In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam.
In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. A whiskery Prussian princeling with a heavily indebted estate and a passion for landscape gardening, Pückler had come to England determined to find a wife.
This was not a romantic project, however. English women were celebrated on the continent not only for their beauty — the perpetual damp was said to do wonders for their skin — but for their prosperity. Every year the arrival of the Season brought with it, like a plague of flying ants, a host of obscurely gazetted European noblemen in search of fat dowries.
Pückler was one of them. He came into his inheritance after a somewhat rackety youth — a bundle survives among his personal papers marked ‘Drafts of old love letters to be re-used as appropriate’ — and he married Lucie Countess Pappenheim, a stout widow nine years his senior.
The relationship between Pückler and Lucie is the really interesting one. There doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of sexual feeling between them. Pückler preferred slender teenage girls, as he demonstrated by seducing her 17-year-old ward Helmina shortly after they married. But they were devoted to one another. He called Lucie Schnucke, meaning ‘lambkin’, and she called him Lou, possibly from loup for ‘wolf’ or filou for ‘rascal’. They were also devoted to his family estate, Muskau. Pückler dreamed of landscaping its grounds, but was in danger of losing the whole estate if he couldn’t clear the debts.
The idea seems to have come from Lucie: they’d get a divorce, Pückler would go to England and marry a docile heiress, and once his new bride was safely back in Muskau and the money banked, Lucie would rejoin the household. To put up with this arrangement, the second Mrs Pückler would have to have certain qualities. He reported back to Lucie, of one prospective target:
With this wife I could be sure of being able to do as I pleased; she is one of those charming, naturally graceful creatures, more or less without a thought of their own, and with these qualities she would submit obediently and unreservedly to a superior mind. […] You would soon come to like her and not be jealous for long: she is beauty, innocence, sweetness, and grace incarnate, and no brains — what joy!
Pückler’s progress sounds, at first, as if it belongs to the universe of Henry James — with our unscrupulous hero’s ex-wife Lucie its Madame Merle. Actually, though, the Henry to whom poor old Pückler belongs is Henry Fielding. Here is a comical- sentimental catalogue of disasters and misunderstandings. Pückler’s scheming, in the marriage market of the time, hardly seems villainous, and his character is marked by a mixture of hopelessness and odd gallantry. None of the ladies in his catalogue of near-Mrs, nor any of their parents, seems to have borne him a grudge.
Pückler, though still handsome, was no longer a young man. He claimed to have forsworn dancing for sentimental reasons — to add mystique and make him look less obviously like a fortune-hunter, though, as his biographer unkindly lets slip, he was a rotten dancer anyway — and dyed his grey hair black. He acquired enemies, who spread unhelpful and largely true rumours about the real state of his marriage, and he was lampooned as ‘Prince Pickle-and-Mustard’ in the public prints.
His first English fiancée, a game old marchioness, was talked out of it by her family. Another prospective fortune was scuppered by arriviste parents who wouldn’t countenance marriage to a foreigner. One didn’t quite have the cash he hoped for, though he kept her on the back burner in case nothing else turned up. And perhaps the most promising prospect, a jewellery heiress with £200,000, turned him down flat on the grounds that he was a divorcé.
All the while — which is what makes Peter James Bowman’s sprightly and engaging book of more than anecdotal interest — Pückler’s letters to Lucie are a rich portrait, with an outsider’s candour and detachment, of the foibles and fopperies of Regency society in England. The quotes on the page really sing.
Pückler was easily diverted. He fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful German opera singer, but was dumped. He also consorted with prostitutes, got the clap and had to spend hours with his afflicted parts immersed in a hot bath. Neither of those episodes can have been much fun for Lucie — he wrote to her with thoughtless candour — but he was also gathering landscaping ideas for Muskau from England’s country houses.
These ideas looked certain to come to nothing. He was running out of time and English society had largely got his number. What finally sent him packing was getting mixed up in the attempted suicide of Napoleon’s niece. He returned to Muskau a single man.
The great comic twist is that out of this colossal failure to find a wife came the success that saved him. Pückler turned his English adventures — heavily edited so as to obscure the reason he was there in the first place — into a gossipy, comical, satirical book about European society with the knowledge of an insider but none of the reverence. Pre-publication puffs from Goethe and Heine were wangled and it became a huge bestseller.
So The Fortune Hunter has a happy ending, sort of. Fame, glory and money pour in; Muskau is completed; debts are cleared. Lucie seems to have got the bum end of the deal, though. She waited all that time for her ex-husband, and he came back empty-handed. Then, in his new role as celebrity travel writer, he took off again for five years and came back with a 17-year-old Abyssinian concubine in tow. She was the stoical type.
The blossom of romance fades, but other things endure. Pückler is now remembered in Germany as a pioneering landscape gardener, and his name lives on in Fürst-Pückler-Eis, a sort of ice-cream pudding.
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