Winfried Sebald: Vertigo

Later, thinking back to that September day on the field of Marengo, it often seemed to Beyle as if he had foreseen the years which lay ahead, all the campaigns and disasters, even the fall and exile of Napoleon, and as if he had realised then that he would not find his fortune serving in the army. At all events, it was in the autumn that he resolved to become the greatest writer of all time. He did not, however, take any decisive steps towards the fulfilment of that ambition until Napoleon's empire

began to crumble, nor did he make a first real advance into the world of literature until in the spring of 1820 he wrote De l'Amour, a kind of resumé of the hopeful yet disconcerting years that had gone before.

In March 1818, Beyle, who at that period often travelled to and fro between France and Italy, as indeed he did at other times in his life, met Métilde Dembowski Viscontini at her salon in Milan. Métilde, married to a Polish officer almost thirty years her senior, was twenty-eight and a woman of great, melancholy beauty. After about a year had passed, during which time he was one of the regular visitors at the houses on Piazza delle Galline and Piazza Belgioioso, Beyle's unspoken, discreet passion was on the point of winning the affection of Métilde, when he himself, as he later admitted, dashed his hopes by committing a blunder for which he could never make amends.

Métilde had gone to Volterra to visit her two sons, who were at the monastery school of San Michele there, and Beyle, unable to endure even a few days without seeing her, followed incognito. He was simply incapable of putting out of his mind his last glimpse of Métilde, on the eve of her departure from Milan. She had bent down in the hallway of her house to adjust her footwear, and, suddenly oblivious to everything else, he had beheld, in a profound darkness, as if through drifting smoke, a crimson desert behind her. This vision left him in a kind of trance, and it was in that state that he purchased the clothing he meant to wear as a disguise. He bought a new buff jacket, dark blue breeches, black patent leather boots, a velours hat with a more than usually high crown, and a pair of green spectacles, and in this attire he sauntered about Volterra, endeavouring to catch sight of Métilde at least from a distance as often as he possibly could. At first Beyle supposed himself unrecognised, only to realise, to his still greater satisfaction, that Métilde was giving him meaningful looks. He congratulated himself on this ingenious arrangement and from time to time, to a tune of his own devising, intoned the words Je suis le compagnon secret et familier, which struck him somehow as particularly amusing. Métilde, for her part, felt compromised by Beyle's conduct, as can readily be imagined, and, when his unaccountable behaviour finally became too vexatious, she sent him a dry note that put a fairly abrupt end to his hopes as a paramour.

Beyle was inconsolable. For months he reproached himself, and not until he determined to set down his great passion in a meditation on love did he recover his emotional equilibrium. On his writing desk, as a memento of Métilde, he kept a plaster cast of her left hand which he had contrived

to obtain shortly before the débàcle — providentially, as he often reflected while writing. That hand now meant almost as much to him as Métilde herself could ever have done. In particular, the slight crookedness of the ring finger occasioned in him emotions of a vehemence he had not hitherto experienced.

In De l'Amour he describes a journey he claims to have made from Bologna in the company of one Mme Gherardi, whom he sometimes refers to simply as La Ghita. La Ghita, who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle's later work, is a mysterious, not to say unearthly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher for various lovers such as Adèle Rebuffel, Angéline Bereyter and not least for Métilde Dembowski, and that Mme Gherardi, whose life would easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence, and was merely a phantom, albeit one to whom Beyle remained true for decades. It is furthermore unclear at what time in his life Beyle made the journey with Mme Gherardi, always supposing that he made it at all. However, since there is much about Lake Garda in the opening pages of the narrative, it seems probable that some of what Beyle experienced in September 1813, when he was convalescing by the lakes of upper Italy, went into his account of the journey with Mme Gherardi.

In the autumn of 1813, Beyle was in a continuously elegiac frame of mind. The previous winter he had taken part in the terrible retreat from Russia, and afterwards had spent some time dealing with administrative business at Sagan in Silesia, where at the height of the summer he succumbed to a serious illness, during the course of which his senses were often confounded by images of the great fire of Moscow and of climbing the Schneekopf, which he had been planning to do immediately before the fever came upon him. Time after time Beyle found himself on a mountaintop, cut off from the rest of the world and surrounded by great squalls of snow driven horizontally through the tempestuous air and by the flames breaking from the roofs of burning houses.

The leave he took in upper Italy after recovering was marked by a sensation of debility and quietude, which caused him to view the natural world around him, and the longing for love which he continued to feel, in a wholly new way. A curious lightness such as he had never known took hold of him, and it is the recollection of that lightness which informs the account he wrote seven years later of a journey that may have been wholly imaginary, made with a companion who may likewise have been a mere figment of his own mind.

The narrative begins in Bologna, where the heat was so unbearable — in the early July of a year we cannot date precisely — that Beyle and Mme Gherardi decided to spend a few weeks breathing the fresher air of the mountains. Resting by day and travelling by night, they crossed the hilly country of Emilia-Romagna and the Mantuan marshes, shrouded in sulphurous vapours, and on the morning of the third day arrived in Desenzano on Lake Garda. Never in his entire life, writes Beyle, had the beauty and solitude of those waters made so profound an impression on him. Because of the oppressive heat, he and Mme Gherardi spent the evenings in a barque out on the lake, observing, during hours of unforgettable tranquillity, the most extraordinary gradations of colour as night fell. It was on one of those evenings, Beyle writes, that they talked of the pursuit of happiness. Mme Gherardi maintained that love, like most other blessings of civilisation, was a chimaera which we desire the more, the further removed we are from Nature. Insofar as we seek Nature solely in another body, we become cut off from Her; for love, she declared, is a passion that pays its debts in a coin of its own minting, and thus a purely notional transaction which one no more needs for one's fulfilment than one needs the instrument for trimming goose-quills that he, Beyle, had bought in Modena. Or do you imagine (thus, according to Beyle, she continued) that Petrarch was unhappy merely because he never knew the taste of coffee?

A few days after this conversation, Beyle and Mme Gherardi continued on their journey. Since the breezes traverse Lake Garda from north to south around midnight but from south to north in the hours before dawn, they first rode along the bank as far as Gargnano, halfway up the lake shore, and from there took a boat aboard which, as day broke, they entered the small port of Riva, where two boys were already sitting on the harbour wall playing dice.