The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  “Truly, my lovely child,” asked Mme von Kleist, “you wish to speak to Her Royal Highness?”

  “Yes, Madame,” replied Porporina. “I’d throw myself at her feet and beg a favor that she would surely not refuse me, for I understand that she’s a great musician and no doubt the patroness of many artists. People also say that she is as kind as she is beautiful. Were she to hear me out, I hope that she would help me get His Majesty to call my music teacher, the great Porpora, back to Berlin. The king had agreed that Porpora should come to Berlin. Upon his arrival at the border, he was turned away on the pretext of some faulty paperwork in his passport and virtually banished. Since then, despite His Majesty’s assurances and promises, I haven’t been able to get this interminable affair settled. I no longer dare importune the king with a request in which he can take only little interest, that always slips his mind, I’m sure. Yet, if the princess deigned say a word to the administrators in charge of expediting this business, I would have the joy of finally being reunited with my adoptive father, my one and only protector in the world.”

  “What you’re saying amazes me no end,” exclaimed Mme von Kleist. “What! the lovely Porporina, who I thought held the king in her sway, has to ask someone else’s help for something that seems so simple? In this case, His Majesty must fear in your adoptive father, as you call him, a guardian too severe or an adviser too adverse to his interests.”

  “Try as I may, Madame, your meaning escapes me,” replied Porporina with a seriousness that disconcerted Mme von Kleist.

  “Apparently I’m wrong about the extreme benevolence and boundless admiration that the king professes for the greatest diva in the universe.”

  “It is not seemly for such a lady as Mme von Kleist to mock a poor, harmless artist without pretensions.”

  “Do you think I’m mocking you? Who could dream of mocking such an angel? Now then, I’m sure you’ll win over the princess, who is a most impulsive person. She’s already so fond of your talent. Once she sees you up close, she’ll be just as fond of your person.”

  “On the contrary, Madame, I had been told that Her Royal Highness was always very hard on me, that she didn’t like my homely face and highly disapproved of my singing method.”

  “Who on earth could tell you such lies?”

  “The king told those lies!” replied the girl a bit mischievously.

  “It was a trap, a test of your sweet, modest disposition,” Mme von Kleist continued.

  “As a mere mortal I have no right to lie to you like a very cunning great king, and this I want to prove by taking you and your musical scores straight off to see the princess.”

  “And you think she’ll be glad to see me?”

  “Will you trust me?”

  “But if you’re wrong, Madame, who’ll be disgraced?”

  “I alone, and you’ll have my permission to tell one and all that while I boast about enjoying the princess’s affection, she has for me neither respect nor regard.”

  “After you, Madame,” said Porporina, ringing for her muff and mantelet. “I’m dressed very simply. Then again, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “You look charming as you are, and you’ll find our dear princess in even more informal attire. Come, let’s go.”

  Porporina put the mysterious scroll in her pocket, loaded Mme von Kleist’s carriage with musical scores, and resolutely followed, telling herself, “For a man who risked his life for me, I can certainly risk wasting my time waiting around for a little princess.”

  For five minutes she sat in a dressing room while the abbess and her confidante exchanged the following words in the next room.

  “Madame, I’ve brought her to you, she’s in there.”

  “So soon? Oh, admirable ambassadress! How should I receive her? What is she like?”

  “Reserved, prudent or simpleminded, highly secretive or admirably stupid.”

  “Oh, we’ll soon find out!” exclaimed the princess, who was practiced in divining motives and doubting appearances. Her eyes flashed with excitement. “Show her in!”

  During this short wait in the dressing room, Porporina had surveyed with surprise the strangest collection of paraphernalia that ever decorated a beautiful princess’s inner sanctum: globes, compasses, astrolabes, astrological charts, jars filled with nameless mixtures, skulls—in short, a sorcerer’s workshop. “My friend is not wrong,” she thought to herself, “and the secrets of the king’s sister are public knowledge. I don’t even think that she tries to hide them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been allowed to set eyes on all these bizarre objects. Come now, there’s no reason to be afraid.”

  The abbess of Quedlinburg was then about twenty-eight or thirty years old. She had been pretty as an angel, and this was still the case in the evening by candlelight and viewed from afar, but seeing her close up, in full daylight, Porporina was surprised to find her withered and blotchy. Her blue eyes, once the most beautiful in the world and now red-rimmed as though she had just been crying, had a sickly glint as well as a deep transparence that did not inspire trust. Her family and the whole court had adored her, and for a long time she had been the most affable, lively, benevolent, and gracious princess ever portrayed in those novels about people of rank in the old patrician literature. Over the last few years, however, her character had deteriorated as well as her beauty. She had fits of bad, even violent temper that made her resemble Frederick at his worst. Without trying to take him as her model, and even secretly excoriating him, she seemed invincibly driven to take on every fault that she blamed in him. Thus, she risked becoming an imperious, absolute mistress as well as a narrow-minded, condescending woman of learning with a skeptical, bitter frame of mind. And yet, under these dreadful defects that were fatally spreading through her every day, one could still see signs of an innate kindness, a judicious mind, a courageous soul, and a passionate heart. So what was happening in the soul of that poor princess? She was being devoured by a terrible sorrow, and she had to smother it in her breast, suffering stoically beneath a cheerful mask in front of a curious, malevolent, or indifferent world. As a result of this continual disguise and self-constraint, she had managed to develop within herself two quite different beings, one that she dared reveal to almost no one, and one that she flaunted with a sort of hatred and despair. People noticed that her conversation had taken a lively, brilliant turn, but that nervous, forced gaiety pained the eye, and its icy, almost frightening effects seemed inexplicable. By turns childishly sentimental and harshly cruel, she astonished others as well as herself. Floods of tears extinguished the fires of her wrath; then, a sudden burst of ferocious irony or unholy disdain would break her out of the salutary depressions that she could neither harbor in her soul nor disclose on her countenance.

  The first thing that Porporina noticed upon meeting the princess was that sort of duality within her. She had two aspects, two faces: one tender, the other threatening; and two voices, one sweet and harmonious that seemed God’s gift to an angel, the other harsh and rasping that seemed to spew out of some fiend’s burning breast. Amazed by such a bizarre creature, torn between fear and compassion, our heroine wondered whether it was a good or a bad genie that was going to invade and dominate her.

  As for the princess, she found Porporina far more daunting than she had imagined. She had been hoping that the singer, stripped of her theater costumes and that makeup that, no matter what people may say, uglifies women in the extreme, would justify the things that Mme von Kleist had said to reassure her, that she was more ugly than beautiful. Yet her olive complexion, so smooth and without a single blemish, her dark eyes so strong and sweet, her frank mouth, her supple figure with its easy, natural carriage—the whole effect of a good, forthright creature brimming with composure or at least the inner strength that comes from integrity and true wisdom forced upon restless Amalia a sort of respect and even shame, as though she sensed in Porporina a soul of unassailable loyalty.

  The princess endeavored to conceal her uneasiness. Tak
ing note of this, Porporina was amazed, as one can believe, to see that such a great princess felt intimidated in her presence. So, in order to revive the conversation that was flagging at every moment, Porporina began opening one of her scores in which she had slipped the cabalistic letter, making sure that this huge sheet of parchment with its huge characters caught the princess’s eye. Once the effect had been achieved, she made as though to remove it, as though she were surprised to find it there, but the abbess snatched it up and exclaimed, “What’s this, Mademoiselle? In the name of Heaven, where did you get this?”

  “If I must confess,” replied Porporina in meaningful tone, “it’s an astrological exercise. I was meaning to present it to Her Highness when she wished to ask me about a subject that is not altogether foreign to me.”

  The princess fastened her ardent gaze on Porporina, looked back at the magic characters, and dashed to a window. She studied the mysterious parchment for a second, then shrieked and sank, as though she were suffocating, into the arms of Mme von Kleist who, seeing her stagger, had raced toward her.

  “Out, Mademoiselle,” the queen’s favorite hastily ordered. “Go back to the dressing room, don’t say a word, don’t call anybody, not a single, solitary person! Do you hear?”

  “No, no, I don’t want her to leave . . . ,” choked the princess. “Here, I want her here, near me. Ah! my child,” she exclaimed as soon as Porporina come close, “what a service you’ve rendered me!”

  And convulsively seizing Porporina in her skinny, white arms, the princess clasped her to her heart and covered her cheeks with jerky, pointed kisses that left the poor child feeling bruised in body and soul.

  “Obviously this country makes people insane,” she thought to herself. “Several times I’ve thought I was going mad, and now I see that people of the highest rank are far worse off than I. There is madness in the air.”

  At last the princess removed her arms from Porporina’s neck, then wrapped them around Mme von Kleist’s, all the while shrieking, crying, and repeating in her strangest voice, “Saved! Saved! He is saved! My friends, my dear friends, Trenck has escaped from the fortress of Glatz; he’s off and running, still running!”

  And the poor princess fell into a fit of convulsive laughter, interspersed with sobs that were painful to the eyes and ears.

  “Oh! Madame, for the love of God, contain your joy!” pleaded Mme von Kleist. “Beware that anyone hear you!”

  Picking up the so-called cabala, which was nothing more than a coded letter from the Baron von Trenck, she helped the princess go on reading, a task interrupted thousands of times by bursts of feverish, almost frenetic joy.

  Chapter V

  “Seducing, by means that my incomparable friend provided me, the junior officers of the garrison, making a pact with a prisoner who shares my fondness for liberty, delivering a good punch to one guard, a swift kick to another, and a fine stroke of my sword to a third, making an amazing leap down to the base of the ramparts, while giving a shove to my friend who couldn’t make up his mind fast enough and dislocated his foot in his fall, picking him up, throwing him over my shoulders, running in this fashion for a quarter of an hour, crossing the Neiss in a pea-soup fog and water up to my waist, taking off again in a run once I got to the other side, walking all night long, a dreadful night . . . getting lost, trudging through the snow round and round a mountain without knowing where we were, then hearing the bells of Glatz toll out the hour of four in the morning! that is to say, having wasted my time and energy only to find myself in the shadow of the city walls at dawn . . . , reviving my courage, entering a peasant’s abode, putting my pistol to his throat and stealing two horses, then galloping off God knows where; conquering my liberty by means of a thousand tricks, terrors, pains, and struggles; finally finding myself penniless, practically naked, almost starving in a foreign land in brutal cold; but feeling free after having been condemned to a dreadful, perpetual captivity; thinking about an adorable friend, telling myself that this news will fill her with joy, making a thousand bold, delightful plans to come closer to her; this is being happier than Frederick of Prussia; this is being the happiest of men, the elect of Providence.”

  This was, in short, young Frederick von Trenck’s letter to Princess Amalia, and the ease with which Mme von Kleist read it to her mistress proved to Porporina, who was both surprised and touched, that this method of correspondence was very familiar to them. There was a postscript that read, “The person who will give you this letter is as much to be trusted as the others were not. You can, in short, confide in her without reservation and give her all your messages for me, with the Count de Saint-Germain serving as our conduit, but it is necessary that the aforesaid count, who does not enjoy my complete trust, never hear your name. He must believe that I’m smitten with Porporina, even though that is not at all the case and my feelings for her have never gone beyond pure, untroubled friendship. So, let no cloud darken the lovely brow of the goddess whom I adore. I live for her alone and would sooner die than betray her.”

  While Mme von Kleist was deciphering the postscript aloud and dwelling on every word, Princess Amalia was scrutinizing Porporina’s face for any sign of pain, humiliation, or resentment. Totally reassured by her angelic serenity, she once again began smothering the singer with kisses and exclaimed, “And to think I harbored suspicions about you, poor child! You don’t know how jealous I was, how much I hated and cursed you! I wanted to think you ugly and a poor actress just because I feared thinking you too beautiful and good. This is on account of my brother who was afraid that I would take up with you. All the while pretending that he wanted to bring you to my concerts, he carefully led me to understand that you had been Trenck’s mistress in Vienna, his idol, knowing full well that this was the way to keep me forever at a distance from you. And I believed it, while you’ve been risking life and limb to bring me this happy news! So you don’t love the king? Oh, how right you are! Of all the men in the world, he’s the most perverse, the most cruel.”

  “Oh! Madame, Madame!” cried Mme von Kleist, terrified by the princess’s abandon and delirious volubility in front of Porporina. “To what dangers you’d be exposing yourself just now if she weren’t an angel of courage and self-sacrifice!”

  “That’s true. . . . What a state I’m in! I must have lost my head. Shut the doors tight, von Kleist, and first check to see if anyone in the anterooms overheard me. As for her,” the princess added, pointing to Porporina, “take a look and tell me if it’s possible to doubt such a face. No, no! I’m not as careless as I look. Dear Porporina, don’t think I’m opening my heart to you inadvertently, nor that I’ll come to regret it in a calmer moment. You see, my child, I’ve got an infallible instinct, an eye that has never led me astray. It runs in the family, and my brother, the king who prides himself on the very same thing, can’t hold a candle to me. No, you won’t betray me, I see it, I know it! You wouldn’t want to betray a woman devoured by an unhappy love, a woman who has suffered things no one can ever imagine.”

  “Oh! Madame, never!” said Porporina, kneeling down near her, as if to take God as her witness. “Neither you, nor Herr von Trenck, who saved my life, nor anyone in the world, for that matter!”

  “He saved your life? Ah! I’m sure that he has saved many others! He is so brave, so good, so handsome! Don’t you find him very handsome? Then again, you must not have looked at him too much. Otherwise, you’d be in love with him, and you aren’t, isn’t that true? You’ll tell me how you met him, how he saved your life, but not now. I just couldn’t listen. I have to talk, my heart is brimming over. For such a long time it’s been drying up in my breast! I want to talk, then talk some more. Let me be, Kleist. I must vent my joy, or I’ll burst. Just close the doors, keep watch, protect me, look after me. Have pity on me, my poor friends, for I am very happy!”

  Thereupon the princess burst into tears.

  “You know, I found him attractive from the first day I laid eyes on him,” she said a few seconds lat
er in a voice choked with sobs, but prey to such agitation that nothing could calm her. “He was eighteen, beautiful as an angel, and so knowledgeable, so frank, so brave! I was supposed to marry the king of Sweden. Oh yes! And my sister Ulrika was vexed to tears that I should become queen while she remained unmarried! ‘My dear sister,’ I told her, ‘we can work this out. The great men who govern Sweden want a Catholic queen; I don’t wish to abjure my religion. They want a nice little queen, very idle, very calm, very aloof from any political doings; if I were queen, I’d want to rule. I’m going to make all this clear to the ambassadors, and you’ll see that tomorrow they’ll write to their prince saying that you’re right for Sweden and not I.’ I did as I said, and my sister is the Queen of Sweden. Since that day I’ve been acting a part every day of my life. Ah! Porporina, you think you’re an actress? No, you don’t know what it’s like acting a part one’s whole life long, morning, noon, evening, and often at night. For everything that has breath around here does nothing but spy on us, trying to read our minds and betray us. I was forced to make a great show of grief and resentment when my sister, thanks to me, stole the throne of Sweden out from under my nose. I was forced to pretend that I detested Trenck and found him ridiculous, to make fun of him, and what else! All the while I was his adoring mistress, choking with drunken joy then as I am now! Ah! more than now, alas! But Trenck wasn’t as strong and wary as I was. He wasn’t born a prince, he didn’t have my talent for lying and dissembling. The king discovered everything. As kings do, he lied and pretended to see nothing. But he persecuted Trenck, and this beautiful page, the king’s favorite, became the object of his hatred and wrath. The king rained down on him humiliation and harsh treatment, kept him under arrest seven days out of eight. But on the eighth Trenck was in my arms, for nothing frightens or disheartens him. How can one not adore such courage? Well, the king entrusted him with a foreign mission. After he had brought the affair to a fine and speedy resolution, my brother was so vile as to accuse him of having handed over to his cousin Trenck the Pandur, who serves under Maria Theresa, the designs of our fortresses as well as military secrets. This was the way not only to get him away from me by locking him up forever but also to disgrace him and make him die of grief, despair, and rage in some horrible dungeon. See if I can honor and bless my brother. He’s a great man, or so people say. But I’m telling you, he’s a monster! Ah! Beware of loving him, girl. He’ll snap you in two, like a twig. But you must pretend, you see, always pretend! In the atmosphere where we live, you have to breathe in secret. I pretend to worship my brother. I’m his beloved sister, as everyone knows, or thinks. . . . He attends to my every desire. He gathers cherries himself from the espaliers at Sans-Souci; he deprives himself, he who loves this one thing alone on this earth, in order to send them to me, and before handing them over to the page who will bring me the basket, he counts the cherries just to make sure that the page won’t eat any on the way. What dainty care! What artlessness worthy of Henry IV of France and King René! Yet he makes my lover perish in an underground dungeon and tries to disgrace him in my eyes to punish me for loving him! What a big heart! What a good brother! And what love we have for each other!”