Burning Secret [1911/2008] – ★★★★1/2

“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Stefan Zweig knew that authentic drama, horror, trauma may simply reside in one’s realisation of personal circumstances, situation, predicament. The story in this psychologically astute novella takes place in Semmering, Austria. When one dashing dandy, a baron, stops at a resort all alone, he is ready for his next romantic conquest partly to ward off the boredom in this place. He is young, but already an expert womaniser, and his gaze falls on one beautiful woman who also happens to be with her twelve year-old boy. The Baron’s pursuit of the woman starts through befriending that boy called Edgar, but the Baron does not even realise the dangers behind sowing so many seeds of attachment, as Saint-Exupéry also wrote in The Little Prince: “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed“.

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