Chapter 29On the Riviera — in Corsica — Porto VenereAN DER RIVIERA — IN KORSIKA — PORTO VENERE
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
My friend Princess Baratov, who was staying at San Remo with her new husband, the Capitano Vernarecci, invited me, and since I had once again given Inge away for some weeks (Helga was going to school in Kiel, where H. had been posted1), I resolved to escape my gloomy thoughts. It was very interesting and very merry there, but frightfully cold in the great palazzo. The couple had a fire-red giant motor car, which was really only a showpiece, in which one drove up and down in San Remo and nowhere else. We also went to tea at the Villa Zirio2 with the Countess Villeneuve, and she had to bring all the days of the Emperor Frederick's suffering back before my soul in those same rooms. Now there is living and laughing and music and revelling in them again, as though the imperial sufferer had never learned there to suffer without complaint. — —
Then I travelled to Nice and stayed at the Pension Tarelli, the same one at which I had once put up with my husband and his old lady. What memories! I also went to the Villa Primatice!
How changed, how turned bourgeois it had become. I felt like a dead spirit walking on graves. After that I went for a month to Corsica. It delighted me, and I painted a great deal there. But my chief gain was the human grasp of Napoleon. How I revelled in his memories: in Ajaccio, in his birth house, the summer lodging up on the heights with the old wisteria, the Musee Fesch, the Bonapartes' former garden on the Monte Salario. And then in wild Corte, where his father and his wife, pregnant with Napoleon, had to flee into the rocky wastes of the Monte Rotondo. Yes, Corsica gave me much, and I travelled and studied it very thoroughly, and found in every Corsican an embryo of his great compatriot. The swaggering manner, the rodomontade, the ready excitability, the delusion of grandeur were common to all Corsicans. In the rock nest of San Bonifacio, which I reached from Bastia by an unspeakably arduous twelve-hour post-coach journey, I then found in old Colonel Ferton, its commandant3, an amiable scholar and a worthy friend.
From Bastia the ship carried me to Italy. Yes, travelling was soon the only satisfying thing in my life.
I forgot to tell of a fine study journey which I had made the previous spring to Porto Venere on the Gulf of Spezia. Konrad had always raved about it; I found all my expectations surpassed as well, and lay there really the whole day on the water, painting the coral-fringed grotto and the wild view of the rocks from the place where Byron is said to have composed his Corsair. I also lodged in the plain albergo in an old palazzo which is supposed to have been Byron's dwelling. Everything was steeped in atmosphere, down to the little enchanted island of Palmaria, whose pink marble quarries, long lying idle, are now to be worked again. Then, to be sure, they will have thoroughly destroyed the wonderful atmosphere of that man-high wilderness of white-flowering heather.
On the way back I went into the marble quarries of Carrara as well, where Michelangelo's shadow hovered about me, and returned by way of Viareggio, the fashionable sea-bathing place with its flowering steppes of broom and its famous “Pineta.” — At Porto Venere something curious happened to me. I was taking my midday rest when the padrone knocked at the door and asked me to play interpreter for some foreign ladies and gentlemen. I did it, and the persons in question bought a picture. The next day I said jokingly to the landlord: “Today wake me only if another buyer comes.” And he really came! This story I would believe from nobody, had I not lived through it myself. — — —
I can imagine that the reader of my story gets the impression that I was really travelling the whole year round. In later years that was indeed the case, but at the “Waldfrieden” less so. I had there such a feeling of killing loneliness — nearly always without the children, and with all the new bitter experiences — that I felt myself perpetually hunted by furies, and found the only comparative inner peace on my many-coloured, changeful, arduous and beauty-filled journeys.
In that time I wrote the thoughts on solitude which I now let follow. They give, as nothing else does, a clear picture of my mood in those days. Solitude and longing have really run through my life since earliest childhood. They made me restless and unhappy, until I had found Him4. Five years at his side I then found peace, happiness, unfolding. But Konrad knew me to the depths: “How unhappy you will be when I am dead,” he often said, “your soul needs understanding and love. And you will always seek and never find. You will seek until you die.”
But I have long since stopped seeking. In that he was wrong. Today I want nothing more from people. I have experienced too much bitterness from them and too much that was contemptible. And too much that was criminal and base. (But I have still many trials and blows of fate to report.)
Ah, I have lost hope! I no longer believe that I can force the world round to me5, and that is the bitterest thing to me, ah, the very bitterest of all. For then I have lived in vain and suffered in vain. And that paralyses my hand and my imagination — it paralyses my soul.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑where H. had been posted — Henning von Holtzendorff — Telmann's brother-in-law, a naval officer and later Chief of the Admiralty Staff, who with his wife adopted both girls in 1906. Kiel was the fleet's home port. This parenthesis is a document. In 1906 Helga and Inge were adopted away from their mother by the childless Holtzendorffs and raised to Prussian nobility the following year; the memoir has never explained how that came about. Chapter 28 gave the mechanism in an aside — the children were forever being “begged away” to the Zitelmann family seat at Höckendorf — and here, in a bracket, is the next stage: Helga is already living in the adoptive household and going to school in the town it has been posted to, while her mother is on the Riviera because the house is empty. Preuschen introduced the Holtzendorffs in chapter 11 with a sentence that reads differently now: “Both the H.s were to become my enemies later on.” His postings are a matter of naval record, so this bracket is also the best chance of dating the chapter.
- ↑the Villa Zirio — The villa at San Remo where Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm spent the winter of 1887–88 dying of throat cancer, and where he learned he had become Emperor. He reigned ninety-nine days. His widow was the Empress Frederick, who had painted Preuschen's portrait over twenty-two sittings. So the tea party puts her in the rooms of the one court that had treated her as a colleague, on the wrong side of the story. Chapter 8 has the Crown Princess painting her, chapter 27 has her losing the Grand Duke of Hesse — Victoria's son-in-law's cousin, in a court world that was one family — for writing as though rank could be friendship. Here she takes tea in the dead Emperor's sickroom and is given the whole illness as an anecdote by its present tenant. What she objects to is not the laughter but the forgetting: the house has moved on and she has not, and she says so in a sentence about somebody else.
- ↑old Colonel Ferton, its commandant — Charles Ferton (1856–1921), French artillery officer and, in his own right, one of the great field entomologists of solitary wasps and bees — Fabre's most exacting successor. He was posted to Bonifacio in 1895 and refused promotion in order to stay there until he died. But her own report from a Corsican journey, printed in December 1908, gives Bonifacio up, “which of course I know only from sailing past” (Berliner Tageblatt, 8 December 1908) — so if she reached it and its commandant, it was on another journey than that one. Her instinct is exactly right: the amiable scholar commanding a fortress at the far end of Corsica was a serious scientist. Ferton had discovered Jean-Henri Fabre's work while stationed at Avignon and spent the rest of his life on the behaviour and instinct of hymenoptera, publishing his Notes détachées in the Annales de la Société entomologique de France for a quarter of a century; his observations are still cited. That he turned down advancement rather than leave Bonifacio makes him a rarer thing in this memoir than a nobleman: someone who chose the smaller life for the work's sake. She calls him “würdig,” which she does not call many people. (Charles Ferton)
- ↑until I had found Him — “bis ich Ihn gefunden hatte” — the pronoun is capitalised in the German, as it is for God. She does it for Telmann without a word of explanation, and English can only reproduce the capital. The sentence also measures the marriage from the inside: “Fünf Jahre an seiner Seite,” five years at his side — in fact five and a half, from the wedding of June 1891 (the couple's announcement is dated 23 June 1891) to his death in January 1897. And it sets up the prophecy that follows, the only place in the memoir where her husband is allowed to describe her: your soul needs understanding and love, you will always seek and never find, you will seek until you die. She quotes it in order to contradict it in the next paragraph, and the contradiction is worse than the prophecy.
- ↑that I can force the world round to me — “daß ich die Welt zu mir zwingen kann” — not that she can succeed, but that she can compel the world to come to her terms. It is the sentence the whole memoir is written against, and it is in the present tense of the writing, about 1917. Four chapters ago she cursed the woman “whose genius cannot force down its womanhood” — niederzwingen; here it is the world she can no longer zwingen. The verb is the same and so is the position: everything must be taken by force, and the force has run out. What she names as the loss is not fame or money but the belief that the compelling was possible, and she is exact about the consequence — the hand and the imagination go first, the soul after. She is fifty-odd, writing in the middle of a war, with her pictures unsold and her daughters another family's, and she puts the whole of it into one paragraph and then goes on with the journey.