IV.
From this time forth I had a strange experience. I saw beauty everywhere. If I sat at the window of a café on the Corso on a Sunday morning, as the ladies were going to Mass, it seemed to me that all the beauty on earth was going past. A mother and her three daughters went by, a mere grocer's wife from the Corso, but the mother carried herself like a duchess, had a foot so small that it could have lain in the hollow of my hand, and the youngest of the three daughters was so absolutely lovely that people turned to look after her; she might perhaps have been fifteen years of age, but there was a nobility about her austere profile, and she had a way of twisting her perfect lips into a smile, that showed her to be susceptible to the sweetest mysteries of poetry and music. My long illness had so quickened the susceptibility of my senses to impressions of beauty that I lived in a sort of intoxication.
In the Scandinavian Club I was received with endless expressions of sympathy, courteous remarks, and more or less sincerely meant flatteries, as if in compensation for the suffering I had been through. All spoke as though they had themselves been deeply distressed, and especially as though Copenhagen had been sitting weeping during my illness. I certainly did not believe this for a moment, but all the same it weighed down a little, the balance of my happiness, and the first meetings with the Northern artists in these glorious surroundings were in many respects very enjoyable. The Scandinavian Club was in the building from which you enter the Mausoleum of Augustus, a colossal building in the form of a cross, several storeys in height. A festival had been got up on the flat roof for a benevolent object one of the first evenings in April. You mounted the many flights of stairs and suddenly found yourself, apparently, in an immense hall, but with no roof save the stars, and brilliantly illuminated, but with lights that paled in the rays of the Italian moon. We took part in the peculiarly Italian enjoyment of watching balloons go up; they rose by fire, which exhausted the air inside them and made them light. Round about the moon we could see red and blue lights, like big stars; one balloon ignited up in the sky, burst into bright flames, and looked very impressive.
Troops of young women, too, were sitting there, and dazzled anew a young man who for a second time had given the slip to the old gentleman with the scythe. There was one young servant girl from the country, in particular, a child of thirteen or fourteen, to whom I called the attention of the painters, and they went into ecstasies over her. The type was the same as that which Raphael has reproduced in his Sistine Madonna. Her clear, dark blue eyes had a look of maidenly shyness, and of the most exquisite bashfulness, and yet a look of pride. She wore a string of glass beads round her lovely neck. We ordered two bottles of wine to drink her health, and, while we were drinking it, the rotunda was lighted up from a dozen directions with changing Bengal fire. The ladies looked even handsomer, the glass lamps dark green in the gleam, the fire-borne balloons rose, the orchestra played, the women smiled at the homage of their friends and lovers--all on the venerable Mausoleum of Augustus.