Source:
Christina of Sweden, pages 70 to 74, by Ada Harrison, 1929
The biography:
3
CHRISTINA UNCROWNED: II
A PHASE FOLLOWED in the queen's history which was an acute repetition of several earlier ones. The shoe pinched worse; she made a more desperate effort to straighten her affairs; she once again forced her way unprofitably into Sweden, and was exiled in Hamburg for a longer and more intolerable time. Yet these two years of stereotyped events are the most interesting of all to posterity, for to them belongs a mass of Christina's correspondence with Azzolino, which remains for us the truest and most moving record of herself.
Christina was at Hamburg from 1666 to 1668. She was kept so long, not only because of the confusion of her affairs, but because she waited on and on for the Swedish Diet to be called. She expected that the assembly, when it met, would settle the question of the continuance of her pension. It would also settle various questions about Pomerania and her other possessions, which depended upon the trend of international affairs.
Through the good fortune of her letters being preserved to us, we see Christina very closely during these two years. It is from her point of view a disadvantageous moment for scrutiny. She was, as it were, suspended, a condition which suited her worse than any. She was in exile, cut off from society, full of feverish activity but without an occupation. She was consumed by the knowledge that she was wasting her time and her wits. Chafing against circumstances, in her loneliness and isolation she was at times so wretched that she actually confessed it; and with all she was ready as ever for chimerical follies and ill-timed gallopadings in the face of convention and sense.
Yet, in spite of everything, this inglorious moment shows Christina in some ways at her best. She had certain gifts which flourished marvellously in adversity. These were her strength, her vigorous perseverance, her pathetic but admirable conviction that if she kept on tilting at the world it must eventually go down before her. The shallow qualities of pride and self-esteem were in Christina so magnified as to be touched with grandeur.
There was little that was cheerful in the queen's stay at Hamburg. Her chief occupation was the attempt to straighten out her financial affairs, from which investigation never drew forth any delights. Though so hopeless with money itself, Christina was admirably conscientious at accounts. With Texeira she spent long hours, plunging deeper and deeper into the figures; and the result, when arrived at, was no more encouraging than usual. The remainder of her indefatigable working hours was passed in keeping up strenuously with the affairs of Europe, and in writing letters to any person who might have the remotest connection with her case. At this time there was something feverish about her interest in affairs. She must fling herself upon large outside issues, to reassure herself that she was still part of them, and that the stay at Hamburg was an accident that would quickly pass. A shuddering seized her when she thought of herself planted here. Her court was small and uninteresting. There was no amusing society in the town and no prospect of any arriving. She had never loved the Germans, and surrounded by them at close quarters she found them more than ever sots.
In these circumstances she hung upon the post-bag from Italy with veritable passion. If a letter came from Azzolino[,] she was saved; if not[,] she was plunged into sickening emptiness and despair. It was not only that she clung to him and longed to hear from him personally; it was also that a letter from him assured her that she still was part of the world, and not forgotten as well as exiled.
For her own part it was unthinkable that she should ever miss a post. She wrote once a week, which was as often as the courier made the journey, but sometimes having finished her letter in the morning of post-day, she would fly to pen and paper again in the afternoon to ease her bosom of a little more of the stuff that seemed so urgent. On her journey from Rome to Hamburg, made in such forced stages that she dropped some members of her suite exhausted in her wake, she found time to write thirteen letters in thirty days.
Azzolino, as was inevitable, grew colder under this persecution. He could not be enraptured with Christina's protestation: '*Je n'ai jamais manqué à une occasion à vous écrire*.' He punished her sometimes by silence and sometimes by hard words, which grew harder as she fed painfully on them until next post-day.
The tone of this correspondence, in spite of the ardour which every now and again entered it, is on the whole, sober. Nor is it particularly attractive. The letters deal almost entirely with business, which Christina transmitted to Azzolino with her own abnormal conscientiousness. We read in close detail of how her agents were progressing in Sweden, of what she wrote to the French ambassador, of every ramification of European politics that could possibly affect herself. These letters are not the letters of a couple with whom passion is uppermost; and yet the personal note, when it is allowed to creep in, is so poignant, although quiet, as to make clear that, from Christina's side at least, all the feeling that she had to offer had been expended. The familiar pathos of the lover who gives more is accustomed in her case by the fact that she was so unused to submission. 'It is the single, constant truth', she wrote, 'that all your cruelties and your ill-treatment of me will never change the steadfast, constant *amitié* that I will bear you till I die.' And later: 'Your repentance is as grateful as your injustice was cruel. But do as you will with me. ...' Like a true lover, she accepts everything, and has given up expecting justice. 'Only', she pleads, at the end of a long letter of affairs, 'think of me a little tenderly.'
In a little while she has arrived at that subservience which almost invites cruelty:
'I have told the marquis to tell you my sentiments. I beg you to receive them as the last efforts of a friendship which you have always esteemed lightly, and to speak your true mind. If this friendship is a burden to you, I avow that I will seek death to relieve you of it, for death would be more bearable than the scorn and indignity you put upon me.'
Again, later, she protests that he must not ask pardon. She will bear everything. Only let him remember that she is not made of marble or steel.
We do not know what Azzolino replied. Being the legatee of all Christina's private possessions, he inherited her papers, and was at pains to destroy every vestige of his own share in this correspondence. Most probably, from the comfort of Rome, he dealt with her protestations impatiently and lightly. But he entered thoroughly into the business side. Like Christina[,] he had a passion for business. He enjoyed his intimacy with a queen, and being a cardinal, and so deeply involved, as a potential pope-maker, in the political game, he was anxious to pull as many strings as came under his hand. He ran Christina thoroughly. It was he who sent her on this mission to Sweden, and urged her to prosecute it, and it was he who attempted, meanwhile, to set her on the throne of Poland.
Above: Kristina.
Above: Cardinal Decio Azzolino.
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