Chapter II (1)

SURELY no city in the world queens it over the waves so completely as does Portoferraio. She rides them imperiously, lifting high the turrets that are her crown and defence; she decks herself in the brightest colours, conscious of her beauty; and sets herself boldly on the very head and front of the dark blue waters that wash her feet or leap up in wrath at her pride, yet never injure her. Genoa is called the Superb, but the epithet rises more spontaneously to the mind on view of the capital of the Island of Elba.

Portoferraio was originally one of those headlands, so characteristic of Elba, that grow out from the mainland on a narrow stalk, and then widen and heighten into rocky peninsulas. It is now, however, an island, for Cosimo I., Duke of Tuscany, cut a moat through the stalk, and severed the peninsula from the mainland. The peninsula consists of two heights, on one of which is the fort known as the Falcone, on the other, that of the Stella; and these are bound together by a lofty wall, within the castellations of which sentinels could walk without descending into the town. Immediately below each fort, a bank of concrete, kept in former times very clean and free from growth, formed a water-shed for the rain which streamed down it into a cistern below. At present the concrete, though still railed in, is quite overgrown, for the city boasts a water-supply brought down from the neighbouring hills. Round the forts are spacious granite-paved squares on which considerable bodies of men could manœuvre; and below cluster the red-roofed, green-shuttered houses, whose inhabitants sleep, in Oriental fashion, through the heat of the day, coming out in the evening to walk among the oleanders of _Le Ghiaie_—a tiny park above a beach of the whitest gravel (_ghiaia_)—or to dance with the officers in the new bathing establishment, of which they are so proud. Down again, at the foot of the houses, lies the port, a semi-circle pointed at the southern end by the pink-washed tumble-down offices of the sanitary inspector, at the northern end by the octagonal tower of the convict prison. Soldiers, convicts, “society,” trade, all hive on those two little hills, and the only opening through which workers and drones can pass in and out on the landside is a low-browed gateway, bearing the Medici arms, and overlooking a plank bridge spanning the moat of sea-water. Within the gateway is a wide, open space, through which one passes up the first ramparts of the Falcone, to a wonderful winding tunnel, hewn in the solid rock. This brings one out through another gate, into the flaunting little city. The tunnel is known as _La Tromba_ (the trumpet-shaped), and was the work, as usual, of Cosimo’s engineer.

Portoferraio, Ferraio, the iron city, as it was originally called, dates, at any rate, from Roman times. The name would suggest this, and the fact is abundantly proved by Roman walls, pavements of brick and marble, tombs with inscriptions, skeletons, lamps, etc., coins of consuls and emperors, workmen’s tools, that were unearthed from time to time during the seventeenth century, when excavations were being made for the subterranean cisterns, guard-houses, powder-magazines, halls of every kind that honeycomb the ground.

Towards the end of April, 1548, there arrived in the bay below Portoferraio a fleet bearing one thousand soldiers, three hundred sappers and miners, and the architect John Baptist Camerini. Ferraio was at that time a heap of ancient ruins, but Cosimo I., the merchant Duke of Tuscany, whose coasts lay open to the invasion of the Turks, and whose galleys were continually assailed by pirates, concluded that the best possible points of defence against these redoubtable enemies were Ferraio and Piombino. With a large sum of money, and a very great deal of diplomacy, he persuaded Charles V. (who thought that the same points of defence would be as irritating to the French as to the Turks) to grant him the places. The agreement was hardly concluded when the Duke’s men landed on the little peninsula, quarried the blocks, ready squared to their hands from the Roman villas and walls, made a brick kiln on the coast near by where there was suitable clay, obtained excellent mortar from the stones of the neighbouring hills, and in a fortnight had raised the walls breast high. Cosimo made two visits to the island to inspect the works, living not in Ferraio itself, but in a house on the hillside opposite, that is still known as the Casa del Duca (Duke’s house), and bears on its garden wall a defaced, weather-stained marble bust of Duke Cosimo. The Turks, the French, the Genoese, and the rest of Cosimo’s many enemies were beside themselves with rage. Elba was wasted throughout its length and breadth, the new town—no longer Ferraio, but Cosmopolis—was besieged by mighty fleets, intrigues were obstinately kept up to induce the Emperor to revoke his grant, but the Duke (now Grand Duke) made head against force and intrigue; the town remained in his hands, and still, as witness to his might, bears over its gateways the proud inscription:

templa, moenia, domos, arces, portum,
cosmus florentinorum dux II. a fundamentis
erexit an. MDXLVIII

The port, as made by Cosimo, still remains, but the defences and engineering works completed by him and his successors are now deserted, or have been turned into the convict prison, the three white columns of whose water-gate form a striking feature in a view of the port. The convicts are here allowed to work at various trades. Workshops are provided within the prison walls, and a show-room for the sale of their goods. The government exacts a small royalty on objects sold.

A sentimental interest attaches itself to Portoferraio, as being the place which preserved to mankind a sickly puling infant of the name of Victor Hugo. An epigraph by Mario Foresi, on the walls of the town-hall, commemorates the fact.[13]

Along the shore of that part of the gulf, which lies outside the port, the sea looks as though some eccentric gardener had been laying out garden beds in it, with grassy walks between, and white pyramids at irregular intervals. These are the _saline_, where the government makes salt (not very good salt either) for its subjects. It produces about 1,152 tons a year, which it sells at the rate of _3d._ per pound. Truly a government salt monopoly is not a pleasant thing for peasants, who can get salt alone as a condiment for their soup of cabbages and beans, or their mess of maize flour.

Ferraio, then, takes its name from the principal product of the island, but the mines are not near the town; they are on the eastern coast, at Rio and at Cape Calamita (Loadstone Cape).

Rio, like all other villages in this part of the world, consists of two parts: Rio Alto, whose streets are merely a succession of stairs; and Rio Marina, a modern town, where the mines are. The prevailing colour in Rio Marina is red: red are the hills that shut out the fresh north breezes from the town, red is the sea where the steamers lie off to be loaded, red are the four piers where the trucks go up and down, red the houses, with their curtains, stairs, and furniture. This red ochrous ore is associated, as one ascends the mountain, with the massive and micaceous varieties of hæmatite; so that while one sees red cliffs towering on one side, and solid knobs and blocks of iron, almost native, on the other, one walks over roads that glitter and sparkle like running water, and are almost as slippery as ice.

“And Seius, whose eight hundred slaves
Sicken in Ilva’s mines,”

writes Lord Macaulay; thereby showing that he had never been to Rio. For there is no mining properly so-called here; there is no tunnelling, no blasting on a large scale. The men work in the open air, digging away the red earth, blowing away the harder masses with small charges of powder or getting them out with picks. The earth is washed in a large cistern, with a revolving paddle-wheel, that keeps the water in continual motion; and the iron thus separated from the clay is loaded on to the ships without further refining.

At present the mines are farmed out by the Government, and produce about 176,516 tons yearly. The men are paid by piece work, and earn from two francs to four francs a day. Only one set of men is kept. When they are not lading foreign vessels, they dig ore, and make great heaps of it; when they are not digging, they lade. It is evident the place wants development.

At the iron quarries of Cape Calamita, where magnetic iron is obtained, we watched the process of lading. A large English-built steamer had come in, under a Genoese captain, for iron, which it was to exchange for coal at Cardiff. She stood in as near to the shore as was safe, and then anchoring, opened three mouths on each side to receive her food. Come out to her six willing slaves, small boats called _laconi_, with the most audacious masts and yard-arms one can imagine. They look as though they would rend the clouds and pierce the sky; but it is all bluster; the boats are such helpless creatures that if they are to cross the bay, they must have a steam-tug to pull them. The men in the _laconi_ rest planks on the open lips of the monster that towers above them, and proceed to pour down its six gaping throats an infinite number of small baskets of the red, earthy ore. For four consecutive days they feed her, if the weather be fine, and then she goes off to the northern seas, where _laconi_ are unknown, where the water is rarely motionless, and where steam cranes and puffing engines tell of work done in a hurry. It must be confessed, however, that the Elban method is adorably picturesque. Sea, sky, and hills are glowing in the great calm. The big black ship lies motionless; her crew lounge, her jovial, white-suited captain, so proud of his mahogany-fitted passenger ship that used to go to India, stands watching the ore slide in; the Elbans cluster up the sides of the planks to pass the baskets from one to the other; they talk and laugh, showing glittering white teeth; and they wear hanging red fishermen’s caps, patchwork shirts and bright sashes.

Onward along the coasts from Rio, we come to the ancient town of Portolongone, built along the curve of a fine, natural harbour. Sheer above the town, where the Portolongone women flaunt it along their sea front after mass, in the brightest of dresses, and the most artistic of black or white lace head-veils, rises one of the strongest fortresses of the island. It was built in 1603, to the infinite dismay and disturbance of such small fry as the Florentines, Genoese, and the Pope, by Philip III. of Spain. The approach to it is broad, but very steep; the outer ring of fortifications are a city in themselves; and within, across the inner moat and drawbridge, there are spacious squares, clusters of houses, an interesting church, and the large prisons in which are kept criminals condemned to solitary confinement. The prisons we cannot enter, but let us sit for a while in the chaplain’s cool, brick-paved room, sipping the country wine and breaking the long, curled strips of pastry which his hospitable womenfolk have heaped on the table, and listen to what he has to tell us of his charges.

“No,” he says, “they none of them live long, once they come in here; they go mad or fall into consumption, and so die if they have not succeeded in committing suicide first. We have to look out sharply to prevent that. A man managed to do it, though, about a month ago. He tore his shirt into strips and made a slip-knot for his neck, climbed, no one knows how, to the grate in the middle of the deep window-hole, and tied the end of the noose there, bound his own hands together somehow or other, and then kicked away the stool he had been standing on. When he felt himself strangling, he struggled to get free, but his hands were fast, and he only succeeded in pulling the noose tighter and tighter. He was quite dead when they took him down. Outside the prison are a number of cells open to the air, closed by iron gates. You can see them down there.” We were walking about outside by this time, where the convicts not in solitary confinement are building the new prisons. “Every prisoner has an hour’s turn in one of those open-air cells once a day, guards pacing outside the gates the whole time.

“Their food? Well, yes, as you say, it is clean, savoury, and well-cooked”—we had been peeping into the kitchens as we came along—“but they have a very small allowance; a plate of soup given half at midday and half in the evening (vegetable soup, with _pasta_ in it) and two loaves, not much bigger than rolls, of white bread. It is piteous to see how a stout well-built man dwindles away on this _régime_. The men who are at work buy extras with their wages. Those who wear chains from ankle to wrist were sentenced under the old penal code. When they go to bed they are chained to the wall. Chains are abolished by the new code.

“The prison consists of two storeys of cells, running down each side of a central corridor that extends up to the roof. Communication with the cells of the upper storey is obtained by an iron balcony which runs the length of the building at the height of the first storey. All the cell doors open towards the inner end of the prison, where an altar has been set up.

“When I say mass, they are all set ajar (there is in every case an iron gate, kept locked, inside the wooden door), and so the prisoners can look at the altar without seeing each other. I go round to them at regular intervals, unless someone calls for me specially, and talk to them from outside the iron gates. No, I am not afraid, but it is the custom. They generally like to have me go, and appear really to appreciate the comforts of religion. Read! Ah, you saw Library printed up near the gate, did you? But there are very few books in it. What can we give them? They must not read novels, and they must not read politics. I give them a religious paper about the miraculous Madonna at Pompeii, and some of them read that. Otherwise they do nothing. All the work of the place, washing, nursing, cooking, building, cleaning, is done by convicts. Even the barbers are convicts, and as they have nearly served their time, and besides get better paid than the others, they are careful of their behaviour; there is no need to be afraid of them. That house down there, with its back against the rock, is the lowest depth of all. The cells are dark, and none but the most refractory prisoners ever go there. It has been empty for some time past.

“Born criminals? No, I don’t much believe in that doctrine; I think that in most cases one whom Lombroso would call a born criminal, may be saved by careful training. Before I came here I knew a man who brutally killed his wife while his little boy looked on. The man was condemned; we looked after the bringing up of the boy. At first but little could be done with him. He would bully his fellows, and then, crossing his arms over his breast, would throw back his head defiantly and say: ‘Do you know who I am? My father was the terror of the village.’ He did not seem to know what pain was. I have seen him undergo an operation in his finger which had been caught in a machine, without a sign of suffering. One day the lads were working at a machine, and one of them grew tired. ‘Who’ll take my place?’ he called out. No answer. ‘Will no one help me?’ Another pause. Then the criminal’s son called out, ‘I will.’ He went to the machine and worked there till he was nearly dropping with fatigue. But from that day he was completely changed, and he has grown up into a quiet, trustworthy, hard-working man.”

By this time our courteous host had accompanied us back to the inner gateway; and so, taking leave of him, we left that terrible artificial world, over which, with a hush still greater than that of the sea and sky and mountain, broods the awful presence of unknown crime terribly expiated.

THE FIRST STEP OF A MIGHTY FALL

“_Le premier degré d’une chute profonde_,” says Victor Hugo, speaking of Elba in connection with Napoleon. And it is impossible to remain in the island long without conjuring up the figure of the fallen prince hurrying hither and thither with one or two attendants, building his villa, enquiring into the agricultural and mineral wealth of his new kingdom, collecting his taxes and his customs duties, strengthening his fortifications, holding the tiny court of which the people of Portoferraio were so inordinately proud, carrying on his _amours_, chatting with the peasants and the proprietors—and under the mask of all this activity enlisting men, collecting stores, conducting a continuous secret correspondence with Naples, with Corsica, with France, undecided whether to make himself King of Italy or to go back to be Emperor of the French.

Elba, towering above her satellites Pianosa, Monte Cristo, S. Stefano, Giglio, with the rocky islet of Palmaiola as sentinel in the very narrow channel towards Piombino, is an excellent place to plot in, and a very difficult place to watch. Napoleon, as was but natural, took in the advantages of his position at a glance. He had hardly arrived in Elba before he claimed the neighbouring islands as part of his domain, and began to establish outposts on them. Thus he surrounded himself with a barrier within which no foreign ship could penetrate without violating the independence secured to him by the Treaty of Fontainebleau; and which at the same time afforded him a valid excuse for short sea-trips and for a constant movement of small vessels eminently adapted to conceal secret negotiations of every kind, and especially his intercourse with Corsica. In this most favourable position, shut off from prying eyes by diplomacy and nature combined, within easy communicating distance on the one hand of Tuscany and of Murat, on the other of Corsica and France, Napoleon remained from May 4th, 1814, to February 26th, 1815. With his political intrigues during that time we do not propose to concern ourselves, nor with the vexed question raised by some disappointed Frenchmen, who seem to have understood neither the Treaty of Fontainebleau nor the geography of Elba, as to England’s complicity in his escape; rather we would picture him in the places with which we too are familiar, would shadow him forth not as the banished Emperor of France, but as Monarch of Elba.

By the time the English frigate, the _Undaunted_, that bore him, reached Portoferraio, Napoleon had decided on the line of conduct he intended to pursue: that of a monarch on a small scale, intent on developing the resources of his kingdom, firm in exacting respect for his new flag from all maritime powers. And so well did he play his part of miniature kingship that even Sir Neil Campbell, English Commissioner in the island, thought that he was contented; and more than once opined that if Napoleon were well supplied with money—as he should have been by the terms of the treaty—he would remain quietly where he was; but he was such a very eccentric person that, if he ran short, there was no knowing what improper conduct he might pursue.

He assumed this position at once on his arrival in the harbour of Portoferraio. He refused to land until his new subjects should have had time to prepare an ovation suitable to the reception of a monarch, and he issued an address to General d’Alhesme, then commanding in the island, in the following terms:—

“General! I have sacrificed my rights to the interests of my country, reserving the sovereignty and possession of the island of Elba. To this the Powers have consented. Have the kindness to make known the new state of things to the inhabitants, and the choice that I have made of their island as my abode on account of the mildness of their customs and their climate. Tell them that they will always be the objects of my warmest interest.”

The Portoferraiesi took the Emperor at his word. They were overwhelmed with gratitude at the honour he showed them. They received him with flags, with fireworks and with Te Deums; they sent deputations to wait on him; they presented him with a map of his dominions—a very bad one, by-the-by—on a silver tray; they gave up their best furniture to furnish, provisionally at least, the Palazzina dei Mulini, just under Forte Falcone, where he was to live; they took his officers into their homes; they put on their finest dresses and went to receptions in the town-hall in the evening, telling themselves that their city already seemed like one of the capitals of Europe. And Napoleon fostered their delusion. He proposed to readopt the name given to the city by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and to call it Cosmopoli; deriving the first part of the word, not from Cosimo, but from the Greek _kosmos_, world, declaring that his Cosmopoli was to be the _City of the World_. At the same time he built and altered extensively in and around his house, adding another storey, planting a garden, forming a library, erecting a tribunal and theatre; he shipped over furniture from the mainland; he prepared a residence close to his own for his mother; he bought land and built a country-house not far from Portoferraio; he sent for his sister Pauline; he prepared extensive stabling; he established a lazaretto in the harbour, which was to compete with that of Leghorn: everything pointed to complete acquiescence in his position.

He had, in fact, scarcely landed before he began to take possession of his new dominions, as a good monarch should do, and had soon visited the places of importance in Elba and its dependant isles. His corpulence rendered climbing and even walking difficult, but his active spirit overcame all difficulties; and the Elbans who met him, his officers and attendants, continually on the roads and mountain paths, felt quite convinced that the Emperor was devoting himself to their welfare.

One of his first expeditions brought vividly before him the extent of his fall. He had visited all the forts and surroundings of Portoferraio, had collected information concerning the salt manufacture (a Government monopoly) and the tunny fishery; and turning to the left from the land gate of Portoferraio, had pushed as far as the iron mines of Rio—then, as now, Government property—and the fort of Longone; but he had not yet climbed the hills that shut in his capital at the back. These are crossed by a few bridle-paths and by a road, sheer up and down, paved now with the native rock, now with loose, rolling stones, and known as the Colle Reciso. About half-way up the Portoferraio side of this road, a breakneck path leads to the right, up the face of a hill called St. Lucia, whence the Etruscans once drew copper for their bronze. The Emperor, Colonel Campbell, General Bertrand, and their attendants, riding to the top of this hill, found themselves among the ruins of a very large ancient castle. The towers lie prone in enormous masses of masonry, the walls have partly fallen in, partly been quarried for surrounding buildings; of roof there is no trace; the place is simply a large grass-grown square surrounded by naked, ruined blocks of masonry. Not quite abandoned, either, for in one corner is a tiny church with a couple of rooms built on to it in which a hermit once lived and died. Here the party halted and looked round. They were dominating the narrowest part of the island. Right and left the hills stretch away in barren, fantastic peaks now crowned with ruins, now sheer with granite cliffs; before and behind the sea is visible in four different places. Napoleon looked around for a little while, taking in the principal points of the landscape, and then, turning to Campbell, said, with a quiet smile:—“_Eh, mon île est bien petite_.”

Later on he would often follow the Colle Reciso down into the fertile, vine-covered plain of Lacona, which lies at its foot on the southern side. The conditions here, even now, are truly patriarchal. The mountains form a semi-circle about the coast; and in the midst stands the proprietor’s villa surrounded by eucalyptus trees, prickly-pears and aloes—an island among the spreading vineyards. To see the _contadini_ waiting at the well for the master, his arrival with his family, and the respectful familiarity with which they take their orders from their _padrone_, is to get a glimpse into old world ways and ideas such as does not fall to the lot of everyone.

From this plain springs the headland known as Capo di Stella. It is narrow and low at its base, but rises and swells as it advances into the sea, and becomes a wild rocky hill, with sheer precipices down to the water, covered with lentisks, with aromatic herbs, with great silvery shining thorn-bushes known to the inhabitants as _prune caprine_. It is the home of hares and innumerable birds. Here Napoleon proposed to make a preserve for game; and actually went the length of arranging matters with the proprietor, Jacopo Foresi, and of making some show of beginning the wall which was to span the isthmus, cutting off the headland from the rest of the estate. Needless to say that the game on Capo di Stella was not in reality profoundly interesting to Napoleon, and that the plan was never carried out. There is an incident recounted of the Emperor in these parts, commemorated by an inscription affixed by the present proprietor, Mario Foresi, to the walls of the house of one of his peasants. A certain Giaconi was ploughing when Napoleon came along, and in his character of one interested in everything, took the ploughshare out of the man’s hands and attempted to guide it himself. But the oxen refused to obey him, overturned the share and spoilt the furrow. Foresi’s inscription runs as follows:

napoleone il grande
quivi passando nel MDCCCXIV.
tolto nel campo adiacente l’aratro d’un contadino
provavasi egli stesso ad arare
ma i bovi rebelli a quelle mani
che pur seppero infrenare l’europa
precipitosamente
fuggirono dal solco.[14]

Farther along the coast, to the west of Lacona, and separated from it by a semi-circle of almost pathless hills, is the beach and village of Campo, where are extensive granite quarries. To this place also Napoleon paid several visits, and caused a road to be made winding round the base of the hills and joining it with Portoferraio. Must he not develop the resources of his island by providing for the carriage of its granite? Or rather, would not such a road be extremely convenient for keeping up communication with the outlying island of Pianosa, where he was collecting troops and training cavalry? The room where Napoleon passed the night on one of his visits to the village is still shown; an old man, too, blear-eyed and tottering, is listened to with a certain respect by the villagers as he relates how he was nursed and caressed by the Emperor. His father had been a sailor in one of Napoleon’s fleets, had been taken prisoner by Nelson, had spent many years in England, had been ultimately accepted as a sailor on an English ship, and had made his escape from Genoa. Napoleon visited the man, made him relate his experiences, and showed himself affable with the children, as was his general way in Elba.

Most thickly do reminiscences of Napoleon cluster round the lovely village of Marciana. The road leading westwards from Portoferraio skirts the seashore. On the left hand rise cliffs densely overgrown with white heather; below, on the right, lies the shore in a succession of bewitching bays and headlands. A ride of between two and three hours brings one to a village lying along a graceful curve, backed by dense chestnut woods, over which hang the frowning precipices of Monte Capanne, the highest mountain in the island. This is Marciana Marina. Behind it a steep, boulder-paved path, running along a ridge above the chestnut woods, where _cicale_ sing all day long to the sound of falling waters, leads to Marciana Alta, a fortified place defended once by a huge castle. The castle is now a mere shell within which fowls are penned; they pick up a living among the heaps of _débris_, and drink out of the two halves of the large iron crown which once hung proudly above the Medici arms. To the right of Marciana Alta, a long Via Crucis leads to a church known as the Madonna del Monte. The road is absolutely breakneck, formed of blocks of stone, which devout visitors to the shrine have hammered into the soil at their somewhat eccentric pleasure. The church is one of the richest in the island, possessing beautiful massive silver chalices and lamps, rich vestments, vineyards and fields. It stands in a wood of magnificent chestnut trees, and has at the back a charming semi-circular wall of grey stone, divided by pilasters into three sections, each of which contains an ancient stone mask spouting the coldest, lightest of water. Close by the church is a little house in which a lay hermit lives. What wonder that Napoleon should take a liking to so picturesque a place, renowned throughout the island for the excellence of its air and its water? What wonder that he should love to retire thither, and to wander through the woods to the truculent little village of Poggio that stands up so defiantly on its granite prominence? That he should even like to picnic on the road in the fold of the hills where the five springs keep up a continuous splashing? That he should choose this place to receive that mysterious lady (in reality, the Polish Countess Walewsky) whom the unlucky mayor of Marciana wanted to fête as no less a person than the Empress Marie Louise in person? Surely all this was harmless and natural enough. But follow up the path that leads off to the right of the hermitage, pass out of the shade of the trees and across the granite boulders to the promontory that commands the coast of Elba, the mainland, and Corsica. There two huge masses of rock tower above their comrades. Between them is a little stairway, partly natural, partly artificial, which leads to the top of the outer rock. This presents a natural platform shielded along part of its length by a natural parapet. The parapet has been added to with brickwork, and a deep hole big enough to hold a large flagstaff has been driven into the platform. This was a favourite resort of Napoleon’s. What place could be better for taking the air? And what place could be better for signalling to Corsica, the window-panes of whose villages glitter at so short a distance? As a matter of fact it is some thirty-five miles away; but in the limpid atmosphere of this “isle of the blessed,” distance, like time, seems to be annihilated. Here then, like the hero of Balzac’s tale, would the prodigal sit gazing at his _peau de chagrin_, now so wofully shrunken, and scheming for some way to reverse the spell and restore it to its former amplitude. Vain dream! from which he was finally awakened by the rude shock of Waterloo. After Napoleon left the island, the people of Marciana put up a pompous inscription on the outer wall of the church. It runs as follows:—

napoleone I
vinti gli imperi
i regi resi vassalli
da rutenici geli soprappreso non dalle armi
in questo eremo
per lui trasformato in reggia abitava
dal 23 agosto al 14 settembre 1814
e ritemprato il genio immortale
il 24 febbraio 1815
da qui slanciossi a meravigliare di se
novellamente il mondo.

il municipio di marciana
con animo grato e riverente
a tanto nome
decretava di erigere questa memoria
il 18 febbraio, 1863.[15]

Of regular residences Napoleon may be said to have had three in the island of Elba: the Mulini in Portoferraio, the country-house at St. Martino, and a house at Longone. The Mulini is a small, two-storeyed house, with a garden behind it, and a winding path leading down to the sea; the path ends in a little grotto known as “Napoleon’s bath.” The Emperor occupied the lower storey, giving the upper one, which he himself had built on, to his sister Pauline. No trace of the illustrious occupant now remains: the furniture has been entirely removed, some of it, as in the case of a bed in my possession, having left the island altogether; even the library, presented by Napoleon to the town, and lodged in the town-hall, has been to a great extent scattered, owing to the carelessness of the municipal authorities. Only one tangible record of the Emperor remains: the bronze mask in the chapel of the Misericordia. Antonmarchi, Napoleon’s doctor, made in Paris three bronze masks from the plaster cast which he had taken immediately after the death in St. Helena. One of these masks passed through the Murat family into the hands of the sculptor, Hiram Powers, in Florence, and is now[16] exposed for sale in London. The second I have not been able to trace. The third is at Portoferraio, kept in a handsome sarcophagus, and exposed to the public gaze every 5th of May, when a funeral service is performed over it. The face, as shown by the mask, is thin and drawn, the brow heavy and projecting; the likeness to the bust of Julius Cæsar in the British Museum is quite extraordinary.

Napoleon’s country-house at St. Martino lies in the fold of the hills west of Portoferraio. The building of it enabled him to play to perfection the _rôle_ he had determined to adopt. He bought up the ground from the small proprietors who owned it, respecting, however, the rights of one old woman who refused to sell; and as soon as the works were well under way was continually to be seen riding along the road from Portoferraio to inspect their progress, supervising everything, chatting with everybody, talking to the children and giving them money. A tree is still shown which he is said to have planted with his own hand. Round the house, which was quite small, is a wood with fine old ilex-trees through which a path leads to the spring at which Napoleon loved to drink, and to the right rises a hill which the peasants still call the _hill of sighs_, because, they say, Napoleon used to go up there to sigh for his beloved France. The Emperor’s bedroom has been preserved intact, with its pretty decorations and its charming Empire furniture. Near the bed are two windows, of which one, just at the level of the eyes of a person lying there, opens on to a superb view of Portoferraio, the sea and neighbouring coast-line.

The house within the fort at Longone is now as bare as that at Portoferraio. The place, however, is interesting, for it was with the excuse of repairing the fortifications there that the Emperor supplied himself with guns and ammunition; while the ostensible sale, at Genoa, Leghorn, and other places, of the old iron found in the fort, afforded him an additional means of communication with the Continent. He was very frequently at Longone while maturing the final details of his escape.

Notwithstanding his apparent affability towards the Elbans, intended, we must believe, rather to mislead outsiders than the people themselves, Napoleon was not popular in the island. Being in continual want of money he was obliged to tax the people beyond their resources; and they naturally saw clearly that, whatever he might say and however condescending he might show himself, the money he drew from them was by no manner of means applied to the improvement of their position. His tax-gatherers were insulted; riots took place in the very churches when the priests gave out the date by which the taxes were to be sent in; in one village troops were billeted on the inhabitants until the last penny should be paid. The cries of “_Vive l’Empereur!_” which had originally greeted him on his various expeditions, ceased to be heard.

Before matters reached a veritable climax, however, Napoleon had played out his part, and had left the island in which he had landed with so many fine promises. He had shown himself a clever actor, a skilful intriguer to the outside world of European diplomacy; debauched, tyrannical and exacting to the inner Elban world, into which foreign diplomats could pry with difficulty. In his vices, in his astuteness, in his ambition, Napoleon, as he revealed himself in the island of Elba, moves backwards through history, and takes his place beside the Borgia, the Orsini, the Medici of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Of the caricatures of the period the most interesting is the grimly ingenious German portrait of the Conqueror, to which the following explanation is attached: The hat is the Russian eagle which has gripped with its talons and will not leave go; the face is composed of the bodies of some of the thousands he has sacrificed to his ambition; the collar is the torrent of blood shed for his vain-glory; the coat is a bit of the map of the confederation arrayed against him and of his lost battlefields. On his shoulder, in the guise of an epaulet, is the great hand of God, which plucks the cobweb and destroys the spider that fills the place where a heart should have been.

FUGITIVE PIECES

A TALE FROM THE BORDERLAND

“WELL, it is a story to take or to leave. I tell it you as it happened to me. Think what you like about it.”

The speaker was a spare man of middle height; an Anglican priest, whose long black coat and white band set off a face that might have belonged to a seer of old: pallid yet not bloodless, with delicately cut mobile nostrils and grey eyes now piercingly bright, now losing themselves in far-off mystery. The few grey hairs combed across the ample brow seemed instinct with the life beneath them. In moments of great spiritual excitement, when the eyes kindled and the nostrils worked, they would appear to rise as into a halo above the inspired pallor of the face. And the cypresses were around us, gloomily aspiring; while the ground on which we sat was alive and gay with the most delicious little pink cyclamens: sweet, everyday human thoughts that come like a smile across the over-strained soul.

“I was in England then, working in a large Northern parish in the midst of dirt, misery and ignorance; and would often come home exhausted by the sufferings I had seen and could do so little to alleviate. One pouring wet evening I got in very late, soaked to the skin, faint with hunger, oppressed by the thought of the preparation needed for an early communion service I was to celebrate on the morrow. I told Janet to admit no one: that for no reason would I go out again that night; and sat down to dinner.

“I had hardly begun when the door bell rang, and voices reached me from the hall—that of a woman, evidently a lady, pleading, and Janet’s, repeating my order.

“‘But,’ the strange voice insisted, ‘he would surely come if he knew. It is to see a dying man. Tell him it is to see a dying man. To save a passing soul.’

“The woman’s distress and anxiety were so evident that I could remain passive no longer. I called Janet and told her to show the lady in. She was tall, graceful, dressed in black, with a long veil which she kept lowered, so that I could see the features but indistinctly. With every sign of agitation she repeated to me what she had said in the hall. ‘Would I come with her? It was to see a person who must die this night, and all unprepared.’

“I had no heart to refuse; and we sallied forth together, she leading, I following. After some time I found myself in a better part of the town, where the rows of squalid houses had given place to detached residences, each in its garden. At one of these we stopped, ascended the steps, and I rang.

“The door was opened by a butler, who had the air of being an old, confidential servant. I asked to see the person who was dying.

“The man looked at me in amazement. ‘No one is even ill here; much less dying. You must have the wrong address.’

“I looked around for my mysterious guide. I was alone.

“‘But,’ said I to the butler, ‘I assure you that a lady came to me this evening, asked me to follow her to a house where a man must die this night, and led me here. Are you certain there is no one ill?’

“‘Not only my master, but all the servants are perfectly well,’ was the reply.

“Just then a door opened and the master of the house appeared: a young, florid man, easy and good-natured, with a certain air of distinction about him. I introduced myself and repeated my story.

“‘Well, come in out of the rain now, at any rate,’ said he. ‘I am just sitting down to dinner. You will not refuse to join me?’

“I accepted the invitation and found my host bright, well-read, well-travelled: a most agreeable companion.

“As we were smoking after the meal, he said, hesitatingly:—

“‘Do you know I have been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long time past? I have had an instinctive feeling that I could confide in you as in no one else: a strange sympathy going out to you while you were personally unknown to me. And now I feel it stronger than ever. I cannot shake it off. May I make a father confessor of you? I am sick of this life. I want to be at something real.’

“I encouraged him to speak, and promised him all the help my experience should enable me to give him.

“‘Well, I will leave you for a little to collect my thoughts,’ said he. ‘Be so kind as to remain here.’

“While he was away I looked about the room, and found myself attracted by a picture, evidently a portrait, of a lady. I considered it attentively, and to my utter surprise recognised my mysterious visitor and guide.

“‘Who is that?’ I asked my host on his return.

“‘That? My mother. She died when I was a child. Yet’—with a hesitancy that was almost shamefacedness—‘yet, I feel somehow as though she were still caring for me.’

“We had a long talk in which he recounted his life, that of a young man about town; and the upshot of it was that he promised to come to the communion service on the following morning.

“I was at the church very early, waiting anxiously for his appearance.

“‘Do you really suppose he will come?’ said the friend who was to help me celebrate, and to whom I had related the strange experience. ‘You had better give up any hope of seeing him. It was probably nothing but a fit of the sentimentality that follows a comfortable dinner. It took that form because you happened to be with him. I have seen dozens of such cases.’

“Still I had faith in my convert; and as the service went on and he did not appear, I felt my heart grow big with sorrowful disappointment.

“I walked home sadly enough.

“In the hall I found the butler of the previous evening. He looked white and scared. He was trembling.

“‘Sir, sir,’ he stammered, ‘come with me. Come quickly. My master is dead. I found him dead this morning.’”

* * * * *

A silence fell upon us. The cypresses waved mysteriously towards the heavens—my friend’s face, with the awe-struck eyes, showing white amid the gloom.

“A mother’s love,” he murmured. “Why should it not compel the forces of material being? A mother’s love. Is it not ‘the last relay and ultimate outpost of Eternity?’”

THE PHANTOM BRIDE

THERE were three of us: men between youth and middle age who had gone through school and college together, had walked the hospitals and worked in the dissecting room without a break in our friendship; and, separated by the exigencies of our practice, had still, as though by some occult sympathy, kept in touch with each other across long stretches of absence and silence. We were sitting with our coffee and cigarettes on the public walk above Florence. Before us lay the great square with the colossal David: the bronze giant that looks ever to the hills beyond the town, with his sling ready to defend her from assault; while behind us rose the church from which the creator of that giant really had protected the city against the strange-speaking North-men who had poured over those very hills for her destruction. The last gleam of sunshine was, as we knew, making the gold of the mosaic glitter over the church-door there above us. It lay too on the town at our feet, lighting up the captivating grace of the bell-tower, the chastened glow of whose marbles seemed actually before our eyes; bringing out the unsurpassable curves of the cathedral dome, and the squatter lines of that of St. Lorenzo, where the Medici moulder in their marble tombs; lingering on the graceful sturdiness of the Palazzo Vecchio; touching the spires of the church of St. Croce and of the Bargello where prisoners once pined. It was that hour before the actual sunset when the city, lying languidly amid the encircling hills, seems consciously to breathe out the suavity by which she captures her lovers and holds them to her in life-long thraldom. And two of us had been long away from our mistress; the spirit of the time and the place was upon us; confidences of loves and sorrows rose naturally to our lips.

Conti flung away his cigarette and threw himself back in his chair. I glanced at his small nervous hands as he folded his arms; remembering their quick, sure movements in the most delicate operations; and then I looked into his blue eyes, whose bright sparkle the deadly habit of morphine-taking, the future ruin of that bright career, was already changing into dreaminess.

“Decidedly, Neri,” exclaimed he, “you are the most changed of the three. There you sit smoking your cigarette as quietly as though we came here every day of our lives. With a line between your brows, too! You look as though you were obliged to take a wife to-morrow. What has happened? Has someone got drowned in such a way that you cannot tell whether it was a homicide or a suicide, and are afraid of misleading justice? Has a supposed corpse come to life again and objected to being dissected?”

A smile flickered across Neri’s gravity. He was the handsomest of the three: one of the best made men in the town. He wore a thick, pointed beard, and the mouth under the moustache was of quite exceptional firmness and delicacy. In fact he was what the women call a _bell’uomo_; and but for his thorough-going solidity of character and immense variety of interests, would infallibly have had his head turned by their admiration. As it was he simply had no time to give them very much attention. And lately, so we were told, he had taken less notice of them than ever; but had gone about his work with the line between his brows, and lips that rarely relaxed except to smile encouragement to some poor patient on whom he had operated.

He breathed out the smoke slowly, luxuriously, from his mouth and nostrils—he was a confirmed cigarette smoker—and answered:—

“No, I am not going to be married to-morrow; and I was thinking of a _post-mortem_, but not of such an one as Conti imagines. I will tell you the story; but keep it to yourselves. There’s a woman in the case, of course,” he added, with a short nervous laugh. Then he hesitated again, and at last began.

“Just a year ago to-day I had to make a _post-mortem_, and a report to the police, on the body of the one woman who has entered profoundly into my life. She was a rising operatic singer with a singular power of vivid dramatic intensity, though I do not think her impersonations were ever a full expression of her innermost powers. Her interests were extremely varied, her mind exceptionally mobile—her occupation fostering this mobility, and increasing that power of quick sympathy, of putting herself into touch with the people with whom she came into contact, which was one of her distinguishing features. She was not beautiful; but she had fine large dark eyes that looked straight at you; and she was so lithe and girl-like in all her movements (she was rather older than myself in reality) that you felt inclined just to take her in your arms and hold her fast against all the troubles of the world—and she had her share, I warrant you.”

“H’m,” said Conti. “And you did it, I suppose. You seem to have been hard hit.”

“No, I did not do it; although I was more than hard hit. Her position was so difficult that I had no heart to make it worse; and she had a certain dignity about her, even in her moments of most childlike _abandon_ in talking with me, that prevented any light advances. You felt as though you must help her even against herself, for her nature was evidently passionate; and that made your feeling for her all the more profound. She had married unfortunately; a man who had ill-treated and neglected her in every possible way. After a couple of years she fled from her husband, left the stage, and changing her name, lived by giving singing lessons; and, when I first knew her, was making a brave struggle not only to support herself and her boy, but to obtain and hold such a position in the world as should enable her to launch him in his career. Then she fell ill; more from exhaustion of vital force than anything else; and I never saw anything like the spirit with which she bore up. She was almost too weak to teach, and held her pupils together with the greatest difficulty; yet she managed always to wear a bright smile, and she refused absolutely to give up hope. ‘Why, it is the most stimulating of medicines,’ she would say. ‘If I give up that, I shall collapse immediately. I consider that, given the conditions in which I live, self-deception, on the right side of course, is a distinct duty.’

“Towards the end of the summer she left town for a fortnight, and I went out to see her. She insisted on our having a little picnic together, and took me to the top of a hill hard by. There was a small pine wood up there, with a stretch of grass and ling. Opposite rose Castel di Poggio. The hills were round us ridge on ridge, and fold on fold; their bosoms veiled by draperies of mist, for it was still early. We might have been hundreds of miles away from any town: yet Florence was close at our feet. I had left it only a couple of hours ago, and should be down there again breathing the phenic acid of the hospital that same afternoon. Never shall I forget the morning of chat and reading (I had taken up a volume of poems—her gift), with the bees booming in the ling, the gorgeous green of the pine needles, intense unchangeable, against the brilliant sky, and the mingled scents of pine, cypress, honey-flowers, and aromatic herbs. As we were starting to go down she stopped. ‘We must keep vivid the remembrance of this, Neri,’ she said, and caught my hand. I turned and looked into her eyes, whose deep earnest gaze remains with me yet. We clasped hands, and so parted.