The repudiation of their republican sympathies, and the renewed religiosity of Paola and Ludovico, should have been welcomed by Scarpia, but incomprehensibly they were not. He was exasperated by Ludovico’s condescension – his implicit assumption that religions and ideologies, like fads and fashions, come and go but the standing of Rome’s patricians was timeless – and by his inability to understand what was going on in Paola’s mind. Had she really undergone a conversion? Were her prayers sincere? Were her good works the product of God’s grace? Or had she simply read the signs of the times, seen that Jacobinism had had its day and, like an actress, taken on a new role?
*
On 14 March 1800, the conclave of cardinals in Venice elected a new pope, the Benedictine Father Gregory Chiaramonti, Bishop of Imola. The choice was a compromise and surprised many because, after the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic by the French, he had preached acquiescence in the new order. ‘Christian virtue,’ he had said, ‘makes men good democrats . . . Equality is not an idea of philosophers but of Christ . . . and do not believe that the Catholic religion is against democracy.’
The new Pope’s liberal outlook did not change the determination of the Roman republicans to seize power in the city before his return. To thwart them, Scarpia formed a small team – Spoletta as his adjutant, three clerks to collate intelligence and four sbirri recruited by Spoletta to undertake the less savoury aspects of their work. It was Spoletta who set up the network of informers – paying out petty bribes to domestic servants in the homes of those known to have Jacobin sympathies.
With the carrot also went the stick. The strappado was close to the Villa Farnese on the via della Corda – the machine gave the street its name. It consisted of a crossbar with ropes and pulleys that would lift a man by his arms tied behind his back and then drop him suddenly to within an inch or two of the floor – tre tratti di corda being the usual punishment for breaches of public order.
All depended now on events in northern Italy. The Russians had withdrawn from the coalition, but the Austrians retained an army of 100,000 men in the valley of the Po. The French remained besieged in Genoa, but the new First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was assembling an army to relieve them. Could the military genius turn the tables once again? For the republicans, there was everything to hope for, and for the Bourbons everything to fear.
Then, just as Bonaparte was leading his newly formed army over the Alps by St Gotthard Pass, Spoletta brought information that he had gleaned from a housemaid at the Palazzo Attavanti. There was a mysterious guest who never appeared at meals but was treated with unusual consideration. She had been told to use the best linen sheets for his bed and saw that the best food on the finest china was taken to his room, not by a lackey but by the marchesa herself. The housemaid was told to clean his room between specified hours in the morning – between nine and ten – when the guest would be elsewhere – it was thought, in the marchesa’s bedroom. At first the servants thought he might be her lover; but once he had returned to his own room while the maid was still dusting and, though she lowered her eyes and hurried from the room, she recognised the guest: it was Cesare Angelotti, the marchesa’s brother.
The Attavantis had a number of retainers; Scarpia therefore did not want to risk an imbroglio by arresting Angelotti in their palazzo. However, he felt that sooner or later he would go out to meet with other conspirators. It was a matter of keeping watch, day and night. Angelotti was cunning. He lay low. It was the marchesa who busied herself going to and fro, no doubt leaving notes or verbal messages with her patriot friends. Moreover, she was posing as St Mary Magdalene for Mario Cavaradossi, who as a gesture of reconciliation had been commissioned to paint a mural depicting the repentant sinner in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle. The painter was undoubtedly a conduit for messages from Angelotti to his republican friends.
Then, on 19 May, as the marchesa left the palazzo in her coach, Spoletta, affecting to be a passer-by, noticed an unusual disarray in the livery of one of the coachmen and saw, beneath his tricorn hat, the face of Angelotti. He followed the coach with his sbirri. It went as so often before to Sant’Andrea della Valle. The coachmen climbed down and, while one opened the door for his mistress, and then took hold of the bridles of the horses, the other went with the marchesa towards the church. Before he could go in, Spoletta’s sbirri had seized him and, fending off an assault by the marchesa with her parasol, dragged Angelotti off to the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Fifteen
1
Shortly after the opening of the carnival of 1800 in the Alibert theatre, the first opera of the new century was staged at the Apollo. It was Cimarosa’s L’italiana in Londra, and was judged mediocre. For the second half of the evening’s entertainment, the company performed a ballet, Gli sogni di Telemaco, which provoked jeers and catcalls from the audience. A month later, I matrimonio in cantina closed after only one performance.
Under Governor Naselli, many of the statutes of pontifical Rome had been reinstated – Jews were once again required to live in the ghetto – but one of the changes made under the republic had remained: women were permitted to appear onstage. At the Valle theatre, to open the carnival, the diva La Bussoni appeared in an opera composed and staged by Luigi Caruso. La Bussoni loathed Caruso – she had wanted to sing in an opera by his rival, Guglielmi – and so sabotaged the first performance by singing in an inaudible whisper. ‘Cavi la voce,’ shouted Caruso from the pit. La Bussoni pretended not to hear. The audience took up the cry, ‘Cavi la voce!’ and when she paid no attention, whistled and jeered her off the stage.
The management of the Valle capitulated and put on an opera by Guglielmi but, though La Bussoni sang with full voice, the show was a flop. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent when the theatres were closed, came as a relief – giving time for the Roman impresarios to plan for what would follow Easter. On 27 April, the Valle opened the spring season with Paisiello’s La spazzacamino, but they sold few tickets and those who did attend booed the performance. In May, Paer’s l’intrigo amoroso did better; and Roma liberata at the Alibert by the Neapolitan composer Giuseppe Curcio, which depicted the Christian Emperor Constantine liberating Rome from the pagan Maxentius, just as King Ferdinand had freed it from the atheist Jacobins, was approved by Prince Naselli and his entourage; but neither opera was enough to save what looked to be a disastrous season.
There was only one hope of salvation – Floria Tosca. The desperate impresarios wrote to their agents in Venice, Vienna, Berlin and St Petersburg – no one quite knew where Tosca was singing at the time – offering her any inducement if she would come at once to sing in Rome, perhaps in the title role in Guglielmi’s La morte di Cleopatra, or better still, Rosina in Paisiello’s ever-popular Il barbiere di Siviglia. Their appeal reached Tosca in Vienna, where she had triumphed as Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. She was toying with an invitation to sing in Berlin. In pecuniary terms, it far outdid the one she now received from Rome; but for reasons that were neither pecuniary nor professional, she was inclined to accept it. She was in love.
Tosca was now aged twenty-six and at the height of her powers. She exulted in those powers; she lived to feel her voice fill a theatre, to entrance an audience and hear their frantic applause. For all the genius of the composers, the arias of a Cimarosa, a Granacci, a Paisiello or a Mozart were only black dots and lines on a page until given substance by Tosca; and then the mix of melody and pure sound created a quintessence of beauty that for her audience was a glimpse of Heaven. Tosca’s talent gave her a unique and extraordinary power that was acknowledged by every crowned head of Europe, and their homage, and that of other highly placed admirers, she had come to accept as her due.
And Tosca had become accustomed to behave like a monarch, treating with impresarios as Queen Maria Carolina might with the ambassadors of foreign powers, and choosing lovers with the insouciance of Catherine the Great. She was not a wanton; there had been perhaps no more than a dozen – or a dozen
she liked to think about – since she had lost her virginity to the great Prince Alberigo di Belgioioso d’Este – one or two of them fellow performers, like the odious Lorenzi; the odd nobleman in the mould of Prince Alberigo whose power was in itself an aphrodisiac and whose influence could further her career; and three or four attractive men she had felt drawn to at a particular time and in a particular place like Baron Scarpia in Taormina.
Tosca had performed twice in Rome during the republic – one of the first women to appear on the Roman stage. She had been vexed by the law that had banned them under the popes, but she had also remembered that it was thanks to Pope Pius VI that she had been able to pursue her career. Tosca remained a Catholic – an unquestioning believer – with a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary – a woman who understood the feelings of women and so was willing to intercede with her son on their behalf. She had no political sympathies, one way or the other, but was irritated to see crosses supplanted by Liberty trees and the festivities on saints’ days replaced by absurd republican ceremonials; play-acting, in her view, should be confined to the theatres and liturgies left to the Church.
On the other hand, novelty had its attractions; Tosca rather liked the young men with their Brutus haircuts who talked so loftily about liberty, equality and fraternity even though all three might be tosh. One young man in particular who took her fancy was the painter Mario Cavaradossi, whom she met at a reception given in her honour after her first gala performance in Rome. In fact, he was not so young – he was well over thirty – of medium height with a fine figure, strong features, dark brown eyes and a conceited manner that she found somehow endearing. She sensed that his conceit was fragile, recognising him as the kind of man who set goals to prove that he was as fine as he thought himself to be. His goal that evening, at the Palazzo Colonna, had been to ask Tosca, in an almost offhand way, if she might like to sit for a sketch, and, when she agreed to his suggestion and went next day to his studio, to attempt to seduce her – an attempt which succeeded all too easily because she saw something poignant in his bravado, found him handsome and had not made love with anyone for quite a while.
Tosca was a year or two younger than Cavaradossi, but there was something in him that brought out a motherly tenderness as they lay together half dressed on the sofa in his studio. She had enjoyed the encounter despite his slightly inept impatience – odd, she thought, since he must surely have experience of other women, some of whom might have taught him that on the whole women preferred their lovers to take their time; or had he thought she would take impetuosity for passion? She was touched when she caught his quick sidelong glance to see how she now felt after their bout of love. He was a dear, posturing and perhaps not particularly intelligent man and, to judge from the canvases in his studio, a mediocre painter; but with a little bit of tactful coaching he could be a delightful lover and, for reasons she did not bother to analyse, he was what she felt like at the time.
Their affair should have lasted no more than a week, because Tosca was due to move on to Milan; but, to the dismay of her entourage, she cancelled the engagement, claiming to be ill. She remained in Rome, giving out that she was tired, but she had enough energy to receive Cavaradossi in her lodgings, visit his studio and spend three days in a delightful love nest – a small farmhouse, the Casa di Ferruto, half an hour’s ride from the Argentina theatre on the Appian Way belonging to a republican friend of Cavaradossi’s. There, away from the impresarios, musicians and admirers, without even a maid or valet, she tactfully taught him that passion did not mean making love at a gallop; and the staying power he showed at a canter brought Tosca’s senses to a high pitch of delight.
Where Tosca’s senses led, her emotions followed. She found she grew increasingly fond of the absurd young painter, listening as if enraptured to his monologues about liberty, the rights of man and the metric system. He was a proud conspirator, showing her the rungs in the side of the well in the garden that led down to an empty cistern which had been used as a refuge for republicans on the run from the papal police during the reign of Pope Pius VI. ‘Patriots would hide out there for as long as a week.’ And he was eloquent on the evil of his adversaries, citing the terrible atrocities committed by Bourbonists in Naples – the monstrous Fra Diavolo who played football with severed heads, Mammone who fed his followers with human flesh, Pronio who raped young girls and then impaled them on sharpened stakes, and the notorious Scarpia who drank his victims’ blood from their skulls. ‘And to think Scarpia once lived here in Rome. If only then I had known what was to come, I would have thrust a dagger into his heart!’
Tosca had thought it prudent not to mention that, if this was the same Scarpia she had known in Sicily, the story of his cruelties seemed unlikely. She showed a polite interest in Cavaradossi’s political intrigues and his views on philosophy and art but, having never read Rousseau or Helvetius, and being unfamiliar with the paintings of David or Ingres, she could not turn his monologues into a conversation. At first she thought that listening to him would be enough, but by the third day of their stay at the Casa di Ferruto, she saw that her lover was growing restless – that his monologues were not enough to entertain him. She sensed that he was bored, and his enthusiasm when she suggested a return to Rome proved that her apprehensions had been correct. They went back to the city and accepted some of the invitations to the grand palazzi that had been piling up for Tosca, or went to the more intimate conversazioni given by Cavaradossi’s republican friends. At both she arrived on his arm and remained with him throughout the evening. Cavaradossi was no longer bored, and he took some pride at being on public display as Tosca’s lover, but he was clearly embarrassed by her occasional attempts to contribute to a discussion – the inanity of what she said and her coarse accent revealing that, for all the beauty of her voice, Tosca’s mind was that of a peasant from the Veneto.
Tosca could not remain in Rome indefinitely: the lavish fees from past engagements were always quickly spent on sumptuous lodgings, the finest cooks, a large and pilfering body of servants, and gifts for her lovers – in Rome, diamond-studded snuffboxes, watches, ebony canes with ivory handles, soft leather boots, fine tailored tunics – gifts which she forced upon Cavaradossi, who affected a republican indifference to material things. If she remained off the stage for long, the impresarios might find they could manage without her – replacing her with Angelica Catalini or Teresa Bertinotti – and then Tosca might be deprived of what she valued more, even, than the love of Cavaradossi – appearing onstage before an audience and enrapturing them with her voice.
Tosca suggested timidly to Cavaradossi that he might accompany her to Milan. Cavaradossi was, as she had feared, indignant: much as he loved Tosca, he had imperative reasons, both professional and political, for remaining in Rome. They therefore parted, but, rather than leave Cavaradossi with the severe warning she had delivered to Scarpia – that he was not to fall in love with her – she made anguished protestations of lasting affection which he accepted as if they were another pair of gold cufflinks or white kid gloves, and returned with a nonchalance that was not in itself insincere but suggested that such protestations in Rome were a currency as debased as the paper money.
Tosca was no fool: she sensed his indifference and thought that she too should try and cultivate a certain detachment; but in Milan, in Venice and then in Vienna, she could not eject Cavaradossi from her thoughts. She had mused ceaselessly on the time she had spent in his company; she wrote to him frequently and received one or two replies; and to her dismay she found that, together with her fond memories, came not just schemes for a future reunion but daydreams of their sharing a home – of her cooking macaroni and washing his clothes as her mother had done for her father. The idea was absurd – it was a decade since Tosca had cooked anything or washed any clothes – but some instinct inherited from the Veneto told her that the kind of love she felt for the handsome young painter could only be fulfilled in cooking, washing, and even bearing a child.
; 2
This, then, was Tosca’s frame of mind when the plea came for her to return to Rome and save the opera season from disaster. Tosca accepted at once. She reneged on her commitment to go to Berlin, wrote to Cavaradossi to say she was returning, and hired a coach to take her south over the Alps. Upon reaching Rome she was installed in her old lodgings and sent a note to Cavaradossi to announce her arrival. There was only a week to rehearse before she appeared onstage as the eponymous heroine in Paisello’s Nina, o sia la pazza per amore. The role of a crazed maiden singing gentle arias with flowers entwined in her hair suited Tosca’s mood because she did indeed become almost demented when her note to Cavaradossi was not answered. Worse, her lackey said he could not be sure whether Cavaradossi had even received it. Perhaps he was not in Rome. Perhaps he was on the run. Even the apolitical Tosca could understand that Cavaradossi’s position under the allied occupation was not the same as it had been under the republic. He was no longer a member of the governing elite, the darling of the patriots, the insouciant hero of the Roman revolution. Perhaps the letters she had sent from Vienna and then Venice telling of her planned arrival had not reached him either? Or was he lying low in his friend’s farmhouse, the Casa di Ferruto, maybe with another woman?
Tosca’s anguish at Cavaradossi’s absence from the first night of Nina so enhanced her performance that the audience went delirious: the season was saved. But Tosca could not rest on her laurels: she had also agreed to play the role of Rosina in Il barbiere de Siviglia. Even as she was rehearsing, enquiries were made on Tosca’s behalf as to the whereabouts of Cavaradossi. All sources agreed that he was in Rome but were shifty as to what he was doing. This confirmed Tosca’s suspicions that he had another woman. No one came up with the name of a rival, but she was told that he spent much of his time in the Palazzo Attavanti, and that he was working on a mural of St Mary Magdalene in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle for which the Marchesa Attavanti was posing as a model.
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