Against strong competition from dead celebrities, the most moving epitaph in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery – or the “non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners” to use the official title – is on the grave of a little-known English teenager.
Located close to the poet Shelley (whose headstone suggests he is not dead, merely undergoing “a sea-change into something rich and strange”) and not far from Keats (“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water”), it commemorates the short life of Rosa Bathurst, who drowned in the river Tiber in 1824, aged 16.
The epitaph is in prose rather than poetry. In fact, stretching to more than 200 words, it’s almost a short story. But as noted by Henry James, one of countless visitors to have read it in the two centuries since, it has “an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic”.
For Rosa’s mother, this was a second tragedy, following the presumed death 15 years earlier of her husband, an English diplomat during the Napoleonic wars. Hence the epitaph’s opening lines:
Remembrance Day: Peter Murtagh on a Wicklow golf club’s 100-year-old tradition and a very special trophy
Suspended sentence – Frank McNally on English revisionism and 1916 executions
The Irish photographer who put Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier at ease in early courtship
I experience the guilt of not pounding the streets when I’ve nothing else on
Beneath This Stone Are Interred The Remains Of Rosa Bathurst Who Was Accidently Drowned In The Tiber On The 11 Of March 1824 Whilst On A Riding Party; Owing To The Swollen State Of The River, And Her Spirited Horse Taking Fright. She Was The Daughter Of Benjamin Bathurst Whose Disappearance When On A Special Mission To Vienna, Some Years Since, Was As Tragical As Unaccountable: No Positive Account Of His Death Ever Having Been Received By His Distracted Wife. He Was Lost At Twenty Six Years Of Age. His Daughter Who Inherited Her Father’s Perfections, Both Personal And Mental, Had Completed Her Sixteenth Year When She Perished By As Disastrous A Fate.
Then, halfway down the gravestone, the grief-stricken mother addresses herself directly to the “Reader” – a word that gets a line to itself – and her eulogy takes flight:
Whoever Thou Art, Who May Pause To Peruse This Tale Of Sorrows, Let This Awful Lesson Of The Instability Of Human Happiness Sink Deep In Thy Mind. If Thou Art Young And Lovely Build Not Thereon, For She Who Sleeps In Death Under Thy Feet, Was The Loveliest Flower Ever Cropt In Its Bloom. She Was Every Thing That The Fondest Heart Could Desire, Or The Eye Covet, The Joy And Hope Of Her Widowed Mother Who Erects This Poor Memorial Of Her Irreparable Loss. “Early, Bright, Transient, Chaste, as Morning Dew”, She Sparkled, was Exhaled and Went to Heaven.
Although similarly tragic, the fates of Benjamin Bathurst and his daughter are otherwise a study in contrast. His body remains undiscovered to this day, despite an urgent search of the kind that, in more recent times, was paralleled by the one for that missing US airman in Iran.
Bathurst was travelling in disguise when last seen, after a mission aimed at persuading Austria to open a second front against Napoleon. And there is every reason to believe he was murdered, either by political enemies or by common criminals coveting his fur coat and other possessions.
An alternative theory, popular with the French, is that he took his own life. It is telling that the Rome epitaph refers to his “perfections, personal and mental”. But by the time of his death, although young, he was not a well man, having suffered physical if not psychiatric breakdowns during his stress-filled travels.
One French newspaper suggested he had “lost his head” and claimed that a predisposition to do so would have recommended him to a career in British intelligence: “The English diplomatic corps is the only one in which examples of madness are common.”
But the intrigue surrounding him was summed up by a pair of his “pantaloons”, found in a German forest near where he went missing. They had bullet holes but no blood. They were dry, even though the forest was sodden. Also dry was a letter inside, which may have been planted to implicate the French.
The manner of Bathurst’s disappearance – the last recorded sighting was of him walking around the horses on his carriage outside an inn – excited more than journalists. His apparent vanishing act became a recurrent theme in 20th-century science fiction, including a 1948 short story, He Walked Around the Horses, in which he slips into an alternative universe.
Back in this universe, meanwhile, poor Rosa’s body was found, but in circumstances that could have been invented by one of the romantic poets among whom she is buried. She was staying with uncles in Rome at the time of the fatal riding party. And we’re told that when her horse slipped into the raging Tiber, no one in the group could prevent her being swept away.
[ John Banville: Novels were never the same after Henry JamesOpens in new window ]
Then, six months later, a young man who had tried to save her returned to the scene, still haunted by the event. Somewhere nearby, he saw coloured clothing on the opposite bank. There, buried in silt, was Rosa, with a wound on her forehead but otherwise perfectly preserved, “and still as beautiful as she was on the day of the accident”.
