#violet shillito

‘I asked for a sitting-room of my own next to my bedroom and somehow secured it [at the Chevy Chase School], and there with my new collection of books, my large photographs of Mona Lisa and St. John the Baptist, together with some photographs of Violet, I made a kind of romantic retreat from the thoughtless gay, noisy girls in the house.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I did not see Mary and Violet any more that summer … I traveled about with my mother and I continued to read Alfred de Musset and the novels of George Sand, and so recovered a little of the mood that I had shared in Paris with the girls in the sweet secrecy of their little salon on the Avenue du Bois.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I sank into a colorless depression and all my bright fantasies deserted me. Away from Violet, I no longer thrilled to her; the wonder of life had departed. Even the meanings we had perceived together vanished from my recollection and everything in life seemed flat and hopeless to me … After the days I had spent near Violet, the contrast between her and other people seemed shocking.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I listened to the music in the days I spent at Bayreuth with so great an intensity and concentration that I learned it by heart and found afterwards that I had all the scores, including Parsifal (I should say particularly Parsifal) memorized forever. To this day I can hear Violet singing over the ta-tata-ta-ta-ta of the anvil motif, her fingers tapping it out on my hand.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘Violet did not draw away from me. Our natural harmony sang on through that night and the next, when we came together again. But into her eyes that compassionate look that was like a mother’s who knows more than the child can understand and is so mute, that sweet, rueful, loving smile was on her face now all the time we were together, and it was called there by that glad life of our blood, which for want of a better term I must call music—but she had named to me by the term sensualité.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘Violet and I lay in the quiet stone room, and I let it all drift into myself, all the past of that place. I turned my dreams to Violet where she lay beside me, a long, stiff effigy in the white light from the moon shining on the wall. I saw her smile gleaming still and sweet and subtle. She knew me and could read my imaginings as though they unfurled before me in scrolls of thought from behind my brow.

“What?” I asked her tenderly, more to let her know by the tone of my voice that I loved her than that she should tell me what I knew already. I reached out my hand and laid it shyly upon her left breast, cupping it with my palm. In-between her young breast and the sensitive palm of my hand there arose all about us, it seemed, a high, sweet singing… .

We needed no more than to be in touch like that with each other, just hand and breast, to make our way into a new world together. “Je t’aime,” murmured Violet, and I answered, “Et je t’aime.”

I looked at her again across the dim light and I saw her smile once more—a different smile. She looked happy, rueful, merry, and a little resigned.

“Je ne savais pas que je sois sensuelle,” she whispered, “mais il paraît que je le suis.”

“Et pourquoi pas?” I asked, for it seemed to me if that was what was meant by sensualité it was exquisite and commendable and should be cultivated. It was a more delicious life I felt in me than I had ever felt before. I thought it was a superior kind of living too. I looked at Violet questioningly. Since she had that music in her, surely she, so cognizant of fine values, would appreciate it as I did. But she didn’t answer. She gave a tiny little sigh and continued to smile, but a deeper, a different meaning had come into it now. Something incredibly antique and compassionate …’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I remember only the room in which I spent the night with Violet, Mary sleeping next to us in a small adjoining dressing-room. The picture comes back to me clearly: Violet and Mary and I standing on the old stone floor that had a few strips of rush matting on it, standing in our little flannel peignoirs, brushing our hair, while two candles on the muslin-covered dressed threw great shadows of us over the whitewashed walls.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I looked at Violet as she waited in the tall grasses, with the dark masses of the château behind her. And I thought that she looked as though she had come out of the round turrets to meet us, leaving her tapestry frame when she saw us on the road. She was always like that; she belonged to all ages, she was like a synthesis of the past.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘Violet had come across the fields to meet the cart. She stood in the long grass and smiled at me with her deep, intentional, loving smile. Any one to whom Violet has given that look will never forget it. The words “look” or “smile” describe adequately enough the gestures with which people convey themselves outwardly to the world. But what happened between Violet and the one to whom she felt she could give her spirit was so vital and electric and intense that her buried ardor leaping to her eyes seemed to flash past the barrier of her flesh and enter one in a swift possession, and go running into one’s secret channels like a permeating, sweet elixir. No, the word “look” cannot tell about it—it made one understand the Immaculate Conception.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘I saw Violet against the dark immovable mass of the château as she walked towards us, knee-deep in the grasses already yellowing, for it was July.  She had on a soft blue batiste dress open at the neck, and a coarse straw hat trimmed with black velvet bows and a wreath of poppies and wheat. Her arms were bare to the elbow and there was such an expression of something in their soft pink curves, in her substantial wrists and padded, intelligent hands. I could not think what it was they expressed so fluently, but it was something vital and feminine and even matronly.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘She had a powerful atmosphere of the au delà  around her! One felt raised up to grander altitudes and greater capacities for pain, and therefore for spiritual development, when one was near her as she flowed deeper into the magical release of art. I learned, in those days, the meaning of art for life’s sake… . Violet had awakened once for all the strange, ineffable love that no words of mine can name, nor any other love completely submerge or destroy—that has to do with purely spiritual values, though quite unqualified by ethics or morals as we have hitherto perceived them.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘It was such sweet pain to listen to music with Violet. Her pointed lips parted a little over her projecting teeth, her eyelids drooping over her slanted eyes, she sat motionless and absorbing the sound and interpreting in terms of her own the arabesques of sound.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘Sometimes … Violet, noting my look of almost witty pain, would catch my face between the soft thick palms of of her hands and, bending her face over mine, would plunge her own gallant red-brown look into my eyes—deep, appreciative, encouraging—and she would murmur: “Ah, des yeux insondables!”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories,Vol. I: Background,1933

‘We stayed a few weeks in Paris. Sometimes Mrs. Shillito would go shopping in the Rue de la Paix, or to her dress-maker’s, and would take us along in her ample open carriage. We would wait for her as she dallied in the peculiarly leisurely ways of ladies a generation ago, and we scanned the faces of the men and women who passed and talked about them and their “kinds.” Almost all the men Mary and Violet sized up rapidly as cochon, petit cochon, grand cochon, and really they did seem so to our taste, fed as we were upon the delicate heroes of 1830. They were terribly disgusting creatures. The men in the Rue de la Paix or any street in Paris of the early nineties were beastly-looking in our fastidious eyes. We were great spiritual snobs at that time.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘When she [Pauline] got rid of the governesses and even of the guardian and began to write poetry and have poets come to see her, Mr. Shillito had forbidden any further friendship between the girls and her. She was no longer comme il faut. So Violet saw her seldom now—it was difficult to manage meetings. She slept all day and the Shillito girls slept at night! But once in a while Violet stole up there late to Pauline, who adored her younger friend and felt her rarity. Violet spoke of Pauline, three years her senior, as one would of a beautiful, helpless child: “Pauvre chérie!”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘On the floor above the Shillitos there lived another mysterious girl. They told me about her—the beguiling, lovely Pauline Tarne, whose parents were dead and who had all the money she wanted and who lived there alone, writing poetry alone at night in a kind of hidden chapel in which she burned incense. She and the Shillitos had played together in the Bois when they were little girls, and she had had a governess and a guardian. When she reached eighteen years of age she had been presented at court in England. Violet had a little photograph of her in a long white train. Her mutinous face looked eager and beautiful.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘The girls [Violet and Mary] appeared to their parents to be two docile creatures, not overburdened with beauty, but having an elegance of their own that their Parisian bringing-up had developed in them. Mr. Shillito, having plenty of money, provided governesses and concerts and opera tickets, and all the books and photographs they asked for, and left them a good deal to themselves and lived with his wife apart in the larger rooms of the apartment.

This was the way jeunes filles were brought up in those days and I am sure that everybody in the family was satisfied to have it so.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘[Violet] was weary … weary … weary; the old, exquisite pattern growing dim … civilization coming to pieces … and Violet knowing it … because she had reached the last phase, which is consciousness of the relative state and where, if one belongs to the old order, the wave at its crest sights the shore and falls back into dissolution. Violet was, of all the people I have ever known of the old world (and by the old world I mean the thought, the feeling, and the knowing of the past) the highest evolved, the one who had reached the farthest. She held all the past within her, and she felt the end was near at hand: she spoke often of the debacle that was upon the heels of the world, upon her own heels—of everything going under. She could not do anything about life. She could scarcely live in actions at all: all her living was of the intuition—a culture that she and her psychic ancestors had created and cultivated, carrying its increasing weight through endless generations, and that I and my kind would take over and perhaps painlessly, without effort, carry over into the new life in which she would have no part, her work being ended.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Nothing had ever deepened me or opened such wide gates as Violet and what she gave me. A whole new world of personalities and experiences in the books and music in her little salon… . the range was wide, going back to the Greek classics and forward as far as José Maria. The great lack was humor. The principal motive was pain in all these lives I touched. The words in Amiel’s Journal that I first found there also sound the weariness of the vision they all celebrated: “Que vivre est difficile, oh, mon cœur fatigué!” This was the note of the fin de siècle—of more than that, of the end of the great era that had lasted for hundreds of years. Since those days I have seen coming into the world something new, something braver than resignation or sorrow nobly borne. Sorrow has had its day, and weariness too. The world has had a rebirth and a new set of values has taken the place of old ones. I think that Violet knew she would not go on into the new life and that perhaps I might. She was old … old … when I knew her. She seemed to have imaginatively lived all lives and sounded every depth. She was like the Mona Lisa, a photograph of whom hung near the piano, and to whom she led me that first day, saying “Vois-tu? Elle est un grand réservoir. Elle sait tout, elle contient tout. Et elle aime tout de même…”’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933

‘Violet played Chopin for me. She had a little grand piano there in the small salon and she used to play late in the afternoons before dark, or evening by candlelight, when I had gone there to dine.

Then, when the limit of romantic love and sadness had been sounded, she would play Beethoven and cut deeper channels for feeling and beauty to flow in—the acceptance of life and resignation to its betrayals. Mary’s tears flowed when Violet played Beethoven.’

— Mabel Dodge Luhan,Intimate Memories, Vol. I: Background, 1933