When we arrived in Rome, my sister Esmeralda was supposed to be partially engaged to Don Emilio Rignano, eldest son of the Duke Massimo, whom she had known well from childhood. Emilio at one time passed every evening at the Palazzo Parisani; but during this winter Donna Teresa Doria appeared in the world, and the old Duchess Massimo, who hated Anglo-Roman alliances, by a clever scheme soon compelled her son to consent to an engagement with her. Having learnt this, Esmeralda refused ever to receive Emilio again. On the day before his marriage, however, he found her in the Church of S. Claudio, and tried to make her marry him at once by the easy Roman form, "Ecco il mio marito—Ecco la mia moglie," but she would not listen to him. Then, when she drove to the Villa Borghese, he pursued the carriage, regardless of the people in the street. His hat fell off, but he would not stop: he seemed to have lost his senses.
At a marriage in high life in Rome, the guests are often asked, not to the actual ceremony, but to St. Peter's afterwards, to see the bridal pair kiss the foot of the famous statue. When the Duke and Duchess Rignano entered St. Peter's, they were piteous to see: they would not look at each other. Old Lady Rolle was there, standing by the statue, and when they came near she said audibly, "What a wicked scene! what a sinful marriage!" And Emilio heard her, gave her one look of agony, and flung himself down on the pavement in front of the statue.
As Duchess Rignano, Teresa Doria was wretched. We saw her afterwards at Genoa, in the old Doria Palace, with her mother, whose death was hastened by the sight of her daughter's woe and her own disappointed ambition. Before long the Duchess Teresa was separated from her husband. Her tragical fate was a good thing for her sisters: the second sister, Guendolina, made a happy marriage with the Conte di Somaglia in the Marchi, and the youngest, Olimpia, was allowed to remain long unmarried. This last daughter of the house of Doria was described by her mother as so very small when she was born, that they swathed her in flannel and laid her in the sun, in the hope that it would make her grow like a plant. I was one day at the house of Mrs. de Selby, cousin of Princess Doria, when her servant threw open the door and announced in a stentorian voice, allo Romano—"La sua Eccellenza l'illustrissima Principessina la Donna Olimpia di Doria,"—and there marched in a stately little maiden of eight years old!
Cardinal Antonelli obtained an order for my sister and me to visit the Madre Makrina, the sole survivor of the Polish nuns who were martyred for their faith in the terrible persecution at Minsk. The nuns were starved, flogged to death, buried alive, subjected to the most horrible cruelties. Three escaped and reached Vienna, where two of them disappeared and never were heard of again. After a series of unparalleled adventures and escapes, the Abbess, the Madre Makrina, arrived in Rome. Pope Gregory XVI. received her kindly, but made her tell her whole story once for all in the presence of sixty witnesses, who all wrote it down at once to ensure accuracy, and then he shut her up, for fear she should be turned into a saint and object of pilgrimage. It was not generally known what had become of the Madre Makrina—it was a mystery in Rome—but we were able to trace her to the tiny convent of the Monacche Polacche, which has since been destroyed by the Sardinian Government, but which then stood near the Arch of Gallienus, nearly opposite the Church of S. Eusebio. Italima wished to go with us, but we could only obtain an order for two. When we rang the convent bell and had shown our permit through the grille, a portress from within drew a bolt which admitted us to a little room—den rather—barred with iron, and with an iron cage at one side, behind which the portress, a very fat old woman, reappearing, asked us many questions about ourselves, the Pope, the state of Rome generally. At last we got tired and said, "But shall we not soon see the Madre Makrina?"—"Io sono la Madre Makrina," said the old woman, laughing. Then we said, "Oh, do tell us the story of Minsk."—"No," she replied, "I promised at the feet of Pope Gregory XVI. that I would never tell that story again: the story is written down, you can read it, but I cannot break my promise."—"How dreadfully you must have suffered at Minsk," we said. "Yes," she answered, and, going backwards, she pulled up her petticoats and showed us her legs, which were enormously fat, yet, a short distance above the ankles, were quite eaten away, so that you could see the bones. "This," she said, "was caused by the chains I wore at Minsk." The Madre Makrina, when we took leave, said, "I am filled with wonder as to how you got admittance. I have never seen any one before since I came here, and I do not suppose I shall ever see any one again, so I will give you a little memorial of your visit!" and she gave me a tiny crucifix and medal off her chain. I have it still.
When the Emperor Nicholas came to Rome, he went to pay his respects to the Pope, who received him very coldly. "You are a great king," said Pius IX. "You are one of the mightiest monarchs in the world, and I am a feeble old man, the servant of servants; but I cite you to meet me again, to meet me before the throne of the Judge of the world, and to answer there for your treatment of the nuns at Minsk."
But of the gathering up of reminiscences of Roman life there is no end, and, after all, my normal life was a quiet one with my mother, driving with her, sketching with her, sitting with her in the studio of the venerable Canevari,[126] who was doing her portrait, spending afternoons with her in the Medici gardens, in the beautiful Villa Wolkonski, or in the quiet valley near the grove and grotto of Egeria.
In the mornings we generally walked on the Pincio, and there often noticed a family of father, mother, and daughter working on the terrace, as the custom then was, at rope-making. One day a carriage passed and re-passed with a solitary gentleman in it, who at last, as if he could no longer restrain himself, jumped out and rushed towards the group exclaiming, "C'est elle! c'est elle!" Then he became embarrassed, retired, and eventually sent his servant to beg that the mother would bring some of her cord to his house the next morning. She obeyed, and on entering his apartment was struck at once by a portrait on the wall. "That is the picture of my daughter," she said. "No," he replied, "that is the portrait of my dead wife." He then proceeded to say that he must from that time consider himself affianced to her daughter, for that in her he seemed to see again his lost wife, and he insisted on establishing the old woman and her daughter in comfortable lodgings, and hiring all kinds of masters for the latter, saying that he would go away and leave her to her studies, and that in a year he should come back to marry her, which he did. In England this would be a very extraordinary story, but it was not thought much of at Rome.
I have always found that the interests of Rome have a more adhesive power than those of any other place, and that it is more difficult to detach oneself from them; and even in this first winter, which was the least pleasant I have spent there—the conflicting requirements of my two mothers causing no small difficulty—I was greatly distressed when my mother, in her terror of Madame Davidoff and Co., decided that we must leave for Naples on the twenty-third of February. What an unpleasant companion I was as we drove out of the Porta S. Giovanni in the large carriage of the vetturino Constantino, with—after the custom of that time—a black Spitz sitting on the luggage behind to guard it, which he did most efficaciously. I remember with a mental shiver how piteously the wind howled over the parched Campagna, and how the ruins looked almost frightful in the drab light of a sunless winter morning. But though the cold was most intense, for the season really was too early for such a journey, our spirits were revived by the extreme picturesqueness of the old towns we passed through. In Valmontone, where the huge Doria palace is, we met a ghastly funeral, an old woman carried by the Frati della Misericordia on an open bier, her withered head nodding to and fro with the motion, and priests—as Lea said—"gibbering before her." Here, from the broad deserted terrace in front of the palace, we looked over the mountains, with mists drifting across them in the wind; all was the essence of picturesqueness, raggedness, ignorance, and filth. By Frosinone and Ceprano—then the dreary scene of the Neapolitan custom-house—we reached San Germano, where the inn was in those days most wretched. In our rooms we were not only exposed to every wind that blew, but to the invasions of little Marianina, Joannina, and Nicolina, who darted in every minute to look at us, and to the hens, who walked about and laid their eggs under the bed and table. Most intensely, however, did we delight in the beauties of the glorious ascent to Monte Cassino and in all that we saw there.
How well I remember the extreme wretchedness of our mid-day halting-places in the after journey to Capua, and wonder how the pampered Italian travellers of the present day would put up with them; but in those days we did not mind, and till it was time to go on again, we drew the line of old crones sitting miserably against the inn-wall, rocking themselves to and fro in their coloured hoods, and cursing us in a chorus of—