Occasional Prose (35 page)

He timidly approaches her. “Has your indisposition passed off?” “I’m better,” she says curtly. The reserve of her tone tells him that she is trying to put him off, and almost angrily he bursts out. “This way of life will kill you.” He moves a little closer so that he can study her still pallid face. “You must take care of your health.” “And how am I to do that?” she teases, opposing her experienced lightness to his youthful solemnity. He ignores the levity, and his answer is like a vow. “If you were mine, I’d take
such
care of you. I’d be the faithful guardian of every one of your precious days.”

Violetta is startled. “What are you saying? Am I in someone’s charge, perhaps?” “No,” he replies promptly, flaring up as though a fire in him had suddenly been fanned. “That is because no one in all this world loves you.” “No one?” she rallies him. “No one but me.” “Is that so?” she gives a trill of laughter, deciding to be amused by him. “Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that grand passion of yours.” He is hurt. “You laugh. Is there a heart in your bosom?” “A heart? Well, yes, maybe. And what do you want with it?” He shakes his head sorrowfully. “Ah, if you had one, you couldn’t jest.”

Up to this point, the dialogue between them in the deserted room has been earnest preaching on his side and on hers a light, practiced fencing, a quasi-professional scoring of points. In other words, she has been firmly treating the interlude as a flirtation, disturbed only by the gravity of his insistent reference to her health, more appropriate to a doctor than to a suitor. But gradually something somber in his tone or the burning expression of his eyes catches her deeper attention, and for the first time she responds with a seriousness matching his.

“Do you mean it?” “I’m not deceiving you,” he answers, with the same knightly earnestness. “Is it a long time that you’ve loved me?” she wonders, curiously, having never felt the sentiment herself. That question is all Alfredo needs. He knows the answer by heart. It is why he is here this evening, having persuaded his friend Gaston to bring him. In the next room the band music stops as if to listen to his declaration. And he begins by taking her question literally; his is a literal nature. “Oh, yes, for a year,” he tells her; the true son of a burgher, he counts. But then a simple poetry that is also in his character starts to tug at the earthbound prose in him; he goes up as if in a bright balloon, recalling the first day he saw her—ethereal, a bolt from the blue. Since that day he has loved her, in secret, with a tremulous love throbbing in him like the heartbeat of the entire universe—a mysterious sovereign love, so very mysterious, a torment and a delight.

The rapture of this extravagant declaration takes Violetta aback; she recoils from the fiery furnace of the young man’s ardor. If what he says is true, she tells him, he had better leave her alone. Friendship is all she can offer him. He must understand her position. “I don’t know how to love. I can’t sustain such heroic emotions. I am telling you frankly, in all candor, you must look for another kind of woman. It won’t be hard for you to find her, and then you’ll forget me.” He is paying no attention, continuing to talk raptly of a mysterious, sovereign power, when the band in the next room strikes up more loudly and at the same moment his friend the viscount appears in the doorway as though blown in by a gust of sound. “What’s going on here?” “Nothing,” Violetta tells him quickly. “We’re talking nonsense.” “Ah ha!” the viscount exclaims, seeing how the land lies and starting to beat a retreat. “Fine! Stay there!” And he hurriedly withdraws.

But the mood has been dispelled by the intrusion of the world. Violetta once more has the ascendancy over her intemperate suitor. He must make a pact with her, she enjoins him: no more talk of love. He agrees and promptly turns to go. But she detains him. Somewhat surprised or even hurt, she draws a flower from the bosom of her dress. “Take it.” “Why?” “Why, to bring it back to me,” she says with a little laugh. This catches him midway in his departure and makes him whirl about. “When?” “When it has faded,” she replies, on a note of self-evidence. She is amused with him again: evidently there is a language of flowers unfamiliar to the inexperienced youth. We are reminded of the story of Camille, another kept woman, and her red and white camellias. But Alfredo, though ignorant of that history, has finally understood. “Good heavens! You mean tomorrow?” “Well, then, tomorrow,” she tells him, indulgently, though that is sooner, apparently, than she meant.

“I am happy,” he declares, taking the flower in a transport of bliss. She smiles on him tenderly. “Do you still say you love me?” If she asks, she must want him to repeat it, contrary to the “pact” she has just imposed. “Oh, how much!” he declares, bringing his hand to his heart. Once again, he starts to go. “You’re leaving?” she exclaims, wistful all at once. “I’m leaving.” During this lingering exchange, it is as if Violetta has grown childish, and he has become a man. “Good-bye,” “Good-bye,” they tell each other softly. For a last time he returns and kisses her hand.

No sooner have they separated than the band of others bursts in, ready to take their leave and totally forgetful, it emerges, of their hostess’s indisposition only an hour or so before. Not a single inquiry from her seeming “best friends,” the very ones who were wondering at the outset whether champagne and a late night might not do her harm. Inside, the musicians have stopped, but the parting guests, volleying out their thanks and their dreadful
joie de vivre
, are making enough noise for a whole military band. “Time to go home,” “The dawn is breaking,” “Thank you, thank you, dear lady, for a marvelous time,” “It’s the height of the season, everyone’s giving parties, so we must get rested up.”

This burst of cheerful, unfeeling chatter makes a peculiar contrast with the pitch of intense feeling that Violetta and Alfredo have mounted to when left to themselves. In this very contrast there are premonitions of tragedy. Two beings of extreme sensitivity seem unprotected, like a pair of orphans in an unfeeling world—despite Violetta’s sumptuous style of entertainment, they are both babes in the woods. “Life is a tragedy for those who feel”—Violetta, long ago, has learned that lesson and taken measures to ensure herself against love, the most powerful feeling of all. Alfredo, on his side, is less prescient; he finds nothing but joy and ecstasy in his capacity to feel.

What we have just witnessed is a scene of temptation with the sexes reversed: Alfredo, our innocent Adam, is urging a reluctant and fearful Eve to taste with him the delights of something more than mere carnal knowledge—a love-apple that for a girl in her position is poison. It is already evident that she has consumption, that is, something inside her, within her frail chest, that is burning her up. This consumption is allied to the passion that will inevitably devour her, a wasting disease beside which mere dissipation—wine and late hours—is harmless child’s play.

Now the beautiful kept woman is alone in her salon. Alfredo has gone off in high spirits and great expectations, not much more sensible than the departing revelers to the struggle she is left to carry on, for self-protection, with herself. The baron has departed and apparently will not return tonight. She thinks aloud. It is strange, strange, she meditates, that those words of his have carved a design in her heart. Would a serious love be a misfortune for her? She cannot answer, never having known one, and there is no one to give her counsel, not even Flora, certainly not the doctor. She can only ask her own confused, ignorant soul. The sensation of being loved while loving (mutual love) is foreign to her experience. But ought she to disdain it for the arid follies of her present life? She paces the room, thinking more and more deeply on the matter.

She asks herself whether Alfredo is not, finally, “the man of her dreams.” Didn’t he appear to her, as a lonely girl, to paint her soul’s prison in vivid, arcane colors? And didn’t he in fact, just recently, stand modest guard outside her sickroom and kindle a new fever in her bosom, awakening her to love? She is seeking a supranatural explanation for the novel feeling in her, pretending that she had known him, dreamed him, in an anterior life or that his presence, at the door of her sick chamber, when he came to inquire every day, had been felt by her in the midst of her fever as an “aura” or emanation of love. Sunk in these mystical thoughts, as if in a trance, she is soon like a creature possessed, by this young man or by a kindred spirit speaking his language of mysterious sovereign powers, balms and crosses, torments and delights.

Then she shakes herself out of her reverie. “Follies,” she scolds, getting herself in hand. “Madness, vain delirium.” Having cast out the love demon, she sighs. “Poor woman, alone, abandoned, in this populous desert they call Paris, what more have I got to hope for? What must I do? Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy ... Die on the summits of pleasure.” She seems to hear a voice—Alfredo’s—in a serenade below the balcony of her open window. Still those heartbeats, crosses, and delights. Her own private music has quite another theme. “Free, forever free, flitting from joy to joy. Let me live for pleasure only. Down the primrose path I fly.” This mundane hymn to liberty is raised to a higher plane by the frenzy in it; a fever of commitment redeems the triteness of the pledge this poor young woman, gesturing with a champagne glass, is taking to the principle of enjoyment.

PART TWO

Five months have passed. It is January. Nothing has turned out as a realist might have expected. Violetta has not persisted in her giddy life of pleasure. Instead, she is living in the country near Paris, and with Alfredo. Where is it? Perhaps Auteuil. These kept women, even when they reform, cannot leave Paris far behind. It was the same with Manon Lescaut, before the Revolution. When she and her Chevalier des Grieux decided to play house in the country, living the simple life and saving taxi fares, they removed to Chaillot. (Today both Auteuil with its racetrack and Chaillot have become indistinguishable parts of Paris, but Chaillot got swallowed up earlier.) Violetta has taken a pleasant country house. French doors give on a garden from the ground-floor living-room. There is an abundance of chairs and little tables, as well as a writing-desk and a few books—“serious” items that had not been visible in her Parisian dwelling. Another symptom of change is the absence of flunkeys; here one little girl, Annina (Annie), in cap and apron, seems to be doing most of the work. At the back of the room, once again there is a fireplace, rustic this time (built of stone), with a mirror hanging over it and under the mirror a clock of the Empire period.

Alfredo comes into the empty room; when he was last seen, he was in evening clothes, and now he is in hunting dress with a gun on his shoulder, which he lays down. The hunting season must be nearing an end. It is three months since Violetta left Paris—lovers, parties, cards, furniture—to devote herself to creating an idyll for him. And it has worked. His boiling youthful spirits, under her serene management, have been tempered to a quiet happiness. He has changed. Ever since the day she told him “I want to live for you alone,” he has been living in a kind of heaven.

Now Annina comes in, dressed in traveling gear. She has been to Paris. Alfredo is surprised. “Who sent you?” Clearly, such trips are unusual. “My mistress,” the girl replies. “Why?” he persists, and Annina tells him: it was to sell the horses and carriages and whatever else Violetta still had. He is thunderstruck, unable to believe his ears. “It costs a lot to live alone out here,” Annina informs him. “And you said nothing?” “I was forbidden to.” “Forbidden?” he repeats, still staggered by what she is revealing. “So how much do we need?” “A thousand,” she replies. He has no visible reaction to the sum of money named—is it a still worse shock? But he at once tells the little servant to make herself scarce.
He
will go to Paris himself. “And you’re not to tell your lady about this conversation. With what I have, I can still repair the damage. Go, what are you waiting for?”

When the little servant goes out, he apostrophizes himself in horror. How can he have been so unnoticing? Infamous! Shameful! To live in such delusion! At last the truth has shattered that rotten dream. There’s still time, though, if offended honor will only be patient, to wash away the shame.

With that thought, he rushes out, bound for Paris. A moment later, Violetta returns, her own transaction accomplished. She comes in slowly, in traveling dress, talking to Annie, her little maid, at the door. In her gloved hand she holds papers—bills of sale, receipts, and so on. Seeing no one in the room, she calls his name. “Alfredo!” There is no answer. Then Annina steps forward, to say that he has left for Paris only a few minutes before. A presentiment seems to grip Violetta. “Is he coming back?” The maid fails to hear the trouble in her mistress’s voice. “Before sundown,” she says. “He asked me to give you the message.” But Violetta is not wholly reassured. “Strange!” she muses aloud. While she stands wondering, Joseph, the old manservant, appears. He has a letter in his hand. “It’s for you.” As a servant, he is no more stylish than Annina. “Good,” says Violetta, opening the letter with a paper knife from the writing-desk. “A man of business will be here to see me soon. Have him come in at once.” The servants withdraw.

Now Violetta opens the letter, which proves to be in fact from Flora, who has found out her hiding-place and wants her to come to a dancing-party in Paris that evening. Violetta tosses the letter onto a table and sinks into a chair. She is tired from her journey and all the business she has done. “Well, well! She’ll have a long wait for me.” Of course she won’t go. She yawns. Joseph again appears in the doorway. “There’s a gentleman here.” “It must be the one I’m expecting,” Violetta decides and she motions to the servant to show the caller in.

A handsome old man, stiff as a ruler, enters the room. “Mademoiselle Valéry?” “I am she,” Violetta replies curtly, as though sensing a need to assert every bit of her dignity. He makes no move to come near her. “You see before you Alfredo’s father,” he announces in a deep, austere voice. In her surprise, Violetta utters a cry. “You?” She gestures to him to sit down in a chair opposite her; she had not risen at his entry. “Precisely,” replies the elder Germont, taking the seat. “Of the reckless young man you’ve bewitched and sent rushing to his ruin.” Having formally stated this, he leans forward and looks her keenly in the eyes. Violetta, incensed at this language, rises to her feet. “I am a woman, sir, and in her own house. Please allow me to leave you, as much for your sake as for mine.” She starts to go out. “What style!” the offended father mutters. He decides to curb his tongue. “However ...” he continues, in a milder tone. “You have been misled,” she tells him but returns to her chair in time to hear him say: “He wants to make you a present of every sou he owns.” “Up to now he hasn’t dared,” retorts Violetta. “I’d refuse.” Germont glances around the sitting-room. “But all this luxury,” he comments.