For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” This was Claude’s first draft. I thought its handling of the Rousseau references surprisingly good, tying in with Marianne’s previous observations about the unfairness of life. I trimmed down the paragraph about Alejandro moving through the crowd. 

Alejandro

The waltz had given way to a contredanse by the time Marianne returned to her seat, and her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the heat of the room.

Éléonore said nothing and waited.

“He is remarkable,” Marianne said, with the directness she brought to all strong feeling, which was to say as though the observation were simply a fact requiring acknowledgment rather than an opinion inviting discussion. “Not in the way that most men at these things are remarkable, which is to say not remarkable at all. He actually listens. He asked me what I thought of New Orleans and then waited for the answer instead of providing one himself.”

“That is a low bar,” Éléonore said, mildly.

“You would be surprised how rarely it is cleared.” Marianne smoothed her gloves and looked out at the dance floor with the expression of someone trying to appear less interested in something than she is. “He has read Rousseau. Not merely heard of him. He quoted the Confessions from memory, in French, and got it right.”

Éléonore considered this. It was, she had to admit, not nothing. “What did you talk of besides Rousseau?”

“Music. The difference between New Orleans and Havana, which he described very vividly. His family’s plantation, though he was not boastful about it, which I thought showed good taste. He asked about our family.” Marianne paused. “He was very respectful about Maman. I noticed that particularly.”

This, Éléonore knew, was not a small thing. The precise degree of respect, or its absence, with which men in this city acknowledged their mother’s history and position was a matter she and Marianne had both learned to read with considerable accuracy. She filed it away alongside the Rousseau and the listening, and reserved her judgment.

Across the room, Alejandro Villarreal moved through the crowd, pausing here to exchange a word, there to bow over a hand, as if he was used to exactly this and found it neither burdensome nor remarkable. He was, Éléonore thought, genuinely charming. Not in the mechanical way of men who have learned charm as a professional skill, but in the way of someone whose pleasure in people was real, or at least convincing enough that the distinction hardly mattered in practice.

That, she thought, was perhaps the thing worth watching.

He found his way back to them before the next dance began, materializing at Marianne’s side with the unhurried confidence of a man who has decided where he intends to be and sees no obstacle to being there.

“Miss Dashwood,” he said, and then, with a courtesy that was neither excessive nor perfunctory, “Miss Éléonore. I hope I am not imposing.”

“Not at all,” Éléonore said. “Please sit, if you like.”

He sat, with the easy grace of a man accustomed to making himself at home in good company, and directed his attention first to Éléonore, which she noted, as it was the correct thing to do and not every man thought to do it. “Mrs. Jennings tells me your family has recently settled in the Faubourg Marigny,” he said. “I know it well. My mother grew up not far from the Esplanade. It is a beautiful part of the city.”

“We are finding it so,” Éléonore said.

“There is nowhere in the world quite like New Orleans,” he said, and there was in his voice something that was not mere social pleasantry but sounded like genuine conviction. “I spent two years in Havana and found myself thinking of this city constantly. The light is different here. The air is different. Even the way time moves is different.”

“And yet you went to Havana,” Marianne said.

“Family obligations,” he said, with a small, expressive shrug that managed to convey both resignation and good humor simultaneously. “My aunt felt I needed broadening. I felt I needed nothing of the sort, but one does not argue with Doña Isabel unless one has a very compelling reason and considerable reserves of patience.” He glanced at Éléonore with a smile that invited her into the joke without excluding Marianne from it. “Are you acquainted with my aunt?”

“We have not yet had the pleasure,” Éléonore said.

“It is a pleasure of a rather specific kind,” he said pleasantly. “One that improves considerably with repeated exposure, or so I am told by people who have survived it.”

Marianne laughed, which was not something she did easily or often at social events, and Alejandro looked at her with the expression of a man who has been offered something he finds genuinely delightful and intends to pursue it. He leaned forward slightly, dropping his voice to a register that was private without being inappropriate, and said, “You mentioned, when we were dancing, that you have been reading the later Rousseau. I have been thinking about what you said ever since.”

“Have you,” Marianne said. It was not quite a question.

“You said that his conception of natural feeling as the only true guide to moral life was beautiful in theory but required a world more just than the one we actually inhabit to function as he imagined. I have been trying to find the flaw in that argument and cannot.”

Marianne looked at him with the particular attention she reserved for people who had earned it. “Most people simply agree with Rousseau or disagree with him,” she said. “They do not usually find the argument complicated enough to require further thought.”

“Most people,” Alejandro said, “have not thought about it carefully enough.”

It was said without arrogance, simply as an observation, and it was this, Éléonore suspected, that was most dangerous about him. The arrogance that announces itself can be assessed and guarded against. The arrogance that wears the face of intellectual honesty is considerably more difficult to see clearly, particularly when one is nineteen and the man expressing it is looking at one as though one’s opinion is the most interesting thing in the room.

The musicians were tuning for the next dance. Alejandro rose and offered his hand to Marianne with a gesture that was a question rather than an assumption, which was, Éléonore reflected, a very well-judged thing to do.

Marianne took his hand and stood, and for a moment, before they moved toward the floor, she glanced back at Éléonore with an expression that was open and wondering and entirely unguarded, the expression she wore when something had moved her before she had had time to decide what to do about it.

Éléonore watched them take their place among the dancers. The contredanse began, the music bright and insistent, and Alejandro led Marianne through the figures with an attention that, to a casual observer, would have looked like simple good manners. To Éléonore, who was not a casual observer and had no intention of becoming one, it looked like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had done it before.

She could not have said, in that moment, whether she was wrong to think so. She could only note the thought, and keep her eyes open, and hope that the distance between what Alejandro Villarreal appeared to be and what he actually was turned out to be smaller than she feared.

She did not, on the whole, expect to be pleasantly surprised.