The Cardinal's Snuff-Box by Henry Harland (1900)

Never has a romance been a candidate for, yet in my experience, considering a reprint, literally a chocolate-box cover. Until now. This is the one. It could also take one of those hypercoloured, incredibly detailed cigar-box illustrations. That's the sort of book this is. Rich veins of deep atmosphere-accentuation, but also the sense of unreality and idealised simplicity. It's a plain-sailing story of a writer who has been captivated by a woman seen only fleetingly a few times - she has become the keystone of his imagination. His works appear under a pseudonym, Felix Wildmay, and he is so inspired by her that she becomes the central motif of one called A Man of Words, his most successful. He is a few years later holidaying in Italy and takes a cottage on a grand estate. To his astonishment, his woman is revealed as the owner. She is a widow and a duchessa. The landscape all around glows and hums in a phenomenally staged manner, mists employed to dull purple vistas, searing sunlight to sharpen intense greens, different points of the topography showing up, or dimming down, in a kind of poetic ecstasy. She reads his book, but doesn't know it's him of course. He thinks he's 'safe' from any interpretation she might put on it, and claims to be a friend of the author, explaining the background to the story as his friend's experience. She finds out secretly that he is the author, but doesn't realise that she is the main character. They try to artfully play each other, without realising what they're playing with. He feels he can never reveal that it's him and about her, because she's a 'high-up' and wouldn't have him (of course, he's a gentleman, but still well beneath her, he feels). She's also a Catholic, and he's not. She feels that he's just covering his personal skin in a game in which she's just an onlooker, and finds it amusing. Then a chance reference from a friend suggests that she may indeed be the subject, which gives her a serious jolt. So much so that she is cool with him at their next meeting, from uncertainty and apprehension, rather than dislike or surety. But he takes this badly, of course, and there is a frost, because he thinks that she may have become fond of him and then rejected the idea because he's not one of her Catholic fold. He still has no idea that she knows he is the author of the book, which she has found fascinating, so assumes her motivations are purely based on him aside from it. His comical, old-Italian-woman servant gets ill as an interlude at this time, and they are parted for a good while through the pressure of his being part of the team looking after her, and the feeling that maybe this frost is permanent. Of course, this is a romantic story, so they finally achieve a rapprochement in her garden, on a morning of suitably pointed dimmed hues and lush drama of terrain. The cardinal's snuff-box of the title is one owned by the duchessa's uncle, who stays in her castle for much of the story, on holiday from clerical duties in the Vatican. Once the cardinal loses it, and returning the lost item is an excuse for him to visit her. A second time she hides it in his garden when he's not there, in the hope that he might repeat the gesture. There is also a strain in it, not profoundly observed but patent, of 'love as a means of conversion', where his quite agnostic Protestantism is altered, through the power of the emotion, to a rich fulfilment of the Catholic right way - a clearing of the path. This is a bit awful, but not pressed. It is all decorously entertaining, with, as may be imagined, an almost fabular tincture. But one strange, caustic thing in the last chapter provides an extraordinary contrast. The duchessa utters some very strong anti-semitic statements when discussing how the castle could have been a hotel owned by Jewish people if she hadn't interceded and purchased. Now, Jew-suspecting / -accusing / -disliking statements are not that rare in literature of this time - one would need to read very carefully indeed not to come across them. So that's not surprising, or, really, unexpected in general. But to have Harland putting them into the mouths of his characters is strange indeed, given what I think was possibly his ethnicity, and his history of publishing, earlier in his life, under his pseudonym of Sidney Luska, works of particular Jewish content. I wonder whether he abjured his Jewishness? If indeed he was? And wow, it makes me wonder whether there was any self-loathing at the basis of all this. Would it have been a 'not to be discussed' subject with him? What is the history of this extraordinary turnaround? So, as a result, this chocolate-box fable can be seen as undercut radically from within, and perhaps keenly disturbed.