Goya
Page 29
This sounds too close to the sort of alarmist, Fatal Woman rodomontade with which nineteenth-century French critics, terrified by the specter of syphilis, used to salute Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Personally, I could imagine few things less scary and more enjoyable than an afternoon romp on those lacy cushions with the maja, but de gustibus, et cetera. And Licht is certainly right on the beam about the essential marcialidad and modernity of Goya’s challenging cutie.
But Goya’s first named portrait for Godoy was of his twenty-one-year-old wife, done in 1800. She was Carlos IV’s cousin, the child of Infante Don Luis de Borbón: Doña María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, the condesa de Chinchón, otherwise known—through her marriage to Godoy—as the Princess of the Peace. Queen María Luisa had personally selected her to be Godoy’s bride, a fact that casts further doubt on the reality of her own alleged affair with him. There is nothing to suggest that the marriage was a close, let alone a passionate, one. It was consummated, and it produced one daughter, Carlota Luisa. Having fulfilled her matrimonial duty, María Teresa sank back into running the household; she was bored by Godoy’s neglect of her, and offended by the scandalous openness with which he pursued his various affairs. Public opinion seems to have been on her side; at the Motín d’Aranjuez, the rising against Godoy fomented by Prince Fernando in 1808, some of the rebels were heard to cry, “¡Viva la inocente paloma!”—“Long live the innocent dove!” Much later, after she and Godoy had separated forever and she had moved back to Madrid while he languished in French exile with Carlos IV and his queen, she would remark to a French general that she hated Godoy so much that she could not love their child for being his daughter.13
Goya, Condesa de Chinchón, 1800. Oil on canvas, 216 × 144 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.13)
Goya’s portrait of her is one of the most enchanting images he ever produced, because it radiates neither conventional power nor confident sexuality: we see a timid girl of twenty-one, her isolation magnified by the deep dark space that surrounds her and gives a tender, almost virginal glow to her white dress. But she is five months pregnant with her future daughter, and looks rather bewildered. Her fluffy blond hair is adorned with green sprigs of wheat, traditional emblems of fertility. Her arms are bare, in deference to the court fashion launched by Queen María Luisa. She looks not only vulnerable but quite defenseless, a condition underlined by the enveloping darkness of the back-ground: a woman isolated and alone in the world. Goya saw right into her. His painting presents no mask and, as a result, it is perhaps the most perceptive, and by far the most touching and empathetic, of all his portraits of women.
It had been an arranged marriage, and the bride was neither sophisticated nor worldly: she had been raised and educated not by her mother but by nuns in a convent in Toledo. She has done her expected task, and will not get much else to do—four years earlier, in 1796, Godoy had met Pepita Tudo. It has been suggested that María Luisa arranged the marriage in an effort to distract Godoy from his new lover. If so, the scheme failed. Godoy was sexually obsessed with Pepita, so much so that he would wait in exile until his poor wife died in 1828 and then marry la Tudo, a gap of nearly three decades. Almost as soon as she married Godoy, the unhappy condesa de Chinchón—who, in the portrait, is wearing what appears to be a miniature portrait of Godoy on a ring on her left hand—was ruthlessly pushed to the periphery of her husband’s life. This was the act of a scandal-proof husband, but Godoy had already developed the armor (along with the political weight) of a rhinoceros.
He looked rather like one in Goya’s 1801 portrait of Godoy celebrating the Spanish army’s victory under his command in an insignificant action against the Portuguese that lasted only two weeks before the Portuguese army ran away and the Treaty of Badajoz was signed on June 7; it later became known as the War of the Oranges, because the Spanish vanguard, riding toward Lisbon, had paused in the gardens of Yelves, cut some orange branches, and sent them back to Godoy, who chivalrously forwarded them by a messenger to his queen.
Seldom has so small a war been so sumptuously commemorated. We see thirty-four-year-old Godoy after victory, leaning back with immense self-satisfaction in a field commander’s chair among rocks, holding a document—presumably the note of surrender. He gazes at captured Portuguese battle standards on the left. A residue of black cannon smoke rises and drifts away in the background. Everything about him—the spotless white linen, the magnificent crimson facings of his lapels, the gold embroideries on collar, cuffs, tricorne, and jacket, the unmarked yellow breeches, and the swagger stick held negligently between his legs—bespeaks a man of boundless self-confidence, whom no pollution from war can touch. Even his appreciably slimmer aide-decamp, hovering just behind Godoy’s shoulder, seems built to about two thirds the scale of the Prince of the Peace. The indolence of his pose suggests a degree of laziness, but mainly power. It is possible that Goya knew other examples of such a pose: that of the reclining emperor Augustus, for instance, on the Roman cameo known as the Gemma Augusta, then in the Spanish royal collections. But in Goya’s obstinately realistic sight, Godoy does not quite carry off this classical pose: he is a little too flushed and soft from years of good living in the palace, and it shows in the half-closed gaze, the overplump thighs. And it is a somewhat awkward pose. Goya, of course, knew others, including British prototypes of the standing military portrait, against the same kind of dark, rolling clouds, whether of natural storm weather or of gunpowder smoke; and it may be that this pose was dictated by the intended placement of the canvas itself, possibly over a fireplace in Godoy’s Madrid palace. It may even be that the king and queen meant the portrait of Godoy to occupy an honored place in the Salón de los Grandes Capitanes in the Royal Palace in Madrid.14
Goya, Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia, “Prince of the Peace,” 1801. Oil on canvas, 180 × 267 cm. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.14)
THE ARROGANT BEING in the portrait was flattering, but it was also how Godoy’s growing band of enemies might have imagined him: the clerics who resented his “enlightened” and confiscatory attitude to Church property, the noble friends and backers of the prince of Asturias who wanted the road to succession kept clear for Fernando, the common people who believed he was humiliating their king by cuckolding him—far more Spaniards, in all, than Godoy himself imagined. His popularity was not increased by the military reverses Spain was suffering, such as the fiasco in 1805 at Trafalgar, which wrote an end to all Spain’s historical claims to naval supremacy: there, some twenty-five miles off Cádiz, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s squadron wiped out a combined Spanish-French fleet, sinking twenty-three of its ships of the line and killing 6,000 of its men. This did not redound to the glory of the Prince of the Peace, who had been promoted to the command of Spain’s navy as well as her army.
If Britain now ruled the waves, it seemed that Napoleon was fast becoming the master of Europe. He crushed the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in December 1805, and then turned his full attention to Spain—his nominal ally.
His plan was tortuous. He could not conquer Spain by frontal attack by land or direct invasion by sea. Somehow he must smuggle his army across the Pyrenees and deploy it in Spain without raising Spanish suspicion—a much easier thing to say than to do. His solution lay in a secret treaty signed at Fontainebleau by Napoleon and Carlos IV, which arranged for the invasion and partition of Portugal: the nation was to be dismembered and divided between Spain, France, and, amazingly enough, the private estate of Manuel Godoy. The Spanish “kings of Etruria”—a title assigned by Napoleon to the Bourbon line of Carlos IV—would give up their Italian estates to Napoleon in exchange for the large tract of Portugal between the Douro and Minho rivers, plus the city of Oporto, the nation’s chief wine-export center. The southern (meridional) part of Portugal, including the Algarve, would be given as an absolute fief to Godoy himself. Lucrative Portuguese colonies in Africa and the New World would be s
plit between France and Spain. Napoleon’s interest in the deal was no mystery: from French-occupied ports on the Portuguese coastline his navy could “harass and interdict” British shipping headed for the Mediterranean, and somewhat reduce their control of the seas around southern Europe.
Since the Portuguese, whatever their military shortcomings, could hardly be expected to lie down and let this happen to them without uttering a squeak, the necessary muscle for the enterprise would be provided by a French army, which Napoleon in October 1807 started moving into Spain nine days before the Treaty of Fontainebleau was even signed. Not a single Spaniard, it seems, and certainly no one in the circle of the royal family, had an inkling of what Napoleon was really up to or foresaw its deadly consequences. Godoy, in any case, was blinded to them by his ambition to have a kingdom of his very own. Before long, the emplacements of 50,000 French troops within Spain formed what a contemporary called “an unbroken chain” from Bayonne to Madrid, and more were arriving every week.15
The Portuguese guessed at Napoleon’s plans by the time more than 100,000 French soldiers, under the command of Marshal Andoche Junot, had been installed in Spain. The royal family began forming plans to decamp to Brazil and, however implausibly, to conduct some kind of resistance from there. This was impossible, and Junot’s troops marched into Lisbon at the end of November 1807. Meanwhile, the Spanish royals went about things in their own bumblingly naïve family way; and Godoy, the brains of the family, was too infatuated with Napoleon to see what he was up against until it was far too late.
Napoleon, however, wanted to be rid of Godoy. He correctly perceived that the favorite was the only person at the higher levels of the Bourbon court who had real skills, however scrambled they might have been by his own narcissism and his desire to curry favor with power, including Napoleon’s own. He also knew something of the deep animosity that confronted Godoy, from the various conservative, pro-Fernandine interests in Spain. No matter that these hated Napoleon too: they could be put to use. So in February 1808 Napoleon dispatched his cousin Joaquim Murat, the grandduke of Berg, to march on Madrid at the head of an army of 50,000 men, take over the capital, occupy the throne, and depose Godoy.
Meanwhile Fernando had embarked on a clumsy intrigue to depose his father. His plot was spiked by Godoy, and Fernando was obliged to grovel in apology before Carlos, who unwisely pardoned him. He then started plotting again, against both Papa and Godoy.
Fernando had two things on his side. First, his faction of upper-class supporters, the anti-Godoy aristocrats, clerics, and army officers, who saw Fernando’s possibilities as a mere puppet king and so were prepared to support him as a fellow reactionary as well as a future legitimate heir to the throne. Some of these jealous and ambitious nobles, who felt that their ancient entitlements were being put at risk by Godoy’s ilustrado sympathies, convinced Fernando that Godoy was persuading his parents to cut him from the line of succession. Notable among these was the ultra-conservative conde de Montijo, who hated ilustrados and was prepared to go to any lengths, including the basest demagogy, to impede the modernization of Spain. Montijo despised plebeians, but knew how to stir them up. It was an old Spanish pattern: aristocrats using the backward as pawns by appealing to their most ignorant fears.
Second, Fernando was, to some extent, liked by those people. Some merely didn’t hate him, but others, royalist in the sentimental and unreasoning way that the uneducated often are, adored him without knowing him. A vast gulf was fixed between prince and commoner, but this prince was, after all, Carlos IV’s eldest son. And the Spanish pueblo had arrived, over the years, at an intense hatred of Manuel Godoy, the choricero whom rumor called a crook who had put horns on the head of their king—a not much loved king but king nevertheless, and as such the keystone of the state. It was all but guaranteed, then, that the pueblo—or, more truthfully, the populacho, the mob—would oppose and distrust anything Godoy did, and that the worst thing he could do would be to meddle with the status of the royal family.
Not that the common people of Spain had much cause to love the antiguo régimen of Carlos IV and his father. Apart from the miseries with which nature, or God, had lately afflicted the country—ruined harvests, floods, droughts, epidemics of yellow fever, even a plague of grasshoppers—there were unjust monopolies and punitive taxes of every sort. The populacho hated the army, too: not only did it cost some 40 million reales a year—a tax burden that fell directly on the common people of Spain—but the poor had no defense against conscription, which the rich could easily avoid, and Spanish soldiers were notorious for the brutal arrogance of their attitude to plebeian civilians. Just as bitterly resented were the royal efforts at proletarian “improvement,” which took the form of a censorious and haughty dislike of popular culture in all its forms—folk songs, zarzuelas, holiday carnivals, and especially bullfighting, which Carlos III, Carlos IV, and Godoy all regarded as a barbarous and brutalizing spectacle—so much so that Godoy banned all corridas in 1805, which made him about as popular as an American president who prohibited baseball would be. These things were quintessentially Spanish, not French, and the common people of Spain were apt to resent the ilustrado kings’ dislike of them as an assault on their national identity. Such things inclined them even more in Fernando’s favor: he became El Deseado, “the Desired One,” “the man we long for,” who would deliver Spain from its ills. This pathetic illusion created a ready-made alliance between his aristocratic supporters, the fernandinos, and the Spanish working class.
In March 1808 the king and queen, their family, and the court were, as usual, beginning their spring residence at the royal palace at Aranjuez, thirty miles from Madrid. Murat and his army were some seventy-five miles from the capital. His steady approach gave confidence to the growing junta of Godoy’s enemies, constantly stirred up by Fernando, led by Montijo, and including the son of the late condesa de Montijo, Eugenio Palafox, the mettlesome and unforgiving count of Teba, whom Godoy had consigned to several years’ exile in Portugal. His exile would have been longer, but Palafox intrepidly disguised himself as a peasant and sneaked back into Spain, reaching Madrid in March before Murat’s army did. He linked up with aristocratic friends in the anti-Godoy faction. Messages came from Fernando urging them to choose the moment to strike Godoy down. So the faction headed for Aranjuez, ready to do as much mischief to the Prince of the Peace as they could. A crowd of madrileños followed Montijo and Palafox, their numbers swollen by the local peasants who joined them as they marched along, aiming to besiege Godoy’s palace and flush him out.
Meanwhile Godoy himself had arrived in Aranjuez and implored the king to flee (though with dignity) to Sevilla so as to be safe from whatever actions Murat might take on Napoleon’s behalf—and, above all, to do it soon, now if possible, and discreetly. But Carlos wanted to do nothing in secret, and he trusted Napoleon. The emperor had been sending him reassuring letters, so friendly that he was even raising the possibility of marriage between Fernando and one of his own princesses. Carlos saw no reason to budge.
Shortly after midnight on March 18, a lit candle was seen in Fernando’s palace window. This was the signal for the rising, and gunshots rang out in front of Godoy’s palace. The heterogeneous rabble, or people’s army (depending on how you saw them), of rebels and protesters led by their aristocratic superiors had arrived, and were looking for the Prince of the Peace. They searched his palace and sacked it, but there was no sign of the royal favorite. He had taken refuge in an attic, where he spent the next thirty-six hours hidden under a pile of old carpets, half-suffocated, with nothing to drink and only a chunk of bread, hastily snatched from the late-supper table, to eat. When Godoy emerged, exhausted, disheveled, bruised, and bleeding (a horse had trodden on him and a sword or bayonet had pierced his left thigh), the insurgents brought him before Fernando, who reluctantly obeyed his parents’ heartfelt entreaties to save their favorite’s life.
Fernando worked out a deal with the protesters: Godoy could live, but in de
tention. And there matters rested until a new outburst of anger from the insurgents forced Fernando to show himself in public and call on them to disperse. Obligingly, they did, whereupon Carlos IV gave his son what he most wanted: he abdicated in Fernando’s favor. Queen María Luisa flew into a spitting rage, accusing her son of having stirred up the crowd to rebellion, which was nothing less than the truth. She denounced him as a coward, a liar, a bastard (without naming his real father), and a traitor. But with the mob outside yelling its praises of El Deseado and Carlos longing only for a little peace, there was nothing to be done.