It is hard to see how this slackening can be avoided. In the case of Proust, translators, multiplying, will naturally give attention to the work of predecessors. And, in a greater context than that of this small passage, the trend of much contemporary writing turns away from distinction: flair, style, singularity are suspect as “rhetoric.” The tendency, when not infused with violence, can be rigorously poker-faced, as if a regiment of Buster Keatons were policing our once-expressive language. Marcel himself, moved by the closing words of Albertine’s letter, seeks to neutralize them as hyperbole, or traces in them his own civilizing influence over her youthful ignorance. However, the words will haunt him by their generosity, as does the dignity of this farewell.
Whatever his weaknesses, Scott Moncrieff did not forget that he was dealing with greatness—already then an embattled concept in literature. Many years earlier, Gustave Flaubert, inexorable but never abstract, had himself noted—in a letter of December 1852 to Louise Colet—a new pressure on writers to move away from their fertile eccentricities toward “the modern democratic idea of equality”; citing with disdain François Charles Fourier’s observation that “great men won’t be needed.”8 Distrust of stature, which leaves its reductive mark on much new writing, surely need not infect fresh renderings of past greatness.
INTRODUCTION TO GEOFFREY SCOTT’S THE PORTRAIT OF ZÉLIDE
Her early life evokes its eighteenth-century setting: a flat, fixed, ordered scene of Dutch manors and villages; of fields extending, almost level, to the cold sea. Overhead, a huge sky of changing light and measureless possibility. Her circumstances are cultivated, wealthy, well born; her immediate family affectionate, exemplary, conventional, confining. As she grows—as she enters “Society” and her twenties—singularities of temperament assert themselves. Unaffected, merry, flippant, confident, she possesses a measure of genius. To an exceptional degree, she is both formidable and enchanting, playful and obdurate. And “I must tell you, too, that Zélide herself is handsome,” so James Boswell writes to her, using the name she has whimsically adopted; James Boswell, a captivated admirer and equivocal suitor.1
We hear nothing of female friendships. Her mother is dear to her, and indulgent. Her sister is resentful and a bore.
Zélide’s wit and beauty, her prodigious intelligence are not without arrogance. For most of her life, however, pride will be countered by a disarming honesty of self-appraisal. Her Gallic rationality is similarly moderated by cordiality. Among her finest attributes is simplicity of conduct: springing from people disposed to take themselves seriously, she has little taste for self-solemnity. Free of national pride, she would, in later years, tell her dearest correspondent: “You and I, in the days of our friendship, were of no country.”2 With all the gaiety and ardor, some sweetness is lacking. It is, again, Boswell who reproaches her for according her goodwill indiscriminately: “Every one is at his ease with you. It is terrible.”3 He reminds her that a man—and even such an ambivalent suitor as himself—likes to enjoy primacy. For the same offense, the autocratic husband of Browning’s “Last Duchess” had his wife put to death:
She had a heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad…
She liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere…
She smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile?4
Yes, for love some particular tenderness is necessary. And the reader, hoping—naturally enough—for love, will have to follow Zélide through much curious experience before the unexpected requital.
Her qualities bring her renown and distinguished correspondents. Having seen her portrait, the king of Prussia advises her to “give up reading Fénelon.”5 She acknowledges that marriage, children, would be a solution—if commonplace—to her dichotomy of temperament, and to an increasingly motiveless life. Of herself she writes that she is secretly “somewhat sensuous.”6 Projects for wedding her fall through—not always through her own reluctance. In what she acknowledges to be an unattractive episode, she labors, vainly, to bring an unenthusiastic candidate to the altar—principally in order to draw closer to the man most worthy, and most appreciative, of her youthful powers. Constant d’Hermenches, the secret epistolary confidant whom she rarely saw, was himself married. In their letters at least, he and Zélide are intimates; in letters, they are lovers. During those years, he said, her radiance would have warmed the heart of a Laplander.
At thirty, she marries. In 1773, Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll becomes Madame de Charrière, choosing from among more notable suitors a prosaic, undemonstrative—but not unfeeling—pedant, the former tutor of her brothers. There is nothing inevitable in that willful decision, seemingly taken at random. There have been many encounters in her life, and many advantages; there have been travels, and much exposure to favorable chance; there has been such an unusual degree of independence that the choice must seem irrational. She cannot easily be claimed as a victim—of her sex, her era, her society. By now, she might be charged with a few victims of her own. She removes herself to her husband’s modest château near Lausanne (where, although within easy distance of Ferney, she chooses not to meet Voltaire). The sky of possibilities, the open sea, the world of travel and discourse are now remote. Mountains and winter fogs enclose her; the lake is seldom stirred. The future is contracting.
Years pass. Merriment has no occasion. Intellect and rationality turn bleakly inward. She writes animated and interesting novels—whose autobiographical aspects alienate her neighbors and would the husband who patiently copies out her manuscripts. Her writings are talented and apposite; their purpose is not merely vengeful. Introducing a volume of her fiction that appeared in translation in 1926, Geoffrey Scott points out that her impulse “was to use all this tedium to good effect…. Her subject is human nature; she watches it in herself.”7 Writing, publishing, does not relieve her spirits. An obscure local love affair disappoints her, intensifying what has become despair.
Why does she stay? What not return to the world? Why not separate—or, as she might have done, divorce?
One summer, retreating to the mountains, she is visited by her grieved and excluded husband who, on return to his gloomy house, writes her a sad, fine letter that must have touched her but could not melt her heart—that heart, one thinks, by now more deeply frozen than any Laplander’s. Years earlier, Boswell, dazzled as he was, had told her: “I fear Zélide is not to be found.”8 Not, certainly, by usual avenues.
Commentators have cautioned us not to insist unduly on the legendary analogy of her suspended life: the sequestered princess languishing for want of rightful awakening. All the same, the fable irresistibly comes to mind—in her case, enigmatically self-imposed. Nothing in all Zélide’s unpredictable existence is more unlikely than the irruption of the brilliant boy, nearly thirty years her junior, who—first encountered during a rare visit to Paris—breaks through brambles and cold Swiss walls to bring her back to life: to bring her liveliness, love, and that intimacy of spirit, wit, and affection in which, perhaps, she had always believed but never trusted.
Benjamin Constant loved her and paid tribute to her to the end of his life. The ironic surname of this mercurial prodigy was, ultimately, valid in relation to her.
We suited each other perfectly. But it was not long before we found ourselves in a relation of more real and essential intimacy. Madame de Charrière’s outlook on life was so original and lively, her contempt for conventional prejudices so profound, her intellect so forceful, her superiority to average nature so vigorous and assured, that for me, a boy of twenty, as eccentric and scornful as herself, her company was a joy such as I had never yet known. I gave myself up to it, rapturously.9
Not since the correspondence with Hermenches—who, into the bargain, is Benjamin’s uncle—has Zélide responded full-heartedly to another human soul. She has somehow maintained, through arid years, her best readiness of self and sensibility, her laughter, and the luminous generosity of
her mind. One feels the release of it, her emancipation. She and Benjamin are happy, not only in their boundless affinity but, as lovers are, in one another’s unstinted presence. Monsieur de Charrière himself enjoys Benjamin’s company—partly, no doubt, because of the enlivening change wrought in his hitherto martyred wife; partly because of the reassuring discrepancy of age; and in part, perhaps, because Benjamin is fascinating, funny, and endearing.
Benjamin sits by her fire, by her desk, by her bed. We do not know how to define that reference to a “more real and essential intimacy.”
Geoffrey Scott tells us that
The hours went their round. And sometimes when the fire was steady or a single candle burned between them, he would watch the dark silhouette of her profile on the wall, and note the elusive beauty that even her shadow possessed.10
Thus, for eight years, Benjamin comes and goes. Her house, for him, represents serenity, stimulus, pleasure, and rigorous thought. They correspond, and his letters become love letters. Despite the convolutions of a libertine existence and divided personality, he sometimes dreams, preposterously, of eloping with her. Much about Benjamin Constant is preposterous—not excepting the preternatural comprehension in which his genius is rooted; and which, exercised on his own psychology and extraordinary life will, in his writings, secure his posterity.
Zélide not only fears the fated rupture but anxiously precipitates it: as ever, she is over-endowed with rational foresight and with a faculty for self-injury. Their parting, when it comes at last, is sublime—and perhaps, she feels, not inconclusive. When the subsequent dénouement arrives, however, she is astonished and appalled. Benjamin has moved away—but a few miles only: to Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva. Thereafter—and again, this time for years, and famously—he will linger there, in chaotic thrall to Zélide’s volcanic neighbor, the brawny and brave Madame de Staël. Detaching himself from Enlightenment, he embraces Romanticism—and embraces, unequivocally, Germaine de Staël. His years with her, unenviably dramatic, will carry him into political and literary adventures, and turbulent amours. He will father a child, he will marry, divorce—and remarry the same wife. He will cut a figure both of folly and courage in the world of action. He will never lose his gift of observation and self-appraisal, and will turn it, uniquely, to literary account.
For Zélide, pride and a haughty resignation consume the remaining years. Her very submission resembles an act of iron will, further dispiriting her husband. (“It is recorded that for fifteen years she never took a walk outside the walls of his garden.”11) She continues to write—but now these are dry writings that defend logic and reason through the convulsed years that conclude the eighteenth century. She performs acts of humanity and philanthropy, befriending solitary—and even outcast—young women, who find her admirable but…intimidating.
With the passage of years, she corresponds occasionally with Benjamin—who, struggling now in the toils of Madame de Staël, thinks tenderly of Zélide, and of the concord and delight of their shared years. Acknowledging the lack of synthesis in her being and her destiny, she tells him: “My life and my memories have no unity; my plan of life had none.”12
As that life closes, she is regarded with awe by those few familiars who attend her. At her death, in 1805, she is sixty-five and has spent more than thirty years by the cold lake—perplexing, aloof, and disclosing only briefly her concealed fires, her great capacity for companionship and love. It was Francis Steegmuller who drew my attention to The Portrait of Zélide—seeing Geoffrey Scott’s earlier work, The Architecture of Humanism, on my shelves, and referring to Zélide as a favorite work of his since youth. During the subsequent years of our marriage, The Portrait of Zélide, in different editions, was among books that accumulated in our rooms abroad—in France, in Italy. In every reading life, certain works are talismans, especially those read in early years. Francis had discovered Zélide soon after its first publication, when he was in his twenties, and he felt that it had influenced him toward the writing of biography, which would occupy the greater part of his working life.
He loved the book—for relating, with sympathetic intelligence, with integrity and beauty, the story of an engrossing life. He admired the close attention to established evidence and existing scholarship, and the truthful ease with which these were incorporated in the narrative, contributing to its authority and surprise. The period and its mentalité, and the culture of the Enlightenment, were already strong interests for him. With this work, Geoffrey Scott undoubtedly stimulated those affinities. Another theme that would develop and recur in Francis Steegmuller’s writing is embodied in The Portrait of Zélide: that of the intelligent and gifted woman seeking to ripen and express her best powers, yet carrying within her an ideal of love unlikely to be realized. The Grande Mademoiselle, Isadora Duncan, Louise d’Épinay all became subjects for books by Francis. He considered and made preparatory studies for biographies—never completed—of Anna Comnena, the first woman historian; of Marie Mancini; and of Queen Christina. All those interests may owe, initially, something to his feeling for the story of Zélide.
When Scott’s book appeared, in 1925, the name of Isabella van Tuyll was virtually unknown to the English-reading world. Despite much serious scholarship since then, and recent publication of her writings in France, Britain, and the United States, she is scarcely today a household word. Geoffrey Scott, who died in 1929 at the age of forty-five, was a forerunner and has occasionally been accorded by subsequent scholars, a condescension sometimes shown to precursors. Nonetheless, the literary intelligence and sensibility, the command of language with which Scott tells this story are qualities to be praised and envied. No one who reads The Portrait of Zélide will forget it. The book is unique, it is humane, it is delightful. It is art.
INTRODUCTION TO IRIS ORIGO’S LEOPARDI: A STUDY IN SOLITUDE
The modern highway that lies along Italy’s Adriatic coast—overlooking, from a high ridge, a succession of old seaports, or elsewhere descending toward the shore—provides one of the beautiful excursions of the peninsula. An outward adventure of sky and sea is paired with the inland splendor of the Marche, an eastern region of Italy that, cultivated as Tuscany, spacious as Abruzzi—is less known to travelers than the Tyrrhenian west.
A visitor who, leaving the coastal road for a brief inland diversion, reaches Recanati will find a handsome hillside town with medieval and Renaissance indications of a long past importance: old squares and churches, grand houses, and an art gallery with masterworks by Lorenzo Lotto. From spring into autumn, the clusters of tourists—Italians and foreigners—who wander here are mostly day-visitors summering by the sea at Ancona or Pesaro, or pilgrims from the nearby shrine of Loreto who are on their way to Ravenna, or, possibly, to Venice. Most visitors will notice the lines of poetry long since posted, with excessive official zeal, on walls throughout the town. Some will call at Recanati’s chief monument, Palazzo Leopardi, to ask the timetable for the guided tour there; and, on learning that they must wait, perhaps, as much as half an hour, may explain that their bus will soon be leaving. At which the custodian will gently smile, and wonder aloud why people come here in a hurry: here, of all places.
Palazzo Leopardi, slightly convex, stands above the incline of its piazza like a pale, bombé chest: a long, large, noble house of blond brick. Stately, also, is the staircase where the little tour assembles. The tone of the house, inside and out, is ivory. Sunlight enters. Nothing seems forbidding—rather, one is relieved to think that Giacomo Leopardi’s excruciating youth was passed, at least, in a graceful setting upstairs, the three rooms of a prodigious library displace such casual reflections. We are no longer spectators, on our forgetful way from one notable site to another. The place re-creates in us its own silence: emotion over what was achieved here mingles with the pang for what was suffered.
Even if one has never seen a photograph, a postcard, of these upper rooms, the scene will seem familiar. Windows look out to the small building across the piazza, where on
ce a girl worked at the loom and sang; here is the undulant descent to the distant sea; there, under immeasurable sky, soft hills precede the Apennines. Indoors, within the enfilade of rooms, the books are aligned in soft, old colors, coppery, rust, or faded brown, floor to ceiling; on a serious old table, the small, pale busts of poets.
For some sense of how this agreeable little city affected its most celebrated citizen nearly two centuries ago, one would need, through a solitary winter, to walk its deserted lanes in the failing light of Sunday afternoons. Nothing, however, can give us back the ageless isolation of such a town and its provincial populace in the first years of the nineteenth century: the monotonies of its customs, tasks, and toil, and of its few distractions; the pattern of its pieties, its lives and deaths. No ingenuity can restore to us the context of centuried silence and self-communing loneliness, the acuteness of impression and incident, in which an immense intelligence could, without assistance, inform itself and a great gift be obscurely nurtured.
In 1797, the year preceding Giacomo Leopardi’s birth, an event affecting all Europe had shaken even little Recanati when Napoleon, following his triumphant irruption into Italy, had invaded the Papal States, in which Recanati was included. General Bonaparte himself had swept through Recanati with armed entourage—a spectacle that Giacomo’s father, Count Monaldo, had not deigned to watch. The figure of Monaldo—weak, sententious, impulsive, intermittently touching, and contradictory enough to seem, at times, a cross between Polonius and Pulcinella—stands over Leopardi’s youth as an apologetic shadow in thrall to Adelaide, the pitiless wife and mother, fanatical in her religiosity, monstrous in her exercise of power. Through Monaldo’s ineptitude, the household, with its revenues and labyrinthine rooms, its servants and resident prelates, had passed early into her hands: husband and children lived in their palace as paupers, threadbare; dependent on her scant charity, fearful of her tyranny. Her own subjection was to bear a child each year. Of those sons and daughter, she gratefully lost several—her eldest son famously recording that when one of her children was ailing, “she did not pray to God that it should die, since religion forbids it, but she did in fact rejoice.”1
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