|
VICTORINE
A novel
Catherine Texier
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole
 "They
stone women like you," Victorine tells herself, facing
a temptation that will take her away from a comfortable
home, her students, a husband and two young children. It
is 1899, and provincial French women do not run off to Indochina
with men who make them dream. Unless they are selfish enough
to commit the grand sin of putting love-or lust, or adventure
or curiosity-ahead of maternal obligation. In that regard
not much has changed. Victorine's ditching her children
would be viewed as poorly today as it was then. Women can
leave men, but can they leave their children? Catherine
Texier's novel, VICTORINE; Pantheon Books, 2004, takes us
on her great grandmother's impulsive journey.
Originally intended as the memoir of the real Victorine
Texier, her great granddaughter, Catherine, found too little
actual evidence to go on, was left with too many questions
to solve once and for all the mystery that haunts her family.
How could Victorine leave her children? Why did she leave?
Where did she go? Rumors placed her in the French Colony
of Indochine (Vietnam) and whisperings had a man involved,
but nothing is proven, and there is no paper trail. Catherine
Texier took her research all the way to Vietnam as the intended
memoir evolved into a novel, an imaginary journey in Victorine's
shoes. This is a smart novel in the lean and concise school
of Flaubert and Stendhal; French to the teeth, tightly written
with a feel for both the history and place of the Vendée
region of France, and the French colony of Indochina. There
is even a tantalizing dip into the opium trade, the French
Government's dirty little secret: a glorious colony surviving
on the opium tax.
What is factually known is that the real Victorine Texier
abandoned her husband Armand and their children, Daniel
and Madeleine, was gone a little over a year then suddenly
returned. A 'reunion' child, Maurice, was conceived with
Armand before they separated for good, leaving her to raise
Maurice on her own. Nothing remains to explain Victorine's
scandalous behavior. Catherine Texier paints the portrait
of an intelligent woman who became a teacher at age sixteen.
A good teacher who liked her work and whose students improved.
The budding career is cut short by a flirtation with dark-haired
Armand Texier, a known skirt chaser, which ends in pregnancy
and a hasty walk down the isle. Victorine's father is furious,
he tells Armand, "Has it ever occurred to you, young
man, that my daughter, who is, as you were saying yourself,
a remarkable young lady-and, make no mistake, I am extremely
proud of her, proud that she is working, extremely proud,
indeed, I encouraged her to pursue her studies, to teach-such
a remarkable young lady that she is the youngest schoolteacher
in the whole of France-no small feat you will admit no doubt.
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps she was destined
to a bigger future than to marry a schoolmaster like yourself?
That what you did, in effect, ruins her chances to have
a future befitting her accomplishments with a man more worthy
of her than you are?" Ouch. And the father refuses
his daughter's hand. But Armand holds his own and in the
end Victor-Paul does not stand in the way, and at seventeen
his daughter Victorine's fate is sealed. Or should have
been.
Does she love Armand? She loved the seduction, the excitement,
the sex. She is attentive to Daniel and later to his sister,
Madeleine. Attentive, but distant, as if she were looking
in on her own life. Marriage and motherhood seem to suffocate.
She announces one afternoon that she will return to teaching
part time. Armand gives in after a few nastily worded objections
and things seem to improve with Victorine working again
until Antoine shows up. Does she love Antoine? Like Armand
once had, Antoine excites her, but more deeply, more freely
than Armand ever could. They'd met as children (before Armand
was on the scene), as teens at La Tranche, the beach where
Victorine and her sisters have gone while staying with an
aunt who lives near the coast. Antoine came down from Paris
to work the mussel beds during the summer. He has a Parisian
accent, is confident, and a dreamer. He tells Victorine,
who has let him take her hand, that he will go to Indochina,
and will she go with him? She laughs; they are children,
still in school. He kisses her. He is open and vulnerable
and very unlike the provincials she has known. Her sister
calls to her; the coach is ready to take them back to Tante
Emilienne's, and Victorine runs off. Thirteen years later
Antoine happens upon her again at La Tranche, this time
visiting Tante Emilienne with her twelve year old son. Antoine
pursues her. He made a mistake, he has never forgotten her,
and should have found her sooner. He tells her he will go
back to Indochina; will she go with him this time? Just
like that. Can she refuse him a second time?
Victorine does not decide. Just as she did not decide with
Armand, or with her pregnancies, she does not decide with
Antoine. One day she simply acts, not knowing herself what
she will do until the moment she does it. Until the moment
she leaves; cleaning the kitchen the night before, having
made everyone's favorite dish, nothing out of the ordinary,
the evening sun glowing on the copper pots in her warm kitchen
as she finishes her work, not thinking she will go, but
next morning, after church, she does. She has secreted a
suitcase in the attic filled with items and clothing for
a five week sail to Indochina. She goes without decision.
"The whole day and night, as they pursue their journey,
she tries not to think how many hours it will take them
to realize she is gone. Gradually, in the early morning,
images of the house, of the waxed table and the sun reflected
on the copper pots, dissolve, until she falls asleep and
the big man wakes her up in Bordeaux." She has left
no note behind on that waxed table.
The book is not about a mother abandoning her children,
it is not about early feminism, or bad men, nor is Victorine
a Madame Bovary. There is something missing in the character
Catherine Texier has created, a gap that keeps Victorine
apart. Even Antoine tells her she has to confront her behavior,
choose instead of hiding after she has run away; make a
declaration of her intentions. Is she only a woman of whims?
She was living in the moment, and, yet, in the depth of
her passion for Antoine, for the world he has shown her
and the freedom he offers, there is a place inside this
character that is not present. I think the thing that separates
Victorine from being a Madame Bovary, keeps her apart from
her children, her mother, her husband-her whole provincial
life-is that she thinks. Not brilliantly, but with a scintilla
of originally. She sees her life and that seeing keeps her
from fully committing. She doesn't so much walk away from
her children for a selfish end as allow her sense of something
different, like sheer possibility, to seduce her. What seems
a hideous act, a mother not loving her children more than
she loves herself, begins to seem like something less easily
judged. Because of this gap, this indecision, she pulls
away in Indochina, too. This is a character who his dutiful
and at times passionate and at the same time utterly detached.
In her prologue, Catherine Texier writes: "There are
families of gamblers, families of leftists, families of
womanizers. My family has its share of wayward women."
But what exactly does that mean? Wayward? In some interpretations
of Shariah law, for example, stoning is recommended for
adultnesses. If the world community had not been loudly
outraged, the Nigerian, Amina Lawal, would felt the wrath
of flying rocks for bearing a child out of wedlock. But
in that system an intractable woman is only a piece of property
gone bad, like a slave who has disobeyed the rules. Sort
of wayward with extreme consequences, a concept the Old
Testament is quite comfortable with. When Victorine says
they stone women like her she means figuratively, she means
internally, she means she will mentally stone herself even
as she tells herself, "It isn't you, in this marriage,
in this house. You have the right to another chance at life."
What right? The pursuit if happiness if it means leaving
a trail of unhappy victims behind? And if she had stayed,
had not gone with Antoine, not taken her shot, however briefly,
what of the unhappy victims among her smothering discontent?
Catherine Texier very wisely does not answer these questions.
She takes Victorine out of the pretty village in the Vendée
into the lethargy-producing steam heat of Saigon, from Armand's
bed into Antoine's bed. Briefly, with Antoine, she comes
fully alive. She thinks sharply, acutely, for herself; like
objecting to the opium, to Antoine's taking a temporary
job with the Opium Bureau. Studies calligraphy with a Buddhist
monk, learns some Vietnamese, rides the third class carriage,
tries to be free, liberal, new. But the dark secret, the
lie that she is Antoine's wife, that she has no children
eats at her few moments of joy and the gap reappears, widens
and swallows her once again. There is no tragedy here, only
the story of a woman who walked away. Flawed? Wayward? In
the traditional interpretation, the tension Catherine Texier
creates is subtle and powerful: how can she leave? Her life
is good where she is, and there are the children, and Armand
is not so bad; she has no idea what she is doing. That is
what you tell yourself as you grow anxious; she will come
to her senses, won't go! But she does. Is that wayward or
crazy brave? Bound to fail, too much pressure, too much
baggage, but what a year it was with Antoine. Better to
have loved and sinned, than never to have loved at all?
You decide.
I enjoyed this book. The place, the characters, the dilemma,
and I really liked the lean piquant writing of it. Take
Victorine's journey with you this summer, just watch out
for
flying stones.
©2004 J. Stefan-Cole
 
|