by George Sand
“Your Ladyship is mistaken. Eating well and resting the mind always fatten them up here. I could cite you a lady who arrived here just as slim as you are. Twenty years later she left weighing at least one hundred and eighty pounds.”
“Thank you very much, Herr Schwartz. I have no desire to get so dreadfully fat, and I hope that you won’t refuse me books and light.”
“I humbly beg your Ladyship’s pardon, but I won’t commit any infractions against duty. Besides, Your Ladyship won’t be bored, for she’ll have her harpsichord and music here.”
“Truly? Do I owe this consolation to you, Herr Schwartz?”
“No, Signora, those are His Majesty’s orders. I also have instructions from the commanding officer to let these objects in and have them brought to your room.”
Consuelo, delighted to be able to make music, did not think of asking for anything more. While Herr Schwarz arranged the rickety bed, the two straw-bottomed chairs, and the little pine table that were all her furniture, she merrily sipped her chocolate.
“Your Ladyship will need a chest of drawers,” he said with that sweet look of people willing to lavish us with kindness and attention in exchange for our money. “And then a better bed, a carpet, a desk, an armchair, a washstand. . . .”
“I’ll take the chest of drawers and the washstand,” replied Consuelo, wanting to spare her resources. “There’s no need for anything else. I’m not delicate, and please bring me only the things I’ve requested.”
With a look of surprise bordering on contempt, Herr Schwartz wordlessly shook his head. When he got back to his most worthy wife, he said, “It’s not mean, but it’s poor. We won’t make a lot off this one.”
“What do you want it to spend?” asked Frau Schwartz, shrugging her shoulders. “This one’s no great lady, but an actress, from what I hear.”
“An actress!” Schwartz exclaimed. “Well, I’m delighted for our son Gottlieb.”
“Shame on you!” said his wife with a scowl. “You want her to turn him into a circus performer?”
“You don’t understand, wife. He’s going to be a pastor. I’ll never change my mind about that. He’s done the necessary studies, and he’s made of the right stuff. Yet he’ll have to preach, and as he hasn’t shown any signs of great eloquence so far, the actress will give him speech lessons.”
“Not a bad idea, as long as she doesn’t want to deduct her fees from our bills!”
“Don’t you worry about that! She’s utterly witless,” replied Schwartz, sniggering and rubbing his hands together.
Chapter XV
The harpsichord, the same one that Consuelo had been renting at her own expense in Berlin, arrived during the day. She was delighted not to have to risk getting acquainted with a new instrument, perhaps less pleasing and reliable. While issuing orders that the harpsichord be sent to the prison, the king, who always tended to the tiniest details, asked whether it belonged to the prima donna. Learning that it was rented, he notified the owner, a violin maker, to say that he would guarantee the instrument’s return, while the prisoner remained responsible for the rent; whereupon the violin maker pointed out that he had no recourse against a person in prison, especially if she were to die there. Herr von Poelnitz, who had been put in charge of this important negotiation, retorted with a laugh, “My dear man, you don’t want to wrangle with the king over such a trifle. Besides, it won’t get you anywhere. Your harpsichord is under arrest and will be locked up this very day at Spandau.”
Porporina’s manuscripts and scores arrived as well. While she was amazed at such amenity in her prison regime, the fortress commander came to explain that she would be continuing as the female lead singer at the royal theater.
“Such is His Majesty’s will,” he said. “Each time your name is put on the program at the Opera, a carriage under escort will convey you to the theater at the appointed hour and return you to bed at the fortress directly after the performance. These journeys to and fro will be conducted with clockwork precision and all due respect to you. I hope, Mademoiselle, that you won’t attempt an escape, thereby forcing us to augment the rigors of your captivity. In accordance with the king’s orders, you’ve been given a heated room and permission to walk on the rampart you see there whenever you wish. In short, we are responsible not only for your person but for your health and voice as well. The only rub is that you’re to remain in solitary confinement, without communication of any sort with anyone inside these walls or out. As there are just a few ladies here and one jailer serves the whole wing, you’ll be spared the unpleasantness of being tended by boors. Herr Schwartz’s honest face and good manners ought to ease your mind in that respect. So, a little boredom will be your only hardship. Given your age and the brilliant situation you enjoyed. . . .”
“Don’t worry, Herr Commandant,” said Consuelo with a touch of pride. “I’m never bored as long as I can keep busy. Just one favor, please. May I have some writing materials and light for making music in the evenings?”
“That’s altogether impossible. I’m desperately sorry to turn down the sole request of such a courageous person. Yet in compensation I can authorize you to sing whenever you wish, day or night. Yours is the only inhabited room in this isolated tower. True, the jailer lives below. Yet Herr Schwartz is too well bred to complain about hearing such a lovely voice, and I’m personally sorry to be out of earshot.”
This dialogue, with Herr Schwartz looking on, ended in many deep bows, after which the elderly officer took his leave. Judging from the singer’s composure, he felt sure that she had been sent to Spandau for some breach of theatrical discipline and for a few weeks at the very most. Consuelo herself did not know the reason for her arrest, whether it was for suspicion of complicity in a political conspiracy, for the simple crime of doing Frederick von Trenck a good turn, or merely for being Princess Amalia’s discreet confidante.
For two or three days our captive felt more restless, disheartened, and bored than she wanted to admit to herself. The long nights, still fourteen hours in that wintry season, were particularly unpleasant while she clung to the hope that Herr Schwartz would deliver her from the dark with a supply of light, pens, and ink. But she soon learned that the obsequious Schwartz was endowed with inflexible tenacity. He was not evil, nor was he sadistic, like most of his kind. He was even pious and devout in his way, believing that he was serving God and saving his soul as long as he fulfilled every professional duty that could not be shirked. True, these reserved sins were few in number, generally situations where he stood a greater chance of putting his job in danger than making a dime on the prisoners. “What a simpleton,” he said to his wife about Consuelo, “thinking that I’d risk getting myself fired just to earn a few groschen a day on candles!”
“You be careful now. No more dinners, not even a single one, when her money runs out,” ordered Frau Schwartz, the Egeria of his greedy inspirations.
“Don’t worry. She’s got savings, she told me, and they’re deposited with Porporino, another singer at the theater.”
“That’s a bad debt!” his wife went on. “Take another look at our Prussian law code and you’ll see an article with regard to actors, which absolves any debtor from all claims on their behalf. Watch out that her depositary doesn’t invoke the law and hold back the money when you show him your accounts.”
“I’ll just have her salary attached, since prison hasn’t broken her engagement with the theater.”
“And who says she’s going to be paid? The king knows the law better than anyone, and if he sees fit to invoke it. . . .”
“You think of everything, wife!” said Herr Schwartz. “I’ll be on my guard. No money? No hot meals, no heat, just regulation furnishings. Everything strictly by the book.”
That is how Herr and Frau Schwartz discussed Consuelo and her fate. As for the prisoner, once it had become clear that the honest jailer was incorruptible in the matter of candles, she made the best of it and arranged her days so as not to suffer too much f
rom the long nights. She stopped singing when it was light, saving that activity for the evening hours. She even tried to refrain from thinking about music and entertaining herself with musical reminiscences or inspirations until after dark. She devoted mornings and afternoons to meditations on her present plight, memories of the past and dreams about the future. That way she soon succeeded in splitting her life into two parts, one altogether philosophical and the other altogether musical; and she recognized that with painstaking care and perseverance a person can to some degree make the capricious, balky charger of fantasy, the odd muse of imagination function on a regular basis and subject them to her will. By living soberly, despite Herr Schwartz’s prescriptions and insinuations, and getting lots of exercise, even without pleasure, on the rampart, she managed to feel very calm at day’s end and made pleasant use of those dark hours that prisoners, forcing sleep to escape boredom, fill with phantoms and fidgeting. Allotting herself just six hours in bed, she was soon sure of peaceful slumber every night, without excess sleep one night ever compromising the next night’s repose.
By the end of a week she was already so thoroughly used to her prison that it felt as if she had never lived otherwise. Her evenings, so forbidding at first, were now her favorite time; and the darkness, far from scaring her as she had expected, revealed treasures of musical conception that she had been carrying around inside, never finding a chance to put them to use and formulate their elements because of her bustling singing career. When she felt that improvising and singing from memory would fill her evenings, she let herself devote a few hours of daylight to noting her inspirations and studying her composers even more carefully than she had been able to do in a whirlwind of emotion or under the eye of an impatient, systematic professor. At first, she wrote music by taking a pin and pricking little holes between the lines, then by using little splinters of wood from her furniture that she blackened against the stove when it was good and hot. As both methods took a lot of time and her supply of ruled paper was very limited, she saw that it would be better to exercise her robust memory more and to file away there the many compositions that each evening brought forth. After getting them all down, she learned with practice to skip from one unwritten piece to another without mixing them up.
Yet, as her room was very warm, thanks to the extra fuel that Herr Schwartz added at no cost to the usual allotment, and the rampart where she walked was always raked by an icy wind, she inevitably went hoarse for a few days, which deprived her of the pleasure of going to sing in Berlin. On the very day that Herr von Pœlnitz, with the king’s consent, had aimed to bring her back before an audience, the prison doctor, under orders to see her twice a week and report on her health, wrote to the baron that she had lost her voice. Her outing was thus delayed, and without the slightest twinge of disappointment on her part. She had no desire to breathe the air of freedom until prison had become such a familiar routine that she could return without regret.
For that reason she did not nurse her cold with all the love and care that a singer usually lavishes on her precious throat. Refusing to give up her walks on the ramparts, she had a slight fever for several nights and experienced a little phenomenon familiar to us all. Anyone with fever undergoes illusions that are more or less unpleasant. Some imagine that the angle formed by the walls of the apartment is closing in on them, getting tighter and tighter, finally squeezing and crushing their heads; then, little by little the angle opens up, setting them free and returning to its original position; then it starts tightening up again, and the whole cycle of distress and relief goes round and round again. Others take their bed for a wave that sweeps them up high as the canopy, then throws them down, then sweeps them up all over again, doggedly tossing them about. When the narrator of this true story is feverish, he has the bizarre illusion of a huge black shadow spreading out horizontally over a brilliant surface with him in its middle. The dark spot swimming over the imaginary ground never stops contracting and expanding. It dilates until it entirely covers the brilliant surface, then immediately shrinks down to a tenuous thread, after which the same process starts up over and over again. The dreamer would find nothing unpleasant about this vision, were it not for a sickly feeling rather difficult to explain that he himself is this obscure reflection of an unknown object restlessly floating over sands burnt by the rays of an invisible sun, and to such an extent that when the imaginary shadow contracts, he feels himself getting small and thin as the silhouette of a hair and when it expands, he feels the substance of his being distending in space like a mountain’s shadow reaching over a valley. Yet there is neither mountain nor valley in this dream. There is nothing but the image of an opaque body performing in a sunny reflection the same exercise as a cat’s black pupil in its transparent iris, and this waking hallucination turns into one of the strangest tortures.
We could cite several cases: one person sees the ceiling come crashing down at every instant when he has a fever; another thinks that he has turned into a globe floating through space; and two others take the space between their beds and the wall for the edge of an abyss, one falling off to the left and the other to the right. But each reader could furnish his observations and the phenomena of his own experience, which would not advance the question nor explain better than we can why every individual, over the course of a whole life or at least for a long period of years, has his own particular dream every night, why every attack of fever produces the same hallucination and the same anguish. This is a matter of physiology; and we think that a doctor might find a few signs that relate not to the source of the obvious problem, revealed by other symptoms no less obvious, but to the seat of a hidden problem deriving from a weakness in the patient’s constitution and that it is dangerous to provoke by certain reagents.
Yet this is beyond my scope, and I beg the reader’s pardon for having dared broach the topic.
As for our heroine, the hallucination brought on by her fever was naturally of a musical sort and involved her hearing. Slipping back into the dreamy state, awake or half-awake, through which her mind had drifted during her first night in prison, she imagined hearing Albert’s violin with its plaintive wail and eloquent phrases, sometimes loud and clear as though the strings were resonating in her cell, sometimes faint as though the music were coming from the edge of the earth. There was something strangely distressing about the rise and fall of the imaginary sounds. When Consuelo thought that the vibration was drawing nearer, she felt terrified; when it appeared to reach its climax, an explosion of sound would hit her like a bolt of lightning. Then the volume would taper off, but without affording her much relief, for it was such an ever greater strain to try and hear the music fading away into the distance that she would soon fall into a faint and seem to lose all sense of hearing. Yet, the incessant return of the harmonious blast sent a thrill through her, made her shudder with terror and burn with unbearable heat as if the vigorous stroke of the ghostly bow had set the air on fire and unleashed a hurricane around her.
Chapter XVI
Yet Consuelo was not alarmed by her condition and changed almost nothing in her regimen, which meant that she was soon back on her feet. Her evenings were once again filled with song and followed by nights of deep, peaceful sleep.
One morning, the twelfth of her captivity, she had a note from Herr von Poelnitz with the news that she would be going out the following evening. “I’ve received permission from the king,” he wrote, “to come fetch you myself in one of his carriages. If you give me your word not to fly out a window, I even hope to spare you the escort and let you reappear at the theater without those gloomy trappings. Rest assured that you have no friend more devoted than I, who deplore the rigorous, perhaps unjust treatment you are undergoing.”
Porporina was somewhat surprised by the baron’s sudden affection and delicate kindness. Up until then, in his many dealings as theater administrator with the prima donna, Herr von Poelnitz had been quite chilly and curt. The old rake was not fond of virtuous women, and severa
l times he had even mocked her decorum and reserve right to her face. It was well known at court that the elderly chamberlain was the king’s stool pigeon, but Consuelo was not privy to court secrets, nor was she aware that one could ply this loathsome trade without forfeiting the privileges of apparent social respectability. Yet a vague instinct of repulsion told Consuelo that Poelnitz was more to blame than anyone else for her plight. So she watched her tongue when late the next afternoon she found herself alone with him in a carriage speeding to Berlin.
“Well, my poor recluse,” he said, “that’s one devilishly tight spot they’ve got you in! Those stiff old guards are simply ferocious! On the pretext that I didn’t have permission, they wouldn’t let me into the citadel. It’s no fault of yours, but for fifteen minutes I’ve been freezing out here waiting for you. Here, wrap up in this fur I brought along to save your voice, and tell me a bit about your adventures. What the devil happened at the last carnival ball? Everybody’s wondering, and nobody has a clue. Several strange characters who to my mind weren’t doing any harm seem to have vanished into thin air. The Count de Saint-Germain, one of your friends, I believe; plus, a certain Trismegistus, whom you may know as well, who was reportedly holed up at Herr von Golowkin’s place; for people say you’re on the best of terms with all these children of the devil. . . .”
“Have they been arrested?” asked Consuelo.
“Either that, or they’ve fled. Both versions are going round town.”
“If they don’t know any better than I the reason for their persecution, they’d have been wiser to sit tight and wait for time to do them justice.”
“Or for the new moon which may change the king’s mood. That’s still the surest bet, and I advise you to sing well tonight. That’ll have more effect on him than fine words. How the devil could you ever be so clumsy as to get yourself packed off to Spandau, my pretty friend? You stand accused of mere trifles, and for that the king wouldn’t ever have uttered a condemnation so discourteous to a woman. You must have acted high and mighty with him, cap down over your ear and hand on the hilt on your sword, like the mad little thing that you are. So what’s your crime? Come on, tell me. I bet I can fix things up for you. Take my advice, and instead of going back to that damp old mousetrap of Spandau, you’ll sleep tonight in your pretty little apartment in Berlin. Come on, tell me everything. I’ve heard you shared an elegant supper in the palace with Princess Amalia and amused yourself in the middle of the night playing ghost and fooling around with a broom in the hallways to scare the wits out of the queen’s maids of honor. Several apparently had miscarriages, and the babies born to the most virtuous of them will have little broom-shaped birthmarks on their noses. I’ve also heard that Madame von Kleist’s planetary told your fortune and that Saint-Germain revealed to you the mysteries of the politics of Philip the Fair. The king just wants a good chuckle with his sister over these follies. Are you foolish enough to think otherwise? Besides, the king has such a childish weakness for the abbess. As for seers, he only wants to know if they take money for the nonsense they utter, in which case they are asked to leave the country, and that’s that. So you see that you’re deluding yourself about the importance of your role, and had you been willing to answer a few trivial questions, you wouldn’t have spent such a dreary carnival as a political prisoner.”