Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

The journey to Normandy was long and tedious, but her first day in Courbépine restored her cheerfulness. Her restless, fanciful mind, always lusting after novelty, discovered an unaccustomed charm in giving itself up to the crystalline purity of a summer’s day in the country. She lost herself in a thousand follies, amused herself by walking down the avenues of the park, jumping hedges and trying to catch fluttering butterflies, clad in a dress white as blossom with pale ribbons in her hair, like the little girl she had once been and whom she had thought long dead in her. She walked and walked, and for the first time in years felt the pleasure of letting her limbs relax in the rhythm of her pace, just as she delightedly rediscovered everything about the simple life that she had forgotten in her days at court. She lay in the emerald grass and looked up at the clouds. How strange it was: she hadn’t looked at a cloud for years, and she wondered whether clouds were as beautifully outlined, as fluffily white, as pure and airy above the buildings of Paris. For the first time she saw the sky as something real, and its blue vault, sprinkled with white, reminded her of the wonderful Chinese vase that a German prince had recently given her as a present, except that the sky was even lovelier, bluer, more rounded, and full of mild, fragrant air that felt as soft as silk. After hurrying from one entertainment to the next in Paris, she delighted in doing nothing, and the silence around her was as delicious as a cool drink. She now realised, for the first time, that she felt nothing for all the people who had flocked around her at Versailles, she neither loved nor hated any of them, she felt no more for them than for the peasants standing there on the outskirts of the wood with their large, flashing scythes, sometimes shading their eyes with a hand to peer curiously at her. She became more and more exuberant; she played with the young trees, jumped in the air until she could catch the hanging branches, let them spring up again, and laughed out loud when a few white blossoms, as if struck by an arrow, fell into the hand she held out to catch them or the hair she was wearing loose for the first time in years. With the wonderful facility of forgetfulness available to women of no great depth throughout their lives, she did not remember that she was in exile and before that had ruled France, playing with the fate of others as casually as she played now with butterflies and glimmering trees. She cast aside five, ten, fifteen years of her life and was Mademoiselle Pleuneuf again, daughter of the Geneva banker, playing in the convent garden, a small, thin, high-spirited girl of fifteen who knew nothing of Paris and the wide world.

In the afternoon she helped the maids with the harvest: she thought it uncommonly amusing to bind up the big sheaves and fling them exuberantly up to the farm cart. And she sat among them—they had been awestruck at first and behaved shyly—on top of the fully loaded wagon, dangling her legs, laughing with the young fellows and then, when the dancing began, whirling around with the best. It all felt to her like a successful masquerade at court, and she looked forward to telling everyone in Paris how charmingly she had spent her time, dancing with wild flowers in her hair and drinking from the same pitcher as the peasants. She noticed the reality of these things as little as she had felt, at Versailles, that the games of shepherds and shepherdesses were only pretence. Her heart was lost to the pleasure of the moment, it lied in telling the truth and was honest even while it intended to deceive, for she only ever knew what she felt. And what she felt now was delight and rapture running through her veins. The idea that she was out of favour was laughable.

But next morning a dark vestige of ill humour seeped in, mingling with the crystalline merriment of her hours. Waking itself was painful; she tumbled from the black night of dreamless sleep into day as if from warm, sultry air into icy water. She didn’t know what had woken her. It was not the light, for a dull, rainy day was dawning outside the tear-stained windows. And it was not the noise either, for there were no voices here, only the fixed, piercing eyes of the dead looking down at her from their pictures on the wall. She was awake and didn’t know why or what for; nothing appealed to her here or tempted her.

And she thought how different waking up in Paris had been. She had danced and talked all evening, had spent half the night with her friends, and then came the wonderful sleep of exhaustion, with bright images still flickering on in her excited mind. And in the morning, with her eyes closed and as if still in a dream, she heard muted voices in the anterooms, and no sooner did her levée begin than they came streaming in: the royal dukes of France, petitioners, lovers, friends, all vying for her favour and bringing the suitor’s gift of solicitous cheerfulness. Everyone had a story to tell, laughed, chattered, all the latest news and gossip came to her bedside, and her moment of waking carried her straight from those bright dreams into the full tide of life. The smile she had worn on her sleeping lips did not vanish but remained at the corners of her mouth, hovering there in high spirits like a bird swinging in its cage.

The day led her on from these images of her friends to those friends themselves, and they stayed with her as she dressed, as she drove out, as she ate, until far into the night again. She felt herself constantly carried on by this murmuring torrent, restless as the waves, dancing in never-ending rhythm and rocking the flowery boat of her life.

Here, however, the torrent cast her moment of awakening upon a rock, where it lay stranded on the beach of the hours, immobile and useless. Nothing tempted her to get up. Yesterday’s innocent amusements had lost their charm; her curiosity, used to being indulged, was of the kind that quickly wore off. Her room was empty, as if airless, and she felt empty too in this solitude where no one asked for her: empty, useless, washed out and drained; she had to remind herself slowly why and how she had come to be here. What did she expect of the day that made her stare so hard at the clock, as it paced indefatigably through the silence with its gentle, tremulous gait?

At last she remembered. She had asked the Prince of Alincourt, the only one of her former lovers for whom she felt any real affection, to send her news from court daily by a mounted messenger. All yesterday she had forgotten what a sensation her disappearance must have been in Paris; now she longed to enjoy that triumph. And the messenger soon arrived, but not the message. Alincourt wrote her a few indifferent banalities, news of the King’s health, visits from foreign princes, and let the letter peter out in friendly wishes for her well-being. Not a word about herself and her disappearance. She was angry. Hadn’t the news been made public? Or had no one really believed her pretence that she was coming to this tedious place for the sake of her health?

The messenger, a simple, bull-necked groom, shrugged his shoulders. He knew nothing. She concealed her annoyance and wrote back to Alincourt—without showing her displeasure—to thank him for his news and urge him to continue writing to her, telling her everything, all the details. She hoped not to stay in the country long, she said, although she liked it here very well. She didn’t even notice that she was lying to him.

But then the rest of the day was so long. The hours here, like the people themselves, seemed to go at a more sedate pace, and she knew no means of making them pass any faster. She didn’t know what to do with herself: everything in her was mute, all the brilliant music of her heart dead as a musical clock when the key has been lost. She tried all kinds of things, she sent for books, but even the wittiest of them seemed to her mere printed pages. Disquiet came over her, she missed all the people among whom she had lived for years. She sent the servants hither and thither to no good purpose with imperious commands: she wanted to hear footsteps on the stairs, to see people, to create an illusion of the busy hum of messages, to deceive herself, but like all her plans at present, it didn’t work. Eating disgusted her, like the room and the sky and her servants: all she wanted now was night and deep, black, dreamless sleep until morning, when a more satisfactory message would arrive.