For more information about this project, check out the earlier posts in the category “Sense and Sensibility and Placage.” Claude’s first draft is largely what you see here; I only had it rework the part where Alejandro is genuinely pleased about something. For my part, I dropped the very last sentence of the scene (too much in the style of some of Claude’s other outros), and trimmed the initial description of the room in the house on Rue Royale.

A Blooming Romance

The concert was held in the long upper room of a house on Rue Royale, belonging to a Madame Fontenot whom Marianne had met twice and found agreeable, and who had the good sense to engage musicians worth hearing and the better sense to let them play without interruption. The room smelled of hothouse roses, and the light of the numerous candles flattered everyone in it, which Marianne suspected was not accidental. Madame Fontenot understood the relationship between atmosphere and feeling in a way that many hostesses did not.

Marianne had been looking forward to it for a week.

She had not been looking forward to it entirely for the music, which she recognized as a slight against the music and felt mildly guilty about. The violinist was Parisian and said to be exceptional, and she fully intended to listen to him with the attention he deserved. But Alejandro had mentioned the concert in passing at the Palmieres’, casually and with the particular casualness of someone who knows the other person will notice the mention, and since then the evening had arranged itself in her imagination in ways that had very little to do with the violinist.

He was already in the room when they arrived, standing near the long windows with a glass of wine and two gentlemen she did not know, and he saw her before she saw him, which she discovered from the fact that when she did see him he was already looking. He excused himself from his companions with the unhurried ease of a man whose social exits were as graceful as his entrances and crossed the room toward her family.

He greeted her mother first, which was correct, and Éléonore second, which was also correct, and then he turned to Marianne and said, “I had hoped you would be here,” in a tone that suggested the hope had been genuine and its fulfillment was a matter of some importance to the evening.

“The violinist is supposed to be extraordinary,” Marianne said, because she had promised herself she would not immediately say something that revealed how much she had been hoping he would be here too.

“He is,” Alejandro said. “I heard him in Havana three years ago. He played a Viotti concerto that I have not been able to stop hearing since.” He said it simply, without performance, and Marianne felt the small internal adjustment she always felt when he said something that proved he was genuinely musical and not merely conversant with the idea of music. It was one of the things that made him difficult to be cautious about.

They found seats as the room arranged itself, and by the circumstance of several people moving at once to accommodate Céleste and a friend of hers near the back, Marianne found herself in the second row with Alejandro beside her and Éléonore one seat further along, close enough to be present and far enough to be otherwise engaged. Marianne did not examine this arrangement too carefully. She settled her skirts and looked at the musicians tuning at the front of the room and told herself she was going to listen properly.

The violinist was, in fact, extraordinary.

She had not doubted it, but there was a difference between believing a thing and being taken entirely off guard by it, and the first notes of the opening movement took her somewhere she had not expected to go so quickly: somewhere high and exposed, where feeling ran close to the surface and the ordinary social management of it became very difficult. She was aware of Alejandro beside her in the particular way she was always aware of him, the warmth of proximity, the line of his sleeve against the air near her arm, and the music made this awareness larger than it usually was, which was already considerable.

He leaned toward her slightly, not enough to occasion remark, and said very quietly, “The second movement is the one.”

She did not trust herself to respond with anything sensible, so she said nothing, and he seemed to understand this as the agreement it was.

The second movement was, in fact, the one. It was slow and searching and structured around a melody that kept returning to the same phrase and finding it different each time, as though the music were conducting an inquiry into something it could not resolve, and Marianne felt it in the specific place behind her sternum where she felt everything that mattered. She was aware, distantly and without much caring, that her face was probably showing more than was strictly advisable in a room full of people she was only beginning to know. Éléonore would notice. Éléonore always noticed. But Éléonore was not beside her, and the music was, and Alejandro was, and the roses in the heat of the candles gave off a sweetness that was almost too much and was precisely enough.

When the movement ended she came back to herself gradually, the way one surfaces from deep water, and found Alejandro watching her with an expression she had not seen on him before. It was quieter than his usual expressions, less arranged. It lasted only a moment before his social composure resumed, but she had seen it, and she held it carefully, the way one holds something that might be fragile.

“You feel music,” he said. It was an observation, not a compliment.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“No,” he said. “They do not.”

The interval arrived and the room rearranged itself into conversation, and Alejandro brought her a glass of lemonade without being asked and stood with her near the window while Éléonore spoke with Madame Fontenot and Céleste was absorbed into a group of older women whose conversation had the comfortable density of long acquaintance. The window looked out over Rue Royale, and the street below was still active in the way New Orleans streets were active in the evening, unhurried and lit by the lamps that turned the banquette a warm amber.

“You are happy here,” Alejandro said, looking at the street rather than at her. “In New Orleans. Despite everything.”

“Despite everything,” she agreed. “I did not expect to be. When we first came to the cottage I thought I should never feel easy anywhere again. But the city has a way of insisting on itself. It does not wait for you to be ready for it.”

“No,” he said. “It does not.” A pause. “I thought of little else when I was in Havana. Two years of thinking of this street, that corner, the way the light is different here than anywhere else. There is no light in the world like New Orleans light.”

She looked at him. He was still looking at the street, his profile toward her, and in the warm lamp-glow through the window he looked, she thought, like someone in a painting who does not know they are being observed.

“What brought you back?” she asked. “Beyond the light.”

He turned then, and his eyes when they met hers had the quality she found most difficult to account for: the sense of looking directly at something rather than in its direction. “Various obligations,” he said. “Family matters that required my return. Doña Isabel does not consider Havana a suitable reason to neglect one’s responsibilities.” He said it lightly, with the dry affection he always brought to descriptions of his aunt, but something beneath the lightness was less light than the manner suggested, and she noticed it the way she had noticed things throughout the evening: too clearly for comfort, not clearly enough to name.

“You speak of obligations very often,” she said, before she had decided to say it.

He looked at her for a moment without speaking. “Do I?”

“On the levee you mentioned family obligations twice. Tonight you mention them again.” She met his eyes steadily, because she was Marianne Dashwood and she had never learned to ask a question while looking away from it. “I do not ask to pry. I ask because you seem, sometimes, to be telling me something you are not quite saying.”

Something moved across his face, a shift too quick and complex to read, and then the social composure came back, not entirely, but enough. He looked at his glass. “You are very perceptive.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No,” he said, quietly. “It is not.” He looked up. “There are things I am not at liberty to speak of freely. Not yet. I hope you will trust that this is not, on my part, a want of frankness but a want of freedom.” A pause. “There are people whose wishes must be consulted before I can speak as I would choose to.”

Marianne received this in silence. It could mean a dozen things, and she was aware that she was choosing, without full justification, to hear it as the most hopeful of them: that he was constrained by Doña Isabel’s opinions, by family expectation, by the same kinds of pressure that pressed on everyone in this city in one form or another, and that the constraint was temporary and its removal a matter of time and management. It was possible this was exactly what he meant. It was possible it was not. She knew, with the part of her mind that she was not consulting very carefully this evening, that these two possibilities were not equally weighted.

But the second movement of the concerto was still in her chest, and he had brought her lemonade without being asked, and he had looked at her in the interval between the first and second movements with an expression that was quieter than his usual expressions and less arranged, and she was nineteen years old and the room smelled of roses, and she chose.

The concert resumed. The violinist played the final movement with a speed and precision that brought several people to the edge of their seats, and when it ended the room applauded with a warmth that Madame Fontenot received on the musician’s behalf with visible satisfaction. Alejandro applauded beside Marianne, and when the noise subsided he turned to her and said, “Well?”

“You were right about the second movement,” she said.

He laughed, and for a moment he looked genuinely pleased rather than charming, which was, she was finding, a more alluring quality in him than the charm.

She did not examine the distinction. The evening was too full and too warm and the roses too sweet for examination, and Éléonore was approaching from across the room with the look she wore when she had decided the time for departure had arrived, and Marianne would think about the other things tomorrow.