VIOLET

L’heure violette.

Leo Larguier.

They called her the old maid, and yet, though she was both a maid and old, she looked like neither one nor the other. Her appearance suggested a widow just past her prime. She always dressed in black, with a profusion of embroidery, ornaments and violet ribbons. Most frequently a bouquet of pale violets would bedeck her corsage and would be repeated, artificially, upon her hat. The scent of violets floated through her garden, her house and her heart: her soft eyes were two beautiful violets. The old maid was jolly and religious; and the curates were not slow in adducing this as a proof that good humor is the inseparable companion of virtue and piety: “Just see the old maid. Heaven is in her soul and in her eyes.” Her eyes were indeed of the sweetest, and a smile, at once celestial and childish, would scatter its benediction over the pink plenitude of her countenance. She was, in every aspect, plump, but not to excess, and the entire effect revealed that restful suavity of definite architectural structures.

A single token betrayed her age—the color of her hair. Their very ashen blond had become even more faded when she reached forty, dissolving into the shade of tawny linen which the years, those skilful laundresses, bleach at each springtime a little.

In short, the old maid was an agreeable canoness.

Toward that period in which she had to undergo the great feminine crisis, her fortune, through the establishment of a railroad that cut across one of her farms, rose considerably. Then, her head being troubled by vapors, she felt a desire to move. She made distant pilgrimages, but only in the company of a lady friend, and at her leisure. Having seen the provinces and some new faces, she felt different; her curiosity, too long dormant, awoke. A literary ecclesiastic loaned her some books of history. The novel treats only of possible loves, while history speaks of real loves attested by letters and relics. The old maid was surprised; one day she dreamed for a long time before the picture of a handsome worldly cardinal which decorated a serious book.

Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse.⁠[A]⁠

She had not married, through piety, having, at the hands of a priest implacable before all terrestrial pleasures, taken a vow to consecrate herself to the Lord. Her mother, informed of this, wept and threatened to die; then the daughter deferred, postponing this abandonment of the world until her mother should have departed. But the years, without abating her piety, had little by little effaced in her spirit even the memory of this vow, and when she had found herself free to fulfill it, she had no longer thought of it. The fanatical priest was dead. The hour of marriage was dead, too. Having refused all the eligibles of the region, she had become, without noticing it, the old maid; and now that she did realize it, it was too late. Besides, she was happy thus, and happier still since she had taken to dreaming.

So the old maid was dreaming, one beautiful twilight toward the end of September, as she shelled peas in her garden together with her servant. One could descry the little town, reclining like a lazy lass along the river bank; one of her arms, half bare, rose toward the station; the other was lost in a forest; her head was formed by the church; her body, the city; and her legs, the suburbs. And all this dozed, even the station, between two cries.

The old maid was dreaming so well that her servant, wearied of not obtaining any replies to her talk, had ceased speaking; she was dreaming so well that, at the sound of the front-door bell, she started and half rose with a bewildered air.

The visitor did not correspond to her dream. She recognized one of her girlhood companions, a poor woman who lived in the country, married to a petty notary and burdened with children. An urchin of some twelve years, garbed in a sorry gray uniform, followed this figure, with humble mien and his cap in his hands.

The reception was a cold one, but the poor woman was so amiable and she brought such pretty rustic flowers and such large plums, that the old maid rediscovered her smile. The youngster was introduced to her; he was going, on the following day, to enter the town academy as a pensioner. Now, the parents, who were too busy and not wealthy, could come all that distance to see him only three or four times per year, perhaps. What was desired of her was, that if it did not inconvenience her too greatly, she should board during holidays this youngster, who was so well-behaved, so gentle, so respectful, and so well advanced in his studies, since he had just won a scholarship.

The old maid consented. This seemed to her at first an act of charity.

“If I can’t attend to it,” she said, “Rosalie will hunt him up and see after him. She’ll take him to my Pine farm in good weather. He’ll drink milk. Is he fond of milk?”

“Oh!” replied the mother, “very much. Thank the mademoiselle.”

“Thank you, mademoiselle.”

At the sound of this sweet voice, already almost masculine, the old maid looked at the youngster.

That was all. As night had fallen the peas were brought in, and the old maid, summoned by the Angelus, went off to church.

Rosalie, toward the middle of October, went to the academy. The boy was given to her.

Mademoiselle would not return till evening. Alone with a servant, the boy soon began to take liberties. Then, tired, he became serious and spoke of his studies, of his plans for the future. When Mademoiselle arrived unexpectedly, she found a young man who was saying, solemnly:

“As soon as I shall have become a sub-lieutenant, I will marry; I already am considering it.”

“And perhaps you know whom?”

“I know very well.”

The servant laughed. She, too, knew whom he would marry as soon as it would be possible.

“Why, he’s charming—this little fellow!” exclaimed the old maid.

After this first day, she never failed to be at home during the school holidays. They would chat, take strolls, or play by the fire. She used the familiar form of address when speaking to him, she would kiss him, touch his clothes, mother him; she loved him.

In the meantime the youngster became thirteen, then came vacation days; she let them pass, and herself went on a trip. But the end of September was like an anniversary; she wished herself to go and fetch him whom she called her protégé. While waiting for school to reopen, he spent three days in her home. She was so attentive, so tender, almost, that Rosalie felt pangs of jealousy.

The holidays came around again, all alike, all happy. There were hours of intimacy, family hours, but mingled with a certain indescribable uneasiness, ever so sweet, of an acute, enervating sweetness. The days went by and the boy grew to fourteen.

The absence of Rosalie on one afternoon that she went to the farm troubled them as an animal is troubled by the sudden opening of his cage. By a common impulse they went into the house. It was stormy and very warm.

“Come,” she said, “to my room. It’s the only cool place in the house.”

And all this was innocent and inevitable.

In her room they drew near to a table where there were albums; they looked them over together, but without seeing anything. Their voices, when they spoke, seemed to them different. Their knees touched, then their hands, then their lips, and the rest came, too, though with difficulty.

The thrill of the chaste old maid was moving. She wept. Then she sank to her knees and worshipped, as a sacred symbol, the adorable body of her little friend. The god that she had sought distractedly on her pious journeys had at last appeared, and the happiness that the priests had prophesied for her she had at last felt swelling her heart.

The young boy was far less perturbed, for at that age pleasure does not radiate. He was absorbed by anatomical curiosity. He made a tour of the woman he had conquered, like the adolescent who feels his first partridge all about and who brushes back all its feathers.

“My little Jesus,” said the old maid, “Rosalie will soon be here.”

The hours that intervened before dinner were like acts of grace. She dined as one listening to mass.

And this continued for four years, from Thursday to Thursday, from vacation to vacation. The young boy, at times, felt a desire for other loves, but tiny hamlets are not very fertile in adventures and, then again, such powerful arms enfolded him, such generous hands!

Rosalie, who detected the secret of her mistress, took advantage of it to procure herself a dowry in view of the uncertainty of the future, and the adopted son of the “old maid” became a young man who enjoyed high esteem.

And now the old maid discovered that, among her friend’s children there were two other little boys, one of twelve and one of eight.

“I’ll see them through their school career,” she said. “But I want only one at a time.”

And thus it was arranged. These three little friends took care of her to her sixtieth year. Rich in the years of youth that she had economised, and unceasingly refreshed by youthful flesh, this innocent Ninon continued, up to an advanced age, to be the benefactress of the honorable poor families who had sons to send to school. Her piety, now become uncertain, gave concern to the clergy, but since one of her pupils, disgusted with his love tasks, entered the ecclesiastical seminary, where the old maid paid his expenses generously, the church was reassured. There are crises of indifference even in the souls of the most religious.

Only the confessor of the old maid, for she confessed regularly and voluptuously—only this honest old canon knew the whole truth. He would lower his eyes as they met those of his penitent and would flee at her approach. The odor of the secret that sealed his lips poisoned his heart. He died of grief at the sight of his tender lioness devouring her seventh lamb.

Violets continued ever to adorn and to perfume the corsage and the hat, the garden and the heart of the old maid with the violet eyes.