Tales of Mystery and Truth

by Jeffrey K. Hill

Ezra breathed deeply and checked his clothes for any sign of injury.

  The driver laughed. “It’s like Somebody wanted you to have a second chance.”

  Ezra wiped a speck of dust from his glasses and stared at the truck driver.

  The driver took a step back. “You’re not going to sue me, are you? You’re not hurt.”

  “What chance do I have when I’m already dead?”

  The Court of Love

  One day, as Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard talked of poetry and patronage with his friend and mentor the Comte de Damville, he was ambushed by fate. Damville offered Chastelard letters of introduction to the court of the Queen, who, he said, was a great lover of lyric. Chastelard had already heard the princess complimented in the verse of Étienne de Maisonfleur. But it was Damville’s whispered aside that he would abandon his wife for just one night with the Queen that inspired a mimetic desire in Chastelard for which he expiated with his head.

  Marie Stuart, Dowager of France and Queen of Scotland, was a twenty-one-year-old widow seeking her destiny in a world of men. Tall of stature with a swan-like neck, she possessed a talent for dancing and attracting admirers. Bright golden-red hair and heavy eyelids suggested a woman of sultry passions lurked beneath her regal bearing. Fluttering eyelashes and wan, pensive looks lured all souls towards her like a net.

  Since the age of thirteen, Marie had maintained as one of her duties a cultivation of the lettered arts. Damville’s letters gained Chastelard inclusion in the retinue of glamor and entertainment that was to accompany Marie to Scotland. During the voyage, he recited a verse that he dedicated to the Queen, averring, though moon and stars be hidden on the blackest of nights, her eyes would light up the whole sea with their fire. Marie found the gallant poet’s ardent and frivolous lyrics suitable in a chivalrous man of literary aspirations. Though he was to return to France after Marie’s journey was complete, he would always find himself welcome at her court.

  His return to Holyrood was not long delayed. Marie received the poet with a soft, sweet, and agreeable speech, at once majestic and modest. Such a gracious reception, though given to all, Chastelard took as amorously special for him. Thus emboldened, and burning with epic lyrics of love, he soon found opportunity to await Marie in her own chamber, by sneaking inside and hiding under the bed. His presence was discovered by Marie’s ladies-in-waiting who, though finding Chastelard attractive in appearance, were appropriately scandalized. As a woman, Marie enjoyed the romantic attentions she was paid, but as a Queen she could never allow her majestic reputation to be blackened by such rakish actions.

  Though Chastelard swore he would do anything his lady love asked, he would not abide her command to return to France. He believed her reprimand was attributable to the presence of her ladies-in-waiting, and had she alone found him, she would have forgiven him with complete submission. In secret he followed Marie to Burntisland Castle and flattered his way into the graces of one lady-in-waiting. She helped to disguise Chastelard in dress and wig, then installed him in an ante-room to Marie’s chambers. A scratch at the door signaled the Queen was alone, and Chastelard burst in, panting with passion and making audacious advances. Marie cried for help. The love-struck poet backed away, assuring her he had intruded only to explain his first intrusion: while walking in search of inspiration for his verse, he had been overcome with sleep and sought the nearest place to rest. This account of his actions touched her woman’s heart, but did nothing to stop her Queen’s mind from seeing his boldness as rashness, and his fault of loving her too well a crime.

  Upon the scaffold, the Earl of Mar and Murray pronounced the sentence of lèse majesté. Chastelard bowed his head, confident Marie was watching from the castle windows with tears in her eyes. Chastelard rejected the services of the Queen’s priest, not because he was a Huguenot, but because he preferred the gods of verse provide him with absolution. Taking from his pocket a volume of Ronsard, Marie’s favorite French poet, he recited part of the hymn to Death: “I salute you, happy and profitable Death, since I must die, grant that I may suddenly encounter you either for the honor of god, or in the service of my lady love.” He then turned to face the unseen Queen, and concluded, “Adieu, thou who art so beautiful and so cruel, who killest me, and whom I cannot cease to love!” What that avowal imported, lovers will divine.

  But for his madness of love, Chastelard would have left no shadow or shred of himself behind.

  * * *

  One day, as Marie-Henri Beyle accompanied his friend Pietro Missirilli to a salon often attended by illustrious Carbonari, he was ambushed by fate. He held out his hand to meet General Dembrowski, while his eyes met a woman who looked like Luini’s depiction of Salome. The wife of the Polish officer, Métilde Viscontini would never allow Beyle to cross the line of friendship with her. And fallen immediately and irrevocably in love, Beyle would be haunted by this woman’s melancholy beauty for the remainder of his life.

  When his first encounter with Metilde had ended, Beyle stepped into the broad street, gazing at the facades of deteriorated buildings dull against one of Milan’s famous grim skies, and declared his surroundings the most beautiful place in the world.

  Beyle was a great admirer of the music of Rossini, which would induce in him a state of reverie that was matched by the presence of this woman, and she became the great musical theme of his heart. He could not hide the outward signs of his inner feelings, for a delicate sweat would accumulate on his brow and he would tug at the side of the beard that many thought was pasted on his rotund face. Pietro warned his friend to forget Metilde, to which Beyle replied, “A woman can always be seduced, and it is the duty of every man to try.”

  Beyle found Metilde to be a clever woman of sensibility and strong character, dedicated to the national cause. His every thought and action was in service of his duty to try to seduce her, yet the lengthy letters he would write to her were full of assurances of his pure intentions. Once she accepted those assurances, he pushed further and swore that anything that seemed to her indelicate was nothing but the desire of a supplicant lover longing to be near his beloved. This the good lady would not accept. She restricted Beyle’s visits to twice a month, and she warned him his letters should show no traces of love, his feelings for her should never again be mentioned. Beyle abided the conditions for a year, all the while believing that his obedient discretion was soon to be rewarded by Metilde’s affections.

  Beyle knew one of the surest methods for winning a woman’s love was not to shower her with gifts, but to oblige her to give him a gift. In Metilde’s younger days, a sculptor had made a plaster cast of her left hand as an offering of love. Beyle expressed a desire to possess this cast, which Metilde gave him out of consolation. To Beyle, his beloved had granted him a small wish and had given him a small piece of herself, a sure sign she would soon grant and give him all.

  One day, Metilde travelled to Volterra to visit her two sons. The hope that Beyle harbored suggested that Metilde took this trip alone to give herself the opportunity to succumb to his passion. He followed her, disguised with a bushy moustache, a velour hat, green spectacles, and waistcoat of Werther blue, watching from the shadows for the right moment to make his appetent presence known. What glory was his when he realized his beloved recognized him and was giving him meaningful looks!

  The letter that would summon him to her arms arrived. He congratulated himself on at last becoming her secret and familiar companion. With adolescent excitement he opened the prized invitation and instead found a cold command not to compromise her any more. She would never accept anyone as a paramour, and now she could no longer accept him as a friend.

  The pendulum of passion swung from the fierce hope of winning her favors to the crushing fear of having already lost them. Had Beyle known only satisfaction, he would have become disappointed in Metilde; had he known only frustration, he would have forsaken her for another. But in the space between these two shifting poles, the flame of his passionate love kept burning brightl
y. In Beyle’s mythology of love, what mattered most was inner tension and desire.

  Every letter Beyle sent to justify his feelings and behaviors was returned by Metilde unopened. Beyle was grim as the Milan skies. He spent hours sitting at his writing desk, contemplating the cast of Metilde’s left hand. A slight crookedness in her ring finger drove him into paroxysms of passion he had never known. The memento was now all he had left of her, of his life.

  Beyle’s friend Pietro tried to relieve him of the obsessive rumination over his shame and humiliation. Beyle instead used his obsession to stimulate his imagination into producing an eternal book for Metilde, written to her alone, about her alone, and for her alone to read, by which she would understand him. Fear of defeat returned to hope of victory.

  Beyle spent months writing his great meditation on love, regaining his emotional equilibrium. Then his romantic purgatory was brought to a sudden end by an order from the Austrian police to leave Milan, on suspicion of plotting with the Carbonari. How to explain such a cruel twist of fate, when on the horizon he had just sighted the mirage of joy and reconciliation?

  The heart can find justification for feelings and behaviors that reason cannot abide. Beyle knew that Metilde was not unaware of his appreciation of Italy, and his attendant political interests. It was because of a shared spirit of nationalism that they had first been introduced to one another by Pietro Missirilli. She could only have hoped to free Beyle from his revolutionary acquaintances so that he could devote himself to her. In order to do so, she had betrayed his political leanings to the Austrian authorities.

  Despite the irony of the actions he believed Metilde had taken, Beyle felt lost, abandoned, and impoverished. He now faced a future in which he would never see her again. He considered killing himself, then worried what his friends would think of such a suicidal passion for a woman he had not even slept with. Yet he could think of nothing worse than to live without passion—it was the pure essence of Beylisme.

  He turned the mad catastrophe of his love into a scientific treatise. In his eternal book he dissected his unrequited love, he classified it, and he indexed it. With ambition, imagination, and vigor he transmuted a lived reality of indignity, selfishness, and debacle into a dreamed reality of romance, passion, and delight.

  Upon publication, Metilde was sent a personalized copy of the book written to her alone, about her alone, and for her alone to read. She did read it, and took it to be a most cruel revenge, her behavior towards Beyle punished by laughing. She burnt the book, thereby ensuring the flame of Beyle’s passion would never be extinguished.

  His friends began to wonder what had become of Beyle after he disappeared. He began a career of compensatory fiction in which his life was embellished with success. He produced romantic heroes whose soaring passion for women enslaved by timidity and prejudice doomed them to sacrifice themselves. For the first time in European fiction the Outsider appeared, a character at odds with society, and Beyle’s metamorphosis was complete. Errico Beyle, Milanese, who lived, wrote, and loved, had become the great writer Stendhal.

  * * *

  One day, as Francesco di Petracco was heading across the public square of Avignon on his way to deliver to his friend Soranzio a copy of the Bergando manuscript from the eminent library of Giacomo Colonna, he was ambushed by fate. Midst a scene of dole and penance appeared a vision of loveliness emerging from the church of Santa Chiara. The wife of Hugues II de Sade, Laura de Noves would turn down all advances Petrarch would make towards her. And fallen immediately and irrevocably in love, Petrarch would be haunted by this woman’s beauty for the rest of his life.

  Petrarch was a man of extraordinary talent, one of the first great Renaissance men. What most people knew him for was his poems of love written to a woman who did not return his feelings. And what we know of that love today is based upon what he wrote. This has led many to question the true nature of his relationship with and his feelings for Laura.

  Whenever he recounted many parts of his life, Petrarch did not hesitate to change a time or a place or even a person in order to create a better presentation, a more engrossing story. He wrote and revised the events of his life into a drama dripping with meaning. Some scholars have even suggested the name by which Petrarch designated his beloved might have been chosen because of its kinship with laurel, which represented the poet’s other grand desire: fame. Petrarch’s legendary Letter To Posterity, which purported to tell his own life, was a carefully edited and revised account intended for general consumption.

  Colonna, with whom Petrarch resided at Avignon, questioned Laura’s existence. Petrarch replied that he wished “she indeed had been a fiction and not a madness.” He felt no less than captured by her person. Considering he might never have even addressed her, his description of his experience of Laura bespoke of exaggerated comparisons and conceit: “born to inspire, obsess and also to distract, perhaps even to mislead, she comes close to signifying life itself: lovely but transient, beguiling, exhilarating; hence the tenderness, the melancholy, the devotion, the irresolution, the yearning forever destined to be unfulfilled.”

  Petrarch also was a great lover of books. He believed they were not mere objects, but emanations of personality, and he made friends with every one he read. Unable to win the heart of Laura herself, he must have imagined the book of his love poetry as the next best thing, and wrote it to serve his hopes and desires. By this the love he could not achieve in life has become immortal.

  In the series of poems which he titled Triumphs, Petrarch gave form to his fantasy. In the Triumphus Pudicitie, we read of Laura and her Virtues defeating Cupid in battle. Far from having his spirit crushed, Petrarch was instead inspired by his lover to forsake what he called “the vulgar path and ordinary trade.”

  The Triumphus Mortis is the final reconciliation of Petrarch’s love and its rejection. Laura appears to him in a vision on the night following her death. She grieves for him because he is still alive and can not enjoy the greater gladness she has found. During their conversation, he asks her if, within the bounds of honor, she ever returned his feelings. She claims indeed to have cared for him, but to have tempered their relations for his sake. He doubts her, and she admonishes him, explaining that what he sought to disclose to the world, she sought to hide. Her proof was in acceptance of the gift of his verse with the song “Dir piu non osa il nostro amor”—our love dares not say more. She leaves him with the assurance his time on earth without her shall not be much longer.

  Though Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura produced no more results than did his scathing speeches to the corrupt clergymen of his time, death soon joined him with Laura and won his fame.

  * * *

  One day, as Henrik Ibsen was strolling through the summer in Gossensass, he was ambushed by fate. Seated with a book on a bench amidst squirrels and birds, framed by the vibrant colors of nature, a princess smiled. In that moment, Ibsen conceived an idyll of love from little more than a look and desire. The elegant, soft-spoken eighteen-year-old Viennese socialite called Emilie Bardach would spend the rest of her life tempering Ibsen’s ardor and fighting his overpowering will.

  Though the gulf between their worlds was large, including the forty-two years difference in age, Ibsen was intent on overcoming all obstacles to the object of his desire. He termed his passion “a simple necessity of nature.” Emilie, according to some scholars, suffered from an assortment of psychological disorders collectively termed mal du siècle. To them she would have been ripe for Ibsen’s attentions.

  By her own admission he inspired her with his passion, and she thought him no ordinary man, but a man who dominated the world. By the playwright’s own admission, he had been a demonic writer.

  In The Master Builder Ibsen wrote of life taking hold of a man and transforming him into poetry. He believed in finding truth through pain and renunciation. Perhaps for no other reason, the breakdown of Ibsen’s relationship with Emilie was inevitable.

  Emilie soon came to view Ibs
en’s love as a mirage in the desert of her life. She would never marry, and the playwright would try to forget his passion for her. In the end, spouting Ibsenities into the cold Norwegian night, he indicted her as a bird of prey that had sought him as her victim. If he had lived long enough, he might one day have accused her in a dramatic Court of Love.

  * * *

  One day, as Johann Wolfgang Goethe took a break from the Marienbad spas to pay a visit to an old acquaintence at Trebivlice Chateau, he was ambushed by fate. Amalie von Levetzow had met the great writer and scientist many years earlier at a local theatre, and ever since she had arranged her family’s annual holiday to coincide with Goethe’s. Though he found Amalie to be a thoughtful and intelligent woman, his first interest in her was for her husband, a chamberlain and lord steward in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He had often enjoyed the hospitality of Amalie, even staying with her family at the chateau, but he did not recall ever meeting the oldest daughter. Now Ulrike von Levetzow had come of age and could appear among the wealthy and privileged in the spa triangle of Bohemia, where she was to become Goethe’s last love.

  The German man of letters had extensive experience in love. Indeed, some scholars suggest he had never spent a single day of his adult life out of love. The list of women who were the objects of his affection was long, longer even than Rilke’s. And though the duration of each love varied from days to decades, the intensity was always powerful. After seventy-two years, the intensity of his feelings for a ravashing seventeen-year-old maiden was strong as ever.

  The day after they met, Goethe inscribed and gave to Ulrike a copy of his newly published Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre. Though he had not yet met her when he wrote the book, he now believed he had somehow already known her, that something of her soul inhabited the book. She seemed to enjoy reading the book, perhaps only as a girl would enjoy a book that her grandfather had given to her. Goethe imagined that every night while reading in bed Ulrike would fall into a blissful sleep, the book held tight to her breast.

  Goethe and Ulrike did not miss a day walking together. At first she accepted his interest with childlike impartiality, and referred to him to her mother as a kind old gentleman. But their first summer spent in each other’s company stretched from July to September, allowing ample time to learn about one another. To Goethe’s delight, they discovered they shared an interest in the natural sciences, by which Ulrike developed a fondness for him. Goethe imparted his knowledge with enthusiasm, and Ulrike soon had amassed an impressive collection of rocks and minerals. At the end of their holiday, Goethe made the short journey to the Vestrev mine where he purchased a necklace from which dangled a small golden key encrusted with the Pyrope garnet native to the region. On the final day of the season together, Goethe presented to Ulrike this gift of remembrance and promise. She locked the chain around her neck, and between her white breasts the jewel appeared like a blood red fire, the flames of which became engraven on Goethe’s heart.