by George Sand
On the way back to the fortress, Poelnitz, a bit blasé about people’s contempt for him and having already nearly forgotten Consuelo’s sneers, was quite candid with her. Without any coaxing he confessed that he knew nothing, that everything he had said about the prince’s dealings with foreign powers was just idle talk based on the strange conduct and secret relations of the prince and his sister with various suspicious characters.
“These comments do no honor to your Lordship’s loyalty,” said Consuelo. “Perhaps it would be better not to boast about them.”
“These comments didn’t originate with me,” Poelnitz replied imperturbably. “They were hatched in the brain of our king and master, a sick and gloomy brain, if ever there was one, when seized with suspicion. And treating guesswork like facts is such a time-hallowed method among courtiers and diplomats that you’re a total prig to be scandalized. Besides, I learned this from kings. They taught me what I know, and all my vices come from the two Prussian kings, father and son, whom I’ve been honored to serve. Telling a lie to get at the truth! Frederick has never done anything else, and he’s considered a great man. It’s all the rage now! Yet I’m called a scoundrel because I follow the error of his ways. It’s so unfair!”
Poelnitz pestered Consuelo as much as he could to learn what was going on with her, the prince, the abbess, Trenck, the adventurers Saint-Germain and Trismegistus, as well as a great number of very important people, or so he said, who were mixed up in an inexplicable intrigue. He naïvely confessed that he would not hesitate to throw in his lot if there were something to it. To Consuelo it was clear that he was at last being frank with her. Yet there was no merit in her stubborn denials because she truly knew nothing.
After watching the gates of the fortress swing shut on Consuelo and her supposed secret, he wondered how to proceed with her. In the end, hoping that she would open up if he managed to get her back to Berlin, he resolved to exonerate her in the eyes of the king. Yet, no sooner had he broached the topic the next day than the king cut him off.
“Did she reveal anything?”
“Nothing, Sire.”
“In that case, don’t bother me. I’ve forbidden you to talk to me about her.”
“Sire, she doesn’t know a thing.”
“Too bad for her! Don’t ever let me hear you say her name again.”
The tone of this decree precluded any rejoinder. Frederick indeed suffered when Porporina crossed his mind. He would feel a little tiny stab of pain deep in his heart and conscience as when a finger brushes over a thorn buried in the flesh. To avoid that discomfort he decided to dismiss its cause from his mind once and for all, which was no trouble at all. Less than a week later, thanks to his robust royal temperament and servile entourage, he no longer remembered that Consuelo had ever existed. Yet the unfortunate creature was at Spandau. The theater season was over, and her harpsichord had been taken away. The king had shown her this kindness the evening when the audience, with the best of intentions, had applauded her in front of his face. Prince Heinrich was under arrest indefinitely. The Abbess of Quedlinburg was seriously ill, as the king had been so cruel as to make her think that Trenck had been recaptured and dropped back down into the depths of some dungeon. Trismegistus and Saint-Germain had truly vanished, and the sweeper was no longer haunting the palace. The omen of her appearance had apparently been more or less fulfilled. Drained by several precocious infirmities, the king’s youngest brother had passed away.
In addition to these domestic woes, Voltaire and the king had had their final falling out. Nearly all the biographers have maintained that Voltaire came out of this wretched squabble honorably. A closer look at the evidence shows that both parties disgraced themselves and that Frederick’s role may have been the less petty of the two. More cold-blooded, implacable and selfish than Voltaire, Frederick knew neither envy nor hatred, and these burning little passions deprived Voltaire of the pride and dignity that Frederick could at least impersonate. Among the bitter little squabbles that gradually brought on the explosion, there was one in which the name of Consuelo was never uttered. Even so, it aggravated the sentence of deliberate oblivion weighing upon her. One evening d’Argens was reading the Parisian gazettes to Frederick, with Voltaire present. There were reports about the adventures of Mlle Clairon, interrupted right in the middle of her part by a poorly seated man who had yelled at her, “Speak up”; ordered to apologize to the audience for having regally replied, “And you pipe down”; finally packed off to the Bastille for having gone on with her role with equal amounts of pride and determination. The stage would not, however, be deprived of Mlle Clairon, the newspapers added. For the duration of her imprisonment, which they hoped and opined would be brief, she would be brought from the Bastille under escort to play Phèdre or Chimène, then taken back to her cell to sleep.
Voltaire was very close to Hippolyte Clairon, who had done a great deal to make his plays a success. This event made his blood boil. Forgetting that something similar and even more serious was happening right before his very eyes, he interrupted d’Argens at every word exclaiming, “Shame, shame on France! What an oaf! Heckling an actress like Mlle Clairon in such a stupid, vulgar way! The audience is nothing but a bunch of boors! The louts, the barbarians want an apology out of a woman, and a charming one at that! The Bastille! God almighty! Are you sure you’ve got it right, marquis? A woman sent to the Bastille in this day and age? And for a delightful repartee, witty, tasteful, and fitting? And this in France?”
“No doubt,” said the king, “Clairon was playing Electra or Semiramis, and the audience, who didn’t want to miss a single word, should find favor in the eyes of Monsieur de Voltaire.”
At some other moment the king’s remark would have been flattering. Yet Voltaire was struck by the king’s ironic tone, which suddenly made him see what a blunder he had just committed. With a witty word or two he could easily have smoothed things over, but he was not in the mood. The king’s spite rekindled his own, and he fired back, “No, Sire, even if Mlle Clairon had utterly ruined one of my roles, I shall never understand how the police anywhere in this world could be so brutal as to drag off and incarcerate as a political prisoner beauty, genius, and vulnerability.”
This retort, along with a hundred others, and above all the cruel quips and cynical jests reported to the king by Poelnitz and others of his ilk, led to the famous breakup and provided Voltaire with the zestiest grievances, the most hilarious curses and cutting reproaches. Consuelo was only more thoroughly forgotten at Spandau, whereas Mlle Clairon at the end of her third day at the Bastille went free, triumphant and adored. Deprived of her harpsichord, the poor child summoned up all her courage to go on singing in the evenings and writing music. She rose to the occasion and soon noticed that her voice and exquisitely fine sense of pitch were benefiting from this dry, difficult exercise. The fear of singing a wrong note made her much more cautious. She listened even harder to herself, which required extraordinary efforts of memory and attention. Her manner gained breadth, substance, and refinement. Her compositions took on a simpler character, and in her prison she wrote airs of remarkable beauty and sublime sorrow. Yet it was not long before she understood how much losing the harpsichord jeopardized her physical and mental well-being. She felt a relentless need to keep busy and could not find relief from the stirring, stormy work of composition and performance in more restful sessions of reading and study. Little by little she felt her blood flushed with fever, her mind overcome with despair. Her temperament, energetic, happy, and tenderly expansive, was not made for physical and emotional isolation. A few weeks of this cruel regime might have spelled her death, had Providence not sent her a friend where she certainly did not expect to find one.
Chapter XVIII
On the floor below the cell assigned to our recluse there was a big, smoky room. The only light that ever touched the gloomy depths of the thick arched ceiling came from a fire in a huge hearth always filled with iron kettles boiling and grumbling at every
possible pitch. Within these walls the Schwartz family would spend the whole day and conduct their clever culinary operations. While the wife mathematically combined the greatest number of dinners possible with the fewest ingredients imaginable, the husband sat at a table black with ink and oil. By the light of a lamp burning night and day in this somber sanctuary he artistically composed the most daunting bills stuffed with the most fabulous details. The skimpy meals were for the goodly number of prisoners that the officious jailer had managed to list as his boarders; the bills were to be submitted to their bankers or their family, but without being checked over by those who were experiencing this sumptuous fare. While the speculating couple fervently pursued their business, two more peaceable characters lived in silence under the hood of the fireplace, perfect strangers to the pleasures and profits of this operation. The first was a big orange cat, skinny and balding, who did nothing but lick his paws and roll in the ashes. The second was a young man, rather a boy, an even uglier specimen, who spent his immobile, contemplative life perusing an old book greasier than his mother’s kettles and spinning endless dreams that resembled moronic bliss more than the meditations of a thinking being. The boy had baptized the cat with the name Beezelbub, no doubt in antithesis to the one he had received from his parents Herr and Frau Schwartz, to wit, the holy, sacred name of Gottlieb.
Up to the age of fifteen, Gottlieb, who was destined for the clergy, had worked hard and made swift progress in Protestant liturgy. For the last four years, however, he had been inert and sickly, never far from the fire, without any desire to move around or see the sun, unable to go on with his schooling. A sudden, chaotic growing spurt had reduced him to this languor and indolence. His long, skinny legs could scarcely hold up his enormously tall, almost disjointed frame. His arms were so weak and his hands so clumsy that he could not touch anything without breaking it. For that reason his tight-fisted mother had forbidden him to use his hands, and he was only too willing to obey. His bloated, beardless face and high, bare forehead rather made one think of a soft pear. His features were as irregular as the proportions of his body. He was so walleyed that he looked completely deranged, and his thick lips spread in a foolish grin. With his formless nose and pasty complexion, his flat ears planted far too low as well as his insipid face with its dreary crown of sparse stiff hairs, he resembled a poorly peeled turnip more so than any Christian. Such, at least, was his fine mother’s poetic analogy.
Despite the disgrace that nature had lavished upon this poor creature, despite the shame and chagrin that Frau Schwartz felt whenever she set eyes on him, Gottlieb, an only child, an inoffensive and resigned invalid, was nonetheless the sole pride and joy of the authors of his days. Back when he had been less ugly, they had cherished the hope that he might turn out to be a handsome young lad. They had rejoiced in his studious boyhood and brilliant future. Despite the precarious condition to which they saw him reduced, they hoped that he would regain strength, intelligence, and good looks once his interminable growing phase was over. Needless to say, a mother’s love makes the best of everything and is content with very little. Frau Schwartz, even though she was sharp and sarcastic with him, adored her hideous little Gottlieb. Had he not been ever present to her eye like a statue of salt (her own expression) in a corner of the hearth, she would have lost the courage to water down her sauces and pad her bills. Old Schwartz, who like many men put more pride than tenderness in his fatherly feelings, went on extorting and robbing his prisoners in the hope that one day Gottlieb would be a minister and famous preacher. Given that the child had been so articulate before his illness set in, Schwartz was obsessed with this idea. Yet for the last four years at least Gottlieb had not said one thing that made sense, and if he managed to string two or three words together, they were only meant for the ears of his cat Beezelbub. In short, Gottlieb had been pronounced a moron by the doctors, and his parents alone believed that he could be cured.
Yet one day Gottlieb, suddenly emerging from his apathy, let his parents know that he wanted to learn a trade to relieve his boredom and put his dreary years of languor to use. Even though manual labor was hardly worthy of a future minister of the Reformed Church, they gave into this harmless whim. His mind was so set on finding repose that they had no choice but to let him go study the art of shoemaking with a cobbler. His father would have preferred that his son choose a more elegant profession, but it was to no avail that they paraded every line of work in front of him. He stubbornly clung to Saint Crispin’s trade and even claimed to feel the call of Providence. As this desire became an obsession with him, as the simple fear that his plans might be thwarted threw him into deep melancholy, they let him spend a month in a master cobbler’s workshop. One fine morning he returned home with all the necessary tools and materials. Taking his accustomed place under the hood of his beloved fireplace, he declared that he had learned enough and had no more need of lessons. That was hardly credible. Yet his parents, hoping that he had grown disgusted with shoemaking and might go back to studying theology, welcomed him home without reproach or sarcasm. Then began a new era in Gottlieb’s life, one entirely filled and enchanted by the imaginary making of a pair of shoes. For three or four hours a day he would pick up his last and awl and work on a shoe that no one ever wore because it was never finished. Recut, stretched, hammered, and sewn day after day, it took every possible shape except that of a shoe, which did not prevent the peaceable artisan from pursuing his work with pleasure, concentration, leisure, patience, and self-satisfaction, above and beyond the barbs of any criticism. At first his parents were a bit frightened by this monomania. Then they got used to it as to everything else, and the interminable shoe, which Gottlieb only put down for his book of sermons and prayers, was counted as just another infirmity. Nothing more was required of him aside from occasionally accompanying his father through hallways and courtyards for a breath of air. Yet, these walks greatly distressed Herr Schwartz because the children of the other jailers and citadel employees were always chasing after Gottlieb, imitating his lackadaisical, clumsy gait and shrieking in every key, “Shoes! Shoes! Cobbler, make us some shoes!”
Gottlieb took their heckling well, smiling at the nasty crew with angelic serenity, even stopping to reply, “Shoes? Of course, with all my heart. Come by so that I can take your measurements. Which one of you wants shoes?”
But Herr Schwartz would always drag him away so that he would not compromise himself with such riffraff, and the cobbler seemed neither angry nor anxious for having been torn away from his eager clients.
Early in her captivity, Herr Schwartz had humbly requested that Consuelo speak with Gottlieb to try and reawaken the memory and taste for eloquence with which he had seemed to be endowed as a child. All the while acknowledging his heir’s sickly state and apathy, Herr Schwartz, faithful to the law of nature that La Fontaine expressed so well,
“Our little ones are more dainty and bonny,
More comely and pretty than all their peers,”
had not given a very faithful description of poor Gottlieb’s charms. Otherwise, Consuelo might not have refused, as she had, to receive in her cell a lad of nineteen described to her as “a fine strapping fellow five feet eight inches tall, who would have made every recruiter in the land drool had it not been for a slight weakness in his arms and legs that, unfortunately for his health and fortunately for his independence, made him unfit for a military career.” The captive thought that the company of a child of that age and size was hardly proper in her situation, and she flatly refused to see him; a discourtesy for which Frau Schwartz made her pay every day by thinning her broth with a pint of water.
In order to walk on the esplanade where she was allowed out for some air every day, Consuelo had to go down through the Schwartzes’ nauseating dwelling, all with the permission and escort of her jailer. He did not need any coaxing, since indefatigable complaisance (in everything regarding services authorized by his orders) was itemized on his bills at a very stiff price. So it happened o
ne day that while Consuelo was crossing the kitchen, one door of which opened out onto the esplanade, Gottlieb caught her eye. This face of an aborted baby on the body of a misshapen giant first struck her with disgust, then compassion. She spoke to him, benevolently asked him some questions and did her best to make him open up. Yet his mind seemed paralyzed by illness or excessive timidity, for he never followed her out onto the rampart except when forced by his parents and only replied to her in monosyllables. So she began to fear that her attentions were merely adding to the distress she supposed he felt. After having told his father that Gottlieb did not show the slightest disposition for oratory, she refrained from talking to him, even looking at him.
Although Frau Schwartz frisked Consuelo again the evening after she had seen her comrade Porporino and the Berlin audience for the last time, the singer managed to outwit this female Cerberus. The hour was late, the kitchen was dark, and Frau Schwartz was not happy to have been roused out of her first sleep. With Gottlieb fast asleep in a room, rather a cubbyhole that looked out into the culinary workshop, and Herr Schwartz having gone ahead upstairs to open the double iron door of her cell, Consuelo drew up close to the smoldering hearth and pretended to stroke Beelzebub. She was trying to find a way to keep her money out of the clutches of the frisker so as not to be at her absolute mercy any longer. While Frau Schwartz was lighting her lamp and putting on her glasses, Consuelo noticed at the back of the fireplace, which was Gottlieb’s accustomed place, a recess in the wall at the height of her arm, and in this mysterious nook the poor moron’s book of sermons and the never-finished shoe. This was his library and workshop. This hole blackened with soot and smoke held all of Gottlieb’s treasures, all of his delights. With a quick, nimble hand she deposited her purse there, then patiently submitted herself to the old Fate, who importuned her at length, running her greasy, crooked fingers over every fold of her dress, surprised and furious not to find a single thing. As Consuelo did not attach much importance after all to pulling off this little scheme, she remained cool and collected. For this reason the jailer’s wife was finally convinced that she was not concealing anything. As soon as the examination was over, she grabbed her purse and held it tight under her pelisse. Back in her cell she tried to find a good hiding place since she knew full well that during her walks every day they went over everything there with a fine-tooth comb. She found nothing better than to sew her little fortune into a belt and keep it on her person at all times, given that Frau Schwartz had no right to search her except after a trip outside the prison.