Posted on  UTC 2025-02-01 08:00

As we have already noted, Heloise's 'Family Notes' diary, from the moment of her arrival in Jassy, relates strictly to her closest family. The only hint we get of an outside relationship is her description of Ermiona Asachi, the godmother to Emil, as 'her loyal friend' (1844). The two other godmothers are mentioned only in very neutral terms. For Alexander (1840):

We asked Frau Anicka Gika [Anicuta/Anica Ghica] to be his godmother and she was gracious enough to agree to our request.

Niccolo Livaditti, Anica si Iancu Manu. ND

Niccolo Livaditti, Anica si Iancu Manu. ND

Even cooler is the description of the godmother to Marie (1841):

Princess Marie Suzo [Princess Maria Soutzos] was her godmother. This lady seems to take quite an interest in the child.

The attribute 'loyal', which she applies to Ermiona it quite telling. Firstly, it implies that the relationship between Heloise and Ermiona has lasted for some time. Secondly, it implies that others have been disloyal or fallen away.

This reading fits in with Heloise's frequent asides on her lack of social contact in her life in Jassy.

Gheorghe Asachi and his wife Elena moved in the highest levels of Moldavian/Romanian feudal society. From humble beginnings, Gheorghe had been ennobled when he was sent as ambassador to the Hapsburg court in Vienna.

Ermiona, fluent in six languages, performed as a harpist, pianist and singer in these events. They gave frequent culture-heavy soirées in their house and participated in the cultural salons of other notable Romanian intellectuals and artists. There were theatre performances in Romanian at the new National theatre set up by the Asachis. She was considered to be 'one of the most cultivated and most inteligent Romanians of her epoch'.

Anica Ghika-Manu and her husband had their own intersecting circle of nationalists, politicians and artists. All were invested in the furtherance of Romanian language and culture.

Out of her depth

Where did Heloise fit into this glittering feudal world? Nowhere. She was a petit-bourgeois import from Vienna with a limited education. True, she spoke French as most educated Romanians did, but we have no indication that she learned to speak Romanian, apart perhaps from a few basic phrases to use with the servants. Of other talents we hear nothing.

Let's be brutal: what was her intellectual level? Grillparzer seems to have humoured her, but he had his mind on other things about her. During her twenties in Vienna she doesn't seem to do very much at all, apart from family chores looking after her father. We find no evidence of an independent cultural life in her letters to Grillparzer.

In contrast, Grillparzer's 'other woman', Kathi Fröhlich (1800-1879), admittedly ten years older than Heloise, was running a singing school, organizing concerts and also keeping a salon with her sisters that was popular with talented people.

A dispassionate look at the family card she wrote for her husband is illuminating. Costinescu was probably wanting Heloise to compile the traditional Familienbuch listing of relatives, dates of birth and death and namedays. Perhaps she just misunderstood him, but what she scribbled so illegibly on that small card suggests that she is a person of limited intellect: the information is incomplete and disorderly – today we might call her a scatterbrain.

Including an irrelevance such as Grillparzer's 'cuckoo's egg' remark when she had so little space available displays an almost childlike propensity to gabble, of which there are traces in her letters and in the 'Family Notes'. We noted at the time the way the Grillparzer quote was bracketed incongrously by two odd effusions assuring her husband of her fidelity.

It may be a lack of serious education (she doesn't seem to have had much) and/or the characteristic disorderly expression frequently encountered in those whose earliest language was a bi- or even multilingual jumble.

Anyone reading the card or the 'Family Notes' will quickly tire of her obsessive use of hyperbolic praise. At its simplest level she seems incapable of writing a simple noun – husband, son, daughter, friend etc. – without decorating it with some flattering adjective.

The reader should note that our assessment of Heloise's modest intellect and cultural attainments is not intended to invalidate her sufferings arising from her situation in Jassy and the childbearing disasters she had to bear. It is an attempt to answer the question of why she (and her husband) were so isolated and friendless there.

The husband

Her husband may have impressed Asachi with the work ethic and mathematical and engineering skills that sent him to Vienna and made him a professor in the Academy, but we suspect – without any evidence at all – that he was not one to dazzle in the Asachi soirées, even if he was invited.

In fact, taken together, all the things that Heloise writes about him leave us cruel ones with one impression: he was a complete wimp. Kind folks, like Heloise, say 'sensitive', but the frequently crumpled state in which, according to her, Alexander Costinescu finds himself is pure wimpishness.

Admittedly, on a few occasions she praises his character extravagantly with her speciality hyperbole ('the model of all virtues'), but at the moments when strength of character is required Alexander is to be found in a darkened room with a cold compress on his forehead.

We both have almost succumbed, My husband is almost more distraught than I am. I have to hide my pain in order to raise his spirits a little.

'Family Notes'

[My good husband] fell seriously ill and suffered greatly during the entire summer, for a long time even in acute mortal danger! […] He is now better, but extremely weak. His sort of illness is one of those that requires continually the greatest care. From my side there will always be loving care and the greatest attentiveness will never be lacking. May God grant that in the future his children never give him cause for heartache, that they sweeten the life of the best of all fathers as much as in their power. He, who is only love and sacrifice for us all, can never be loved and respected enough from us and always surrounded with care and love.

'Family Notes'

My husband is quite well, however he is occasionally ill. He has a weak constitution. May God preserve the best of fathers, the most admirable of all husbands.

'Family Notes'

The two hermits

Heloise's repeated assertions that she and her husband lived very quiet lives, bleakly asocial, avoiding social events whenever possible sound credible.

Her letters in her Grillparzer years, however, give no hint that she is by nature a recluse – quite the contrary. Thus, her repeated and explicit assertion that a life withdrawn from society is something that suits both of them – well, perhaps we might question that.

We have to consider Heloise and her husband as a unity. No respectable married woman could turn up at salons and other events without her husband or an appropriate chaperone, so if her husband was having one of his sensitive moments, she would be constrained too. Her social isolation may have been as much her husband's doing as hers.

She had no relatives in Jassy. If indeed the Costinescus were invited to some event, Heloise would have to leave her children in the care of one of these Moldavian rustics. We can be sure that the 'sensitive' husband would be quite useless as a childminder, so she is effectively chained to her children – as she herself hints in the 'Family Notes':

My husband and I live now for this sweet being. Our life was always very quiet and withdrawn, but now even more than before. We hardly go out unless we must and even then we find it difficult to leave the lovely little angel.

'Family Notes'

In our comments on the 'Family Notes' we quoted the remarks Heloise made to Grillparzer about her isolation in Jassy in her last letter to him, dated 5 November 1847, almost nine years to the day after she had left Vienna:

Wickerhauser will tell you of my life and conditions; from the image of this land that he will draw for you, you will realise that only a completely secluded life will do for us, since even my husband is in his heart no Moldauer, rather bourgeois, proud and upright; he neither wants nor seeks association with others, which here would cost only time and spirit; and we live therefore exclusively for our children, bothering little about the world outside, an inner life that benefits our family and which makes us all happy.

Wickerhauser wird Ihnen von meinem Leben und Verhältnißen sprechen; aus dem Bilde daß er Ihnen von diesem Lande entwerfen wird, muß es Ihnen einleuchten daß nur ein ganz zurückgezogenes Leben uns taugen kann, denn auch mein Mann ist im Herzen kein Moldauer, sondern bieder, stolz, und wahr; er will und sucht keinen fremden Umgang, der hier blos Zeit und Geist tödtend wäre, und wir leben daher ausschließlich unseren Kindern, uns wenig um die Aussenwelt kümmernd, ein inneres Leben, was unserer Familie frommt, und uns alle beglückt.

She states that the locals, the 'Moldauer', are sub-bourgeois, undercivilised peasants. If she is sincere in saying this, we can only conclude that Asachi's 'renaissance' and cultivated salons, Anica Ghica-Manu's soirées and her friendship with the seriously talented Ermiona (at that time already in Paris) all somehow passed her by. That incongruity needs more explanation than I can provide.

Certainly, her justification for their 'completely secluded life', her husband's opinion that contact with these rubes would 'cost only time and spirit' is completely specious. In the modern jargon, he clearly has some mental health issues. 'By their words shall ye know them'. She found a good one there, one that makes even Mr Collins appear quite passable.

Ermiona

Ermiona, whose convention-defying pursuit of her underage noble lover shows that she was bohemian and strong willed – a freethinker at thirteen. However, we might suspect – once again, without any evidence at all – that she saw Heloise, eleven years older than she was, not solely through a feudal filter, that there was a real friendship there.

We'd like to imagine that between the years 1840 and 1844 (marked in red on the timeline) some occasion brought Heloise and Ermiona in contact and started the loyal friendship between the young and the not so young mother. In 1843 Heloise made no entries at all in the 'Family Notes' – was her mind occupied on other things? Were things happier for her? Who knows?

We'd also like to think that the freewheeling Ermiona was not one to stand on ceremony in the course of the friendship. We do not know, but it is not implausible.

They were both young women with young children and probably had much to share because of that. Both of them were fluent French speakers and we might imagine that this was their shared language. We might wonder what Alexander Costinescu thought of this clever, sparky young woman, the daughter of his patron Gheorghe Asachi, who had become his wife's 'loyal friend'. Was she one of these 'Moldauers'?

However, the choice of Ermiona as godmother to Emil is a little bizzare. In the Greek Orthodox Church the role of godmother as the moral and religious anchor for the child is taken very seriously. The first two godmothers matched that role well – the second one, Princess Maria Soutzos, even spooking Heloise with her extreme 'interest in the child', which makes us think she was really going to take the godmother role seriously. The tone of Heloise's remark suggest that not only was the Princess not a friend, but that she had also not been chosen by her.

In contrast, Ermiona, bohemian convention-breaker, who would shortly up-sticks for France, seems to have been completely unqualified for the role. But significantly, Heloise chose a 'loyal' friend, not a godmother who would come round and check that the child was being taken to church regularly.

Can we detect a social decline for the Costinescus in the series of godmothers they had? Anica Ghica-Manu (top notch aristocrat), Princess Maria Soutzos (still a princess, but her family was now out of power), then Ermiona Asachi (her father Gheorghe's humble origins, she erratically married to a Moruzi). Perhaps living apart from the social whirl had its disadvantages.

However, the relationship between Heloise and Ermiona did not last long after that baptism. A year later, in 1845, Heloise's son Alexander died and Ermiona took herself and her son Alexander to Paris, partly for his education, partly so she could attend the public lectures at the Collège de France and partly for la vie culturelle and the political ferment of the time in general. In 1848 Heloise died in childbirth, far away from her 'loyal friend', who was certainly otherwise occupied in that great revolutionary year.

In the midst of this swirling aristocratic and cultural life in the vortex of the Romanian 'Renaissance' it was clearly quite possible for a relative outsider such as Heloise to feel isolated. It seems possible that she and her husband simply did not fit in and that one or both of them chose to stay in the comfort zone of a 'completely secluded life'.

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