Chapter XVII: Book XII: 500 (1)

My Embassy to Rome--Three kinds of materials-Diary of the road--Letters to Madame Récamier--Leo XII. and the Cardinals--The ambassadors--The old artists and the new artists--Old Roman society--Present manners of Rome--Town and country--Letter to M. Villemain--Letter to Madame Récamier--Explanation concerning the memorandum I am about to quote--Letter to M. le Comte de La Feironnays--Memorandum on Eastern Affairs--Letters to Madame Récamier--Letter to M. Thierry--Dispatch to M. le Comte de La Ferronnays--More letters to Madame Récamier--Dispatch to M. le Comte Portalis--Death of Leo XII.--Dispatch to M. le Comte Portalis--Letter to Madame Récamier.

The preceding book, which I have just written in 1839, joins this book of my Roman Embassy, written in 1828 and 1829, ten years ago. My Memoirs, as Memoirs, have gained by the story of Madame Récamier's life: other persons have been brought upon the scene; we have seen Naples under Murat, Rome under Bonaparte, the Pope set free, returning to St. Peter's; unpublished letters of Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Canova, La Harpe, Madame de Genlis, Lucien Bonaparte, Moreau, Bernadotte, Murat are preserved; the narrative of Benjamin Constant shows him in a new light. I have introduced the reader to a little "out-of-the-way canton" of the Empire, while that Empire was accomplishing its universal movement; I now find myself brought to my Roman Embassy. The distraction of a fresh subject will have been a relief from myself: all has been to the reader's advantage.

For this book of my Roman Embassy there has been no lack of materials; they are of three kinds:

The first contain the story of my innermost sentiments and of my private life, as related in the letters addressed to Madame Récamier.

The second set forth my public life: those are my dispatches.

The third are a medley of historical details concerning the popes, old Roman society, the changes that have taken place from century to century in that society, and so on.

Among these investigations are thoughts and descriptions, the fruit of my rambles. All this has been written in the space of seven months, the time of the duration of my embassy, in the midst of festivities or serious occupations[501]. Nevertheless, my health was impaired. I could not lift up my eyes without feeling dizziness; to admire the sky, I was obliged to place it around me by climbing to the top of a palace or a hill. But I cured the lassitude of the body by means of mental application: the exercise of my thought renewed my physical vigour; what would kill another man gives me life.

[Sidenote: My journey to Rome.]

In revising all this, I have been struck with one thing. On my arrival in the Eternal City, I feel a certain dislike and, for a moment, I believe that everything has changed; little by little, the fever of the ruins overtakes me and I end, like a thousand other travellers, by adoring that which left me cold at first. Nostalgia is the regret of one's native country; on the banks of the Tiber we also suffer from "home-sickness," but it produces an opposite effect to its customary effect: we are seized with the love of solitudes and the distaste for our own country. I had already felt this "sickness" at the time of my first visit, and I was able to say:

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ[502].

You know how, when the Martignac Ministry was formed, the mere name of Italy had dispelled what remained of my repugnance; but I am never sure of my disposition in matters of joy: no sooner had I set out with Madame Chateaubriand than my natural melancholy joined me on the way. You shall convince yourselves of this by my diary of the road:

"LAUSANNE, 22 _September_ 1828.

"I left Paris on the 14th of this month; I spent the 16th at
Villeneuve-sur-Yonne: what memories! Joubert is gone; the
deserted Château de Passy[503] has changed masters; I have
been told, 'Be thou the cricket of the nights: _Esto cicada
noctium._'"

"ARONA, 25 _September_.

"Arriving at Lausanne on the 22nd, I followed the road along
which disappeared two other women who wished me well and who,
in the order of nature, should have survived me. One, Madame
la Marquise de Custine, came to die at Bex; the other, Madame
la Duchesse de Duras, was hastening, not a year ago, to the
Simplon, flying before the face of death which overtook her
at Nice[504]."

"_Noble Clara_, digne et constante amie,
Ton souvenir ne vit plus en ces lieux;
De ce tombeau l'on détourne les yeux;
Ton nom s'efface et le monde t'oublie[505]!

"The last letter which I received from Madame de Duras brings
home to us the bitterness of that last drop of life which we
shall all have to drain:

"'NICE, 14 _November_ 1828.

"'I have sent you an _asclepias carnata_; it is a laurel
creeper which grows in the open air, is not afraid of
the cold, and has a red flower like the camélia, with
an excellent smell; plant it under the windows of the
Benedictine's Library.

"'I will tell you my news in a word: it is always the same
thing; I droop on my sofa all day, that is to say, all the
time that I am not driving or walking out, which I cannot do
for more than half-an-hour a day. I dream of the past: my
life has been so agitated, so varied, that I cannot say that
I am violently bored: if I could only do some needle-work or
rug-work, I should not feel unhappy. My present life is so
far removed from my past life that it seems to me as though I
were reading Memoirs or watching a play[506].'

"And so I have returned to Italy deprived of my friends, as I
left it five and twenty years ago. But, at that first time, I
was able to repair my losses; to-day, who would wish to take
part in a few remaining old days? No one cares to live in a
ruin.

"At the village of the Simplon itself, I saw the first smile
of a happy dawn. The rocks, whose base stretched out black at
my feet, gleamed with rose-colour at the mountain-top, struck
by the rays of the sun. To issue from darkness, it is enough
to rise towards Heaven.

"If Italy had already lost some of its brilliancy for me at
the time of my journey to Verona in 1822, in this year, 1828,
it appeared to me still more discoloured; I have measured the
progress of time. Leaning on the balcony of the inn at Arona,
I gazed at the banks of the Lago Maggiore, blazoned with the
gold of the setting sun and edged with azure. Nothing was
more agreeable than this landscape, which the Castle edged
with its battlements. This sight afforded me neither pleasure
nor sentiment. The years of spring-time wed their hopes to
what they see; a young man goes a-roaming with what he loves,
or with the memories of his absent happiness. If he have no
bond, he seeks one; he flatters himself at each step that he
will find something; thoughts of felicity haunt him: this
disposition of his soul is reflected upon surrounding objects.

"However, I notice the littleness of present society less
when I find myself alone. Left to the solitude in which
Bonaparte has left the world, I scarcely hear the feeble
generations which pass and mewl on the edge of the desert."

"BOLOGNA, 22 _September_ 1828.

"In Milan, in less than a quarter of an hour, I counted
seventeen hunchbacks passing under the window of my inn. The
German flogging has deformed young Italy.

"I saw St. Charles Borromeo[507] in his sepulchre, after
touching his birthplace at Arona. He reckoned two hundred and
forty-four years of death. He was not beautiful.

[Sidenote: An earthquake.]

"At Borgo San Donnino, Madame de Chateaubriand came running
into my room in the middle of the night: she had seen her
clothes and her straw hat fall off the chairs over which they
were hung. She had concluded from this that we were in an
inn haunted by ghosts or inhabited by robbers. I had noticed
no shock as I lay in bed; nevertheless it was the case that
an earthquake had been felt in the Apennines: that which
overturns cities is able to throw down a woman's clothes.
I said as much to Madame de Chateaubriand; I also told her
that, in Spain, in the Vega del Xenil, I had passed without
accident through a village which had been turned upside
down the day before by a subterranean concussion. These
lofty consolations did not have the smallest success, and we
hastened to leave this cave of murderers.

"The continuation of my journey has displayed to me on every
hand the flight of men and the inconstancy of fortune. At
Parma, I found the portrait of Napoleon's widow that daughter
of the Cæsars is now the wife of Count Neipperg; that
mother of the conqueror's son has presented that son with
brothers[508]: she allows the debts which she piles up to be
guaranteed by a little Bourbon[509] who lives at Lucca and
who, if it is expedient, is to inherit the Duchy of Parma.

"Bologna appears to me less deserted than at the time of my
first journey. I have been received here with the honours
with which ambassadors are pestered. I have visited a fine
cemetery: I never forget the dead; they are our family.

"I have never so much admired the Carraccis[510] as in the
new gallery at Bologna. It seemed to me as though I were
seeing Raphael's St. Cecilia for the first time, so much more
divine is it here than at the Louvre, under our sooty sky."

"RAVENNA, 1 _October_ 1828.

"In the Romagna, a country which I did not know, a multitude
of towns, with their houses coated with marble lime, are
perched on the tops of different little mountains, like
coveys of white pigeons. Each of those towns possesses a few
master-pieces of modern art or a few monuments of antiquity.
This canton of Italy contains the whole of Roman history: the
traveller should go through it with his Livy, Tacitus and
Suetonius in his hand.

[Sidenote: Dante's tomb.]

"I passed through Imola, the bishopric of Pius VII.[511], and
Faenza. At Forli I went out of my road to visit Dante's tomb
at Ravenna. As I approached the monument, I was seized with
that thrill of admiration which a great renown gives, when
the master of that renown has been unfortunate. Alfieri, who
bore on his forehead _il pallor della morta e la speranza_,
flung himself prone upon that marble and addressed to it his
sonnet, _O gran Padre Alighier!_ Standing before the tomb, I
applied to myself this verse from the _Purgatorio_:

Frate,
Lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui[512].

"Beatrice[513] appeared to me; I saw her as she was when she
inspired her poet with the longing _di sospirare e di morir
di pianto_[514]:

My plaintive song, take now thy mournful way,
And find the dames and damosels, to whom
Thy sisters, joyful-gay,
Were wont to bear the light of sunny gladness,
And thou, distressful daughter of my sadness,
Go thou and dwell with them in cheerless gloom[515]!

"And yet the creator of a new world of poetry forgot Beatrice
when she had left the earth! He only found her again, to
adore her in his genius, when he was undeceived. Beatrice
reproaches him with it, when she is preparing to show
Paradise to her lover:

"'These looks,' she says to the powers of Paradise,

These looks sometimes upheld him; for I show'd
My youthful eyes, and led him by their light
In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd
The threshold of my second age, and changed
My mortal for immortal; then he left me,
And gave himself to others[516].

"Dante refused to return to his country at the price of a
pardon. He replied to one of his kinsmen:

"'If there is no other way of returning to Florence than
that which is opened to me, I shall not return there. I can
everywhere contemplate the stars and sun.'"

Dante refused the Florentines his days and Ravenna refused them his ashes, even though Michael Angelo, the resuscitated genius of the poet, was resolving to decorate the funeral monument of him who had learnt _come l'uom s'eterna._[517]

"The painter of the Last Judgment, the sculptor of the Moses,
the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, the engineer of the
Old Bastion at Florence, the poet of the sonnets addressed to
Dante joined his fellow-townsmen and supported the petition
which they presented to Leo X. with these words:

"'_Io Michel Agnolo, scultore, il medesimo a Vostra Santità
supplico, offerendomi al divin poeta fare la sepoltura sua
condecente e in loco onorevole in quest a città._'

"Michael Angelo, whose chisel was disappointed in its hope,
had recourse to his pencil to raise another mausoleum to that
other himself. He drew the principal subjects of the _Divina
Commedia_ on the margins of a folio copy of the works of the
great poet; a vessel which bore this two-fold monument from
Leghorn to Civita Vecchia suffered shipwreck.

"I returned much moved and feeling something of that
commotion, mingled with a divine terror, which I experienced
at Jerusalem when my _cicerone_ proposed to take me to Lord
Byron's house. Ah, what were Childe Harold and the Signora
Guiccioli[518] to me in presence of Dante and Beatrice!
Misfortune and the centuries are still lacking to Childe
Harold; let him await the future. Byron was badly inspired in
his _Prophecy of Dante._

[Sidenote: At Ravenna.]

"I have found Constantinople again at San Vitale[519]
and San Apollinare[520]. Honorius[521] and his hen
were indifferent to me; I prefer Placidia[522] and her
adventures, the memory of which came back to me in the
basilica of St. John the Baptist: they form the romance of
the Barbarians. Theodoric[523] remains great, even though
he put Boethius[524] to death. Those Goths were a superior
race; Amalasontha[525], banished to an island in the Lake
of Bolsena, strove, with her minister Cassiodorus[526], to
save what remained of Roman civilization. The Exarchs[527]
brought to Ravenna the decadence of their empire. Ravenna
was Lombard under Astolf[528]; the Carlovingians restored
it to Rome. It became subject to its archbishop; then it
changed from a republic into a tyranny; finally, after having
been Guelph or Ghibelline, after having formed part of the
Venetian States, it returned to the Church[529] under Pope
Julius II.[530] and lives to-day only through the name of
Dante.

"This city, which Rome bore in her advanced age, had, from
its birth, something of the old age of its mother. Upon the
whole, I should not mind living here; I should like to go to
the French Column, raised in memory of the Battle of Ravenna.
There were the Cardinal de Medici[531] and Ariosto[532],
Bayard[533] and Lautrec, brother to the Comtesse de
Chateaubriand. There the handsome Gaston de Foix[534] was
killed at the age of twenty-four.

"'Notwithstanding all the artillery fired by the Spaniards,'
says the _Loyal Serviteur_, 'the French marched on; never
since God created Heaven and earth was a crueller nor fiercer
assault between French and Spaniards. They rested in front
of one another to recover their breath; then, lowering their
visors, began again worse than ever, crying "France!" and
"Spain!'"

"Of all those warriors there remained but a few knights who
then, become freed-men of glory, put on the frock.

"One saw also in some cabin a young girl who, in turning her
spindle, caught her dainty fingers in the hemp; she was not
accustomed to that life: she was a Trivulzis. When, through
her half-open door, she saw two billows join each other on
the bosom of the waters, she felt her sadness increase: that
woman had been beloved by a great king. She continued to
go slowly, by a lonely way, from her cabin to an abandoned
church and from the church to her cabin.

"The old forest through which I passed was composed of
solitary pines: they resembled the masts of galleys settled
in the sand. The sun was near its setting when I left
Ravenna; I heard the distant sound of a bell tolling: it was
summoning the faithful to prayer."

[Sidenote: Ancona.]

"ANCONA, 3 and 4 _October._

"Returning to Forli, I left it once again without having
seen on its crumbling ramparts the place where the Duchess
Caterina Sforza[535] declared to her enemies, who were
preparing to murder her only son, that she could still be
a mother. Pius VII., born at Cesena, was a monk in the
admirable convent of Madonna del Monte.

"Near Savignano, I passed across the ravine of a little
torrent: when I was told that I had crossed the Rubicon, it
seemed to me as though a curtain was raised and that I saw
the land of Cæsar's time. My own Rubicon is life: it is long
since I cleared its first bank.

"At Rimini, I met neither Francesca nor the other shade, her
companion, ‘ who seemed so light before the wind:'

E paion si al vento esser leggieri[536].

"Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia have brought me to Ancona
over roads and bridges left by the Augustuses. In Ancona they
are to-day keeping the Pope's[537] birthday; I hear the music
from Trajan's[538] triumphal arch: a double sovereignty of
the Eternal City."

"LORETTO, 5 and 6 _October._

"We have come to sleep at Loretto. The territory offers a
perfectly-preserved specimen of the Roman _colonia._ The
peasant farmers of Our Lady are in easy circumstances and
seem happy; the peasant-women, handsome and gay, wear a
flower in their hair. The Prelate Governor gave us his
hospitality. From the top of the steeple and the summit of
some of the eminences of the city one enjoys smiling vistas
over the plains, Ancona and the sea. In the evening we had a
storm. I took pleasure in watching the _valentia muralis_ and
the fumitory beloved by the goats bow before the wind on the
old walls. I walked under the double galleries erected after
Bramante's[539] designs. Those pavements will be beaten by
the autumn rains, those blades of grass will shiver at the
breath of the Adriatic long after I shall have passed away.

"At midnight, I had retired to a bed eight feet square,
hallowed by Bonaparte; a night-light hardly illumined the
darkness of my room; suddenly, a little door opened, and I
saw a man enter mysteriously, bringing with him a veiled
woman. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at them; he
approached my bed and lost no time, bowing down to the
ground, in offering me a thousand excuses for thus disturbing
the rest of His Excellency the Ambassador: but he was a
widower; he was a poor steward; he wished to marry his
_ragazza_, here present: unfortunately he fell somewhat short
of the dowry. He lifted up the orphan's veil: she was pale,
very pretty, and kept her eyes lowered with becoming modesty.
This family man looked as though he wanted to go away and
leave the affianced bride with me to finish her story. In
this urgent danger, I did not ask the obliging and unhappy
man, as the good knight asked the mother of the young girl
of Grenoble, if she was a maid; very much flurried, I took
some pieces of gold off the table by my bed and gave them,
to do credit to the King my master, to the _zitella_, 'whose
eyes were not swollen by dint of weeping.' She kissed my hand
with infinite gratitude. I did not utter a word, and, upon
my falling back on my immense couch, as though I wanted to
sleep, the vision of St. Anthony disappeared. I thanked my
patron saint, St. Francis, whose feast it was; I remained in
the darkness, half smiling, half regretting, and rapt in a
profound admiration of my virtues.

[Sidenote: Loretto.]

"It was thus, however, that I 'scattered gold,' that I was an
ambassador, entertained in pomp and state by the Governor of
Loretto, in the same town where Tasso was lodged in a sorry
den and where, for want of a little money, he was unable
to continue his journey. He payed his debt to Our Lady of
Loretto by his _canzone_:

Ecco fra le tempeste e i fieri venti.

"Madame de Chateaubriand made amends for my transient fortune
by climbing the steps of the Santa Chiesa[540] on her knees.
After my victory of the night, I had a better right than the
King of Saxony to deposit my wedding-coat in the Treasury of
Loretto; but I shall never forgive myself, a puny child of
the Muses, for having been so powerful and so happy in the
spot where the singer of Jerusalem had been so weak and so
miserable! Torquato, do not take me in this unusual moment
of my inconstant prosperity; riches are not my habit; see me
on my way to Namur, in my attic in London, in my infirmary
in Paris, in order to find in me some distant resemblance to
thyself!

"I have not, like Montaigne, left my portrait in silver
at Our Lady of Loretto, nor that of my daughter, _Leonora
Montana, filia unica_[541]; I have never desired to survive
myself; but still, a daughter, and one who should bear the
name of Leonora!"

"SPOLETO.

"After leaving Loretto, passing Macerata, leaving
Tolentino[542], which marks a step of Bonaparte and recalls
a treaty, I climbed the last redans of the Apennines. The
mountain table-land is moist and cultivated as a hop-garden.
To the left were the seas of Greece, to the right those of
Iberia; I could be pressed by the breath of the breezes which
I had inhaled at Athens and Granada. We descended towards
Umbria, winding down the curves of the leafless gorges, where
live suspended in clusters of woods the descendants of the
mountaineers who furnished the Romans with soldiers after the
Battle of Trasimenus[543].

"Foligno used to possess a Virgin by Raphael which is to-day
in the Vatican. 'Vene' occupies a charming position at the
source of the Clitumnus. Poussin[544] has reproduced that
warm, suave site; Byron has sung it coldly[545].

"Spoleto gave birth to the present Pope[546]. According to
my courier Giorgini, Leo XII. has placed the galley-slaves
in that town to do honour to his birthplace. Spoleto dared
to resist Hannibal[547]. It displays several works of Lippi
the Elder[548] who, nurtured in the cloister, a slave in
Barbary, a kind of Cervantes[549] among painters, died at
over sixty years of age of the poison administered to him by
the relations of Lucrezia[550], whom he was believed to have
seduced."

"CIVITA CASTELLANA.

"At Monte Lupo, Count Potoçki[551] buried himself in charming
_laurœ_; but did not the thoughts of Rome follow him there?
Did he not believe himself transported there amid 'choirs of
young girls?' And I too, like St. Jerome[552], 'have in my
time spent day and night in uttering cries, in beating my
breast, until God gave me back my peace.' _Plango me non esse
quod fuerim._

"After passing the hermitage of Monte Lupo, we began to wind
round the Somma. I had already taken that road on my first
journey from Florence to Rome over Perugia, when accompanying
a dying woman....

"By the nature of the light and a sort of vivacity of the
landscape, I should have believed myself on one of the ridges
of the Alleghany Mountains, were it not that a tall aqueduct,
surmounted by a narrow bridge[553], recalled to me a Roman
work to which the Lombard Dukes of Spoleto had put their
hands: the Americans have not yet come to those monuments
which follow upon liberty. I climbed the Somma on foot,
walking beside Clitumnian oxen which dragged Her Excellency
the Ambassadress to her triumph. A young goat-girl, as thin,
light of foot and pretty as her kid, followed me with her
little brother in that opulent country-side, asking me for
_carità_: I gave it her in memory of Madame de Beaumont, whom
these spots have forgotten.

Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day[554].

[Sidenote: Civita Castellana.]

"I saw Terni again and its cascades. A champaign planted with
olive-trees brought me to Narni; then, after passing through
Otricoli, we arrived and stopped at sad Civita Castellana. I
should much like to go to Santa Maria di Faleri to see a city
of which nothing is left but its skin, the walls; inside, it
was empty: _misère humaine à Dieu ramène._[555] Let us wait
till my grandeurs are past, and I shall return to seek out
the city of the Faliscans. Soon, from Nero's Tomb, I shall be
showing my wife the cross of St. Peter's which commands the
city of the Cæsars."

You have glanced through my diary of the road, you shall now read my letters to Madame Récamier, interspersed, as I announced, with pages of history. Alongside of these, you will find my dispatches. Here will appear distinctly the two men that exist in me.

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, 11 _October_ 1828.

"I have crossed this beautiful country, filled with your
memory; it consoled me, without being able to take from me
the sadness of all the other memories that I encountered
at every step. I have seen again that Adriatic Sea which I
crossed more than twenty years ago, in what a disposition of
soul! At Terni, I had stopped with a poor expiring woman.
Finally I entered Rome. Its monuments, as I feared, appeared
less perfect to me after those of Athens. My memory of the
places, astonishing and cruel at once, had not allowed me to
forget a single stone....

"I have seen no one yet, except the Secretary of State,
Cardinal Bernetti[556]. To have somebody to talk to, I went
to call on Guérin[557] yesterday, at sunset: he seemed
delighted with my visit. We opened a window upon Rome and
admired the horizon. It was the only thing that had remained,
for me, such as I had seen it; either my eyes or the objects
had changed, perhaps both[558]."

[Sidenote: Leo XII.]

The first moments of my sojourn in Rome were employed in official visits. His Holiness received me in private audience; public audiences are not customary and cost too dear. Leo XII., a prince of tall stature and of an air at once serene and melancholy, is dressed in a plain white cassock; he maintains no pomp, and keeps to a poor room, almost unfurnished. He eats scarcely anything; he lives, with his cat, on a little _polenta._ He knows that he is very ill and sees himself waste away with a resignation that partakes of Christian joy: he would be quite willing, like Benedict XIV., to keep his coffin under his bed. When I come to the door of the Pope's apartments, I am taken by a priest through dark passages to the refuge or sanctuary of His Holiness. He does not allow himself the time to dress, for fear of keeping me waiting; he rises, comes towards me, will never allow me to touch the ground with my knee to kiss the hem of his robe instead of his slipper, and leads me by the hand to the seat placed on the right of his own poor arm-chair. We sit down and talk.

On Monday I go at seven o'clock in the morning to the Secretary of State, Bernetti, a man of affairs and pleasure. He has an intimacy with the Princess Doria; he knows his century, and has accepted the cardinal's hat only in self-defense. He has refused to enter the Church, is a sub-deacon only by patent, and by giving back his hat can get married to-morrow. He believes in revolutions, and goes so far as to think that, if he lives long enough, he has a chance of seeing the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy.

The cardinals are divided into three factions:

The first consists of those who try to march with the times; among these are Benvenuti[559] and Oppizoni[560]. Benvenuti has become famous through his extirpation of brigandage and his mission to Ravenna after Cardinal Rivarola[561]; Oppizoni, Archbishop of Bologna, has conciliated the various shades of opinion in this industrial and literary town so difficult to govern.

The second faction is formed of the _zelanti_, who try to go backwards: one of their leaders is Cardinal Odescalchi[562].

Lastly, the third faction comprises the immovable men, old men who will not or cannot go either forwards or backwards: among these old ones is Cardinal Vidoni[563], a kind of gendarme of the Treaty of Tolentino: tall and fat, with a red face, and a skull-cap worn on one side. When you tell him that he has a chance of the Papacy, he replies, "_Lo santo Spirito sarebber dunque ubriaco!_" He plants trees at Ponte-Mole, where Constantine made the world Christian. I see those trees when I leave Rome by the Porta del Popolo to return by the Porta Angelica. The moment he catches sight of me at a distance, the cardinal shouts, "_Ah! ah! Signor Ambasciadore di Francia!_" and then flies out against the men who plant his pines. He does not follow the cardinalist etiquette; he goes out accompanied by a single footman in a carriage to his fancy: people forgive him everything, content to call him Madama Vidoni[564].

My ambassadorial colleagues are Count Lützow, the Austrian Ambassador, a polished man; his wife sings well, always the same air, and is always talking of her "little children;" the learned Baron Bunsen[565], the Prussian Minister, and friend of Niebuhr[566] the historian (I am in treaty with him to have the lease of his palace on the Capitol cancelled in my favour); Prince Gagarin, the Russian Minister, exiled among the past grandeurs of Rome by reason of banished loves: if he was preferred by the beautiful Madame Narischkine[567], who for a moment inhabited my hermitage at Aulnay, there must be some charm in his bad temper; we prevail rather through our defects than our good qualities.

M. de Labrador[568], the Spanish Ambassador, a faithful man, talks little, walks about alone, thinks a great deal, or does not think at all, I cannot make out which.

Old Count Fuscaldo represents Naples as winter represents spring. He has a great cardboard placard on which he studies, through his spectacles, not the rose-fields of Pæstum, but the names of suspicious foreigners to whose passports he must not put his visa. I envy him his palace (the Farnese), an admirable unfinished structure, crowned by Michael Angelo, painted by Annibale Carracci, aided by his brother Agostino, and sheltering under its portico the sarcophagus of Cæcilia Metella, who has lost nothing by the change of mausoleum. Fuscaldo, ragged in mind and body, is said to have a mistress.

The Comte de Celles[569], Ambassador of the King of the Netherlands, was married to Mademoiselle de Valence[570], who is now dead. He has had two daughters by her, who are consequently great-grand-daughters of Madame de Genlis. M. de Celles has remained a prefect because he used to be one; his character is that medley of the gossip, the petty tyrant, the recruiting sergeant and the steward which one never loves. If you meet a man who, instead of acres, yards and feet, talks to you of hectares, metres and decimetres, you have laid your hand on a prefect.

[Sidenote: My ambassadorial colleagues.]

M. de Funchal, the semi-acknowledged Ambassador of Portugal, is a little, fat man, excitable, grimacing, green as a Brazil monkey and yellow as a Lisbon orange: he sings his negress, however, this modern Camoëns. A great lover of music, he keeps a sort of Paganini[571] in his pay while awaiting the restoration of his King[572].

Here and there I have caught glimpses of little sly-boots of ministers of various little States, very much scandalized to see how cheaply I hold my embassy: their buttoned-up, solemn and silent importance walks close-legged and with short steps: it looks ready to burst with secrets which it does not know.

As ambassador in England in 1822[573], sought out the places and men that I had formerly known in London in 1793; as Ambassador to the Holy See in 1828, I hastened to visit the palaces and ruins, to ask after the persons whom I had seen in Rome in 1803: of the palaces and ruins I have found many there; of the persons, few.

The Palazzo Lancellotti, formerly let to Cardinal Fesch, is now occupied by its real owners, Prince Lancellotti[573] and the Princess Lancellotti[574], daughter of Prince Massimo[575]. The house in which Madame de Beaumont lived, on the Piazza d'Espagna, has disappeared. As to Madame de Beaumont, she has remained in her last asylum and I have prayed with Pope Leo XII. at her tomb.

Canova has also taken leave of the world[576]. I twice visited him in his studio in 1803; he received me mallet in hand. He showed me, with the simplest and gentlest air, his enormous statue of Bonaparte and his Hercules and Lichas: he was anxious to persuade you that he was able to achieve energy of form; but even then his chisel refused to dig deep into anatomy; the nymph lingered in the flesh in spite of him, and Hebe reappeared in the wrinkles of his old men. I have met the first sculptor of my time upon my road; he has fallen from his scaffold, as Goujon[577] fell from the scaffold at the Louvre: death is always there to continue the eternal St. Bartholomew and to lay us low with its darts.

But there is one still alive, to my great delight, and that is my old Boquet, the oldest of the French painters in Rome. Twice had he tried to leave his beloved _campagne_; he has gone as far as Genoa; his heart has failed him, and he has returned to his adopted home. I have cockered him up at the Embassy, as well as his son, for whom he has the tenderness of a mother. I have begun our old walks over again with him; I notice his old age only by the slowness of his steps; I feel a sort of emotion when I mimic a little child and measure my strides by his. We have neither of us much longer before us to see the Tiber flow.

[Sidenote: The Roman artists.]

The great artists, at their great period, led a very different life from that which they lead now: attached to the ceilings of the Vatican, to the walls of St. Peter's, to the partitions of the Farnese, they worked at their master-pieces suspended with them in mid-air. Raphael walked surrounded by his pupils, escorted by cardinals and princes, like a senator of Ancient Rome, preceded and followed by his clients. Charles V. sat thrice to Titian[578]. He picked up his brush, and yielded the right to him when walking, even as Francis I. attended Leonardo da Vinci[579] on his death-bed. Titian went in triumph to Rome; the immense Buonarotti received him there: at the age of ninety-nine, at Venice, Titian still held with a firm hand his century-old brush, the conqueror of the centuries.

The Grand-duke of Tuscany[580] secretly disinterred Michael Angelo, who had died in Rome after laying, at the age of eighty-eight, the coping-stone of the cupola of St. Peter's. Florence, with a magnificent funeral, expiated on the ashes of its great painter the neglect which it had shown to the ashes of Dante, its great poet.

Velasquez[581] twice visited Italy, and Italy twice rose to greet him. The precursor of Murillo[582] resumed the road to Spain laden with the fruits of that Ausonian Hesperia, which had fallen into his hands: he carried away a picture by each of the twelve most celebrated painters of that time.

Those famous artists spent their days in adventures and feasting; they defended towns and castles; they built churches, palaces and ramparts; they gave and received mighty sword-thrusts, seduced women, took refuge in the cloisters, were absolved by the popes and saved by the princes. In an orgy described by Benvenuto Cellini we see the names figure of Michael Angelo and of Giulio Romano[583].

To-day the scene has greatly changed; the artists in Rome live poor and in retirement. Perhaps this life contains a poetry which is as good as the first. A society of German painters[584] has set itself to carry painting back to Perugino[585], in order to restore to it its Christian inspiration. Those young neophytes of St. Luke[586] maintain that Raphael, in his second manner, became a pagan and that his talent degenerated. Be it so; let us be pagans like the Raphaelite Virgins; let our talent degenerate and grow enfeebled as in the picture of the _Transfiguration!_ This creditable error of the new sacred school is none the less an error; it would follow that the stiffness and bad drawing of the forms would be a proof of intuitive vision, whereas that expression of faith which we observe in the works of the painters who precede the Renascence comes from the fact, not that the figures are posed squarely and motionless as sphinxes but that painting believed as did its century. It is the thought, not the painting, of the century that is religious; so true is this, that the Spanish School is eminently pious in its expression, notwithstanding that it has the grace and movement of the painting subsequent to the Renascence. Whence does this come? From the fact that _the Spaniards are Christians._

I go to see the artists separately at work; the pupil sculptor lives in some grotto, under the evergreen oaks of the Villa Medici, where he finishes his marble child giving a serpent to drink out of a shell. The painter inhabits a dilapidated house in some deserted spot; I find him alone, taking through his open window some view of the Roman Campagna. M. Schnetz's[587] _Brigand's Wife_ has become the mother asking of the Madonna the cure of her son. Léopold Robert[588], returning from Naples, passed through Rome recently, bringing with him the enchanted scenes of that lovely clime, which he has simply stuck on to his canvas.

[Sidenote: Guérin, Horace Vernet, Quecq.]

Guérin has retired, like a sick dove, to the top of a pavilion of the Villa Medici. He listens, with his head under his wing, to the sound of the wind from the Tiber; when he wakes up, he makes a pen-drawing of the Death of Priam.

Horace Vernet[589] is struggling to change his manner: will he succeed? The snake which he twines round his neck, the dress which he affects, the cigar which he smokes, the masks and foils with which he surrounds himself remind one too much of the bivouac.

Who has ever heard speak of my friend M. Quecq[590], the successor of Julius III.[591] in the cabin of Michael Angelo, Vignola[592] and Taddeo Zuccaro[593]? And yet he painted the _Death of Vitellius_ none too badly, in his nymphic grotto seized under distress. The waste garden-plots are haunted by a crafty animal which M. Quecq occupies himself in hunting: it is a fox, the great-grandson of Reynard the Fox, first of the name, and nephew of Ysengrin the Wolf.

Pinelli[594], between two fits of drunkenness, has promised me twelve scenes of dances, gambling and robbers. It is a pity that he starves the big dog which lies at his door. Thorwaldsen[595] and Camuccini[596] are the two princes of the poor artists of Rome.

Sometimes those scattered artists meet and go together, on foot, to Subiaco. On the road, they scrawl grotesque figures on the walls of the inn at Tivoli. One day, perhaps, some Michael Angelo will be recognised by the charcoal drawing which he will have made on a work of Raphael's.

I would like to have been born an artist: the solitude, the independence, the sunshine amid ruins and master-pieces would suit me. I have no wants; a piece of bread, a pitcher of the _Aqua Felice_ would content me. My life has been wretchedly caught in the thickets on my road; how happy should I have been, had I been the free bird that sings and builds its nest in those thickets!

Nicolas Poussin bought, out of his wife's dowry, a house on the Pincian Hill, opposite another _casino_ which had belonged to Claude Gelée, surnamed Lorraine[597]. My other fellow-countryman, Claude, also died in the lap of the Queen of the World[598]. If Poussin reproduces the Roman Campagna, even when the scene of his landscapes is set elsewhere, Claude Lorraine reproduces the skies of Rome, even when he paints ships and a sunset at sea.

Why was I not the contemporary of certain privileged creatures to whom I feel attracted in the different centuries? But I should have had to rise from the dead too often. Poussin and Claude Lorraine have trodden the Capitol; kings have come there and not been worth so much as they. De Brosses[599] there met the English Pretender[600]; I found there, in 1803, the abdicated King of Sardinia and to-day, in 1828, I see there Napoleon's brother, the King of Westphalia. Rome in her decline offers an asylum to the fallen powers; her ruins are a place of sanctuary for persecuted glory and unfortunate talents.

If I had painted Roman society, a quarter of a century ago, as I have just painted the Roman Campagna, I should be obliged to retouch my portrait; it would no longer be like. Every generation lasts thirty-three years, the life of Christ (Christ is the type of all things); every generation in our western world changes its outward aspect. Man is placed in a picture whose frame is invariable, but whose figures move. Rabelais[601] was in this city, in 1536, with the Cardinal du Bellay[602]; he performed the functions of house-steward to His Eminence; he "carved and handed."

Rabelais, changed into "Friar John of the Funnels," is not of the opinion of Montaigne, who heard scarce any bells in Rome and "fewer than in the most insignificant town in France[603];" Rabelais, on the contrary, hears many in the "Ringing Island" (Rome): "some of us doubted that it was the Dodonian Kettle[604]."

[Sidenote: Old-time visitors to Rome.]

Four and forty years after Rabelais, Montaigne found the banks of the Tiber planted, and he observed that, on the 16th of March, there were roses and artichokes in Rome. The churches were bare, without statues of saints, without pictures, less ornate and less beautiful than the French churches. Montaigne was accustomed to "the cloudy vastitie and gloomy canopies of our churches[605];" he speaks several times of St. Peter's without describing it, insensible or indifferent as he appears to be to the arts. In the presence of so many master-pieces, no name offers itself to Montaigne's recollection; his memory does not speak to him of Raphael nor of Michael Angelo, not yet sixteen years dead.

For the rest, ideas on the arts, on the philosophic influence of the geniuses which have magnified or protected them, were not yet born. Time does for men what space does for monuments; we judge both one and the other correctly only at a distance and from the point of view of perspective; viewed from too near, we do not see them; from too far, we no longer see them.

The author of the _Essayes_ looked in Rome only for Ancient Rome:

"The buildings in this bastard Rome, which the moderns were
raising upon, or appending to, the glorious structures of
the antique world, though they sufficed enough to excite the
admiration of the present age, yet seemed to him to bear a
close resemblance to those nests which the rooks and the
swallows construct upon the roofs and walls of the churches
in France, which the Huguenots have demolished[606]."

What sort of idea had Montaigne of Ancient Rome, if he regarded St. Peter's as a swallow's nest, hung on to the walls of the Coliseum?

The new Roman citizen by an "authenticke bull" of the year 1581 A.D.[607] had remarked that the Roman ladies wore no masks, as they did in France; they appeared in public resplendent with pearls and precious stones, but "they had the waist exceedingly loose, which gives them all the appearance of being with child." The men were dressed in black, and although they were "dukes, marquisses, counts," they "are somewhat mean-looking[608]."

It is not singular that St. Jerome remarks the gait of the Roman women, which gives them the appearance of being with child: _solutis genibus fractus incessus?_

Almost every day, when I go out through the Porta Angelica, I see a mean house not far from the Tiber with a smoky French sign-board representing a bear; it was there that Michael Lord of Montaigne landed on arriving at Rome, not far from the hospital which served as an asylum to that poor madman[609], "one most fitted under the ayre of true ancient poesie," whom Montaigne saw "in so piteous a plight" at Ferrara, and "rather spited than pitied him[610]."

It was a memorable event when the seventeenth century deputed its greatest Protestant poet and its most serious genius to visit great Catholic Rome in 1638. Leaning against the Cross, holding the Old and New Testaments in her hands, with the guilty generations driven from Eden behind her and the redeemed generations descended from the Garden of Olives before her, she said to the heretic born of yesterday:

"What do you want of your old mother?"

Leonora[611], the Roman, bewitched Milton[612]. Has it ever been remarked that Leonora appears once again in the Memoirs of Madame de Motteville[613], at the concerts of Cardinal Mazarin[614]?

[Sidenote: Milton, the Abbé Arnold.]

The order of dates brings the Abbé Arnauld[615] to Rome after Milton. This abbé, who had borne arms, relates an anecdote which is curious on account of the name of one of its persons, while, at the same time, it brings before us the manners of the courtesans. The "hero of the fable," the Duc de Guise[616], grandson of the Balafré, going in search of his Naples adventure, passed through Rome, in 1647: he there knew Nina Barcarola. Maison-Blanche, secretary to M. Deshayes[617], Ambassador to Constantinople, took it into his head to become the rival of the Duc de Guise. It was a bad business for him; they substituted (it was at night, in an unlighted room) a hideous old hag for Nina:

"If the laughter was great on one side," says Arnauld, "the
confusion on the other side was as great, as may well be
imagined. The Adonis, extricating himself with difficulty
from his divinity's embraces, ran quite naked out of the
house, as though the devil were at his heels."

The Cardinal de Retz tells us nothing on the subject of Roman manners. I prefer "little" Coulanges[618] and his two journeys of 1656 and 1689: he celebrates those "vineyards" and "gardens" whose mere names possess a charm. When I walk to the Porta Pia, I meet almost all the persons named by Coulanges: those persons? No: their grandsons and grand-daughters!

Madame de Sévigné receives verses from Coulanges; she replies to him from the Château des Rochers in my poor Brittany, at ten leagues from Combourg:

"What a sad date after yours, my amiable cousin! It suits a
solitary like myself, and that of Rome suits you, whose star
is a wandering one. How gently has fortune treated you, as
you say, even though it have fastened a quarrel on you!!!"

Between Coulanges' first journey to Rome, in 1656, and his second journey, in 1689, thirty-three years elapsed: I reckon only twenty-five years wasted between my first journey to Rome, in 1803, and my second journey, in 1828. If I had known Madame de Sévigné, I should have cured her of the grief of growing old.

Spon[619], Misson[620], Dumont[621], Addison[622] successively follow Coulanges. Spon, with Wheler, his companion, acted as my guide over the ruins of Athens.

[Sidenote: Dumont, Addison, Labat.]

It is curious to read in Dumont how the master-pieces which we admire were disposed at the time of his journey in 1690: one saw at the Belvedere the statues of the Nile and the Tiber[623], the Antinous[624], the Cleopatra, the Laocoon[625] and the supposed torso of Hercules[626]. Dumont places in the gardens of the Vatican "the bronze peacocks which once adorned the tomb of Scipio Africanus."

Addison travels as a "scholar[627]," his trip is summed up in classical quotations tinged with English recollections; when passing through Paris, he presented his poems to M. Boileau[628].

Père Labat[629] follows the author of Cato: a singular man, this Parisian monk of the Order of Preaching Friars. A missionary to the Antilles, a filibuster, an able mathematician, architect and soldier, a brave gunner levelling the cannon like a grenadier, a learned critic, who had restored the Dieppois to the possession of their original discovery in Africa[630], he had a mind inclined to raillery and a character to liberty. I know of no traveller who gives clearer and more exact ideas concerning the Pontifical Government. Labat walks the streets, goes to the processions, meddles in everything and laughs at nearly everything.

The Preaching Friar relates how the Capuchins, at Cadiz, gave him sheets to his bed which had been quite new since ten years, and how he saw a St. Joseph dressed in the Spanish fashion, sword at side, hat under its arm, powdered hair, and spectacles on nose. In Rome he attends a mass:

"Never," he says, "have I seen so many mutilated musicians
together, nor so numerous a symphony. Those who were judges
said that there was nothing so fine. I said as much, to make
believe that I was a judge too; but, if I had not had the
honour to form one of the train of the officiating priest, I
should have left the ceremony, which lasted at least three
good hours, which seemed to me quite six."

The more I come down to the time at which I write, the more do the usages of Rome begin to resemble the usages of to-day. In the time of De Brosses, the Roman women wore false hair; the custom proceeded from far back; Propertius asks his "life" why she delights in adorning her hair:

Quid juvat ornato precedere, vita, capillo[631]?

The Gallic women, our mothers, supplied the hair of the Severinas, Piscas, Faustinas, Sabinas. Velleda says to Eudorus, speaking of her hair:

"'Tis my diadem, and I have kept it for thee[632]."

A head of hair was not the greatest conquest of the Romans, but it was one of the most lasting: we often take from the tombs of women the whole of that ornament, which has resisted the scissors of the daughters of the night, and we look in vain for the comely brow which it adorned. The perfumed tresses, the object of the idolatry of the lightest of the passions, have outlived empires; death, which shatters all chains, has been unable to break that net. To-day the Italians wear their own hair, which the women of the people plait with coquettish grace.

De Brosses, the traveller magistrate, bears, in his portraits and writings, a false air of Voltaire, with whom he had a comical dispute about a field. De Brosses often sat chatting on the edge of the bed of a Princess Borghese. In 1803, I saw in the Borghese Palace another princess who was shining with all the brilliancy of her brother's glory: Pauline Bonaparte is no more[633]! Had she lived in the days of Raphael, he would have represented her in the form of one of those Loves which recline on the backs of the lions in the Farnese Palace, and the same languor would have carried off the painter and the model. How many flowers have already passed away in those plains in which I made Jerome and Augustine, Eudorus and Cymodocœa roam!

[Sidenote: De Brosses, King James III.]

De Brosses represents the English on the Piazza d'Espagna much as we see them to-day, living together, making a great noise, eyeing poor mortals from head to foot, and returning to their brick-red dog-hole in London, after scarce so much as glancing at the Coliseum. De Brosses obtained the honour of paying his court to James III.:

"Of the two sons of the Pretender," he says, "the elder[634]
is about twenty years old, the younger[635] fifteen. I have
heard say by those who know them thoroughly that the elder
is worth by far the more and is better loved in private;
that he has a good heart and great courage; that he feels
his position keenly and that, if he does not escape from
it one day, it will not be for want of fearlessness. I was
told that, being taken, when quite young, to the siege of
Gaeta[636], at the time of the conquest of the Kingdom of
Naples by the Spaniards, during the crossing his hat came to
fall into the sea. They wanted to pick it up:

"'No,' said he, 'it is not worth while; I shall surely have
to go to fetch it myself one day.'"