"I gave her everything – my heart, I promised chastity despite all a soldier's soldier's -"
"Temptations, yes, I see. We had best go to some wineshop and -"
"Drink, yes, drab, yes, for they are all nothing, they are things to be used and then flung away. I gave her everything, I gave her all my love -"
Pauline Bonaparte glided through the twilight, two servants keeping their distance behind. She was exquisite in taffetas. She turned her great eyes frankly, as before, on Elton. Elton spoke. Elton said:
"Madame, vous ne me verrez plus. Je m'en irai demain. J'ai été blessé, oui, mortellement blessé par une femme. Malédictions à votre sexe, madame, un sexe tout à fait maudit, madame -"
Pauline Bonaparte seemed no whit put out, maledictions on her sex being truly tributes to the power of it. But John cut into Elton's bad French with his own mongrel Romance:
"Altessa, cara principessa, mon ami est souffrant, la sua inamorata non, ne, sa fiancée, vous comprenez, aime un altro. Her love is dead."
"It is my love that is dead, damn her."
Pauline Bonaparte, to John's surprise but Elton's incomprehension, spoke Latin: "Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentes concelebras -" Then she waved the citation away into the twilight with a graceful snaking of her arm. She said: "Lucrezio." Then, smiling brilliantly, she swayed off, servants keeping their distance after.
"What was all that about?" said Elton. "Who's this Lucrezio?"
"Lucretius," John said. "Strange, I'd never have believed she knew Latin. That was the opening invocation to Venus in De Rerum Natura. What she was saying was that love doesn't die, not in the bigger sense. Everything grovels to Venus. She'll have you yet, Isaac Marmaduke."
"I'm leaving tomorrow, I told you I was leaving."
"Yes, yes, but she'll have you yet. Alma Venus won't leave you alone for long."
They went down the Steps in silence for a while. Then John said: "I see it, of course, I see the whole picture. Quite a little poem. The divine Pauline reclines as Venus reclining for Canova, and Canova gives her those lines to learn and repeat over and over, stop her fidgeting. That accent, I should suppose, is Corsican."
"Damn her, damn all of them, bitches."
They turned into a side-street off the piazza and went into a tavern. There were smoky oil-lamps and a few other drinkers, big-shouldered sincerely voluble Romans who stared their fill, moving their big bulks bodily the better to stare, and then resumed vivid gesture-sauced colloquies. A crone who limped brought wine.
"You know what it looks like?" Elton said. "It looks like horse-piss."
"It tastes well enough. A little acidulous. Strange how things always read better than they taste. Acorns and cheese brick-hard in Don Quixote, the wineskin cooling in the leaves – no meal more delicious in print. Wine in poetry is superior to wine in a glass. What will you do?"
"When I go back? I don't know what I will do. I loved her, you see." He had the sort of classical beauty that became inhuman when attacked by grief, a Greek façade meant only for sunlight. Gothic was best, John thought, looking at the face prepared to crumble into snivels, Gothic was built for storms. He said quickly:
"You should read Burton. Listen." And he began to recite the one paragraph of the Anatomy of Melancholy he had committed to memory. " 'Love is blind, as the saying is, Cupid's blind, and so are all his followers. Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin lean chitty face, have clouds in her eyes, be crooked, dry bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squised cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, snub and flat nose, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch's beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane's neck which stands awry too, her dugs like two double jugs, or else no dugs, bloody-fallen fingers, she have long filthy unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist, gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty rank rammy filthy beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish – if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors or imperfections of body or mind, he had rather have her than any woman in the world.' "
Even the Romans had been listening from about halfway through the catalogue, openmouthed. One old man said "Bravo" at the end. Elton goggled at Keats, his face restored to handsomeness, very vacuous.
"Why?" he said: "Why did you learn all that?"
"I like it," John said. "Besides, it's a manner of warning. Not to fall in love."
"But the whole drift is, as I see it, that love is strong and mighty and overcomes reason."
"Yes yes, I see, I know. Shakespeare was shorter with his brow of Egypt. Alma Venus works through madness." He drank. The wine took fire from the lantern on its shelf on the roughcast wall beside them. "Sour. I used Burton's book once to a very practical end. I used advice he gives for the stemming of lust. It was difficult for me at that time, you see. I was sharing a house with a man, and he was sharing his bed with the Irish maidservant. I could hear them every night and sometimes in the afternoon. And there was I in love, and desirous, and not able – Burton advised the thinning out of the diet. I took no meat, no wine. I was a very Hindoo with my mess of greens. It subdued desire and I was able to concentrate on love. What kind of a world is it that denies the goddess to us? Alma Venus, indeed, ruling all. She does not rule the way we of the middle sort must love."
Elton's face began unbecomingly to crack again. "It is not just any body, not just any breasts or buttocks or – It is hers under the muslin. Hers, hers only. Now Major Kettering will thrust in."
"Is this the Harry she speaks of?"
"I know him, I know the swine. We were at Rochester together. God curse, God damn -"
"For God's sake think of it as mere madness. Something that must be cured."
"Are you cured?"
John thought about that. "Perhaps," he said at length, "if you ate a beefsteak."
"Here? Beefsteaks here in this town? It's all veal. Their calves never reach bullockhood."