Authors: Ian Buruma
She made it to Jerusalem, but her fate did not quite turn out the way Brothers had prophesied. The closest she got to becoming a queen was in Syria, in the remote desert town of Palmyra. She was already a famous traveler and the first European woman to reach the ancient town, whose last queen had been Zenobia. Under Zenobia’s reign the Palmyrans had conquered Egypt, but her glory was cut short in
A.D
. 272 when her army and city were destroyed by the Roman emperor Aurelian.
Lady Hester’s visit was greeted as though it were Queen Zenobia’s second coming. After traveling through the desert for thirty days, her caravan was met by an army of half-naked warriors, dressed only in petticoats, “studded or ornamented with leather, blackamoors’ teeth, beads, and strange things that you see on the stage.” They pretended to do battle and fired guns. The procession then entered the town, surrounded by men, women, and children dancing and ululating around her horse. Poets sang odes to her greatness, musicians strummed their lyres, young girls posed on top of the ancient columns in “the most picturesque manner,” and as she approached Queen Zenobia’s triumphal arch, a crowning wreath was held over her head by a child suspended by her feet.
By the time Pückler managed to see her in the old mountaintop monastery she had made into her home, Lady Hester’s days of triumph were over. The British government had cut off her pension, and she complained that her circumstances were further reduced by a combination of rapacious servants, extortionate moneylenders, and her own generosity to countless refugees from famines and wars. Pückler heard these complaints too, but remarked in a letter home that Lady Hester’s “poverty was at all events
English
poverty, pretty nearly equivalent to German wealth.”
Lady Hester had become obsessed with astrology and prophecies and was convinced that the Messiah would arrive to ride into Jerusalem with her, as the queen of the Orient, by his side. Two horses were kept ready in the monastery for that event. But he did not come, and she felt increasingly isolated in her rocky home. Her only refuge from the cold world that had scorned her was a place few people ever got to see. She had built the most splendid garden. It had green lawns sprinkled by delicate fountains, and perfumed roses, and allées planted with fruit trees from England, and pergolas and arbors covered in honeysuckle, and lanes lined with blue periwinkles.
There, amidst the fragrance of roses and jasmine, she entertained Pückler. Wearing an Arab
keffiyeh
casually thrown across his shoulders, wide blue Turkish pantaloons, and a pair of fine Parisian boots, he smoked a pipe with a chameleon crawling up and down its stem. Occasionally he would wonder where it had gone and anxiously call for
“mon petit bijou.”
Lady Hester found him handsome. And the fact that the horse meant for the Messiah licked his hand was taken as a sign from heaven. For eight nights they talked, about her visions, about his plans, about the perfect society, and about how England had forgotten her. Two aristocrats dreaming in a rose garden.
Pückler returned from the Middle East in 1839 with Machbuba, the Abyssinian slave, twelve Arabian horses, and a flock of ibises, whose feathers began to molt when they reached Budapest. Pückler, a Lutheran, decided to convert to Catholicism, and Machbuba was a sensation in Vienna, where she was tutored in European etiquette and met Metternich and Liszt. Lucie was unhappy about sharing her Lou with a “
Schwarze
.” Nonetheless the ménage à trois lasted until Machbuba’s fatal illness in Muskau only a year later. A wax model of her stood in the garden until it wasted away.
Pückler decided to sell his estate in Muskau in 1845 and moved into the smaller family seat at Branitz, near Cottbus. He called it Bransom Hall. There you can still see, in a glass case, a marble replica of Machbuba’s tiny hand. The landscape in Branitz is flat and sandy, and the old East German air still reeks of brown coal quarried from the huge open mines near the German-Polish border. Even in Pückler’s time, the country around Branitz was bleak. As one of his guests once wrote to him: “To get to your creation of Eden, you still have to cross the sandpit of the Holy Roman Empire, a thought that depresses me somewhat.”
But despite the acid air and the smell of coal, Pückler’s Eden has kept much of its old elegance. For twenty-five years, until his death in 1871, he worked on the pleasure ground, the fine lakes, the rose gardens, the smithy, the groups of trees planted in the style of Capability Brown, and the pièce de résistance, a pyramid built to mark his own grave. This so-called tumulus, a cross between an Egyptian pyramid and a pre-Columbian tomb, stands in the middle of a lake. It is about 60 feet high and 120 feet wide, and Pückler meant this monument to himself to last forever, like a natural mountain. As he said, “Even though all seven wonders of the world have gone, the tumuli to the kings of Crete, and the pyramids of Egypt still rear their youthful heads today.”
More and more, as he grew older, he retreated in this private Arcadia, where he still entertained guests in the costume of a Turkish pasha, with a tassled fez on his head. The main rule of the house was “Complete freedom for host and guests,” for as he wrote in English, “This is the custom of Bransom Hall.” Prince Pickle, buried beneath his tumulus, might be relieved to know that after a century that saw years of violent destruction and communist neglect, there is still a little bit of England that survives in his Prussian garden paradise.
C
HAPTER
S
IX
G
RAVEYARD OF THE
R
EVOLUTION
T
HE REVOLUTION THAT
T
OCQUEVILLE HAD HALF EXPECTED
, and half feared, never came to Britain. But European revolutionaries did. London in the mid-nineteenth century was a haven for foreign political intrigue. And to Britain’s credit it remains so to this day. While the English went about their daily lives in smug insularity, European radicals and political refugees gathered in boardinghouses and suburban homes, chic salons and dreary pubs, wintry lecture halls and the British Museum reading room, plotting their next moves.
It must have been quite a party. The anniversary of George Washington’s birthday: February 22, 1854. Mr. Saunders, the American consul in London, had invited the leading European political exiles for dinner with James Buchanan, the ambassador and future president of the United States. This would show the old countries which side the new world was on. The guest list was a roll call of the failed 1848 revolutions: Lajos Kossuth from Hungary, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin from France, Stanislaw Worcell from Poland, Alexander Herzen from Russia, and from Italy, the triumvirate of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Orsini. Karl Marx was not invited. He represented a faction—known by his
critics as the “sulphurous gang”—not a country, and even if he had been invited, he surely would have despised the others as a bunch of bourgeois wets.
In Herzen’s memory, there were no German guests at all. No doubt this would have pleased him, since he did not care for Germans. He found them vulgar. As he put it in his wonderful memoirs: “Among the English coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it never disappears.” But other accounts do mention one German, a crotchety man of letters named Arnold Ruge, who had founded a radical society in London called the Agitation Club. His seniority in German émigré circles might have afforded him a seat at the consul’s table, but it is doubtful that he was actually there. Since Herzen knew him, and intensely disliked him, he probably would have recorded his presence with a suitably caustic quip.
As with most good parties, this one had various subtexts. For one thing, the Americans had to reconcile their own not wholly liberal sociopolitical arrangements with their professed alliance to the “future federation of free European peoples.” Herzen, who enjoyed such ironies, described the occasion as “a
red
dinner, given by the defender of
black
slavery …” It was also an opportunity for Ledru-Rollin and Kossuth to meet without either one of them having to lose face. The hierarchy of exiled revolutionaries was complex; feelings were easily bruised. Kossuth had been the revolutionary ruler of Hungary for one year, which gave him precedence over Ledru-Rollin, who had governed France for only two hours. But having fled straight to Britain in 1849, Ledru-Rollin had been in London longer than Kossuth, who arrived two years later, and besides, he was French. So although they had many interests and friends in common, neither could make the first move. But once the introductions had been made at the consul’s dinner, the two men were able to compete in flowery compliments.
Toasts were drunk to freedom and democracy. Mazzini, dressed in his usual black suit, and smoking little black cigars, charmed Mrs. Saunders. Kossuth looked impressive in a velvet jacket and little black cap. Buchanan flattered Ledru-Rollin by saying that a friend of his had been ready to travel from New York to Europe especially to meet the great Frenchman, whereupon Ledru-Rollin, whose English was not perfect, thanked the future American president for having come such a
long way. After dinner, the consul’s wife retired, cigars were distributed, and Saunders himself mixed a lethal punch of Kentucky bourbon. He then proposed a chorus of the “Marseillaise” to celebrate the revolutionary spirit. When it turned out that few of the guests knew the tune, Mrs. Saunders was summoned back from her bedroom to lead the chorus of European radicals by playing the anthem on her guitar.
A
FTER THE VARIOUS
democratic rebellions had failed to crush European monarchies in 1848, London was teeming with radical exiles. It was a peculiar setting for so much revolutionary fervor, this most stable of nations, governed by an aristocracy of landed and commercial wealth, freely elected by an energetic, prosperous bourgeoisie, which was proud of its liberty to own property and conduct its business in peace. The slums were appalling and the gap between rich and poor was immense, but the potential sting of rebellion had been drawn by the promise of prosperity, by civil liberties, and by the officially encouraged notion that however much one suffered at home, to be born in England was still a slice of God-blessed fortune envied by all those unlucky enough to have been born anywhere else. The poor man was as proud of his country as the rich, especially at times of war, which, happily for those who benefited from patriotic deference, were quite frequent. The socialist publisher George Jacob Holyoake, who was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1842 and knew the European revolutionaries well (he published their pamphlets), said he was “for the success of England, right or wrong.” The demand for universal suffrage, or Chartism, had lost its mass appeal now that its most radical leaders had been shipped off to Australia. Industry boomed, and foreign wars beckoned.
Life in Britain was in every sense businesslike and, for those who had money, comfortable. Foreigners, particularly those of a romantic disposition, found it dull. Not only did they complain about the “tyranny of Sunday” (Theodor Fontane), but the hustle of commerce, the hissing, steaming machines of industry, the politicking in Westminster, the earnestness of middle-class Victorian family life were somehow lacking in passion, in poetic Sturm und Drang. Heinrich Heine, for one, couldn’t stand England: “the mere seriousness of everything, the
colossal uniformity, the machine-like movement.” You might send a philosopher to London, he said, “but on pain of your life not a poet.”
Chopin felt the same way. He came to London in 1848 and noted that the English thought only in terms of pounds. He gave his friends an account of a typical conversation with an English society lady:
T
HE
L
ADY
:
Oh, Mr. Chopin, how much do you cost?
C
HOPIN
:
My fee is twenty guineas, madam
.
T
HE
L
ADY
:
Oh! hut I only want you to play a little piece
.
C
HOPIN
:
My fee remains the same, madam
.
T
HE
L
ADY
:
Oh! Then you’ll play a lot of things?
C
HOPIN
:
For two hours if you so desire, madam
.
T
HE
L
ADY
:
Oh! Then that’s settled. Oh! Are the twenty guineas to be paid in advance?
C
HOPIN
:
No madam; afterwards
.
T
HE
L
ADY
:
Oh! Very reasonable, I’m sure
.
Most of the revolutionary exiles were romantics. Their visions of the liberation of mankind were often poetic, their universalist dreams—especially in the case of the French—filled with grandeur. Like Pückler-Muskau, most of them—Herzen, Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, and even Marx—were avid readers of Byron. They could not understand why the British establishment had rejected him. It infuriated them. Pückler was convinced the English hated Byron because he mocked their petit-bourgeois values and their hypocrisy. Byron, he said, “belonged to Europe”; the English “make the sign of the cross at the mere mention of his name.”
Mazzini, who loved England as his “second home,” could not forgive the English for their neglect of Byron either. In his opinion, Byron was a far greater poet than Coleridge or Wordsworth, who were so remote from action. And action, for the revolutionaries, was the thing. After every setback on his long campaign to liberate Italy, Mazzini would find comfort in Byron. “I have,” he said, “throughout life, scattered Byrons of mine wherever I have been sojourning.” Europeans have perhaps exaggerated the English rejection of Byron, for he had adoring fans in Britain, but it is true that his brand of revolutionary romanticism seemed out of place in Victorian England. Like his sexual
habits, it was viewed with suspicion. He was altogether too excessive, too, well … European.