Chapter Nine

 

THEN came Italy’s turn to declare war. Jacques, with tears in his eyes, saw Nino set off to join his regiment. It was poor Nino’s fate to be “intoxicated” even at the front: he volunteered as a guinea-pig for some experiments with mustard gas, and was seriously injured. Jacques suffered the grief of knowing his friend to be in a hospital at Milan while he himself, still undergoing his “cure” in Naples, was unable to visit him.

He was worse off than Nino, having lost the comfort of his cocaine supply. But weakness at least set his senses at rest. He recalled something which Robert d’Humières had said to him, the last time they had met, in Paris. “When old greyhounds are past hunting, they dream.” The author of this remark had been killed at the head of his platoon.

Robert de Tournel, too, was dead, killed in the Artois. That was the end of Jacques’ oldest friendship, and he recalled his seventeenth year, their encounter on Vesuvius, their two trips to Capri, where they had seen Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Krupp. Jacques had built the Villa Lysis on the spot which they had discovered together; but Robert had never set foot in it.

In Paris, the Dowager Duchesse de Rohan, whose son had died as bravely as the two Roberts, put on a play of her own called The Animals During the War, in which the dialogue was spoken by the Gallic cock, the stork, rat, horse, dog, and a Fontainebleau carp. The Dowager Duchesse d’Uzès wrote poems in praise of “the wounded Frenchman” and “the young soldier, young soldier of France”. These good ladies were forgiven when people read what Edmond Rostand was inspired to write by patriotism.

In Italy, Gabriele d’Annunzio, not content with writing poetry about the war, helped to fight it. But Italian universities repudiated the Græco-Latin editions of Leipzig, doubtless in imitation of France where the playing of German music was forbidden. The Duchess of Aosta’s son, just seventeen, joined the army commanded by his father “the Iron Duke”. Gemito had carved, for General Caviglia, a statuette of a young god representing “The fatherland in arms”.

Jacques learned that Norman Douglas had returned to England, that Ephy Lovatelli was weaving for the Red Cross, and that Axel Munthe was having lint made for the forces, had authorized a limited number of quail patties, and had sent back his Austrian and German decorations. There had been a miracle, presaging victory, in the ex-cathedral: a woman had seen the statue of San Costanza wearing the uniform of an Italian general.

Apart from public events and the state of his health, Jacques had worries of a kind quite new to him: money troubles. The Longwy region had been occupied by the Germans from the beginning of the war and he was no longer receiving dividends. Moreover, he had invested money in certain northern coal-mines, which supplied the Aciéries and were now in the same hands. Despite his æsthetic attitudes it had been his invariable rule to maintain and support the family patrimony. He had to pay for that now, but did not regret it. It seemed to him like a sacrifice to the manes of his ancestors, whom he was glad to honour in this fashion. Not for the world would he have sold any of his shares which, in any case, were falling in value: he would rather have starved in an attic.

The Société Nanécienne, authorized agents of the Aciéries de Longwy, were paying him, it is true, a small income, but so small that he appealed to his mother. But her own means were straitened and she was able to help him only occasionally. He nevertheless continued to pay the octogenarian Julienne’s pension.

Fortunately, he was on the best terms with Germaine who, just before the war, had separated from her husband. The elegant and noble Member for Aversa, ex-ambassador and one-time Under-Secretary of State, had entered upon a new round of risky speculation which was a danger to his wife’s fortune. She had bought a property at Mazzé Canavese, near Turin, and shared with her husband the care and education of their three children—a girl had arrived to keep the boys company. Jacques had visited her when he returned from exile and had liked her big, modern neo-Renaissance villa, which suited his sister’s tastes, for she liked period furniture between new walls. She had been to see him at Capri in June 1914 when Nino, by tacit custom, moved out for the time being. Pressed by necessity, Jacques did not hesitate to write to her for help. She was more generous than the Baroness to the poor outcast who, after all, was still her children’s rich uncle with no heirs of his body.

Meanwhile another danger cropped up: the new French consul in Naples, Boulot, dismissed all the talk of opium as a lot of old wives’ tales and was determined to send the one nobleman under his jurisdiction to stand up to Phili’s and Tutu’s fellow-countrymen. More physically enfeebled than ever, Jacques could not seize this opportunity to rehabilitate himself, and sought only to find one of escaping from M. Boulot and the trenches. Claudel had been given a propaganda job in Italy; why should not he, Jacques, get one for himself in Sweden? He begged Germaine to do what she could for him, in the first place with the French Ambassador in Rome, and likewise with their Stockholm cousin, the trustee of the family’s senior branch, who had visited the French front at the head of a Swedish military delegation. He could already see himself delivering patriotic lectures, which would subsequently be printed as a handsome appendix to the Hymnal to Adonis; or playing a diplomatic role which would revive his old hopes of an ambassadorial career.

The resulting negotiations at least sufficed to impress M. Boulot, who thought himself well-advised to allow the future propagandist to leave hospital—Jacques’ room there was difficult to heat in winter—and to move into the small apartment which Baron Quercia had let to Nino. Jacques, restored to liberty, was able to resume taking cocaine, at the same time visiting the hospital twice a week for a check-up on the effects of his divorce from opium. He even obtained permission to pay a short visit to Capri “to air his villa”.

The real reason for this trip to the island was not to disinter his reserve of opium; he would not have been able to take it back with him. It was to follow the joyous troop of Russian dancers which Serge Diaghilev had just presented in Naples and was taking to Capri. Lodged at the Quisisana, they all came up to the Villa Lysis to empty Jacques’ cellar. The dance steps which they practised in the garden, at the foot of the peristyle stairs, were very different from Carmelina’s and Raffaello’s. Capri, however, did not consider its tarantella at all inferior to the Russian Ballet and made efforts to slip into Diaghilev’s company. Young barbers, fishermen, boatmen and muleteers, not yet caught up by conscription, beseiged the Quisisana to prove that they knew how to dance. Their tarantellas were continued in the grottoes, which had been out of business since the war. Diaghilev departed with his troop and with Jacques while, generously, barbers, muleteers, boatmen and fishermen danced a farewell tarantella on the Marina Grande mole.

Russia danced in Naples for the benefit of her wounded but collapsed at home under German pressure. One of Eulenburg’s sons was killed in East Prussia, and Bertrand de Salignac-Fénelon on the Western Front. Other people Jacques had known were cut down by the war. The circumstances leading up to two such deaths were calculated to touch Jacques’ heart: Jean de Broglie, wounded in action had, it was said, let himself die in hospital, his wife having seized certain “Virgilian” letters which had been written to him. And Jacquelin de Maillé had undergone a court martial similar to the trials of Moltke and Eulenburg, whereafter, enlisting in the Foreign Legion, he had got himself killed—gloriously.