The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor

First published: 1953

Type of work: War allegory

Time of work: Events of the year 1902 as recalled from the year 1952

Locale: Mitylene in Asia Minor and the Caribbean island Saint-Jacques

Principal Characters:

• Berthe de Rennes, the protagonist, a seventy-year-old Frenchwoman, painter, pianist, and former governess of the Serindan family
• Count Raoul de Serindan, the owner of Beausejour, Saint-Jacques’s largest estate in 1902
• Sosthene de Serindan, his oldest son and an admirer of Berthe
• Josephine de Serindan, the Count’s oldest daughter
• Valentin Sciocca, France’s resident governor in Saint-Jacques in 1902
• Marcel Sciocca, his son and Josephine’s love interest

The Novel

In 1902, Captain Alfred Dreyfus languishes on France’s Devil’s Island, wrongly convicted of betraying military secrets and sentenced to life imprisonment. By 1906, he will be proved innocent and freed from the twelve years of incarceration that have elevated his personal plight to a symbol of justice. In the interim, throughout France and her colonies, his name divides Royalist from radical, Catholic from anticlerical, nobleman from Freemason. Conservative incumbents contrive to preserve tradition; intellectual revolutionaries plot to abolish tyranny. Paradoxically, both parties bear on their standards the convenient, flesh-and-blood metaphor Dreyfus, the embodiment of all good and evil in France’s bitterly torn society.

On the distant Caribbean island of Saint-Jacques, however, the sound of Dreyfus’ name is barely heard over the strains of violins at carnival time. Shadowed by the larger islands of Sainte-Domingue and Martinique, Saint-Jacques succumbed early in the eighteenth century to impoverished French noblemen eager to revive their family names in the new world colony. Against the hillsides of the volcano Salpetriere, the colonists cut their terraces, erected their rococo mansions, and lighted their island with fancy gasoliers. With the helpful passivity of the natives and imported African slaves, they established a peaceful oligarchy and soon reigned in Jacobean splendor over their sugar plantations. They prospered so quietly, in fact, that when the Reign of Terror broke out in the mother country and a guillotine was perfunctorily raised on the island, the abject blacks themselves disassembled the contraption, and the colonists advanced through the next century, forgotten by the revolutionaries at home and secure in their anachronistic haven.

In 1896, Berthe de Rennes fled to Saint-Jacques, a girl of eighteen matured by the death of her father and consequent poverty. At the time of the novel, six years later, she is the much-respected and relied-upon governess of Count Raoul de Serindan’s family on the prestigious estate, Beausejour. The Count’s family is representative of the smooth functioning that the insular colony enjoys when ignored by troubled France. Obedient to nobility’s customs, Berthe’s charges (Sosthene, the oldest son; Josephine, Lucienne, and Solange, the daughters; and Anne-Jules, the youngest son) attend their lessons in piano, Latin, and the social graces but equally inherit the exotic, immediate life of Saint-Jacques: their Creole French drops the difficult r-sound; their home crawls with mongooses tamed by the boy Anne-Jules; their playmates are mulatto testaments to their father’s youthful passion. Unfortunately, the Jacobean influence is still felt, all too strongly, in the masquerading romances of the Creoles. Infatuated with his beautiful mentor Berthe, Sosthene pines psychotically for a love that will never be requited. Drawn by a sisterly affection for Josephine, Berthe broods over a love that may never be admitted. Finally, when Josephine is beguiled by Marcel Sciocca, son of France’s resident, dogmatically liberal governor, Valentin Sciocca, the inhibitions and sublimated yearnings of this antique society forbode calamity. If their unspeakable love is discovered, Saint-Jacques will be rift by its own Dreyfus.

The Count’s Shrove Tuesday ball, the social event of the year, hosts the inevitable climactic showdown. Saint-Jacques’s elite arrive in shining lacquered carriages, drowning out the orchestra’s latest Parisian dance tunes with the rustle of starched lace. Hibiscus and magnolia dangle from ornate cornices, mixing scents with wood polish and French perfume. The ladies sample hors d’oeuvres of urchins and sea eggs, chattering over the latest vogue. The quaint veneer cracks, however, with the entrance of the Scioccas, invited by the Count to foster peace between factions. The festivities degenerate sharply. Anne-Jules charms a deadly serpent, striking fear into the merrymakers. A hoard of masked blacks descends on the party, playfully taking hostages according to carnival tradition but uneasing the pristine nobles with the sensual thump of tom-toms. In an unguarded moment, Marcel Sciocca flippantly ridicules a portrait of Prince Louis, raising the ire of the roughneck Royalist Gontran de Chambines, who challenges him to a duel on the following day. By the early morning hours, Josephine and Marcel begin separate flights toward the Sciocca yacht, the rendezvous for their elopement. Discovering this ploy, Berthe and Sosthene pursue the couple, hoping to quell an affair that will permanently split the island. In the same dire moment, the Count unmasks the black revelers, exposing their well-disguised leprosy, a menace more threatening than any political struggle.

To Berthe, positioned offshore on a trading ship ready to intercept Sciocca’s yacht, the intricate network of Saint-Jacques’s society appeared bent on destroying itself that fated night in 1902, as she recalls the cataclysm fifty years later to a British traveler she has met in Mitylene. Yet God’s hand prevented the self-sacrifice when the volcano Salpetriere erupted, bursting its own tiered hillsides, flooding the island’s shores with hot lava, burying itself with its own ashes. In moments, the Caribbean waters swallowed the leveled island, granting survival only to Berthe de Rennes. In the end, comfortingly, Berthe learns from the British traveler that her youthful world, wholly overlooked by cartographers and historians, is yet remembered for the mysterious, festive strains of violins that rise from beneath the sea and fill the blotted space of Saint-Jacques.

The Characters

One aim of many storytellers is, certainly, to preserve the memory of lives that might otherwise be lost. In The Violins of Saint-Jacques, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s protagonist, Berthe de Rennes, bound for her own grave, strives consciously to achieve this goal, fully aware of the urgency of re-creating an all but forgotten world. Inadvertently, Berthe emerges from her story as the only fully realized character. The British traveler in whom she confides intentionally builds her reliability: natives of Mitylene, her home for the last twenty years, admire her talents as painter and musician and feel indebted to her for ridding them of a corrupt town official years before; the woman servant Phrosoula dotes on her as if she were a holy relic and her paintings, icons; the British traveler himself is entranced by the precision and intelligence of her many stories, some of which he directly verifies through his own travels. In this light, her narrative self-portrait is both trustworthy and empathetic. Reared and trained in France to play the part of the cultivated gentlewoman but never provided the means to live the part, she was welcomed by the comparatively heathen Count Raoul de Serindan as a provider of European grandeur and, at his bidding, governed not only the children but the affairs of the estate as well. In time, the Count’s passion for the natives faded beside his passion for Berthe, just as the impromptu holidays and festivals he contrived gave way to the more decorous and arranged Shrove Tuesday ball. Setting aside childish ways, Berthe’s charges dismissed their native friends and learned to love through subterfuge and social posing.

Ultimately, Berthe perceived the irony and, perhaps, the tragedy of the changes she wrought. Her paintings of the period emphasize the coexistence of incompatible worlds: “Women with parasols and men in boaters and top hats were poised in cushioned aloofness over thin-spoked wheels. Below them bustled a swarm of negroes with pyramids of fruit or bright green sheaves of sugar-cane on their heads.” In retrospect, despite the conflicts inherent in that colonial world, Berthe must admit to imposing a sinister decadence on the Serindan family of Beausejour and, in consequence, on the people of Saint-Jacques. Similarly, she must hold herself responsible, even if indirectly, for the island’s apocalyptic destruction, ostensibly a freakish twist of fate. This recognition prevented her for fifty years from recollecting her story. Now, like the Ancient Mariner’s, her tale must serve both to preserve the memory of those lost without her and to unburden herself of crippling guilt. To fulfill these ends, Fermor artfully employs the second narrator, the British traveler. Taking with him Berthe’s last token from Saint-Jacques, a delicately carved silver spoon, the British traveler relieves her of all reminders; in narrating the novel, he creates a lasting testament to the sunken world.

Consistent with a story essentially twice removed by time and teller, Fermor’s minor characters are controlled by selective memory: sharply, briefly drawn, they are composed of their most flattering gestures. The Count appears, at first, a clownish bumbler, a fork-bearded man in tuxedo among half-naked natives. His political prejudices send him spouting ignorant cliches against the liberals and defaming the Dreyfusards, only to be proved wrong by history. His intolerance of Valentin Sciocca threatens the island’s serenity. Yet the impression is short-lived, for his is a deeply compassionate heart. He relents, with the least persuasion, and invites the Scioccas to his ball, dispensing personal inclinations for common goodwill. He falls unwarily in love with Berthe’s charms but, recognizing his foolishness, sincerely prays for her marriage to Sosthene. He practices fairness and generosity with the natives, earning from them the unofficial title, Mayor of Plessis. He protects the community upon discovering the lepers, locking them in the servants’ quarters, but provides a suckling pig and bottles of rum for these pathetic men. Through his sensitivity, then, he easily transcends his own buffoonery in Berthe’s nostalgic remembrance. His most lasting impression, fittingly, is the persistent sound of the violin, an instrument with which he was a virtuoso.

Fortunately, the Count’s children inherit his finest qualities. Josephine’s love for Marcel Sciocca, inexplicable to Berthe, is nevertheless the noble, reckless love of youth, admirable for its willingness to sacrifice all the world for its object. Josephine is spared even the blemish of poorly choosing her lover, for she is snared by the older Marcel while Berthe recovers from a case of malaria. With this single, deft coincidence, Fermor both excuses Josephine’s frailty and dramatizes the seedy antagonistic force of the novel. Sosthene, too, may be excused for his maddening love of Berthe, whose beauty and brilliance attract father and son alike. With his sister’s fervor, he grows despondent in love, threatening suicide and the upheaval of the family if his desires are not reciprocated. Yet the mettle of his character triumphs when he learns of Josephine’s elopement and quickly marshals the plan to save her from certain tragedy. Their younger brother, finally, represents that unaffected childhood from which Sosthene and Josephine have lately emerged. A tiny fragment of memory, Anne-Jules, mongoose and snake charmer, survives as a static reminder of that which was lost with Saint-Jacques: an uncorruptible boy in a world without fear.

Critical Context

The Violins of Saint-Jacques, Fermor’s third novel, initiated his work in fiction. Preceded by The Traveller’s Tree (1950) and Chance Acquaintances (1952)—both best-selling travel books considered classics of their genre—it was heralded for the same descriptive flourishes that marked his previous writing. Before beginning his literary career, Fermor traveled extensively in Central Europe, Greece, and the Caribbean; this broad range of experience, coupled with an acute perception of unique cultures, brings to his writing a color and pageantry that re-create the most vital characteristics of exotic worlds. With his first novel, however, Fermor draws as well on his participation in World War II—years with the resistance forces in Crete—adding to the beautiful descriptions of the tropics an undercurrent of violent conflict that clearly distinguishes The Violins of Saint-Jacques as a work of subtle power.

In treating the war allegorically, despite firsthand experience of it, Fermor breaks cleanly from the war novelists of the first half of the twentieth century—Ernest Hemingway, for example—and joins the ranks of postmodernists. For his predecessors, the war, its battles and senseless deaths, metaphorically supports a fatalistic perception and provides content enough for the novel; the effect is too immediate to be sublimated and too sensitive to be determined meaningless. For Fermor, however, setting his characters an ocean apart from the fighting and locating them during crucial years before and after the conflict, the war represents another accident in the long, fortuitous history of human affairs. His contemporary outlook is at once more stark and more palliative than that of his predecessors. Fatalism permits little possibility for mankind to charter its own course, but it does not reduce mankind’s efforts to the absurdities of Fermor’s random world. On the other hand, as it does for Berthe de Rennes, that random world does relieve man of the guilty suspicion that he may have sabotaged his own existence.

Bibliography

Harrison, W. K. Review in Library Journal. LXXIX (February 1, 1954), p.204.

Swan, Michael. Review in London Magazine. I (1954), p. 92.

Weeks, Edward. Review in The Atlantic Monthly. CXCIII (May, 1954), p.72.

White, Antonia. Review in New Statesman and Nation. XLVI (December 5, 1953), p. 738.

Winchester, Simon. Epilogue to The Violins of Saint-Jacques, 1984.