Kate Williams Read online

  “You have sent me to a strange place,” Emma lamented to Greville. She arrived in Naples on her twenty-first birthday. Perhaps she first saw the city early in the morning as her carriage bounced through the streets, past the poor sleeping on the steps. To a girl used to London fog, the sky would have seemed inordinately bright: she could see not only the stars but also the red sparks exploding out of Vesuvius and the twinkle of the sea in the bay. Passing dilapidated Renaissance palazzos, baroque churches, and glossy shop windows, they turned into a quiet side street, Santa Maria a Cappella Vecchia. The coach slipped through the gate, and Emma and Mrs. Cadogan found themselves in the courtyard of their new home. In the dark, the Palazzo Sessa looked like a ramshackle ruin.

  Emma struggled to appear composed. Sick and disoriented after six weeks on the road, she was unhappy to find no letter from Greville awaiting her.

  You don’t know how glad I was to arrive hear the day I did, as it was my Birthday & I was very low spirited. Oh God, that day that you used to smile on me & stay at home & be kind to me, then that day I should be at such a distance, but my comfort is I shall rely on your promise & September or October I shall see you.

  Despite her homesickness, she was excited to see her old friend and admirer again and was won over by his gracious welcome. Ignoring Greville’s instructions to stow Emma in a suburban villa, he had prepared the splendid suite on the first floor reserved for his most distinguished guests. Mother and daughter were shown to their lovely quarters: a sitting room painted white with gold stars on the ceiling, two more rooms, and a luxurious bedroom with a fireplace. One window faced the Chiaia, the main promenade, and from the other they could see the sweep of bay all the way to Vesuvius.

  Emma prepared for bed with her eye trained tremulously on the volcano. Everyone expected it to erupt within a few months. In recent years, six major eruptions had killed hundreds and devastated the countryside, and Emma had a bird’s-eye view of it plotting and bubbling. At night, columns of flame the height of the mountain shot into the sky alongside exploding clouds of peacock blue or buttercup yellow lightning, covering the windowsill with ashes.2 She lay listening to the volcano’s billowing sighs and the sound of rival gangs fighting in the caverns of rock under her window, trying to ignore the creaks as Sir William paced the floorboards in his upstairs room. Her new home was much more exciting than Edgware Row, in every way.

  Next morning, there was a surprise: Sir William had a house guest, Mrs. Anne Darner, a respectable sculptress whose ornamental heads still adorn Henley Bridge over the Thames. Even though his nephew’s mistress was on his way to him as—according to Greville—a willing bedmate, William had spent March debating whether to propose to Anne. She was disconcerted by the appearance of a sexy woman of poor reputation who was nearly half her age. But Emma, since she had no idea that she had been sent as a paramour, was curious about Anne: it was her husband who had set tongues wagging at Kelly’s and the other brothels after he had lavished money on food, drink, and prostitutes before shooting himself dead.

  Flirtation with Anne had inflamed Sir William, and he fell back into his old infatuation with Emma almost immediately. “The prospect of possessing so delightfull an object under my roof soon causes in me some pleasant sensations,” Sir William wrote to his nephew on the day before Emma arrived. “You may be assured that I will comfort her for the loss of you as well as I am able.”

  “We have had company most every day since I came,” wrote Emma proudly to Greville four days after her arrival. “Sir Wm is never so happy as when he is pointing out my beauties to them.” Messengers on business, Ferdinand’s courtiers, sellers bearing fragments of vases from Pompeii, and musicians poured through the doors, along with dozens of English visitors who treated their envoy’s house as a tourist office, restaurant, and private club. Warned by Greville that “Emma’s passion is admiration,” Sir William invited his friends to praise his guest. Mrs. Damer found herself suddenly excluded from Sir William’s attentions. There was no point in fighting—he was utterly wrapped up in his darling new visitor. He was, as Emma wrote, “doing everything he can to make me happy, he as never dined out since I came hear, & endead to spake the truth, he is never out of my sight, he breakfastes, dines, supes, & is constantly by me.” Mrs. Cadogan was left alone to sort out Emma’s clothes and battle against the “fleas and lice” of which Emma complained “their is millions” infesting their first-floor rooms. Only in her early forties, a little older than Mrs. Damer, and fifteen years younger than Sir William, Mrs. Cadogan was firmly demoted. Like Greville, Sir William needed to separate Emma from her background, and he did so by treating her mother as a domestic servant.

  Emma was being treated like a princess, but she still yearned for Greville: “I am sure to cry the moment I think of you.” No coach rides, plays or operas “can make me happy, it is you that as it in your power.” Anxious that Sir William was becoming overly attentive, she begged her lover, “For my sake, try all you can to come here as soon as possible.” Sir William’s flirtations were much more intense than they had been in Edgware Row, for he was always “looking into my face, I cant stir a hand, a legg, or foot, but what he is marking as graceful & fine.” She worried that he was angling for sexual favors and made it clear she would ignore him. “I can be civil, oblidging, & I do try to make my self as agreeable as I can to him, but I belong to you, Greville, & to you only.” Everything, she wrote, “depends on seeing you” at the end of the summer. “How happy shall I be when I can once more see you, my dear, dear Greville.”

  Sir William had admitted to Greville “some anxious thoughts on the prudent management of this business,” but he was dismayed to find Emma ignorant of what he expected of her. When she begged him to send Greville money so he could travel over to collect her, he realized that it was time to tell her the truth. Overwrought at his revelation that Greville was not coming for her, Emma rushed to her writing desk. “I have had a conversation with Sir Wm. that has made me mad. He speaks half I do not know what to make of it.” She could not believe what she had heard.

  I hope happier times will soon restore you to me for endead I would rather be with you starving, than from you in the greatest splender in the world…. I will not venture myself now to wright any more for my mind & heart is so torn by different passions that I shall go mad, onely Greville, remember your promise, October. Sir Wm. says you never mentioned to him abbout coming to Naples at all…. I live but in the hope of seeing you & if you do not come to hear, lett what will be the consequence, I will come to England… Greville, my dear Greville, wright some comfort to me, pray do if you love me.

  Believing she would be gone for just a few months, Emma had arrived in Naples with only a handful of holiday clothes and without having wished good-bye to her child. Now Sir William had informed her she had no lover and no home. She shut herself in her room, wept for days, and scrawled in desperation to Greville.

  Sir William read her miserable letters.3 Shocked by her reaction and angry that Greville had lied to him and her, he eased off on the sexual advances. He accepted that he was not going to succeed (or at least not immediately) at making her his temporary mistress, and focused on enjoying her company and showing her the city he loved. He dreaded her return to England. As he wrote to his niece, Mary Hamilton, congratulating her on her recent marriage to Mr. Dickenson, “it is most terrible to live chiefly alone.” Although he teased that he had a “female visiter from England,” he admitted “it is probable the visit will not be of long duration.“4 Soon Emma convinced herself that it had all been a mistake. She decided that Greville was coming after all, and, making an effort to be cheerful, concentrated on enjoying what she thought was a short vacation.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Greatest Splendor in the World

  Naples was the third biggest city in Europe after London and Paris. About nine miles in circuit, it contained just fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, as well as hundreds of foreigners and troops of soldiers. As a bestselli
ng guidebook of the time put it, the “gay and populous” city was “one of the most agreeable places in the world to reside at.”1 Naples was a town of big-time glamour and massive spending, an eighteenth-century Las Vegas, but it was a flimsy pack of cards, built on the slenderest of economic and political props.

  Today, the Palazzo Sessa is in the wealthiest area of the city, just off the Piazza dei Martiri in Chiaia. Emma’s old home is now an exclusive residential block, near via Filangeri and via dei Mille, which houses the boutiques of international designers. Exquisite women, fingers sparkling with jewels, wander the piazza with their dogs. The road to Sir William’s house hosts Naples’s best bookshop and a few chic wine bars and is flanked by a handsome cake shop. The window bursts with elaborate confections of cream and puff pastry and chocolate and ricotta, topped with cherries or strawberries, all very like the sweet cakes full of ricotta, citrus peel, and nuts that so thrilled eighteenth-century English travelers long habituated to plum pudding. So many of the places that Emma lived are now changed entirely: Ness is a comfortable commuter village, Hawarden is a housing estate, Chatham Place, Arlington Street and Clarges Street are covered in office blocks, and Paradise Merton is a car park. Only in Chiaia are there the remnants of the luxurious life Emma led there over two hundred years ago.

  Neapolitan buildings were painted bright colors: garnet, sapphire blue, pink, and mint green. Foreign visitors sighed after the clean lines of the buildings in Rome and declared themselves disgusted by the tacky, florid excess of the palaces, churches, and the recently completed San Carlo Opera House. But the extravagant architecture suited Naples. People, noise, and color spilled out of every doorway. Even travelers from London, a city more than twice as populous, gazed openmouthed at the throngs. Unlike London, where the poor congregated in hidden slums, the Neapolitans seemed to live almost entirely outdoors. There were about 40,000 lazzaroni, the ragged unemployed who filled the streets, all fervent fans of the king and, to the horror of English visitors, rather fond of swimming and sunbathing naked.2 At the other end of society were over a hundred princes and dozens more dukes, all obsessed by, according to one commentator, “the brilliancy of their equipages; the number of their attendants, the richness of their dress, and the grandeur of their titles,” despite the hot climate.3

  The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which covered Naples and most of the area south of the city, including Sicily, had not been governed by a Neapolitan since the medieval period, ruled instead by a seemingly endless succession of foreign dynasties. Rich and poor Neapolitans alike had family histories of repression and resentment, and Ferdinand was not the monarch to bring them together. He had ascended to the throne in 1759, as an eight-year-old boy king. At the age of nearly forty, he was still a big baby, spoiled and sometimes spiteful. As Sir William’s friend and relation William Beckford observed, he needed only a “boar to stab or a pigeon to shoot” to be entirely satisfied.4 He laughed off protocol, teased his diplomats, devoted every day to hunting or fishing, and could not speak French or even correct Italian, sticking to a broad Neapolitan vernacular. Sir William sighed that his “habits of dissipation have taken such a firm root that there is little probability of his ever changing.“5 Largely ruled by his formidably intelligent wife, Queen Maria Carolina, sister of Queen Marie-Antoinette of France, he occupied himself with setting up factories to make the splendid silk and china for the palace, specifying that they must be staffed by beautiful young girls who had to be very docile, sexily casting down their eyes when he happened to visit. He and his government neglected the city’s infrastructure and hardly bothered to encourage trade. Most visitors believed the lazzaroni too idle to work, but the more astute realized that the city was utterly lacking in manufacturing industry. The poor were ruined by terrible unemployment, and the rich lost themselves in leisure.

  Neapolitans devoted their energies to socializing. During the “universaljubilee” of the camevak, the royal family threw galas almost every night, and the San Carlo theater hosted a weekly masquerade teeming with shepherdesses, princesses, nuns, and oriental queens. On one day, nobles drove along the main street pelting one another and the spectators with balls of bread and plums frosted over with sugar. Ferdinand led the bombardment, gleefully ambushing his long-suffering ministers and ambassadors with sticky fruit.6 The most famous event in carnevale was the repellent Cocagna festival. Over a few days, workers made a giant mountain of bread, grain, cakes, pasta, fruit, and vegetables, and used rope to tether freshly killed cattle and live birds and lambs to the mass, prettifying it with fountains of wine, grottoes made of fish, and rolling pastures of vegetables. Guards held off the looters. Then, when the nobles were all assembled to watch, the guards left the mountain to the hungry crowds. In the ensuing bloody frenzy, birds were torn away from their posts so ferociously that only their wings were left behind, and the people fought and crushed one another, with some even stabbed in the tumult.7 The rich spectators then returned to their palaces to enjoy a sumptuous dinner, their hunger piqued by the sight of poor women fighting over a loaf of bread. Some were sickened, but the majority enjoyed Cocagna, telling themselves that the royal family was generously allowing their subjects to satisfy their brutal desires.

  The author Laurence Sterne was entranced by Sir William’s life of nothing but parties, operas, and masquerades. Drink flowed, everybody gambled, parties broke up at around five in the morning, thousands danced in the streets on a Sunday night, and even respectable families caroused late into the night. “If a young man is wild, and must run after women and bad company, this should be done abroad,” proclaimed Dr. Johnson, and Naples was seen as the perfect place for womanizing. James Boswell admitted he chased girls unrestrainedly, his “blood inflamed by the burning climate.“8 Every gentleman who arrived in the city aimed to have an affair with one of its legendary demimondaines or even a singer or dancer from the opera.

  The English were the most eager participants in the Neapolitan parties. There were not quite the three thousand English that Stendhal later complained filled every available hotel (he had to search for five hours for a room), but there were hundreds, wandering with guides around Pompeii, bartering for vases, and fanning themselves in their carriages.9 As Sir William grumbled, “Go where you please on the continent, you are sure to find some straggling English tourists.“10 Emma’s countrymen packed hotels such as the Ville de Londres, which comforted with a stodgy full English breakfast those daring souls returning from Vesuvius.11 As one contented traveler reported, “Everybody else here might be English, and Naples has more the air of London than any place I have seen on the Continent.“12 Theaters even ran plays to please the English about the political scuffles between the Whig and Tory MPs.13 But few amusements could drag the English from their main passion: shopping. Excited by the dozens of shops piled high with everything from fine art to tacky reproductions, they stuffed their bags with jewelry and souvenirs from the new excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, snapping up statues of Hercules or busts of Augustus at rock-bottom prices. After his tour, Lord Burlington filled nearly nine hundred trunks with souvenirs. Only Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at thirty-seven the most famous author in Europe after the publication of his The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the continent’s most hardworking and cultured man, managed to resist the temptation of bargain hunting on his visit to Naples. Already developing their reputation as the world’s most determined shoppers, English travelers left the city weighed down with paintings, statues, carvings, jewelry, busts, manuscripts, and even a painter or sculptor to decorate their newly inherited mansions.

  By the time they arrived in Naples, most tourists were suffering from museum fatigue, their brows furrowed by days of trying to appreciate the treasures of Rome and Florence. After a grueling six-day “Course in Antiquities and the Arts” in Rome, Boswell happily became a “slave to sensual pleasures” in Naples.14 Even those who relished visiting the churches, buildings, and museums felt, like Goethe, uncomfortable admiring Catholic ar
t. Fortunately, everybody agreed that, apart from Titian’s Danae at the royal palace in Caserta, Naples had no worthwhile art and there was nothing to do but dance, drink, see shows, and hunt for bargains. As one jolly traveler exulted, “What is to be done at Naples, but to live and enjoy life?“15

  CHAPTER 20

  Painful Truths

  Sir William loved the Palazzo Sessa for the breathtaking view it -Jo/ commanded of the bay. A monastery until the monks were evicted by Ferdinand’s chief minister, Tanucci, the house had been given to a fellow courtier who rented out all of the southern side and most of the west to Sir William for about £150 a year. There were fifteen main rooms in the house. The envoy’s private apartments were on the second floor, as were those of his late wife, Catherine, then occupied by Mrs. Damer. Sir William’s staff had been busy in the first months of the year, dusting, tidying, and stuffing antiquities into boxes in the basement, clearing enough space to accommodate Anne Damer, Emma, her mother, and their maids. Visitors to the palazzo arrived in the antechamber and found it full of sellers and tourists. The chosen few were ushered in to wait in the gallery, where the envoy showed off his latest vases. When the paperwork became pressing, Sir William retired to the adjacent library, where his secretaries, Smith and Oliver, were busily planning parties and answering invitations. Perhaps the most exciting novelty for Emma and Mrs. Cadogan was the proper WC (the waste simply flowed into the bay). When Emma arrived, her host was attempting to convert the upper floors into one large room. After months of arguing with workmen and searching for the right materials (he had a particularly tedious hunt for the perfect window), as well as spending nearly $6,000, he transformed his room into one of the must-sees of the city. At the corner was a circular tower, half of which was a large bow window which curved around, giving his guests a fabulous view over the bay almost as far as Sorrento. He added a backdrop of mirrors across the other wall, so Vesuvius was doubly reflected. Dazzled by the view, the painter Wilhelm Tischbein felt as if he was sitting “on the crest of a cliff above sea and earth.” When Goethe visited, he was delighted by the rooms “furnished in the English taste,” praising the view of Capri, Pasillipo, and the wonderful view of the coast. He decided “probably nothing comparable could be found in the whole of Europe.“1