CAMILLA’S FIRST AFFAIR
BY GERTRUDE HALL
Author of “What Camilla did with Her Money,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY EMIL POLLAK-OTTENDORFF
NEVER did there live a pretty woman so poor in faith as Camilla, where the protestations of her adorers were concerned.[5] It was certainly not when they professed to find her charming that she was incredulous, nor yet when they declared themselves épris. It was when they asserted for their sentiments, durability; for themselves, the same conspicuous constancy as distinguishes the north star.
Particularly during the period when she was known as Princess Elaguine, and lived in Paris, was comment made—in those circles where it is thought no shame to talk over lovely ladies—upon the ultimate inaccessibility of the princess, who was yet so ready to be courted. She liked the society of men, delighted in the atmosphere of their lively admiration, accepted their compliments as animals in the Zoo will swallow buns. But she no more reposed confidence in them than she would have reached with her hand through the bars of the wild-beast cages.
A singular case. For she was Italian, and though her eyes were cool and green, there lurked in her face somewhere—her lips, perhaps, or her eyelids, or her cheeks or chin—what physiognomist could tell?—a promise of warmth and richness that drew foolish fellows to press on and on—till they came to a barrier, beyond which she looked at them with ironical eyes which told them that, sorry for them though she was, she did not believe in them one little bit. Not one of her critics had the intelligence, probably, to guess what was at bottom of it. (Yet how common it is, when you find a person afraid of dogs, to discover that he was bitten when a child!) And far from Camilla would it have been to set them on the right scent.
The truth was, in her mind there lived the memory—quite fresh still when she chose to recall it, so deep a mark had it made—of a passage in her youth to which was referable the line of a whole life with regard to the tender passion. It was the memory, as you have guessed, of her first affair.
IT was in Florence, where she was born and brought up. They were tarradiddles which she told later about her origin: that her mother was a Roman marchesa and her father court physician to Victor Emmanuel II, and that her name was Cordez. Her name, as a matter of truth, was Bugiani. Her mother had at one time waited on customers in a village osteria, at another had been a house-servant. The man who called her daughter was something or other at the railway-station. Her aunt was a cook. Her sister Bianca worked in a little shop on Porta Rossa at making straw-braid into hats, with other gossiping little women who ate their simple lunch out of a piece of newspaper. Her brother Olindo was apprenticed to a gardener.