• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was along the Méséglise way, at Montjouvain, a house built on the edge of a large pond against the side of a steep, bushy hill, that M. Vinteuil lived. And so we used often to meet his daughter driving her dogcart at full speed along the road. After a certain year we never saw her alone, but always accompanied by a friend, a girl older than herself with a bad reputation in the neighbourhood, who one day installed herself permanently at Montjouvain. People said: “That poor M. Vinteuil must be blinded by fatherly love not to see what everyone is talking about—a man who is shocked by the slightest loose word letting his daughter bring a woman like that to live under his roof! He says that she is a most superior woman, with a heart of gold, and that she would have shown extraordinary musical talent if she had only been trained. He may be sure it isn’t music that she’s teaching his daughter.” But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed it is remarkable how people never fail to arouse admiration for their moral qualities in the relatives of those with whom they are having carnal relations. Physical passion, so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of kindness and self-abnegation, to such an extent that they shine resplendent in the eyes of their immediate entourage. Dr Percepied, whose hearty voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart’s content the role of mischief-maker which his looks belied, without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make the Curé and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a gruff voice: “What d’ye say to this, now? It seems that she plays music with her friend, Mlle Vinteuil. That surprises you, does it? I’m not so sure. It was Papa Vinteuil who told me all about it yesterday. After all, she has every right to be fond of music, that girl. I’m not one to thwart the artistic vocation of a child; nor Vinteuil either, it seems. And then he plays music too, with his daughter’s friend. Why, good lord, it must be a regular musical box, that house! What are you laughing at? They play too much music, those people, in my opinion. I met Papa Vinteuil the other day, by the cemetery. It was all he could do to keep on his feet.”

Anyone who, like ourselves, had seen M. Vinteuil at that time, avoiding people whom he knew, turning away as soon as he caught sight of them, growing old within a few months, brooding over his sorrows, becoming incapable of any effort not directly aimed at promoting his daughter’s happiness, spending whole days beside his wife’s grave, could hardly have failed to realise that he was dying of a broken heart, could hardly have supposed that he was unaware of the rumours which were going about. He knew, perhaps he even believed, what his neighbours were saying. There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning—without altogether recognising it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behaviour which it assumes in his presence: the strange remarks, the unaccountable attitude, one evening, of a person whom he has a thousand reasons for loving. But for a man of M. Vinteuil’s sensibility it must have been far more painful than for a hardened man of the world to have to resign himself to one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to be the monopoly of Bohemian circles; for they occur whenever a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child—perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colour of its eyes—needs to ensure for itself the room and the security necessary for its development. And yet however much M. Vinteuil may have known of his daughter’s conduct it did not follow that his adoration of her grew any less. The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere