The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  Epilogue

  If, with regard to the lives of Albert and Consuelo after their wedding, we had been able to obtain the faithful, detailed documents that have guided us thus far, we could no doubt go on recounting their travels and adventures a good while longer.

  But, oh persevering reader, we cannot satisfy you; and you, weary reader, we ask just a moment more of your patience. For this we deserve from you neither reproach nor commendation. The truth is that the materials that have allowed us to coordinate the events in this history up to the present moment disappear in large part for us after the romantic night when the union of our two heroes was blessed and consecrated at the Invisibles’ gathering. Whether the commitments they made in the Temple prevented them from confiding in friends in their letters, whether their friends, themselves members of secret societies, thought it prudent to destroy their correspondence in times of persecution, we no longer see them except through a cloud, under the Temple’s veil or the disciples’ masks. If we were to rely uncritically upon the rare traces of their lives in our manuscripts, we would often go astray in their pursuit; for contradictory evidence shows the two of them in different spots simultaneously or headed in different directions at one and the same time. But we can easily guess that they willfully gave rise to these errors, now engaged in some secret enterprise directed by the Invisibles, now forced to elude, amid a thousand perils, the governments’ inquisitorial police. This much we can affirm regarding the existence of this soul in two persons bearing the names Consuelo and Albert: their love kept its promises, while destiny cruelly belied those that it had seemed to make them in those delightful hours they called their midsummer’s night’s dream. Yet they were not ungrateful to Providence that had given them this fleeting happiness in all its plenitude and which, amid their setbacks, kept alive in them the miracle of the love that Wanda had proclaimed. In poverty, suffering, and persecution they always harkened back to this sweet memory that stood out in their lives like a celestial vision, a covenant with God that they would enjoy a better life after a phase of toil, trial, and sacrifice.

  Everything, moreover, becomes so mysterious for us in this history that we have not even been able to discover in what part of Germany the enchanted estate was located. It was there that, cloaked by the commotion of hunts and galas, a prince who remains anonymous in our documents acted as the rallying point and principal mover in the Invisibles’ social and philosophical conspiracy. They had given this prince a symbolic name which, after much painstaking work to divine the code used by the disciples, we presume to be Christopher, Christ-bearer, or perhaps Chrysostom, mouth of gold. They poetically referred to the temple where Consuelo was married and initiated as the Holy Grail and the leaders of the Tribunal as the Guardians of the Temple, romantic emblems revived from ancient legends about the golden age of chivalry. Everyone knows that, according to these lovely fictions, the Holy Grail was hidden in a mysterious sanctuary deep in a cave unknown to mortals. It was there that the Guardians of the Temple, those illustrious saints of early Christianity who already in this world were devoted to immortality, kept the precious cup that Jesus had used to consecrate the miracle of the Eucharist while eating the Passover with his disciples. That cup no doubt contained heavenly grace, represented now by the blood, now by the tears of Christ, a divine potion, in short, a eucharistic substance whose mystical nature was not explained, yet the mere sight of it was enough for one to be transformed inside and out, to be forever safe from death and sin. These pious paladins, after dreadful vows, terrible mortifications, and earthshaking feats, took up ascetic lives as knights-errant, and it was their ideal to find the Holy Grail at the end of their peregrinations. They searched for it in the icy North, on the shores of Brittany, deep in the forests of Germany. In order to carry out this sublime conquest they had to face dangers comparable to those of the garden of the Hesperides, to overcome monsters, the elements, barbarian peoples, hunger, thirst, even death. It is said that a few of these Christian Argonauts discovered the sanctuary and were regenerated by the divine cup, but they never betrayed this awful secret. Their triumph was known by the strength of their arms, the holiness of their lives, their invincible weapons, and the transfiguration of their whole beings; but they did not long survive, among us, such a glorious initiation; they disappeared from our midst, like Jesus after his resurrection, and left earth for heaven without undergoing the bitter transition of death.

  Such was the magic symbol that in fact adapted quite well to the Invisibles’ work. For several years the New Guardians of the Temple preserved the hope of making the Holy Grail accessible to all mankind. Albert undoubtedly worked hard and well to spread the doctrine’s main ideas. He attained the order’s highest degrees, for we have somewhere the list of his titles, which would be evidence that he had time to win them. Now, as everyone knows, it took eighty-one months just to rise up through the thirty-three degrees of Freemasonry, and we are sure that much more was then required to complete the limitless number of the Holy Grail’s mysterious degrees. The names of the Masonic degrees are no longer a mystery to anyone, but perhaps one wouldn’t mind if we were to recall a few of them here, for they are a rather good illustration of the inspired genius and felicitous imagination that presided over their creation one after the other:

  “Apprentice, Fellow of the Craft and Master Mason, Secret Master and Perfect Master, Secretary, Provost and Judge, English Master and Irish Master, Master in Israel, Master Elect of the Nine and Fifteen, Elect of the Unknown, Sublime Chevalier Elect, Grand Master Architect, Royal-Arch, Great Scot of the Sacred Lodge or Sublime Mason, Chevalier of the Sword, Chevalier of the Orient, Prince of Jerusalem, Chevalier of the Orient and Occident, Rose Croix of France, Heredom and Kilwinning, Grand Pontiff or Sublime Scot, Architect of the Sacred Arch, Pontiff of the Celestial Jerusalem, Sovereign Prince of Masonry or Master ad vitam, Noachite, Prince of Lebanon, Head of the Tabernacle, Chevalier of the Bronze Serpent, Trinitary Scot or Prince of Mercy, Grand Commander of the Temple, Chevalier of the Sun, Patriarch of the Crusades, Grand Master of the Light, Chevalier Kadosh, Chevalier of the White and Black Eagles, Chevalier of the Phoenix, Chevalier of the Iris, Chevalier of the Argonauts, Chevalier of the Golden Fleece, Grand Inspector-Inquisitor-Commander, Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, Sublime Master of the Ring of Light, etc.”1

  Next to these or at least most of them, we find lesser known titles joined to the name of Albert Podiebrad, written in a code less legible than that of the Freemasons, such as Chevalier of Saint John, Sublime Joannite, Master of the New Apocalypse, Doctor of the Eternal Gospel, Elect of the Holy Spirit, Guardian of the Temple, Areopagite, Magus, Man-People, Man-Pontiff, Man-King, New-Man, etc. We were surprised to see here some titles that would seem to be advance borrowings from Weishaupt’s Illuminism, but that particularity was later explained to us and will not require comment for our readers by the end of this history.

  Working through the labyrinth of obscure but significant facts regarding the Invisibles’ labors and accomplishments, dispersion and apparent extinction, we find it quite difficult to follow from afar the adventurous star of our young couple. Still, with a prudent commentary making up for the missing pieces, here is more or less a brief history of the main events in their lives. The reader’s imagination will help fill things in; for our part, we have no doubt that the best endings are those that the reader is willing to undertake himself, in the narrator’s stead.2

  It was probably after leaving the Holy Grail that Consuelo went to the little court of Bayreuth where Frederick’s sister the margravine had palaces, gardens, summerhouses, and waterfalls in the style of Count Hoditz’s at Roswald, although less sumptuous and expensive, for this clever princess had been married without a dowry to a very poor prince, and only for a short while had she been enjoying dresses with reasonable trains and pages without threadbare doublets. Her gardens, rather her garden, to speak plainly, was set in an admirable landscape, and there, in an ancient temple, she indulged in the
pleasure of an Italian opera house of somewhat Pompadour style. The margravine was very philosophical, meaning Voltairean. The young hereditary margrave, her husband, was the zealous leader of a Masonic lodge. I don’t know whether Albert was in communication with the margrave, with his incognito under the protection of the brothers’ secrecy, or whether he stayed away from that court and rejoined his wife a bit later. Consuelo no doubt had some secret mission there. It may be as well that she did not openly live with her husband at first so as to avoid drawing him into the limelight that was everywhere fixed on her. At that point their love undoubtedly had all the attraction of mystery, and if the public celebration of their union, consecrated by the fraternal sanction of the Guardians of the Temple, had seemed to them sweet and exhilarating, the secrecy with which they surrounded themselves in a hypocritical, licentious world was in the beginning a necessary shield for them, a sort of silent protest from which they drew their inspiration and strength.

  Several Italian singers were then the delight of the little court at Bayreuth. Corilla and Anzoleto appeared there, and the inconsequent prima donna again burned with passion for the traitor whom she had consigned to all the furies of hell a short while before. But Anzoleto, while cajoling the tigress, cautiously strove, and with a mysterious reserve, to find favor with Consuelo, whose talent, expanded by so many secret and profound revelations, eclipsed all rivalry. Ambition had become the young tenor’s dominant passion, love having been smothered under spite, even pleasure under surfeit. So he loved neither chaste Consuelo nor impetuous Corilla, but he tactfully managed the two of them, all prepared to hook up ostensibly with whichever one would help him along to fame. Consuelo showed him tranquil friendship and spared him neither the good advice nor the conscientious lessons that could make his talent soar. But she no longer felt any stirrings of emotion around him, and being able to forgive him with such mansuetude made her realize how absolute was her detachment from him. Anzoleto made no mistake about it. After having benefited from the artist’s lessons and feigned heartfelt attention to the friend’s advice, he lost patience at the same time as he lost hope, and his deep resentment and bitter disappointment permeated his words and bearing despite himself.

  In the meantime it seems that the young Baroness Amalia von Rudolstadt arrived at the court of Bayreuth with the Princess von Kulmbach, Countess Hoditz’s daughter. If several indiscreet or exaggerating witnesses are to be believed, some rather strange little dramas took place among these four individuals, Consuelo, Amalia, Corilla, and Anzoleto. Seeing the handsome tenor unexpectedly appear on the stage of the Bayreuth opera house, the young baroness fell into a faint. No one thought to note the coincidence, but Corilla, sharp-eyed as a lynx, had caught a particular glow of smug self-satisfaction on the tenor’s brow. He had botched the passage meant to create an effect; the court, distracted by the swooning baroness, had not encouraged the singer; and instead of cursing between his teeth as he always did in such cases, an unequivocal smile of triumph played on his lips.

  “Well!” Corilla whispered to Consuelo back in the wings, “it’s not you or me that he loves, but that little fool who just made a scene for him. Do you know her? Who is she?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Consuelo, who had not seen a thing, “but I can assure you that it’s neither she nor you nor I who matters to him.”

  “Who then?”

  “Himself, al solito!” said Consuelo with a smile.

  The chronicle adds that the next morning Consuelo was summoned to a grove at some distance from the residence for a conversation with Baroness Amalia that went more or less as follows.

  “I know everything!” said the latter testily before Consuelo could even open her mouth. “You’re the one he loves! You wretched woman, scourge of my life, you’ve robbed me of Albert’s heart as well as his.”

  “His, Madame? I don’t know. . . .”

  “Don’t pretend with me, Anzoleto loves you, you’re his mistress, you already were in Venice and you still are. . . .”

  “That’s a vile calumny or a conjecture unworthy of you, Madame.”

  “It’s the truth, I tell you. He told me so last night.”

  “Last night! Oh, Madame, what are you telling me?” Consuelo exclaimed, blushing with shame and chagrin.

  Amalia dissolved in tears, and when Consuelo had succeeded in calming her jealousy, she learned despite herself the secrets of this unhappy passion. Having seen Anzoleto sing on stage in Prague, Amalia became intoxicated with his handsome looks and success. Knowing nothing about music, she did not hesitate to take him for the best singer in the world, all the more so that in Prague he was quite the vogue. She had him come give her singing lessons, and while her poor father, old Baron Frederick, paralyzed by idleness, snoozed in his armchair and dreamed of furious packs of hounds and boars at bay, she succumbed to seduction. Boredom and vanity drove her to her ruin. Anzoleto, flattered by this illustrious conquest, and wanting to make himself all the rage by means of scandal, persuaded her that she had the stuff to become the greatest singer of the century, that the life of the artist was paradise on earth and that she had nothing better to do than run away with him and make her debut at Hay Market in Handel’s operas. At first Amalia rejected with horror the idea of abandoning her elderly father but just when Anzoleto was about to leave Prague, feigning a despair he did not feel, she surrendered to a sort of vertigo and went off with him.

  Her intoxication was brief; Anzoleto’s insolence and crude ways once he had ceased to play the seducer made her come to her senses. So it was with a sort of joy that three months later she was arrested in Hamburg, brought back to Prussia, and mysteriously incarcerated at Spandau at the request of the Saxon Rudolstadts, but her punishment was too long and too severe. Amalia grew weary of repentance as quickly as she had tired of passion; she yearned for liberty, comfort, and respect for her rank, of which she had been so suddenly and cruelly deprived. Amidst her own suffering she scarcely felt the pain of losing her father. Upon learning that she had been freed, she finally realized all the troubles that had befallen her family, but not daring to go back to the canoness and fearing the galling tedium of a life of reprimands and sermonizing, she begged the Margravine von Bayreuth’s protection; and the Princess von Kulmbach, who was then at Dresden, undertook to bring Amalia to her relative. In this philosophizing, frivolous court Amalia discovered the amiable tolerance that the fashionable vices made the future’s only virtue. But when she again set eyes on Anzoleto, she had already fallen victim to the diabolical sway that he knew how to exercise over women, against which chaste Consuelo herself had waged such a struggle. At first her heart was stricken with terror and chagrin, but after her swooning fit she went out alone at night for a breath of air in the gardens and happened to run into him. He felt emboldened by her emotion, and his imagination chafed against the obstacles that had cropped up between them. Now she was in love with him again, she was red with embarrassment and frightened, and she confessed her faults to Consuelo, her former singing teacher, with a mixture of feminine modesty and philosophical cynicism.

  It seems certain that Consuelo was able to find the way to Amalia’s heart with ardent exhortations, convincing her to return to the Castle of the Giants to extinguish her dangerous passion there in solitude and to look after her elderly aunt.

  After this adventure Consuelo could no longer bear to stay in Bayreuth. She was singularly weary of the stormy jealousy of Corilla who, still foolish as ever and still basically good-hearted, would heap gross accusations on Consuelo, then throw herself at her feet an instant later. Anzoleto, for his part, who had figured that he could take revenge on Consuelo for her disdain by affecting passion for Amalia, was not about to forgive her for having rescued the young baroness from danger. He played a thousand nasty tricks on her, such as making her miss all of her stage entrances as well as taking her part in the middle of a duet so as to throw her off and, by his own aplomb, make the ignorant public think that she was in the wrong. If sh
e had stage business with him, he would go right instead of left, try to trip her, or get her tangled up with the extras. These mean pranks fell flat in front of Consuelo’s composure and presence of mind, but she was less stoical finding that he was spreading the most shameful calumnies about her and that the idle great lords, in whose eyes a virtuous actress was a phenomenon impossible to admit or at least tiresome to acknowledge, were lending him an ear. She saw libertines of every age and rank make bold with her and, refusing to believe that her resistance was sincere, they joined forces with Anzoleto to malign and disgrace her in a spirit of cowardly vengeance and ferocious spite.

  These cruel, miserable persecutions were the beginning of a long martyrdom that the unfortunate prima donna suffered heroically throughout her career in the theater. Whenever she ran into Anzoleto, he caused her a thousand troubles, and it is sad to say that she ran into more than one Anzoleto in the course of her life. Other Corillas tormented her with their envy and ill will, more or less treacherous or brutal, and of all these rivals the first was still the least nasty and the most capable of a good impulse. But whatever may be said about the spitefulness and jealous vanity of women in the theater, Consuelo felt that when these vices entered a man’s heart, he was even more degraded by them and became more unworthy of his role in humanity. The haughty, debauched lords, the theater directors and the gazetteers, depraved as well by contact with so much filth; the fine ladies, curious and whimsical protectresses, quick to impose, but soon peeved to find a girl of that sort with more virtue than they had or wished to have; lastly, the audiences often ignorant, almost always ungrateful or biased, these were the enemies against which Liverani’s austere wife had to struggle with incessant bitterness. Persevering and faithful, in art as in love, she never lost heart and carried on, ever more adept in music and virtue, often failing in the thorny pursuit of success, often lifting herself up as well through deserved triumphs, remaining despite everything the priestess of her art, better than Porpora himself understood it, and always drawing new strength from her religious faith, immense consolation from her husband’s ardent, devoted love.