Remember Me (13 page)

“What would you have me do? I am not Louis XIV.”

She was politically minded. He had given up politics. These exhortations were irrelevant. It does no good to tell an eagle in a cage to use its wings.

“Louis XIV is not King of Bavaria. You are.”

It impressed him. He had not thought of the matter in that way, ever. But of course she was right. The noble hero, outcast, rejected, living in exile, still comes back when his people are in danger and leads them to victory. That was his role. He had forgotten. He had tried to be creative, but music, the stage, sculpture, painting,
architecture
, even friends, these are the materials of a creative artist. He was not a creative artist. He was a king, and the raw material of a king is politics. He had sought
salvation
in the wrong medium. Now he would be architect of the State, and so saviour of his people. Again he would be loved.

He was a Wittelsbach. From his line had sprung
consecrated
emperors. And she was a sibyl. Unfortunately she was a sibyl in the wrong time and place. Later she would go off to rot in Texas. Nonetheless, she had helped him find his role.

I
t was perhaps just as well that the experiment upon which she launched him was mercifully short. By the time it was completed, she was far away near Galveston, dreaming her own dreams. At least his ruins were his own.

But she had so fired his imagination, that he did not even conceive of ruins. He conceived of triumphal arches, bandstands, bunting, and parades. The time was
unpropitious.
She had left him on the threshold of 1870, and in the contention of great forces there is no room for the neophyte.

But he did not know that either. He did not realize that each generation must learn its own wisdom. He thought that wisdom could be inherited, like the crown.

After leaving his last sitting with the Ney, he received shattering but by no means unexpected news. It only confirmed him in his new resolve. Wagner had married Cosima, so that at last the bronze doors on to the creative world he had coveted were firmly shut in his face, like the doors of a bedroom on the guests at a wedding.

So it was time for him to conquer the real world and to force its respect, since there was nothing else he might have. He took his thoughts to the wintergarden, where he could think them best.

Who was there to tell him the system of the present world? He was a constitutional monarch: they brought him only yesterday’s newspapers, never to-day’s. He must see for himself. He would need vision, which is the only valid yardstick of political greatness. It was a pity that to achieve his ends he should have to stoop to the tactics of his prime minister. Like Christ, the
Wittelsbachs
had been given their crown only when their
temporary
power was gone. That power he must re-establish. It was a matter of
amour-propre.

For what did people now think of him? The Great Friend thought less than nothing. He had scooped up his gifts and drifted away. Our family never thinks much of us, but the Empress Elizabeth liked to laugh at him, and to spread gossip about him besides. Richard was already disappointed, and wanted him to be firmer. Sophie he knew better than to trust. She was safely
married
, but she would always hate him, because he had embarrassed her. His governess, Fräulein Meilhaus, behaved too patiently and understandingly to have
anything
but secret doubts. The Cabinet thought they could do as they pleased with him. They even made it a
practice
to sigh anxiously in his presence, with exasperation, as though they were in actuality the regents of the child they obviously thought him.

If he entered politics, he would have to deal with Bismarck and Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia.
Bismarck
had no respect for anyone, but only feigned it. Crown Prince Friedrich was a bumptious toady who despised everything that was not Prussian. If Ludwig wrested power away from his ministers, what would the world think of him then?

What would they say? Wagner, for one, would be delighted, and attribute everything to his own influence.
A stronger Wittelsbach would make him sorry he had fled such patronage. He would pretend to recognize Parsifal and Lohengrin again. Sophie would be so
consumed
with envy that she would smile at him whenever she saw him. And Richard would be gratified. It would be pleasant to see a warm glow of respect in Richard’s eyes. The Empress Elizabeth would have to pretend not to snigger at him from behind her barricade of spurious affection; and the Cabinet would be put in its place. Bismarck would be courtly and sardonic, as always. He would also be furious, for only Bavaria stood between Prussia and the unification of Germany. Crown Prince Friedrich would have to strut his Prussian superiority at some small court in Pomerania.

It was a delicious dream. Like Louis XIV, Ludwig would rule and unite the country. Even Fräulein
Meilhaus
, Frau von Leonrod, who asked nothing of him, would feel that her loyalty was justified and be pleased with him. It was so long since anyone had been genuinely pleased with him.

But why was it, hurrying down the corridor to meet the Cabinet, that he remembered the words of someone now a total stranger, of Paul who had once called him “a wild little brain”? Perhaps because the words were human and direct, and gave him the same pleasure a dog feels, when someone strokes its ears after it has retrieved the mallards. Words lost their warmth. We all have these treasured phrases, which we take out from time to time, when we feel cold. Words could not warm him. Therefore only power was left. He would rule supreme in a cold country, or not rule at all.

When one knows people have two faces, like Janus, and turn whichever is the more suitable to the weather, particularly when the emotions stand open in time of war,
one feels nothing but contempt for them. One is flattered then not by their praise, but by their meretriciousness. Yet if he could not have the dangers of love, at least let him have the security of being feared.

He opened the door at the end of the corridor, and stepped into the Cabinet room, a shabby tiger among professionals. It would perhaps be more decent not to say what they did to him. Dishonesty was their career. To him it was only a desperate measure. How could he win?

The delicious dream became a nightmare soon enough.

To the aristocrats of the nineteenth century, the
political
figures below them moved with a jerky and inevitable precision, like the statues of the hours on some
marvellous
blue and gold medieval clock. After the hour, and the figures whirl by out of sequence, but it did not occur to Ludwig that he was attempting to set the clock back. To him the principle of monarchy was self-
regulating.
He could not see the politicians in the works, the cogs both large and small, nor did it occur to him that the mechanism might wear out.

Instead he saw the face of the clock, both waking and in his dreams.

It was the time of the Franco-Prussian war. The Cabinet had explained that to him patiently. So eager to act was he, that he had answered someone else’s cue. Prussia hoped to squeeze Bavaria out like a blackhead, in the pincers of a war, and so to rule the Germanies alone. He should contrive things otherwise.

As the hands of Germany met at noon, the door to the left snapped open and out leaped the statues of the
current
hours.

First came Louis Napoléon, a figure with neither a past not a future of his own. The arrangement of his
facial hair gave him a superficial resemblance to Charles I, but the rest of him moved with the abrupt gestures of Tom Thumb. He was the son not of a dynasty, but of the brother of a great man. He was astute, but like so many virtues that are French, his astuteness was too miserly to be practical. On the first stroke of noon he vanished back into the clock.

The second figure was in better repair. It must be the Empress Eugénie. She had many years ahead of her, most of them a little mad. With a soft click she pivoted away from her dressmaker and took the road to Sédan.

Immediately behind these out whirled three figures chockablock. One was a brisk old man. One was placing the crown upon his own head. One was packing a bag. Who were these? The future kings of Bavaria, but
Ludwig
could not see them.

The seventh figure was more majestic, a great black eagle with gilt wings, leading by the nose-ring a dancing bear with the face of a woman. Behind them stood an enormous figure in white chalked buckskin, knee-length black boots, and a spiked helmet, carrying a whip and a hoop. His eyes were fatherly, but shifty. His gestures were oddly supple, as he moved along after the others, flowing down the track. He nodded and smiled. It was Bismarck, leading Bavaria in chains.

Down in the square those who watched the clock raised a shout, for immediately behind Bismarck rode Lohengrin in the guise of St. Michael, patron of Bavaria, his foot upon the dragon Prussia, his sword upraised against the conqueror in front of him. Peering deeper into his dream, Ludwig recognized himself and sat upright with the agility of decision. Like the bear, St. Michael was his patron. He would liberate the bear.

He had waked from his dream too soon. He did not
see moving on the track behind him the statues of the future kings of a united Germany, unwilling William and William the untouchable. The clock stopped chiming. The tourists moved away, unaware that when they
returned
another noon the figures, though the same, would have different names and a different order of precedence. They did not care. Tourists have no patience to see any marvel more than once.

To Ludwig, as he became caught in it, the dream
became
obsessive. He had it almost every night. He shook his head and slipped out of bed, for he always waked at the same point. Below him on the cobbles a carriage rattled by. He went to the window and glanced at the closed doors of the Theatinerkirche. Time was going too rapidly for him. He could get no hold upon it and no leverage. Politics were more difficult than he had
supposed
; and it was often thus with a well-contrived war. He was foolish to suppose that in anything so self-centred as politics his mere appearance could tip the scales either way. He was uneasily aware of that. Kings did not make history any more: it was merely presented to them for signature. Even the kings of Crete did not know the plans of Daedalus. No more could he fathom Bismarck’s designs.

His interviews with the Cabinet ministers did nothing to help. At first he was cautious, like a man who has not played cards for a long time and is afraid some of the rules may have been changed. Then he decided to call out the troops on the side of Prussia, and to march against the French before they could march against him. It was a decisive act, and he admired himself for it. He did not realize that Bismarck had manoeuvred him into it, and did not admire him at all.

Each of us has a portrait gallery in his head. In
moments
of ambition, which usually come at night, we
saunter
barefoot over the cold parquet, holding aloft a torch, peering at idealized likenesses of ourselves.

Here was the
portrait
d’apparat
showing the defender of Munich, invaded by the French. The overpainting faded out. Here was the King fleeing his capital.

And here, in a triptych, were the friend, the conqueror and the dupe of Bismarck. Closed, the wings of the
central
panel showed a king sitting in an empty room, a slide rule and a compass on the table beside him, the architect of Germany, deaf, ugly, forgotten, and ignored.

Here was the commander of Bavarian troops,
insignificantly
lost in a cloud of Prussian advisers. And here Füssli’s
Nightmare,
the figure of a young man thrown back on a rumpled bed, while the Crown Prince sat on his chest, digging spurred heels into his ribs, like a monkey with saucer eyes, and there peered out from the draperies the enormous presence of Bismarck with a horse’s face. As a matter of fact there had already been a newspaper cartoon of that scene.

It came out quite suddenly, the day after the war was won. For in war, as in everything else, the only real
victory
is that which the allies have over each other. That is not something that can be learned on the carpet with a set of lead soldiers. It can be learned only at school, and later, among men.

It made no difference that Prussia had won the war. It made only slightly more difference that Bavaria had been defeated in the course of it, and that Prussia now controlled the Germanies. What mattered was that he had been made to look a fool. What hurt was that he was one.

The armies were coming back, almost before they had had time to set forth. He stood at the window, watching the parade ground below him. Bavaria was no longer a sovereign state outside her own boundaries. The matter
was over as soon as that. The nightmare was over, but so also was the dream. There would not be many more.

At the ends of columns of Bavarian men down in the square rode Prussian officers, hedging them in and
ordering
them about. As a reward for such a spectacle, he was hailed as the saviour of German unity. That was what the crowds shouted, anyhow. He did not bother to listen. Instead he seemed to hear the warning voice of his
grandfather,
Ludwig I, he who had lost his throne. “Don’t give up any rights of the Crown. For a short time you will be praised for it—but the loss remains. How
changeable
the
aura
popularis
is. Your grandfather has had his lesson.”

So had he.

When he drove through the cheering crowds, these phrases turned in his head in rhythm with the turning wheels of the carriage. His grandfather was quite right. The crowd would applaud anything, but never the same thing twice. He remembered how, at Versailles, with Richard, he had turned to see the rats pouring towards the palace from the town. Applause is like the warmth of the sun. But like sun that breaks intermittently through heavy clouds of disapproval, it is gone before we can settle ourselves to receive it, making us feel colder than ever. It comes out somewhere else.

He knew now what had happened. His hand had been forced, so that he would play the wrong card. He felt as though he had seen the flag of Bavaria fly for the last time. At the moment the crowds were shouting their
enthusiasm
, but this applause would dwindle away like any other. Berlin would siphon it off. If the crowds did not know that they were applauding their own destruction, he did, nor did he wish to hear what those for whose admiration he had craved would now say of him.

He decided to leave the capital. He could not bear to remain there. He would go to Hohenschwangau, for after every defeat he moved farther and farther from Munich. The cold waters of the Alpsee beckoned him. Slowly they lapped round his consciousness, full of the odd consoling gentleness of the inanimate, that would have us join it if we could.

So he sat in his carriage with the shades drawn, as it headed for the hills. Only up there was kingship an ideal and not merely a factitious reality. It was only among archetypes that he could move, for he was one himself.