by Susan Sontag
* * *
1793. They had been back a year. His contentment bloomed, unfolded.
Not that he hadn’t been happy before. Not that he hadn’t almost always been happy. But the Cavaliere’s command of gratification had depended on his being able to take up the right distance from himself and from his passions. His happiness had had the self-consciousness of a view claimed at the top of a mountain, and the deliberate contrasts of one of those busy paintings of a scene, observed from a high angle, in which some people are sowing and tilling, others are bringing harvest to market, others are getting drunk in the village square, children are playing, lovers are fondling each other …
Of course he had known happiness! But his happiness had been composed of many small parts, like a portrait in mosaic that doesn’t read as a face until you stand back. Now he could stand as close as he wanted and see both the tiny fragments and the large bewitching face. He still had the same tastes, still liked to read, fish, play the cello, climb the mountain, examine marine specimens, have a learned conversation, look at a pretty woman, acquire a new painting—the world was a theatre of felicity. But now it had one person at the center, unifying it. His heart’s choice was as affectionate as ever—her warm flesh against his, she was ripening. And she was interested in everything. She accompanied him to the new excavations at Paestum (she had entirely concurred with his disparagement of the brutal, primitive Doric columns of the Temple of Neptune), she was studying botany so she could help him advise on the completion of the English garden at Caserta, she adored the life of the court, she seemed fascinated by his vases and rock collections. He had only to stretch out his hand to something and it was his.
He yielded gratefully to the experience of satiety. Inevitably, some of his collecting zeal began to abate. It was no longer the chase that obsessed him, but the sheer joy of ownership. He derived no less pleasure from looking at the things he possessed and showing them to others and seeing their admiration and envy. But his need to add to his collections had slackened. Financial interest more than desire now drove him to continue to acquire new pictures, vases, bronzes, ornaments. The collecting desire can be enfeebled by happiness—acute enough, erotic enough happiness—and the Cavaliere was happy, as happy as that.
Reports on the newlywed couple went back to England. The Cavaliere, people said, is as amorous as ever, his lady no less vulgar, with the accent and manners of a barmaid, braying, bawling, cackling. Few deigned to add that she seemed extremely goodhearted. They were a most improbable couple—the reformed kept woman and the unapologetic, elderly aristocrat with his exquisite manners and indefinitely expanding horizons of appreciation—and, thanks to the unique demands and generic permissions of this southern setting, a very successful one. She had become a wife without forfeiting the attentiveness and charms of a mistress. She helped him, not just as a wife (or not just as Catherine did) but as a collaborator. Her talents twinned with his. For he always had to spend a great deal of time with the King, and now she spent a great deal of time with the Queen. Their tasks are symmetrical: he to be first in the King’s favor and she to be first in the eyes of the Queen.
The Cavaliere must keep up with the King’s diversions. She must keep up with the Queen’s burdens. Moderately intelligent, which makes her far more intelligent than her husband, the Queen has all the cares of an immoderate number of births and a partial understanding of political realities to add to her normal duties, frustrations, and distractions. The Cavaliere’s wife, with her great capacity for taking in information and for identifying with someone, quickly became an ideal confidante. She and the Queen write each other every day. Rowing vigorously in the polyglot sea of the era, the Austrian-born Queen writes not in German or in Italian or in English but in an ill-spelled French. She signs herself Charlotte. There are visits several times a day as well as daily letters.
Secret Jacobin sympathizers in Naples added to their defamatory portrait of the royal couple the charge that the Queen and the Cavaliere’s wife are lovers. And the charge has been vigorously denied by beauty snobs, who cannot imagine a physical relationship between the Cavaliere’s wife and a woman of forty with a dramatically homely face and a body abused by fourteen childbirths—grounds of denial that are as much a cliché as the allegation. (The Queen had real power, and a woman in power, feared as virile, is often accused of being a slut. An ampler anti-royalist campaign in France had featured charges of incest as well as lesbianism against her sister.) The charge was false. The effusive sentimental temperament of the Cavaliere’s wife rarely flowed into the erotic. But she did have a great need for the affection and friendship of women—indeed, she enjoyed the company of women more than of men. She loved being unbuttoned with women, as she could be in her bedroom with five or six of her maids on a hot afternoon, gossiping, trying on her clothes, having a glass or two, listening to their love griefs, showing off the latest dance or a new cap from Paris with white feathers. That was when she felt most like a woman, surrounded by her adoring maids and by the mother whom she kept by her side the older woman’s entire life. Their prattle calmed her. And then she would make them fall silent and hold their breath, make their eyes shine and go moist—as hers would too—with a song.
* * *
Autumn 1793. The Queen, her dear Charlotte, cannot help conjuring up the scene.
Portrait of a woman condemned to death. In the cart transporting her to this, this, this … machine, this new machine, her hands tied loosely behind her, her hair cropped short to expose her nape. Portrait of a martyr. She is all in white: a simple dress, coarse stockings, a shapeless bonnet on her head. Her face is old, tired, and drawn. The only trace of her former glory is her strict and upright posture.
She blinks her eyes. They sting because she has been so many months in prison. The cart wheels rattle and bump. The streets are strangely silent. The sun is shining. The cart arrives, she mounts the ten rough wooden steps. There is her chaplain murmuring prayers, staring at his crucifix, tears streaming down his face. And a voice, someone else’s voice, saying, It will not hurt, Your Majesty. It seems to come from the man with the hood. She averts her eyes from the ladder-like structure, some fourteen feet tall, with its ax-shaped blade rusty with blood, and she feels her shoulders being pushed down on both sides, making her lean over, no, lie down, her stomach and legs on the board, lie just so. Someone pulls her by the shoulders a little forward, so her throat rests in the trough of the bottom half of a wooden yoke, and then the upper part closes down on the back of her neck. She feels a strap squeezing her waist and another being affixed to her calves, binding her to the board. Her head is over the dark-brown plaited basket, the blood rushes forward to her face. She resisted the weight of her head pulling it down, held it out to see over the platform the bobbing heads of the crowd, lifted it up to lighten the painful contact of the edge of the board with her collarbone, the yoke against her gorge, which made her gag, which was starting to cut off her breath, saw a pair of large muddy boots advancing toward her and heard the bellowing of the mob go still louder, then go silent; here’s some kind of strange creaking: something rising, higher, higher; the sun getting brighter, so she shuts her eyes; the sound, higher still, stops—
No!
The Queen tossed in her bed and groaned, then woke, parted the curtains of her bed, and stood up. She had slept only fitfully for weeks, waiting for news from Paris. Because of the worsening situation in France they were now at the mercy of the British—the only country strong enough and with the will to oppose the tide of revolution. The British naval commander who had anchored in the bay for five days, Captain Nelson, had won a great victory over the French, and been most encouraging about British resolve; but the Queen placed little trust in military solutions. Though the offer of a ransom had been refused, she dared to be hopeful. To kill a king was already unthinkable. And killing their king should have sufficed them. What could they want from a foreigner, a woman; surely they would not execute her young sister.
&nb
sp; Would not, could not …
When the news came that Marie Antoinette had been executed, there was consternation at the court. The Queen retreated to Portici, her favorite of the royal palaces. It was feared she would go mad. She refused to see her children (she had just given birth a fifteenth time); she refused to bathe or change her clothes. She howled with rage and despair, chorused by her tribe of forty German-speaking maids. Even the King was moved by his wife’s grief, though he had not much luck in consoling her, since every attempt at tenderness ended in his becoming aroused and trying to mount her. Her husband’s embraces were the last thing the Queen desired. She was vomiting convulsively. Doctors wanted to bleed her. The Cavaliere’s wife spent every day at the palace, joining her in shrieks and cries, bathing her head, and singing to her. Only her singing calmed the Queen. Music cures. When the King’s grandfather, Philip V, had tumbled into the abyss of depression, the greatest voice of the earlier part of the century, that of Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, had brought relief. Until the appearance of the wonder-working castrato at the Bourbon court in Madrid—where he would be detained at a vast salary for nine years—the stuporous monarch would neither eat, drink, change his clothes, nor rule. For nine years Farinelli would arrive at the royal bedchamber every evening promptly at midnight, and until five in the morning would sing the same four songs over and over, interposing the songs with elegant conversation. And Philip V would eat and drink and let himself be washed and shaved, and look over the papers that his ministers had left him.
So the Cavaliere’s wife, with her beautiful voice, calmed the Queen. Day after day she went to the palace to sit with the Queen in a darkened room, returning home red-eyed to the Cavaliere late each evening. Never have I seen anything so piteous, she said. The dear woman’s grief knows no bounds.
With her indefatigable gift for empathy, she was almost as grief-struck as the Queen. But the Queen became calmer, between bouts of tears, and the Cavaliere’s wife did too.
The Queen returned to the city and took her seat at the Council of State.
She was a woman, said the Queen. Only a woman.
(Majesty!)
But I will have my revenge.
(How can the puny Kingdom of the Two Sicilies punish mighty France?)
God will punish France, and the English will help God, and we will help the English, said the Queen.
(You mean the English will help us, said the prime minister.)
Yes, said the Queen. Our friends.
And so they—he—did.
* * *
The Cavaliere’s mazy backwater, so rewardingly isolated from transforming events, was being dragged into what passed then for the real world, the one defined by the threat of France. As was this fastidious spectator himself.
A club calling itself the Society for the Friends of Liberty and Equality began to meet in secret to draw up plans for modernizing the kingdom, and quickly divided into two clubs, one in favor of a constitutional monarchy and the other determined to go all the way to a republic. Someone was indiscreet, a plot to assassinate the King was discovered or concocted, and of those arrested, who included jurists, professors, men of letters, doctors, and scions of some of the oldest noble families in the kingdom, nine were sentenced to severe prison terms and three were executed. The Queen boasted bitterly of the extreme clemency of Neapolitan justice, in contrast to the carnage in France. The lava of the revolution was flowing, the Terror was just reaching its climax—and in June 1794, nature rhyming with history, Vesuvius erupted with a violence that had no precedent in the Cavaliere’s experience. It was the worst, or best, eruption since 1631, and would be counted the third greatest in the nearly two millennia of the volcano’s modern history.
The volcano was not to be patronized, after all, by such stale categories as grandeur and interest and beauty. This was terror—blackening day and bloodying night. In the evening sky, a roar of broad flame streamed sideways and upward, as if seeking to flee the thin diagonal orange slash of the descending lava. The inky sea turned red and the moon blood-orange. All night the swath of descending lava widened. In the brief interregnum of pale dawn, ropes of pitchy smoke were unfurling, climbing, fattening at the top into a sky-high funnel of smoke and fire, which became steadily more columnar, first materializing a stack of bulging rings of smoke around its stem, then widening to engulf them. By midday the sky had gone dark and the sun was a cloud-blackened moon. But the roiling bay was still blood red.
A paralyzing, silencing vista.
The greatest shock to the Cavaliere came when a more indifferent light had washed the sky and the customary distant view had returned. It was as painful as the sight of a leafy, many-branched, centuries-old tree gone diagonal, cleaved through the heart of its trunk. The mountain cannot fall, like a great tree brought down in a hurricane, but a mountain can be mutilated. And like the dismayed homeowner in her yard who has to admit that while winds of such velocity might have been enough to do in the tree, it was already in trouble, and points to the exposed innards of the fallen trunk, a repulsive, termite-rotted, crumbly brown, so the admirer of a shapely volcano has to think that some weakness in the volcano’s retaining walls made this indignity inevitable. The force of the eruption had lopped off one-ninth of its height, slicing the summit flat at the top. The Cavaliere’s wife wept with pity for the mountain, which had become ugly. The Cavaliere, feeling something not too different, professed to find in the mountain’s new shape only a destiny—and a fresh reason for a quick ascent, as soon as the eruption had subsided.
Tolo, are you there?
Yes, my lord.
I should like to see.
Yes, my lord.
At the end of June, attended by a now bearded Bartolomeo Pumo, the sixty-four-year-old Cavaliere reached the top of the dramatically changed mountain he had been climbing for thirty years. The cone was gone. In its place there was now a huge jagged crater.
I would like to stand closer.
Yes, my lord.
But the ground was burning through his thick-soled boots, and he was choking from the noxious exhalations of sulphurous and vitriolic vapors.
Tolo, are you there?
Yes, my lord.
Shall we retreat?
Yes, my lord.
He should have been frightened, but he was not. The mountain had a right to explode. The destructive mission of the volcano inspired in him a satisfaction, an increasing satisfaction, that he would have found hard to acknowledge.
But what could be more apt for this great collector of valuable objects than to have also been collecting the very principle of destruction, a volcano. Collectors have a divided consciousness. No one is more naturally allied with the forces in a society that preserve and conserve. But every collector is also an accomplice of the ideal of destruction. For the very excessiveness of the collecting passion makes a collector also a self-despiser. Every collector-passion contains within it the fantasy of its own self-abolition. Worn down by the disparity between the collector’s need to idealize and all that is base, purely materialistic, in the soul of a lover of beautiful objects and trophies of the glorious past, he may long to be purged by a consuming fire.
Perhaps every collector has dreamed of a holocaust that will relieve him of his collection—converting all to ashes, or burying it under lava. Destruction is only the strongest form of divestment. The collector may be so disappointed with his life that he wants to divest himself of himself, as in the novel about the book-besotted reclusive scholar with a legendary hoard of twenty-five thousand necessary, irreplaceable volumes (that dream, the perfect library), who pitches himself into the pyre he makes out of what he has most loved. But should such an angry collector survive his fire or fit, he will probably want to start another collection.
4
He was often described as little. Certainly he was short, a good bit shorter than the Cavaliere and his young wife, and thin, with an arresting tanned face set low on his large squarish head, thick brows,
heavy-lidded eyes, a deep philtrum below his bold nose, full lips, a wide mouth already missing a fair number of teeth. When they first saw him, he had not fought any important battles. But he had the look, the hungry look that evinces the power to concentrate utterly on something, of one destined to go far. Mark him, said the Cavaliere—an expert on promise, or the lack of it, in younger men—he will be the bravest hero England has ever produced. The Cavaliere’s spurt of recognition was not so remarkable. A star is always a star, even before the right vehicle has been found, and even after, when the good parts are no longer available. And the thirty-five-year-old captain was undoubtedly a star—like the Cavaliere’s wife.
She, despite her large talent for effusiveness, had not seen that. Yes, his arrival had been thrilling, it was thrilling to stand with the Cavaliere at the window of the observatory room and watch the sixty-four-gun two-decker ship he commanded, the Agamemnon, sail proudly into the bay only seven months after wicked France had declared war on England. And his brief stay had been memorable—mainly because of the role she had played. He had brought urgent dispatches from Lord Hood for the Cavaliere. Neapolitan troops were needed to reinforce the coalition gathering to defend Toulon, where a royalist faction had seized power, against the advancing republican forces; and it was she who had got him his six thousand troops when the Cavaliere could get neither a yes nor a no from the frightened King and his advisers, got them by the route women use, the back stairs, taking the request to the bedchamber of the most powerful voice on the Council of State, who lay in seclusion, about to give birth to a sixteenth prince or princess, and securing her support. Invited to dine at the royal palace, he had the place of honor at the King’s right, and the Cavaliere’s wife, seated on his right, translated his attempts to converse with the King about the French menace and the King’s long rambling anecdote about a giant boar he’d killed which turned out to have three testicles. She was satisfied that she had impressed him. His visit lasted five days. After came many other distinguished visitors. She did not single him out.