Vertigo (2 page)

On the 23rd of September, 1800, some three months after his arrival in Milan, Henri Beyle, who until then had been performing clerical duties in the offices of the Embassy of the Republic in the Casa Bovara, was assigned to the 6th Dragoon Regiment with the rank of sub-lieutenant. Acquiring what was necessary in order to be correctly uniformed rapidly depleted his resources, since the cost of buck-leather breeches, of a helmet adorned from tip to nape with horsehair, of boots, spurs, belt buckles, breast straps, epaulettes, buttons and his insignia of rank far exceeded all his other expenses. This notwithstanding, it was with some satisfaction that Beyle now observed the figure he cut in his mirror, and, as he supposed, in the eyes of the Milanese women. He felt transformed, as if the high embroidered collar had lengthened his all too short neck and he had at last succeeded in shedding his unprepossessing body. Even his eyes, set somewhat far

apart, on account of which, to his chagrin, he had often been called
Le Chinois,
suddenly seemed bolder, more focused on some imaginary midpoint. And once fully apparelled in the uniform of a dragoon, this seventeen-and-a-half-year-old went around for days on end with an erection, before he finally dared disburden himself of the virginity he had brought with him from Paris. Afterwards, he could no longer recall the name or face of the
donna cattiva
who had assisted him in this task. The overpowering sensation, he wrote, blotted out the memory entirely. So thoroughly did Beyle serve his apprenticeship in the weeks that followed that in retrospect his entry into the world became a blur of the city's brothels, and before the year was out he was suffering the pains of venereal infection and was being treated with quicksilver and iodide of potassium; although this did not prevent him from working on a passion of a more abstract nature. The object of his craving was Angela

Pietragrua, the mistress of his fellow-soldier Louis Joinville. She, however, merely gave the ugly young dragoon the occasional pitying look.

It was not until eleven years later, when Beyle returned to Milan after a long absence and visited the unforgettable Angela once again, that he plucked up the courage to tell her of his exalted feelings. She scarcely remembered him. Somewhat discomfited by the passion of her unorthodox admirer, she attempted to ease the tension by proposing an excursion to the Villa Simonetta, where a widely famed echo would repeat a pistol shot up to fifty times. But this delaying tactic was of no avail. Lady Simonetta, as Beyle called Angela Pietragrua from that time on, at length felt compelled to capitulate before what seemed to her the insane loquacity Beyle displayed in her presence. All the same, she succeeded in exacting from him the promise that once he had enjoyed her favours he would depart Milan forthwith. Beyle accepted this condition without demur and left Milan, which he had missed for so long, that very same day, though not without recording, on his braces, the date and time of his conquest: 21 September at half past eleven in the morning. When the perennial traveller was once again seated in the diligence and the fine scenery was passing by, he wondered whether he would ever again carry off another such victory. As darkness fell, the now familiar melancholy stole upon him, feelings of guilt and inferiority very similar to those that had first given him real and lasting anguish at the close of 1800. That whole summer, the general euphoria that had followed upon the Battle of Marengo had borne him up as if on wings; utterly fascinated, he had read the continuing reports in the intelligencers of the campaign in upper Italy; there had been open-air performances, balls and illuminations, and, when the day had come for him to don his uniform for the first time, he had felt as if his life finally had its proper place in a perfect system, or at least one that was aspiring to perfection, and in which beauty and terror bore an exact relation to each other. Late autumn, however, had brought dejection with it. Garrison duties increasingly oppressed him, Angela seemed to have little time for him, his disease

recurred, and over and over again, with the aid of a mirror, he examined the inflammations and ulcers in his mouth and at the back of his throat and the blotches on his inner thighs.

At the start of the new year, Beyle saw
IL Matrimonio Segreto
for the second time, at La Scala, but although the theatrical setting was perfect and the actress playing Caroline a great beauty, he was unable to imagine himself among the protagonists as he had in Ivrea. Indeed, he was now so far removed from it all that the music well-nigh broke his heart. The thunderous applause which shook the opera house at the close of the performance struck him as the final act in a process of destruction, like the crackling caused by a tremendous conflagration, and for a long time he remained in his seat, numbed by his hope that the fire might consume him. He was one of the last to quit the cloakroom, and in leaving he gave a parting glance at his reflection in the mirror and, thus confronting himself, posed for the first time the question that was to occupy him over the ensuing decades: what is it that undoes a writer? In view of the circumstances it seemed to him of particular significance when, a few days after that signal evening, he read in a gazette that on the eleventh of the month, in Venice, while working on his new opera,
Artemisia
, Cimarosa had suddenly died. On the 17th of January,
Artemisia
was given its première at the Teatro La Fenice. It was a huge success. Subsequently, strange rumours began circulating, to the effect that Cimarosa, who had been involved in the revolutionary movement in Naples, had been poisoned on the orders of Queen Caroline. Others speculated that Cimarosa had died as a result of the maltreatment he had suffered in the Neapolitan gaols. These rumours gave Beyle nightmares in which everything he had experienced in recent months was most horribly mixed up. They persisted undiminished, nor were they laid to rest when the Pope's personal physician, having especially conducted a post-mortem examination of Cimarosa's corpse, declared the cause of death to have been gangrene.

It was some considerable time before Beyle regained his peace of mind after these events. Throughout the early months of the year he suffered fevers and gastric cramps, which were treated partly with quinquina, partly with ipecacuanha and a paste of potash and antimony, whereupon his condition deteriorated to the extent that he more than once thought his end was nigh. When the summer arrived his fears, and with them the fever and the terrible stomach pains, gradually subsided. As soon as he was restored to a reasonable degree of health, Beyle, who had never been in any engagement except for his baptism of fire at Bard, set about visiting the places where the great battles of recent years had been fought. Time after time he traversed the landscape of Lombardy, of which he came to realise he had become exceedingly fond, with the grey and blue of distance lying in ever more delicately nuanced bands until at the horizon they dissolved into something resembling the haze that hangs over the high mountains.

So it was that Beyle, on the way from Tortone, stopped in the early morning of the 27th of September, 1801, on the vast and silent terrain - only the larks could be heard as they climbed the heavens - where on the 25th of Prairial the previous year, exactly fifteen months and fifteen days before, as he noted, the Battle of Marengo had been fought. The decisive turn in the battle, brought about by Kellermann's ferocious cavalry charge, which tore open the flank of the main Austrian force at a time when the sun was setting and all already seemed lost, was familiar to him from many and various tellings, and he had himself pictured it in numerous forms and hues. Now, however, he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of perhaps 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew. The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion such as he had never previously experienced. It may have been for that reason that the memorial column that had been erected on the battlefield made on him what he describes as an extremely mean impression. In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor with the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom.

Later, thinking back to that September day on the field of Marengo, it often seemed to Beyle as if he had foreseen the years which lay ahead, all the campaigns and disasters, even the fall and exile of Napoleon, and as if he had realised then that he would not find his fortune serving in the army. At all events, it was in the autumn that he resolved to become the greatest writer of all time. He did not, however, take any decisive steps towards the fulfilment of that ambition until Napoleon's empire

began to crumble, nor did he make a first real advance into the world of literature until in the spring of 1820 he wrote
De l'Amour,
a kind of resumé of the hopeful yet disconcerting years that had gone before.

In March 1818, Beyle, who at that period often travelled to and fro between France and Italy, as indeed he did at other times in his life, met Métilde Dembowski Viscontini at her salon in Milan. Métilde, married to a Polish officer almost thirty years her senior, was twenty-eight and a woman of great, melancholy beauty. After about a year had passed, during which time he was one of the regular visitors at the houses on Piazza delle Galline and Piazza Belgioioso, Beyle's unspoken, discreet passion was on the point of winning the affection of Métilde, when he himself, as he later admitted, dashed his hopes by committing a blunder for which he could never make amends.

Métilde had gone to Volterra to visit her two sons, who were at the monastery school of San Michele there, and Beyle, unable to endure even a few days without seeing her, followed incognito. He was simply incapable of putting out of his mind his last glimpse of Métilde, on the eve of her departure from Milan. She had bent down in the hallway of her house to adjust her footwear, and, suddenly oblivious to everything else, he had beheld, in a profound darkness, as if through drifting smoke, a crimson desert behind her. This vision left him in a kind of trance, and it was in that state that he purchased the clothing he meant to wear as a disguise. He bought a new buff jacket, dark blue breeches, black patent leather boots, a velours hat with a more than usually high crown, and a pair of green spectacles, and in this attire he sauntered about Volterra, endeavouring to catch sight of Métilde at least from a distance as often as he possibly could. At first Beyle supposed himself unrecognised, only to realise, to his still greater satisfaction, that Métilde was giving him meaningful looks. He congratulated himself on this ingenious arrangement and from time to time, to a tune of his own devising, intoned the words
Je suis le compagnon secret et familier,
which struck him somehow as particularly amusing. Métilde, for her part, felt compromised by Beyle's conduct, as can readily be imagined, and, when his unaccountable behaviour finally became too vexatious, she sent him a dry note that put a fairly abrupt end to his hopes as a paramour.