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The heart has its reasons which reason knows not
- Blaise Pascal -


Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. Petty prejudices, fear of the unknown and the painfulness of having to face one’s own shortcomings can swirl one into obnoxious judgmentalness. We, humble and ignorant wizard-apprentices in a life we cannot re-create, might never acquire adequate depth of insight and wisdom to understand another one’s � or even our own - heart, one’s innermost feelings and inner storms. Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) did, as this gorgeous novella abundantly and proficiently demonstrates.

In a small pension at the French Riviera, an apparently respectable, married woman overnight abandons her husband and offspring to elope with a perfect stranger. Abhorred, a few other couples residing in the pension discuss her conduct vehemently. Why did she behave like that? Was it a planned act of conspiracy, or did it equate a whimsical coup de foudre? What kind of woman could be that wicked? (I recall the horrible Sylvia Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade's End). Their commensal, the narrator, bored and irritated by the bigot display of moral purity and bourgeois arrogance, challenges the couples� haughty thoughts and comes to the defence of the ‘fallen� woman. Taking the noble stance that ‘he’d rather understand others than condemn them�, he draws the attention of another guest, a distinguished, old English lady, Mrs. C. Pushed by the scandal, evoking strong reminiscences, Mrs. C., after 20 years of shame and silence, feels the need to finally pour her heart out on what has been the most eventful and passionate 24 hours in her life. That is where a remarkable tale within the tale starts, ending up in a secular confession - a woman talking about the passion.

Her story catapults us back to the deliciously vicious mundane setting of ´Ú¾±²Ô-»å±ð-²õ¾±Ã¨³¦±ô±ð Monte Carlo, where Mrs. C, world-weary, seeks thrill in the casino, to feel that she is still alive after her husband’s untimely death:

In my second year of mourning, that is to say my forty-second year, I had come to Monte Carlo at the end of March in my unacknowledged flight from time that had become worthless and was more than I could deal with. To be honest, I came there out of tedium, out of the painful emptiness of the heart that wells up like nausea, and at least tries to nourish itself on small external stimulations. The less I felt in myself, the more strongly I was drawn to those places where the whirligig of life spins more rapidly. If you are experiencing nothing yourself, the passionate restlessness of others stimulates the nervous system like music or drama.



Within a space of twenty-four hours she will learn life-reconfiguring lessons on human nature and herself, inspired by the encounter with a troubled young Polish diplomat in the casino: ‘I had come to know immeasurably more about reality than in my preceding forty respectable years of life.� The word ‘impossible� suddenly has lost its meaning to her. Despair, obsession, passion, crisis will become her part.

Zweig plays masterfully with the conventions of the genre, depicting the raffish aristocrats and the dubious coquettes, lacing the most elegant sentences brilliantly together. The most impressive however is his amazingly intricate psychological dissection of the heart and soul of the aging woman regarding her own life as utterly pointless, aiming to rescue another lost soul.

I summoned everything in me to save him by all the means at my command. A human being may know such an hour perhaps only once in his life, and out of millions, again, perhaps only one will know it- but for that terrible chance I myself would never have guessed how ardently, desperately, with what boundless greed a man given up for lost will still suck at every red drop of life. Kept safe for 20 years from all the demonic forces of existence, I would never have understood how magnificently, how fantastically Nature can merge hot and cold, life and death, delight and despair together in a few brief moments. And that night was so full of conflict and of talk, of passion and anger and hatred, with tears of entreaty and intoxication, that it seemed to me to last a thousand years, and we two human beings who fell entwined into its chasm, one of us in a frenzy, the other unsuspecting, emerged from that mortal tumult changed, completely transformed, senses and emotions transmuted.

Some parallels can be drawn with one of Zweig’s literary heroes, both in the psychological scrutinizing of the characters and the intense style: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Zweig’s story both echoes White Nights, and, even more The Gambler. (Zweig published a study about Dostoevsky (and Balzac and Dickens) in 1920, Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky).

In 1920, in his Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Zweig’s highly admired friend, wrote on Tolstoy at cards: ‘His hands become nervous when he picks up the cards, exactly as if he were holding live birds instead of inanimate pieces of cardboard.� By letting Mrs. C.’s passion develop from chiromantic observations, comparing hands to animals, one could say Zweig probably paid homage to his dear friend. In turn, Maxim Gorky wrote about Zweig’s novella he had never read anything more profound.

I saw two hands such as I had never seen before, left and right clutching each other like doggedly determined animals, bracing and extending together and against one another with such heightened tension that the fingers joints cracked with a dry sound like a nut cracking open. They were hands of rare beauty, unusually long, unusually slender, yet taut and muscular � very white, the nails pale at their tips, gently curving and the colour of mother-of-pearl.

As Zweig admired Freud, something could be said about the erotically hued mothering of the widow over a man the same age as her son. Thinking of the flowering phenomenon of wealthy cougar women in our times - the difference in age as such might be less unfamiliar and scandalous than it was back in 1926, which by no means diminishes the power of the story at present.

My thanks go to Ina and Jean-Paul, for their enthusiasm about Zweig stimulated me to blow the dust from Zweig’s collected stories residing on the shelf again. This collection’s title story is Zweig’s most famous work, Chess Story (aka The Royal Game). Even though I remember loving this novella when reading it aeons ago, it was the ominous word ‘chess� on the cover that kept me from continuing reading the collection. 25 years ago, my beloved endeavored to learn me the basics of the chess game. He started with checkmating me in 2 moves, naggingly metaphorizing chess to life: losing in chess equals losing in life. Older and wiser, I prefer to second the assertion that chess is not like life, as chess has rules.

Intrigued by Mitteleuropa, its history, literature and art, its intellectual life in the coffee houses (Prague, Budapest, Vienna) and by his fabulous range of interesting friends , I hope to get to Zweig’s famous memoir The World of Yesterday soon.

I read the novella in a Dutch translation, and would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher Pushkin Press for providing me with a copy of the English translation (by Anthea Bell), which allowed me to insert the quotes in English.

It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.
� Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha