We shall leave at daybreak, and probably make no stay at Modena, as we return by the same road, when I will satisfy my own curiosity, and any you may feel likewise.
You know the anecdote of Cambacérès, told by Montgaillard. “On the 11th of April, 1814, he put down his liveries and imperial representation, and in a spirit of legitimacy, justice and humility, which cannot be sufficiently praised, signed a deed of renunciation to the title of Prince of Parma in presence of a notary! and remitted this deed to the Austrian cabinet, so that the Empress Maria Louisa and the court of Vienna will, on this head, have nothing to fear!!”
At the village of St. Ilario, at which we arrived after crossing a long narrow bridge over the Enza, is the frontier. We were detained some time, but the duke’s doganieri are the first and only who have a touch of modesty about them, for they do not stretch forth the hand for coin. Fed our horses at dirty Reggio, Ariosto’s birthplace; the poor noble, the unsuccessful lawyer; the great but ill-recompensed poet, to whose Orlando Furioso the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este said, “Master Louis, whence gathered you together such fooleries?” but better appreciated by the wild robber chief Pacchione, when Ariosto (sent by Duke Alfonso to purge the mountainous district of Garfagnana of the lawless bands who infested it, and having so legislated as to succeed, and in a brief space of time to bow or soothe the turbulent to submission) was passing on horseback, and with six or seven domestics only, along a narrow pass, when at a sudden turn, and grouped in the shadow, he perceived a number of men of suspicious appearance, and hurried by, knowing his party’s inability to cope with theirs. The chief of the band, however, who watched him go past, arrested his last follower by the bridle, and inquired the name of the nobleman. The domestic replying “Ariosto,” armed as he was, he joined the charger at a bound, and the poet checked him suddenly, uncertain as to the motive of his haste and the action which might follow.
The robber doffed his cap and bowed respectfully, asking pardon for having failed to salute him on his passage as being then unacquainted with the person of one whose fame was familiar to him, and having made him the most polite offers, took his leave.
It was Ariosto, who, endowed with genius, not with fortune, engraved over his small house the inscription:—
SMALL DWELLING SUITED TO ME, OBNOXIOUS TO NONE, IN
NO RESPECT MEAN, RAISED AT MINE OWN COST.
and who replied to the question, why he who, in his Orlando, could so well describe splendid palaces with porticoed courts and marble halls, had built a dwelling so humble? “It is easier to gather together words than stones.”
On our left hand (the road conducting thither following the course of the torrent Crossolo, which washes one side of the town) is the village of Correggio, the birthplace and the home of Allegri, to whom it has given a name which is not to die—the man who it is said had no master: who studied nature in her grandeur and her grace; of whom a modern writer has observed that his love of childhood, his study of its anger, its joys and tears, so exact that he was wont to stop to sketch in his walks the groups he met at play, gave him in its representation such purity of conception, such brilliancy and delicacy of touch, that he seemed to paint with the breath, while over his female forms there is diffused a divinity, a celestial grace, belonging to beings of a higher order, as if he had painted in prophecy. Never rich, ill paid for his mighty works, having received but about £20 and his food during the six months his labour lasted for the chef d’œuvre of his life, the St. Jeronimo, he proceeded one day of 1534 to Parma to solicit that the remainder of a sum due for the frescoes of the cupola of the cathedral might be paid him, and received there £8 in copper money. Impatient to bear it to his family at Correggio, he started on foot to carry it thither, arrived heated and exhausted by the enormous weight, was seized with acute fever and died at forty.
The appearance of the little city of Modena is most prepossessing, regularly built and clean, with wide streets and handsome buildings, a pleasant impression increased by the magnificent rooms and extreme civility of our inn San Marco.