The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “Balderdash, sir!”

  “Maybe so, Allegra. Still, as you yourself have said, your years of renunciation after the death of your husband have been necessary to your development and independence as much as for your grief. But have those years not also readied you to be all the more pliable in the hands of such a man?”

  “Mr. Spooner, am I some witless woman of fashion falling unawares and overheated, through the shock of her renunciations, into the hands of the first man she finds attractive? Would you not give me a little credit for consciousness?” I laughed, and he joined me. But he never came to believe in Chas’s “innocence” as to the strength of my affections for him. I simply did everything I could to put Chas Sparhawk out of my mind. I was, moreover, engrossed in my work. I was, in short, little more than a drudge all these days and weeks.

  Mostly, such drudgery was the effect of the necessary pace of my earnings, but as Mr. Spooner had always warned his protégés, there is no avoiding the necessity of the artisan in every artist, that sheer labor of craftsmanship that must accompany one’s inspirations or intuitions—however magnificent. Only one’s brush, or chisel, he liked to say, can speak for the spirit. “The rest is dilettantism, the humbug of chatterboxes and theorists who accomplish nothing. Do you imagine that the masters we so greatly admire spent much of their time debating the finer points of art? No, they went like loyal workers into their vineyards, or steady burghers into their shops at daybreak, and labored in solitude. Even Rubens,” he never tired of reminding us, “regulated his affairs with precision: receiving company only at stated times, taking regular exercise, and painting only while someone read to him from a classic work of poetry or history.”

  Out of my own steady labors, meagre funds accumulated, but I was sorry to see that Julian had less fortune in that regard. There were days in the heat of summer when I felt like some chaste and lowly priestess, both buoyed and pained by steadfast renunciations that friend Julian was unable to match. By swearing herself to work and celibacy, I began to see, a woman might not only free herself from lengthy entanglements of love, but also extricate her way of life from blame and petty gossip (and the ill will of others that was sure to follow), from, in brief, that pettiness which darkens the parlors as much as the ateliers of Boston.

  AS I SAY, HOWEVER, it was in October of 1843 that I seized the opportunity to sail for Europe. Our ultimate destination was to be Florence, Italy. And I shall bring us, reader, to that new home in short order. But unexpected misfortune as well as the journey itself brought Mr. Spooner and me into a new, daily relation that prepared me for my Florentine days and nights—as if here my very substance were to be furrowed and reshaped.

  Shortly before their long-planned departure, Mrs. Spooner took ill, grievously at first, so they had thought to cancel the journey and, if possible, postpone the important commissions. But on the verge of rearranging all their extensive plans, Mrs. Spooner began to improve. So Mr. Spooner procrastinated a bit longer. As the day approached, she insisted that I go on her passage, however, and that she would follow once she had fully recovered and felt up to the rigors of the journey. There was much heated discussion and difficulty over these arrangements, but the upshot was that Mr. Spooner and I sailed for Europe only on the condition that Gibbon stay to look after his mother, who was by then clearly improving, and later accompany her abroad to join us. Julian did not have sufficient funds to take Gibbon’s place, nor did his mother’s condition improve. But I was able to reimburse the Spooners for my passage at that time, and I resolved to repay them for the remainder of my own travel and living expenses while in Europe.

  We sailed from New York to Paris. Never had I been at sea with no land in sight, where the ocean looks not at all as it does from land: the blackness of nearby waters, the intense blue but a little distance away, the little rainbows either side of the ship. Mr. Spooner continually remarked on the improvements and conveniences of steamship travel. No more leaning to leeward, no seasickness, no bumping of blocks or strong odors of shipboard life. Merely the quiet parties of whist, chess, and backgammon, the smooth gaiety of a handsome saloon of brilliant lights and popping champagne corks.

  We spent many hours on deck, Mr. Spooner and I, enchanted by the beauty and power of the open ocean. When we were not enjoying such enchantment, or not dining and conversing with other passengers, we improved our time below, in our tiny staterooms, reading the collection of books we had brought along, whose most common theme was the masters—the times and places and lives behind their works. All this while my mentor, God bless him, was attentive and companionable. Often I thought how different it would have been enduring all these miles entirely alone.

  Late one morning while I was reading, he knocked on my door and announced: “Land in sight, Allegra! England.”

  It was the first land we had seen for more than a fortnight, with great rocks along the coast and a few villages spotting the green hills beyond, which had the look of hill pastures. Many other ships and boats were about us now and remained for nearly the entire day as we stood, finally, just off shore. At first there was a mist near shore, and the sun kept striking here and there on a pasture or cluster of cottages, illuminating them beautifully as if for very show.

  We eventually moved toward the Isle of Wight—at first a long line of pale, almost fantastic rocks reaching out toward us, later becoming green hills again, and, shortly, woods. By dusk we were at Southhampton and disembarked some passengers into the beautiful, mellow lamplight that shone their way. After I returned to my room to sleep, I dreamed of these lamps, and of these rocks and green pastures again and again, and in the morning I thought I might paint what I had seen, but there was no time. After daybreak, we were close to France, the sea voyage over, and the voyage by land about to begin.

  The little French steamboats took us ashore, and after the delays of the Custom House and final good-byes to some fellow passengers, we set off for Paris in a landscape of gardens and board-and-plaster houses, reaching the city none too soon for the fatigue and grime of travel. Here, next to Mr. Spooner’s room, in my own little room of thick carpets and marble slabs, a French clock over the fireplace, a large mirror and thick curtains, I lived pleasantly but dearly, for it seems impossible to economize in Paris. We knew we should have to keep our stay brief. We would but rest a while before moving on to Chalons, Lyons, Marseille, Leghorn, and finally Florence.

  I was all the more pleased not to be spending the winter in Paris, for the weather was growing cold and a city of such size and bustle did not, at the moment, for some reason, please me. I seemed to long for Italy, though I had never been there, and I think I was beginning to long for a place to settle—a new, humble, and economical life working as a person ought to. It was, strange to say, not enough to be going some place or stopping over some place, as at Paris. I wanted to be someplace, to feel set down somewhere again, and Florence then to my mind would be as good a place as any. Or so I hoped. “Some call Florence the ‘Boston of Italy,’ for all its own peculiar provincialisms, I dare say,” Mr. Spooner explained. “But that does not begin to do the city justice.”

  While we were in Paris, we had wandered into the artists’ district one day to search out a friend of Mr. Spooner’s—the artist Theophile Nantieul, who despite his modest success and middle age continued, I believe merely for frugality’s sake, to live in these quarters teeming with students and young artists who were restless, ambitious, and unaccomplished. As we sat inside protected from the damp Parisian evening, we observed the denizens of the boulevard, these rapins and grissettes, who seemed determined to outdo one another by their whimsical coiffure and dress: Spanish cloaks, waistcoats à la Robespierre, Henry III bonnets, scarlet sashes, and pea-jackets; in short, arrayed in every fashion but the reigning one, every costume of a previous century, or so it seemed as we waited for M. Nantieul.

  Later, while we were getting acquainted with this refreshingly plain-looking Frenchman with close-cropped hair, he asked me wheth
er I found Paris congenial. He laughed when I answered that I had not yet found it so.

  “Then perhaps, Madame Fullerton, there is hope for you!” He indicated the bright yet oddly cheerless scene about us with a sweep of his arm, and looked knowingly at me. “Ambition for celebrity destroys many in Paris. It happens only too often that, with the idea of taking a shortcut to a kind of fortune, they borrow wings by attaching themselves to a system, by changing a clique of admirers into a real ‘public.’ So one turns Republican, another Saint-Simonian, or juste milieu, or whatever. But such mere opinions or systems don’t give a man talent. Indeed artists ruin their talents by them, as witness so many about us.” His arm swept beyond us again. “An artist’s views ought to be confined to belief in himself.”

  He stopped, looked up at us, and arched an eyebrow without saying another word. Then, slowly and emphatically, he said: “One’s sole means of achievement ought to be hard work.”

  “Ah! Monsieur Nantieul,” I said, “but it’s not merely hard work; it’s love, also, don’t you think?”

  He and Mr. Spooner looked at me. “Oh, I see,” M. Nantieul said, shaking his index finger playfully. “You, Madame Fullerton, are an artist.”

  “So you see, indeed,” Mr. Spooner said. He looked at me proudly, then at M. Nantieul.

  Nantieul laughed. “There are always those for whom a sort of drawing-room celebrity is sufficient, is, indeed, the main thing.”

  Mr. Spooner nodded his head in agreement.

  “And those for whom shocking the burgher is the true achievement,” Nantieul offered further, “forgetting that what shocks the burgher today is certain to bore the rest of us tomorrow. But you see, these are merely childish things, perhaps what destiny prepares most mortals for in their youth. But such childishness, I tell you, is the ruin of many a talent.”

  I saw that M. Nantieul had fathomed what I was already finding vaguely oppressive about Parisian Art Life, but which I had been not quite able to grasp or articulate. I dared not presume on our brief acquaintance by asking how, with his opinion of this inner city of poses and attitudes, he could immerse himself so completely in it (this realm of Le Chapeau Pointu, as he at one moment called it). I assumed only, as Mr. Spooner had suggested, he valued his frugality above all. And surely it was his low opinion of it all that inoculated him against such posturings, steeling him to carry on with his own independent work.

  But our acquaintance with M. Nantieul was more remarkable for what I finally came to understand, inadvertently, about the gradual change in my relation to Mr. Spooner.

  We had been invited to M. Nantieul’s little studio, perhaps three blocks from where we sat, to examine his current work and to share a bottle of his “best Sherry.” After nearly an hour of conversation, I excused myself in order to make use of the public facility, and was just returning (had only stopped to adjust my dress once more) when I heard Mr. Spooner and his friend discussing, apparently, me. The door had been left slightly open, they had not heard me coming down the hall, and as one does without thinking in such circumstances, I listened.

  “… an inspiring traveling companion,” M. Nantieul was saying. “If as you say she is an accomplished painter, well, I wish I were in your boots. You have the look of an Infatuated One, old boy!”

  I heard the clink of bottle on glass.

  “At my age? Come now, Theo,” Mr. Spooner said. “Oh, don’t look so amused, Nantieul.” There was a pause and laughter. Then Mr. Spooner continued. “Well, I confess, sir, I am a little infatuated… . Who would not be? But it is harmless, I assure you.”

  “A little? My dear man, you are saturated with this delightful being; you forget perhaps that I’m too old and experienced not to recognize the … shall we say … ‘manly illness’?”

  “Ah, you overstate things, as always, my old friend. But I suppose I hardly know my own mind these days, living so close to her, in the strange isolation of travelers. But what can I do? I am long and lovingly married, appear respectable to a fault. Violate her trust, and that of my wife?”

  “By throwing this ‘complication’ carelessly into the companionship you have established?”

  “That is obvious, is it not, my friend?”

  “Well, of course these things are always … delicate, but life passes us by, you know, if we do not seize upon it and live honestly with those whom we love or desire. Of course, you know best the trust you and your fair friend have established, the boundaries of your relations, but I think you may do better to be honest with her. And I for one can not believe she suspects nothing.”

  There was another brief pause in the conversation; then Mr. Spooner spoke. “For some time now I’ve been quite at a loss over the strength of my feelings. I don’t sleep well. I suffer every day I spend so innocently beside her.”

  “A difficult case, indeed, George. Well then, there is only one cure. Declare yourself! At a more convenient hour, to be sure, but out with it, man. You may be casting aside that brief happiness which is the only thing the Good Lord gives us poor creatures—excepting the rare passion for one’s work—‘without a hitch,’ as you Americans like to put it.”

  “Then everything, everything would change between Mrs. Fullerton and me. And what of my family, sir, were I to subvert our relations for some such weakness and humbug as this … as you say … infatuation?”

  “Nonsense. You are not so old as that. And need you trumpet a delicious and secretive little liaison to the wide world? You Americans do make such fools of yourselves over these things!”

  “We can not help it, Theo. We have a thing called conscience, which you French know nothing about. At any rate, I am the fool who can’t make up my mind to act upon my feelings, as you recommend.”

  M. Nantieul was about to respond when I opened the door and said, “Gentlemen, would you offer me one more glass of that divine Sherry?”

  They looked shame-faced and began to bump about like schoolboys in their efforts to fulfill my request. M. Nantieul, the more calm of the two, began anew our previous conversation on the state of painting and painters in France. I said that I had been attending whenever possible lectures at the Academy, to say nothing of our daily rounds in one gallery or another. I also related our experience of attempting to attend a lecture at the Sorbonne. Some old guardian of the inner temple saw me and approached us before the entrance with his ready speech. I was just about to speak when he said, “Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but madame must remain here,” meaning the courtyard. So we turned on our heels and left with the same supercilious air, we hoped, in which he had addressed us.

  While we spoke, Mr. Spooner remained flushed for some time, and mostly silent. His embarrassment over discussing me with his old friend, and perhaps suspicions that I had overheard something of it, led to our leaving immediately. And although we were invited to return by our host, we never went back because of our need to move onward to our destination.

  In the first days it was a long journey by coach-and-four led by a postilion with immense jack-boots and a ferocious whip driving his bell-bestrewn horses. These days seemed interminable: over a countryside of dull plains alternating with endless unpopulated avenues, except for beggars it seemed; and then the fantastic old towns with drawbridges and walls and towers and ramshackle inns; and then the passing caravans of long, narrow little wagons bearing the cheese from Switzerland, and the twice-daily Diligence bearing Young-France passengers with great beards and blue spectacles and large sticks; and then the Mail Coach as well. After the dusty roads, Chalons was a resting place with a good inn and pretty red and green steamboats on the river; and then on to Lyons by the river and on down the Rhone where, eventually, villages hang off the sides of mountains and castles perch on many a peak.

  While we had remained in Paris, Mr. Spooner never said a word to me about his feelings. But let me tell you, reader, something of our new home that autumn. Mrs. Spooner saved all the letters they ever received from his pupils, and this letter I sent to her shortly
after our arrival (which later came into my own hands) will best describe our new situation, for it seems to provide a sense of the immediacy of my first experience in Florence much better than casting back in memory to those years in Italy as I now write.

  Florence, Thursday, November 30, 1843

  To Mrs. George Spooner

  My Dear Mrs. Spooner.

  I pray this letter finds you well, and that you may soon be among us. After arriving by steamer in Leghorn and posting the final thirteen miles, we have arrived in Florence—“thou patriot’s sigh, thou poet’s dream!”—at last. For the moment we are settled in the pension Swizzera, close to the Plazzo Strozzi, and not far from the Corsini (wherein we have been studying the Salvators).

  We have begun our excursions (mostly afoot) and now take regular exercise, when the chill winds choose not to sweep down from the Apennines, walking about any gardens that come open to the public. But just last night we happened to walk by Giotto’s Campanile in a particular slant of moonlight, and I thought for a moment it would lift upward and float above us, so angelic did that Greco-Arabic tower appear in its illumination. I have noticed a somewhat similar effect in brightest midday—the tower shimmers as if it were rising just above the treeless ground.

  But as you once suggested, Madame, it is the Florentines, indeed the Tuscans, who are certain to recall us to our clay. Never have I seen so many beggars and cripples (Mr. S. says Rome is much worse), yet they seem a not unhappy lot here. More than that, I find the hurly-burly of vendors and storemongers in the streets, and the confusions of renovation and construction, surprising or distracting, depending on one’s mood, I suppose. I had expected a quiet, inland city mellow with antiquity, and have found a restless, modern bustle of trade and pleasure. But antiquity is here as well. So I find myself verily fleeing street and agora for the silent, protective wonders of the Pitti or the Tribune or the holy precincts of St. Croce, or, of an evening, the Cascine along the Arno. Ah then, Madame, one believes one is after all in the city of Boccaccio, Dante, Bruni, Petrarch, and Brunelleschi; in the city where Leonardo dreamed of turning the Arno from its course and Michelangelo of hewing mountains into a work of sculpture.