her to the love-nest he pays for, she is able to serve a delectable after-theatre supper to the young genius she adores.

Some such ideal arrangement appears to be in the mind of Violetta Valéry in the early stages of the relation with
her
young man from the country, Alfredo Germont. She is a long way from the destitute Fantine, and yet there is an uncanny resemblance, even to the tuberculosis: “There but for the grace of God,” Violetta might well have murmured to herself, had she read Fantine’s history in one of the books she is fond of.

It is to a smallish intimate supper in her flat near the Opéra that Alfredo has been brought by a friend somewhat better born than himself—Gaston, the Viscount of Letorières. Alfredo has been yearning to meet the famous cocotte, at present kept by a Baron Douphol. He is shy and feels the honor of being taken to one of her occasions. The young blades are dressed in evening clothes, and the women, when they begin to appear in the arms of the gentlemen escorting them, have the air of society ladies in low-cut silks and velvets, flounces and ribbons—it is the age of the crinoline—carrying fans and with jewels in their hair. Only a certain freedom of manners will reveal them to be high-class tarts.

Violetta has been ill. When we first see her, that evening in her drawing-room, she is sitting on a sofa with her doctor—Grenvil—and some friends, as a party of other friends arrives late, having lingered playing cards at the house of a woman named Flora. Another fashionable demi-rep, we can surmise, watching her come in, preening, with the Marquis d’Obigny, a young man who is now keeping her. “We’ve all been at Flora’s,” they chorus, to excuse themselves. “Flora!” cries Violetta, rising to greet her and her train. The flower names of these women—before Violetta’s launching there had been a Camille, so called for her white and red camellias, and a Marguérite (Daisy)—give a whiff of the fashions of the period.

An immense table is laid for the supper to come, with cold fowl and game, pâtés of little birds, galantines, chaud-froids, lobsters, Russian salads, hams from York and Prague. Champagne is being served by liveried footmen; later there will be sherbets, pineapples, and Italian ices. It is an August night (hence no oysters). Other servants are bringing platters, richly decorated, and wine bottles in iced coolers of highly polished silver. Everyone drinks, even the doctor. To us, the gaiety—clinking of glasses, raised voices, familiarity of manners—may be slightly reminiscent of some “wild party” of the twenties or a Hollywood soirée of silent-film days, when the Mary Pickfords and Gloria Swansons were the style leaders (and often kept women) of an extravagant new class.

In Violetta’s suite of reception rooms, one opening into another, the atmosphere is unusually fevered and hectic, even for this milieu. This is a sign, surely, of her disease, like the doctor’s presence at her side, an omen, as in the big mirror over the dainty marble fireplace on the left of the principal room, furnished with sofas,
faces-à-faces
, love seats, footstools, small tables and tabourets, rosewood and buhl cabinets full of Sèvres and Meissen. This is a room designed for moments of intimacy and suggestive of a boudoir. The mirror is Violetta’s eternal, warning companion, like the mirror in the fairy-tale (“Mirror, mirror, on the wall”), a necessity of her profession—the kept woman must constantly know the truth about the fluctuating bank account constituted by her beauty. As the saying goes, her face is her fortune, or has been up to now, but it is also her misfortune.

Now, as her guests pour in from Flora’s (significant that they should be late, indicating that to them one kept woman’s house is the same as another’s), Violetta promises an evening of riotous pleasure, to the point where Flora and her new “protector” wonder aloud whether the hostess is allowed to stay up late drinking champagne with so much abandon. “I want it,” Violetta says with a little air of obstinacy, glancing at the doctor, who says nothing. “I have the habit. The life of pleasure agrees with me. It’s the best medicine I know.”

At that very moment, at the entry to the drawing-room someone appears who will be her fatal drug: Alfredo. He has hardly been presented to her, as a great admirer, when Flora’s marquis speaks to him, tapping him on the shoulder, and the two shake hands. He is a young fellow from the provinces, of middle-class background, and most of the others are titled playboys, but in this house equality reigns; he is greeted by his first name—“Alfredo!” “Marquis!” he replies. Meanwhile Violetta’s baron has showed his face among the latecomers who had stayed gambling at Flora’s. This seems to be Violetta’s signal to summon a servant: “Is everything ready?” At the servant’s nod, she calls the company to table as champagne still makes the rounds.

Violetta has put herself between Alfredo and his sponsor, the viscount, who tells her in an undertone about the new young man. Opposite are Flora, with her marquis on one side and Violetta’s baron—Douphol—on the other. This is the key group; the rest find places where they can. “He’s always thinking of you,” Gaston says softly to the hostess. “You’re not serious?” she answers, laughing. “When you were ill,” Gaston persists, “he came running to ask after you every day.” “Oh, stop it!” she decrees, but with a touch of archness. “I’m nothing to him.” When she tries to ward off flattery, she is half-serious, half a trained coquette. “I’m not fooling,” Gaston retorts, looking toward Alfredo, as if to draw him into the exchange. “Is it true, then?” No longer laughing, she turns to Alfredo. “But why? I don’t understand.” With her look fixed on him, he speaks to her, shyly, for the first time, to confirm what his friend is reporting. “Yes, it’s true.” He sighs. Sweetly and seriously, she thanks him for his concern. Then, across the table, to the baron: “But you, Baron, how is it you didn’t do likewise?” “I’ve known you only a year,” says the baron, harshly. “But this one has known me only a few minutes,” she points out.

Alfredo, with his seriousness and shyness, is getting on the baron’s nerves. He does not like the change the young provincial is effecting in Violetta. Flora notices this, and, sotto voce, out of the corner of her mouth, chides the baron for his manners.
She
finds Alfredo charming, she adds.

Meanwhile, across the table, Gaston is chiding Alfredo, who is
his
responsibility. “Aren’t you going to open your mouth?” he inquires. Flora’s protector, the marquis, knows Alfredo well enough to put the burden on the hostess. “It’s up to you, my lady,” he tells Violetta, “to wake the young fellow up.” “I’ll be Hebe, your cupbearer, and pour you a glass,” she announces to the still dumbstruck Alfredo. “And may you be immortal, like her,” he answers, gallantly; he is schoolboy enough for a classical allusion to have loosened his tongue. Then the others join their voices to the wish, raising their glasses. This inspires the viscount to try to jolly up the moody baron. Can’t he find some verses—a song—to suit the festive occasion? Without a word, the baron refuses. “All right, it’s up to you, then,” Gaston tells Alfredo. The others loudly second the suggestion. “A drinking song! Let’s have a drinking song!” He, too, declines. “I’m not in the proper mood.” “But aren’t you a master of the art?” teases his friend Gaston. “Would it please
you
if I sang?” Alfredo turns to Violetta, abruptly altering the tone. “Yes,” she tells him, simply. That is all he needs. “Yes? In that case I’ll sing. I have the song here in my heart.” He rises. “Everybody listen!” cries the marquis. “Attention for the singer,” they chorus, the baron excepted.

Alfredo, on his feet, sings in praise of wine—a fairly standard paean. As he goes on, however, more and more carried away, he is singing directly to her, and words and music take on, as it were, an undertone of deeper meaning. Through wine, it is love he is hymning—the hotter kisses that lie at the bottom of the cup. “Love ... love ... love”—the word repeats itself like an incantation, as though he were compelled. At one moment, intoxicated by the song, he has pointed straight to Violetta, and now, as his young voice ceases, she too rises to her feet as if compelled also, and sings her own paean. Not to wine nor to love but simply to pleasure. Anything but pleasure is folly. The flower of love is born and dies in a day. Take it, joy in it. Seize the alluring occasion, revel in every pleasure, laugh and make merry till dawn.

It is her creed she is pronouncing, of feverish enjoyment, without distinction between sensuous delight and sensual pleasure, a creed, at bottom, of forgetfulness. She has addressed herself to the whole like-minded company and, when she has finished, all but Alfredo join in. Then, in quite another voice, she speaks to Alfredo: “Life is jubilation.” Is it an apology for herself or an instruction to him? “Do you hear me, life is having fun,” she seems to be telling him, ignoring everyone else. And he replies in the same tone, as though they were alone in a room: “For those who haven’t yet loved.” This is a mild reprimand or gentle correction. Each of these young people—for all her amorous history, she is not yet twenty-three—is playing teacher. Surrounded by her guests, by a veritable chorus of inane worldlings, they are all by themselves in a schoolroom, as it were, each reciting a lesson, solo. “Don’t tell it to somebody who isn’t in the know.” (To somebody, she is admitting, who has never loved.) “It’s my destiny,” he says grandly, as if embracing the fate of loving. It is a kind of quarrel—their first falling-out, based on assertions and counter-assertions of principle. Then the mindless chorus breaks in, supporting her side of the argument (“Wine, jesting, and song, All the night long”), but without her desperate dependence on pleasure as oblivion.

At this appropriate moment a band strikes up in the next room. The guests show surprise. “Wouldn’t a dance be nice now?” inquires Violetta, who of course has planned it. There is a cry of general delight (“What a lovely thought!”), and Violetta, once more the hostess, leads the way to the center door. “Let’s go in, then.” She urges them ahead, to the ballroom. “Oh, my!” She has turned deathly white. “What’s the matter?” the choir of guests tunes up. “Nothing, nothing,” she replies. “What in the world
is
it?” other voices exclaim, some almost irritable. “Let’s go,” she repeats. “Oh, God!” She takes a step or two and is obliged to sit down. “Again!” they all cry out. “You’re in pain,” says Alfredo. “Heavens, what is it?” the others chime. “Just a trembling that comes over me.” She makes a gesture toward the inner room, where the band is still playing a waltz. “Please! Do go in! I’ll be with you soon.” “As you wish,” they tell her. And amazingly all of them, except the mute, motionless Alfredo, pass into the next room, drawn by the music like children by a Pied Piper of Hamelin. They leave the drawing-room (as Violetta thinks) empty. She goes up to the great mirror over the fireplace—her truth-teller. “Oh, how pale I am.” She looks at herself a long time; then a warning instinct makes her turn, and she becomes aware of Alfredo, behind her. “You here?”