The Man Who Sees Ghosts Read online

  And the Prince has indeed appropriated all the rights of a guide and is treating him with the vigilance and severity of a mentor. But it is precisely this relationship that gives the Marchese certain rights over the Prince, too, and these he is very good at asserting. He never leaves his side, is present at all the social occasions the Prince attends; he is still too young for the Bucentauro—luckily for him! Everywhere he finds himself with the Prince, he draws our master’s full attention to him alone by the refined way in which he is able to occupy and engross him. No-one, they say, has managed to master him and the Prince would deserve a place in legend if he succeeded in this Herculean labour. I fear very much, however, that the tables may be turned and that the guide may rather learn from his pupil, which in fact, by the looks of things, already seems to be happening.

  The Prince von **d** has left and indeed much to everyone’s relief, including my master. What I predicted, my dear O**, did in fact come about. It was not possible for friendly relations to last for long between such opposite characters and in the course of such unavoidable clashes. The Prince von **d** had not been long in Venice when a veritable schism opened up amongst the intelligentsia here, which put the Prince in danger of losing half his former admirers. Wherever he appeared, in his way he found this rival, who possessed just the right amount of low cunning and self-satisfied vanity to make use of every advantage over him, however small, that the Prince gave him. Since he also had at his command all the petty tricks that the Prince, out of a noble self-respect, forbade himself to employ, it was inevitable that he soon had all the simpletons on his side and was preening himself at the head of a clique all too worthy of him.* The most sensible course of action would naturally have been not to have got involved in a competition with an opponent of this sort, and a few months earlier this would certainly have been the position the Prince would have adopted. But now he had been drawn too far into the main current for him to be able to reach the bank again that easily. These pettinesses had come to mean something to him, albeit through these circumstances alone, and even though he may have really despised them, his pride did not allow him to renounce them at a point where his withdrawal might have been taken not so much as a free decision than as an admission of defeat. Added to this and issuing from both sides was the wretched exchange of cutting remarks, so that the spirit of rivalry that fired his followers seized hold of him, too. In order, then, to secure his conquests, to hold his position on the slippery spot that world opinion had assigned him, he believed himself obliged to increase those opportunities where he could shine and make connections. This could only be achieved by a princely outlay of funds. There thus followed endless feasts and banquets, expensive concerts, gifts and high entertainment. And because this strange frenzy soon communicated itself to both retinues and sets of servants—who, as you know, tend to be even more vigilant over matters of honour than do their masters —the Prince therefore had to bolster the good will of his servants with his liberality: a great long chain of trivialities, all unavoidable consequences of a single, fairly excusable weakness that in an unhappy moment the Prince let himself be sucked into.

  We are now rid of the rival, it is true, but the damage he did is not easily put right. The Prince’s purse is empty; gone are the fruits of years of wise frugality. We must leave Venice quickly if he is not to fall into debt—something which he has guarded against most carefully until now. We are to leave, it has been decided, as soon as fresh funds arrive.

  All this extravagance would nonethless have been worthwhile if my master had obtained one single pleasure from it all! But he has never been unhappier than now! He feels he is no longer what he was before—he is looking for himself—he is dissatisfied with himself and hurls himself into new distractions in order to escape the consequences of old ones. He makes one new acquaintance after the other, which serves but to drag him deeper and deeper down. I cannot see what will come of it. We must leave—there is nothing that can be done here—we must get out of Venice.

  But, my dear friend, still no word from you! What am I to understand by this long and stubborn silence?

  Baron von F*** to Count von O**

  Fourth Letter

  12th June

  Thank you, dear friend, for the token of remembrance from you that young B***hl delivered to me. But what are these letters you speak of that I am supposed to have received? I have not received any letter from you, not one line. They must have taken a very roundabout journey. In future, dear O**, when you do me the honour of writing me a letter, send it via Trient and with my master’s address.

  We have finally had to take the step that until now we have been fortunate enough to have avoided.—The funds have not arrived, not arrived for the first time and in this most urgent time of need, and we were obliged to resort to a usurer because the Prince is willing to pay dearly to keep the matter secret. The worst thing about this unpleasant turn of events is that it delays our departure.

  This occasion gave rise to some words between myself and the Prince. The whole business was conducted by Biondello, and the Jew was there before I got the least wind of it. To see the Prince brought to this extremity gave me a heavy heart and made all my memories of the past and fears for the future so vivid that I may well have looked rather gloomy and downcast when the usurer had left. The Prince, who had anyway been made very irritable by the foregoing scene, paced up and down the room ill-humouredly; the notes were still lying in rolls on the table; I was standing by the window, busy counting the panes of glass in the Procurator’s building; there was a long silence; finally he burst out.

  “I cannot tolerate any long faces about me,” he began.

  I remained silent.

  “Why don’t you answer me?—Can I not see that your heart is bursting with discontent? I insist you speak. We will otherwise think you are suppressing the wisest of thoughts.”

  “If my face is long, my lord,” I said, “then it is only because I see that you are not in good spirits.”

  “I know,” he continued, “that you think I am not behaving correctly—for some considerable time now—that all the steps I have taken are frowned on—that—What does Count von O** have to say in his letters?”

  “Count von O** has not written anything to me.”

  “Nothing? Why deny it? You pour out your hearts to each other—you and the Count! I know all about it. But come, admit it. I won’t probe into your secrets.”

  “Count von O**,” I said, “has yet to reply to the first of the three letters I have written to him.”

  “I have acted wrongly,” he continued. “Have I not? (snatching up a roll of notes)—“I shouldn’t have done it, should I?”

  “I can certainly see that this was necessary.”

  “I should not have put myself in the position where it was, should I?” I said nothing.

  “Of course not! I should never have been brazen enough to let my desires drive me beyond that point; it has aged me, just as I aged when I became a man! This is because I am finally emerging out of the sad monotony of my former life and looking around to see if there is not a source of delight opening to me somewhere else—because I—”

  “If it was an experiment, my lord, then I have nothing more to say—then the cost of the experience it will have provided you with would not be too high at three times what it is. It upset me, I will confess, that it should be the world’s opinion that is to decide the question as to how you should find happiness.”

  “You are fortunate indeed to be able to disdain that—the world’s opinion! I am its creature and must be its slave. What are we apart from opinion? Everything about princes is opinion. Opinion is our wet-nurse and educator in childhood, our law-giver and lover in manhood, our crutch in old age. Take from us what we have gained from opinion and the lowest fellow from the classes that remain is better off than we; for his fate has helped him to a philosophy that consoles him over this fate. A prince who derides opinion nullifies himself like the priest who denies the e
xistence of a god.”

  “And yet, my lord—”

  “I know what you are going to say. I can step out of the circle that my birth has drawn about me—but can I also tear out of my memory all the mad notions that education and early habits implanted there and which a hundred thousand fools amongst you caused to set down deeper and deeper roots? Everyone wants to be completely what he is, and our existence is simply to appear happy. Because we cannot be this in the way you are, does that mean we should not be so at all? If we may no longer draw joy directly from its pure well-springs, can we not deceive ourselves with an artificial pleasure, receive from the very hand that robbed us some small amends?”

  “You found this once in your own heart.”

  “What if I no longer find it there now?—Oh, what led us to this? Why did you have to awaken these memories in me? What if I now take refuge in this orgy of the senses in order to muffle an inner voice that makes my life a misery—to quieten my mind’s brooding that slices back and forth in my brain like a sharp sickle, with every fresh probing cutting off a new branch of my happiness?”

  “My dearest Prince!”—He had risen to his feet and was pacing about the room in unaccustomed agitation.

  “When everything before me and behind me is swallowed up—behind me the past, depressingly the same, like some petrified realm—when the future offers nothing—when I see the entire circle of my existence enclosed within the narrow space of the present—who then blames me for wanting to embrace this paltry gift of time, the moment, passionately and ravenously like a friend I am seeing for the last time?”

  “My lord, once you believed in an abiding good—”

  “Oh, stop that cloud picture dissolving for me and I will fling my burning arms about it. What joy can come from giving my blessing to visions which, like me, will be gone tomorrow?—Is not everything around me transient? Everything is thrusting forward, pushing its neighbour out of the way in order hastily to drink a drop from the well of life and then move on still parched. At this very moment now when I rejoice in my strength there is already a life somewhere in the making whose task it is to destroy me. Show me something that endures and I will be virtuous.”

  “What has driven out those wholesome desires that were once the pleasure and guiding principles of your life—to sow seeds for the future, to serve a higher, eternal order—?”

  “The future! Eternal order! If you take away what man has drawn out of his own feelings, imputing purpose to his imagined god and laws to nature, what do we then have left?—I see what has preceded me and what will follow me as two black and impenetrable curtains hanging down at either end of the limits of human life, and which no mortal has ever drawn back. Generations upon generations have stood before them with flaming torches trying to guess what might perhaps be behind them. Many see their own shadows, the shapes of their own passions enlarged and moving over the curtain of the future, and these start back in fear at this picture of themselves. Poets, philosophers and great statesmen have painted them with their dreams, joyful or dark, according to whether the sky above them was grimmer or brighter; and from far away the perspective was misleading. Many a charlatan, too, has battened on this universal curiosity and, by means of strange masquerades, set people’s eager fantasies alight with amazement. A deep silence reigns behind this curtain; no-one, once they are behind it, calls out in answer; all that was ever heard was a hollow echo of the question, as if one had cried out in a vault. Everyone must pass behind this curtain and they clutch at it in fear, uncertain as to who might be standing behind it and who will be there to receive them; quid sit id, quod tantum perituri vident.* Among these, for sure, have been unbelievers, too, who maintained that this curtain made fools of men merely and that nothing had been seen because, behind it, nothing in fact was there; but in order to convince them, others sent them swiftly through.”

  “Having no better reason than that they could see nothing was always a hasty conclusion to come to.”

  “And now, my friend, you see, I have happily resigned myself to not wishing to look behind this curtain, and the wisest action will be to wean me from all curiosity. But as I draw this circle about me that I cannot step out of and enclose my whole existence in the confines of the present, so this little spot that I was in danger of neglecting through vain thoughts of mastery becomes all the more important to me. What you call the purpose of my existence is now no longer of any concern to me. I cannot escape it, I cannot further it, but I know and firmly believe that I must and do fulfill such a purpose. I am like a messenger carrying a sealed letter to its appointed place. What the letter contains does not matter to him—he has only to earn his fee for its delivery.”

  “A poor recompense you leave me with!”

  “But what is this place we have strayed into?” the Prince now exclaimed, smiling and looking at the table where the rolls of banknotes lay. “And yet not strayed so very much,” he added, “for perhaps you will now rediscover me in this new way of life. Even I was not able to wean myself that quickly from supposed wealth, detach that quickly the supports of my morality and happiness from the lovely dream with which everything that had lived in me until now was so firmly bound up. I longed for the recklessness that makes the lives of most of the men around me bearable. Everything that seduced me away from myself was welcome. Shall I confess to you? I wanted to sink in order to destroy this source of my suffering along with its power.”

  At this point a visitor interrupted us—At some future time I will entertain you with a piece of news that will come as quite a surprise after a conversation like today’s. My warmest wishes to you.

  Baron von F** to Count von O***

  Fifth Letter

  1st July

  Since our departure from Venice is now fast approaching, this week was also to be used to catch up with all the sights, the paintings and buildings that you always put off seeing during a long stay. People had spoken to us with particular admiration of The Marriage of Cana by Paul Veronese, which is to be seen on the island of San Giorgio in a Benedictine monastery there. You should not expect a description from me of this extraordinary work of art, which I did indeed have a very surprising but not very enjoyable view of. In order to take in a composition consisting of a hundred and twenty figures and which measures over thirty feet in width, we could have done with as many hours as minutes. What human eye can succeed in taking in such a complex whole and in appreciating the whole beauty that the artist has lavished on it in just one viewing! In the meantime I find it a shame that a work of such merit as this, which should be displayed in all its glory in a public place and be enjoyed by everyone, is put to no better use than to gratify a group of monks in their refectory. The monastery’s church also deserves to be seen just as much: it is one of the most beautiful in the city.

  Towards evening we were taken into the Giudecca in order to spend a lovely evening in the delightful gardens there. Those who made up the company were not many and soon dispersed, and Civitella, who had been looking for the opportunity to talk to me all day, drew me aside into an area enclosed by shrubs.

  “I have it on very good authority,” he began, “that you are one of the Prince’s friends, someone from whom he generally has no secrets. When I was going into his hotel today I saw a man coming out whose trade I know—and when I entered the Prince’s rooms, his face was overcast.”—I was about to interrupt him—“You cannot deny it,” he continued, “I recognised the man, I got a good look at him—how is it possible? The Prince has friends in Venice, friends who are indebted to him for life and limb, and has he come to such a pass that in an emergency he has to make use of such creatures? Be honest with me, Baron!—Is the Prince in difficulties?—You would be wasting your time trying to hide it from me. What I do not learn from you, I can easily find out through some man for whom every secret has its price.”

  “My lord Marchese—”

  “I am sorry. I have to appear indiscreet in order not to be ungrateful. I owe the Prince
my life and, what is far more important to me than life, the sensible use of it. Am I to watch the Prince take steps that cost him dear, that are beneath him and, while it rests within my power to spare him these, am I supposed stand back and do nothing?”

  “The Prince is not in difficulties,” I said. “Some bills of exchange that we were expecting by way of Trient have unexpectedly not arrived. Quite by chance, I am sure—or because, in view of uncertainty over his departure, more detailed instructions from him were expected. These have been given and until then—”

  He shook his head. “Do not mistake my purpose,” he said. “There can be no question here of reducing by such means my obligation to the Prince—not all my uncle’s wealth would be enough to settle it. I am talking about sparing him a single unpleasant moment. My uncle possesses a large fortune which is a good as mine to dispose of as I choose. A happy chance now presents me with the one possible situation in which the Prince might make use of all that lies in my power. I know,” he continued, “that the matter requires the Prince to act with delicacy—but this is true also of me—and it would be an act of great generosity on the part of the Prince to grant me this small satisfaction, albeit for the sake of appearance only—so as to lessen my sense of the weight of obligation that bears down on me.”

  He would not desist until I had promised to do all I could in the matter; I knew the Prince and my hopes were far from high. The Marchese was willing to submit to any terms the Prince wanted, although he confessed he would be deeply hurt if the Prince treated him like a stranger.

  In the heat of the conversation we had strayed far from the others and were just returning when Z** approached us.