Poland by James A. Michener
The expedition entered the city on a broad thoroughfare that had always been known under the curious name of Krakow Suburb, since it had formed in even the oldest times the initial stage of the highway leading to that southern city. As they traversed this boulevard they could see the imposing palaces of the Radziwills and the Czartoryskis, but as they approached the center of the beautiful city they came on that fine street Senatorska, where the Lubonski palace, a modest affair of marble and pyracantha bushes thirty feet high, stood beside the Lubomirski palace, a tremendous affair, and across from the stately Mniszech home, the most severe and imposing of them all. When Feliks saw the latter palace, where Elzbieta would be waiting for her wedding, he felt his heart contract, and he wanted to dash across the muddied roadway and throw himself at her feet, pleading with her to reconsider. Instead, even as he looked longingly at the Mniszech palace, he entered the portals of Count Lubonski’s Warsaw home.
Although it appeared modest when seen from Senatorska Street, each of its three fine stories had thirty rooms, more or less, and this was customary in the homes of the leading magnates, for they liked to have in their Warsaw complement a dozen or so of the penurious gentry beholden to them, and these petty knights brought with them their wives and children, so that a palace might have as permanent guests some sixty or seventy persons, each of whom was obligated to serve the owner when he put in an appearance at the capital. In time of war, of course, the men would be called on to serve in the count’s private army, fighting on whichever side the magnate had elected to support.
Feliks had settled into his modest room, for he had no wife to justify an apartment, for only a few minutes when a messenger from the palace next door arrived with a summons: ‘The Princess Lubomirska invites you to join her in a visit of inspection to the Palais Princesse,’ and when Feliks asked what that might be, the messenger smiled broadly and said: ‘You’ll see.’
Feliks was delighted to see Lubomirska again and was honored when she stepped forward almost eagerly to kiss him on the cheek. She was in her Warsaw costume now, fur decorating her dress, with jewels in her silvery hair and an imperious and condescending smile on her lips. ‘I have such a delightful surprise for you, Feliks. Climb into my carriage.’
She directed her driver to go eastward on Senatorska toward the castle, where her arch-enemy King Stanislaw August still reigned, as she said, ‘clinging on by his fingernails,’ but when the six horses were almost entering the castle compound, the driver pulled them smartly to the left, and Lubomirska with her young companion entered that most charming of the Polish streets, Miodowa, the Street of Sweet Nectar. Not big and broad, like Senatorska, nor obviously important, like Krakow Suburb, it ran for only one very long block, but it contained some of the loveliest buildings in Warsaw, churches and bishops’ palaces and the residences of those new millionaires who mattered in the city now.
As they rode, Lubomirska explained to Feliks who lived where and who commanded what authority, but as her carriage approached the end of Miodowa she gripped his arm and cried with the pleasure of a little girl: ‘See what the Mniszechs have done for their child!’ And on a plot of ground newly landscaped with the shrubs and flowers of spring, she showed him what was already called the Palais Princesse, a little marble building of exquisite taste, sitting back from the street, each window, each decoration balanced by another, as charming a small palace as all of Europe could provide.
‘What a beautiful wedding present for a beautiful child!’ she cried as she pointed out its various perfections. ‘Quick, we must slip inside.’
The hurried building of the palasis, which would always be called by its French name, had muddied Miodowa so that Lubomirska’s coachman had to carry her to the entrance and then come back for Feliks lest he muddy his boots. Once at the doorway to the palais, Lubomirska assumed command, and with grand gestures, entered the little jewel and started describing its quiet glories: ‘See how everything balances, a room here, a room there, the piano here where it will echo well, the harp over here where we’ll be able to see the player.
She led him to each of the floors, expostulating on what a superb job ‘those heavy peasants, those bearded Mniszechs’ had done, and in a small room on the third floor they found Elzbieta sewing on a piece of gold-threaded fabric. ‘Darling child! No one told me you were here!’ Lubomirska engulfed the bride-to-be in her arms, then pushed her toward Feliks with a gracious introduction: ‘This is my young friend Feliks Bukowski, who pertains to Count Lubonski, your new father-in-law.’
Neither Elzbieta nor Feliks acknowledged any previous acquaintanceship; they bowed; he took her hand gravely when she extended it and said: ‘I wish you much happiness, Panna Elzbieta.’
‘As do I!’ Lubomirska cried enthusiastically, kissing her robustly, and with that they withdrew, but when the visitors had descended to the second floor, where they inspected a barely furnished salon, Feliks fell into a chair, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Lubomirska, unable to guess what had assailed her young friend, drew a chair beside him and took his hands. ‘What is it, Feliks?’ And he burst forth with an account of his love for Elzbieta, and their sleigh ride, and their kisses on the battlements of the frontier castle.
‘Pani Izabella, what shall I do? She is my life.’
‘And she should be. I would to God that I were she, at her age, with her beauty.’ She gripped his hands tightly and said with a kind of grim determination: ‘I was, too. I really was, Feliks. Maybe not with her striking beauty, but at seventeen, when I was supposed to marry Poniatowski, I was an important young woman with a strong mind and a good character.’ He could feel her hands tightening about his as she said: ‘And I was scorned as few girls ever have been. Now I move from palace to palace, from country to country, and watch that silly man who scorned me slip down and down to an infamous conclusion.’
She dropped his hands and sat with hers folded severely in her lap. ‘I could have saved him, Feliks. Jan Sobieski was a great king because he had a great wife, that Frenchwoman. Stanislaw Poniatowski could have been a great king if he’d had character and support. But he doomed himself when he elected easier routes.’
She left her chair and displayed profound distress as she stamped about the room. ‘He doomed himself, and I shall do everything within my power to speed that doom. He is strangling in his castle over there, and where is Catherine to help him now?’ She laughed. ‘Help him? She leads the three eagles who attack his liver.’
‘Why do you hate him so?’ Feliks asked when the storm subsided. ‘I don’t hate Elzbieta. I seem to love her even more.’
‘You’re not a Czartoryski,’ she said. ‘I am, and I am cursed with tremendous pride.’
‘Are you working with the others … to destroy Poland, I mean?’
‘What others?’
‘At Niedzica, in Hungary … they gathered like vultures. Mniszech for Russia, Lubonski for Austria, Baron von Eschl for Prussia …’
‘Were they at Niedzica?’
‘They were. For two weeks at least.’
‘And had they maps?’
‘They did.’
‘And you guessed what they were up to?’
‘I did. Count von Starhemberg came up from Vienna to speed things.’
‘And what did you think, little spy, that they were doing?’
‘They were preparing the final assault on Poland.’
‘That is exactly what they were doing, little spy. You’re a clever lad, and now we must take the necessary steps to protect your future in this time of change.’
She drew her chair close to his and said: ‘I love a lad who Can weep for a lost lady. Feliks, we must find you a wife.’ Before he could respond, she said with that striking realism which marked all she did: ‘We must find you a wife with money, Feliks. All you have to offer is a good appearance and a respectable name. To that you must add money if you are to survive in the new Poland.’
‘The Mniszechs laughed at me when I wanted to marry
She astonished him by saying bluntly: ‘So also would I, had you come courting my daughter. No magnate of serious importance is going to accept you into his family. Poland has a thousand lads like you, young, good-looking, two horses and a historic name. Feliks, in the grand design you are nothing, and you had better realize that cruel fact.’
He gasped at the severity of her analysis, but when she hammered at him: ‘Do you acknowledge that what I say is true?’ he had to answer: ‘Yes. But what shall I do?’
‘Money is everything. And how shall you find money?’ As she uttered this harsh summary of his situation she indicated with a sweep of her right hand the immense sums the Mniszechs must have spent to build this little palais, this flawless salon. ‘Feliks, tell me, where are you going to find the money?’ Again she intercepted his answer: ‘Only by marriage to the daughter of some rich merchant.’
When he protested that he had no desire to humiliate himself by marrying a townsperson, she became impatient: ‘Whom are you to choose, Pan Feliks? You can’t marry into a magnate’s family. And you mustn’t just drift along, marrying the daughter of some petty gentry as impoverished as yourself. Your fathers always did that, and where did it get them?’
This brutal question had only one answer; Bukowski men had never made brilliant marriages, and as a consequence they lived in penury, obligated to do whatever the various Counts Lubonski directed, and it looked as if they must do so interminably unless Feliks could find himself a girl with money.
In the gathering darkness the Princess Lubomirska instructed the young man she had once said she wished were her son: ‘There is in Warsaw a wealthy merchant of tested character. I like him, always have. His name is Orzelski and he has a daughter of your age named Eulalia. He is rich enough to hope for her marriage with a young man of nobility. You’re poor enough to hope for marriage with an heiress. I think we should visit this Orzelski.’ And without allowing Feliks to object, she led him down the stairs of the Palais Princesse, which would now hold his beloved, and out to her waiting carriage, where she was again lifted over the mud. ‘We shall go to Orzelski’s.’
Gustaw Orzelski conducted a large establishment that imported goods from St. Petersburg, Paris, Vienna and London, sending in return the lumber and wheat of Poland, and since he had served as banker for many of those with whom he conducted his negotiations, he had been able to amass a respectable fortune. Princess Lubomirska, of course, had met him only at his place of business, a large and handsome store on a street parallel to Miodowa, and it was there that she went with Feliks.
‘This is my dear and trusted young friend Feliks Bukowski, of good family, who has come to court your daughter.’ Orzelski, now in his fifties, bowed low to the princess and offered a respectful but limited nod to Feliks. Then, with the boldness which characterized Lubomirska in all her negotiations, she said: ‘I think we three should drive directly to your home, Orzelski, because these things do not wait.’
‘But it wouldn’t be fair to Eulalia …’
‘Send your carriage on ahead. Right now. To warn her. You ride with us.’ And it was she who dispatched the Orzelski footmen with instructions that Panna Eulalia was to present herself within the quarter-hour in her own drawing room.
During the tense ride to the Orzelski home, a large house but not a palace, on Krakow Suburb, Lubomirska spoke forcefully: ‘I think God must have ordained it that my Feliks should meet your Eulalia. These two young people need each other … desperately … a union made in heaven.’
‘But, Princess, I’ve just met this young man, and he hasn’t even seen my daughter.’
‘True, but sometimes things are arranged in heaven, and this is one of them.’ She would allow no further discussion. ‘What a splendid little palace the Mniszechs have put together for their daughter. Have you seen it, Orzelski?’ He said that he had supplied the furniture from Paris: ‘And very good it was, too. Also the crystal hangings in the salon.’
‘I didn’t notice them,’ Lubomirska said.
‘For good reason. We don’t install them till tomorrow.’
When they reached the Orzelski home the two men were perspiring, one more nervous than the other, and as Eulalia moved forward to greet them Princess Lubomirska understood why, for as she was to write to a confidante: ‘The unfortunate girl stepped clumsily at us, fat and red and positively oafish, and my heart wept for Feliks, but she was the only young woman available with the proper amount of money, so we had to accelerate things lest she fall into the hands of another.’
It was a painful meeting, Eulalia blushing like a wounded beet, Feliks barely able to hide his shocking disappointment, and Orzelski obviously dismayed to realize that he and Eulalia were not to find with Lubomirska’s help a member of the magnate class, to which they had rather fatuously aspired. Tea was served in the English manner, with china from France, and Eulalia played rather more heavily on the piano than her Viennese professor would have approved. There was no mother, she having died some years previously, but there was a younger daughter as florid and awkward as her sister.
It was a doleful meeting and Lubomirska knew it, so when the two girls were excused, with Eulalia almost bolting from the room, she became angry and sat the two men before her as if they were schoolchildren:
‘You, Orzelski, are disappointed that you are unable to find a young man from a family of greater distinction. You, Feliks, behaved shamefully, showing your disappointment in not finding a rich girl of greater beauty. Who are you, pray tell me honestly, Pan Feliks, to demand anything? What have you accomplished either in acts or wealth that entitles you? I am disgusted with you, that you should humiliate a young girl in that brutal way. I am disgusted with you!
‘My dear friends, both of you. Families are like birds in the sky. Yours, Orzelski, is flying upward … wealth … respect … hopes. Yours, Bukowski, is swooping downward … no money … no propects … only honor … historic pride. [Here she moved her now-heavy arms beautifully in the air, making crisscrossing patterns.] You are caught in a moment when your two paths cross, one brief moment in infinity. Orzelski, Bukowski occupying the same fragment of the heavens. You will never cross paths again. You will never again share this mystical moment.
‘Now I want you to listen. Orzelski, if you marry your daughter to this young man, you gain esteem and the possibility of his promotion to almost any position in the government, whatever it’s to be. Bukowski, if you marry this wealthy girl, your son can aspire to the daughter of a major family and his son might marry the daughter of a magnate. This is a golden opportunity for each of you.
‘Feliks, I want you to go right now to whatever room Panna Eulalia sits in, crying her heart out, and I want you to ask her if she will walk with you tomorrow, and you are to smile, and kiss her hand, and tell her that you shall await tomorrow with joy … with joy, do you hear?’
She pushed him from the room and sat talking with Orzelski about his last purchasing trip into Russia and about how he would conduct himself if Poland were ultimately destroyed; he judged that whoever took over would require business affiliations, and he was prepared to provide them.
Feliks did walk with Eulalia the next day, and before the week was out he and Eulalia met with Orzelski and Princess Lubomirska, who said: ‘When a young man like Bukowski has no father, he having died with great heroism in a ridiculous cause, some older person must serve as parent, and I am proud to do so. I want the wedding to be held in my palace, for I have grown to love this young fellow and wish him well.’
It was arranged that the Mniszech-Lubonski wedding would take place on Tuesday and the Orzelski-Bukowski on Thursday, and they were the highlights of the fading winter season, one brighter and more lavish than the other, and fortunately, Princess Lubomirska was never told of the curious behavior of her protégé on the night of his wedding, but it was known among her servants:
‘The wedding ended in our palace at three, and a procession
That very afternoon Jan of the Beech Trees came to the Orzelski home with secret information that an officer of the cavalry wished to see Feliks, immediately, so the confused young man allowed himself to be taken to a coffeehouse near the cathedral where a group of fiery young men were speaking in hushed voices, which often rose into daring cries: ‘Kosciuszko has appeared on the streets of Krakow, back from France and America, and he says that Poland can defend herself.’
‘Is he to be trusted?’
‘None better. A true patriot.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Nearly fifty, I suppose.’
‘Too old! Too old! He’ll start something, then quit at the first cannon fire.’
‘Not Kosciuszko.’
‘Has he a chance? I mean a serious possibility?’
‘We can win!’
Feliks was impressed by the structure of this group: three sons of magnates, half a dozen lesser gentry like himself, four or five sons of merchants like Orzelski, and a handful of students from no discernible background. Seven were cavalry officers, the most eager of the lot, and all were of the opinion that patriots must move south immediately to support what appeared to be a major uprising.
The only question Feliks voiced was one of the most profound: ‘Whom are we fighting against?’ and one of the leaders said: ‘Against them all.’
He learned, however, that the real battle, if one developed, would be against Russia, whose Empress Catherine was uttering bold threats. ‘Can we defeat Russia?’ one of the cavalrymen asked, and another answered: ‘Prussia will move in to help us, you can be sure.’ Feliks, having overheard the conversations at Niedzica, was not at all sure.