Her portrait is not complete without an account of her strangest habit, due partly to the sleepless nights of a lifetime of illness, and partly to the fear of ghosts instilled in her by governesses when she was a girl. She was never able to sleep until the coming on of dawn. She feared to be alone; toward one in the morning she could be found urging her last callers to stay a little longer; c'est l'heure du champagne, she would say, offering them that untimely inducement. When finally they went away she would devote the rest of the night to music, for like the German princes of the Eighteenth Century she maintained her own troup of musicians.
These sessions before dawn were not vaguely and sentimentally musical; they were to the last degree eclectic. In one night she would hear all the sonatas of Skriabin or the marches of Medtner; in one night both volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavichord; all the Handel fugues for organ; six Beethoven trios. Gradually she won away from the more easily appreciated music altogether and cultivated only what was difficult and cerebral. She turned to music that was interesting historically and searched out the forgotten rivals of Bach and the operas of Grétry. She paid a group of singers from the Lateran choir to sing her endless Palestrina. She became prodigiously learned. Harold Bauer would listen meekly to her directions on phrasing Bach—he averred that she had the only truly contrapuntal ear of the age—and the Flonzaleys acceded to her request to take certain pages of Lœffler a little faster.
In time I encountered a number of people who for one reason or another were unable to sleep between midnight and dawn, and when I myself tossed sleepless or when I returned late to my rooms through the deserted streets—at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring against his feet in the darkness—I pictured to myself old Baldassare, in the Borgo, former Bishop of Shantung, Apostolic Visitor to the Far East, rising at two to study with streaming eyes the Church Fathers and the Councils, marvelling he said, at the continuous blooming of the rose-tree of Doctrine; or of Stasia, a Russian refugee who had lost the habit of sleeping after dark during her experience as nurse in the War, Stasia playing solitaire through the night and brooding over the jocose tortures to which her family had been subjected by the soldiers of Taganrog; and of Elizabeth Grier listening the length of her long shadowed room to some new work that d'lndy had sent her or bending over the score while her little troup revived the overture to Les Indes Galantes.
When we remounted the steps an hour later, then, we found the guests already arrived and awaiting their hostess. Among other privileges Miss Grier had long reserved to herself a prerogative of royalty, that of being the last arrival at one's own parties. In the hall the maître-d'hôtel gave me a note reading: Please take in Mlle de Morfontaine, a high Merovingian maiden who may invite you to her villa at Tivoli. In a few moments Miss Grier had slipped in and was greeting her guests in a hurried zigzag across the room. She was dressed after a costume-plate by Fortuny, conceived in salamander red and black. About her neck hung a rare medal of the Renaissance, much larger than any other woman would have ventured to wear.
As this woman wanted to be in a position to hear every word spoken at her table Rome had long had good reason to complain of the crowded arrangements of her dinners; we were packed together like the hurried diners at Modane. But she had still other conventions to challenge: she discussed the food; she reversed the direction of conversation from the right to the left hand at the least convenient opportunities; she talked to the servants, chattily; she shifted the conversation from French to English or Italian capriciously; she referred to guests who had been invited but had not been able to come. One suddenly became aware that she was not eating the courses that were served to us. She began with a little bowl of breadcrumbs and walnuts; to this she added later—while we confronted a faisan Souvaroff dressed with truffles and foie gras and graced with that ultimate dark richness which it is the privilege of Madeira to confer on game—an American cereal, soaked in hot water and touched with butter. Nor could she restrain herself from teasing her guests in a dangerous way, and with almost inspired precision: a political Duke on his dull speeches; Mrs. Osborne-Cady on the career as a concert-pianist that she had sacrificed to a more than usually disappointing home-life. For a moment at the beginning of the meal her electric eyes paused at my place and she began to murmur ominously, but thinking better of it she ordered the servant to offer me some more œufs cardinal adding with a sort of insolence that they were the only œufs cardinal that one could eat in Europe and that Mémé (the elder Princess Galitzine) was a little fool to vaunt her chef, who had received his training in railway-stations, etc., etc.
The high Merovingian maiden at my left was Mademoiselle Marie-Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine, daughter of Claude-Elzéar de Morfontaine and Christine Mézières-Bergh; her grandfather Comte Louis Mézières-Bergh had married Rachel Krantz, the daughter of the great financier Maxi Krantz and had been the French ambassador to the Vatican in 1870. She was then, excessively rich, for she owned, they said, more shares in the Suez Canal than the Rothschilds: She was tall, large-limbed and bony, without somehow being too thin. Her high white face, framed between two carnelian ear pendants, recalled some symbolical figure in a frieze of Giotto, out of drawing, but radiating gaunt spiritual passions. She had a hoarse voice and a rapt manner, and for the first ten minutes said many foolish things because her mind was afar off; one felt vaguely that it would come around in its own time. This it presently did and with considerable impact. She outlined to me the whole Royalist movement in France. She seemed to believe as passionately in its aim as she despised its practice. There can be no king in France, she cried, until Catholicism has had a great revival there. France cannot be great save through Rome. We are Latins; we are not Goths. They are forcing alien systems upon us. Eventually we shall find ourselves, our kings, our faith, our Latin hearts. I shall see France return to Rome before I die, she added clasping her hands before her chin. I replied faintly that both the French and Italian temperaments seemed to me singularly unrepublican, whereupon she laid her long pale hand upon my sleeve and invited me to come that week-end to her villa.
You will hear the whole argument, she said. And the Cardinal will be there.
I asked which Cardinal? The pain on her face showed me that at least for the circle in which she moved there were not seventy cardinals, but one.
Cardinal Vaini, of course. The College at present is singularly free of uninteresting priests, but surely the only cardinal with learning, with distinction, with charm, is Cardinal Vaini.
I had so often encountered learning, distinction and charm, (to say nothing of piety) in the lower reaches of the Church that I was shocked to learn that these qualities were so rare higher up.