Annette and Sylvie: Being Volume One of The Soul Enchanted

by Romain Rolland

She was seated beside the window, with her back turned to the light, so that the rays of the setting sun fell upon the firm column of her neck. She had just come indoors. For the first time in months, Annette had spent the day in the open, tramping and finding intoxication in the spring sunlight. Tipsy sunlight, like pure wine, diluted by no shadow of leafless trees, and brightened by the cool air of the winter that had flown. Her head was humming, her veins pulsing, and her eyes were drenched in torrents of light. Red and gold beneath her closed eyelids. Gold and red in her body. Immobile, bemused, upon her chair, for an instant she lost consciousness. . . .

A pool, in the midst of woods, with a patch of sunlight like an eye. Around about, a circle of trees, their trunks befurred with moss. She must bathe her body; she finds herself undressed. The icy hand of the water rubs her feet and knees. Voluptuous torpor. In the pool of red and gold she contemplates her nudity. . . . A feeling of shame, obscure and indefinable, as though other spying eyes were watching her. To escape them she advances further into the water, which rises to her chin. The sinuous water becomes a living embrace; and slippery creepers twine themselves about her legs. She seeks to free herself, she sinks into the slime. Above, the patch of sunlight sleeps upon the pool. Angrily she thrusts her foot against the bottom and rises to the surface. The water now is gray, dull, and muddied; but still the sunlight on its gleaming surface. . . . Annette grasps a willow branch that overhangs the pool, to lift herself free from the watery contamination. The leafy limb covers her naked back and shoulders like a wing. The shadow of night falls, and the air is chill Upon her neck. . . .

She emerges from her trance; only a few moments have flown since she sank into it. The sun is disappearing behind the hills of Saint-Cloud. The cool of evening has come.

Sobered, Annette rises, shivering a little; and, wrinkling her brows in irritation at the lapse she has allowed herself, she goes to sit down before the fire, within the depths of her room. It is a pleasant wood fire, designed to distract the eye and to furnish company rather than to give warmth; for from the garden, through the open window, with the damp breeze of an early spring evening, there enters the melodious chattering of homing birds settling down to sleep. Annette dreams; but this time her eyes are open. She has recovered a foothold in her accustomed world. She is in her own house: she is Annette Rivière. And, as she leans towards the flame that reddens her youthful face, teasing with her foot the black cat that stretches out its gold-barred belly, she once more becomes conscious of her sorrow, that for an instant had been forgotten; she recalls the image (escaped from her heart) of the person she has lost. In deep mourning, with the trace of grief's passage not yet effaced from her brow or from the corners of her mouth, with her lower lids still slightly swollen from recent tears; but healthy, fresh, and bathed in sap like youthful nature itself, this vigorous young girl who is not beautiful but well made—with heavy chestnut hair, lightly tanned neck, starry eyes and flower-like cheeks—seeking to enfold anew her wandering glance and round shoulders in the dispersed veils of her melancholy—this girl, sitting thus, seems like a young widow watching the departure of the beloved shade.

Widow, indeed, Annette was in her heart; but he whose shade her fingers sought to detain was her father.

Six months had passed already since she had lost him. Towards the end of autumn, Raoul Rivière, still young (he was not quite fifty), had been carried off in two days by an attack of uremia. Although for several years he had been obliged to show some consideration for the health he had abused, he had not expected so brusque a lowering of the curtain. He was a Parisian architect, an old student of the Villa Romaine, handsome, congenitally cunning and possessed of inordinate desires, lionized in drawing-rooms and honored by the official world; and all his life long he had known how to collect commissions, honors and windfalls without ever appearing to seek them. His was a typically Parisian face, popularized by photographs, magazine sketches and caricatures,—with bulging forehead, swelling at the temples, head lowered like a charging bull; round, protuberant eyes with an audacious glance; white bushy hair cut in a brush, and a little tuft of hair below his laughing, voracious mouth; the whole expression being marked by wit, insolence, charm, and effrontery. In the Parisian world of arts and pleasures, he was known by everyone. And yet none knew him. He was a man of dual nature, who knew admirably how to adapt himself to society for the sake of exploiting it; but he also knew how to conduct his hidden life as a thing apart. He was a man of strong passions and powerful vices who managed to cultivate them all, while taking care to reveal nothing that might scare away his clients; he had his secret museum (fas ac nefas), but only the rarest initiates were allowed a glimpse of it; he cared not a hang for public taste and morality, but at the same time he conformed to them in his outward life and in his official works. There was none who knew him, neither among his friends nor among his enemies. . . . His enemies? He had none. Rivals at the most, who had smarted that he might forge ahead. But they bore him no malice: having got the better of them, he was such an adept at the art of wheedling that they almost smiled and begged his pardon, like those timid persons on whose feet one treads. Hard and cunning as he was, he had accomplished the feat of remaining on good terms with the competitors he supplanted, and with the women he abandoned.

In his own household he had been somewhat less fortunate. His wife had had the bad taste to suffer from his infidelities. Although it seemed to him that she should have had ample time, during the twenty-five years of their married life, to habituate herself to them, she never learned resignation. Morosely virtuous, with a manner slightly cold as was her Lyonnaise beauty, possessed of feelings that were strong but concentrated, she lacked all adroitness in holding him; and she had still less of that eminently practical talent of ignoring what she could not help. She was too self-respecting to complain, yet she could not resign herself to hiding from him the fact that she knew and suffered. As he was sensitive (at least he believed he was) he avoided thinking of this; but he bore her a grudge for not knowing better how to veil her egotism. For some years they had lived practically apart; but by tacit accord they hid this from the eyes of the world, and even from their daughter, Annette, who never became cognizant of the situation. She had not sought to fathom her parents' misunderstanding; it was distasteful to her. And adolescence has enough preoccupations of its own. A fig for those of others! . . .

Raoul Rivière's cleverest act was winning his daughter to his side. Naturally, he made no move in this direction; it was a triumph of art. Not a word of reproach, not an allusion to the wounds inflicted by Madame Rivière; he was chivalrous, he left his daughter to find out these things for herself. Nor did she fail to do so, for she too was under her fathers spell. And how could she fail to decide against the woman who, being his wife, was clumsy enough to spoil their happiness! In this unequal battle poor Madame Rivière was beaten in advance; and she crowned her defeat by being the first to die. Raoul remained sole master of the field,—and of his daughter's heart. For the past five years Annette had lived morally enveloped by her amiable father who was devoted to her, and who, intending no harm, lavished on her those charms that were natural to him. His generosity to her was augmented when he found less opportunity to employ these charms outside; for during the last two years he was kept closer to home by warnings of the illness that was to carry him off.

Nothing, then, had troubled the warm intimacy that united father and daughter, and filled Annette's unawakened heart. She was between twenty-three and twenty-four, but her heart seemed younger; its development had not been forced. Perhaps, like all those who have a long future before them, and because she felt a profound life pulsing within her, she let that life amass itself, in no hurry to take stock of it.