Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  “She was, moreover, an exceptionally witty woman; indeed her rare gift of repartee during her stay in Rome made her a highly welcome, if somehow feared, guest in all drawing rooms. Still here as elsewhere she preserved a peculiar quality which set her apart from our own wits. Whenever a sensational event or a scandal in society touched on an amorette or did in the slightest way taste of la belle passion, to her eyes it lost any kind of interest, and she turned away from it as from something altogether beneath her dignity.

  “My friend, the Prince Scipione Odescalchi, who at that time was more than ninety years old, said to me: ‘Oh, that I were only seventy-five years younger! For our young Roman beaus of today are nothing but a handful of petit-maîtres! They have lost sense of the sublime, and they see not that this Lady Flora is a goddess. Sweet Cupid, God of Love, deign to let the shadow of one of your pinions fall upon our guest, for it is a disgrace to all of us that she should leave the Eternal City the same as she came!’

  “Later on from Father Jacopo I learned some of the lady’s history.

  “Lady Flora was an only child, and sole heir to her father’s wealth, which had been increased by her mother’s great dowry. This virtuous and noble lady, her mother, had been as tall as the daughter and had weighed as much. But on the other hand the maiden’s father—around whom a multitude of gay and gallant anecdotes had grown up, so that to his countrymen he had become a kind of mythic figure—was below medium height and slight of build. Yet at the same time the Scots nobleman had been so harmoniously proportioned, with such big radiant eyes, such rich locks, and such perfect gracefulness in all his movements, that till his death he was reckoned to be the finest-looking man in the Kingdom. He had made use of his rare beauty, as well as of his many talents, to enjoy to the full the delights of this earth—and above all the delights of love! It seems that he was ever irresistible to the ladies of his own country, as well as to those of other countries, for like his daughter he had traveled much. His consort, who was deeply in love with him, and jealous by nature, suffered much in her married life.”

  The Cardinal made a short pause, then continued:

  “Are you, my amiable audience, familiar with the name of the great English poet and philosopher Jonathan Swift? Without doubt he was a man of true genius. But he was also, sad to say—and, to us, incomprehensibly—filled with a strange and terrible loathing of the earth and of humanity as a whole. In his most celebrated book, Lemuel Gulliver’s Travels, with almost satanic cleverness he manages to ridicule human conditions and functions, simply by distorting their dimensions. Military valor and glory, the grandeur and pathos of the battlefield he holds up to laughter by making officers and soldiers, horses and cannon, present themselves en miniature, the size of pins and thimbles.

  “But the immortal passion of love, with all its attributes, he burlesques by magnifying to a monstrous, a fabulous scale the persons of the lovers and their mistresses, and such charms of the human body as are elsewhere praised and sung. His adventurous traveler, Gulliver, ascends the bosoms of the amorous dames d’honneur as an alpine climber scales a snow-white mountain. Under their languishing sighs he totters as under an earthquake, and he comes near to drowning in the beads of sweat which the rapture of the rendezvous makes start out on their skin. The faint perfumes which surround a woman’s body are turned into exhalations which nearly stifle him; nay, I will not detail to you, my graceful and gallant listeners, this poet’s sinister representation of what other poets have made the subject of sonnets.

  “Father Jacopo more than once, he told me, discussed this remarkable book with Lady Flora. She evidently knew it by heart, and made use of it to deride in toto the Almighty’s work of creation.

  “ ‘Look, Reverend Father,’ she said to him, ‘how little is needed, what slight transposition of dimensions suffices to reveal to us the true nature of your noble and beautiful universe!’

  “Father Jacopo in his heart was horrified at her heresy, but he answered her, as he always did, discreetly and meekly. ‘Unless, Signora,’ he said, ‘these same observations will reveal to us with what subtle precision the harmony of our universe is adjusted and balanced. Unless they will tell us with what reverence we must eye the ordinance of the creator, so that not even in imagination do we presume to alter or transpose any jot or title thereof. The shortening or lengthening of a single string of an instrument may enable us to distort, aye, to annihilate its music. But surely, surely the fact does not justify us in blaming that master who built the violin.’

  “It now appears as if Lady Flora’s father, when exasperated by his lady’s jealousy, was wont to quote to her the book of this English poet, and that he would even with cruel fantasy and wit add to it and invent and recount new adventures of Lemuel Gulliver. Verily, when we consider the lady’s situation we cover our eyes, as if invited to gaze into an abyss of suffering and injury. A small young woman, who had her slightness and scantiness made an object of mockery and complaints from her husband, might well feel personally hurt and mortified. Yet in her case it would not be the insignia of womanhood itself which were blasphemously discussed. This Scots lady, to whom her husband would recite hexameters describing the adventures of the Prophet Jonah, his tremblings and final engulfment, will have suffered not only in her personal dignity, but in that of her sex. It is not to be wondered at that through the years she was changed, until the friends of her childhood and youth no longer found in her any trace of the maiden’s or the new-married wife’s rich and innocent nature. The incessant, burning wish to grow smaller had acted as a corrosive on her heart.

  “It furthermore appears that Lady Flora’s mother, while heroically keeping silent on her misfortune to the whole outer world, in the end failed to suppress all articulation of her misery. She made her daughter her confidante! Young Flora, while growing up, and month by month approaching the measures and weight of the elder woman, had heard her father’s sallies repeated by the mouth of her mother. And yet the girl was like her father in courage and wit, and this handsome and gay father of hers, at the time when she was still a pretty, nimble little girl, had taken pleasure in galloping with her across the Scottish heather and in training her to the arts of dance and sword-play. She could not possibly wish him any ill. But with the lamentations of her mother in her mind she yearned to annihilate the small, slim wanton women who seduced him, and with the flippancies of her father in her mind she longed to annihilate that same sacred body, which was just now budding into its season of rich flowering. Undoubtedly at an early age she vowed never through a marriage or a love affair to repeat her mother’s misery, and this in itself was a barren and desolate destiny. But her reason for the resolution, of which she could not speak, was a still heavier burden. What sad condition in a young virgin to grow pale with shame at the very same thoughts which will make her sisters blush deeply with sweet, delicate modesty!

  “Thus daily life at the ancient Scottish castle, between the two mighty ladies and the small gentleman, to the eyes of the world passed nobly and harmoniously. But within this same existence a young heart day by day hardened, until it could find comfort but in one single thing—absolute loneliness. The maiden shrank from any touch, physical or mental. Her great wealth and high rank, far from making her lot easier, seemed to render her even more lonely. Her isolation became her pride, and by the time when, after the death of both her parents, she first traveled in Italy, her arrogance was boundless.

  “Father Jacopo made Lady Flora’s acquaintance without at first suspecting in the presence of what misfortune and of what obduracy he found himself. These two, who in the future were to signify so much to each other, met for the first time in a small village of Tuscany, where Lady Flora had rented a villa for a couple of months, and where Father Jacopo on his way to Rome had fallen ill with a sudden fever, and was laid up at the inn. When Lady Flora was informed that an old priest was lying at death’s door in the miserable tavern, she had him fetched up to her own house and saw to it that he was nursed a
nd nourished until he had regained his strength. The priest already in the inn had learned of the lady’s exceptional wealth; his primary feelings toward her were gratitude and admiration. But in his simplicity he had knowledge of the human heart, and before long he looked deep into the condition of her soul. Undoubtedly the sight struck him with awe; without doubt, too, her impenitence itself did tie him to her, so that at no price in the world would he have let go of her.

  “They were brought closer together by the fact that she soon left to him to distribute the rich alms which she dealt out, without ever, in her general contempt of man, bothering who received them. And when she made up her mind to continue to Rome, she invited Father Jacopo to keep her company in her comfortable English coach, while her British and Italian attendants followed in two other carriages.

  “In the Eternal City the friendship between the noblewoman and the priest was continued and confirmed; for three months they met almost daily. Father Jacopo’s manner in his intercourse with his fellow creatures was so naturally winning that most people, almost unknowingly, disclosed to him their feelings and their doings. It must have been the same in the case of Lady Flora. I cannot imagine that she did ever confide in him, still less complain to him. Her communications about her past life were given gaily and with a high hand. But his mysterious intuition had its effect even on this haughty lady; step by step she was led to speak to him with absolute frankness.

  “A particular circumstance made itself felt in the relation between them. Lady Flora had known many clergymen, high and low, of her own country, but till now had not conversed with a priest of our church. It had amused her to shock and scandalize the British ecclesiastics by her utter disbelief and her utter contempt of Heaven and Earth. She now took it for granted that it would be still easier to give offense to a Roman Catholic priest; she lost no time trying her hand at Father Jacopo. This task, however, she did not undertake out of malice, but out of a kind of hard jocularity peculiar to her nature. But there was no scandalizing Father Jacopo. He was, as he himself told me, by no means a courageous man, and in the confessional while he listened to the reports of evil doings and thoughts his hair would often stand on end. But he could no more take offense at such things than he could take offense at a stroke of lightning or at an avalanche. In the one case as in the other he would at once endeavor, in every possible way, to stop or repair the havoc worked by the savage powers of nature; but in the one case as in the other he would accept the catastrophe without the slightest personal rancor. This attitude in a servant of the Church surprised Lady Flora; she carried her blasphemy further and grew coarser and harder of speech. Father Jacopo’s imperturbable peacefulness under this persecution in the end forced from her a kind of respect which she can rarely, if ever, have felt toward any human being.

  “ ‘In my dealings with Lady Flora,’ Father Jacopo said to me, ‘I sometimes felt that she had donned a heavy armor, which she had till now, quite rightly, considered impenetrable. She had taken pleasure in seeing all bullets glance off from it. And yet it is not impossible that within her proud heart she had at times vaguely desired to meet an opponent worthy of her.’

  “Now Father Jacopo in his quality of priest had a peculiar trait. It went against him to set forth in his prayer any particular request; he disliked pestering Heaven with a specified petition. Nor did he ever pray directly for the salvation of his penitents. Lady Flora a couple of times challenged him: ‘I suppose, Father Jacopo, that you will now be praying for my conversion?’ And guiltily he would have to confess that this he had never done. Whenever the weal and woe of any individual human being lay heavy on his heart, he was wont, he told me, before he began to recite his breviary, to center his thoughts upon that person, and during the prayer to hold him or her, as it were, upon his arms until they ached from the weight. ‘And then,’ he used to explain, ‘it came to me that I must act in such and such a way.’

  “Lady Flora was a strong and healthy woman, and had never in her life been hindered from an undertaking by ill health. But it so happened that on her first day in Rome she slipped on a marble stair of the palazzo on the Piazza del Popolo of which she had rented two floors, and sprained her ankle. For some time she had to keep to her sofa, and the doctor enjoined her to refrain from all excursions, even by coach. During these weeks Father Jacopo in spite of his many duties found time to visit her. And the thought of her filled his whole mind even when he did not see her.

  “So here they sat, two human beings of unique honesty, both singularly free of ever having wronged a fellow-creature, talking together. In one of them the uprightness and the blameless conduct had produced a sovereign arrogance, in the other an unconditional humility.

  “Within the lofty salon they went over both the phenomena of earthly existence and the ideas of Paradise and Hell. Lady Flora was skilled in such debates, and was never at a loss for an answer, while on his side Father Jacopo was often struck dumb by her heart-rending irreverence. It seemed to him that were he to answer her at all he must shriek out loud, and he was only able to stifle the shriek by pressing his lips hard together. Neither would he let himself be driven by her to make the sign of the cross, and he therefore during their conversations sat with his hands firmly folded in the lap of his old soutane. But it happened that on his return to his own small room he crossed himself time after time, so vividly did he feel the presence of the demons evoked by her words; aye, it would seem to him that for hours he had conversed with Lucifer himself. In spite of all this, on the morrow he went back to the palazzo, meek as ever.

  “In his heart Father Jacopo decided that the unequaled loneliness of the woman and her unequaled arrogance were one and the same mortal sin. For a long time he pondered in what way to encounter her, and he called himself an unworthy priest because he could not find a solution. He fasted and watched in the hope that he might thereby fortify his weak nature and hit upon the right spiritual weapon in their trial of strength. Empty and exhausted, upon his knees on the stone floor, he fought his battle for the woman who at that moment was supping on dainties and generous wine, or sleeping placidly behind the silken hangings of her four-poster.

  “For a moment Father Jacopo imagined that Lady Flora’s inconceivable isolation in itself might be a road to salvation. What a hermitess of the desert, what a stylite, famous through the ages, might he not make of her! But he rejected the thought as a dangerous temptation. It was, he felt, at once too easy and too bold. In his mind—for he was a man of vivid imagination—he saw the Scots noblewoman on top of her pillar, straight and colossal, never giddy, one with the marble on which she stood. From her altitude she would glance down at the men and women round the pillar’s foot, confirmed in her conviction of their pin-size, or she would gaze tranquilly skyward, at last confirmed in her conviction of the emptiness of the heavens. Terrible, terrible the hermitess with the gay, grim smile would be up there!

  “ ‘Nay,’ Father Jacopo thought, ‘it is by the low, rough roads of humanity; it is by the streets, lanes and highways trudged by the feet of human beings that my high-flying lady must walk to Heaven.’

  “So he spoke to her, first of all, of the oneness of all creation.

  “ ‘I know,’ said the lady, ‘your evangelists of oneness will proclaim first of all that one must not be oneself. My own oneness is my integrity. I have not married, I have taken no lover; the idea of children repels me—all because I want to be one, and alone in my skin.’ ”

  “ ‘I have not expressed myself well,’ said Father Jacopo, ‘I was thinking of the brotherhood of all human beings.’

  “ ‘What!’ Lady Flora exclaimed, ‘are you, my good, pious Father Jacopo, in reality a Father Jacobino? Is it the maxim of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—in the name of which the Government of France did so merrily play ball with the heads of my father’s good French friends—which you are preaching to me?’

  “ ‘I know but little of politics,’ said Father Jacopo. ‘The equality of men of which I talk is the
likeness of one man to the other—a family likeness, if you want, of which phenomenon you know more than I. We speak of one thing being like another without disparaging the integrity of either; nay, on the contrary, in doing so we acknowledge their essential difference, for nobody will compare two identical things. I do not comment on the likeness of one button of my cassock to another, but I may well allow myself to hold forth on the likeness between the diamond in your ring, which measures not half an inch, and the clear star in the sky, which according to the astronomers is a sun, if not a whole solar system!

  “ ‘This likeness between all things within creation does not, like the egalité of which you spoke, claim that they all be treated in the same way. For I cannot set the sun in your ring, and however rare and fine your diamond, it would not, if placed in the sky, shine far about. No, this equality of mine has no claims to make. But it yields proof that all things of this world are issued from one and the same workshop; it is in each thing the authentic signature of the Almighty. In this sense of the word, Milady, likeness is love. For we love that to which we bear a likeness, and we will become like to that which we love. Therefore, the beings of this world who decline to be like anything will efface the divine signature and so work out their own annihilation. In this way did God prove His love of mankind: that He let Himself be made in the likeness of men. For this reason it is wise and pious to call attention to likenesses, and Scripture itself will speak in parables, which means comparisons.’

  “ ‘Yes, in pretty comparisons,’ said Lady Flora. ‘King Solomon, I have been taught, prophesies on the relation between Christ and His Church, and tells of the bride—who symbolizes the Church—that she is like a rose of Sharon, and then again that her teeth are like a flock of sheep about to lamb, whereof every one beareth twins, and that her belly is like a heap of wheat!’