Authors: David Stacton
B
ut love may take peculiar forms. With him it took the form of the family sickness, which was a mania for
building
. This form of madness is not unknown. Some of us build monuments to those we love. Others build traps to catch them. From 1869 until 1886 he built incessantly. He only stopped when he could build no more. Even before he was first defeated, he began to construct a refuge against defeat. Even the most victorious of armies is wise to retain a strategy of retreat.
So he began to build, as the pharaohs built,
compulsively
. Such buildings are like trousseaux which; he no longer marriageable stitch away at with such confidence. And who is to say they are wrong, for as they sew, they smile. They know that if the trousseau is sufficiently
perfect
, then the ideal husband will appear.
Building was the passion of the family. All the
Wittelsbachs
built. Each one of them clumsily evoked a dream. For Ludwig I, his grandfather, it had been the dream of Italy.
It was his grandfather who had given him building blocks on his seventh birthday. Perhaps it was an early lesson in a system of consolation he would find useful later, for Ludwig I was a wise and tacit man. In any event the lesson took. There are times when the events
of our childhood can be the salvation of that adult world which is without events.
The first shrine Ludwig built was Linderhof. He began it at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, as though sensing he might need it very soon.
Always he had liked the site, below the medieval monastery of Ettal, and twenty miles from
Hohenschwangau.
Even as a child he had thought it a magic spot. In its little glades spotted with flowers was the
perfect
place for a Knight of St. Hubertus to encounter the holy stag, symbol of salvation in the magic world of nature. He was, after all, a Knight of St. Hubertus, and he had never been able to find salvation anywhere else. It was a pretty vale, intimate and yet not too far from the snows. He had always meant to build there.
Two years before he and Richard had sauntered down the allees of Versailles and entered the Petit Trianon. He remembered how they had shared each other’s thoughts. He attempted to reproduce the Trianon. He attempted to reproduce that one room where they had once stood
together
. Perhaps they might share such a moment again, he and Richard, if he built the surroundings for such an experience properly.
Certainly the palaces he built are tense with an
atmosphere
of waiting, the atmosphere we feel in an
abandoned
temple, when we stand in the empty shrine, half believing the gods might suddenly come back. He half believed it, too; but only half.
Linderhof was to be a very private place.
He went often to inspect the site. In winter the weather was so severe, the bark of the trees so tough, that the deer had to be fed by hand. To put a summer palace in a winter landscape was an ultimate act of faith, yet are there not legends that deep in the Himalayas there is an
apple valley, where the blossoms are perpetual and no one is ever old? And in the Antarctic are there not narrow open lakes, on whose fringes yellow lichens grow, as the first plants left the sea long ago, to sway on the
borderland
of life? And what Empress of the Russians was it, who gave orders out of caprice and malice, so that there stood on the Neva an ice palace, to discomfort the
wedding
night of a former favourite? Linderhof should be as glittering, but warmer than that.
Ludwig sent a commission of architects to Paris, to find inspiration. Linderhof should be French. When they returned, and the building began, he shut the site to the world. Like Wagner, he would create alone.
He spent a lot of time there. He lived in a small
hunting
lodge nearby, that had belonged to his father, and every day went to a hummock from which he watched the foundations rise. He liked to see the workmen. He liked to talk to them. They liked him. They knew who he was, but they did not plot against him. They were loyal. That reassured him.
Sometimes he would drive through the surrounding forest in a gilt coach, with plumed lackeys around him, like the magic prince in a fairytale. For the farther we retreat from the capital, the closer we are to the truth of any country, and it was the truth he sought. The
peasants
believed the life he led, far more than he was able to believe in it. He took reassurance from them. He would step from the coach into the woods and there talk to the stonecutters. They did not seem to mind if he admired them. They saw no advantage to themselves in his admiration, so they relaxed. The smell of sweat in brisk woods, like the smell of a sauna, is the cleanest and most male of smells.
Near the site was a small woodsman’s hut he had
ordered to be built. There he could wear lederhosen and silly hats, and for a moment be a woodsman or a
stonecutter
, too.
On the pine needles there lay wood shavings coiled like the fronds of ferns. He could pick them up and play with them, to feel growth within the spring of the
shaving,
like the tensile strength of a fernball. The smell of wood freshly planed is like the smell of babies freshly washed.
Before and below him the idea of Linderhof began to spread out like blueprints on a table. Already was
installed
on the hill behind the site the Moorish kiosk he and Richard had bought during that brief springtime in Paris. To enter it was to enter Asia, whose morals are not ours, so that for a moment, conforming to theirs, we are free of our own.
Buried in the grounds there would be a grotto
invisible
from the outside, and blue, above whose water would flow a yellow moon, and on whose narrow shores there would be feasts for the traveller, not so much a Venusberg, as the interior of Virgil’s cave at Posilippo.
Linderhof took many years to build. During those years Richard seemed to draw farther and farther away from him, even while the building became more actual. In these rooms, at least, would walk an experience not quite lost, for it could be felt in all of them. He had only to hurry down these miniature allees to recapture the ghost of it.
When winter came, the basins of the fountains had to be drained, and an ice castle hung from every faucet and jet. The garden statues wore snow on their shoulders like epaulets. Then the place became real. Its baroque
garden
front stood up like a water organ, and all its
springtime
youthfulness was frozen immutably in the cold.
Then he loved it best. Then there was a crack in the air, and one might ride perilously through the night, by the lantern of the sleigh, in search of events.
It took ten years to finish Linderhof. They were the years during which he was beaten back farther and farther from the world other people live in, into that world which has but one inhabitant. Only a child, a madman, a suicide, or a genius lives in a single world. His choices narrowed down.
And ten years later, when spring slowly unfurled the garden he would stand enthralled among the trees,
peering
out, until against the forest which was still black with winter he would hear a noise, lean against the bronze back of a crouching lion above the
schloss,
and wait, excited. Then, with an almost inaudible rumble, as of great powers first released, the fountain would charge out of its jet, rushing up like energy out of a triton, shoot forty feet into the air, and blow in the wind like
separating
mist. Then the world was truly renewed. It was like the bursting of a fig. In that great white seminal rush that meant for him the birth of spring, hope would be renewed, and everywhere in the palace and the grounds, night or day, he could hear it playing above him, like the leitmotif of
Tristan,
carrying him irresistibly towards the climax of the act.
And yet it was not satisfactory. It could not be. It was built for someone who was not there, in memory of someone who once had been. No one should build a monument to the living who is unwilling to alter his plans, for only the dead are beyond change. Only the lost love lasts. The others all decay.
He took a walk through those empty rooms.
Instead of solitude, he had been fobbed off with
loneliness
. The only sleigh to jangle towards the
schloss
was
his own sleigh when he returned. No man should ever finish what he builds, for once a thing is perfect it allows us no way in, perfection being jealous of itself. The creator is forever barred from his own works. They outgrow him as a child outgrows its parents.
He went into the dining-room. In the dining-room he had installed a hydraulic table, so that he should not be disturbed by the servants while he dined. When he pressed a button, the table sank into the kitchens. He would gaze into the hole with horror. It was like the opening to that circular stair down which he moved. It led down to the cellars and it yawned like madness. Then it rose, set with his dinner, and sealed him in again.
Nor was the bedroom any better. He had built the wrong dream. He would never stay in it overnight, lest it turn into a nightmare. To live alone at Linderhof was to wander through the overstuffed rooms of a well-loved mistress unexpectedly dead, who has taken her
personality
with her. It was true. He could visit the past only if he shut his eyes. Wait how he would, it would never visit him.
The workmen were gone. Their hammers were silent. There were no more wood shavings underfoot. He could not sit and watch the carpenters, and they were the only audience he had. If he must live, then he must build again. He realized that. Reality was always somewhere else, in the next room. So in order to capture it, it would always be necessary to build more rooms.
“Damned be the blinding apparition which oppresses our senses,” he wrote in his diary. But he did not write the truth. It was he who was damned, not the apparition. For Eros was not merely a charming boy who wounded us in ecstasy. Eros was also the wilful boy who shattered Jove’s thunderbolts to bits.
Nor could he bear the gallery of mirrors at the garden front of the
schloss.
It was as futile as that similar gallery at Versailles, where Bismarck had robbed France of its king and him of his kingdom. He had to do something about that gallery. It seemed to him altogether natural to smuggle in a chamois and set it loose in there. He had already gone that far into wilfulness.
The chamois faced the walls of glass and smashed them. The glass fell tinkling to the bottom of a depthless nightmare, but as it fell it set his spirits free. He stood at the door, watching the chamois butt its way to freedom. When he could bear the sight no longer, he opened a window and it scuttled on the parquet, looked at him uncertainly, and launched into space, sailing for an instant against the incessant mockery of the fountain outside.
In the empty room there fell one more piece of glass. It splashed against the silence. He moved to the window, stood on the balcony, and gazed down. The light streamed out across the white gravel towards the pool of the
fountain.
The orange trees stood motionless in their urns. There was no moon. The chamois was unhurt, but it was gone. He heartily wished he could go also. Already it would be toiling up through the woods, and so in a little while it would reach the safe peaks of its habitat. He had no habitat.
S
o in 1878, in his thirty-third year, he began to build Herrenchiemsee. He must try again, but he was warier now. If his own past could not give the present back to him, then the past of another might.
For he had given up all hope of finding understanding or wisdom in any living face. He looked now to the faces of the dead, and in particular to the faces of those dead who live immortal in our minds because they epitomize a principle. In the gallery of time there are certain
portraits
which tell us salvation lies within our heads; and this truth, though terrible, is also comforting.
Alone in his library he drew out an engraving of Louis XIV. It was a wily face. There was not much
wisdom
in it, but much animal cunning and a stubborn will to survive. Louis XIV struck a bargain with mortality and won. Yet it is difficult to know how to make use of another man’s wisdom, for wisdom is an end-product, and it is the technique we need.
It was an intelligent face, but a poodle is intelligent at the end of a leash. Among that breed, only Charles II had a warm spaniel intelligence, and so we forgive him anything. But Louis XIV could be forgiven nothing, so he did not dare to be wrong. His is not a face that teaches us how to live, as the sad, weary, intentionally merry
face of Charles II does. It is a sharp face, telling us only how to survive. Ludwig had need of such wisdom.
He studied the engraving. Linderhof had failed, and no spider ever repairs a web: she makes another, for she knows that once a thing is touched, then it is gone.
Ludwig
would reproduce Versailles. He set about the task at once.
There are those who would say that Herrenchiemsee is more beautiful than Versailles, by which they mean more moving, and who is to say they are not right? For Versailles is a stage set, but Herrenchiemsee is an ode, perhaps a threnody. We go through Versailles as we would go through the Maginot Line. It is mighty and splendid and damp, but as a system of defence it failed. Herrenchiemsee is full of quiet pathos. It enshrines an emotion, where the other is merely the monument to a will. The windows of Versailles are always watching us. Its allees are a text-book on strategy. But the windows of Herrenchiemsee are blind and introspective, like the eyes of the Virgin in a Piétâ.
Yet Herrenchiemsee is strangely without joy. It is not the work of a man, but of a dreaming white-skinned boy trapped in the body of a man. Linderhof was an ex-voto. Herrenchiemsee was only something to do.
It was built on the isle of Herrenworth. There was a reason for that. The most a king can do, in
disenfranchised
times, is to rescue something from the greed of his subjects, an act for which only the future will thank him. Speculators had bought the dense, living forest on that isle and threatened to cut it up into kindling. There is something in the soul of city men which rejoices in the death of a tree. Ludwig bought the land out from under them. So Herrenchiemsee was begun. He would build nobility in the woods, where it belonged.
Yet of this building he enjoyed only the model and the plans. He even went incognito to Paris in search of designs. From a world he could never touch he brought back the souvenirs that would make it visible. It was his determination that now sovereignty should have its symbol, even though sovereignty was no more, as once emperors carved their deeds so high on rocks and obelisks that even their descendants could not destroy them.
And yet Herrenchiemsee is beautiful, in the same way that autumn is beautiful, when the world is going to sleep. It is the palace of a somnambulist.
For he was decided that though outwardly the palace would present the idea of sovereignty, orderly, extensive, yet concise, inwardly it should reproduce those state chambers in Munich through which, years ago, he had moved inexorably towards the mockery of a throne.
In the great hall of Herrenchiemsee he placed a statue of Louis XIV, not as the object of his admiration, but as a warning to the impious, as before any sanctuary there was once placed a guardian statue of the God within.
The building of the
schloss
took years. But he took no pleasure in it. It was empty. As he limped facelessly towards his descendants, he heard behind him only the vacant footsteps of himself. He would rather have had the sound of one human voice to speak to him.
Now the only voice that spoke to him, told him he was not a man, but a principle, and that to maintain that
principle
he could neither touch nor be touched by anyone. He was self-immured for a principle, like Antigone; yet noble as she was, what were her last thoughts
underground
? Truly they must have been terrible, down there in the permanent, mortal dark.
He found Herrenchiemsee like that tomb. He felt that no one must ever see it. And he did not wish to see it
himself. He visited it only in the daytime, and slept
elsewhere
. He had not the courage to stay there overnight.
And the aimless years went on.
One day in autumn, the Empress Elizabeth, who was staying at Possenhofen, rowed across to Berg, when Ludwig was not there, accompanied by her daughters. On his desk in one of the rooms she placed a sealed
envelope
addressed to him. She did not quite know why. Perhaps pity moved her. Perhaps, she, too, was
consulting
an oracle and afraid to hear the answer.
When, days later, stopping at Berg, he picked it up, he thought for a moment it was a message from someone who had yet to appear, the person for whom he waited. He opened it eagerly and found a poem. He was deeply hurt, as though rebuffed to find only a familiar hand and not that of a stranger.
The poem upset him. It seemed a warning from the dead, for since he did not see Sisi any more, she was dead to him, as dead, no doubt, he already was to her. It was another token that his only escape lay within.
He came and went, between Berg, Linderhof;
Herrenchiemsee
, and Hohenschwangau. He had nothing else to do with himself other than to move from place to place.
Yet there was one room at Herrenchiemsee he avoided, and when he did appear there, it was only in masquerade.
Taking Richard and a few lackeys, dressed in costumes of the early eighteenth century, and himself robed in the ermine and plush of Mignard’s portrait of Louis XIV, he would enter his carriage and whirl up to Herrenchiemsee. In its rooms he would stalk the corridors as Louis XIV stalked, like a rat-catcher hunting down the nobility. But there was no truth in the impersonation. It was not real.
Tall torches would illuminate the garden. The candles
reflected the bright colours of the pilasters and the twinkling of the chandeliers which, unlike stars, could be let down on a pulley and replenished when they
guttered
out. But the robes hung round him like a shroud. He tore them off. Like the shirt of Nessus, they would burn him up, for he had raped the wrong ideal. The image was no doubt a little mixed up, but then so was everything.
He was growing older and he had no heir.
Yet some of his family would supplant him. They were fecund enough. Prince Ludwig Ferdinand, his cousin, had married the Infanta Paz of Spain. They were in Munich now. They were together. They were safe. The nightmare did not stalk their bed. They might even have his heirs, now that Otto could have none. They had asked to see Herrenchiemsee.
He decided to let them do so, but they should not see it while he was there. They should see instead how cold, unyielding, and inexorable was the royalty they might, perhaps, inherit.
So, when he had removed himself, they arrived. Silently, and maybe even tittering, with those significant glances which the middle classes love to throw back and forth like balls of yarn, they moved through those
horleft
unfinished. They saw the Salle du Conseil, the Chambre de Parade, the Salon de l’Oeil de Boeuf, and the whole jiggerypokery mockery he had wanted to lay out before them. He never asked to know what they thought of it. He did not want to know.
But a day or two after they had gone, at midnight, he approached the
schloss
himself, and unwilling to enter it, stood in the moonlit garden, gazing through the trees towards the façade. In the garden the statues of hounds
and stags seemed to shift and move, but were too small to do him damage. At last, while the lackeys held up torches, he entered the hall, skirted the statue of Louis XIV, and looked to see what his royal visitors had left of themselves there.
What they had left was a little of their life. They had even left their laughter, which melted into silence like snow crystals on the floor. But it was not laughter for him. For him they had only pity. It was another reason to avoid them.
Abruptly he gave the order that the great hall of
mirrors
was to be illuminated. That was the room he avoided, but now that they had been there, he felt that it was safe for him to see it.
One by one, the chandeliers leaped into life, and, as the lackey released the draw pulleys, sailed up in a chorus of crystal to their natural height. There they trembled and swayed in a breeze off the lake, as though a presence were entering the room through a window carelessly left open. He frowned. The windows should never be left open, for there was nothing beyond them at all.
Then, half fearfully, he entered the room, alone, and could feel their passage through it a day ago, in a
gregarious
perambulating huddle, and their voices soft with pity. Their pity was not what he wanted of them. He glanced towards the doors, which were obediently closed. He stood by himself, as invisible to those who had been there as now they slowly became to him. They faded away. He began to stride up and down the room. They could have children, and a king does not even begin to exist until he has produced heirs, who are his memory, in which he truly lives. He would have no children. He was thirty-six. How could a boy of twenty-one be thirty-six?
As he walked up and down that endless, fatal hall, the square panes of glass in the mirrors made huge prisms. In the spluttering light above him, which lighted
nothing
, from a thousand panes, at different heights, he saw bits and pieces of his own enormous body, staggered across the panes of glass which, as he approached closer, snapped into a single image, until, going very close to one of the panes, with the wind from off the lake like the tap of a finger on his shoulder, for the window still stood negligently open to the park beyond, he saw not his own bearded face staring out at him, but Otto’s.
As he turned and backed into the safety of the centre of the room, from every panel he seemed to see Otto’s face, beckoning and smiling to him half-gaily and
half-sadly
, with the wisdom of the truly mad, who, like the dead, cannot tell us what life is like upon the other side, yet seem to know.
Otto, sealed already in the lead casket of himself, flickered in the mirrors, repeated endlessly, and raised a forefinger to his lips, as though there were a secret
between
them that not even the empty room must know. Ludwig turned and ran.
Outside, in the hall, leaning against the door, he reached out, touched an orange tree in a pot, and plucked off an orange, as one would hold an orb, which is not only a symbol, but a weapon. But the orange came away in his hand. He turned it in his palm and even it was without life. It was artificial. There was no life here, but only madness.
A king must have heirs. If he has heirs, then he can live. A little of his responsibility drops from him, and knowing that kingship will not die, then he has done his duty and he can believe in life again.
Once more he ordered his carriage. He waited outside
on the lawn until it arrived. Stepping into it, he did not once look back, but behind him the windows of
Herrenchiemsee
grinned in the moonlight like the eye-sockets of a skull.
He went immediately to Nymphenberg.
The Prince and the Princess Paz had been staying there, but for the time being they were away. In the carriage he dozed. The journey seemed to go on forever. When he awakened it was almost dawn. The carriage was rattling over the winter leaves of Nymphenberg, as the horses methodically chewed away the roadway snow.
The
schloss
was in darkness. It was better so. He directed the carriage towards the west wing, and taking only a lackey with him, ran across the snow and into the building, afraid to be seen by the relentless stars, so like those spluttering chandeliers, but higher, which in the swaying ice-decked night seemed to make the same derisive music.
He fled up the stairs, following the lackey. At last a serving woman opened the door, wearing a flannel wrapper and with her hair in plaits, to receive him. He paid her no attention, but told her what he wanted. She looked startled, but he forced her to obey.
More slowly now they moved through the empty, silent rooms, towards the other end of the wing, which faced the park, as did the windows of the room in which he himself had been born.
With a warning shrug, the woman opened the door to the nursery.
Stepping lightly across the floor, he told them both to wait for him outside. Something in his manner forced them to comply. He stood in the centre of the room, blinking his eyes, and then moved towards the cradle under the window. Prince Ludwig Ferdinand and the
Spanish woman had lost no time in having a son and it was ten months old.
He looked down for a long time at the small red face, wrinkled with sleep, in the light from the window. There was no likeness either to himself or to Otto in it; and as for Otto, he would never have the chance to gaze down at it with his solemn, beckoning stare. This much of royalty, at least, was safe.
As he left the apartment and went down the stairs, the face of Otto hung before him in the darkness like a mirror, luring him on to the latent image he knew he must not see.