LOVE STORY OF DICTATOR

Taranaki Daily News, 17 November 1926, Page 12

LOVE STORY OF DICTATOR

MUSSOLINI’S STORMY PAST HIS WIFE IN OBSCURITY. THE RUSSIAN GIRLS AND “LITTLE BENITOUCHKA.” What is the mystery of the women in the. life of Musfeolini? Who knows the secrets of his passion for the beautiful school teacher, Signoriua Rachele Lombardi, who to-day is Signora Mussolini, with of the modern Caesar, and mother of his daughter, Edda, and his two sons, V ittorio and Bruno? 'Signora Mussolini lives with her children in Milan, while “Il Duce” works and labours 4n the Chigi Palace in Rome, the unwilling prisoner of a corps of detectives, police, and carabineers. He, .the man, the Dictator, the power behind the throne, the descendant of the Caesars, Rienzi, and Garibaldi, the most amazing figure of warlike romance in this modern world, lives in a blaze of publicity, the target of the camera and the bomb alike. No name is better known, no man more written about. Yet behind it all is the veil of secrecy which Mussolini, the husband and father, the lover of his wife, draws over the lives of those who are dearer to him than all else in the world. Is it because he lid. no illusions about the limelight, or because of a tragedy over which he has no control? His own words give a clue to either theory. The fascinating story was told b'y a writer in the London Sunday Express. In the preface to his “official life,” written by his woman friend, Signorina Margharita Sarfatti —in which there is no mention of his wedding romance — he says: “The public man is born •public’ —he bears the stigma from his birth. The public man, like the poet, is born to his doom. He can never escape it. His tragedy is one of infinite range: it extends from martyrdom to the supplying of autographs.” He qualifies this lamentation of his fate by saying that its compensation is that the public man belongs to all —is an essential element in the lives of others. But he adds: “When one belongs to all —one belongs to none.” Is that, then, the tragic secret of the veil which is drawn over the home life of this superman, whose life, sleeping and waking, is enslaved to the great work which he has set himself? Is Mussolini, the man and the lover, swamped and stifled beneath the herculean task of Mussolini, the superman. INDISCREET WIVES. Is it his secret tragedy that the labours of Rome bar him from the love which awaits his at Milan. Aiussolini is still the" actor —his sense of the drama is too strong ever entirely to desert him —but he has subordinated this, the strongest passion of his life, to the rigid self-discipline which his life demands. He is a mob-master with the mind of a statesman —or a statesman with the tricks of the mob-master up his sleeve—whichever you prefer. Yet how many people would recognise in this grim-faced, iron-jawed master of a nation, this queer blend of ruthlessness and mercy, the wild-eyed young anarchist who, a few short years ago, was tli»3 darling of two little yel-low-haired, dancing, laughing Russian girls—two Kursistki students at Geneva? “Little Benitouchka,” as these chattering little Muscovites called him, spent his days then in running errands for a wine-shop keeper in Lausanne. Each morning he Woke early in his garret a'bove the shop, breakfasted on bread and thin soup and thinner wine, and then ran barefooted through the streets delivering bottles of wine to the landladies of the little “pensions” .where the American and English tourists stayed. THE YOUNG STUDENT. Sometimes the tourists—men and women who must be alive to-day—-gave a tip of fifty eentessimi to the queer, brooding youth, with the formidable, wide-open eyes, who in a few years was to become the most-talked-of man in the world. With those tips Mussolini bought food. He and starvation were old enemies, never far apart. In the evenings he would descend from his garret a changed man. Socks, shoes, trousers, jacket, a tie and hat took the place of the patched rags of the morning. He was no longer Mussolini, the errand boy, the ex-stone-mason, but Signor Mussolini, the young student about to walk, or go by train —if funds allowed—to the lecture halls at Geneva. He had friends at Geneva—a curious, coloured, hectic little world of Russians, garret dwellers, cafe debaters, insatiable debaters, living in a world of tea drinking, cigarette smoking, and endless, unanswerable discussions on nebulous, metaphysical profoundities, the quintessence of impraetible Byzantine idealism. In this vivid world “Litte Benitouchka” was the king uncrowned—the hottest-headed of a kingdom of hotheads of Anarchists against Church and State. . Christ and morality. Here he and Helen M., the yellow-haired divorced wife of a Russian, discussed all possible and impossible things under heaven. Eventually came the day when "Benitouchka s” revolutionary and anti-Christian speeches attracted the attention of the police. He was forbidden to enter Geneva —lie who is now one of the most powerful men in the councils of that League whose palace is the focus of Geneva to-day. Another Russian woman came into Mussolini’s life like a torch —and went out like a burned brand.

This was the puny, misshapen, hysterical hunchback, "Comrade” Angleica Balabanoff. Angelica was the antithesis of femininity—a flamillg. monomanical Bolshevik, thirsting for the blood of kings and the bourgeoisie, inflamed with class hatred, feeding her perverted mind on an idealistic idolatry of Karl Marx, the bomb, and the guillotine. She could curse in half the tongues of Europe. Men quailed before her. Angelica Balabanoff, spitting vituperations from a platform to a mob of revolutionaries or gesticulating from the top of a cafe table in a haze of smoke and fumes, was a grotesque, goblin-like, avenging spirit, incarnate with hate and pent-up passions, a hunchback Valkyrie of the Revolution. Her great luminous eyes lit up her grey face like flames. Her voice was coarse and cracked with the passion of the utterances—and when she had leached the crescendo of her denunciaI tions with the inspired laudation of “Our Holy Mother Russia,” she would fall back in her ehair, a broken, pallid, weeping wreck. >So blind was her faith in the Revolution that she was incapable of reasoned thought beyond her one ideal. If you asked her which road she would take on a walk, it was always “To the Left! To the Left!” She had no humour, no sense of beauty, but a vast range of learning of economics, sociology, and philosophy. This was the woman who attached herself to Benito Mussolini in the days of his youth. She became later assistant editor of his Socialist paper, tlie Avanti, wheye she sat at his feet, a jealous pythoness, looking to him as the Messiah of her gospel of blood. It was a strange partnership. There temperaments, in which words were struck like sparks and denunciations Hamed forth like live coals. He was never revolutionary enough for her. He was too moderate, too bourgeois. She would dictate to him. “You were not vigorous enough in your leading article. You should have emphasised the victory of the Extremists at the Congress.” He would answer quietly, dangerously, authoritatively: “You know nothing of it. Go to your own work. Leave me!” Finally he expelled her altogether. Her admiration for him turned to fury and burning scorn. She denounced him as “the hired assassin of the bourgeoisie.” Then the Italian Government expelled her from, Italy, and she joined Lenin and Trotsky as one of the group of exiled Russian revolutionaries who travelled across Germany In the train provided by the ex-Kaiser during the war, in order that they might harass and overthrow Kerensky. SHORT TRIUMPH. They succeeded, and Angelica Balabanoff became a torch-bearer, an oriflanuue, of that revolution of blood for which her misshapen soul and body had yearned. She rode through the streets of Moscow in a magnificent limousine, on cushions on which the Tsarina had once reclined. But her triumph was short. She was too Girondist even for the Soviet—so, in due time, Angelica Balabanoff was expelled by the “Holy Mother Russia’ she had worehipued, was cast out of the land she loved, from the triumphs she had tasted all too briefly, and hounded over the frontier as "a dangerous revolutionary.” And as she crossed the frontier, cursing the revolution she had helped to make, there entered Russia, in the pomp of State, the Ambassador of the King of Italy, nominated by Benito Mussolini and accredited to the Soviet Republic as the representative of the most anti-Socialist dictatorship in .the world. Was ever fate more ‘ironic? No page in fiction, no legend of romance, can tell a stranger storv than of the woman who sat at "the feet of Mussolini,the . anarchist, burning with the fervid mysticism of her perverted creed, and was then cast out from the n oiid she had helped to make, cursing the man who had forged the weapon which overthrew her doctrines in Italy —the man who, once hunted by the police, is now the liberator of his people, the champion of Absolutism, the arch-enemy of Socialism.