The Countess von Rudolstadt

by George Sand

  Trenck was ultimately freed, as everybody knows, thanks to Maria Theresa, who claimed him as her subject; and he finally acquired that belated protection through the efforts of Her Majesty’s Bedchamber Polisher, none other than our Karl. There are, on the subject of this magnanimous plebeian’s ingenious schemes with regard to his sovereign, some very curious and very touching pages in the memoirs of the time.

  During the first years of Trenck’s captivity, his cousin, the notorious Pandur, the victim of accusations more deserved but no less hateful and cruel, died of poisoning at Spielberg. Trenck the Prussian had scarcely been freed from prison when he arrived in Vienna to lay claim to Trenck the Austrian’s immense estate. But Maria Theresa was of no mind to turn it over to him. She had benefited from the pandur’s exploits, she had punished his acts of violence, she meant to profit from his plundering, and indeed she did. Like Frederick II, like all crowned heads with great minds, while the powers of her role were dazzling the masses, she did not deny herself those secret iniquities for which God and man will require reckoning on the day of judgment, which will weigh as heavily on one side of the scales as official virtues on the other. Conquerors and sovereigns, in vain you use your treasures to raise up temples: this doesn’t make you any less wicked when a single piece of that gold comes at the cost of blood and suffering. In vain you subject whole races by the splendor of your arms: the men most blinded by the prestige of glory will reproach you a single man, a single blade of grass broken in cold blood. The muse of history, still blind and uncertain, all but concedes that the past holds great crimes that were necessary and justifiable, but humanity’s inviolable conscience protests against its own error, reproving at least the crimes that contributed nothing to the success of great causes.

  The empress’s greedy designs were marvelously seconded by her deputies, the ignoble agents that she had appointed as administrators of the pandur’s estate, and the dishonest judges who adjudicated the heir’s rights. Each one had his share of the spoils. Maria Theresa thought to take the lion’s share for herself, but it was in vain that a few years later she sent off to prison and the galleys the unfaithful accomplices in that great misappropriation: She was not able to recover all the profits. Trenck was ruined and never obtained justice. Nothing has taught us more about Maria Theresa’s character than the part of Trenck’s memoirs where he gives an account of his discussions with her on this subject. Without departing from respect for royalty, which was then an official religion for patricians, he makes us feel the great woman’s coldness, hypocrisy, and greed, a reunion of contrasts, a character sublime and petty, naïve and deceitful, like every beautiful soul doing battle with the corruption of absolute power, this antihuman cause of all evil, this inevitable reef against which all the noble instincts are fatally drawn to their destruction. Determined to send the plaintiff away empty-handed, the sovereign often deigned to console him, give him back hope, promise him her protection against the vile judges who were fleecing him; and when it was all over, pretending that she had failed in the pursuit of truth and no longer understood a thing about the mazelike intricacies of this interminable trial, she offered him, in compensation, a meager grade of adjutant and the hand of an old maid, ugly, churchy, and coquettish. Upon Trenck’s refusal, the matrimoniomaniacal empress told him that he was mad, presumptuous, that she knew of no way to satisfy his ambition, then turned her back on him and had nothing more to do with the man. The reasons put forward for confiscating the pandur’s estate had varied according to the persons and circumstances. One tribunal had found that the pandur, who died condemned of a crime that stripped him of his civil rights, had not been entitled to make a will; another one, that while the will was valid, the rights of the heir, in his quality as a Prussian subject, were not; yet another, finally, that the debts of the deceased absorbed the entire estate and more, etc. Points of law were raised one after the other; justice was sold to the plaintiff several times, and he was never done justice.5

  There was no need of all these artifices to despoil and proscribe Albert, and the spoliation no doubt took place with less ado. It was enough to consider him dead and forbid him the right to come back to life in untimely fashion. Albert had most certainly not laid claim to anything. We only know that at the time of his arrest Canoness Wenceslawa had just died in Prague, where she had gone to receive treatment for her acute ophthalmia. When Albert heard that she was near death, he could not resist the voice of his heart crying for him to go shut the eyes of his dear aunt. He left Consuelo at the Austrian border and rushed to Prague. This was his first time back in Germany since the year of his wedding. He wanted to think that ten years away and certain precautions of dress would prevent him from being recognized, and he approached his aunt without much mystery. He wanted to receive her blessing and to repair, in a last effusion of love and pain, the neglect in which he had been forced to leave her. The canoness, nearly blind, was struck only by the sound of his voice. She did not fully understand what she was feeling, but she abandoned herself to the tender instincts that had survived memory and reasoning; she pressed him in her feeble arms, calling him her beloved Albert, her son forever blessed. Old Hanz had died, but Baroness Amalia and a woman from the Bohemian Forest who was in service to the canoness and had once been Albert’s sick-nurse were amazed and frightened by this alleged doctor’s resemblance to the young count. It does not seem, however, that Amalia had positively recognized him; we do not want to believe that she was an accomplice to the persecutions that hounded him. We do not know what alerted the swarm of agents, half-magistrate half-stool pigeon, thanks to which the Viennese court ruled the subjugated nations. This much is certain: No sooner had the canoness breathed her last in her nephew’s arms than he was arrested and interrogated about his station in life and the intentions that had led him to the dying woman’s bedside. They wanted to see his doctor’s diploma; he had a proper one; but they challenged the name Liverani that he bore, and certain individuals remembered having met him elsewhere under the name of Trismegistus. They accused him of being a quack and a magician. It was impossible to prove that he had ever taken any money for his treatments. They brought him before Baroness Amalia, and this was his ruination. Irritated and pushed to the limit by the investigations which he was having to undergo, weary of secrecy and disguise, he abruptly confessed to his cousin, in a private conversation that was being observed, that he was Albert von Rudolstadt. Amalia no doubt recognized him at that moment, but she fainted, terrified by such a bizarre event. From that point on things took another turn.

  They wanted to consider Albert an impostor; yet, in order to raise one of those interminable disputes that are the ruin of both parties, some functionaries, of the ilk that had despoiled Trenck, worked furiously to compromise the accused by getting him to say and maintain that he was Albert von Rudolstadt. A long investigation ensued. They invoked the testimony of Supperville, who, no doubt in good faith, refused to doubt that he had witnessed his death at Riesenburg. They ordered that his cadaver be exhumed. In his tomb they found a skeleton that it had not been difficult to put there the day before. They convinced his cousin that it was her duty to put up a fight against an adventurer determined to despoil her. No doubt they did not allow them to see each other again. They smothered the captive’s complaints and his wife’s fervent protests under the bolts and tortures of prison. Perhaps the two of them fell ill and nearly died in separate dungeons. Once things had got underway, Albert could no longer clamor for his honor and liberty except by proclaiming the truth. To no avail he protested that he had renounced his inheritance, that he now wanted to make a will in his cousin’s favor, they wanted to draw out the suit and confuse matters, which they had no trouble doing, because the empress had either been deceived or made to understand that confiscating this fortune was no more to be disdained than confiscating the pandur’s. In order to do so, they tried to pick a quarrel with Amalia herself, they stealthily harked back to the scandal of her old escapade, they noted her lack
of devotion and secretly threatened to have her shut away in a convent if she refused to abandon her rights to a disputed estate. She had to give in and content herself with her father’s estate, which was significantly diminished by the enormous fees that she had to pay for a lawsuit that they had forced her to pursue. Finally the castle and domain of Riesenburg were confiscated by the state after the lawyers, managers, judges, and court reporters had placed liens on these spoils amounting to two thirds of their value.

  Such is our commentary on the mysterious lawsuit that lasted five or six years and after which Albert was expelled from Austria as a dangerous madman, by the empress’s special grace. From that point on, it is almost certain that an obscure and ever more impoverished life was the couple’s lot. They took their youngest children with them. Haydn and the canon tenderly refused to give them back the oldest children, who were being educated under the watch of these faithful friends and at their expense. Consuelo had irrevocably lost her voice. It seems all too certain that captivity, idleness, and the pain of his companion’s sufferings had once again unsettled Albert’s mind. It does not however appear that their love became less tender, their souls less proud, and their conduct less pure. The Invisibles had disappeared under persecution. Their work had been ruined, especially by the charlatans that had speculated on enthusiasm for new ideas and the love of things supernatural. Persecuted once again as a Freemason in intolerant, despotic lands, Albert had to take refuge in France or England. Perhaps he continued his proselytizing there, but it must have been among the people, and his labors, if they bore fruit, went unnoticed.

  There is a great lacuna here for which we cannot compensate by imagination. Yet one last authentic and very detailed document shows us, around the year 1774, the couple wandering through the Bohemian Forest. We shall transcribe this document as it came to us. This will be our last word on Albert and Consuelo; for after that, regarding their life and their death, we know absolutely nothing.

  1. Several of these degrees are from various creations and rites. A few of them may be from a later time than the period of which we speak, and for rectification we refer to the learned tile-makers [Translator’s note: brothers whose duty is to guard the entrance of the lodge]. There were, I believe, more than a hundred degrees in certain rites.

  2. That is why the story about Johann Kreissler strikes us as Hoffmann’s most wonderful novel. Death having taken the author by surprise before the end of his work, the poem has a thousand different imagined endings, each one more fantastic than the others. This is how a beautiful river branches off near its mouth and vanishes into the shore’s golden sands in a thousand whimsical rivulets. [Translator’s note: The novel to which Sand refers is Lebenansichten des Katers Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), a German Romantic writer and composer.]

  3. There are still some in a few private museums in Germany.

  4. See in Thiébault [Dieudonné Thiébault (1733–1807), Mes souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin (Paris: Buisson, 1805)] the portrait of the Abbess of Quedlinburg, and the curious revelations in that regard.

  5. Here we shall remind the reader, once and for all, about the rest of Trenck’s story. He grew old in poverty, occupied his energy with the publication of dissident newspapers that took very advanced views for his time; he married a woman of his choice and fathered several children; persecuted for his opinions, his writings, and no doubt as well for his membership in secret societies, he sought refuge in France at an advanced age. There he was welcomed with the enthusiasm and confidence that characterized the beginnings of the Revolution. Yet, destined to be the victim of the most sinister mistakes, he was arrested as a foreign agent during the Terror and led to the scaffold, to which he marched with great firmness. Just a short while before he had seen himself praised and depicted on stage in a melodrama retracing his captivity and deliverance. He had hailed liberty in France with transports of joy. On the fateful tumbrel he smiled and said, “This too is a comedy.”

  He had seen Princess Amalia again just once in more than sixty years. When he learned that Frederick the Great had died, he rushed to Berlin. The two lovers, who were at first frightened at the sight of one other, dissolved in tears and exchanged vows of a new affection. The abbess ordered him to bring his wife to Berlin, took charge of their welfare, and wanted to take one of his daughters on as her reader or governess, but she was unable to keep her promises. A week later she was dead!–Trenck’s memoirs, written with a youth’s passion and an old man’s prolixity, are nevertheless one of the most noble and endearing monuments to the history of the last century.

  Letter from Philon1 to Ignatius Joseph Martinowicz Professor of physics at the University of Lemberg

  Swept along in his swirling wake like the satellites of a royal planet, we followed Spartacus 2 over the steep trails and through the most silent shady recesses of the Bohemian Forest. O friend! why weren’t you there? You would have forgotten to gather pebbles in the silvery bed of the mountain streams, to study now the veins, now the bones of our mysterious foremother, terra parens. The master’s ardent words gave us wings; we traversed ravines and peaks without counting our steps, without gazing down at the abysses over which we reigned, without seeking on the horizon the faraway shelter where we were to take our evening rest. Never had Spartacus seemed to us greater, more imbued with almighty truth. The beauties of nature act upon his imagination like those of a great poem; and despite his flashes of enthusiasm, his spirit of learned analysis and ingenious combination never wholly abandons him. He explains the stars and the planets, the earth and the seas, with the same clarity, the same order that rule over his essays on law and the arid things of this world. Yet how his soul expands when, alone and free with his chosen disciples, under the azure of the starry firmament or with his face turned to the first blush of dawn, he traverses time and space to embrace the human race at a glance, as a whole and in its parts, to fathom the fragile destiny of empires and the imposing future of peoples! You’ve heard him speaking from his chair, this young man of lucid words; why haven’t you seen and heard him on the mountain, this man whose wisdom flies ahead of the years, who seems to have lived among men since the infancy of the world!

  Having arrived at the border we hailed the land that saw the exploits of the great Zizka, and we bowed even more deeply before the pits that served as tombs for the martyrs to the nation’s ancient liberty. There we resolved to go our separate ways so to direct our research and investigations on all points at once. Cato 3 went northeast, Celsus 4 southeast, Ajax 5 went due east, and we would all meet up again in Pilsen.

  Spartacus kept me with him and resolved to proceed at random, counting, he said, on chance, on a certain secret inspiration to show us the way. I was somewhat amazed to see him abandon calculation and reasoning; this seemed to me contrary to his methodical habits.

  “Philon,” he said, when we were alone, “I do believe that men like us are the ministers of Providence here below, but do you think I believe her to be inert and disdainful, this motherly Providence through which we feel, will, and act! I’ve noticed that you enjoy her favors more than I; your designs nearly always meet with success. So, forge on ahead, and I’ll follow, having faith in your second sight, that mysterious light that our Illuminist ancestors naïvely invoked, those pious fanatics of the past!”

  This truly seems to have been a prophecy on the master’s part. Before the end of the second day we had found what we had come looking for, and this is how I became the tool of destiny.

  We had reached the edge of the woods, and there was a fork in the road ahead. One road plunged down and away into the lowlands, the other ran along the gentle flanks of the mountain.

  “Which way shall we go?” asked Spartacus, sitting down on a rock. “Here I see tilled fields, meadows, wretched huts. We were told that he is poor; he must live among the poor. Let’s go ask the humble shepherds in the valley about him.”

  “No, master,” I replied, pointing out to him the road hal
fway up the slope. “On my right I see steep hillocks and the crumbling walls of an ancient manor. We were told that he was a poet; he must love ruins and solitude.”

  “Besides,” said Spartacus with a smile, “I see Vesper rising white as a pearl in the still rosy sky above the ruins of the old estate. We are the shepherds searching for a prophet, and the miraculous star leads the way.”

  We soon reached the ruins. It was an imposing edifice, with parts dating from various periods, but vestiges of the era of Emperor Charles lay next to those of feudal times. It was not the centuries, but the hands of men that had recently presided over that destruction. It was still full daylight when we clambered up the side of a dry moat and slipped in under the rusted, motionless portcullis. The first thing that we encountered, sitting on the rubble at the entrance to the courtyard, was an old man covered in bizarre rags, and more like a man out of the past rather than the present. His beard, the color of yellowed ivory, hung down over his chest, and his bald head was shining like a lake in the sun’s last rays. Spartacus shuddered, hurried up to him and asked the name of the castle. The old man seemed not to hear us; he stared at us with glassy eyes that seemed not to see. We asked him his name; he made no reply; his physiognomy expressed only a dreamy indifference. Yet his Socratic features were not those of a mindless idiot; his ugliness had a certain beauty that comes from a pure, serene soul. Spartacus put a piece of silver in his hand; he brought it very close to his eyes and let it drop without seeming to understand its use.