Lucrezia Floriani, page 14
Salvator seemed to him to be more noisy, more crudely alive than ever. He had not felt happy away from them, but he had found distraction and amusement despite the disappointments and irritations one encounters in a life of pleasure. He related as much as he could of his stay in Venice. He described a ball at an old palace, excursions on the lagoons, music in churches and processions around St. Mark’s Square; then spoke of accidental but pleasant meetings, a Parisian friend, a beautiful English acquaintance, distinguished German and Slav personages, relatives of Karol – in short, over the dazzling prism in which Karol had forgotten himself, he projected the small magic lantern of society.
In everything he said there was nothing in any way unpleasant or perturbing. Yet Karol felt a horrible unease as if in the midst of a sublime concert a screeching old woman had suddenly added shrill sounds and a vulgar musical theme to the divine thoughts of the great masters. There was no one who interested him, nor anything which did not seem inferior to his situation and which did not seem unworthy of mention. He tried not to listen but, in spite of himself, he heard Salvator say to Lucrezia: “Now then, let me give you some news which will interest you. I met many of your friends, or rather, everybody, for everybody adores you, and not a single one of those who saw you even for one night, on the stage, can forget you. I saw Lamberti, your former fellow-producer, who still bewails your retirement and says that the theatre in Italy is now dead. I saw Count Montanari, of Bergamo, who until his last breath will speak of the day when you deigned to visit his villa; and young Santorelli who is still in love with you … And Countess Corsini who knew you in Rome and at whose home you consented one evening to read a drama written by her friend, the Abbé Varini, – a poor play, apparently, but you spoke it so well that everyone thought it good and all eyes were bathed in tears.”
“Do not remind me of my past sins,” said Lucrezia. “It may even be a mortal one to declaim a platitude carefully and conscientiously, it means deceiving the author and the audience. Thank heaven, I am no longer exposed to committing similar mistakes. And tell me, whom else did you meet?”
The prince sighed. He could not imagine that all this could interest his mistress. Salvator mentioned half a dozen other people and although Madame Floriani did not feel any positive interest in them, she listened with the kindliness which one owes to one’s friends. But there was one name which she took up, however, with a certain amount of concern. It was that of Boccaferri, an unfortunate artist whom she had rescued several times from destitution, although she had never had the slightest love for him nor even the remotest hint of infatuation.
“What! In debt again and to such an extent?” she said, after Salvator had given her some details about Boccaferri. “Is it impossible then to save the wretched man from his disorderly and improvident way of living?”
“I am afraid so.”
“No matter, we must try again.”
“I anticipated your wish; I gave him a little help.”
“Oh, thank you for that You are kind. I shall return it to you, Salvator.”
“Nonsense. Are you trying to prevent me from giving a little charity?”
“No, but in this case it is possibly misguided, and you did it out of consideration for me, because you only knew Boccaferri slightly and I am sure that he used my name to win your interest in his sad story.”
“What does it matter? He could not call upon a protectress whose name would be more effective. I like the rascal, he amuses me; he is so witty.”
“And so talented,” added Madame Floriani. “If he could only make use of his gift and wished to do so … Poor Boccaferri…”
Karol heard no more. He had walked a little behind the others, as they chatted and strolled along a path in the park. Then he stopped to see if when she reached a bend in the path, Lucrezia would turn round to look at him. But she did not turn round: she was engaged with Salvator in seeking some means of employing Boccaferri’s skill to paint scenery in some theatre other than Milan, Naples, Florence, Rome, Venice, etc. – all of them towns from which he had been driven through loose living and a capricious temperament.
“You say that an extra three hundred francs might induce him to undertake a journey to Sinigaglia where he could find employment, at least during the festival time? Well, I shall send it to him, because I can appreciate his disgust, pressed for money and compelled to put himself at the mercy of those who employ him. It is thus that extreme poverty breeds and increases itself tenfold”
As she spoke Lucrezia’s only thought was that she was fulfilling a duty of pity and charity. By one of those instincts of modesty which go with true benevolence she had even lowered her voice and walked a little faster so as not to be heard by Karol, and possibly also because she sensed that the subject was too ordinary to interest him.
But for the first time she was mistaken in her idea of what suited Karol’s state of mind He was only too interested in what she was saying. He would have wished not to miss a single word of it and yet he would have blushed to try and hear anything against her wishes. He stopped and hesitated for a moment and when she had vanished from sight, he was seized by vertigo and it seemed to him that an abyss had just opened between them.
What had happened and what was it that could cause him so much suffering? Nothing! But one who aspires to the glory of the gods requires nothing and less than nothing to make him fall from the heights of the empyrean to the lowest depths of hell The old classical writers whom we so foolishly scorn created the image whereby a fly had sufficed to plunge into the abysses of space the bold mortal who wished to steer the chariot of Phoebus along its celestial course. Let us, if we can, try and find a more apt and ingenious metaphor to express the little that we are, and the little that is required to trouble our happiness. I cannot do so. All I can say, in humble prose, is that Prince Karol had soared too high to descend by slow degrees. His fall had to be sudden and without apparent cause. The giant steeds of the sun were certainly very fiery and powerful, and the gadfly which made them bolt was a very poor and very small insect!
Karol left the garden, ran and shut himself in his room and paced about in it, pursued by the Furies. This soul, only a few moments ago so magnanimous and strong, was now nothing but the plaything of the meanest delusions. Who was this Boccaferri who interested Lucrezia so much? Some former lover perhaps! He remembered something which he had completely forgotten since the first day they met, namely that she had had many lovers. And why should she return with so much concern to a memory unworthy of her, when he, the betrothed of Lucie, had sacrificed the very portrait of this pure virgin, in order not to have even the likeness of any other woman than Lucrezia in his possession?
The more he strove to explain naturally so simple a fact, the more mysterious and hopeless were the complications he encountered. She had lowered her voice and she had walked faster as she spoke to Salvator. That was undeniable. She had not turned round at the end of the path to see if he was following her – she who for a whole month had not lost a single second of the time she could devote to him without neglecting the duties she owed to her family! And now she was still walking, leaning on the count’s arm, probably speaking warmly of this terrible memory and the mysterious person whom she had not even mentioned to him! He was amazed at this, as if Lucrezia had never told him anything of her life, forgetting, on the contrary, that he had always implored her never to accuse herself before him and to erase altogether the emotions of the past in order to concentrate on the enjoyment of the present.
So she was not returning … She was not wondering where he might be or why he had left her! The minutes seemed to him like hours and years … And Salvator, too, that insensitive, tactless friend who had come to entertain her with such problems and drop poisoned names into the cup of their happiness! Karol suffered so much in the space of a quarter of an hour that he felt that he had aged a whole century. Suddenly he shuddered as he heard the voices of Lucrezia and Salvator beneath his window. She was laughing! The count was reminding her of Boccaferri’s witticisms and eccentricities. She was laughing … and he, her lover, was enduring tortures without her even suspecting it!
Certainly poor Lucrezia was far from suspecting it. She was only a little uneasy not to see him near her and merely said to herself that as the subject of her conversation was strange to him he had preferred to plunge into his usual reveries. When she used to go to Menapace’s cottage, how many times had he told her that he preferred not to go in, but he had waited under the pink acacias, by the lakeside, to continue to converse with her in imagination!
Yet the instinct of her heart drew her back towards him more quickly than Salvator would have wished. He would have liked to keep her in the park and make her speak of her love. But she had progressed too fast along the path of exclusion which Karol had opened for her, to be in such a hurry as she usually was to give way openly to confidences and friendship. This time she was afraid of expressing the immensity of her happiness badly or of not being understood even partially.
She answered briefly, and with a subtlety which she discovered for the occasion, she led the conversation back to Boccaferri and directed their walk towards the house, for Karol was nowhere to be seen in the garden.
She was hardly in the drawing room when, making some excuse or other, she went up to the prince’s apartments.
The violence of his condition was revealed in his distracted face. A secret fury was seething deep in his breast. Afraid that he would be unable to pretend and not wishing to appear in this condition and lose all control of himself, as soon as he heard footsteps in the gallery, he rushed through another door and down the staircase. As he fled towards the shore of the lake he thought he could hear Lucrezia looking for him and calling his name.
But presently he saw issuing from a clump of trees a cloud of tobacco such as Salvator always trailed around his head like a halo. He thought that his friend was about to join him and fearing his looks even more than Lucrezia’s he dashed into old Menapace’s cottage, in the knowledge that no one would come and look for him in a place he was never known to enter. He had just seen the old man, accompanied by Biffi, leave the shore in his fishing boat and Karol felt sure that he would be left alone for as long a time as was necessary for him to regain command of himself and at least the appearance of calm.
After a while he did indeed grow calmer and he began to reproach himself for having dreamed a monstrous dream. The sight of this cottage in which he had never set foot since the day of his arrival nor ever closely examined until that moment filled him with a strange sensation when he found himself alone there in this emotional state.
The interior of this rustic dwelling which, thanks to Biffi’s efforts, was clean and tidy, had undergone no change since Madame Floriani’s childhood, and if the old fisherman had agreed, but only reluctantly, to the necessary repairs involving the fabric and the sanitation of the house, he had positively refused to allow the furniture to be renewed or the coarse material of the curtains to be renovated The only object which gave evidence of civilisation was a large engraving framed in rosewood which stood in the alcove behind the old man’s bed Karol leaned forward to look at it. It was Madame Floriani in all her beauty and all her glory, in the costume of Melpomene, bare-shouldered, wearing the antique diadem and with a sceptre in her hand A beautiful vignette encircled the noble face and was ornamented with the attributes of several muses: the mask of Thalia, the sock and the buskin side by side, the trumpet, the pearls, the myrtles of Calliope, Erato and Polyhymnia A couplet in classical Italian expressed the idea that as an actress of tragedy and comedy, as a heroic and historic poetess, as a letterata etc. etc. Lucrezia Floriani combined in herself all the talents and all the skills which are the glory of the theatre and letters.
This engraving was a tribute from the dilettanti of Rome, which Lucrezia had not wished to put in her villa; but her father had taken it because he had heard a servant say that such a beautiful print was worth at least two hundred francs.
He had set it up above a small pastel drawing which interested Karol much more and which represented a little girl of ten or twelve, in peasant costume, with a rose above her ear, a large silver pin in her hair, a delicate white chemisette and brick-red bodice. This portrait, though lacking skill in execution, possessed a charming naïvety. It had captured the frank, innocent air of a child, intelligent in thought and simple in feeling and upbringing. Below it ran the words: Antonietta. Menapace, aged ten, drawn from life by her godmother Lucrezia Ranieri.
On seeing these two portraits which presented so strange a contrast here in the cottage of her birth: the humble, happy child and the famous hapless woman, the former so pretty, so untroubled, with her innocent, bright and carefree smile, her firm, boyish breast chastely covered by a thick, coarse bodice; the latter, so beautiful, so severe, with her expressive look, her noble attitude, her proud bosom hardly veiled by the classical drapery – on seeing this contrast Karol experienced a feeling of terror and pain. He could not deny that both portraits were true to life and that Lucrezia, in the calm of her present life, had preserved or regained much of the sweet and touching expression of the innocent Antonietta Menapace. But the nobility, grace and allure which she had acquired in becoming Madame Floriani had also left an impression which for the first time frightened Karol when he saw her image ornamented and indeed revealed through the admiration of the painters of the portrait This aureole seemed to burn his eyes and he was forced to turn them away and let them rest on the wild rose which adorned the brow of the little girl. He had the feeling that the past, fighting for the muse of the picture, was stealing her away from his jealous possession, whereas the child, belonging to God, remained with him, undisputed.
Yet he had the courage to examine the muse minutely, and one may judge of his dismay when he read in small letters below the vignette that this decoration had been composed and drawn by Jacopo Boccaferri!
He had forgotten the accursed name, and there it was once more, the name which, perhaps wrongly, had obsessed and shaken his imagination for the past hour. Boccaferri was not the author of the portrait That bore the signature of a more famous artist, but at all events Boccaferri had had a hand in the work. Perhaps he had seen the actress Floriani pose before the painter wearing that transparent tunic and in the splendour of youth, strength and beauty which Karol only possessed in their decline. In short, this Boccaferri must have known her very well and very intimately, seeing that he accepted help from her without blushing. Unless one were a scoundrel, how close would one have to be to a woman in order to take charity from her? And if here were indeed an artist degraded by loose and debauched living to the point of begging for alms, how could Lucrezia, that saint whom Karol adored, have such friends?
“When one is the mistress of a Prince Karol, how can one even remember such previous associates?”
The insane pride which is born of love and gives birth to jealousy does not express such follies in clear words in the conscience of the man who is obsessed by it. Instead, it whispers them low in his ear, so low that even as he is beside himself with fury he cannot understand what is causing this inner rage and pain.
Karol took his head in both hands and was tempted to beat it against the wall. If acts of violence had not been outside his habits and the principles of his education he would have destroyed the fatal portrait But he gradually grew calmer as he contemplated the proud serenity of the gaze fixed on him. The eyes of a well-rendered portrait have in themselves something terrifying by virtue of their pensive stare which seems to be asking you what you think of them. Karol fell a victim to this influence. It seemed as if the tragedienne was saying to him: “By what right are you questioning me? Do I belong to you? Was it you who gave me my sceptre and my crown? Lower your inquisitive and insolent eyes, for I never lower mine, and my pride will break yours.”
Karol’s brain, already weakened by this violent struggle against himself, passed through a succession of hallucinations. He averted his eyes with a feeling of childish terror and brought them to rest on the charming pastel. He discovered fresh graces in it and, gradually overcome by the purity of its sweet, profound gaze, he finally burst into tears with the sensation that he was pressing to his heart the dark head of the angelic Antonietta.
Lucrezia who had been searching everywhere and had now come to ask her father or Biffi if they had seen the prince, entered at that moment. Thoroughly frightened at seeing him weep so, she rushed towards him and anxiously clasped him in her arms, lavishing the sweetest names on him and pouring out a stream of questions which betrayed the greatest concern.
He neither could nor wished to answer. How could he possibly have confessed to her and made her understand all that had just been going on inside him? He blushed for it, and, to the great credit of love, it must be added that if Karol had recently shown the excessive haste and injustice of a spoilt child, he now equally quickly displayed the love and gratitude of a child whom one has every reason to adore. Scarcely had he felt the embrace of those strong arms which had served him as a refuge against the terrors of death, scarcely was his heart, paralysed by suffering, restored to life through contact with this maternal heart than he forgot his madness and once more felt that he was the happiest, most willingly submissive and trusting of mortals.
He would have preferred to die at that very moment rather than insult his dear mistress by confessing to the slightest suspicion. He had a very touching and very simple pretext close at hand in explanation of his emotion and his tears, which was to show her the little pastel drawing, and Lucrezia, moved by this delicacy of heart, passionately pressed against her lips the beautiful hands and beautiful hair of her young lover. Never had she felt so happy and so proud of inspiring great love. The poor woman could hardly suspect that only a few minutes earlier she had been almost an object of horror to him.
