Peruse her biography:

The Penultimate Years

Part 1: Clichy
Part 2: St. Pol-sur-Mer
Part 3: Lake Garda
Part 4: Ballybunion
Part 5: Encore St. Pol-sur-Mer

The Penultimate Years:
Il Duce and Other Assorted Autocrats of Short Stature

Part 3: Lake Garda

Emily commuted from St. Pol-sur-Mer to Lake Garda, Italy for the next six years.

The next few months were a whirlwind for Emily.  Whisked away to Il Vittorale, D'Annunzio's mountain-side estate, she found herself dining next to an embalmed and gilded tortoise, sleeping on leopard skins, and surveying the Lake Garda vista from the prow of the battleship Puglia, which D'Annunzio had hauled up the side of the mountain after his Yugoslav campaign.  Emily also found herself socializing with D'Annunzio's fascist friends, the geniuses, prophets and other assorted supermen who made up the tenth corporation of the Charter of Carnaro.[7]   While fascinating, this experience was also chillingly surreal.  Emily's journal tells the story of her dichotomous feelings and indecision during this time:

This is marvelously mad.  I have but one burning question: should I stay or should I go?"

Chesleyan scholars marvel that Emily was able to do both, commuting back and forth from St. Pol-sur-Mer to Italy many times over the next six years.  She returned home regularly to check on Veracity and maintain her intimate involvement with The Pomegranate Club, but never for more than a week.  Like a moth to a flame, Emily was drawn to the chaotic swirl of the Lake Garda social season. 

One of the most hazardous aspects of socializing at Lake Garda was keeping track of the constantly changing list of people whom D'Annunzio favoured or despised at any point in time.  It was at one of Il Vittorale's famous soirees in 1933, after the poet had retired to his bedchamber to contemplate death that Emily met the only two men in Italy who could compete with D'Annunzio's potent personality: the autocratic Irish potato magnate Sir Randolph Richard Ruddock[8] and the helmet-wearing Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, Il Duce.  While D'Annunzio pondered his mortality, Ruddock and Mussolini chatted up his well-dressed lady friend.  Unsurprisingly, both men were on D'Annunzio's most-reviled list in perpetuity after that night.

A letter sent by Emily to Veracity speaks volumes about her immediate attraction to the two powerful newcomers:

"Randy Ruddock is a tremendously wealthy businessman, with silk coming out of every pocket.  He has a glint in his eye and the Devil's own hair.  Darling Benito doesn't have any hair to speak of, but his barrel chest really fills out that uniform.  Also, he wears leather on all his extremities.  What a lovely pair they are, although both are rather short."

Clearly, Emily was not committed to a monogamous intellectual relationship with Gabriele D'Annunzio, and her mental availability was apparent to Ruddock and Mussolini.  When D'Annunzio discovered Emily's perceived cerebral unfaithfulness, he was incensed, but quickly realized that displaying his jealousy would be fruitless.  Instead, he began a campaign to demonstrate the degree of his fascination with Emily, not realizing the degree to which the other men would be willing to compete for her intellectual affections.  Thus began an unrestrained game of global one-upmanship that would last for five years, with Emily at the stormy centre of a cranial love quadrangle.

The competition for Emily's attention among the three strong-willed men was fierce.  The mad poet dropped rhyming pro-D'Annunzio propaganda on her from a small airplane while she rowed on Lake Garda .  Sir Randolph named an experimental variety of potato after Emily, [9] an uncertain compliment to say the least.  And Mussolini insisted on showing her his grenade-practice scars while reading from his abysmal 1908 novel, The Cardinal's Mistress.

On October 3, Il Duce invaded Ethiopia , just to show Emily he could.

In 1935, as the winds of war began to gently swirl, the three combatants increased the stakes in their three-way struggle for intellectual intimacy with Emily.  A buck-naked D'Annunzio recited fascist limericks about invading Yugoslavia again while ritualistically slaughtering goats in a bizarre recreation of Hitler's Night of the Long Knives.  Ruddock, the Potato Pasha, bought most of the neighbouring mountainside to entice Emily away from Il Vittorale.  And on October 3, Il Duce invaded Ethiopia , just to show Emily he could.  A journal entry from late 1935 clearly shows Emily's enjoyment of this competitive environment:

"I am dating, if that is the word, three men concurrently: a fascist, a capitalist and a complete arsehole.  Frankly, each has his charms.  If only Benito's impressive physique, Randy's penchant for making money and Gabriele's tragic poetic soul could be rolled into one person. that would be the perfect man."[10]

Emily never found the single personification of the manly perfection she sought, but her cerebral suitors did occasionally cooperate.  In 1938, shortly withdrawing Italy from the League of Nations , Mussolini named Gabriele D'Annunzio as President of the Royal Italian Academy .   While the poet initially saw this as a victory, Il Duce confided to Clara Petacci - the very public mistress of his very private physical desires - that he had made the D'Annunzio appointment just to impress Emily.  Realizing this, D'Annunzio took immediate and drastic action to trump Mussolini's manouevre: he thought himself into a cranial frenzy, and died of a rather explosive cerebral hemorrhage on March 1^st, 1938.

Mussolini was astounded and impressed by the depth of his rival's desire for victory.  When he heard the news, he bowed to D'Annunzio's clear superiority on the field of brain-based battle.  As he headed off on March 12^th to celebrate Germany 's annexation of Austria,[11] the Italian dictator was heard to murmur to an unseen presence: "You win. you can have her."  Emily never saw Il Duce again.

Part 4: Ballybunion .....>

Notes: