PAGELLO
Long beforeMadame Sandwas 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 fromdelirium 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 bybrother 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 theocchi stupendimade 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 withocchi 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 senseby 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 withcortesi 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!