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By Root 3390 0

it was there that people made carved chairs, porcelain, crystal and curtains, it was there that polishers, upholsterers, gardeners and the girls who made her dresses were born. Once in a modiste’s, she had asked to be shown the tailoring shop and it was so interesting to see a dozen girls cutting, tacking and fitting garments on busts. She was certain this gave them great pleasure, for the girls who took her measurements were always smiling and so anxious that the dress be well cut. And Izabela knew that in that inferior world there existed some people who happened to be unhappy. So she gave instructions that any poor person she met should be given a few złoty. Once, meeting a poor woman with a child as pale as wax at her breast, Izabela gave her a bracelet of her own, while she always bestowed sweets on beggar-children and kissed them piously. For it seemed to her that Christ might be hidden in one of these poor people, or perhaps in each one of them, and they had crossed her path so she might have the opportunity of doing a good deed.

On the whole she felt benevolent towards the people of this inferior world. The words of the Bible came to her mind: ‘thou shalt labour in the sweat of thy brow,’ and obviously they had committed some grave sin, since they were condemned to labour. Angels such as she could not but pity their fate. Such as she, whose greatest labour was that of touching an electric bell or giving an order.

Once only did that inferior world make a powerful impression upon her.

She visited an iron foundry in France one day. While travelling down from the mountains into a region of woods and fields under a sapphire sky, she saw an abyss of black smoke and white steam, and heard the dull rattling, creak and hiss of machinery. Then she saw the foundries, like the towers of medieval castles breathing flame, powerful wheels that revolved as fast as lightning, great scaffolds that moved on rails, streams of molten iron glowing white, and half-naked labourers like bronze statues with sombre expressions. Over it all was a blood-red glow, the sound of rumbling wheels, bellows panting, the thundering of hammers and impatient breathing of furnaces, and underfoot the terrified earth trembled.

Then it seemed to Izabela that she had descended from the heights of Olympus into the hopeless chasms of Vulcan, where the Cyclops were forging thunderbolts that might shatter Olympus itself. She recalled legends of rebellious giants, of the end of this splendid world of hers, and for the first time she the goddess, before whom senators and marshals bowed their heads, was afraid.

‘These are terrible people, papa,’ she whispered to her father.

He did not say a word, but pressed her arm more closely.

‘Surely they won’t harm a woman?’

‘No, not even they,’ Tomasz replied.

Then Izabela was ashamed to think she was only concerned about herself, and she hastily added: ‘If they won’t harm a woman, they won’t harm you either …’

Mr Łęcki smiled and shook his head. At the time much was being said of the coming end of the old world, and Mr Łęcki felt this particularly, for he was experiencing great difficulty in extracting funds from his agents.

This visit to the iron foundry was an important epoch in Izabela’s life. Piously she read the poem by a distant cousin of hers, Zygmunt, and thought that she had this day found an appropriate illustration to his ‘Un-Divine Comedy’. From this time on, she often dreamed at twilight that the bastions of the Holy Trinity Fortress stood on that sunlit mountain from which her carriage had driven down to the iron foundry, and that the rebel democrats had their encampment in the valley below, veiled in smoke and steam, ready to set out to storm and overthrow her beautiful world.

Only now did she realise how much she loved her spiritual homeland, where crystal chandeliers replaced the sun, carpets the earth, statues and columns the trees. This other homeland included the aristocracy of all nations, the elegance of every age and the finest blessings of civilisation.

And was all this to collapse and