Inevitable E-Book

Louis Couperus

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Cornélie de Retz Van Loo, a 23-year-old recently divorced socialite, tries to begin a new life in Italy, with mixed feelings. After spending time in Rome, however, she discovers that Italy itself can never bring her the consolation she seeks, and writes a pamphlet on 'The Social Position of the Divorced Woman'. Flouting convention, she moves in with the Dutch painter Duco van der Staal, with only two acquaintances - an amorous Italian prince and the American heiress whom he has married for her money - for company. In desperate financial straits, Cornélie is forced to take a position as companion to an elderly American lady in Nice, where she unexpectedly runs into her ex-husband. Will she be able to resist his continuing power over her?

Leseprobe

LOUIS COUPERUS

INEVITABLE

Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent

Contents

Title PageIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIXVIIIXIXXXXXIXXIIXXIIIXXIVXXVXXVIXXVIIXXVIIIXXIXXXXXXXIXXXIIXXXIIIXXXIVXXXVXXXVIXXXVIIXXXVIIIXXXIXXLXLIXLIIXLIIIXLIVXLVXLVIXLVIIXLVIIIXLIXLLILIILIIILIVAFTERWORDAlso Available from Pushkin PressAbout the PublisherCopyright

INEVITABLE

I

THE MARCHESA BELLONI’Spensione was situated in one of Rome’s most salubrious, if not most poetic, quarters: half the house formed part of a villa from the ancient Ludovisi gardens, those beautiful old gardens lamented by everyone who knew them before the apartment blocks had risen where the exclusive Roman residential area had once extended. The pensione was in Via Lombardia; the old villa section had retained a certain antique charm for the marchesa’s guests, and the newly built extension offered spacious rooms, running water and electric light. The pensione had something of a reputation for being good, cheap and pleasantly appointed; a few minutes’ walk from the Pincio, and high up so that one need have no fear of malaria, and the price one paid for an extended stay, which was just over eight lire, was exceptional for Rome, well known for being more expensive than any other Italian city. Consequently the pensione was usually full: travellers arrived as early as October—those who arrived earliest in the season paid least; and apart from a few tourists in a hurry most of them stayed on till Easter, before making their way down to Naples after the great church festivals.

The pensione had been warmly recommended by English fellow-travellers to Cornélie de Retz van Loo, who was travelling alone through Italy and had written to the Marchesa Belloni from Florence. It was the first time she had travelled in Italy; it was the first time she had alighted at the great, cavernous Termini station close to the baths of Diocletian, and in the square, in the golden Roman sunshine, while the great Acqua Marcia fountain babbled and the coachmen cracked their whips and clicked their tongues (to catch her attention), she had her “precious Italian sensation” as she had imagined, and was glad to be in Rome.

She saw a little old man with ‘Hôtel Belloni’ written on his cap limping towards her, with the instinct of a veteran porter who immediately recognises his travellers, and she signalled to him with a smile. He greeted her like a long-lost friend, at once familiar and respectful, as if pleased to see her, asked whether she had had a pleasant journey, whether she was tired, accompanied her to the victoria, adjusted her travel-rug and her valise, asked for the ticket for her cases, and said that she should go on ahead: he would follow in ten minutes with the luggage. She found it fun, being looked after by the old fellow with the limp and gave him a friendly nod as the coachman drove off. She felt light and airy, with just a tinge of melancholy at the unknown things that were to happen to her, and looked left and right, taking in the streets of Rome: she saw nothing but houses and houses, apartment blocks; then a great white palace: the new Palazzo Piombino—where she knew the Ludovisi Juno was—and then the coachman pulled up, and a bell boy came up to her. He took her to the lounge, a dark room with a table in the centre covered in magazines, arranged in a neat, still unread circle; two ladies, obviously English, and of the aesthetic sort—grubby hair, loose blouses—were sitting in a corner studying their Baedekers before going out. Cornélie nodded briefly, but received no acknowledgement; she did not take it amiss, being familiar with the ways of English travellers. She sat down at the table and picked up the Roman Herald, the paper that appears fortnightly and gives information about everything there is to do in Rome, and at that point one of the ladies addressed her aggressively from a corner,

“I’m sorry, but you will be sure not to take the Herald to your room, won’t you?”

Cornélie turned her head loftily and languidly towards the corner where the ladies were sitting, looked vaguely past their grubby heads, said nothing and looked back at the Herald, found herself a seasoned traveller and smiled inwardly, because she knew how to behave with this kind of English lady.

The marchesa came in and welcomed Cornélie in Italian and in French. She was a fairly plump matron, in a vulgar way; her ample bosom was contained in a silk cuirasse or spencer that shone at the seams and was bursting under the arms: her grey coiffure gave her a lion-like appearance; the large eyes, lined with yellow and blue, were opened unnaturally wide by belladonna; in her ears huge crystals created a rainbow effect, and bands of nameless precious stones girded her podgy fingers. She spoke very fast, and Cornélie found her phrases as pleasantly homely as the welcome of the crippled porter on the station square. She allowed the marchesa to escort her to the lift, and got in with her: the hydraulic lift, a barred cage that ascended past the staircase, climbed at a stately pace and came to a sudden halt between the second and third floors.

“Third floor!” the marchesa called down.

“Non c’é acqua!” the bellboy called back calmly, meaning—as seemed quite natural—that there was insufficient water to start the lift moving.

The marchesa barked a number of orders; two facchini appeared, hoisted themselves up with the bustling bellboy on the cable of the lift, and in fits and starts the cage rose higher and higher till it finally, almost, reached the third floor.

“A little higher!” ordered the marchesa.

But flex their muscles as the facchini might, the lift would not budge.

“We can still get out!” said the marchesa. “Wait a moment.”

With a long stride, baring her huge white calf, she stepped onto the floor, smiled and extended her hand to Cornélie, who copied her gymnastics.

“We’re here!” sighed the marchesa with a satisfied smile. “This is your room.”

She opened a door and showed Cornélie a room. Although it was bright and sunny outside, the room was as dank as a cellar.

“Marchesa,” said Cornélie at once, “I wrote to you that I wanted two rooms facing south.”

“Really?” asked the marchesa in a naïve, innocent tone. “I really couldn’t remember. Yes, foreigners are always so set on south-facing rooms … I can assure you this is a lovely room.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t take it, marchesa.”

‘La Belloni’ grumbled a little, then went down the corridor and opened another room.

“What about this room, signora … What do you think of this …?”

“Is it south-facing?”

“Almost.”

“I must have due south.”

“This faces west: you’ll see the most wonderful sunsets from your window.”

“I absolutely must have a south-facing room, marchesa.”

“I have some most charming east-facing rooms: the most beautiful sunrises.”

“No, marchesa …”

“Have you no feeling for natural beauty?”

“A little, but I’m a lot more concerned about my health.”

“I sleep in a north-facing room myself.”

“You’re Italian and you’re used to it, marchesa.”

“I’m very sorry, but I have no south-facing rooms.”

“Then I’m sorry too, marchesa, but in that case I shall have to look elsewhere.”

Cornélie turned away, as if to go. The choice of a room can be the choice of a lifetime …

The marchesa took her hand and smiled. She abandoned her cool tone and her voice was soothing as balm.

“Davvero, foreigners are so set on south-facing rooms! I still have two cubby-holes. Here …”

And she quickly opened two doors: two small, cosy, sunny long and narrow rooms, and from the open windows a lofty, wide panorama over the streets and roofs below and in the distance the blue dome of St Peter’s.

“These are my last south-facing rooms,” lamented the marchesa.

“I’ll take them, marchesa …”

“Sixteen lire,” smiled ‘la Belloni’.

“Ten, as you wrote.”

“I could put two people up in these.”

“I’ll be staying—if it’s to my liking—the whole winter.”

“You’re a brave one!” the marchesa suddenly exclaimed in her most charming voice, the voice of defeat. “You can have the rooms for twelve lire. No more discussions. The rooms are yours. You’re Dutch, aren’t you? We have another Dutch family; a mama with two daughters and a son. Would you like to sit next to them at table?”

“No, I’d prefer it if you would seat me somewhere else; I don’t like my compatriots when they’re travelling …”

The marchesa left Cornélie alone. She looked out of the window, her mind empty of thoughts, happy to be in Rome, with a touch of melancholy at the unknown things that were about to happen to her. There was a knock at the door and her suitcases were brought in. She saw that it was eleven o’clock and started unpacking. One of her rooms was a small sitting room, like a birdcage in the air, looking out over Rome. She rearranged the furniture herself, draped the faded chaise-longue with a length of cloth from the Abruzzi and with drawing pins fixed a number of portraits to the distempered wall which was broken up by crude fresco arabesques. And she smiled at the border of purple hearts pierced by arrows that surrounded the frescoed section of the wall.

An hour’s work and her sitting-room was organised: a home of her own with a few of her own bits of material, a cover so, a side table so: cushions on the chaise-longue, books to hand. When she had finished and sat down, she suddenly felt very lonely. She thought of The Hague, of what she was leaving behind. But she did not want to think, picked up her Baedeker and read about the Vatican. She could not concentrate and turned to Hare’s Walks through Rome. A bell rang. She was tired, felt nervous, looked in the mirror, saw her hair that had lost its curl, her blouse smudged with coal and dust, unlocked a second suitcase and changed. As she did her hair she cried, sobbed. The second bell rang and after powdering her face she went downstairs.

She thought she was late but there was no one in the dining-room and she had to wait to be served. She resolved not to come so promptly in future. Some lodgers looked in through the open door, saw that no one was at table yet except for a new lady and disappeared again.

Cornélie looked around and waited.

The dining-room was the antique banqueting room of the old villa section with a ceiling by Guercino. The waiters were just strolling about. An old grey-haired head waiter surveyed the table from afar to make sure everything was in order. He became impatient when no one came and gave orders for Cornélie to be served with the macaroni. Cornélie noticed that, like the porter, he was lame in one leg. But the waiters were very young, scarcely sixteen or eighteen, and lacked the usual waiterly aplomb.

A fat gentleman, lively, self-important, pock-marked, badly shaven, in a threadbare black jacket without much linen on show, came in, rubbed his hands, and sat down opposite Cornélie.

He greeted her politely and also had some macaroni.

And it seemed to be a sign that it was time to eat, because numerous guests, mostly ladies, now entered, sat down and had portions of the macaroni being served by the young waiters under the supervision of the grey-haired head waiter. Cornélie smiled at the amusing manners of these travelling types and when she looked involuntarily at the pock-marked gentleman opposite, she noticed that he was smiling too.

He hurriedly ate a little more bread with tomato sauce, leant a little further across the table and in a near-whisper said in French:

“Amusing, isn’t it?”

Cornélie raised her eyebrows.

“How do you mean?”

“A cosmopolitan company …”

“Oh, yes …”

“Are you Dutch?”

“How do you know?”

“I saw your name in the register, and it said The Hague after it …”

“That’s true …”

“There are some other Dutch ladies here, they’re over there … they’re charming.”

Cornélie ordered a cheap wine from the head waiter.

“That wine is no good,” said the lively gentleman, in an animated tone. “I’m having Genzano,” he said, pointing to his carafe. “I pay a small corkage and drink my own wine.”

The head waiter brought Cornélie her half bottle: it was included with her board.

“If you like, I can give you the address for my wine: Via della Croce 61 …”

Cornélie thanked him. The unusual ease and vivacity of the pock-marked gentleman amused her.

“You’re looking at the head waiter?” he asked.

“You’re very observant,” she smiled.

“Quite a character, our head waiter, Giuseppe. He used to be head waiter at the palace of an Austrian archduke. He did something, I don’t know what. Stole perhaps. Or was impertinent. Or dropped a spoon. He came down in the world. Now he’s in our humble Pensione Belloni. But what dignity …”

He leant forward.

“The marchesa is thrifty. All the staff here are either old or very young. Less in wages.”

He bowed to two German ladies, mother and daughter, who had come in and sat down next to him.

“I’ve got the permit I promised you, to see the Palazzo Rospigliosi, Guido Reni’s Aurora,” he said in German.

“Is the prince back then?”

“No, the prince is in Paris. The palace is closed, except to you.”

He bowed gallantly.

The German ladies exclaimed that he was so sweet, that he could do everything, find a solution to every problem. The trouble they had gone to bribe the concierge of Rospigliosi! With no success.

A thin English lady had sat down next to Cornélie.

“And for you, Miss Taylor, I have a ticket for an early mass in his Holiness’s own chapel …”

Miss Taylor beamed with joy.

“Have you been sightseeing again?” the pock-marked gentleman continued.

“Yes, the Kircher Museum,” said Miss Taylor. “But now I’m exhausted … It was most exquisite.”

“I’m prescribing you an afternoon at home, Miss Taylor, and some rest.”

“I’ve arranged to see the Aventine …”

“You mustn’t go. You’re tired. You’re looking worse every day and getting thinner. Rome is too tiring for you. You must rest, otherwise I shan’t give you the ticket for morning mass.”

The German ladies laughed. Miss Taylor promised, flattered, delighted. She looked at the pock-marked gentleman, as if waiting for his words of wisdom.

Lunch was over: the steak, pudding and dried figs. Cornélie got up.

“Can I pour you a glass from my bottle?” asked the fat gentleman. “Try my wine. Do you like it? If so, I’ll order you a flask in the Via della Croce …”

Cornélie did not like to refuse and drank. The wine was wonderfully pure. She thought it would be good to drink a pure wine in Rome and as she thought this the fat gentleman seemed to read her rapid train of thought.

“It’s good,” he said, “if you drink a fortifying wine in Rome, where life is exhausting.”

Cornélie agreed.

“This is Genzano, two lire seventy-five a flask. It will last you a long time, as the wine doesn’t go off.” He bowed to all the ladies with a circular motion and left.

The German ladies bowed to Cornélie.

“Always so obliging, that Mr Rudyard …”

“What can he be?” thought Cornélie. “French, German, English, American?”

II

AFTER LUNCH she had hired an open carriage and taken a drive through Rome, a first taste of the city she had so yearned for. That first impression had been a great disappointment. Her lively imagination, her reading, even the photographs she had bought in Florence and pored over with the devotion of a novice sightseer, had given her a vision of a city from an ideal antiquity, an ideal Renaissance, and she had forgotten that, especially in Rome, life has moved on inexorably and that the ages do not appear in buildings and ruins as separate periods but every period is linked to the next by a tight-knit succession of days and years.

So she had found the dome of Saint Peter’s small, the Corso narrow, Trajan’s Column a column like any other; she had not seen the Forum as she drove past and on the Palatine she had not been able to call a single emperor to mind.

Now she was back home and tired, resting and thinking, melancholy yet savouring her vague thoughts, the silence around her and the big boarding-house, to which most guests had not yet returned. She thought of The Hague, of her large family, father, mother, brothers and sisters, to whom she had said farewell for a considerable time in order to travel. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars, not being a man of means, had not been able to help satisfy her whim, as he put it, and she would not have been able to indulge that whim, of starting a new life, without a small legacy left her years ago by a godmother. She was glad to have a degree of independence, although she felt the selfishness of that independence …

But what good would she have been to her circle, after the commotion surrounding her divorce? She was weak—selfish—and she knew it; but she had suffered a blow to which she had at first thought she would succumb. And when she survived after all, she had gathered together her remaining energy and told herself that she could not go on living in the same tight circle of sisters and friends, and she had forced her life to take a different direction. She had always had a flair for turning an old dress into an apparently new outfit, of transforming last year’s hat into a new creation, and she had done the same with her diffuse and miserable life, storm-tossed and broken as it was: she had scraped together, frugally as it were, what remained and was still serviceable, and from those remnants she had made herself a new life. Yet in the old atmosphere this new life had no room to breathe: it was aimless and alien there, and she had managed to force it into a new path, despite the resistance of family and friends. Perhaps she would not have been quite so resolute in this if her life had not felt quite so fractured. Perhaps she would not have been quite so aware of her energy if she had suffered only a little. She had her strength and she had her weakness; there was a great wholeness in her, but great diversity too, and perhaps that complexity had been the salvation of her youth.

Besides, she was very young, twenty-three, and at that age there is an unconscious resilience, for all the apparent weakness. And her contradictions constituted her equilibrium, so that she did not gravitate towards the abyss … All of that passed through her, vague and cloud-like, not with the concision of words, but with the mistiness of weary dreams. Lying there she did not look as if she had ever exerted the power of giving her life a new direction. A pale, delicate woman, slim and with disjointed movements, lying on a chaise-longue in a no longer pristine dressing gown with its faded pink and crumpled lace. Yet she was surrounded by the poetry of herself, despite those tired eyes, the limp lines of her garment, despite the rented room, with the hastily improvised air of comfort, which owed more to flair than to reality and could be fitted into any suitcase. With her fragile figure, her pale features, more refined than beautiful, she was surrounded by a halo of individuality, an atmosphere that she emanated unconsciously, that travelled from her eyes to the things she gazed at, from her fingers to the things she stroked. For those unsympathetic to her that atmosphere was odd, eccentric, unbefitting for a young lady from The Hague, and was censured. For those who were sympathetic it had an element of talent, soul, something special that almost resembled genius, though in an enervated form, and was enchanting and thought-provoking and promised much: perhaps too much to contain. This woman was a child of her time but particularly of her environment, which was why she was so immature: conflict against conflict, a balance of contradiction, which might be either her downfall or her salvation, but was certainly her fate.

She felt lonely in Italy. She had lived for weeks in Florence, and had tried to construct a life rich in art and history. Though she forgot much about herself, she still felt lonely. She had spent two weeks in Siena, but had found it oppressive with its gloomy streets and funereal palaces, and had longed for Rome. But that afternoon she had not yet found Rome. And though she felt tired, most of all she felt lonely, totally alone and futile in the great wide world, in a great city, a city where one perhaps feels greatness and futility more intensely than anywhere else. She felt like a tiny atom of suffering, like an ant, an insect, battered and half-crushed among the vast cupolas of Rome that she sensed were outside.

Her hand wandered idly over her reading-matter, which in her conscientious way she had piled up on a side table near her, a few translated classics: Ovid, Tacitus, then Dante, Petrarch and Tasso. Dusk was falling in her room, not a light to read by, and she was too unsure of herself to ring for a lamp; a chill drifted through her room, now that the sun had completely set, and she had forgotten to have them light a stove that first day. Wide acres of loneliness surrounded her, her suffering pained her, her soul longed for another soul, her lips for a kiss, her arms for the man who had once been her husband, and as she tossed about on her cushions, wringing her hands, indecision rose from deep within her:

“Oh God, tell me what I’m to do!”

III

THERE WAS A BUZZ of voices at dinner; the three or four long tables were full; the marchesa sat at the head of the centre table. Now and then she beckoned impatiently to Giuseppe, the old head waiter, who had dropped a spoon at an archducal court, and youthful waiters trotted about breathlessly. Sitting opposite her Cornélie found the benevolent fat gentleman whom the German ladies had called Mr Rudyard, and by her place setting her flask of Genzano. She thanked him with a smile, and talked to Mr Rudyard—the usual chit-chat: how she had been for a tour that afternoon, her first taste of Rome, the Forum, the Pincio. She talked to the German ladies and with the Englishwoman, who was always so tired from ‘sightseeing’, and the German ladies, an old baroness and her daughter, a young baroness, laughed with her at the two aesthetes whom Cornélie had encountered in the drawing-room that first morning. They were sitting some distance away; tall and angular, with unwashed hair, in strangely cut evening dresses that revealed bosoms and arms, comfortably covered by grey woollen vests, over which they had calmly draped strings of large blue beads. Both of them surveyed the long table, as if pitying anyone who had travelled to Rome to become acquainted with art, since they alone knew what art in Rome was. While eating, which they did unappetisingly, almost with their fingers, they read aesthetic works, frowning and occasionally looking up crossly because people were talking at table. With their pedantry, their impossible manners, their appalling taste in clothes, together with their great pretentiousness, they were typical English ladies on their travels, of the kind one finds nowhere but in Italy. The criticism of them at table was unanimous. They came to Pensione Belloni every winter, and painted watercolours in the Forum or on the Via Appia. And they were so extraordinary in their unprecedented originality, in their angular scruffiness, with their evening dresses, the woollens, the blue necklaces, the aesthetic books and their fingers busily picking meat apart, that all eyes were drawn to them by a Medusa-like attraction. The young baroness, a type from a fashionable magazine, incisive, quick-witted, with her round little German face and high sharply drawn eyebrows, laughed with Cornélie, and was showing her a sketchbook containing a drawing she had dashed off of the two aesthetic ladies, when Giuseppe led a young lady to the end of the table where Cornélie and Rudyard were sitting opposite each other. She had obviously just arrived, wished the assembled gathering a good evening, and sat down with a great rustle of material. All eyes turned from the aesthetic ladies towards this newcomer. It was immediately obvious that she was American, almost too beautiful, too young to be travelling alone, with a smiling self-assurance, as if she were at home, very white, with very lovely dark eyes, teeth like a dentist’s advertisement, her full bust sheathed in mauve linen with silver trimmings full of arabesques, on her heavily permed hair a large mauve hat with a cascade of black ostrich feathers, attached by an over-large paste clasp. Her silk underskirts rustled at every movement, the plumes waved, the paste glittered. And despite this showy appearance she was like a child, no more than twenty, with a naive look: she immediately addressed Cornélie and Rudyard; said she was tired, had come from Naples, had danced at Prince Cibo’s the night before, that her name was Miss Urania Hope, that her father lived in Chicago. That she had two brothers who, despite papa’s fortune, worked on a ranch way out West, but that she had been brought up like a spoilt child by her father, who nevertheless wanted her to stand on her own feet and so let her travel alone, and wanted to arrange joint outings in the Old World, in “dear old Italy”. She was overjoyed to hear that Cornélie was also travelling alone, and Rudyard teased the ladies about their newfangled notions, and the two baronesses applauded them. Miss Hope took an immediate liking to her Dutch fellow-traveller, but Cornélie, hesitant, gently declined, saying that she was busy and wanted to study in the museums. “My, my, so serious?” inquired Miss Hope respectfully, and the underskirts rustled, the plumes waved and the paste sparkled. She struck Cornélie as a multicoloured butterfly, nimble and unthinking, that was in danger of crashing into the conservatory glass of a confined existence. Though she felt no attraction to the strange creature that looked at the same time like a coquette and a child, she did feel pity, why she did not know. After supper Rudyard suggested a short walk to the two German ladies. The young baroness came over to Cornélie and asked her to join them, to see Rome by moonlight, nearby, around the Villa Medici. She was grateful for the kind words, and was going to put on a hat when Miss Hope ran after her.

“Stay with me in the drawing-room …”

“I’m going for a walk with the baroness,” replied Cornélie.

“That German lady?”

“Yes.”

“Does she belong to the nobility?”

“I fancy she does.”

“Are there many people from the nobility in this pensione?” asked Miss Hope eagerly.

Cornélie laughed.

“I don’t know. I only arrived here this morning.”

“I think there are. I’ve heard that there are lots of members of the nobility here. Are you a member of the nobility?”

“I was!” laughed Cornélie. “But I had to relinquish my title.”

“What a shame!” cried Miss Hope. “The nobility is so sweet. Do you know what I have? An album of coats-of-arms, of all sorts of families, and another album of samples—silk and brocade of every ball gown of the queen of Italy … Would you like to see it?”

“I’d love to,” laughed Cornélie. “But now I must put my hat on.”

She went off and returned in her hat and cape: the German ladies and Rudyard were already waiting in the vestibule and asked why she was laughing. She told them about the album of samples of the queen’s evening gowns, which caused great merriment.

“Who is he?” she asked the baroness, as they walked on ahead down the Via Sistina; the young baroness followed with Rudyard.

She found the baroness charming, but was struck, in this German woman from an aristocratic military background, by a cold, cynical view of life not exactly typical of her Berlin environment.

“I don’t know,” replied the baroness with some indifference. “We travel a lot. At the moment we have no house in Berlin. We want to enjoy our trip. Mr Rudyard is very nice. He helps us with all kinds of things: tickets for a papal mass, introductions here, invitations there. He appears to have considerable influence. What do I care who or what he is? Else feels the same. I take what he has to offer here and apart from that I don’t delve too deeply into him …”

They walked on.

The baroness took Cornélie’s arm.

“My dear child, don’t think us too cynical. I scarcely know you, but I like you. Odd, isn’t it, on our travels, suddenly to be sitting down to a pensione set menu with scrawny chicken. Don’t think us bad, or cynical. Oh, perhaps we are. Our cosmopolitan, dissolute life free of duty makes one like that: ignoble, cynical and selfish. Very selfish. Rudyard does us many favours. Why shouldn’t I accept them? I couldn’t care less who or what he is. I’m not putting myself under an obligation to him.”

Cornélie looked round involuntarily. In the street, almost completely dark, she saw Rudyard and the young baroness, almost whispering and acting mysteriously.

“And does your daughter feel the same?”

“Oh yes. We’re not under any obligation to him. We don’t even care greatly for him, with his pock-marked face and black nails. We simply accept his introductions. Do likewise. Or … don’t. Perhaps it would be nobler of you not to. I, I’ve become very selfish, through our travelling. What difference does it make to me …”

The dark street seemed to invite confidences, and Cornélie understood a little of that cynical indifference, unusual in a woman brought up amid narrow concepts of duty and morality. It was not noble; but was it not weariness at life’s tribulations? Whatever the case, she had a vague understanding of that indifferent tone, that nonchalant shrug of the shoulders …

And they turned past Hôtel Hassler and approached the Villa Medici. The full moon poured out its flood of white light, and Rome was bathed in the blue-white nocturnal glow. From the full basin of the fountain, beneath the black holm oaks, whose foliage provided an ebony frame for the painting of Rome, the abundant water splashed noisily down …

“Rome must be beautiful,” said Cornélie softly.

Rudyard and the young baroness had caught up, and heard Cornélie’s words.

“Rome is beautiful,” he said earnestly. “And Rome is more. Rome is a great consolation to many people.”

In the bluish moonlit night his words struck her. The city seemed to be undulating mystically at her feet. She looked at him: he stood before her, with his black coat, without much linen on show: always a fat, polite gentleman. His voice was very piercing, with a rich tone of conviction. She looked at him for a long time, unsure of herself and vaguely sensing an approaching suggestion, but mutely hostile.

Then he added, as if not wanting her to dwell too long on what he had said:

“A great consolation, for many people … since beauty consoles …”

And she found his last remark an aesthetic truism, but he had meant her to find it so.

IV

CORNÉLIE FOUND THE FIRST DAYS in Rome extremely exhausting. She did too much, as everyone does who has just arrived; she wanted to embrace the whole city at once, and the distances, though covered in a carriage, wore her out. In addition she was constantly disappointed, in paintings, in statues, in buildings. At first she did not dare admit those disappointments to herself, but one afternoon, dog-tired, after a painful disappointment in the Sistine Chapel, she admitted it. Everything she saw and already knew from her studies was a disappointment. She decided not to see anything else for the time being. And after her gruelling days of going out in the morning, out in the afternoon, it was a luxury to abandon herself to the subconscious stream of days. She stayed home in the mornings in a peignoir, in her cosy, lofty birdcage of a sitting-room, wrote letters, dreamed a little, her arms folded round her head, read Ovid, Petrarch, listened to some street musicians, who with trembling tenor voices, to the plaintive twang of their guitars filled the quiet street with the sobbing passion of music. At lunch she felt she had been fortunate in her choice of pensione: in her corner at table she found the Baroness Von Rothkirch with her nonchalant condescension towards Rudyard interesting, as she saw how travel can uproot someone from their narrow circle. The young baroness, who did not worry at all about life and just painted and sketched, interested her when she whispered to Rudyard, so that Cornélie did not understand. Miss Hope was so naive, so childishly scatterbrained, that Cornélie could not see how Hope Senior, the rich stocking-manufacturer over there in Chicago, simply let this girl travel alone with her excessive monthly allowance and total lack of worldliness and understanding of people; and Rudyard himself, although she was sometimes repelled by him, fascinated her despite that repulsion. So although she had not struck up a deeper friendship with any of these table companions, there were people around her to whom she could talk, and the table conversation was a diversion from the whole day’s loneliness.

For in these days of weariness and disappointment she took only a short afternoon walk down the Corso or the Pincio, then returned home, made tea for herself in her silver teapot, and daydreamed in front of the wood fire till it was time to dress for dinner.

And the well-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was cheerful. The pensione was full: the marchesa was sleeping in the bathroom, having given up her own room. There was a constant buzz of voices at table, the waiters trotted about and spoons and forks clattered. The melancholy mood of so many restaurants with set menus was absent here. People knew each other and the bustle of Roman life, the oxygen of Roman air, seemed to have injected vitality into their gestures and conversations. Amid that vitality the two scruffy aesthetic ladies stood out with their unchanging attitude: always in evening dress, the woollens, the beads, the reading of the thick tome; the angry looks because people were talking.

And after dinner people sat in the drawing-room, in the hall, getting to know this person and that, and talking of Rome, Rome, Rome … There was always great excitement about the music in the various churches: people consulted the Herald, asked Rudyard, who knew everything, and surrounded him, while he smiled, fat and polite, and distributed tickets, telling them the days and times when there was an important service in such and such church. Now and then, in passing, he gave English ladies who were not au fait, information about the complex formalities and hierarchies of Catholic worship: he told them the nationalities indicated by the various colours of the seminarists whom one met in hordes on the Pincio in the afternoon, staring at St Peter’s, in ecstasy at the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he told them the difference between a church and a basilica; he told intimate stories about the life of Leo XIII. He talked about all this in a fascinating, insinuating tone: the English ladies, eager for information, hung on his every word, found him most charming, asked him for a thousand details.

These days, then, were a time of recuperation for Cornélie. She recovered from her exhaustion, and became indifferent to Rome. But she had no thought of leaving early. Whether she was here or somewhere else, it was the same: she had to be somewhere. Apart from that the pensione was good, and her table companions were excellent company. She no longer read Hare’s Walks through Rome or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but reread Ouida’s Ariadne. She did not like the book as much as when she had found it in The Hague three years before, and read nothing else. But she enjoyed herself for a whole evening with the Von Rothkirch ladies looking at Miss Hope’s collection of seals and sample album. How keen those Americans were on nobility and royalty. The baroness magnanimously stamped her coat-of-arms in the album. The samples were much admired, gold brocade, silk as heavy as silver, foliage-patterned tulle. Miss Hope told them how she had acquired them: she knew one of the queen’s lady’s maids through her having previously served an American lady and for a high price that maid was able to provide her with the samples: a precious scrap, picked up while the queen was having a fitting, sometimes even cut from a wide seam. The child was prouder of her collection of samples than an Italian prince of his paintings, said Baroness Von Rothkirch. But despite that ridiculousness, that vanity, the beautiful American girl appealed to Cornélie because of the spontaneity and honesty of her nature. In the evenings she looked utterly charming, in a black low-cut dress or a red chiffon blouse. For that matter, it was different every evening. It was a kaleidoscope of outfits, blouses, jewels. She wandered through the ruins of the Forum in a tailored off-white linen suit, lined in orange silk, and her white lace petticoat tripped airily over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the temple of Vesta. Her busily designed hats provided a dash of the colours of the Avenue de l’Opéra or Regent’s Street amid the tragic earnestness of the Colosseum or in the palace ruins of the Palatine. The young baroness teased her about her orange silk lining, so in keeping with the Forum; about her hats, so in keeping with the seriousness of a site of Christian martyrdom, but she never became angry. “But it’s a lovely hat!” she would reply in her Yankee accent, giving a splendid view of her fine teeth, but opening her mouth wide, as if she were cracking hazelnuts. And the child was delighted, delighted with the “old baroness” and the “young baroness”, delighted at being in a pensione run by a down-at-heel Italian marchesa. And the moment she caught sight of the grey lion’s mane of the Marchesa Belloni, she would leave the others, rush up to her—according to Mrs Von Rothkirch, because a marchioness is above a baroness—pull ‘la Belloni’ into a corner and monopolise her, if possible for the whole evening. Rudyard joined the two of them, the marchioness and Miss Hope, and seeing this Cornélie again wondered what Rudyard was, who he was, and what he was after. But it did not interest the baroness, who had just obtained a ticket to mass in the Papal chapel, and the young baroness said only that he was a good raconteur of saints’ legends, which helped explain some paintings in Doria and Corsini.

V

ON ONE OF THOSE EVENINGS Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family, next to whom the marchesa had first wanted to seat her: Mrs Van der Staal and her two daughters. They were also staying in Rome for the whole winter, they had friends there and went out. The conversation flowed easily, and Mrs Van der Staal invited Cornélie up to her sitting-room for a chat. The following day she went to the Vatican with her new friends, and heard that Mrs Van der Staal was expecting her son from Florence, who was to come to Rome to pursue his archaeological studies.

Cornélie was glad to find a Dutch element in the hotel that was not uncongenial. She enjoyed being able to speak Dutch and freely admitted it. In the space of a few days she was on intimate terms with Mrs Van der Staal and the two girls, and the first evening after the arrival of Mr Van der Staal Jr, she revealed more of herself than she had ever thought herself capable of doing to strangers whom she had known just a few days.

They were in the Van der Staals’ sitting-room, Cornélie in an easy chair, by the tall blazing wood fire, as it was a chilly evening.

She had talked about The Hague, about her divorce, and now she talked about Italy, about herself.