Stefan Zweig - The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig

The festivities continued unabated for the whole month of August. September came, the trees wore colourful fruits in their hair, and the evening clouds were shot with gold. The guests were fewer now; time was pressing.

But amidst the pleasures, Madame de Prie had almost forgotten her purpose. Wishing to deceive others with such magnificent frenzies, she deceived herself; her carefree mood matched this imitation of her former life so well that she took it for real, and even believed in her power, her beauty, her joie de vivre.

To be sure, one thing was different, and that hurt. People were all kinder to her now that she was of no importance, they were warmer and yet cooler. The women no longer envied her, did not inflict malicious little pinpricks, the men did not flock around her. They all laughed with her, treated her as a good friend, but they told no more lies about love, they did not beg, they did not flatter, they did not make an enemy of her, and that was what made her feel that she was quite powerless. A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living. She realised, with horror, that in fact she had already been forgotten; the social whirl was as wild as ever, but she was not at its centre now. The men laughed with other women, whose freshness and youth they saw for the first time; the moment had come to remind the world of herself again before she grew old and a stranger to them all.

She put off her decision from day to day. A sensation quivered within her, half fear, half hope that something might yet hold her back, might keep her from that despairing leap into the irrevocable. Among all those pairs of hands reaching for the food on her tables, holding women close in the dance, rolling gold coins over the gaming tables, might there not be one who could hold her back, would want to hold her back, one who loved her so much that she could happily dispense with the bright show of a large company, and exchange the unstable possession of royal power for him? Without knowing it, she was looking for such a thing; she courted the passion of all the men, for she was courting her own life. But they all passed her by.

Then, one day, she met a young captain in the royal guard, a handsome, amusing fellow whom she had noticed before. They met as twilight fell over the park, and she saw him walking up and down among the trees, his eyes wild, his teeth clenched, and sometimes he struck the tree trunks with his fist. She spoke to him. He gave her a distracted answer; she saw that some secret was troubling him, and asked the reason for his desperation. At last he confessed that he had lost a hundred louis d’or at the gaming table, money entrusted to him by his regiment. That made him a thief, and now he must carry out sentence on himself. She felt it strangely ominous that here, amidst this happy tumult, someone else had come to the same dark conclusion too. But this man was young, had rosy cheeks, could laugh again; there was still help for him. She summoned him to her room and gave him five hundred louis d’or . Trembling with joy, he kissed her hands. She kept him there a long time, but that was all he wanted from her, he asked no more with any glance or gesture. She was shaken; she couldn’t even buy love now. That fortified her in her decision.

She sent him away, and stepped quickly out into the hall. Laughter met her as she opened the door, happy voices and lively people filled the room like a cloud. Suddenly she felt that she hated them all, cheerful as they were, dancing and laughing on her grave. Envy took hold of her when she thought that they would all live on, and be happy.

She was burning with a malicious desire to disturb her guests, alarm and confuse them, stop their laughter. And suddenly, when their exuberance died down for a second and silence fell, she said directly, “Don’t you notice that there’s a death in the house?”

For a moment confusion reigned. Even to a drunk, the word “death” is like a hammer falling on his heart. Baffled, they asked each other who was dead. “I am,” Madame de Prie said coldly, without any change of expression, “I shall not see this winter come.”

She spoke so gravely, in so sombre a tone, that they all looked at one another in silence. But only for a second. Then a jest flew from somewhere in the room like a coloured ball, someone else threw it back, and as if enlivened by the curious notion of death the wave of exuberance surged foaming and high again, and buried the discomfort of that initial surprise.

Madame de Prie remained very calm. She felt that there was no going back now. But it amused her to stage her prophecy even more dramatically. She went up to one of the round tables where her guests were playing faro, and waited for the next card to be turned over. It was a seven of one of the black suits, clubs or spades. “The seventh of October, then.” Without meaning to, she had said it out loud under her breath.

“What’s the seventh of October?” one of the onlookers asked casually.

She looked at him calmly. “The day of my death.”

They all laughed. The joke was passed on. Madame de Prie was delighted to find that no one believed her. If they didn’t trust her in life any more, then at least they should see how she and her comedy had fooled them in death. A wonderful sense of superiority, pleasure and ease ran through her limbs. She felt as if she must rejoice aloud in high spirits and derision.

In the next room music was playing. A dance had just begun. She joined the dancers, and had never danced better.

From that moment on, her life had meaning again. She knew she was preparing to do something that would certainly make her immortal. She imagined the King’s amazement, the horror of her guests when her prophecy of her death came true to the very day. And she was staging the comedy most carefully; she invited more and more guests, doubled her expenditure, worked on the multifarious magnificence of these last days as if it were a work of art, something that would make her sudden fall even more keenly felt. She aired the prediction of her death again at every opportunity, but always drew a glittering curtain of merriment over it; she wanted everyone to know that it had been announced, and no one to believe it. Only death would raise her name once again to the ranks of those who could never be forgotten, from which the King had cast her down.

Two days before she was to carry out her irrevocable purpose, she gave the last and most magnificent festivities of all. Since the Persian and other Islamic embassies had set up for the first time in Paris, all things Oriental had been the fashion in France: books were written in Eastern guise, the fairy tales and legends of the Orient were translated, Arab costume was popular, and people imitated the flowery style of Eastern language. At enormous expense, Madame de Prie had turned the whole château into an Oriental palace. Costly rugs lay on the floor, squawking parrots and white-feathered cockatoos rocked on their perches on the window bars, held there by silver chains; servants hurried soundlessly down the corridors in turbans and baggy silk trousers, taking Turkish sweetmeats and other refreshments entirely unknown at the time to the guests, who were dazzled by such daring splendour. Coloured tents were erected in the garden, boys cooled them by waving broad fans, music rang out from the dark shadows of the shrubberies, everything possible was done to make the evening an unforgettable fairy-tale experience, and the silvery half-moon hanging in the starry sky that night encouraged the imagination to conjure up the mysteriously sultry atmosphere of a night by the Bosphorus.

But the real surprise was a particularly spacious tent, containing a stage hung with red velvet curtains. Wishing to appear to her guests in the full radiance of her fame and beauty, Madame de Prie had decided to act a play herself; a final display of all the merriment and levity of her life to an audience was to be her last and finest deception. In the few days she still had left, she had commissioned a young author to write a play to her exact requirements. Time was short and his alexandrines bad, but that was not what mattered to her. The tragedy was set in the Orient, and she herself was to play the part of Zengane, a young queen whose realm is captured by enemies and who goes proudly to her death, although the magnanimous victor offers to share all his royal power with her if she will be his wife. She had insisted on these details: she wanted to give a dress rehearsal of her voluntary death in front of the unsuspecting audience before she put the plan into practice.