Long before _Madame Sand_ was produced at the Duke of York’s Theatre more
had been written all the world over about the trip of George Sand and
Alfred de Musset to Venice in 1833-4 than about the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire or the campaigns of the Great War. A heavy fine should
be imposed on any one who needlessly adds a drop of ink to the vast mass
of controversy that has raged round that subject, and I promise to leave
the main story, which must be known to every adult man and woman in the
two hemispheres, severely alone. But there is a subordinate actor in
the story, to whom injustice, I think, has been done on all hands, and
whose case it would be an act of the merest decency to reconsider. I mean
Pietro Pagello.
His case was prejudiced from the first by the dissemination of an
atrocious libel. When a patient alleges scandalous behaviour between
doctor and nurse, it is well to be sure of the witness’s mental
condition. Now Musset was suffering, not, as Pagello politely put it,
from typhoid fever, but from _delirium tremens_. This would at once
disqualify him as an eye-witness. But the fact is Musset himself never
made the allegation; the story was spread about by brother Paul, a
terrible liar. Pagello had been called in first to attend not Alfred, but
George herself, for severe headache. Half a century later he remembered
that her lips were thick and ugly, and her teeth discoloured by the
cigarettes she was perpetually smoking; but she charmed him by her
wonderful eyes: _per gli occhi stupendi_. After they had both nursed
Alfred to convalescence the _occhi stupendi_ made short work with the
young doctor. In the common phrase, George threw herself at him. People
who don’t study the facts talk of the new arrangement as though it were
a betrayal; but observe that it was of the highest convenience not only
to George, but to Alfred. It enabled the poet to get away alone to
Paris with an easier conscience; it provided George, compelled to stay
on in Venice to complete her tale of “copy,” with a protector. But we
are in 1834, with romanticism at its most ecstatic and “sublime.” So
the convenience of the situation is draped in phrases and bedewed with
tears. Alfred shed them with enthusiasm, while Pagello swore to him
to look after the happiness of George. “Il nostro amore per Alfredo”
was Pagello’s delightful way of putting it. A singular trio! Evidently
poor Pagello was George’s slave. What was a poor young Venetian medical
gentleman to do? A foreign lady with _occhi stupendi_ (and a habit of
writing eight or nine hours a day on end) handed over to him, with
tears of enthusiasm, by a grateful patient! Anyhow, Pagello showed his
sense by removing the lady to cheaper lodgings. When Venice grew a
little too hot he escorted her on a trip to Tirol, taking her on the way
(such were the pleasing manners of the time) to see his father! He was
a little short with me, says the son, but he received her with _cortesi
ospitalita_, and the pair discussed French literature. Mr. Max Beerbohm
should draw the picture.
It has been the fashion to dismiss Pagello as a mere nincompoop. But
if he had been that, a George Sand would not have cared a rap for him,
and he would have been terrified by George. As it was, when she asked
him to take her back to Paris he “chucked” his practice and cheerfully
parted with his pictures and plate to provide funds for the journey. He
was, at any rate, a disinterested lover; but the truth seems to be he
was not passionate enough for George. “Pagello is an angel of virtue,”
she writes to Musset, “he is so full of sensibility and so good ...
he surrounds me with care and attention.... For the first time in my
life I love without passion.... Well, for my part, I feel the need to
suffer for some one. Oh! why couldn’t I live between the two of you and
make you happy without belonging to either?” But by the time she had
reached Paris she was already thinking of belonging to Alfred again, and
“door-stepped” Pagello. Her Parisian set, of course, made fun of him.
The poor gentleman’s situation was, indeed, sufficiently awkward. But it
is not true, as it is the fashion to say, that he was “sent straight
back.” George, who had retreated to Nohant, invited him there, but he had
the good sense to decline. She was afraid he might be in want of money,
and wrote to a friend, “he will never take it from a woman, even as a
loan.” She, at any rate, knew he was a gentleman. But the Italians, with
all their romantic traditions, are a practical people. Finding himself
adrift in Paris, Pagello remembered his profession, and stayed on as
long as he could to study surgery, with such substantial result that he
subsequently became one of the chief surgeons in Italy, and gained a
special reputation, it is said, in lithotomy. Thus may a fantastic love
adventure be turned to good account.
I take my facts about Pagello from Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s “George Sand”
(1899-1912), the one authentic and exhaustive work on the subject. He
died, over 90 years of age, after the first two of her three volumes were
published, and what one likes most of all about him is that, till very
near the end of his life, he kept his mouth tight shut about the great
adventure of his youth. A mere nincompoop could not have done that. In
1881 the Italian Press happened to be reviving the story of the Venetian
amour, and they succeeded in getting from Pagello a few of George’s
letters and some modest, manly reminiscences. He had no piquant scandals
to disclose, and merely showed, quite unconsciously, that he was far the
most decent of the strange three involved in the Venetian adventure.
As for the Pagello of the new play, the American dramatist has made him
just a tame, hopelessly bewildered donkey. He is provided with a fierce
Italian sweetheart, to bring him back safe, if scolded, from Paris to
Italy. He lives freely on other people’s money, George’s—when it isn’t
Alfred’s. After all, it doesn’t matter, for all the people of the play
are mere travesties of the originals, turned (in the published book
of the play, though not at the Duke of York’s) into modern American
citizens. Buloz talks of “boosting” his subscriptions. Alfred says George
is “like a noisy old clock that won’t stop ticking.” Oh dear!