Villa Triste Read Online Free
Author: Patrick Modiano
openmouthed.
“Did you understand what I said, Miss Carlton?”
For several seconds there was absolute silence in the dining room. The athletic blond man lowered his head. His companions were petrified. Yvonne, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eye, as if accustomed to incidents of this sort.
“Have no fear,” Meinthe whispered, leaning toward me. “It’s nothing, nothing at all …”
His face had become smooth, childlike; all his tics were gone. Our conversation resumed, and he asked Yvonnewhat she’d like him to bring back for her from Geneva. Chocolates? Turkish cigarettes?
He left us at the entrance to the Sporting Club, saying we could meet again at the hotel around nine o’clock that evening. He and Yvonne spoke of a certain Madeja (or Madeya), who was giving a party in a lakeside villa.
“You’ll come with us, won’t you?” Meinthe asked me.
I watched him walk over to the Dodge as though propelled by a succession of electric shocks. He drove off the way he’d done the first time, his wheels spinning in the gravel, and once again the automobile just missed the gate before disappearing. He raised his arm and waved to us without turning his head.
I was alone with Yvonne. She suggested a stroll in the Casino gardens. The dog walked ahead of us, more and more wearily. Sometimes he sat down in the middle of the path and we had to call out his name, “Oswald,” before he’d consent to go on. She explained that it was not laziness but melancholy that made him so lackadaisical. He belonged to a very rare strain of Great Danes, all of them congenitally afflicted by sadness and the ennui of life. Some of them even committed suicide. I wanted to know why she’d chosen a dog with such a gloomy nature.
“Because they’re more elegant than the others,” she replied sharply.
I immediately thought about the Habsburgs, whose royal family had included some delicate, hypochondriac creatures like the dog. This was attributed to intermarrying,and their depressive character became known as “the Portuguese melancholy.”
“That dog,” said I, “is suffering from the Portuguese melancholy.” But she didn’t hear me.
We’d reached the wharf. About ten passengers were boarding the
Amiral-Guisand
. Then the gangway was drawn up. Some children leaned out over the rail, waving and shouting. The boat moved off, and it had a dilapidated, colonial charm.
“We’ll have to take that boat one afternoon,” Yvonne said. “It would be fun, don’t you think so?”
She’d just addressed me with the familiar
tu
for the first time, and she’d spoken with inexplicable urgency. Who was she? I didn’t dare ask her that.
We walked on Avenue d’Albigny, shaded by the plane trees’ leafy branches. We were alone. The dog was about twenty meters ahead of us. His habitual languor was gone, and he marched along proudly, head up, abruptly veering off from time to time and performing some quadrille figures, like a carousel horse.
We sat down and waited for the cable car. She laid her head on my shoulder, and I was seized by the same giddiness I’d felt when we drove down Boulevard Carabacel in Meinthe’s Dodge. I could still hear her saying, “One afternoon … we’ll take … boat … fun, don’t you think so?” in her indefinable accent, which I thought might be Hungarian, English, or Savoyard. As the cable car slowly climbed up, the vegetation on either side of the track looked thicker and thicker. It was going to bury us. The flowering bushespressed against the glass panels of the funicular, and sometimes a rose or a privet branch was carried off by our passage.
In her room at the Hermitage, the window was half open, and I could hear the regular plunk of tennis balls and the players’ distant cries. If there still existed some nice, reassuring idiots who wore white outfits and whacked balls over a net, then that meant the world was continuing to turn and we had a few hours’ respite.
Her skin was
“Did you understand what I said, Miss Carlton?”
For several seconds there was absolute silence in the dining room. The athletic blond man lowered his head. His companions were petrified. Yvonne, on the other hand, didn’t bat an eye, as if accustomed to incidents of this sort.
“Have no fear,” Meinthe whispered, leaning toward me. “It’s nothing, nothing at all …”
His face had become smooth, childlike; all his tics were gone. Our conversation resumed, and he asked Yvonnewhat she’d like him to bring back for her from Geneva. Chocolates? Turkish cigarettes?
He left us at the entrance to the Sporting Club, saying we could meet again at the hotel around nine o’clock that evening. He and Yvonne spoke of a certain Madeja (or Madeya), who was giving a party in a lakeside villa.
“You’ll come with us, won’t you?” Meinthe asked me.
I watched him walk over to the Dodge as though propelled by a succession of electric shocks. He drove off the way he’d done the first time, his wheels spinning in the gravel, and once again the automobile just missed the gate before disappearing. He raised his arm and waved to us without turning his head.
I was alone with Yvonne. She suggested a stroll in the Casino gardens. The dog walked ahead of us, more and more wearily. Sometimes he sat down in the middle of the path and we had to call out his name, “Oswald,” before he’d consent to go on. She explained that it was not laziness but melancholy that made him so lackadaisical. He belonged to a very rare strain of Great Danes, all of them congenitally afflicted by sadness and the ennui of life. Some of them even committed suicide. I wanted to know why she’d chosen a dog with such a gloomy nature.
“Because they’re more elegant than the others,” she replied sharply.
I immediately thought about the Habsburgs, whose royal family had included some delicate, hypochondriac creatures like the dog. This was attributed to intermarrying,and their depressive character became known as “the Portuguese melancholy.”
“That dog,” said I, “is suffering from the Portuguese melancholy.” But she didn’t hear me.
We’d reached the wharf. About ten passengers were boarding the
Amiral-Guisand
. Then the gangway was drawn up. Some children leaned out over the rail, waving and shouting. The boat moved off, and it had a dilapidated, colonial charm.
“We’ll have to take that boat one afternoon,” Yvonne said. “It would be fun, don’t you think so?”
She’d just addressed me with the familiar
tu
for the first time, and she’d spoken with inexplicable urgency. Who was she? I didn’t dare ask her that.
We walked on Avenue d’Albigny, shaded by the plane trees’ leafy branches. We were alone. The dog was about twenty meters ahead of us. His habitual languor was gone, and he marched along proudly, head up, abruptly veering off from time to time and performing some quadrille figures, like a carousel horse.
We sat down and waited for the cable car. She laid her head on my shoulder, and I was seized by the same giddiness I’d felt when we drove down Boulevard Carabacel in Meinthe’s Dodge. I could still hear her saying, “One afternoon … we’ll take … boat … fun, don’t you think so?” in her indefinable accent, which I thought might be Hungarian, English, or Savoyard. As the cable car slowly climbed up, the vegetation on either side of the track looked thicker and thicker. It was going to bury us. The flowering bushespressed against the glass panels of the funicular, and sometimes a rose or a privet branch was carried off by our passage.
In her room at the Hermitage, the window was half open, and I could hear the regular plunk of tennis balls and the players’ distant cries. If there still existed some nice, reassuring idiots who wore white outfits and whacked balls over a net, then that meant the world was continuing to turn and we had a few hours’ respite.
Her skin was