/lit/ - Literature

>>10481564
It was thus into a family of money which I aspired to marry, for I had, and have not still, none of my own to speak of. Rather, my Roman nose, doltish eyes, dull wits, and melancholic disposition inspired in the mercurial Eugénie ill-founded fantasias of Werther, and she declared herself an avid patron of my woes. Having been faithful to her purpose and compounded them with her Cretan tryst, she suddenly abandoned my project with a remarkable indifference—cruel, is it not, the servitude of the artist, wracked to-and-fro by the vicissitudes of the philistines? The bull appeared to her then a golden calf, and her a most willing idolater; and despite my best efforts to bring down my own commandments upon her head, the mustachioed patriarch, his paunch having outpaced the efforts of his tailor in the mending of the old uniform (he was, then, unashamed to wear it), announced to me my ruin. “You see,” he said in walrus tones, floating in a haze of pipe smoke and fingering one of the brass buttons of his aching Attila, “You, and certainly the young Vicomte, in all the world are privy to a sacred secret: my daughter’s chastity, or, rather, the lack of it. You understand, of course, that a woman of society, and all creatures of the fairer sex, are outfitted with a singular resource, one around which their grand stratagem pivots—and it is that very virtue, that vestal grace, that Eleusinian mystery, that impenetrable (pardon me) holdfast, which yourself and the good Vicomte have seen (bon, that you have seen) cloven. I cannot, father that I am, conscience such an unveiling, such an end to the masque. Custom must be given satisfaction.”

It was thus that my career as a dandy was delivered its coup de grâce, and as a young man, perhaps more akin Werther than I care to admit, I was sentenced to an eternal autumn. Horned as I was, I fled to Marseille to bury my head in the sand. My father, the owner of a glassworks near Chartres, nearly shattered at the news; my mother, waifish from birth, shrunk some degrees more, unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes. At the very least, they thought only, by way of my letters, that I had fled to the coast at the behest of some newfangled malady, in order to secret myself away in a sanatorium and to be made clean by the salt air; likewise, just as Boccaccio’s Florentines fled to their perches, Eugénie retired to her aunt’s retreat in the mountains, weathering a fit of melancholia while her valiant intended languished in the throes of the Plague. Of the young bull, the Vicomte T—, it is known that he departed to Spain to fight for the Infanta Isabella—rather appropriately, he was slain at the hand of some matador or other, in a white town outside of Valencia.