THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, WORKING with the publisher Little, Brown, had the idea of inviting writers to tell in their own words the stories of some “beloved” operas. The rules laid down were simply that the narratives should be about seventy typed pages long and should contain no allusion to the music.
The result was an expanded program in hard covers, to be sold in the opera-house lobby as well as in bookstores and containing the libretto, analyses of the score, photos and drawings of former performances, in addition to the writer’s narratives.
The first to appear was Anthony Burgess’s Der Rosenkavalier; then came V. S. Pritchett’s La Bohème; then me. I was always glad not to have picked one with a plot like La Forza del Destino.
The “woman gone astray” of our story is a classic product of her century and of a single country, France—you would not find her in Madrid or London. She is as much a Parisian distillate as perfume is of Grasse. But she is also a universal, an archetype of the misunderstood woman of easy virtue—the Magdalen, Moll Flanders, Dostoyevsky’s Sonia, Tolstoy’s Maslova, Sartre’s “Respectful Prostitute.” The type perhaps goes back to the temple prostitutes of ancient religions—opposites and counterparts of vestal virgins tending the sacred flame. Is it in the temple of love that Violetta Valéry, a highly successful cocotte and our special fallen woman, is serving as a votary or somewhere else? The story will show.
In our own century, this Violetta, so alluring to aristocrats, might have been a Coco Chanel, kept by the Duke of Westminster, or the Mlle. Modiste of an opera by Victor Herbert (whence the song “Kiss Me Again”). Or a famous model—there is a continuing relation to fashion. But actually she belongs, historically and in spirit, to the reign (1830–1848) of Louis Philippe, the so-called citizen king. The kept woman, of course, was not invented during those years; the mistresses of French kings over several centuries had been acting as “role models” for young women of luxurious tastes and accommodating habits, and they did not even have to be beautiful to catch the royal eye—look at the portraits. Nor was it necessary to be vicious—think of Madame de Maintenon.
The kept woman, or high-class courtesan (the same as “court lady,” originally), was well known to readers of romances long before Violetta’s time. Indeed a key book that may well have guided her footsteps was Manon Lescaut (1731) by the Abbé Prévost, about a well-born youth, the Chevalier des Grieux, ruined by the bewitching girl of fatally acquisitive propensities he undertakes to keep. Much later, this story became an opera, in fact, two, but Violetta can have known only the novel. She identified herself, very likely, with Manon (higher up than she, to start with, on the social scale), though this would have been a guilty identification; her sympathies, since she is a young woman of heart, must have gone to the Chevalier des Grieux.
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?”
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.
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.
Violetta has followed his glance. “This is a secret from everyone. Let it not be one from you.” Without a further word she hands the unbending old man the papers she has brought back from Paris—papers that speak for themselves. He runs a hurried eye through them. “Good God! What a revelation! You think of stripping yourself of all your possessions—everything you have?” Then an explanation occurs to him. “Ah, because of your past. Why let it accuse you?” He is moved to pity. “That past no longer exists,” she announces proudly. “Now I love Alfredo. And God has annulled the past because of my repentance.” Germont is more and more struck. “These are noble feelings,” he observes. Here is not the kind of wanton he had expected to deal with.
With her acute sensibility, Violetta is immediately aware of the change in his feeling toward her. She leans forward impulsively. “How sweet your words sound to me.” Germont ignores this winning speech, intent on his main purpose. “Such feelings demand sacrifices. I am asking one of you.” He has stood up. She leaps up herself, affrighted, trembling like a hunted deer. “Ah, no. Be quiet. You’d ask for terrible things. Yes, I foresaw it. I expected you. I was too happy.” The old man squares his shoulders and stiffens his bony spine, making himself look even taller. “Alfredo’s father demands it in the name of two destinies—the future of his two children.” “Two children?” She is startled. Seeing her surprise, Germont takes a deep, preparatory breath. Now he can speak to her of the little sister, the daughter God gave him, pure as an angel.
Pure as an angel. But if her truant brother refuses to return to the bosom of the family, then her fiancé—the youth she loves and who loves her in return—will have to back off from his commitment, which had been the joy of both. On the theme of that pure maiden, Germont waxes eloquent. He soars to a pitch of feeling. As he pleads his suit (or the suit of his daughter), the old burgher in his virtuous plain attire curiously recalls the figure of his son in evening dress in the salon of Violetta’s apartment holding forth on ethereal rapture, mysterious, sovereign love, and so on. Like father, like son. Violetta listens, transfixed. We are witnessing a seduction scene—nothing less than that.
And, like so many women mesmerized by a seducer, Violetta does not understand at first what Alfredo’s father wants of her. “You’re not going to turn the roses of love into thorns,” he has been pleading, carried away on a fresh rhetorical flight. “You won’t withstand my prayers. Your heart will not refuse.” “Oh, I understand,” she cries, brightening, her next words a clear indication that she does not. “For a little while I shall have to live apart from Alfredo. That will be hard. However ...” “That’s not what I’m asking,” he says bluntly.
“Good heavens, what more can you want? I’m offering a great deal.” “Not enough, though.” “You want me to give him up for good?” “It’s necessary.” His terse, staccato replies reveal a different, wholly determined man. They come like short pitiless stabs at her tender, quivering heart. At last she understands what this Nemesis wants of her. As comprehension pierces her, she screams. “Never! No, never!” she shrills, like somebody on the rack. Then she gets hold of herself, her voice drops to a soft pleading tone that begs him pitifully for mercy.
Germont cannot know the love she has burning in her heart. That among the living she has neither friends nor relations. That Alfredo has sworn to her that he will be all of them for her—parents, brother, friends. Nor does her torturer know that she has been stricken by a dread disease, that the end of her days is already in plain sight. And yet he is asking her to give Alfredo up. To such heartless torture, she decidedly prefers death.
Again his attitude changes, to one of respectful sympathy. The resolution of her last few words has showed another side to her, which he must treat with a new deference. The sacrifice will be heavy, he acknowledges. “But still—listen to me calmly—you’re beautiful and young. With time—” “Don’t go on,” she interrupts, as though to spare him useless effort. “I understand you. But for me it’s impossible. I can love only him.” “Granted,” he tells her. “And yet men are inconstant, you know.” To this terrible hint, Violetta reacts with a start, as though the idea that Alfredo could be faithless were coming to her for the first time. “Good God!” she cries out. The paterfamilias, confident that he has touched a vulnerable spot, presses on with his insinuations. A day may come, he prophesies, when the pleasures of Venus pall and boredom is quick to follow. ... What will happen then? “Think!” he bids her. “For you the sweeter affections can never serve as balm, since unions like yours cannot be blessed by heaven.” Violetta drops her eyes, again touched to the quick. The fact that Alfredo cannot marry her, which she has accepted with an easy heart, takes on its full, bleak significance in the father’s relentless optic: they can never have children, a real home, family life, an assured place in society; when love-making loses its first charm, they will find nothing to occupy them, no binding agent to hold them together. “It’s true!” she whispers, excruciated; again the torment he skillfully produces in her is like a physical pain.
“Well, then, abandon that seductive dream.” Germont is close to attaining his object; he has only to drive home his points. Vigor and manly confidence now visibly exude from him, like an athlete’s sweat. He has shown her enough of the bad and threatening aspects of the future; it is time to point to the rewards in store if she behaves. “Be my family’s consoling angel. Violetta”—for the first time he pronounces her name—“think, do think. There’s time still, don’t you see? Young woman, believe me, God is speaking through a father’s voice.” It is a privilege he is offering her if she will only understand. Through the sacred character of the family tie (which she has never known, apparently), she will be drawn into the embrace of the Padre Eterno, stern but forgiving, like his human simulacrum. Germont, as if bathed himself in holy light, is showing the fallen woman the path to salvation.
But the prevailing erotic undertone, the caressing voice, deeper and more virile than the son’s mere tenor, start to make one wonder. Isn’t this grave old party the devil? To one more versed in the Gospels than Violetta, this is the familiar temptation in the wilderness, with a perverse Victorian twist. The family is the god to which she and all her sisterhood are required to sacrifice. Indeed, without Violetta and her sisters to “take care of” the coarse lusts of the male, the family as temple of purity could not be enshrined.
Meanwhile, Violetta, writhing on the cross prepared for her, is sadly aware, at last, of her fate. She has been deluded—now she knows it—to suppose that she can rise from ashes and create a new life. There’s no hope for a fallen woman. Even if God in His indulgence can forgive her, man will be implacable.
Bitterly weeping, she turns to the parent-extortioner to tell him to tell his daughter, that fair, pure daughter, how a poor wretch, victim of misfortune, had a single ray of happiness and sacrificed it to her. Having done so, the wretch will die. The extraordinary thing is that Violetta, as though to bear out the father’s well-worn arguments, is transfigured while speaking by her good (as she thinks) action. Although she weeps bitter tears, her feeling for the fortunate, sheltered maiden has no trace of animus or sarcasm; if there is envy, it is a kind of holy envy, suffused with tender piety. And now Germont, perhaps sincerely, is able to offer consolation to his suffering victim. “Weep, weep,” he tells her, “weep, poor woman.” Her tears are good for her—a therapy; she must let them flow. And, now that it is over and she has given way, he is able to see—and admit—that it is a supreme sacrifice he is asking of her. In his own breast already he feels the pain of it. “Courage!” he concludes, on a brisker note. “Your noble heart will conquer.”
A silence intervenes, as at the conclusion of a rite: ite, missa est. Then, like a soldier or a hired assassin, she asks him to give her his orders. “Tell him you don’t love him.” “He won’t believe me.” “Leave.” “He’ll follow.” “Then ...” Germont is at a loss; he has no experience in these matters. In his stead, Violetta decides what she must do. But first, like a young knight, she needs his blessing. “Embrace me like a daughter,” she instructs the old man. “That will make me strong.” He puts his arms around her, and for a moment they stand clasped. Then the newly armored woman, the “daughter,” speaks. “He’ll be delivered to you shortly, but he’ll be in a pitiable state.” She points to the garden. “Please wait for him there and comfort him.” She goes to the writing-desk. “What’s in your mind?” he asks, uneasily. She shakes her head. “If you knew, you’d try to stop me.”
Germont is more and more impressed and surprised by her. “Generous woman! And what can I do for you?” Violetta has the answer ready for him—another surprise. Advancing from beside the desk, she takes a few steps in his direction. She has been thinking ahead. “I’ll die! When it happens, don’t let him curse my memory. If you do feel something for me, at least tell him what I’ve suffered.” “No, generous spirit, live. You must be happy. Heaven will reward you one day for these tears.” In a new way they are still at cross-purposes. Her realism and urgency are met by uplifting speeches of a deeply conventional sort. Alfredo’s father prefers not to know the truth, which Violetta, for her part, has accepted—almost, in a strange fashion, embraced.
She replies calmly. When she is dead, Alfredo should know of the sacrifice she has made for love of him. He should know that her heart has been his up to her last breath. Germont’s answer to this is, of course, the predictable set of clichés. “Your heart’s sacrifice will find its reward. You will be proud then of such a noble deed.” Violetta is no longer listening. She has heard a sound perhaps from the garden. “Someone’s coming! Go!” “Oh, my heart is so grateful,” he says, turning to leave. “Go!” she repeats and adds, on reflection: “This may be the last time we’ll see each other.” Very simply, she turns to him, and they embrace. Each then enjoins the other to be happy—impossible in both cases—and they bid each other farewell. He goes out by a garden window, and she is alone.
“God, give me strength.” She sits down at the desk, writes something, then rings the bell. Annina appears. “You wanted me?” “Yes. Deliver this yourself.” Annina glances at the folded sheet of paper and is surprised by the name of the addressee. She gives a little shriek. “Quiet,” her mistress tells her. “Be off.” The girl goes out. Violetta ponders. Now she must write to Alfredo. But what will she tell him? And where will she get the courage? She writes and seals the letter.
Alfredo enters, in city clothes. “What are you doing?” he immediately wants to know. “Nothing,” she tells him, hiding the letter. “You were writing!” he exclaims. “Yes, no, no,” she answers in confusion. “Why so perturbed? Whom were you writing to?” She faces him. “To you.” “Give me that sheet of paper.” “No, not now.” He is embarrassed by his own brusqueness. “Forgive me. I’m a little upset.” She rises. “What has happened?” “My father has arrived.” “You’ve seen him?” “No. He left me a stiff letter. But I’m waiting for him. He’ll fall in love with you as soon as he sees you.”
She becomes extremely agitated. “He mustn’t find me here. Let me leave. ... You calm him, and then I’ll throw myself at his feet.” She can barely hold back her tears. “He won’t want to separate us anymore. We’ll be happy. Because you love me. You do, don’t you, Alfredo?” “Oh, so much! But you’re crying?” “I just felt the need of tears. But now I’m over it. See? I’m smiling at you.” She makes an effort. “I’ll be there, among those flowers, always near you, always, always near you. Alfredo, love me as much as I love you. Love me, Alfredo. ... Good-bye.” She runs out into the garden.
Strangely enough, Alfredo seems quite undisturbed by this precipitate departure. “That dear heart lives only for my love,” he observes, somewhat fatuously. As we have already seen, he is not a noticing young man. He sits down and opens a book (can it be Manon Lescaut?) and glances at the clock on the chimney-piece. “It’s late. Maybe I shan’t see my father today.” The old servant, Joseph, comes in. “Madame has left. A carriage was waiting for her and by now it’s speeding along the road to Paris. And Annina left even sooner than she did.” “I know it,” Alfredo tells him. “Calm down.” Joseph mutters to himself. “What does it all mean?” After the servant has left the room, Alfredo puts down his book and ponders. Violetta, he decides, has gone off to speed up the disposal of her property. But Annina will prevent it. Through the French windows the father’s tall black-clad figure can be seen crossing the garden. “Somebody’s in the garden!” Alfredo exclaims. “Hello, who’s there?”
A gold-braided messenger appears in a side doorway. “Monsieur Germont?” “I am he,” answers Alfredo. The messenger is out of breath. “A lady in a carriage, not far from here, gave me this for you.” He hands a letter to Alfredo, pockets a tip, and leaves. Alfredo studies the letter. “From Violetta! Why am I disturbed? Maybe she’s asking me to join her. Why, I’m trembling. Oh, Lord, courage!” He unfolds the letter and begins to read. “‘Alfredo, when you get this letter—’ Ah!” Turning, with a wild cry, he finds himself face to face with his father, who stands silently waiting as Alfredo falls into his arms. “Oh, Father!” “Oh, my son! Oh, how you’re suffering!” He is shocked by the young man’s racking sobs, evidently an unfamiliar spectacle for him. To the original surge of pity, parental impatience is a natural sequel. “Oh, dry those tears. Come back to us. Be once more the pride and boast of your father.”
The invitation to dry his tears and come home does appear somewhat ill-timed. It’s as if Germont were blind to the awful grief he is witnessing, with the wilful blindness of old age. While the young man sits unhearing, the old man decides to rally him by singing the praises of their native Provence. The father, like so many Southerners, is a patriot—not to say a booster—of the local air and light. Provence, he seems to be saying, can cure whatever ails anyone.
He invokes the blue sea, the soil, the glittering sun of Alfredo’s forefathers. Who could expunge them from the heart of a true-born Provençal? If only Alfredo in his sorrow would remember the joy he once knew under those sparkling skies, the peace that once again can shed its effulgence on a native son! In the course of this reverie laced with exhortation, he has convinced himself that all Alfredo’s troubles came from leaving home. And he has treated himself to a bath of sentiment on his own account, the pitiful old sire of a distant son, his white head bowed with shame. He has suffered more than Alfredo can ever know. But if he has found his boy again, if his own power of hope does not falter, if the voice of honor has not been entirely silenced in the errant youth, then God has heard him!
Alfredo, seemingly, has not. Old Germont gives him a shake. “Don’t you have any response to a father’s affection?” Alfredo shakes himself out of his absorption. “I’m devoured by a thousand furies. Leave me alone.” He pushes the old man away. “Leave you here alone?” Alfredo ignores him, speaking to himself with determination. “Revenge!” Germont has no perception of his son’s mood or the direction of his thoughts. Characteristically for this story, they are talking at cross-purposes (like Germont with Violetta), each intent on his privately nurtured design. The father supposes that the son is ready to leave with him for the curative blue skies of Provence. “Enough delay. We’re leaving. Hurry up.” Alfredo remains fixed to his chair, brooding to himself. “It was Douphol,” he decides, his fevered brain fixing on his former rival, Violetta’s protector of five months before. Germont grows peremptory. “Do you hear me?” he demands. “No!” shouts Alfredo, who at length understands what is being asked of him.
“So it’s useless to have found you again, is it, Alfredo?” But from his son’s taut face, Germont realizes that he is wrong to antagonize him. “No, Alfredo, you’ll hear no reproaches from me. We’ll bury the past together. Love has brought me here to find you and love knows how to forgive. Come! Let’s surprise your dear ones with the sight of us together. You can’t refuse that joy to those you’ve pained so much. A father and a sister, even now, are hastening to console you.” Alfredo is taking no interest. Again he shakes himself, as if to focus his attention. His eye lights on Flora’s letter on the table beside him. He reads it. “Ah!” he cries, enlightened. “So she’s at the party. I’ll fly to avenge the insult.” He rushes out, headlong, with his father on his heels. “What are you saying? Stop!” The doors to the garden bang. The love-nest is empty; all the birds have flown.
It is quite another décor that meets our eyes, still that same night. We are at Flora’s. A long, richly decorated room is brilliantly lit by crystal chandeliers and bronze candelabra. There is a small refreshment table laid with snowy linen and flowers in silver epergnes. In the middle of the room is a gambling table, holding cards, a roulette wheel, dice. Flora is escorting her first guests into the salon. We recognize the habitués of Violetta’s former circle: the doctor, the marquis, and so on. There will be a masquerade this evening, Flora promises; the viscount has got it up. And she has asked Violetta and Alfredo too. Her lover, the marquis, smiles. Hasn’t she heard the news? Violetta and Alfredo have separated. Flora and the doctor can hardly believe it. But the marquis is very sure. She will come tonight with the baron; the company will see. The doctor shakes his head, still incredulous. He saw them only the day before, and they seemed so happy.
Just then a distraction occurs: the masquerade. Flora calls for silence, and a band of ladies enters disguised as gypsies. Some are picked out by the guests as members of the familiar select circle. Thus when the “gypsies” begin the game of pretending to tell fortunes, they are able to make use of their intimate knowledge of the private lives of the company—e.g., that Flora’s marquis is a rake who gives her countless rivals—without causing too much surprise. Following on the artificial storm raised by this intelligence—common knowledge to all, Flora included—new maskers come in: the viscount and his friends disguised as matadors. They put on a frankly amateurish show, reciting parts and singing a Spanish-style chorus of love and bullfighting. But this somewhat perfunctory “theatre” soon gives way to business, as masks are removed and everybody either makes for the gambling table or prepares to stroll about, idly flirting.
At this moment Alfredo, having waited perhaps for a lull, chooses to present himself. “You?” they all exclaim, not concealing their astonishment. “Why, yes. It’s me, friends.” He is alone, manifestly, yet Flora feels that she must ask about Violetta—where is she? Alfredo shrugs. He has no idea. And this casual disclaimer wins him a flurry of applause. They admire his parade of detachment, which leaves them free to pursue their own concerns—the gambling they have promised themselves. He joins the group around the table. His friend Gaston—the viscount—cuts the cards; Alfredo and the other young blades put down stakes. As they do so, Violetta appears, in a low-necked dress, on the arm of the baron—the prediction was right. Flora, as the hostess, hurries up to welcome her. “How delightful that you were able to come.” “I could only yield to your very kind invitation.” Flora turns to the baron. “So pleased that you, too, were able to accept.”
The baron’s look lingers on the group at the gaming table. “Germont’s here,” he murmurs to Violetta. “See him?” “Oh, God, it’s true,” she whispers to herself. Then, to the baron: “Yes, I see him.” “Not a word from you tonight to this Alfredo,” the baron warns her in a fierce, sibilant undertone. He is older than the other men and has a deep, disagreeable voice. “Reckless girl, what made you come here?” a frightened Violetta demands of herself. “Oh, Lord, have pity on me!” Then Flora sweeps her off. “Come, sit next to me. Tell me everything. What’s this sudden change I see?” Violetta has no choice but to sit down by her on a sofa; the doctor, as always, hovers near the two women. The marquis, tactful, draws the baron to one side and holds him in conversation.
At the table, the viscount cuts the cards; Alfredo and the other players put down stakes. Some guests are strolling up and down the long room, as though it were their private boulevard, holding the promise of some exciting diversion—a new coupling, a quarrel. Alfredo’s light voice can be heard announcing that he has a four. He has won again, marvels his friend Gaston. “Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” Alfredo says dryly. He bets and wins. The onlookers are pressing around the table, making a dense hedge so that Alfredo’s play cannot be seen. “He’s always the winner,” they report. “Oh, I’ll win this evening all right,” Alfredo declares headily. “I’ll take my winnings to the country and be a happy man.” “Alone?” The sharp, pertinent question comes from Flora, on the sofa. “No, no,” the young man answers, turning to stare at the two women. “With the one who was with me there once and then fled my company.”
Eyebrows go up around the room; fans are agitated. “My God,” whispers Violetta, stricken to the quick. The viscount nudges Alfredo, pointing to poor Violetta. “Have pity on her,” he says. Meanwhile, the baron, detaching himself abruptly from the marquis, pushes up to Alfredo with barely contained fury. “Monsieur!” he says in an insulting tone. But Violetta, rising with determination, interposes in a low voice. “Restrain yourself or I’ll leave you.” “Were you addressing me, baron?” Alfredo coolly inquires. The baron answers on a note of irony. “You’re so very, very lucky that you tempt me to play with you.” “Really?” replies Alfredo. “I accept the challenge.”
Violetta drops her eyes, unable to bear what she fears is coming. “Oh, dear God, have pity on me. I feel I’m about to die.” “A hundred louis!” The baron puts down his stake. “I’ll match you!” says Alfredo. They play. Gaston deals cards to Alfredo. “An ace ... a jack ... You’ve won!” “Double it?” says the baron. “Very well, two hundred.” Gaston cuts the cards. He deals. “A four ... a seven.” “He’s done it again!” the crowd exclaims. “I’ve won,” says Alfredo. “Bravo!” they chime. “Really and truly bravo! Luck’s on Alfredo’s side.” “The baron will foot the bill for that ‘month in the country.’ That’s clear,” observes Flora, provocatively. Alfredo lets this pass. He turns to the baron. “Your play.”
But now supper is served. A lackey comes in to announce it. “Come along, then!” commands Flora. Obediently, her guests start filing out into the next room. Alfredo is close to the baron as they leave the gaming table. “If you wish to continue ...” he suggests, in a low tone. “For the moment we can’t,” replies the baron, his voice low too. “Later I’ll have my revenge.” “At any game you like,” answers Alfredo. “Let’s follow our friends,” says the baron. “Later.” “At your service, then,” Alfredo agrees. The two follow the other guests out through a big set of doors at the back of the apartment. The room stands empty, strewn with discarded masks that the servants have not yet picked up. After a longish interval, Violetta bursts in, breathless.
She has asked Alfredo to follow her and is not sure that he will obey. And even if he comes, will he listen to her? She is afraid that hatred may prove to be stronger than her pleading voice. Alfredo enters. He has obeyed her summons. “You wanted me?” He bows stiffly. “What is it you wish?” Knowing better but unnerved by his manner, she plunges straight to the point. “Leave this place!” She is still breathless. “A danger is hanging over you.” Alfredo gives a cynical smile. He has understood, he believes. So she thinks him as vile a creature as that. He is no coward—this much he can show her. That was never in her mind, Violetta protests. “Then what is it you fear?” “I’m in deadly fear of the baron,” she confides. Alfredo’s answer is chilly. “True,” he agrees, “there’s bad blood between us that’s bound to be fatal to one or the other.” If the baron falls by his hand, obviously she’ll lose both her lover and her protector at a single blow. Can that be the disaster that terrifies her?
Violetta ignores his sarcasm and replies from the heart. “But if he should be the slayer? That’s the sole misfortune that I fear like death.” “My death!” he says contemptuously. “Why should that trouble you?” At that she flares up, impatient with his foolishness. He must depart this place at once. To her surprise and relief, he agrees. But then he turns equivocal; he bargains. He will leave but on one condition: that she will swear to follow him wherever he goes. “Ah, no!” she cries out. “Never!” The force of that stuns him. “No, never?” he shouts back. She is angry now herself, an effect of desperation. “Go, unhappy wretch! Forget a name that’s infamous to you. Go, leave me at once. I’ve given my sacred oath to put you out of my life.”
In her anger and fear for him (she truly does quake before the baron), she is giving the show away. Hearing herself, she catches her breath: another word of that and she will have gone too far to retract. And of course there is something soft and tender in her that is aching to tell him the truth. “Whom did you swear such an oath to? Tell me. Who could ask it of you?” She first tries an evasive answer, which will be true enough and yet misleading. “Someone who had every right.” But the hint does not make him curious. “It was Douphol,” he states. In other words, the baron. He has put the lie into her mouth for her. “Yes,” she faintly assents, with a supreme effort of her will. But the weakness in her voice only suggests to the young man that she is ashamed of the admission. “You love him, then?” he demands. This lie comes easier. “Well, yes ... I love him.” For her, the crisis is over. She falls limply back on the sofa.
But for Alfredo it is far from over. He runs furiously to the big central doors and yells into the dining-room: “Everybody come here!” In confusion the guests enter from the supper tables; some of the men still have napkins tucked into their evening waistcoats. Behind the guests stand the servants, full of curiosity. “You called us? What do you want?” guests demand. In their bosoms there is evidently a conflict between anticipation of a scandal and desire to finish an exquisite meal in peace. Alfredo draws himself up. He points to Violetta. “You know this woman?” There is something almost biblical in the tableau; he must sense himself as an accusing prophet. She flinches and supports herself by leaning on a table. “Who? Violetta?” They all know her, of course. “But you don’t know what she did?” She can half-guess what is coming and tries to stop him. “Be still,” she begs, closing her eyes. But the others want to hear. He goes on to recount to the company how this woman they see before them squandered her whole property on him while he, blind, vile, abject, was able to let her do it right down to her last possession. The company listens in silence to this public confession.
“But there’s still time!” he begins again, his convulsed voice rising to a shout. “Time to clear my honor of the infamous stain. I call everyone in this room to witness that I have paid her off—here!” With furious contempt he throws a purse at Violetta’s feet. Coins tumble out onto the carpet as she falls fainting into the arms of Flora and the doctor.
In his frenzy Alfredo has not noticed the entry of his father, who has been in time to witness the gesture and hear the last scornful words. The severe, soberly dressed Germont cuts a path between the worldlings as they give voice to their shock and horror. They do not doubt that he has committed an infamous act. He has put himself beyond the pale. Not only has he struck a death blow at a sensitive heart but he has dishonored womanhood. This is the sacrilege for which he will be banished from society. No door will open to him again.
His father is in absolute accord. “No man insults a woman without dishonoring himself,” he decrees in deep, measured tones, constituting himself the spokesman of the social establishment and the natural judge of his son. The fact that this is not a “respectable” gathering and that the insulted and injured party is a professional woman of pleasure is not felt by anyone as ironical but on the contrary seems to deepen the crime. “Where is my Alfredo?” Germont continues inflexibly, running his eyes over the criminal. “In you I don’t find him anymore.” In other words, through his action, the beloved son has vanished as a member of the human race.
In a curiously parallel reaction, as he comes to his senses, Alfredo before our eyes is driven to ostracize himself. He, too, feels horror at his abominable deed and no longer knows the person who was capable of it; “mania” is the only word he can find to characterize the force that propelled him. And, naturally, he believes that he has put himself beyond forgiveness, at least Violetta’s, which is suddenly all he cares about.
Simultaneously with his torments of repentance, Violetta is recovering consciousness. As she comes out of her swoon, she is conscious only of Alfredo, addressing herself to him or, rather, to the memory of him in feeble, passionate accents. The real young man, sunk in hopeless remorse, she apparently does not take notice of. Or else he is hidden from her by the throng of sympathizers that press forward to surround her the moment she sits up.
As she is conscious only of an ideal Alfredo existing as a central fixture in her unhappy mind, so her only concern is that he should comprehend how much she has loved him and loves him now. He does not know the lengths she has gone to to prove it, earning his contempt. But one day he will; he will learn of her sacrifice, and she prays God to save him then from bitter remorse.
“Even in death I shall continue to love you.” It is another Violetta who weakly sits up in her chair—a pale prophecy of her dying self but already seeing visions and talking, as it were, to a ghost. He does not hear her, and she does not see him, or only indistinctly, like a reflection in the mirror of her thoughts. This is the ultimate case of cross-purposes in this ill-fated story, of a dialogue of the deaf.
Meanwhile Violetta’s well-wishers crowding around her chair give the baron the chance he has been waiting for—to address Alfredo unheard by anyone and promise him the duel he asked for by his atrocious insult to a woman. From his point of view, Alfredo, besides being a rival, is an upstart—a little bourgeois from the Midi thrusting his way in—and he intends, with his weapon, to humble his “pride.” Pride, though Douphol is too insensitive to guess it, is the last attribute that the wretched Alfredo, banished from his own society by his conscience, is in a position to sport.
At the same time old Germont is fighting a temptation, which is to tell what he knows. He is aware of being the only one in this whole milieu to be able to gauge the full measure of this kept woman’s virtue, fidelity, nobility of spirit. But he must be cruel and keep silent. That, he tells himself, is where his duty lies.
In fact, were he to speak out now, the story would be over. Leading a quiet life in the country with her lover by her side, Violetta might even recover her health. Who knows, they might finally brave the conventions and marry. That could lead to children—Violetta is still under twenty-three—and children could serve to reconcile the family to an accomplished fact. But such a solution is not dreamed of, just as it has entered nobody’s mind that the fiancé of that pure and spotless sister might marry the girl anyway, whatever her brother’s truancy, if only he loved her as devotedly as the father claimed. No one among these people concerns himself with what one might call practical morality, involving concession and compromise. The ruling principle is sacrifice. For Germont, a skilled missionary of renunciation, it is a lofty program to be carried out by the kept woman mainly and to a lesser degree by Alfredo, who, however, can be expected to suffer less because of serene family influences and the “cure” of Provence. It may actually be that old Germont now sees himself as sacrificing pleasure to duty: it would be pleasant to speak up on Violetta’s behalf since she has stirred grateful emotions in him and he is not insensitive to her beauty and charm. But, as head of the family, acting in its best interest, he must reject temptation and bow to duty’s command.
Without a word to the deeply injured Violetta, he takes stern leave of the pleasure-den, pulling Alfredo along with him and followed at a discreet distance by the baron, stalking his prey. The remaining guests do their best to comfort Violetta, assuring her that they share her sufferings, that she is among friends, that she must dry her tears now. From this noisy, though well-meaning, consolation, she is rescued by the doctor and by Flora, who lead her into another room, where she can at least be quiet.
Hardly a month has passed. It is February now, carnival-time, and Violetta’s disease has made its classic “galloping” progress. It is another, poorer, part of Paris. Her circumstances seem to be reduced; there are no signs of luxury. She is in bed with the bed-curtains half drawn; at the single window, closed inside shutters prevent the entry of light. In the fireplace a fire is burning. On the table by the bed are a decanter of water, a glass, bottles of medicine, a thermometer—all the accoutrements of the serious invalid. Across the room there are a dressing-table and a sofa, indicating that she is still able to get up occasionally. A night-light burns on another table. The closed shutters and dim illumination produce a disorienting effect, as though the sickroom were adrift in space. There is no way of knowing where we are or what time it is. In this room there is no clock. Behind the half-drawn curtains Violetta is asleep on the big bed, and in front of the fireplace, in a chair, there is another sleeping figure, apparently a maid—the same one, Annie.
It is the same girl. Violetta, waking up, calls her name to ask for some water. The sleepy girl pours her a glass from the carafe. Then Violetta wants to know whether it is morning yet. Nearly seven o’clock, Annina thinks. Violetta orders her to let in some light. Annina opens the shutters and looks out into the street. “Dr. Grenvil!” she exclaims. “What a true friend,” Violetta murmurs, touched by his calling so early to see after her. She wants to get up to receive him and tells Annina to help her. As soon as she has put her feet down and tries to stand, she falls back on the bed. But then, supported by the maid, she manages to walk slowly toward the sofa. The doctor is in time to give her an arm to lean on.
Again, she is touched by his goodness and tells him so, revealing how alone in life she must be. He takes her pulse. “How are you feeling?” Her body is in pain, she replies honestly, but her soul is at peace. Last night she had a visit from a priest, who brought her some comfort. Religion is a solace for those who suffer—she confides that discovery with an innocent soft smile. Clearly she has never heard before of the consolations of religion. “And how did the night go?” She thinks back. “I slept well.” “Take heart, then. Convalescence can’t be far off.” She gives a half-teasing shake of her head, then lets it fall back wearily on a cushion. “You doctors have the right, don’t you, to tell us kindly lies.” He presses her thin hand. “Good-bye, till later.” “Don’t forget me,” she begs, sitting up as if in a flurry of alarm.
As Annina is showing him out, she asks him softly how Violetta is. Only a few hours left, he whispers. “That’s the way it is with consumptives.” Hiding her own disquiet, the girl makes an effort to cheer the patient. “So then, take heart!” Violetta, not deceived, changes the subject. “Isn’t today a holiday?” Carnival, Annina tells her (i.e., Mardi Gras); Paris is going wild. This moves Violetta to reflection: amid the general merrymaking, God alone knows how many unfortunates are suffering. It is lonely to be sick or poor on a holiday. She points to a little money chest. “How much have we got left?” Annina unlocks it and counts out some gold coins. “Twenty louis.” “Go give ten to the poor.” “But that won’t leave you much,” protests Annina. “Enough to last me,” Violetta answers calmly. It is hard to guess whether this sudden profligate gesture springs from the generosity we already know in her character or whether she is using a reliable magic formula to conciliate fortune—women of her profession are superstitious.
“Afterwards, fetch my letters.” She dispatches the girl, who seems hesitant to execute the charitable commission. “But what about you?” wonders Annina, turning back at the door. “I won’t need anything. But hurry, if you can.” As soon as the door has closed, Violetta takes a letter from the bosom of her nightgown, carefully unfolds it, and reads it softly aloud. It is almost a recitation, so well does she know the contents. “‘You kept your promise. The duel took place. The baron was wounded. He’s recovering, however. Alfredo is in foreign lands. I myself have revealed your sacrifice to him. He’s coming back to you to beg your forgiveness. I shall come, too—take care of yourself—you deserve a happier future. Giorgio Germont.’”
“Too late!” she moans in a dead lusterless voice, letting the letter fall. She gets up. “I wait and wait and they never come.” She struggles to the mirror on the dressing-table. “Oh, how changed I am. Yet the doctor tells me to hope. Ah, with this sickness every hope is dead!” She hovers before the mirror, peering at images of the past she seems to see reflected—roses in her cheeks, now cruelly faded, Alfredo’s love. ... She misses it even now, on the edge of the grave. What a comfort, what a support it would have been for her weary soul. ... She cannot tear herself away from the mirror. Memories mingle with tears; laments finally yield to prayers for redemption. But the sudden vision of her earthly tomb, coldly intervening, is too much for her: no flowers, no mourners, no cross with her name on it to cover her bones. ... Will God not consent to smile on the last desire of “the woman gone astray” and welcome her to Himself?
She sinks down hopeless on the sofa while outside the window a wild pagan song is heard. The populace is acclaiming the Fatted Ox, king and lord of the Carnival, who is being drawn in procession down below in the street with garlands of flowers and vine-leaves around his neck to the shrilling of pipes and drums. The piercing sound coming in the window is a hymn of worship to the ribboned victim. At a thousand altars across the city of Paris, the guild of aproned butchers awaits his coming with sharpened sacrificial knives. Violetta is not attending. The analogy with herself as sacrificial victim would not be present to her.
The procession moves off, and Annina hurries into the room. There is something hesitant in her manner. “Madam ...” “What’s happened?” “Is it true, madam, that you’re feeling better today?” “Yes, but why?” “You promise to be calm?” Violetta can hardly fail to guess that some important news is about to be broken to her. “Yes, yes. What is it you want to tell me?” “I wanted to prepare you for an unexpected joy—a surprise.” “A joy, did you say?” “Yes, dear madam.” Violetta lets out a cry. “Alfredo! You’ve seen him!” The girl nods. “He’s coming! Oh, make him hurry!” And, despite her weakness, she is able to rise and post herself in the doorway. “Alfredo?” In a minute, he is there, still in traveling clothes, and they fall into each other’s arms, exclaiming and marveling, both talking at the same time in a veritable Babel of happiness.
His first distinguishable words are a confession of guilt. He has learned the truth and blames himself for everything. But she will not have that. No explanations or accounting. All she knows or wants to know is that he has come back to her. He takes her hand and presses it to his heart. Its beating will teach her whether or not he loves her. He knows that he will not be able to exist without her any more. She smiles slightly at this, touched by the characteristic hyperbole. She has made a discovery, she tells him: grief cannot kill. If it could, he would never have found her still alive this morning.
But he has missed the seriousness behind her frail little jest, not observing in his excitement how fearfully changed she is. She must forget grief now, he tells her, and pardon him and his father. “But no, I ask your pardon,” she answers with great sweetness. “I am the guilty one. But only love could have made me do what I did.” She is referring to her resumption of the relation with the baron—a risky subject, one would think. But Alfredo receives it very calmly, which looks like a sign that he has matured.
Together they bury the Douphol interlude. Neither man nor devil, they agree, will ever come between them again. The emphasis they bring to this joint declaration sends a light shiver down the spine. By naming the devil, will they make him appear in their path? And when they speak of him, the Prince of Darkness, what or whom do they mean? It cannot be a mere roué like the Baron Douphol whose advances they must pledge themselves to resist. Douphol is no real danger. Rather, it must be Alfredo’s own father—the formidable missionary of middle-class morality, Giorgio Germont. Are these young people alert enough, now that it is too late, to recognize the Father of Lies, smell the whiff of brimstone?
In any case, Alfredo has the remedy for their troubles, which is to leave Paris. Violetta is of the same mind. And this time it will not be to Auteuil they will go, virtually at the city’s gates, but to the genuine country. Far from the great world’s lures, he will be able to look after her in peace and she to regain her health. Our pity goes out to their ignorance, for we have heard what the doctor said. And in the midst of the plans they are sketching for a smiling future in the classical rus (reminiscent of Germont’s apostrophe to the purifying sun and sea of Provence), Violetta herself has a frisson of foreboding. She halts her joyful lover in the middle of his farewell to Paris. Her voice is unsteady. “No more, please ... Alfredo ... Let’s go to church and give thanks for your return.” Moving toward the clothes-cupboard with the intention of dressing for church, she hesitates, sways on her feet. He stares at her, taken aback, observing her, really, for the first time since they left each other a month ago. “You’re getting pale!”
She tries to reassure him. “It’s nothing. You know. I can never stand a sudden access of joy.” But even as she offers this half-plausible explanation, she lets herself fall, exhausted, onto a seat. He is terrified. He holds her up and looks into her face with horror. “Good God, Violetta!” “It’s my illness. A sinking spell. Now I’m better. See? I’m smiling.” That smile, a product of her will, appalls him more than her feebleness. Under his breath, devastated, he laments this last cruel turn of destiny. “It’s nothing,” she repeats tenderly, still forcing her mechanical smile. “Annina, give me something to put on.” “Now?” He is incredulous. “Oh, please, wait.” She is determined. “No, I want to go out.”
Annina, who understands her mistress, is standing by with a flounced dress. Violetta starts to put it on and then, hindered by her feebleness from getting her arm through a long tight sleeve, throws it on the floor. “Oh, God! I can’t do it!” Once more, she falls back onto the seat. Alfredo, still hardly able to believe his eyes, orders Annina to go for the doctor. The mention of that faithful friend somewhat revives Violetta. She sits up straighter. “Tell him,” she directs, “that Alfredo has come back to my arms. Tell him that I want to live.”
The maid hastens out and, alone with Alfredo, Violetta seems to have regained a little more of her strength. Raising her head, she looks straight at him and utters the truth. “But if you, coming back, can’t save me, nobody on earth can.” She reflects. “Oh, God, to die so young when I’ve suffered such a lot already. To die when I’m so close to drying my tears at last.” This is said not in a tone of self-commiseration but soberly, with a clear-sighted awareness of the irony of her “narrow escape” from happiness. “But it was a delusion,” she goes on, “that credulous hope of mine. It was a waste of effort to fortify my heart to be true. Alfredo, what a rough ending they’ve reserved for our love.”
He does not want to hear this. His torn soul is in no mood for stock-taking. She’s his breath and his very heartbeat, he cries out, his dear delight. Her tears call forth his—he cannot tell which are which. But more than ever—she must believe it—he needs her steadfast spirit. For his sake, she must not close her mind to hope. He begs it of her. “Oh, calm yourself, my own, my dear Violetta. Your grief is killing me.” What he cannot admit, of course, is that she is calm, facing her own extinction. It is he who is agitated. And what he is really begging her is to spare him her death, in other words, not to die.
At that moment, without preparation, when his son’s demoralized state has reached a point close to total abjection, Germont enters the sickroom. He is a breath not of fresh air but of authority, and his concern is not with love but with dignity. Standing in the doorway, he speaks Violetta’s name, loudly, like a summons. “Ah, Violetta!” Behind him appear Annina and the doctor. “You, sir!” she cries happily, struggling to sit up and arrange her laces and ribbons. “Father!” puts in Alfredo, surprised. He has not been aware of the special relation that has grown up between these two. Wholly intent on each other, Violetta and Germont seem for the moment to forget him. She is oblivious, too, of the doctor, who is taking her pulse. “So you didn’t forget me?” she marvels. The father draws himself up. “I am here to keep the promise I gave you. To take you to my heart as a daughter.” His stiff form bends down toward her; his deep voice darkens with emotion. “Oh, generous girl.” In deference to his father’s feeling, Alfredo steps aside. “Alas, you’ve come too late.” The flat words escape her before she can stop herself. “Still, I’m grateful. ...” She would not wish to take away from his pride in the keeping of the promise. With his assistance, she pulls herself upright and embraces him. As they stand clasped in each other’s arms, she catches sight of the doctor. “Do you see this, Grenvil? In the arms of all my dear ones, I’m drawing my last breath.”
Startled, Germont releases her, so that he can study her better. Her tone just now with her medical attendant has been gay, almost teasing, but the father does not like what he sees in her over-bright eyes. “What are you saying?” he exclaims. Then he examines her wasted form. “Great Heaven, it’s true!” he mutters to himself.
He bows his head, shaken, remembering how he had doubted her when she had spoken during their last meeting of her failing health. He had taken it for a lie she had invented to put him off. Obviously he had not known this woman at all, despite the god-like part he had played in her unhappy destiny. Or was the part he played diabolical? The thought occurs to him for the first time. Unfortunately she has to die to prove what she really is—a dying woman—and absolve herself of the last of his suspicions. “Do you see her, Father?” the son says vehemently. Germont bows to the stinging reproach. He will have a great deal to forgive himself, if he is able.
“Don’t torture me, I beg you. No more, please! I’m devoured with remorse already. Every word of hers goes through me like a bolt of lightning. Imprudent old man!” Repentance, as always—is that not its nature?—is too late, just like his arrival in this dingy room in a “popular” neighborhood. He shakes his head. “Only now I see the wrong I did her.”
With father and son brooding on either side of her, Violetta is called on to exercise her force of character. The moment is ripe for a universal reconciliation, and she must reconcile these unhappy men, her dear ones, with themselves—their past errors and cruelties—and, more important, with the future. And, wonderfully, she has a plan. From a hiding-place at her elbow, she takes a jewel-case that contains a miniature of herself. Unlocking the little casket—unique relic of her worldly past—she turns to Alfredo, her real love, from whom in her simplicity she has let the hideous specter of duty tear her away.
“Come closer, dear Alfredo. Listen, won’t you take this? It’s the picture of me as I was then, in the good days. It can serve to remind you of her who loved you so.” Alfredo still refuses to hear the note of finality, maybe because it speaks to him in that dreamy, dulcet voice, which affects him like a caress. “No, you won’t die! Don’t tell me that. God cannot have put me here to bear such a torment.” But the dulcet voice overrides his protest and grows dreamier still.
It is telling of the life to come, where Violetta sees a vision, of a pure young girl. Is it the little sister for whom she has made the heroic sacrifice? No, it is another maiden, a girl he does not know yet, the girl who will offer him her heart and whom he must marry, because Violetta wishes it. Sister and bride blur as Violetta gazes raptly into the future. This is the ultimate sacrifice, the crudest and sweetest of all. She has died on the altar of the family and looks down on it from Heaven.
“Give her this little image. Tell her that it’s a present from one who is praying for her, one who’s up above with the angels and prays for her and for you.” The fusion is complete. She has made a gift of her life to a young girl “pure as an angel” and now, in reward, she is an angel herself, offering the gift of her image to another chaste spirit. The unchaste one, chastened, is leaning down from Heaven dangling a holy eidolon, like the girdle that the Virgin on the day of her Assumption tossed to the Apostle Thomas doubtingly watching her mount.
In an ideal sense, it is all true. Violetta, who was never bad except in the eyes of middle-class morality, has become wholly and visibly “good.” This can be a moral fact even if a deception has been practiced on the aspiring soul, even if the new-made angel does not receive a genuine, twenty-four-carat harp, even if it is a shocking case of victimization. In any event, the struggle is over, or nearly so. Consummatum est. They gather round her deathbed, Alfredo still begging to be told it is not true, his father repenting, and the doctor and Annie bidding her suffering soul farewell as they see it fly off to join the blessed spirits they believe are “up there.” And, for a pseudo-miraculous moment, Violetta herself is brought back to life, rising to her feet with no sign of weakness. All her pains have left her; her former strength, as if by magic, has come back. But only Alfredo is deceived, crying “Violetta!” in an access of joy. It is a phenomenon familiar to medicine—a last flare-up of life. She falls back on the bed. The doctor feels her pulse. She is dead.
Fall 1983