Letters полностью

Disgusted, she had made her way to Leghorn, sought out Mme de Staël there on her own, been generously received by that lady on the strength of what she acknowledges having pled, in tears: her past connection with Andrew Cook; and while being cured of her venereal infection, had helped nurse Germaine’s ailing husband back toward health. Indeed she had made herself so useful to her heroine (who did not share Consuelo’s weariness with men, but sympathized with it and introduced her to the idea, but not to the practice, of le saphisme) that Mme de Staël had brought her back in her retinue to Coppet and Paris. In that city, chez Germaine, she had met a truly sister spirit, the aggrieved but undaunted Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, with whom, on the strength of their common ill-handling by Napoleon’s brothers, she had become friends. More exactly, with Germaine’s fascinated encouragement, the two women had become first friends, then quite close friends, then finally and briefly (the first such experience for either) more than friends.

Unsettled by that adventure, Betsy had returned to Baltimore, where she put by her disposition against Joseph Bonaparte and sought him out, in her son’s interest, at Point Breeze. Consuelo had remained behind to attend Mme de Staël, whose own health was failing. For a time the two refrained from correspondence — the very time, as it happens, when Andrew had made Betsy’s reacquaintance and interested her in his project of rescuing the chief of the Bonapartes. Mme de Staël died, with her last breath encouraging Consuelo, should she ever take pen again in hand, to “rework that little business of the poison’d snuffbox,” a device she could wish to have employed in her own life against more men than one.

Her words inspire Consuelo not to literature but to that aforementioned “Second Cycle.” She is 37, without husband, children, lovers, or further wish for them. She considers writing to Betsy; decides not to. Recalling Andrew’s program of “correcting his life’s first half,” she conceives a project of revenge against the man “who had 1st corrupted her, & whose life was a catalogue of such corruptions”: Don Escarpio! She goes to Rome, where she understands him to have made an infamous reputation as agent of the anti-Bonapartist secret police; she intends by some means — perhaps a poisoned letter opener! — to end his wicked life, at whatever risk to herself. But she has been prevented: a certain opera singer of that city, whose sexual favors Don Escarpio had demanded as payment for her lover’s release from the political prison at Castel Sant’ Angelo, has availed herself of an unpoisoned letter opener to stab him through the heart.

At once thus gratified and thwarted — and nearly out of funds — Consuelo is reduced to two equally disagreeable options: appealing to her friend Mme B. for money on the strength of their brief but extraordinary connection, or attempting another novel, perhaps on the subject of Don Escarpio. But the former smacks of blackmail, and for the second, despite a promising title (whose promise is perhaps diminished in literal translation: The Woman before Whom the Man before Whom All Rome Trembled Trembled), she has come to understand she has not the talent. Her investigations, however, and her credentials from Mme de Staël, have led her into Roman anti-Bonapartist circles from the early years of the century, in which there is concern that the habitation in that city of Napoleon’s mother, uncle, sister, and two brothers (Lucien and Louis), will generate schemes for his rescue and return to Europe. Consuelo herself is nonpolitical — and lonely, and at loose ends. She is befriended by, and for a modest stipend becomes the assistant of, a fellow lodger in her pensione, one Mme Kleinmüller, who is in the service of these anti-Bonapartists…

Andrew interrupts: she was not herself this Mme Kleinmüller? She has no gift for imposture, Consuelo replies — nor for dissembling, nor for fiction. She was Mme K.‘s assistant. The spiritualist herself was now returned in discredit to her ultimate employer, Prince Metternich, whose object it was to discover and forestall all rescue attempts. Consuelo’s own object, in the beginning, had been merely to survive; a remarkable letter from Betsy Bonaparte, received fortuitously at just this time (1817, when Andrew was busy with the Lakanal affair), gives her a new purpose. So far from having forgotten their brief affair, Betsy confesses that it has changed her life: ambitious as ever for her son, for herself she now craves “something more,” which she dares not spell out in plain English. She encloses the Patterson family cipher, begs Consuelo to set forth in it her own feelings…