II.
I was seventeen years old when I made the acquaintance of my dearest friends, in a splendid palace which I see before me as clearly as though I had left it only yesterday. I see the great courtyard, the stately porticos, the saloons adorned with columns, statues and bas-reliefs; and, amidst these beautiful and magnificent objects, vestiges of the bygone splendors of the ducal residence, the long lines of bedsteads and school-benches, the hanging rows of uniforms, dirks and rifles. Five hundred youths are scattered about those courts and corridors and staircases; a dull murmur of voices, broken by loud shouts and sonorous laughter, reverberates through the most distant recesses of the huge edifice. What animation! What life! What varieties of type, of speech and gesture! Youths of athletic build, with great moustaches and stentorian voices; youths as slim and sweet as girls; the dusky skin and coal-black eyes of Sicily; the fair-haired, blue-eyed faces of the north; the excited gesticulation of Naples, the silvery Tuscan intonation, the rattling Venetian chatter, a hundred groups, a hundred dialects; on this side, songs and noisy talk, on that side running, jumping, and hand-clapping; men of every class, sons of dukes, senators, generals, shopkeepers, government employees; a strange assemblage, suggesting the university, the monastery, and the barracks: with talk of women, war, novels, the orders of the day; a life teeming with feminine meannesses and virile ambitions; a life of mortal ennui and frantic gayety, a medley of sentiments, actions, and incidents, absurd, tragic, or delightful, from which the pen of a great humorist could extract the materials for a masterpiece.
Such was the military college of Modena in the year 1865.