Chapter 60Primula verisPRIMULA VERIS
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The children were at the boarding school and felt happy there. I now set off, by way of Innsbruck (where I caught a violent chill) for Nice. But I arrived there seriously ill, and poor Princess Baratov had no joy of me. I lay a fortnight in bed and then travelled on to Rome.
After a long time I was in old Rome again. I seemed to myself like a departed spirit visiting the scenes of its earthly wandering. Everything was altered — a new Rome. The third flowering had shot up outside the gates. I felt oppressed, frightened, disquieted, unhappy — and blissful all the same. For how I love Rome, how I love the old memories, how I love the Roman air, the Roman tongue. Everything! Everything! And my Roman grave1!
But I had not much peace — I was afraid of the visit to St. Aubin. How would the children take it. Would they not telegraph my arrival to the adoptive parents at once, and I should have to travel on?
All of it pursued me into my dreams at night. —
At Vevey I stayed with Marie Moulin, Konrad's correspondent. She was very dear and full of sympathy in my affair, and warmly invited me to visit Chillon with the children and then stay at her house. (Which of course they did not do.)
And then I set off. I had found a little clump of primula veris in the damp moss, quite small, and I wanted to bring it to my beloved ones. I had written the day before to Mr. Durand that I was passing through, “pour visiter les enfants de mon beaufrere.”
That was the truth, after all, for they had now become my brother-in-law's children.
And I would stay a week, and begged to be allowed to see them in their free hours. —
So I came, with my heart hammering, as “aunt” into this strange house, to press my own children secretly to my heart.
The Durand house was the last in the village. My fear grew with every step, my heart hammered up into my throat. I had myself announced. The children came down, pale, stiff. They did not know themselves how they were to behave towards “the aunt.”
“Mais embrassez donc votre tante,” cried Madame Durand. And then I rummaged out my little flowers.
“C’est donc tres touchant,” cried Madame again. “Faut que vous aimez bien vos nieces.”2 — “Je les aime,” I said quietly.
They kept me to table that evening, and I soon felt that in the Durand house a good air was blowing, and one that did me good!
The son Henry was a painter, a pupil of Hodler. So we soon had the most varied points of contact. Henry brought me back to the “Hotel Pattus,” where I had put up, about twenty minutes from the Pre de Sauges, the Durands' charming property. There he told me how everyone loved the two children, how gifted, how interesting they were. But so shy — could I not bring it about that they gave themselves a little more freely!
After three days everything was altered.
Henry now drew Helga and Inge of an evening, and they were blissful about it, for they were both smitten with the “young artist.” I was together with my two beloved ones almost the whole day long. In the mornings they fetched me from Pattus, and then we made a “picnic” walk to one of the old castles round about. I had brought all manner of delicacies with me, bought a pound of delicious Swiss cheese every time (ah, eighty centimes in those days), and we did ourselves well. For tea we came to the Durands'. Afterwards there was drawing in the studio, and Inge recited (she was smitten just then with Ernst Hardt's “Gudrun”3). Henry spoke fluent German.
For supper I stayed once and for all. Afterwards there was music. In these days the little primulae veris had grown, and the souls of the children unfolded like flowers in the sun; the whole great sowing of love that had lain so long on stony ground came up in Helga's and Inge's souls like a glorious blessing of spring, and scented us round with happiness.
When the stormy weather of the early spring allowed no “picnic,” though, the children came to me early at Pattus, and we played writing games. That was almost the loveliest thing of all. How Helga's talent, Inge's genius4 unfolded in air that was congenial to them! It was shattering for me to see, to feel, to live through. Very beautiful, singular poems the two of them made in those days at these writing games. Each one more deeply felt than the last. Some things came off for me too, when I looked from the window at the jagged horizontal line of the lake and the chain of the Alps emerging here and there behind the clouds.
Once we were in Neuchâtel with Henry, at the old castle and in the picture gallery. On the last day, though, we climbed “a travers les brouillards,” to see the chain of the Alps above the mists. It was movingly beautiful, a phantasmagoria, and worked on Inge, who was seeing it so for the first time, almost frighteningly, like a revelation.
When Madame Durand embraced me for the last time, she whispered to me: “Je comprends, je sais tout!”
The children confessed it to her themselves soon afterwards; the “lie” weighed on them all too heavily. They had so warm and hearty a relation to the whole house. But when the adoptive parents learned that Mr. Durand and his wife were “faith-healers,”5 they took Helga and Inge away again after a few moons from that soil so healing and so nourishing to the soul. They were not even allowed to live to see the full flowering of the trees, which they had been so unspeakably looking forward to. My heart hurts when I think of this. To Vevey and Chillon, of course, we had not come either. But it had been so upliftingly beautiful in those days of early spring, raged through by wild storms and breathed through by sweet secret scents, of lovely young human souls. Primulae veris!
Comforted and strengthened, I travelled back.
At Darmstadt, my home town, I broke the journey; after so many years I wanted to seek out my father's city once again. To study the Darmstadt “Rosenhöhe art.”
I arrived at five in the morning, in the dark of night. A huge new modern station. I wandered through the whole city, and passed those sphinxes of the Freemasons' lodge6 as well, on which my first longing had been fixed, and which I made again for myself in the Tempio sphinxes.
In the Catholic domed church (St. Peter's, as I always said to myself longingly as a child) a light was burning.
So I went in.
Then I came to the Steinstrasse and to my late uncle's house. Cousin Mariechen was to take me in there. She was already awake, and breakfast was being got ready for me. We both wept at seeing one another again. Was this still the same Mariechen? Did she think the same?
I found much that was new and great in the city and on the Rosenhöhe, and a wholly singular thing, the “Darmstadt art,” in which I had no part. In the newer, wonderful museum I looked for my two flower pieces, whose purchase had been in its day the first act of art of the new Grand Duke7. I did not find them. I ran to and fro. At last I asked at the office. They had been “set aside” at the move, with other things.
Then I smiled bitterly — Michelangelo — Vittoria Colonna! The unlucky Greek letter!8 His Royal Highness the Grand Duke has made a clean job of it. A prince's favour can call much forth — a prince's disfavour wants only to destroy.
Now I was back again in the Tempio.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑my Roman grave — The plot she fought for in the crowded Protestant cemetery by the pyramid of Cestius, where Konrad Telmann's ashes were buried in 1897 — not far from Goethe's son and from Shelley. She calls it hers five years before she was laid in it. Chapter 12 tells how she got it: the old Protestant cemetery was "already so densely occupied" and she had to conquer a place there for him. She brought his urn across from the columbarium at San Lorenzo herself, with Maria von Bülow, while Sudermann waited at the vault to speak and Bjørnson's greeting was read. Sixteen years later, walking through a Rome she barely recognizes and calling herself a departed spirit, she lists the grave among the things she loves. She died in Berlin in December 1918 and was taken to Rome and laid under the same slab, which carries his portrait in bronze and, now, both their names. (The grave in Rome — photograph)
- ↑“Faut que vous aimez bien vos nieces.” — "You must be very fond of your nieces." Madame Durand's French is colloquial and ungrammatical, and printed exactly so. The exchange is the finest thing in the chapter, and it works only in French. Madame Durand supplies the sentiment in the loose, kindly idiom of the house — you must be very fond of your nieces — and Preuschen answers with three words that drop the nieces and the fondness both: Je les aime. I love them. Said quietly, in a language neither woman was born to, in a room where it could not be said any other way; and Madame Durand, on the last day, whispers that she has understood the whole thing.
- ↑Ernst Hardt's “Gudrun” — A verse tragedy on the Middle High German epic by Ernst Hardt (1876–1947), premiered at the Lessing-Theater in Berlin in 1911 — two years old, and being recited from memory by a fifteen-year-old in a Swiss drawing room. (Ernst Hardt (1876–1947))
- ↑Helga's talent, Inge's genius — She gives her younger daughter the word Genie — the one she claims for herself, and the one German cannot mark as female. Genie is neuter and has no -in form, against Künstlerin, Malerin, Dichterin, Schriftstellerin; her 1896 lecture turns on that fact and so does her own "Ich bin ein Genie." It is the highest word she owns and she uses it three times in the memoir: of herself, of the thief who emptied her house in the chapter before this one, and here of a fifteen-year-old girl who is not allowed to know she is her daughter. The graded pair — Helga's talent, Inge's genius — is a painter's judgement delivered on her own children, and it is the only place in the book where either girl is measured as an artist.
- ↑were “faith-healers,” — Gesundbeter — literally those who pray people well. The house that had been good for the children turned out to hold the wrong religion, and that was enough. Gesundbeter was the ordinary German word for the healing movements spreading through Protestant Europe in these years, Christian Science chief among them; it is dismissive, and she puts it in quotation marks because it is the adoptive parents' word, not hers. The sequence is worth setting out plainly, since she does not: the girls were pale and stiff, then happy, then drawing and reciting and writing verse; and within a few months of confessing the truth to Madame Durand they were removed from the house. She never says the confession caused the removal, and she puts the two sentences next to each other.
- ↑those sphinxes of the Freemasons' lodge — The thread closes. In chapter 41 she said the sphinx hall had been the dream of her life since passing these sphinxes daily with her satchel; here she walks past the originals at five in the morning and says outright that the Tempio pair are copies of them. It is the one design in her whole estate whose source she names, and she names it twice, forty pages and a lifetime apart. As a Darmstadt schoolgirl she went by the lodge door every day and dreamed of its secrets. In 1911 two reclining sphinxes on narrow socles were set either side of her picture hall in Lichtenrade, and Zeus the peacock used to display in front of them. By the time she walks past the originals here, the hall behind those copies has been stripped of sixty to eighty pictures. The villa was demolished in 1996.
- ↑my two flower pieces, whose purchase had been in its day the first act of art of the new Grand Duke — Bought for the grand-ducal collections on Ernst Ludwig's accession in 1892, and banished to a back room after she wrote him the wrong letter. She comes to see them twenty years later and they are gone. Chapter 27 tells the first half: the two flower pieces were the new Grand Duke's first purchase, and after the letter he "had them banished from the museum into back rooms." This is the second half, and it is worse. The newer wonderful museum is Alfred Messel's building, commissioned by Ernst Ludwig himself and opened in 1906; at the move into it the pictures were "zurückgestellt" — set aside, held back — with other things, and a woman who had to ask at the office was told so. Two documented paintings by her, in a state collection, last recorded in 1892 and not hung since 1906. The Hessisches Landesmuseum's acquisition registers for 1892 are where to look, and they are the most findable lost pictures in the book.
- ↑The unlucky Greek letter! — Written aboard a Greek steamer, and it cost her Darmstadt for good. Chapter 27: coming back from Corfu she found the Grand Duke of Hesse aboard the same ship, recognized him on deck in Greek peasant shoes, and got on with him. That night she wrote him a few lines asking leave to lay her poems at his feet and adding that, as Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna had been friends, she hoped a bond of friendship might join woman artist and prince for all time. "That I ought not to have done. That broke my neck with the Grand Duke." She lost his favour, the Princess of Erbach's with it, and — as this chapter finds out at the museum office — the wall her paintings hung on. The offence was the comparison: she had put a Künstlerin beside a prince as an equal.