70 Clarisse's Disturbing Story

This chapter is short, but it needs to be addressed by itself because it brings up the taboo subject of incest. Of course, in the present age (the "digital" age, the "information" age) when we are saturated with a thousands things we don't want to know about, nothing seems to really be taboo.

What is curious is how casually Clarisse brings up the "incident" with her father. The chapter begins:

Redecorating old castles was the specialty of the well-known painter van Helmond, whose masterpiece was his daughter Clarisse, and one day she unexpectedly walked in on Ulrich.

On the surface, her reason for visiting Ulrich couldn't be more middle class: her father's business was slow, and he sent her "to find out whether you couldn't use your splendid aristocratic connections just a little for him." But Clarisse has other reasons behind her visit:

"Anyway, if you can do it, you will. If not, you won't. Of course, I promised him you would. But I came for another reason. His asking me to see you put an idea into my head. It's about a certain problem in my family. I'd like to hear what you think."

The "certain problem" was that Clarisse had as a friend, Lucy Pachhofen, a young woman Clarisse's father was "interested in" in more than a social way. Clarisse explains:

"Lucy's friendship for me was of course mixed up with the feeling that she had a man for a lover whom I still obediently called 'Papa.' She was more than a little proud, but at the same time it made her terribly ashamed to face me."

Ulrich interrupts to say "It strikes me . . . that nothing much had really happened between them," and Clarisse agrees.  Then she goes on to explain how her father called out her name one night when they were visiting with Lucy.

"I had no intention of answering him, but this weird thing happened: from somewhere deep inside me, as though I were a deep space, came a sound like a whimper."

In reaction, her father "almost fell on my bed, and his head was lying on the pillow beside mine." Clarisse seems to take a curious detached pleasure in analyzing the situation:

"Oh, I tell you, if it were possible to tell afterward all one felt at such a moment, it would be something really enormous. I think he was beside himself with fury against the whole world of propriety, because of what it had made him miss. Suddenly I sense that he is himself again, and I know right away, although it's pitch-dark, that he's absolutely convulsed with a ruthless hunger for me."

But Clarisse resists, and her father "instantly sat up":

 "I couldn't see what was going on in his face; embarrassment, I suppose. Maybe gratitude. After all, I had saved him at the last moment. You must understand: an old man, and a young girl has the strength to do that!

Ulrich's reaction is stunned silence, but the narrator steps in to explain that his "silence had sobered her and dissipated the idea that had kept her under its spell."  Once again we're asked to consider the power ideas have over us.

Having told her disturbing story, Clarisse leaves as casually as she entered: "Trim and correct, in a tailored dress she wore only when she came into town, she stood there, ready to leave, and held out her hand to say good-bye.