Lucrezia Floriani, page 3
It is very strange that with such a character the young prince could have any friends at all. Yet he did have some, not only his mother’s who esteemed him as the worthy son of a noble man, but also young men of his own age, who loved him ardently and who thought themselves loved by him. He himself thought he loved them greatly, but it was with his imagination rather than his heart. He possessed a high conception of friendship, and at the age of youth’s illusions he was apt to think that his friends and he, reared in the same manner and with the same principles, would never change their opinions and would never reach a situation in which they would find themselves in positive disagreement.
This did happen, however, and at twenty-four, which was his age when his mother died, he had already grown weary of nearly all of them. One only had remained very faithful to him, and that was a young Italian, somewhat older than himself, noble of features and generous of heart; ardent, enthusiastic. Very different in all other aspects from Karol, he had at least two things in common with him, namely, a passionate love for beauty in art and a devotion to the knightly ideal of loyalty. This friend it was who dragged him away from his mother’s grave and carried him off to the bracing skies of Italy. Here, introduced by this friend, the prince saw Madame Floriani for the first time.
2.
You may indeed ask “Who is this Madame Floriani twice mentioned in the previous chapter, yet without moving a single step in her direction?”
I beg my reader to be patient. Just as I am about to knock at my heroine’s door I realise that I have not yet made you sufficiently acquainted with my hero and that there are still certain tedious facts which I must ask you to accept.
There is nobody with a greater sense of urgency and impatience than the reader of novels; but that is a matter of indifference to me. I have a complete man to reveal to you, that is, a world, an ocean boundless in its contradictions, diversities, heights and depths, logic and inconsistency, and you expect a single small chapter to be sufficient for that! By no means. I cannot do justice to it without entering into some detail and I shall take my time. If this wearies you, omit, and if, later, you make nothing of his behaviour, the fault will be yours, not mine.
The man whom I introduce to you is himself, and no other. I cannot make you understand him by telling you that he was young, handsome, well proportioned and well bred. All heroes in novels are so, and mine is a being whom I know thoroughly in my thoughts since, whether he is real or fictitious, I am attempting to portray him. He has a very specific character and one cannot apply to the instincts of a man the standard words used by naturalists to describe the perfume of a plant or a mineral by saying that this being exhales an aroma sui generis.
This sui generis explains nothing and I maintain that Prince de Roswald possessed a character sui generis which it is possible to explain.
In consequence of his good education and his natural grace, he was so affectionate externally, that he had the gift of pleasing even those who did not know him well His charming face predisposed one in his favour; his physical frailty made him interesting in the eyes of women; the richness and ease of his intellectual gifts, the suave and attractive originality of his conversation, won him the attention of educated men. As for those of lesser metal, they liked his exquisite politeness and they were all the more appreciative of it as they could not imagine, in their simple goodheartedness, that he was merely performing a duty and that sympathy did not enter into it at all.
Had people been able to penetrate his character they would have said that he was more lovable than loving and as far as they were concerned this would have been the truth. But how could they have guessed it when his rare attachments were so intense, so deep and so unshakable?
And so he was always loved if not with the certainty, at least with the hope of some return of affection. His young companions when they saw him feeble and lethargic in the performance of physical exercises, did not dream of despising this rather frail person, because Karol did not set great store by his own performance in this respect When he sat down quietly on the grass, in the midst of their games, he would say to them with a sad smile, “Enjoy yourselves, dear friends, I can neither wrestle nor run. You will come and rest by my side,” and as the strong are the natural protectors of the weak, it sometimes happened that the sturdiest generously abandoned their energetic sport to come and keep him company.
Among all those who were fascinated and as it were spellbound by the poetic colouring of his thoughts and the grace of his mind Salvator Albani was the most steadfast This excellent young man was frankness itself yet Karol exercised such influence over him that he dared not contradict him openly, even when he observed exaggeration in his principles and eccentricity in his behaviour. He was afraid of displeasing him and seeing him grow cool towards him, as had happened to so many others. He tended him like a child when Karol, not so much ill as highly strung and over-sensitive, withdrew to his room to conceal his indisposition from his mother’s eyes, because it distressed her too much. Thus Salvator Albani had become necessary to the young prince. And Salvator sensed this, so that when youth and its passions urged him to amuse himself elsewhere he sacrificed his pleasures or hid them from his friend, saying to himself that if Karol happened to cease loving him, he would no longer tolerate his attentions and would decline into a solitude, deliberate and fatal.
So Salvator loved Karol on account of the need the latter had of him and, out of a strange kind of pity, he became the flatterer of his theories, however wrong-headed and extravagant He admired stoicism with him, though fundamentally he was what is known as an epicurean. Tired by some escapade of the previous night he would read an ascetic volume kept by his bedside. He became innocently enthusiastic when his young friend depicted the sole, exclusive, undying, limitless love which was to fill his life. He regarded that as truly magnificent, and yet he himself could not live without love affairs and had to hide the number of his adventures from Karol.
This innocent pretence could only continue for a limited time, and Karol gradually discovered with sorrow that his friend was no saint But by the time he learned the painful truth, Salvator had become so necessary to him and he had been obliged to recognise in him so many outstanding qualities of mind and heart, that he would do nothing but continue to love him, to be sure much less than before, but still sufficiently not to be able to dispense with him. However, he could never reconcile himself to the youthful escapades of his friend and his affection for him, instead of alleviating his habitual sadness became as painful as an open wound.
Salvator, who feared the sternness of Princess de Roswald even more than that of Karol, concealed from her as long as possible what Karol had discovered with so much horror. The long painful illness to which she finally succumbed also contributed towards making her less clear-sighted during the last years of her life; and when Karol saw her cold on her deathbed, he fell into such overwhelming despair that Salvator resumed all his influence over him and was the only being capable of making him abandon the intention of allowing himself to die.
This was the second time that Karol saw death strike down someone close to him. He had loved a girl whom he had intended to marry. That was the only romance of his life, and we shall speak of it in due course. There was nothing left for him to love save Salvator. He did love him; but always with reservations, with pain, and a kind of bitterness, when he thought that his friend was incapable of being as unhappy as he was.
Six months after the second catastrophe, undoubtedly the more cruel and real of the two, Prince de Roswald was traversing Italy in a post-chaise, carried along by his enterprising friend in a whirlwind of hot dust. Salvator had a need for pleasure and gaiety, yet he sacrificed everything for the sake of the one whom others referred to as “his spoilt child”. “Say my dearest child,” he would reply. “For however cherished Roswald has been by his mother and me, neither his heart nor his character have been spoiled. He has become neither exacting, nor despotic, nor ungrateful, nor capricious. He is appreciative of the slightest attentions, and is more grateful than he need be for my devotion.”
This was a generous admission, but it was true. Karol had no small defects. He had only one – large, unintentional and fatal: mental intolerance. He was incapable of opening the floodgates of compassion fully, in general charity, when judging things human. He was one of those who believe that virtue consists in abstaining from evil and who do not understand the most sublime message of the Gospel (which they incidentally profess to the letter) and that is the love of the repentant sinner which creates more joy in Heaven than the perseverance of a hundred just men, and the faith in the return of the lost sheep; in short, the very spirit of Jesus which is evident in all His teaching and pervades all He says: namely, that he who loves is greater, even if he strays, than the one who walks undeviating along a cold, lonely path.
In daily life Karol behaved with the greatest charm; all forms of kindness assumed unusual grace with him and when he expressed his gratitude it was with a deep emotion which repaid friendship with interest Even in his grief, which seemed eternal and of which he refused to foresee the end, he bore a semblance of resignation, as if he had yielded to Salvator’s wish to keep him alive.
The fact is that his delicate health was not deeply affected and his life was not threatened by any serious decline; but the habit of languishing and never testing his strength had given him the belief that he would not long survive his mother. He was ready to imagine that he felt himself dying every day and, with this thought in mind, he accepted Salvator’s attentions and concealed from him, how little, according to his judgement, remained of the time during which he could take advantage of his solicitude. He had much fortitude and if he did not accept the idea of an early death with the heroic unconcern of youth, he at least cherished the expectation of it with something of a mixture of bitterness and pleasure.
In this conviction he detached himself more and more each day from humanity, of which he believed he no longer formed part All the wickedness that existed on this earth became remote to him. Apparently, so he thought, God had not given him the mission of being perturbed by it and combating it, since He had measured out to him so few days on this earth. He regarded this as a favour granted to the virtues of his mother, and when he saw the suffering which was part of the punishment for men’s sins, he thanked Heaven for granting him that suffering which would purify and absolve him from all the blemishes of original sin. At such times he leapt forward in imagination towards the other world and was lost in mysterious dreams. Basically all this was a synthesis of Catholic dogma; but in the details it was his poet’s fancy which was giving itself free rein. For it must be said that if his instincts and principles of behaviour were absolute, his religious beliefs were very vague, and this was the effect of an education entirely consisting of emotion and inspiration, where the arid work of examination, the rights of reason and logic – that guiding thread through the labyrinth – counted for nothing at all.
As he had not pursued and developed any course of study on his own, there were great gaps in his mind which his mother had filled, as best she could, by invoking the impenetrable wisdom of God and the insufficiency granted to men That, too, was Catholic teaching. Younger and more of an artist than his mother, Karol had idealised his own ignorance; he had, so to speak, furnished the frightful void with romantic ideas; angels, stars, a sublime flight through space, an unknown place where his soul would repose side by side with that of his mother and his betrothed. So much for Paradise. As for Hell, he could not believe in it; but unwilling to deny its existence, he did not think about it. He felt pure and full of trust as far as concerned himself. If he had been driven to say where he relegated guilty souls, he would have sited their torments amid the turbulent waves of the sea, in the storm on high places, in the sinister noises of autumn nights, in eternal unrest. The misty, insinuating poetry of Ossian had been his companion together with the Rite of Rome.
The firm, open hand of Salvator dared not test all the strings of this subtle and complicated instrument. Therefore he could not fully realise the extent to which this exceptional being was both strong and weak, immense and incomplete, terrible and exquisite, tenacious and unstable. If in order to love him he would have had to know him completely, he would have abandoned the task very quickly, for one requires a whole lifetime to understand such natures; and even then one only succeeds, through endless study and patience, in ascertaining the mechanism of their intimate lives. The cause of their contradictions always escapes us.
One day, as they were going from Milan to Venice, they found themselves not far from a lake which sparkled in the setting sun like a diamond in the green landscape.
“Let us go no further to-day,” said Salvator, who had observed signs of fatigue on the face of his young friend. “Our daily journeys are too long, and we exhausted ourselves, both body and mind, yesterday, admiring Lake Como.”
“Ah, I don’t regret it,” replied Karol. “It is the most beautiful spectacle I have seen in my whole life. But let us spend the night where you wish. It is of little importance.”
“That depends on your state. Shall we proceed to the next stage or would you prefer to make a little detour and go as far as Iseo, on the edge of the little lake? How do you feel?”
“Indeed, I don’t know.”
“You never know. It is enough to drive one to desperation. Tell me, are you in pain?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But are you tired?”
“Yes, but no more than ordinarily.”
“Well, let us go to Iseo; the air there will be milder than up here.”
So they made their way towards the little harbour of Iseo. There had been a festival in the neighbourhood Carts, harnessed with lean sturdy ponies, were returning home with girls in their Sunday best, their coiled hair pierced with long silver pins and crowned with real flowers. The men were riding on horses or donkeys, or simply walking. The entire road was covered with the merry crowd, happy women and men a little over-excited by wine and love who were shouting and exchanging laughter and broad remarks, too broad for the chaste ears of Prince Karol.
In all countries the peasant who speaks as he feels and does not change his simple manner of expressing himself, has both wit and originality. Salvator, who did not miss a single pun of the dialect they spoke, could not refrain from smiling at the swift sallies which were flung from one side of the road to the other, as the post-chaise passed between them, slowly descending a steep slope in the direction of the lake. Those beautiful women in their beribboned carts, those dark eyes, those floating kerchiefs, that fragrance of flowers, the red sunset in the background and the bold words uttered in fresh ringing voices, put him in excellent Italian humour. Had he been alone he would not have needed much time to seize the bridle of one of the little horses and slip into the cart adorned by the prettiest women. But the presence of his friend compelled him to be grave and, to distract himself from his temptations, he began to hum between his teeth. This expedient was of no avail, for he soon realised that in spite of himself he was repeating a dance tune which he had picked up out of the air from a bevy of village girls who were humming it as a souvenir of the festivity.
3.
Salvator managed to maintain an air of cool composure until a tall brunette, riding astride her horse not far from their carriage, displayed with rather excessive self-satisfaction her firm, rounded leg topped by a pretty garter. It was impossible for him not to utter an exclamation and lean his head out of the window in order to pursue the sight of this strong, shapely leg.
“Has she fallen, then?” said the prince, noticing his concern.
“She? Don’t you mean what?” answered the young fool. And he went on: “Aren’t you referring to the garter?”
“Garter? I am talking about the woman who rode past. What are you looking at?”
“Nothing, nothing,” replied Salvator who had been unable to resist raising his travelling cap in salute to the leg. “In this land of polite manners one should always keep one’s head uncovered” And as he flung himself back into the rear of the coach he added: “A vivid pink garter edged with bright blue is very fetching.”
Karol’s vocabulary was by no means prudish; he made no comment, but looked at the sparkling lake which shone with colours certainly far more splendid than those of a country girl’s garter.
Salvator understood his silence and, as if to excuse himself, asked his friend if he were not struck by the beauty of the human race in this region.
“Yes,” replied Karol, with the intention of being agreeable. “I have noticed that the human form around here is of a sculptural type. But you know that I am no connoisseur.”
“I deny it; you have an admirable understanding of what is beautiful, and I have seen you in ecstasy over ancient statuary.”
“One moment! There is ancient and ancient; I love the fine, pure, elegant ideal of the Parthenon. But I do not like or at least I don’t understand the heavy-muscled Roman art and the bold lines of the decadence. This country is inclined towards materialism, the race smacks of it I am not interested in it”
“What? In all honesty, doesn’t the sight of a beautiful woman delight your eyes, even for a moment, when she passes?”
“As far as I am concerned, I have accepted your easy, trite admiration for all women who pass you, however slight their pretensions to beauty. You are eager to fall in love, yet the one who is to gain possession of your being has not appeared hitherto. Doubtless, the woman God has created for you exists; she is waiting for you and you are seeking her. That is how I explain your senseless loves, your brusque bouts of disgust, and all those tortures of the soul which you call your pleasures. But, as for me, you know that I did meet my life’s companion, you are aware that I learnt to know her well, you know that I shall always love her dead, as I have loved her alive. As nothing can resemble her, as nobody can remind me of her, I do not look nor do I search I have no need to admire what exists outside the image which I carry in my thoughts, eternally perfect, eternally living.”
