Vivienne de Watteville - Seeds That The Wind May Bring (1965)

Seeds That The Wind May Bring (1965)

Travelling in the Midi in June 1929, as she tells us in her third and final book, Vivienne chances to visit with her Swiss grandmother Blanche Eleonore de Gingins (an unfailing supporter of her adventurous approach to life) the Ile de Port-Cros, one of the Îles d'Hyères on the Côte d'Azur. Enchanted by the unspoilt island, she conceives the idea of settling in a remote gîte there and making it "a rest-home for world-weary friends". She rents a house in the bay of Port Man, orders alterations and, shopping recklessly in Paris in August (she has now come into a legacy), furnishes it to perfection. Things at first go to plan, though she is cheated and brow-beaten by all around her ("Bleak is the battle of the lone woman in Latin countries," she notes). She observes, detached, the failing relationships of her world-weary guests. But her idyll turns to nightmare when alone during the long, wind-tormented winter months, she finds to her horror that her only servant, a full-blooded young Italian called Josef, has developed a passion for her. Josef is driven to frenzies of jealousy by the visits of a cultivated Englishman, Bunt; and in a dramatic climax reminiscent of a D. H. Lawrence plot, though with an un-Lawrentian outcome, Vivienne, "like one waking from the dead", is forced to confront all her psychological demons: her "freedom-complex" ("it was my own will to be free that had bound me hand and foot" ... "the battle within raged between this devil's pride and the other voice which pleaded for the self's surrender" ); the ambivalent ties that bind her to her father's memory; the delayed trauma of her father's death; fear of "saddling with the wrong companion for the rest of life"; extreme perfectionism. In the book that she wrote about this Port-Cros adventure, Seeds that the Wind may bring (published posthumously in 1965), we find a travel-writer confronting with honest self-examination the question 'What am I doing here?'. De Watteville's third book thus becomes a mature and ironic - but necessary - sequel to her two previous ones. It is, moreover, in its latter pages, a love-story: about "the heaven-sent gift of two people of perfect understanding". Bunt (Capt. George Gerard Goschen, soldier, diplomat), a stranger she had met at an Albert Hall concert and who visits her on the island, shares her love of solitude and beauty and music and games, saves her from the unhappy Josef, and at the end becomes her fiancé.