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Part 3: The Zero Winter
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Passion, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion
Storytelling
Gambling
War
Hero-Worship and Religion
Summary
Analysis
Some years later, Henri can hear the dead “on this rock,” though people claim the dead do not speak. He hears Napoleon, who died “on his rock.” After the Russians took Paris, they arrested Napoleon. Napoleon waited on his island, escaped, and fought at Waterloo. Henri concludes: “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.” People play because they like the play, and all games’ endings are less exciting than expected. In victory, people have to keep fighting to guard what they’ve won. Eventually, even the people who win end up gambling “the valuable, fabulous thing” and losing.
Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to the British-controlled island of Saint Helena in 1815 and died there in 1821. Henri’s implicit comparison of Napoleon’s “rock” to “this rock” where Henri resides suggests that Henri has been imprisoned or exiled after murdering the cook. Henri’s repetition of the phrase “You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play” reminds readers yet again that risk is an unavoidable part of human life—even for people as powerful as Napoleon—and that everyone has the urge to gamble away the “valuable, fabulous thing” that is most important to them.
Themes
When Napoleon was exiled to an island the first time, he felt like he had regained his penniless youth. The second time he was exiled to an island, the Third Coalition intended his death. Though Henri loathes Napoleon, he also loathes the Third Coalition, who won due to “numbers” and not “righteousness.” When Napoleon visits Henri, he begs Henri to profess love. Henri thinks how all the people who followed Napoleon into exile intended to make money writing about him, “exhibiting this lamed beast.”
Henri’s claim that Napoleon felt like he had regained his youth after his first exile suggests that losing everything—and thus gaining the opportunity to gamble to win everything back—made Napoleon feel young again. The Third Coalition refers to the alliance including the UK, Russia, and Austria, whose member countries fought against Napoleon. Henri’s loathing for the Third Coalition suggests that his current hatred of war and military powers is general, not just symptomatic of his disillusionment with Napoleon. Meanwhile, the fact that all Napoleon’s attendants wanted to “exhibit” him as a “lamed beast” through their writing emphasizes that writing is not just the objective communication of truth but a motivated form of communication: it occurs for a reason and serves a particular person’s ends, rendering it untrustworthy.
Themes
Henri lives in a tiny room with a window that is not barred, unlike most windows in the building. When he looks out, he sees the lagoon—and, occasionally, Villanelle waving from a boat. Sometimes, he smells porridge, and his mother visits him. Henri no longer remembers how many years he has been living in this place. When he first arrived, the cook would try to strangle him each night as he was falling asleep. Eventually Henri was moved to a single room to keep from upsetting the others. One other man in the place, who believes he can walk on water, has a single room because he is rich—Henri could be rich, except he won’t take Villanelle’s money.
Wherever Henri is staying, most windows are barre, and one of his co-residents believes he can walk on water—details implying that Henri may be in an insane asylum. That Henri is interacting with dead people such as his mother and the cook lends credence to this possibility—though given the other miraculous occurrences in The Passion, including Villanelle herself walking on water, it is unclear whether readers should take Henri’s claims about seeing dead people as a sign of his insanity and unreliability as a storyteller—or as another instance of the story’s supernatural reality.
Themes
In a flashback, Henri and Villanelle hide the two boats, the cook, and his heart inside a garbage tunnel. While Villanelle puts her boots on, Henri sees that her feet can expand or collapse “like a fan.” He longs to touch them, but he has bloody hands. As Villanelle and Henri walk home, Villanelle throws Henri up against a wall and kisses him anytime someone passes—to hide Henri’s bloody clothes with her body.
In this scene, Villanelle finally shows Henri her webbed feet for the first time, and she also throws him up against walls to kiss him. Yet rather than being signs that she finally reciprocates his passion, these incidents ironically emphasize that Henri has committed a terrible crime in part to protect someone who does not reciprocate his passion.
Themes
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When Villanelle and Henri reach her house, they tell her mother and stepfather what happened. Her mother mentions dreaming of death. The family puts Henri to bed. In his dreams, he hears Villanelle tells her mother and stepfather not to get involved when the authorities visit—which they will do, as Villanelle is the cook’s wife. When Villanelle’s mother and stepfather ask what will happen to Henri, Villanelle asserts that she’ll take care of him.
Though Villanelle does not reciprocate Henri’s passion, she immediately swears to protect Henri when her parents ask about him—showing that she does care for him and thus that the book recognizes many more forms of affection than passion.
Themes
For the next five days, Henri and Villanelle live thoughtless, hedonistic lives: visiting beautiful churches, sunbathing, eating local foods. On the sixth day, three authorities come knocking early in the morning. They question Villanelle and Henri about the cook’s murder and what happened after they fled the Casino. They also explain that as the cook’s wife Villanelle stands to inherit a lot of money, supposing she isn’t the one who murdered him. They take Villanelle away to identify the cook’s body, and she does not come back for two days.
Earlier in the novel, Villanelle claimed that Venice gave itself over to hedonism after Napoleon’s conquest took its freedom. Now, she and Henri give themselves over to hedonism because they know they are waiting to lose their freedom to the law. This parallel suggests that seeking pleasure—and even seeking passion—may sometimes constitute an attempt to escape the knowledge of one’s powerlessness and lack of freedom.
Themes
On the third day, Villanelle returns to the house escorted by authorities, who take Henri away to the cook’s lawyer. The lawyer asks Henri to sign a statement saying that Villanelle murdered the cook and Henri was an “accessory.” If he signs, the lawyer promises to let Henri go free. When Henri asks what they’ll do with Villanelle, the lawyer explains that according to the cook’s will, all his possessions go to the church if Villanelle can’t inherit. At Henri’s surprised expression, the lawyer mentions that the cook liked looking at choirboys. Henri, realizing that he has “the wild card” and the power, announces that he murdered the cook and removed his heart. The lawyer pronounces Henri insane and leaves, locking the door behind him.
The cook was initially attracted to Villanelle because she dressed like a young man. Now readers learn that he willed all his possessions to the church if she couldn’t inherit because he liked looking at choirboys. These details hint that perhaps the cook’s passion or obsession was always for young men, a feeling he displaced onto Villanelle and onto the sex workers he abused. The novel does not give enough information for readers to judge whether this interpretation is true, however. When Henri refers to his true confession as “the wild card,” meanwhile, it suggests that he is engaged in a form of gambling with his own future when he confesses to protect Villanelle.
Themes
That evening, Villanelle visits and asks Henri whether he knows what he’s doing. When Henri protests that he only told the truth, Villanelle tells him that the lawyer, whose name is Piero, will try him as insane. If this happens, Henri will be executed or consigned to San Servelo, an asylum on a Venetian island, for life. Henri asks what Villanelle plans to do. She says she’ll use the cook’s money to buy a house and work to free Henri. Villanelle clasps Henri to her heart, which he hears beating. It reminds him of his mother, who used to pull him to her chest and quietly recite scripture. He tells Villanelle he loves her, like he used to tell his mother.
When Villanelle clasps Henri to her heart and he feels it beating, the gesture suggests that she loves him without being passionately in love with him—that she loves him without losing anything essential of her identity, unlike the way she lost her heart to the woman with gray-green eyes. The comparison between Villanelle and Henri’s mother here emphasizes that Villanelle has a familial, not a romantic, love for Henri.
Themes
The following morning, Henri is tried, found guilty, and sent to San Servelo for life. Villanelle promises that she’ll visit him in about a week and, eventually, free him. She says that they can do it—they walked from Moscow and can “walk on water.” When Henri points out that only she can walk on water, Villanelle insists they both can.
Henri challenges the reliability of Villanelle’s narration in this moment: while he believes that she can “walk on water” due to her peculiar webbed feet, he refuses to believe that this miraculous skill extends to him.
Themes
Henri takes to San Servelo the icicle containing Domino’s gold chain and an embroidered depiction of the Virgin Mary sewn by Villanelle’s mother. The asylum used to be for rich patients only, but Napoleon opened it to rich and poor patients, and the grounds are now quite rundown. No one cares for the garden anymore. Henri isn’t afraid of the other people in the asylum, but he fears the voices he starts to hear. When Villanelle visits, he tells her about the voices and the cook’s attempts to strangle him. She tells him there are no voices, but he knows there are.
While Henri challenged the reliability of Villanelle’s stories in the previous scene, Villanelle challenges Henri’s reliability here—claiming that the ghosts that visit him aren’t real, even though Villanelle has had equally fantastical and unlikely experiences in the past. Their mutual distrust foreshadows a possible breakdown in their relationship.
Themes
Villanelle tries to find a legal way to free Henri but determines he will have to escape. For several months, as she visits Henri, he seems cheerful and ordinary, preoccupied with his notebooks. Villanelle is otherwise preoccupied: she is renting a six-story house opposite that of the woman with gray-green eyes. She stares across the water into the woman’s windows until one day, while she is beating a rug on the balcony, she and the woman see each other—at which point she drops her rug into the water. The woman, realizing that they are neighbors, invites Villanelle over.
Though the woman with gray-green eyes no longer possesses Villanelle’s heart, Villanelle intentionally puts herself in the woman’s path once more—hinting that Villanelle may gamble her heart with the woman again and thus revealing Villanelle’s addiction to emotional risk.
Themes
Villanelle calls on the woman with gray-green eyes the next day. Though years have passed, Villanelle feels like she did when she first came to visit the woman in her Casino clothes. After knocking on the woman’s door, she covers her heart with her hand. When they eat dinner, the woman explains that her husband has abandoned her to search for the Holy Grail and may or may not return. Villanelle thinks of this event as “the wild card” and wonders what would have happened if it had been drawn years ago.
When Villanelle covers her heart with her hand, it indicates that she wants to keep the woman from stealing it again—and, symbolically, that she wants to retain control and a sense of self in her subsequent interactions with the woman. When Villanelle refers to the woman’s husband’s possibly permanent absence as a “wild card,” meanwhile, it shows how chance and external circumstances greatly affect the viability of Villanelle and the woman’s passionate relationship.
Themes
When the woman with gray-green eyes asks whether Villanelle will stay, Villanelle angrily thinks that “passion will not be commanded” yet feels that the woman still has power over her as her first love. Again the woman asks whether Villanelle will stay. Villanelle thinks that people who encounter passion when they are older have to choose between three difficult options: they can give up the comfortable lives they have built, tiresomely “juggle” their passion with their comfortable lives as the woman and Villanelle once did, or reject passion entirely as a lurking danger—and end up haunted by passion.
When Villanelle thinks that “passion will not be commanded,” she means that she cannot order herself to feel passion for the woman again now that it would be easier for the women to conduct their affair. Yet Villanelle’s musings on passion suggest she feels some empathy for the woman: Villanelle recognizes that because the woman stumbled upon her passion for Villanelle when she was older and married, she wasn’t simply free to do what she liked—she had to choose between three unpalatable options.
Themes
Villanelle is tempted to stay one more night with the woman with gray-green eyes, but she warns herself that the woman will steal her heart again if she does. She leaves and spends the night wandering the city. The next day, she moves out of her rental house and never returns to it.
Villanelle wants to gamble her heart again—but she wants to retain the self-possession and self-control that her heart represents too. As such, she decides not to gamble her heart and so permanently ends her passionate relationship with the woman.
Themes
Thinking of Henri, Villanelle muses that though she loves him in a “brotherly incestuous way,” she cannot return his passion and he cannot steal her heart. She speculates about what would happen if someone had ever returned his passion—his passion which first landed on Napoleon, who later proved “unworthy” and turned Henri’s passion to hatred. She speculates, too, that killing the cook may have driven Henri insane: in his eight years in the army, he never killed a man, though he risked his own life saving comrades.
When Villanelle describes her love for Henri as both “brotherly” and “incestuous,” she means that she has both familial and sexual feelings for him—but not passionately romantic ones. As Villanelle experiences passion as a loss of self-control, symbolized by the loss of her heart, she expresses her lack of passion for Henri by saying that he would be unable to steal his heart. Sadly, Henri has never felt passionate love for someone he could expect to return it—Napoleon, for instance, could not reasonably be expected to return the love of each individual one of his soldiers. Still, given how badly Villanelle’s reciprocated passion for the woman with gray-green eyes turned out, it’s not clear that reciprocated passion would have improved Henri’s life, either.
Themes
Early in Henri’s incarceration, Villanelle tells him to ignore the voices, which are really his own invention. He stops mentioning them—but she hears from the asylum guards that his nightly “self-strangling” has gotten him moved to a single room. Villanelle and Henri continue to have sex when she visits him. One day, she tells him that she is pregnant and will help him escape in a month. When he suggests that they can marry afterward, she says she’ll never marry again—and he needs to flee to France. She promises to bring their child to visit once the coast is clear. They have sex afterward, and Henri puts his hands on her throat and says, “I’m your husband.” When Villanelle shoves him away, he cries—and they never have sex again, which is “not [Villanelle’s] doing.”
The guards say that Henri has been engaged in “self-strangling,” which indicates that he has been choking himself while he hallucinates the cook trying to kill him. Having killed the cook, Henri assumes the cook’s identity, claiming to be Villanelle’s “husband” and trying to choke her during sex. This disturbing incident implies that murder, like war, is self-propagating: when a person kills someone, it tends to lead to more violence rather than peace. Yet Henri’s horror at his own behavior, evidenced by his refusal to have sex with Villanelle again after his attempt to strangle her, suggests that he still passionately loves her despite his occasional murderousness.
Themes
On the day that Villanelle has set for Henri’s escape, she goes to fetch him, and he tells her Patrick has just visited. She urges him to leave with her, but he tells her the asylum is his home and asks what his mother would think. The next time Villanelle visits San Servelo, the warden informs Villanelle that Henri refuses to see her. Villanelle comes back many times, but each time, Henri refuses to see her.
Henri is spinning a narrative around himself in which ghosts are visiting him in the asylum—meaning he can’t escape, lest he no longer be able to see and interact with the dead. What Henri believes matters more to his behavior than what seems actually to be the case—namely, that the ghosts are hallucinations, not real visitations.
Themes
Much later, while rowing in the lagoon with her daughter, who has feet like Henri’s, Villanelle sees Henri from the window. They wave at each other. But the next time she visits, he still won’t see her, and he returns her letters unopened. She is sure she’s “lost” him and thinks that he may have “lost himself” too.
Villanelle experienced her passion for the woman with gray-green eyes as a loss of self, symbolized by the loss of her literal, physical heart. She now suspects that Henri has “lost himself” due to his passion for her, which partly motivated him to kill the cook—an act of violence that seems to have driven him insane.
Themes
Villanelle’s daughter loves games of chance and will, Villanelle knows, one day gamble her heart away. Villanelle herself lives alone, though she doesn’t always sleep alone. Often, she goes to the Casino and looks at the white hands on the wall: “the valuable, fabulous thing.” She wonders whether she will gamble her own “valuable, fabulous” thing now that she has repossessed it—and answers herself, “Yes.”
Villanelle predicts that her daughter will one day lose her heart in a wager. Villanelle also believes that she herself will again gamble her own “valuable, fabulous” thing—her heart, which symbolizes her self-control and identity. Villanelle’s predictions that she and her daughter will inevitably gamble their hearts in games of passion suggest that both passion and risk are unavoidable human experiences, both frightening and desirable to the individuals who engage in them.
Themes
“Après moi, le deluge.” Pondering this phrase, Henri thinks that, strangely enough, Napoleon was fooled by his own myth. The French turmoil barely affects him in Venice. Henri glad that the English and Russians chose to trivialize Napoleon with exile on Elba rather than martyring him—and though his death has made him “a hero again,” he can’t take advantage of it now, so it doesn’t matter. All the same, though Henri is tired of hearing Napoleon ghost’s constantly repeated stories about himself, he likes that the cook’s ghost is afraid of Napoleon’s and leaves when Napoleon visits Henri.
“Après moi, le deluge” is a French phrase that literally translates to “After me, the flood.” It has two plausible meanings: first, “I don’t care about any disaster that occurs after I die,” and second, “After my death, disasters will occur.” Henri’s quotation of the phrase indicates that Napoleon believed terrible chaos would ensue after his death. But Napoleon was wrong: the turmoil that ensued after his death was merely local. Henri dislikes that people view Napoleon as “a hero again” after his death, presumably due to Henri’s disillusionment with his own passionate hero-worship of Napoleon.
Themes
Henri sends back Villanelle’s letters because they pain him excessively, though he still loves her and looks for her through his window. The day she tried to make him escape—to be “alone again”—Domino died. Henri knew this, though Domino never visits him, because the icicle containing Domino’s gold chain melted. He put the chain around his own neck, but when Villanelle came, she didn’t notice. He thinks that while he stayed with the French army first because he loved someone and then because he didn’t know what else to do, he stays in the asylum “by choice,” which matters to him.
Henri thinks of his passion for Napoleon and his passion for Villanelle as similar in that neither passion is reciprocated—Henri was just another replaceable soldier to Napoleon, and Villanelle doesn’t notice when Henri changes his appearance. Yet whereas Henri obeyed Napoleon up to the point he deserted the army, he rejects Villanelle’s plans and stays in the asylum “by choice”—indicating that his passion for Villanelle does not entail the loss of self-control that his passion for Napoleon did.
Themes
Henri doesn’t believe that they could have reached Villanelle’s escape boat without him killing someone again, and he doesn’t know why she’s going to have his child but doesn’t want to marry him. Sometimes he uses a mirror to spy on her in the lagoon without her seeing him. He sees the child in the boat, too, and wonders what her feet are like.
This passage suggests that Henri rejected Villanelle’s escape plan because he thought the escape would require violence—and he wanted to escape the cycle of violence that his passion for Napoleon, his army service, and the cook’s revenge had trapped him in.
Themes
Henri doesn’t talk to the other people in the asylum because it’s difficult to keep them on topic. They aren’t interested in Henri’s topics of conversation, “passion” and “obsession,” whose “dividing line is as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife.” When Henri deserted in Moscow, he thought he would find a better life. But if it weren’t for his mother and friends, his current life would be terrible. When he joined the army, he thought it would make him free, but everyone disagrees about where freedom truly resides. Henri now thinks that freedom is “lov[ing] someone else to forget about yourself even for one moment.” He thinks that “lukewarm” people wouldn’t care so much for war if they were brave enough to love.
Henri likes to talk about “passion” and “obsession.” He describes the difference between them as “thin and cruel as a Venetian knife”—a Venetian knife being the weapon with which he killed the cook. The allusion to the murder weapon in Henri’s discussion of passion and obsession indicates that Henri killed the cook primarily to protect not himself but Villanelle, the object of his passion. Meanwhile, the cook sought revenge on Henri and Villanelle out of obsessive hatred of them for humiliating him. Interestingly, whereas Villanelle experienced the loss of self in passion as a threatening and traumatic experience, Henri thinks that “forget[ting] about yourself” in passionate love is a form of freedom. The difference in their perspectives suggests that passion is an ambiguous experience—that it is positive or negative depending on a person’s interpretation. Meanwhile, Henri’s speculation that “lukewarm” (i.e., not passionate) people would care less about war if they could love suggests that war, like religion, is a sublimation of people’s passionate feelings.
Themes
Henri thinks that while love can “enslave[],” it brought him self-knowledge and made him brave enough to loathe those parts of himself unworthy of his beloved. It also made him see the true glory of the natural world. In the asylum, he works in the long-neglected garden. He has dug up and levelled the soil and plans to write Villanelle for some seeds—and to Joséphine, a noted botanist, who brought geraniums to France. Henri’s mother likes poppies, and he’ll plant grass for Patrick and a cypress for himself that will endure past his death: “I like to know that life will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood.”
Whereas Villanelle simply hated the loss of control and identity that came with passion, Henri acknowledges both that passionate love can “enslave[]” a person and that it can have positive consequences, such as self-knowledge, self-improvement, and an increased sensitivity to beauty. Henri’s passion has made him less egotistical: he “like[s] to know that life will outlive” him (i.e., that the world will continue after his death) in a way that passionately egotistical people like Napoleon are unable to appreciate.
Themes
Henri has adopted a motherless baby bird, which he feeds worms from the garden, and which can fly and sing. He feels that Villanelle taught him how to see beauty in strange places. One night, he dances naked in the rain. A warden who’s always looking out for Henri keeps trying to get him to dig with a spade rather than his hands, telling him that he’ll never leave if people still think him mad. But Henri likes “the freedom to make [his] own mistakes” and doesn’t want to leave.
Again, Henri attributes his new attunement to and appreciation for the natural world to his passion for Villanelle, suggesting that passion can be a positive as well as a destructive experience. While the warden endorses one cultural narrative about the asylum—that it is a place of terrible confinement one should want to escape—Henri tells another, more personal story: staying in the asylum asserts his “freedom to make [his] own mistakes.” Thus, Henri’s subjective interpretation of the asylum fundamentally changes and improves his experiences there.
Themes
Henri still loves Villanelle—for herself, not a “myth” he himself fashioned the way he did with Napoleon. He believes that his passion for her showed him true love, which is “about someone else,” in contrast with “inventing a lover,” which is “about you.”
While Henri has previously paralleled his passions for Villanelle and Napoleon, here he distinguishes his two passions. Because Napoleon was more a “myth” than an individual to Henri, Henri’s passion for Napoleon was really about Henri. By contrast, Henri’s passion for Villanelle was genuinely about Villanelle.
Themes
Henri receives a letter from Joséphine containing seeds. He recalls a rumor that when Joséphine was imprisoned during the Terror, she and other aristocratic women tended wild plants in their prison to bolster their spirits. This story pleases Henri so much that it “doesn’t matter” to him whether it’s true.
It “doesn’t matter” to Henri whether the story about Joséphine is true, which suggests that sometimes a story’s power derives from its meaning rather than its adherence to facts.
Themes
Henri says that on New Year’s Eve at midnight in Venice, every single church—of more than 100—rings its bells. He challenges anyone who doesn’t believe him to investigate for themselves. Meanwhile, on San Servelo, Henri skips the asylum’s mass and stares out the window. Last year, Villanelle came close and set off fireworks. Henri has just reread his notebook and found the passage about what it means to love Villanelle, how it gives him new self-knowledge. He says that he writes so that he never runs out of reading.
While Henri has just suggested that stories’ deeper meanings should matter more than their factual truthfulness, he now challenges his audience to fact-check him—a challenge indicating that he knows some people will still care more about superficial facts than deeper meanings. Meanwhile, when he rereads what he has written about Villanelle, passion, and self-knowledge, it suggests that Henri keeps himself intellectually occupied by telling and trying to understand the story of his own life.
Themes
Patrick, from Henri’s window, can see into St. Mark’s. Patrick still has excellent sight, but now he can see through walls too. He describes the entire church to Henri. More than 20 years ago, they went to church in Boulogne together. Henri asserts that he’ll be growing roses in San Servelo the next year. “On this rock? In this climate? I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”
Henri ends his story by suggesting he is satisfied with his life as a gardener in an asylum—and challenges the reader to “trust” that this secluded gardening life will be successful. By ending with this challenge to “trust” his “stories,” Henri asks readers to look to the deeper meaning of his life and passion rather than its surface unbelievability.
Themes
