Emma’s baby starts crying. She picks it up and paces.
NATALIE You haven’t understood anything. All my actions spring from the divine spirit of love, which I feel for all creation. Your logical way of looking at things just shows that you have grown apart from Nature. George is not the way you talk about him. He understands. He loves you. He loves Alexander. He loves your children and mine. Together, our love will be strong enough for all of us.
George enters, in travelling clothes. He takes one look at his wife, baby and pregnant mistress, and turns about.
NATALIE George!
EMMA George!
Natalie, with a glad cry, runs after him, followed by Emma.
NOVEMBER 1850
A newborn baby starts squalling inside the house. Bouquets of flowers arrive, by messenger and butler (Rocca). Herzen and George appear from indoors in smoking jackets, with cigars and glasses of champagne.
HERZEN (toasts) To Natalie and baby Olga.
GEORGE To Natalie and Olga.
HERZEN Where’s Emma?
George looks around.
GEORGE There.
DECEMBER 1850
The same place. A nurse (MARIA FOMM) wheels a smart pram. Emma is holding her crying eighteen-month-old child and close to hysteria. Herzen is writing what turns out to be a cheque and an IOU. When the baby raises its voice, Emma continues louder, so the decibel level threatens sometimes to become ludicrous.
EMMA On our honeymoon in Italy, George didn’t like the cologne they had there, so I sent to Paris for his special cologne, and when it arrived in Rome we were in Naples, and when it reached Naples we were back in Rome, and so it went on until the cologne followed us back to Paris. The carriage charges were enormous. That’s how I’ve always been with George. Nothing was too good or too much. Daddy used to be rich, he supplied all the silk furnishings to the Prussian court, but somehow the revolution made him quite poor, and he resents George, it’s so unfair. I’ve borrowed and sold everything I can so that George isn’t troubled, and now I don’t know where else to turn.
Natalie, no longer pregnant, wearing white, is seen being painted in Mediterranean sunshine.
EMMA (cont.) I felt you would be sympathetic because Natalie and I have such a close bond in George. He hardly wrote to me in all the months I was left behind in Paris. Natalie is the one who wrote, to tell me how wonderful and kind and sensitive George is, how good with your children, how adorable he is … She has such a broad loving heart, there’s room for everybody in it, it seems …
HERZEN (giving her the cheque) Ten thousand francs for two years.
She signs the receipt, takes the cheque and leaves, with her crying baby.
JANUARY 1851
Natalie, with the painting she posed for, comes to show it to Herzen.
HERZEN Oh yes … Where will we put it?
NATALIE Oh … but it’s a present for George for the New Year.
HERZEN How silly of me.
NATALIE Do you like it?
HERZEN Very much. If Herwegh will permit it, I’ll order a copy made for myself.
NATALIE You’re angry.
HERZEN What should I have to be angry about?
NATALIE Take it for yourself, then.
HERZEN Nothing would induce me.
Natalie becomes tearful and confused.
NATALIE George is like my child. He becomes distressed—destroyed—or elated—by the smallest things. You’re a grown man among men, you don’t understand the yearning for love of a sensitive being for a different kind of love—
HERZEN Please speak plainly.
NATALIE He worships you, he lives for your approval, spare him this—
HERZEN Natalie, examine your heart calmly, be open with yourself, and with me. If you want me to go, I’ll go—I’ll go to America with Sasha—
Natalie becomes almost hysterical.
NATALIE How can you! How can you! As though such a thing were possible! You’re my homeland, my whole life. I’ve lived on my love for you as in God’s world, without it I wouldn’t exist, I’d have to be born again to have a life at all—
HERZEN Plain speech, for God’s sake! Has Herwegh—known you?
NATALIE If only you could understand!—you would beg my forgiveness for what you’re saying.
HERZEN Has he taken you?
NATALIE I have taken him—to my bosom like a babe.
HERZEN Is this poetry or infantilism? I want to know if he’s your lover.
NATALIE I am pure before myself and before the world—I bear no reproach in the very depths of my heart—now you know.
HERZEN (exasperated) Now I know what?
NATALIE That I am yours, that I love you, that my affection for George is God-given—if he went away, I would sicken—if you went away, I would die! Perhaps I should be the one to go—to Russia for a year—Natasha is the only one who would understand the purity of my love. Oh, how did this happen? How did this innocent world of my loving heart shatter to fragments?
HERZEN Christ! Just tell me without the double-talk!—Is Herwegh your lover?!
NATALIE He loves me, yes—he loves me—
HERZEN Is he your lover? Have you been to his bed?
NATALIE Oh—I see. You have no objection if I take him to my heart, only to my bed—
HERZEN Precisely. Or his bed, or a flower bed, or up against the back of the town hall—
NATALIE Alexander, Alexander, this is not you, this is not the great-hearted soul I gave my tender innocent heart to when I—
Herzen shakes her.
HERZEN Tell me, damn your speeches! Is it true?
Natalie collapses weeping.
HERZEN (cont.) It’s true, then. Say it. Say it.
NATALIE He is my lover! There!
HERZEN Thank you. That guttersnipe—that unctuous, treacherous, lecher—that thiefl—
NATALIE Oh my God, what have we done—and the children!
HERZEN There was a time to think of that before you besmirched all of us with your common little fall from grace—well, I shall go!
NATALIE No—no!—It’ll kill him!
HERZEN Kill him? What kind of mockery of a love affair is this?
NATALIE I swear it—he’ll kill himself. He’s got a pistol.
Herzen laughs madly.
HERZEN Well, he’d better clean it if it’s the one he went to war with—the barrel must be full of mud!
NATALIE Alexander, aren’t you ashamed? I’m at your mercy, and you make a joke of a love which gave me back my life.