Devereux — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (best interesting books to read txt) 📕

THE last accounts received of the Czar reported him to be at Dantzic. He had, however, quitted that place when I arrived there. I lost no time in following him, and presented myself to his Majesty one day after his dinner, when he was sitting with one leg in the Czarina’s lap and a bottle of the best eau de vie before him. I had chosen my time well; he received me most graciously, read my letter from the Regent—about which, remembering the fate of Bellerophon, I had had certain apprehensions, but which proved to be in the highest degree complimentary—and then declared himself extremely happy to see me again. However parsimonious Peter generally was towards foreigners, I never had ground for personal complaint on that score. The very next day I was appointed to a post of honour and profit about the royal person; from this I was transferred to a military station, in which I rose with great rapidity; and I was only occasionally called from my warlike duties to be intrusted with diplomatic missions of the highest confidence and importance.

It is this portion of my life—a portion of nine years to the time of the Czar’s death—that I shall, in this history, the most concentrate and condense. In truth, were I to dwell upon it at length, I should make little more than a mere record of political events; differing, in some respects, it is true, from the received histories of the time, but containing nothing to compensate in utility for the want of interest. That this was the exact age for adventurers, Alberoni and Dubois are sufficient proofs. Never was there a more stirring, active, restless period; never one in which the genius of intrigue was so pervadingly at work. I was not less fortunate than my brethren. Although scarcely four and twenty when I entered the Czar’s service, my habits of intimacy with men much older; my customary gravity, reserve, and thought; my freedom, since Isora’s death, from youthful levity or excess; my early entrance into the world; and a countenance prematurely marked with the lines of reflection and sobered by its hue,—made me appear considerably older than I was. I kept my own counsel, and affected to be so: youth is a great enemy to one’s success; and more esteem is often bestowed upon a wrinkled brow than a plodding brain.

All the private intelligence which during this space of time I had received from England was far from voluminous. My mother still enjoyed the quiet of her religious retreat. A fire, arising from the negligence of a servant, had consumed nearly the whole of Devereux Court (the fine old house! till that went, I thought even England held one friend). Upon this accident, Gerald had gone to London; and, though there was now no doubt of his having been concerned in the Rebellion of 1715, he had been favourably received at court, and was already renowned throughout London for his pleasures, his excesses, and his munificent profusion.

Montreuil, whose lot seemed to be always to lose by intrigue what he gained by the real solidity of his genius, had embarked very largely in the rash but gigantic schemes of Gortz and Alberoni; schemes which, had they succeeded, would not only have placed a new king upon the English throne, but wrought an utter change over the whole face of Europe. With Alberoni and with Gortz fell Montreuil. He was banished France and Spain; the penalty of death awaited him in Britain; and he was supposed to have thrown himself into some convent in Italy, where his name and his character were unknown. In this brief intelligence was condensed all my information of the actors in my first scenes of life. I return to that scene on which I had now entered.

At the age of thirty-three I had acquired a reputation sufficient to content my ambition; my fortune was larger than my wants; I was a favourite in courts; I had been successful in camps; I had already obtained all that would have rewarded the whole lives of many men superior to myself in merit, more ardent than myself in desires. I was still young; my appearance, though greatly altered, manhood had rather improved than impaired. I had not forestalled my constitution by excesses, nor worn dry the sources of pleasure by too large a demand upon their capacities; why was it then, at that golden age, in the very prime and glory of manhood, in the very zenith and summer of success, that a deep, dark, pervading melancholy fell upon me? a melancholy so gloomy that it seemed to me as a thick and impenetrable curtain drawn gradually between myself and the blessed light of human enjoyment. A torpor crept upon me; an indolent, heavy, clinging languor gathered over my whole frame, the physical and the mental: I sat for hours without book, paper, object, thought, gazing on vacancy, stirring not, feeling not,—yes, feeling, but feeling only one sensation, a sick, sad, drooping despondency, a sinking in of the heart, a sort of gnawing within as if something living were twisted round my vitals, and, finding no other food, preyed, though with a sickly and dull maw, upon them. This disease came upon me slowly: it was not till the beginning of the second year, from its obvious and palpable commencement, that it grew to the height that I have described. It began with a distaste to all that I had been accustomed to enjoy or to pursue. Music, which I had always passionately loved, though from some defect in the organs of hearing, I was incapable of attaining the smallest knowledge of the science, music lost all its diviner spells, all its properties of creating a new existence, a life of dreaming and vain luxuries, within the mind: it