The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  At first he felt numb, and then his heart filled with a bewildering mixture of pain and fear like nothing he had ever experienced. He broke into wild lament and tears streamed down his cheeks. That was the turning point. The good fairy of insight had broken through the evil circle that imprisoned Rudolf.

  HE ROSE before daybreak the next morning to discuss the reconstruction of the buildings. He sketched architectural plans and huddled with the chiefs of the mill to estimate the costs. He got back to the castle only at nightfall. His engagement amazed everyone. His mother’s face went chalk white when she heard of it; she thanked the Almighty and wept in her room.

  MONTHS PASSED. One freezing cold day when the land was covered with snow, the workers were forced to suspend construction for fear of frostbite. Their fingers were stiff with cold. The entire population of the estate was summoned to the castle. Spiced wine was heated at open hearths and served to them. Rudolf told them he had hired a manager in order to keep the property out of the hands of his greedy creditors. He said that the uniquely talented man scheduled to arrive from Frankfurt the following day had saved his German cousin Prince Ludwig von Thurn und Taxis, an experienced practitioner of the fine art of idleness whose estate had been in deep financial decline. He wound up his address by stressing that each of them had the duty to comply with every request of the manager, no matter how apparently insignificant. The residents of the estate felt somewhat reassured and looked forward to the following day. The choice of manager, however, turned out to be a source of great surprise at Biederhof.

  MY HEAD IS SPINNING again as I confront the complicated skein of past events that affected my own life. A young son of a rabbi in León who encountered Moses, an unprincipled physician in Granada who poisoned his master, a wandering Jew who defied death for more than three hundred and fifty years, a philosopher in Amsterdam who suffered from paranoia, a Parisian attorney who loved books, his daughter avid for learning and her two strange sons—all those presences in the past that my great-uncle with his enthralling tales re-created for us in my childhood may perhaps have had more influence on my character than my own mother and father, who always seemed so remote and unavailable.

  WHAT WOULD my life have been if Jakob Spinoza hadn’t accepted the request to manage the affairs of the run-down Biederstern estate and save it from ruin?

  His eldest son, Bernhard, would almost certainly have married a different woman, so none of us—not Grandfather, not Father, not I—would have been born.

  But as I think it over, it occurs to me that probably none of us would’ve been granted the mercy of drifting in eternal heavenly bliss and avoiding birth. I would still have come into this world, but as someone different, not as the person I am.

  Would my life have been happier?

  I’ll never know, and I’m willing to admit that I’m grateful for that. It would’ve been bitter to find out, some time before the curtain finally fell, that my life, ruled more or less by chance in a world of troubles, could have been different from the very start and could have offered me joy and worldly pleasures.

  CHIARA GOT to the Place de Grève as dawn was breaking, to make sure of securing a place as close to the platform as possible. She then stood there for hours in the pouring rain, waiting with unshakable serenity.

  The event announced for that morning would have made anyone else despondent, stunned with grief. But not Chiara. She did not care for tears. Weeping was anathema to her. She was of the opinion that women should never indulge in tears.

  She had put on her wedding dress, as white as snow, so Nicolas would see her in the gray mass of people. It was her message to her husband that life was on their side, a way of endowing him with even greater courage.

  She saw no reason to expect any miracle or divine intervention. She was sure that Robespierre would save Nicolas from the guillotine at the last moment. She believed they were still “the inseparables,” even though the differences between them had become contentious, and she entertained no misgivings. It was not the belief in friendship that kept her from groveling at Maximilien’s feet with pleas for Nicolas’s life, as some friends had urged her to do; it was her fierce conviction that a woman who begged demeaned herself and deserved no sympathy.

  The ever provocative Robespierre accepted no protests and tolerated no criticism. He was arrogant and pitiless, brimming with contempt for humanity and determined to go to any lengths in his campaign to apply his stirring revolutionary slogans and create a new world. Everyone knew that by now. Many of them had begun to realize that the spirit of freedom that had intoxicated France was already ebbing away. Chiara could not believe that Robespierre, despite the arrogance and brutality she knew so well, would make Nicolas pay with his head, merely for daring to speak of acts that betrayed equality, brotherhood, democracy, and human rights, all the achievements of the revolution.

  At the stroke of eleven, just as the rain stopped and the sun peeked out from behind the dark clouds, drums beating in the marketplace signaled that the prisoner was on his way from the Conciergerie. The tumbrel with Nicolas aboard arrived a few minutes later. The excited crowd stood there, packed tight. Many were eager for the bloody spectacle, as if it were the first public execution in Paris. Whistles and boos were heard, and many waved their fists in derision.

  Nicolas advanced with slow steps, head high, accompanied to the scaffold by the rhythmic beating of the drums. His hands were tied behind him, as a precaution and to mark him as a criminal condemned by the people’s tribunal. He appeared confident and fearless, alone against the rest of the world. He knew that as a rebel against the tyrannies of Robespierre, he could expect no mercy. The dignity radiating from him impressed even the vilest of his abusers.

  When Chiara and Nicolas caught sight of each other, she spontaneously went up on tiptoe and pursed her lips in a declaration of love. He smiled and blew her a kiss.

  The drumbeat suddenly ceased. Nicolas turned toward Maximilien, who looked pale and listless. The colossal power vested in Robespierre as the absolute dictator of France obviously had not cured him of the chronic fatigue from countless sleepless nights, but the Jacobin leader was concentrating upon the only thing that energized him and made him forget his weariness: the execution of enemies in the name of the high ideals of the revolution.

  Nicolas nodded and greeted him with a friendly tone. “Maximilien, next time it will be your turn to set your thick neck here. Au revoir.”

  He knelt and placed his head beneath the guillotine. His neck was bared so everyone could see his throat and the shapes of the vertebrae that led back under his white shirt.

  The crowd fell silent. The executioner stood motionless, as if believing that the ideologue of the revolution would be spared at the last second. Chiara’s hands began to tremble. She felt dizzy. An invisible power took her by the throat and squeezed her chest so hard that she had trouble breathing. Robespierre rose and savagely ordered the executioner to get to work. No mercy would be granted to conspirators against the revolution. The blade fell with a thud and was greeted by a joyous outcry.

  Chiara stood there motionless long after the spectators had left the marketplace.

  TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER, when Chiara heard that Napoleon had died in exile on St. Helena, she patiently tried to explain to her grandson Jakob how a revolution in the name of freedom and equality had produced an emperor with absolute power ruling the country. She found that the task was too much for her.

  How could one explain that a people who had sought to exterminate the ancien régime once and for all, that old despotic order, would then turn to follow a Corsican captain who on the thirteenth of vendémiaire (October 4, 1795) ordered troops to shoot into the crowd on the steps of Saint Roch church in Paris, killing more than three hundred royalists, and then shortly afterward promised France a new golden age? And how does one respond when asked why the revolution could not be carried out without piling up tens of thousands of bodies in the streets and marketplaces? How did liberation tu
rn into terror? Above all, why does history always require a bloodbath, and why do we humans never learn from the past but always allow the hydra of violence to grow new heads and spit more poison?

  CHIARA AND HER TWO SMALL SONS somehow survived the months immediately after Nicolas’s execution, and no one, not even my great-uncle, knew how they did so. In the autobiography she wrote late in her life, Souvenirs, she did not say a word about that time.

  On the other hand, she records in those memoirs with matter-of-fact realism and a good dose of self-irony that she hesitated for a very long time before finally deciding to write about her experiences during the revolution, principally because they were still so vivid to her. She also had evident problems in selecting an appropriate point of view. She initially sought to take a factual approach, so the account would not be colored by her own temperament or suffering. With that idea in mind, she wrote it as an essay. Her friends’ response was unenthusiastic; they found it deliberately dull, with none of her energy. Their comments did not discourage her. Quite the opposite; she realized that her first draft was a naïve effort to hide from the realities and instead she would have to describe what had happened in her own style, daring to abandon genteel artifices considered appropriate for the weaker sex.

  ———

  WOMEN OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY were supposed to write in a distinctly feminine style that did not challenge the reader. They deftly constructed a fabric woven of many individual lives, colored with sentimentality and self-sacrificing generosity. Ever undemanding, admirable in their self-abnegation, and always ready to yield to others, female authors relegated themselves to invoking unquestioned platonic concepts such as Love and Charity.

  BECAUSE OF HER FIERCE DESIRE to communicate her own truths about the revolution, Chiara abandoned the empty rhetoric of contemporary female writers. She wanted her art to confront reality. She wanted to shape the consciousness of her world by bursting balloons; to tear down the myths about a heroic revolution and subject them to healthy rational analysis and sober reflection; in short, she wanted to create a hurricane to sweep away the reassuring lies that prevailed throughout the land.

  THE NOVEL APPEARED under her maiden name, Chiara Luzzatto. It was published in 1804 by Éditions du Agorah in Strasbourg with the title Chronos dévorant un de ses enfants (Time—from the Greek—Devouring One of His Children). Hers was the first account of its type to describe the days of the bloodbaths in Paris. It was a thunderclap, a cannon shot, and its fame rapidly spread across all of Europe. Chiara was praised for her unique artistic felicities, and above all, for her language. “A French of such clarity and purity had scarcely been seen since the days of La Rochefoucauld,” noted the Marquis de Sade, who as a political opponent of the Jacobins’ use of the death penalty had only with great difficulty avoided the guillotine.

  HEINDRICH ZU BIEDERSTERN, who never lost an opportunity to criticize leaders of the French Revolution whose ideas made him recoil in horror and repulsion, was among the most devout admirers of the novel. He found it masterful, in certain passages almost a work of genius (especially those that described the grim suffering of the nobility at the hands of the unruly masses) and in other passages of international caliber. He declared that Chiara Luzzatto was the equal of even the best male authors. The prince was so pleased with her novel that he underwrote the costs of translation into German. He made no secret of the fact that it had given him a much deeper understanding of the politics of the time. He declared that this account made the truth of the barbaric events of the French Revolution the property of all.

  During the Vienna Congress of 1814, where Europe’s leading rulers discussed how aristocrats were to regain the power they had wielded before the French Revolution, Heindrich made a much-applauded appearance. His lengthy speech was essentially an attack against the ideals of the Enlightenment, which he blamed for undermining the natural right of the aristocracy to exercise power. The prince directed sharp criticism against Nicolas Spinoza for having roused the wrath of the people with his scribblings and against Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre for instituting the reign of terror. He quoted no fewer than four passages from Chiara’s novel to evoke the cruelty of the revolution—ignorant of the fact that the authoress was Nicolas’s wife and, moreover, one of those who voted on January 20, 1793, in favor of decapitating the king.

  ———

  SEVERAL CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS were deeply marked by Chiara’s debut novel and took inspiration from it. The most significant of them was the Spaniard Francisco Goya.

  The year was 1819. Dismayed by the increasingly antiliberal actions of the Spanish monarchy and fearing he would be targeted, the painter fled Madrid for the pastoral landscape of Castile and isolated himself at his newly purchased house. He had just turned seventy-three. He was accepting no new commissions, even though many of the nobility had begged him to paint their portraits. With his memory failing, half deaf, and perpetually ill-humored, Goya preferred to be with his canvases, his paintbrushes, and his dark oil paints. He seldom left his studio with its unimaginable disarray of canvases and frames piled in precarious heaps and all sorts of work material flung at random on the floor. He never told anyone how he spent his days and nights. His wife knew only that he hardly slept anymore. A cook brought him food in the morning and in the evening, always accompanied by a bottle of strong Rioja wine. He wore wide black trousers and sleeveless white shirts of the finest Egyptian cotton day and night. He wore this garb even in the deepest of winter. He never felt the cold; the Rioja in his blood kept him warm.

  Goya received Chiara’s novel as a birthday present from one of his mistresses, a woman forty years younger than he was. She spent one night a week with him, but they almost never spoke to each other anymore. For that reason he was surprised when she handed him the book and told him to read it. She left without saying goodbye. He immediately understood that she had left him for good and would never return. He sat motionless for a time, with the book in his hand, surrounded by a portentous silence.

  Goya was surprised to find himself piqued by curiosity. He had never been a reader of novels. He would have given his life for Don Quixote by Cervantes, but he considered all other novels to be lies written by contemptible wretches who wanted to get ahead and therefore not worth the effort of studying. Chiara’s book, however, appeared to be something different. It was the parting gift of his lover of many years. He wanted to see what lay within.

  Goya opened the novel at random and began reading, not without an occasional yawn, until he came to the passage that tells how the coldhearted revolutionary leader sends his best friend to the guillotine. It describes with a hair-raising wealth of detail the head of the condemned prisoner separating from his body and falling into a laundry basket as his wife, clad in her wedding dress, stands only a few feet away, having believed right up to the last instant that he would be pardoned by his friend. The episode is permeated with devastating horror, intense revulsion, and stunned hopelessness. It greatly impressed Goya. Fascinated, he paged farther. At last, eighteen hours later, he put down the bulky novel. He was deeply affected. For three days he found it impossible to eat, drink, or sleep. He stared into space, haunted by horrible visions. He could see heads chopped from bodies spurting cascades of blood. On the fourth day, unexpectedly, exhilaration filled him. He picked up the broadest of his paintbrushes and a container of black oil paint. He looked around for a canvas that would be large enough. Finding none, he hurried into the dining room, tore down the canvases hanging there, and began painting on the whitewashed wall. This was the beginning of the “black period” in his art.

  The completed work shows a gigantic monster that has just chewed off the head of a naked male body held in its hands. Goya named it after Chiara’s novel, for despite its powerful description of human folly he regarded it not as degrading to mankind but rather as liberating and purifying. To emphasize that the wall painting was his own interpretation of the French Revolution, he used the Roman term �
��Saturn” instead of the Greek “Chronos” (“Time”). Saturno devorando a su hijo (“Saturn devouring his child”) is one of the artist’s greatest masterpieces.

  CHIARA’S DEBUT NOVEL brought Amschel Rothschild into her life. She traveled to Freiburg at the invitation of Princess Karen von Hohenweiler, who regularly invited friends and acquaintances to her home to discuss current issues. Chiara was pleased—pleased to be recognized as a writer and proud that her novel had attracted attention outside France.

  Although this was the first time she had been asked to discuss her novel in public, she was not at all nervous, and the sophisticated individuals of the literary salon saw none of her customary reticence. A group of friendly and curious princesses and baronesses clustered around her, and she discovered to her great astonishment that they had all read the book. She saw a fashionably dressed man watching her intently as the crowd swirled around her. She was exhilarated by the ambiance of titled ease at the elegant gathering, especially by the unaccustomed experience of being the focus of attention.

  In her memoirs she describes that evening as giving her the sensation of suddenly emerging from a dark tunnel into the dazzling light of day.

  Chiara spoke at length and in detail of the events that had shaped the novel, not neglecting Nicolas’s fate and its decisive effect upon her attitude toward life. In a firm, clear voice she said she believed that within every writer a great hurt is concealed. Seeing that gloom had settled upon the gathering and some of the women had tears in their eyes, she concluded by assuring them that despite all the adversity and defeats, she saw life as a celebration. The audience applauded enthusiastically.