The Death of Baldassare Silvande
Viscount of Sylvania
The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too, each man is a God in disguise who plays the fool.
– Emerson*
“Monsieur Alexis, don’t cry like that; maybe the Viscount of Sylvania will give you a horse.”
“A big horse, Beppo, or a pony?”
“A big horse, perhaps, like Monsieur Cardenio’s. But please don’t cry like that… on your thirteenth birthday!”
The hope that he might be getting a horse, and the reminder that he was thirteen years old today, made Alexis’s eyes shine through their tears. But he was not entirely consoled, since it would mean having to go and see his uncle, Baldassare Silvande, Viscount of Sylvania. Admittedly, since the day he had heard that his uncle’s illness was incurable, Alexis had seen him several times. But since then, everything had completely changed. Baldassare had realized how ill he was and now knew that he had at most three years to live. Alexis could not understand how this certainty had not already killed his uncle with grief, or driven him mad, and for his own part felt quite unable to bear the pain of seeing him. Convinced as he was that his uncle would start talking to him about his imminent demise, he did not think he had the strength to hold back his own sobs, let alone console him. He had always adored his uncle, the tallest, most handsome, youngest, liveliest, most gentle of all his relatives. He loved his grey eyes, his blond moustache and his knees – a deep and welcoming place of pleasure and refuge when he had been smaller, seemingly as inaccessible as a citadel, affording him as much enjoyment as any wooden horse, and more inviolable than a temple. Alexis, who openly disapproved of his father’s sombre and severe way of dressing, and dreamt of a future in which, always on horseback, he would be as elegant as a fine lady and as splendid as a king, recognized in Baldassare the most ideal man imaginable; he knew that his uncle was handsome, and that he himself resembled him, and he knew too that his uncle was intelligent and noble-hearted, and wielded as much power as a bishop or a general. It was true that his parents’ criticisms had taught him that the Viscount had his failings. He could even remember the violence of his anger on the day when his cousin Jean Galéas had made fun of him, how much the gleam in his eyes had betrayed the extreme pleasure of his vanity when the Duke of Parma had offered his sister’s hand in marriage to him (on that occasion he had clenched his jaws in an attempt to disguise his pleasure and pulled a face, an expression habitual to him – one that Alexis disliked), and he remembered too the tone of contempt with which his uncle spoke to Lucretia, who professed not to like his music.
Often his parents would allude to other things his uncle had done, things which Alexis did not know about, but which he heard being severely censured.
But all of Baldassare’s failings, including the vulgar face he pulled, had certainly disappeared. When his uncle had learnt that in two years, perhaps, he would be dead, how much the mockeries of Jean Galéas, the friendship of the Duke of Parma and his own music must have become a matter of indifference to him!… Alexis imagined him to be just as handsome, but solemn and even more perfect than he had been before. Yes, solemn, and already no longer altogether of this world. Thus his despair was mingled with a certain disquiet and alarm.
The horses had long been harnessed, and it was time to go; he climbed into the carriage, then stepped back out, as he wanted to go over and ask his tutor for one last piece of advice. At the moment he spoke, he turned very red.
“Monsieur Legrand, is it better if my uncle thinks or does not think that I know that he is going to die?”
“Better that he does not think so, Alexis!”
“But what if he starts talking about it?”
“He won’t talk about it.”
“He won’t talk about it?” said Alexis in surprise, for this was the only possibility he had not foreseen: each time he had started imagining his visit to his uncle, he had heard him speaking of death to him with the gentleness of a priest.
“Yes but, what if he does talk about it?”
“You’ll tell him he’s wrong.”
“And what if I start crying?”
“You’ve cried enough this morning, you won’t cry when you’re at his place.”
“I won’t cry!” exclaimed Alexis in despair. “But he’ll think I’m not sorry about it, that I don’t love him… my dear old uncle!”
And he burst into tears. His mother, tired of waiting, came to fetch him; they set off.
When Alexis had given his little overcoat to a valet in white-and-green livery, with the Sylvanian coat of arms, who was standing in the entrance hall, he paused for a moment with his mother to listen to a violin melody coming from a nearby room. Then they were led into a huge round room, with windows extending all around it, where the Viscount was often to be found. As you went in, you saw the sea facing you and, as you looked round, lawns, pastures and woods were visible; at the far end of the room, there were two cats, roses, poppies and a great number of musical instruments. They waited for a while.
Alexis suddenly rushed over to his mother. She thought he wanted to kiss her, but he asked her in a low voice, his mouth glued to her ear, “How old is my uncle?”
“He’ll be thirty-six in June.”
He wanted to ask, “Do you think he’ll ever actually make thirty-six?” but he did not dare.
A door opened, Alexis trembled, and a servant said, “The Viscount will be here presently.”
Soon the servant returned, ushering in two peacocks and a kid goat that the Viscount took everywhere with him. Then they heard some more footsteps and the door opened again.
“It’s nothing,” Alexis told himself; his heart thumped every time he heard a noise. “It’s probably a servant, yes, most probably a servant.” But at the same time he heard a gentle voice saying, “Hello, young Alexis, many happy returns of the day!”
And his uncle came to kiss him, and made him feel afraid – and no doubt realized as much, since he turned away to give him time to pull himself together, and started to chat cheerfully to Alexis’s mother, his sister-in-law, who, ever since the death of his mother, had been the person he loved most in the world.
Alexis, now feeling reassured, felt only immense affection for this young man, still so charming, scarcely any paler and so heroic as to be able to adopt a tone of cheerfulness during these tragic minutes. He would like to have flung his arms around him, but did not dare, fearing that he might break his uncle’s composure and cause him to lose his self-possession. It was the Viscount’s sad and gentle eyes that especially made him want to cry. Alexis knew that his eyes had always been sad and that, even at the happiest times, he seemed to be imploring you to console him for sorrows that apparently did not affect him. But just now, he felt that his uncle’s sadness, bravely banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, the only sincere thing about his whole appearance, together with his hollowed cheeks.
“I know you’d like to drive a two-horse carriage, young Alexis,” said Baldassare. “Tomorrow they’ll bring you a horse. Next year I’ll make up the complete pair, and in two years I’ll give you the carriage. But perhaps this year you’ll already be able to ride the horse – we’ll try it out when I get back. I’m leaving tomorrow, you see,” he added, “but not for long. I’ll be back within a month and we can go off together and, you know, see a matinee of that comedy I promised to take you to.”
Alexis knew that his uncle was going to spend a few weeks at one of his friends’ houses. He also knew that his uncle was still allowed to go to the theatre; but as he was even now transfixed by the idea of death that had so deeply shaken him before coming to his uncle’s, the latter’s words gave him a painful and profound surprise.
“I won’t go,” he said to himself. “How much pain it would cause him to hear the actors’ buffoonery and the audience’s laughter!”
“What was that lovely violin tune we heard when we came in?” asked Alexis’s mother.
“Ah! So you thought it was lovely?” said Baldassare quickly, looking extremely pleased. “It was the romance I mentioned to you.”
“Is he putting it on?” Alexis wondered. “How can the success of his music still give him any pleasure?”
Just then, the Viscount’s face assumed an expression of deep pain; his cheeks had grown pale, he pursed his lips and knit his brows, and his eyes filled with tears.
“Good Lord!” thought Alexis in alarm. “He’s not up to playing this part! Poor uncle! Anyway, why is he so concerned to spare us any suffering? Why take such a burden on himself?”
But the painful effects of his general paralysis, which sometimes gripped Baldassare as if in an iron corset, even imprinting marks and bruises on his body, and whose intensity had just forced him to contort his face despite his best efforts, had vanished.
He resumed his good-humoured conversation, after wiping his eyes.
“I have the impression the Duke of Parma has been rather neglecting you of late?” Alexis’s mother asked, unthinkingly.
“The Duke of Parma?” exclaimed Baldassare in tones of rage. “The Duke of Parma, neglecting me? But what can you be thinking of, my dear? This very morning he wrote to me to put his castle in Illyria at my disposal, if I think the mountain air will do me any good.”
He suddenly stood up, but this brought on another attack of his dreadful pain, and he had to keep still for a while; his suffering had hardly been assuaged before he summoned a servant.
“Bring me the letter next to my bed.”
And he made haste to read:
My dear Baldassare,
How sorry I am not to be able to see you, etc.
As the Prince came out with more and more kindly words, Baldassare’s face softened and shone with happiness and confidence. Suddenly, no doubt because he wished to disguise a joy that he felt was not very dignified, he clamped his teeth together and made the attractive and rather vulgar little grimace that Alexis had imagined for ever banished from his face, pacified as it was by death.
This little grimace, now twisting Baldassare’s lips as it had before, opened the eyes of Alexis who, ever since he had been in his uncle’s presence, had thought and hoped that he would be able to contemplate the face of a dying man forever detached from vulgar realities – a face on which the only expression would be the gentle hint of a heroically forced smile, tender and melancholy, heavenly and disenchanted. Now his doubts had been removed, and he knew that Jean Galéas, by teasing his uncle, had yet again made him angry, and that in the sick man’s gaiety, in his desire to go to the theatre, there was no trace of either pretence or courage, and that now that he was on the threshold of death, Baldassare still continued to think only of life.
On his return home, Alexis was overwhelmed by the thought that he too would one day die, and that even if he himself still had much more time ahead of him than his uncle, the latter’s old gardener and his cousin, the Duchess of Alériouvres, would certainly not survive Baldassare for long. And yet, even though he was wealthy enough to retire, Rocco continued to work ceaselessly so as to earn even more money, and was trying to win a prize for his roses. The Duchess, in spite being seventy years old, took great care to dye her hair and paid for newspaper articles in which the youthfulness of her bearing, the elegance of her receptions and the refinements of her table and her wit were all celebrated.
These examples did nothing to diminish the sudden amazement that his uncle’s attitude had aroused in Alexis, but rather gave him a kindred feeling that, gradually spreading, turned into an immense stupefaction at the universal scandal of these existences, his own included, walking backwards into death with their gaze still fixed on life.
Resolved not to imitate such a shocking aberration, he decided, following the ancient prophets of whose renown he had been taught, to retire to the desert with some of his close friends, and he communicated this wish to his parents.
Happily, more powerful than their derision, life itself, whose sweet and fortifying milk he had not yet drunk dry, proffered her breast to dissuade him. And he settled back to drink from it anew, with an avid joy whose insistent grievances his credulous and fertile imagination took with naive seriousness, and whose dashed hopes that same imagination made amends for so magnificently.
The flesh is sad, alas…
– Stéphane Mallarmé*
The day after Alexis’s visit, the Viscount of Sylvania had left for the nearby chateau for a stay of three or four weeks: the presence of numerous guests might take his mind off the melancholy that often followed his attacks of ill health.
Soon all the pleasures he enjoyed there came to be concentrated in the company of a young woman who made them twice as intense by sharing them with him. He thought he could sense that she was in love with him, but kept her at a certain distance: he knew she was absolutely pure, and was in any case impatiently awaiting her husband’s arrival; and then, he was not sure he really loved her, and felt vaguely what a sin it would be to lead her into temptation. When exactly their relationship had become less innocent he was never able to recall. Now, as if by virtue of a tacit understanding, which had come into existence at some indeterminate period, he would kiss her wrists and stroke her neck. She seemed so happy, that one evening he went further: he started by kissing her; then he caressed her at length and once more kissed her on her eyes, her cheek, her lips, her neck and the wings of her nose. The young woman’s lips puckered up with a smile to meet his caresses, and her eyes shone in their depths like a pool of water warmed by the sun. Meanwhile, Baldassare’s caresses had become bolder; one minute he gazed at her; he was struck by her pallor, by the infinite despair expressed by her lifeless brow, her weary, grief-stricken eyes shedding glances sadder than tears, like the torture endured during crucifixion or after the irremediable loss of someone you love. He gazed at her for a while; and then, in one final effort, she raised up to him her suppliant eyes begging for mercy, while her avid lips, in an unconscious, convulsive movement, asked for yet more kisses.
Both of them were rapt in the pleasure that hovered all around them, in the perfume of their kisses and the memory of their caresses, and they flung themselves on one another, but with their eyes now closed, those cruel eyes that showed them their souls’ distress, a distress they refused to see – he in particular kept his eyes shut tight, with all his strength, like a remorseful executioner sensing that his arm might waver when the time comes to strike his victim, aware of the risk he would run if, instead of imagining her as still arousing and thus forcing him to assuage the wrath she aroused, he were to look into her face and for a moment feel her pain.
Night had fallen and she was still in his room, dry-eyed, her gaze wandering. She left without saying a word, kissing his hand with passionate melancholy.
He however could not sleep, and if he did momentarily doze off, he would come to with a start, sensing his sweet victim’s eyes raised towards him, imploring and desperate. All at once, he imagined her as she now must be, also unable to sleep and feeling so very lonely. He got dressed, walked quietly to her room, not daring to make any noise in case he woke her, should she be asleep, not daring, either, to go back to his room, where heaven and earth and his own soul would suffocate him under their weight. He stood there, just outside the young woman’s room, each moment thinking that he would be unable to contain himself a second longer and would have to walk in; then, horrified at the idea of breaking that sweet oblivion in which she slept – breathing softly, sweetly and evenly, as he could hear – only to deliver her cruelly over to the remorse and despair from whose grip she had, for a moment, found repose, he remained there, at her door, sometimes sitting, sometimes kneeling, sometimes lying down. In the morning, he returned to his room, feeling the chill, and calmer now; he slept for a long time and woke up in a state of great well-being.
They found ingenious ways of mutually allaying each other’s conscience, and grew used to the remorse which faded and to the pleasure which also lost its edge, and when he returned to Sylvania, he retained, as did she, no more than a gentle, somewhat frigid memory of those cruel and fiery moments.
The din of his youthful days means he can’t hear.
– Mme de Sévigné*
When Alexis, on his fourteenth birthday, went to see his uncle Baldassare, he did not feel, as he had expected he would, the violent emotions of the previous year. His repeated rides on the horse his uncle had given him had imbued him with new strength, and overcome his tendency to nervous exhaustion, reviving in him that uninterrupted feeling of good health which supplements our youth like the obscure awareness of the depths of our resources and the latent powers of our vitality. As he felt his chest swelling like a sail in the breeze awoken by his gallop, his body burning like a winter fire and his forehead as cool as the fleeting foliage that wreathed it in passing, and as he stretched out his body under a cold shower, or allowed it to relax at length as he savoured the meal he was digesting, he would exalt in those inner powers of life which, having once been the tumultuous pride of Baldassare, had for ever withdrawn from him and come to bring new joy to younger souls, whom they would also, nonetheless, one day desert.
Nothing in Alexis could now suffer with his uncle’s debility or die at his imminent demise. The joyous buzz of the blood in his veins and the desires in his head prevented him from hearing the sick man’s ever fainter plaints. Alexis had entered on that ardent period when the body labours so energetically to build palaces between itself and the soul that the latter soon seems to have disappeared – until the day when illness or grief have slowly opened a painful fissure, through which the soul again appears. He had grown used to his uncle’s fatal illness, as we become used to everything around us that lasts for a certain time; and even though his uncle was still alive, since he had once made Alexis weep for the same reason that the dead always make us weep, he had behaved towards Baldassare as if he had actually been dead, and had begun to forget him.
When, on that particular day, his uncle had said to him, “Young Alexis, I’m giving you the carriage at the same time as the second horse,” he had realized that his uncle was thinking, “as otherwise you’d risk never having the carriage at all”, and he knew that this was an extremely sad thought. But he did not feel it to be such, as just now he had no more room within himself for any deep sadness.
A few days later, while reading, he was struck by the depiction of a villain who had been left unmoved by the most touching and tender affection of a dying man who adored him.
That evening, he was kept awake by the fear of being the villain in whom he had thought he could recognize himself. But the following day, he had such a lovely ride out on his horse, worked so well, and in addition felt so much affection for his living parents that he fell back into the habit of enjoying life without scruple, and sleeping without remorse.
Meanwhile, the Count of Sylvania, who was starting to lose his ability to walk, barely left his chateau any more. His friends and relatives spent all day with him, and he could confess to the most blameworthy folly or the most absurd extravagance, parade the most shocking paradox or hint at the most shocking failing, without his relatives uttering a word of reproach, or his friends allowing themselves to make a joke or contradict him. It seemed that he had been tacitly relieved of the responsibility for his deeds and words. It seemed in particular that, by swathing his ailments in their kindness, and even vanquishing them with their caresses, they were trying to stop him from hearing the last creaks and groans of his body as life departed from it.
He would spend long, delectable hours lying down and holding intimate conversations with himself, the only guest he had neglected to invite to supper during his lifetime. As he pampered his long-suffering body, and leant in resignation at the window gazing out to sea, he felt a melancholy joy. He decorated the scene of his death with images of this world – images which surged up within him but which distance, already detaching him from them, turned into something hazy and beautiful; and this deathbed scene, long premeditated but endlessly embellished and renewed with ardent melancholy, was like a work of art. Already he had sketched out in his mind’s eye his farewells to the Duchess Oliviane, his great Platonic friend, over whose salon he reigned, even though the greatest lords, the most renowned artists and the most brilliant people in Europe had gathered there. He felt as if he could already read the account of their last conversation:
“…The sun had set, and the sea, visible between the apple trees, was mauve. As light as weightless, withered wreaths, and as persistent as regrets, little blue and pink clouds were floating on the horizon. A melancholy row of poplar trees was immersed in shadow, their resigned heads bathed in a pink glow like that of a church; the last rays of the sun, without touching their trunks, dyed their branches and, from those balustrades of shadow, draped garlands of light. The breeze mingled the three aromas of sea, damp leaves and milk. Never had the Sylvanian countryside tempered the melancholy of evening with a more alluring tenderness.
“‘I loved you so much, but I gave you so little, my poor dear,’ she told him.
“‘What do you mean, Oliviane? You gave me so little, you say? You gave me all the more in that I asked you for less – much more, to be honest, than if sensual pleasure had played any part in our affections. Supernatural as a madonna, gentle as a nurse – I loved you and you rocked me in your arms. I loved you with a tenderness whose delicate forbearance no expectation of carnal pleasure ever came to ruffle. Did you not bring me, in exchange, incomparable friendship, exquisite tea, conversation both natural and ornate, and how many bouquets of fresh roses? You alone were able, with your maternal, expressive hands, to cool my burning, fevered brow, to pour honey into my withered lips, and fill my life with noble images.
“‘My dear friend, give me your hands so I may kiss them…’”
Only the indifference of Pia, a little princess from Syracuse, whom he still loved with all his senses and with his whole heart and who had fallen for Castruccio with a wild and invincible love, occasionally brought him back him to a crueller reality, albeit one which he strove to forget. Right up to the final days, he had still been present at parties where, as he walked along arm in arm with her, he thought he was humiliating his rival; but even then, at her side, he sensed that her deep eyes were distracted by another love that only her pity for a sick man made her try to disguise. And now he could not even manage this. He had so lost control of the movement of his legs that he was now unable to go out. But she would often come to see him, and as if she had entered the great conspiracy of kindness woven by the others, she would talk to him constantly with an ingenious affection that was no longer shown to be feigned, as it once had been, by her exclamations of indifference or the open expression of her anger. And he felt this gentle attentiveness, more than all the others, filling his whole being with its solace and delight.
But one day, as he was rising from his chair to go to table, his servant was amazed to see him walking with much more self-assurance. He summoned the doctor, who said he needed to wait before giving his verdict. The next day he was walking well. After a week, he was allowed to go out. His friends and relatives were then filled with an immense hope. The doctor thought that a simple and curable nervous disease had perhaps been the initial cause of the symptoms of general paralysis – which was now, indeed, starting to disappear. He presented his doubts to Baldassare as a certainty, and told him, “You are saved!”
The man who had been sentenced to death expressed deep joy and emotion on learning that he had been pardoned. But after a while, as his recovery continued to make progress, a persistent note of disquiet started to make itself heard beneath the joy that had already started to fade as he grew used to it. Sheltered from life’s storms, in that propitious atmosphere of all-pervasive gentleness, enforced calm and untrammelled meditation, deep within him the seed of an obscure desire for death had started to grow. He was still far from suspecting its existence, and merely felt a vague panic at the thought of having to start living again, having to suffer the blows which he had lost the habit of enduring, and being forced to lose the caresses that had recently enfolded him. He was also dimly aware that it would be wrong to lose himself in pleasure or action, now that he had learnt to know himself, and become acquainted with the fraternal stranger who, as he watched the boats furrowing the sea, had conversed with him for hours on end, far away, so close, within him. As if now he were sensing an as yet unknown love, newly born, awakening within him, like a young man who has been deceived about his true original homeland, he felt a longing for death, for which he had once felt he was setting out as if into eternal exile.
He ventured an idea, and Jean Galéas, who knew he was cured, contradicted him violently and teased him. His sister-in-law, who for two months had been visiting him every evening and morning, went for two days without coming to see him. It was too much! For too long he had lost the habit of bearing life’s burdens, and he no longer wished to pick them up again. And this was because life had not managed to recapture him with her charms. His strength returned, and with it all his desire to live; he went out, started living once more, and died to himself a second time. After a month, the symptoms of general paralysis reappeared. Little by little, just as before, walking became difficult and then impossible for him, but gradually enough for him to grow accustomed to his return to death, so that he now had time to avert his gaze from it. His relapse did not even have the advantage of the first attack – then, he had eventually begun to detach himself from life, no longer seeing it in its reality but gazing on it, like a picture. Now, conversely, he was becoming vainer, more irritable, pierced by longing for the pleasures he could no longer enjoy.
His sister-in-law, whom he loved tenderly, was the only one who brought some solace to his final days, coming to see him several times a day, with Alexis.
One afternoon, as she was going to see the Viscount, just as she was drawing up to his house, the horses of her carriage suddenly took fright; she was violently flung out, trampled by a horseman who was galloping by, and brought into Baldassare’s house unconscious, with her skull split open.
The coach driver, who had not been wounded, immediately came to announce the accident to the Viscount, whose face turned waxen with shock and anger. His teeth were clenched, his eyes flashed and bulged and, in a terrible outburst of wrath, he hurled prolonged abuse at the coach driver; but it seemed as if these explosions of violence were an attempt to disguise a cry of pain which, in the intervals, could faintly be heard. It was as if, next to the infuriated Viscount, there was a sick man lamenting. Soon this plaint, at first feeble, stifled his cries of anger, and he fell onto a chair, sobbing.
Then he wanted to have his face washed so that his sister-in-law would not be alarmed by the traces of his grief. His servant shook his head sadly; the wounded woman had not regained consciousness. The Viscount spent two desperate days and nights at his sister-in-law’s side. At any moment she might die. On the second night, a hazardous operation was attempted. On the morning of the third day, her fever had fallen, and the patient smiled as she looked at Baldassare who, unable to hold back his tears any longer, wept uninterruptedly for joy. While death had been approaching him little by little, he had refused to see it; now he had found himself suddenly in its presence. It had terrified him by threatening what he held most dear; he had begged it for mercy, and he had forced death to yield.
He felt strong and free, proudly sensing that his own life was not as precious to him as was that of his sister-in-law, and that he could view it with so much scorn now that she, a different person, had filled him with pity. It was death, now, that he could look in the face, and not the scenes he had imagined would accompany that death. He wanted to remain as he now was right up to the end, and no longer give in to the lie which, by trying to arrange a fine and splendid deathbed agony for him, would have thereby committed the last and worst of its profanations, sullying the mysteries of his death just as it had hidden from him the mysteries of his life.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time –
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
– Shakespeare, Macbeth*
The stress and upheaval Baldassare had experienced during his sister-in-law’s illness had accelerated his own malady. He had just heard from his confessor that he had less than a month to live; it was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was pouring with rain. A carriage stopped outside the chateau. It was Duchess Oliviane. When he had been making those artistic arrangements for the scene of his death, he had told himself:
“…it will happen on a clear evening. The sun will have set, and the sea, visible between the apple trees, will be mauve. As light as weightless, withered wreathes, and as persistent as regrets, little blue and pink clouds will be floating on the horizon…”
It was ten in the morning, under a louring, filthy sky, as the rain came pelting down, when Duchess Oliviane arrived; and, worn out by his illness, his mind entirely given over to higher things, and no longer susceptible to the grace of all that had once seemed to constitute the value, the charm, the splendour and refinement of life, he asked them to tell the Duchess that he was not strong enough to see her. She insisted, but he refused to receive her. And this was not even out of a sense of duty: she meant nothing to him any more. Death had made short work of breaking those bonds whose capacity to enslave him he had for some weeks so greatly feared. When he tried to think of her, he saw nothing appear before his mind’s eye, and the eyes of his imagination and his vanity had closed.
However, about one week before his death, the announcement of a ball to be given by the Duchess of Bohemia, at which Pia was to lead the cotillion with Castruccio, who was leaving for Denmark the next day, reawoke his jealousy in all its fury. He asked for Pia to come to him; his sister-in-law resisted his request for a while; he thought that they were preventing him from seeing her, that they were persecuting him; he flew into a rage, and so as not to torment him further, they immediately sent for her.
When she arrived, he was completely calm, but in a deep state of sadness. He drew her over to his bed and immediately started talking to her about the Duchess of Bohemia’s ball. He told her:
“We were not related, you won’t need to go into mourning for me, but I wish to beg one thing of you: promise me you won’t go to that ball.”
They gazed into one another’s eyes, from which their souls seemed to peer out – those melancholy, passionate souls that death had not succeeded in uniting.
He understood her hesitation, pressed his lips together painfully and gently told her:
“Oh! It’s better if you don’t promise! Don’t break a promise made to a dying man. If you’re not sure you can keep your promise, don’t make one.”
“I can’t promise you that, I haven’t seen him for two months and I may never see him again; nothing would ever console me, in all eternity, if I didn’t go to that ball.”
“You’re right, since you love him, and death may happen any minute… and you are still living life to the full… But you will do one little thing for me; during the time you spend at the ball, set aside the period that you’d have been obliged to spend with me so as to divert suspicion from you. Invite my soul to remember for a few moments, together with you – spare some thought for me.”
“I hardly dare promise you that, the ball will last such a short time. Even if I don’t leave his side, I will hardly have time to see him. I’ll set aside some time for you on all the days that follow.”
“You won’t be able to, you’ll forget me; but if, after one year – alas! More than that, perhaps – something sad that you read, someone’s death or a rainy evening make you think of me, what charity you will be doing me! I’ll never, ever see you again… except in spirit, and for that to happen, we’d need to be thinking of each other simultaneously. I will think of you always, so that my soul will always be open to you, if you wish to enter it. But how long the guest will keep me waiting! The November rains will have rotted the flowers on my tomb, June will have withered them, and my soul will still be weeping with impatience. Ah! I hope that one day, the sight of some souvenir, the return of an anniversary, the drift of your thoughts will lead your memory into the neighbourhood of my tenderness; then it will be as if I had heard you and spotted you coming, and some magic spell will have decked everything out with flowers for your arrival. Think of the dead man. But, ah! – can I hope that death, and your own sense of the gravity of things, will accomplish what life, with all its passion, and all our tears, and our moments of gaiety, and our lips, could not?”
Now cracks a noble heart; good night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
– Shakespeare, Hamlet*
Meanwhile, a violent fever accompanied by delirium refused to loosen its grip on the Viscount; a bed had been made up for him in the vast rotunda where Alexis had seen him on his thirteenth birthday, when he had still been so cheerful, and from which the sick man could now look out over the sea and the harbour jetty and at the same time, on the other side, the pastures and the woods. Now and then, he would start to speak; but his words no longer bore the trace of those thoughts of higher things that, over the last weeks, had purified him with their visit. In violent imprecations against some invisible person who kept teasing him, he insisted over and over again that he was the finest musician of his century and the greatest lord in the universe. Then, suddenly calming down, he would tell his coach driver to take him to some humble lodge and have his horses saddled up for hunting. He asked for writing paper to invite to dinner all the sovereigns of Europe on the occasion of his marriage with the sister of the Duke of Parma; alarmed that he might not be able to pay off a gambling debt, he would seize the paperknife placed near his bed and point it in front of him like a revolver. He would send out messengers to find out whether the policeman he had beaten up the previous night was dead, and he would utter obscenities to a person whose hand he thought he was holding. Those exterminating angels called Will and Thought were no longer there to thrust back into the shadows the evil spirits of his senses and the foul emanations of his memory. After three days, at around five o’clock, he awoke as you wake from some bad dream for which you are not responsible, but which you indistinctly remember. He asked if any friends or relatives had been near him during those hours in which he had presented only the most negligible, most primitive and most lifeless side of himself, and he begged his servants, if he were again overcome by delirium, to show those acquaintances out and allow them back in only when he had regained consciousness.
He lifted his eyes, looked around the room, and gazed with a smile at his black cat, which, having climbed onto a china vase, was playing with a chrysanthemum and sniffing the flower with the gestures of a mime artist. He asked everyone to leave and talked for a long time with the priest who was watching over him. Nonetheless, he refused to take communion and asked the doctor to explain that his stomach was no longer in any fit state to tolerate the Host. After an hour, he asked his servant to tell his sister-in-law and Jean Galéas to go home. He said:
“I am resigned; I am happy to die and to go before God.”
The air was so mild that they opened the windows that looked over the sea, yet without seeing it; and because of the rather fresh breeze they left the ones opposite closed, those facing the expanse of pasture and woodland.
Baldassare had his bed pulled over to the open windows. A boat was being launched from the jetty, where sailors were hauling it along by rope. A handsome cabin boy, about fifteen years old, was leaning forward, right at the edge; at every wave he looked as if he were going to fall into the water, but he stood firm on his sturdy legs. He was holding out the net with which he would catch the fish, and a lit pipe was clamped between his lips that could taste the salty tang of the sea. And the same wind that swelled the sail came to cool the cheeks of Baldassare, and made a piece of paper flutter round the room. He turned away his head from the happy image of the pleasures that he had passionately loved and would never enjoy again. He looked at the harbour: a three-master was setting sail.
“It’s the ship leaving for India,” said Jean Galéas.
Baldassare could not make out the people standing on the deck, waving their handkerchiefs, but he could guess at the thirst for the unknown that filled their eyes with longing; they still had so much to experience, to know and to feel. The anchor was weighed, a cry went up, and the boat moved out over the sombre sea to the west, where, in a golden haze, the light mingled the small boats together with the clouds and murmured irresistible and vague promises to the travellers.
Baldassare had the windows on this side of the rotunda closed, and those looking out over the pastures and the woods opened. He gazed at the fields, but he could still hear the cry of farewell from the three-master, and he could see the cabin boy, with his pipe between his teeth, holding out his nets.
Baldassare’s hand fidgeted feverishly around. Suddenly he heard a faint silvery sound, imperceptible and profound like a beating heart. It was the sound of the bells from a village in the far distance, which, thanks to the gracious and kindly air, so limpid this evening, and the favourable breeze, had crossed many leagues of plains and rivers before reaching him and being detected by his faithful ears. It was a voice both present and very ancient; now he could hear his heart beating with the bells’ melodious flight, hanging on the moment when they seemed to breathe the sound in, and then breathing out a long slow breath with them. At every period in his life, whenever he had heard the distant sound of the bells, he had involuntarily remembered the gentle sound they made in the evening air when, still a small child, he would make his way back to the chateau across the fields.
At that moment, the doctor asked everyone to draw near, saying:
“It’s the end!”
Baldassare was resting, his eyes closed, and his heart listening to the sound of the bells that his ears, paralysed by the approach of death, could no longer hear. He saw his mother again – the way she would give him a kiss when she got home, and then put him to bed at night and warm his feet in her hands, staying at his side if he couldn’t get to sleep; he remembered his Robinson Crusoe and the evenings in the garden when his sister would sing; the words of his tutor predicting that one day he would be a great musician, and his mother’s delight at the time, which she tried in vain to hide. Now he had run out of time to realize the passionate hopes of his mother and his sister, hopes that he had so cruelly dashed. He saw the lime tree under which he had become engaged and the day when his engagement had been broken off, when only his mother had been able to console him. He imagined he was hugging his old maidservant and holding his first violin. He saw all of this in the distance, glowing sweetly and sadly like the horizon which the windows facing the fields looked towards and yet did not see.
He saw all of this, and yet two seconds had not elapsed since the doctor, listening to his heart, had said:
“It’s the end!”
He straightened, saying:
“It’s all over!”
Alexis, his mother and Jean Galéas knelt down, together with the Duke of Parma who had just arrived. The servants wept outside the open door.
– October 1894