In accordance with this tendency to level up, her style in Villette attains a more even and a more certain excellence. Her flights are few; so are her lapses. Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost gone. Gone too are the purple patches; but there is everywhere delicate colour under a vivid light. But there are countless passages which show the perfection to which she could bring her old imaginative style. Take the scene where Lucy, under the influence of opium, goes into Villette en fête.
"The drug wrought. I know not whether Madame had over-charged or under-charged the dose; its result was not that she intended. Instead of stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new thought—to reverie peculiar in colouring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons….
"I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal Haute-Ville; thence the music I heard certainly floated; it was hushed now, but it might rewaken. I went on: neither band nor bell-music came to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed—to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a Grande Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd.
"Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipage, fine horses and gallant riders, throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams."
This is only beaten by that lyric passage that ends Villette; that sonorous dirge that rings high above all pathos, which is somehow a song of triumph, inspired by the whole power and splendour and magnificence of storm and death.
"The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, the leaves grow sere; but—he is coming.
"Frosts appear at night; November has sent his fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; but—he is coming.
"The skies hang full and dark—a rack sails from the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange forms—arches and broad radiations; there rise resplendent mornings—glorious, royal, purple, as monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest—so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know some signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since childhood. God, watch that sail! Oh, guard it!
"The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—'keening' at every window! It will rise—it will swell—it shrieks out long: wander as I may through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. The advancing hours make it strong; by midnight all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south-west storm.
"That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder—the tremor of whose plumes was storm."