Vertigo (3 page)

Beyle was inconsolable. For months he reproached himself, and not until he determined to set down his great passion in a meditation on love did he recover his emotional equilibrium. On his writing desk, as a memento of Métilde, he kept a plaster cast of her left hand which he had contrived

to obtain shortly before the débàcle - providentially, as he often reflected while writing. That hand now meant almost as much to him as Métilde herself could ever have done. In particular, the slight crookedness of the ring finger occasioned in him emotions of a vehemence he had not hitherto experienced.

In
De l'Amour
he describes a journey he claims to have made from Bologna in the company of one Mme Gherardi, whom he sometimes refers to simply as La Ghita. La Ghita, who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle's later work, is a mysterious, not to say unearthly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher for various lovers such as Adèle Rebuffel, Angéline Bereyter and not least for Métilde Dembowski, and that Mme Gherardi, whose life would easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence, and was merely a phantom, albeit one to whom Beyle remained true for decades. It is furthermore unclear at what time in his life Beyle made the journey with Mme Gherardi, always supposing that he made it at all. However, since there is much about Lake Garda in the opening pages of the narrative, it seems probable that some of what Beyle experienced in September 1813, when he was convalescing by the lakes of upper Italy, went into his account of the journey with Mme Gherardi.

In the autumn of 1813, Beyle was in a continuously elegiac frame of mind. The previous winter he had taken part in the terrible retreat from Russia, and afterwards had spent some time dealing with administrative business at Sagan in Silesia, where at the height of the summer he succumbed to a serious illness, during the course of which his senses were often confounded by images of the great fire of Moscow and of climbing the Schneekopf, which he had been planning to do immediately before the fever came upon him. Time after time Beyle found himself on a mountaintop, cut off from the rest of the world and surrounded by great squalls of snow driven horizontally through the tempestuous air and by the flames breaking from the roofs of burning houses.

The leave he took in upper Italy after recovering was marked by a sensation of debility and quietude, which caused him to view the natural world around him, and the longing for love which he continued to feel, in a wholly new way. A curious lightness such as he had never known took hold of him, and it is the recollection of that lightness which informs the account he wrote seven years later of a journey that may have been wholly imaginary, made with a companion who may likewise have been a mere figment of his own mind.

The narrative begins in Bologna, where the heat was so unbearable - in the early July of a year we cannot date precisely - that Beyle and Mme Gherardi decided to spend a few weeks breathing the fresher air of the mountains. Resting by day and travelling by night, they crossed the hilly country of Emilia-Romagna and the Mantuan marshes, shrouded in sulphurous vapours, and on the morning of the third day arrived in Desenzano on Lake Garda. Never in his entire life, writes Beyle, had the beauty and solitude of those waters made so profound an impression on him. Because of the oppressive heat, he and Mme Gherardi spent the evenings in a barque out on the lake, observing, during hours of unforgettable tranquillity, the most extraordinary gradations of colour as night fell. It was on one of those evenings, Beyle writes, that they talked of the pursuit of happiness. Mme Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature. Insofar as we seek Nature solely in another body, we become cut off from Her; for love, she declared, is a passion that pays its debts in a coin of its own minting, and thus a purely notional transaction which one no more needs for one's fulfilment than one needs the instrument for trimming goose-quills that he, Beyle, had bought in Modena. Or do you imagine (thus, according to Beyle, she continued) that Petrarch was unhappy merely because he never knew the taste of coffee?

A few days after this conversation, Beyle and Mme Gherardi continued on their journey. Since the breezes traverse Lake Garda from north to south around midnight but from south to north in the hours before dawn, they first rode along the bank as far as Gargnano, halfway up the lake shore, and from there took a boat aboard which, as day broke, they entered the small port of Riva, where two boys were already sitting on the harbour wall playing dice.

Beyle drew Mme Gherardi's attention to an old boat, its mainmast fractured two-thirds of the way up, its buff-coloured sails hanging in folds. It appeared to have made fast only a short time ago, and two men in dark silver-buttoned tunics were at that moment carrying a bier ashore on which, under a large, frayed, flower-patterned silk cloth, lay what was evidently a human form. The scene affected Mme Gherardi so adversely that she insisted on quitting Riva without delay.

The further they penetrated into the mountains, the cooler and greener the landscape became, much to the delight of Mme Gherardi, for whom the dust-laden summers of her native city were so often an ordeal. That sombre moment in Riva, which crossed her memory like a shadow several times, was presently forgotten, and gave way to such high spirits that in Innsbruck, for the sheer pleasure of it, she bought a broad-brimmed Tyrolean hat of the kind familiar to us from pictures showing Andreas Hofer's rebellion, and persuaded Beyle, who had been meaning to turn back at this point, to continue further down the Inn valley with her, past Schwaz and Kufstein and onwards to Salzburg. There they stayed for several days, visiting the famed underground galleries of the Hallein salt mines, where one of the miners made Mme Gherardi a present of a twig which was encrusted with thousands of crystals. When they returned to the surface of the earth once again, Beyle writes, the rays of the sun set off in it a manifold glittering such as he had only seen flashing from diamonds as ladies revolved with their partners in a ballroom blazing with light.

The protracted crystallisation process, which had transformed the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to Beyle, by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul. He expounded this idea at length to Mme Gherardi. She for her part, however, was not prepared to sacrifice the childish bliss that filled her that day in order to explore with Beyle the deeper meaning of what was doubtless a very pretty allegory, as she sardonically put it. Beyle took this as another example of the obstacles that so often appeared in his path as he continued his quest for a woman who might accord with his intellectual life, and he remarks that it was then he realised how even his most extravagant efforts would never be able to overcome those obstacles. In noting this, he broached a subject that was to occupy him as a writer for years to come. And so now, in 1826, approaching forty, he sat alone on a bench in the shade of two fine trees, enclosed by a low wall in the garden of the monastery of the Minori Osservanti high above Lake Albano and, with the cane he

now generally carried with him, slowly inscribed the initials of his former lovers in the dust, like the enigmatic runes of his life. The initials stand for Virginie Kubly, Angela

Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mélanie Guilbert, Mina de Griesheim, Alexandrine Petit,
Angéline
{qui je n’ ai jamais aimé)
Bereyter, Métilde Dembowski, and for Clémentine, Giulia, and Mme Azur, whose first name he no longer remembered. Just as he no longer understood the names of these stars now unfamiliar to him, as he phrases it, so too it seemed ultimately incomprehensible to him, when he wrote
De l'Amour,
that whenever he tried to persuade Mme Gherardi to believe in love, she made him replies now of a melancholy sort, and now quite tart. It especially pained Beyle, however, at a time when he was beginning to accept with some reluctance the foundations of her philosophy, to find Mme Gherardi, as occurred often enough, according a certain value after all to the illusions of love he associated with the crystallisation of salt. At such moments he was horrified by a sudden awareness of his own insufficiency and a profound sense of failure. Beyle distinctly recalls that this horror came upon him on one occasion in the autumn of the year in which they had made their journey to the Alps together, when they were riding on the Cascata del Reno and discussing the torments the painter Oldofredi underwent in the name of love, which were then the talk of the town. Beyle had still not abandoned hope of winning the favour of Mme Gherardi, who was usually well disposed to his quick-witted conversation, and when she began to speak of a divine happiness beyond comparison with anything else in life, quite to herself as it seemed to him, a feeling of dread overcame him, and he described Oldofredi, doubtless thinking more of himself than of the painter, as a wretched foreigner. Thereupon he fell back, allowing the gap between his horse and that of Mme Gherardi - who, as has been remarked, may have existed only in his imagination -to widen steadily, and they rode the remaining three miles to Bologna without exchanging another word.

Beyle wrote his great novels between 1829 and 1842, plagued constantly by the symptoms of syphilis. Difficulties in swallowing, swellings in his armpits, and pains in his atrophying testicles troubled him especially. Having now become a meticulous observer, he kept a minute record of the fluctuating state of his health and in due course noted

that his sleeplessness, his giddiness, the roaring in his ears, his palpitating pulse, and the shaking that was at times so bad that he could not use a knife and fork, were related not so much to the disease itself as to the extremely toxic substances with which he had dosed himself for years. His condition improved as little by little he stopped taking quicksilver and iodide of potassium; but he realised that his heart was gradually failing. As had long been his habit, Beyle calculated, with growing frequency, the age to which he might expect to live in cryptographic forms which, in their scrawled, ominous abstraction, seem like harbingers of death. Six years