Chapter 15 Luxury and grandeur (2)

Maybe Ottoland is a little absurd at times in terms of her desire to create happiness, a little bit of a boss in the way she wants to bestow that happiness on others.But Garsington Park should be a wonderful place: a Mount Olympus where young intellectuals occupy the place of gods (one day, then Prime Minister Asquith and Maynard Keynes Cairns and another gentleman); a cozy sanctuary where guests flocked like flies—no matter how much they taunted Ottoland afterward, they obviously liked going there; plus Hinton is also a cultural Disneyland, and no one openly admits to having fun in an environment that is artistically innocent and at the same time beautiful and childish. "I feel terribly alone on the occasion," Lytton Strachey wrote to a friend after a visit, "a melancholy joy of the eighteenth century overwhelms you, and it is difficult to compare man with a pug. Separate." But he also wrote to Ortolan, saying how pleasant his stay at Garsington Manor was, and earnestly invited himself to return next time.

①Asquith (1852-1928): Prime Minister of the British Liberal Party Cabinet (1908-1916), the British leader in the first two years of the First World War - Annotation. ②Maynard Keynes (1883-1946): British economist, financier and newspaper writer, known for his revolutionary economic theory (Keynesian economics) for long-term unemployment - Annotation. ③Roger Fry (1866-1934): British art critic and painter, a pioneer in rectifying the name of Post-Impressionist painters—annotation. Ottoland was not only a consummate hostess of the art salons and an active protector of literature and the arts (with Roger Fry she firmly pushed Post-Impressionism into Great Britain), but also Played a prominent political role in Britain's policy of appeasement during the Great War.If Bertrand Russell was the hero of the movement (he ended up behind bars for his critical essays), she was the flagship.She encouraged her husband, the Labor MP Philip Edward Morell, to read an appeasement speech in Parliament, which Philip did bravely and against all opposition and thus forever ruined his career. Political career (his career was not very brilliant until then).Ortolan then turned Garsington into an aid center for dissidents, hiring them to work the land—cultivating farmland was considered a top priority by the government.

Thus, during the war years, the Ortolands supported half a dozen dissidents, most of them lazy artists who couldn't do farm work at all.They just used Ortolan, thinking she was rich.But she wasn't very rich (her mother disinherited her), and the enormous expenses of her generous mistress life began to consume her fortune.In fact, she ended up facing so much financial difficulty that she was forced to sell her Bedford Square home and Garsington Estate and move to a small, gloomy, modest house on Gower Street.But all this embarrassment, along with her many other physical and mental sufferings, was never known to her friends.

Ortolan's husband, Philippe, was an elusive man.He was attractive (all of Ortoland's lovers, except Russell, were handsome), and on occasions of rare nobility, such as the appeasement speeches that took place in Congress.Or when he went to meet Ottoland in a German hotel where she had received a visit from Russell a few weeks before, the Puritan owner of the hotel told Philip that a gentleman went in and out of his wife's room every day, even the bedroom door. The couches were all burned by his cigarettes.Philip smiled and paid the owner for the loss of the sofa, saying he was glad his wife hadn't lost company.On the other hand, Philippe appears weak and indecisive; Ortolan tries to create a political future for him, pampers and protects him all his life.From the moment they were married, Philip showed her that she was not sexually attractive to him; but the maid did, and he had two illegitimate children, one by a maid and the other by his secretary. raw.In addition, his psychology is very fragile, and he suffered from serious mental crises again and again in his middle age.

There is a moral disquiet that we often meet women who trap themselves in the pleas of the weak by being caught up in the needs of others.This also happens to Ortolán (“I am a magnet for selfish people”), who has been bullied by a crippled and possessive mother.All her emotional history since then has been the same - she's always given more.Maybe she no longer has passion (Russell was crazy about her, but Ottoland refused to abandon Philip), but she did give him more care, more concern, more love and affection, until she fell in love with him. When the beautiful tiger Lionel came. Ortoland was fifty when she fell in love with Tiger, a lad of not more than twenty, the gardener of Garssington Park.Tiger is a nice guy, generous, and smitten with her.Ottolan wrote in her diary that she had finally found her ideal partner, "When I love I always give and now I am finally allowed to have. It is a miracle." Ottolan's relationship with Tiger continued For two years, until one day the lad died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage—a strange death that joined the Ortolan legend.Since people are happy to invent romantic absurdities, why can't they imagine that the poison was poisoned by the husband who was already insane at that time?These are the secrets of the bed, the uncanny privacy that is to be kept by all.

Ortolan endured the painful loss of Tiger with great courage, as she had endured everything before.She suffered from very fragile health as a child, suffering from excruciating migraines and other unexplained ailments that were presumably symptoms of diabetes.In short, she was a chronic patient, which was quite common among upper-class nineteenth-century women; she, like Virginia Woolf, who was anorexic (an ailment common among the ladies of the era), refused to eat in her youth .At fifty-five she discovered she had a cancer of the jaw—a brutal operation that disfigured her.That's when her friends discovered that Ortolan could suffer without complaint.