The palace has achieved, one might say, its logical destiny; it survives, but in a bad state of repair mental and material. The ducal gardens also survive, but for the benefit of the “people.” Everywhere, since those days, the flood of democracy has broken through the social dam, and robbed exclusiveness of its most picturesque privileges. It was predestined, it was inevitable; but I prefer, I confess, for my part, to think of Colorno as it lay slumbering, before the vulgarising cataclysm, on that sultry June morning in the year 1759.
There came lumbering up the high road from Florence a great travelling carriage drawn by four bays, with a sober-suited postilion to each pair, and a couple of travellers, no more, within. One might have known that the younger of these men—though plainly enough dressed in a suit of black velvet, with his head in a powdered bag-wig and a simple black beaver set on it—was, from the very serene authority of his expression, a person of particular distinction. He was, in fact, the Archduke Joseph of Austria, heir-apparent to God knew what dominions (the Seven Years’ War was then in the fourth of its perennial stages), and on his way home from a minor diplomatic mission—with which, despite his youth, he had been entrusted—to the Court of Rome. He travelled incognito as the Comte de Falckenstein, and, for the moment, had elected to eschew display. His entourage, his personal equipage, had preceded him on the road; he himself desired to lag a little for purposes of observation. For he was always observing, was Archduke Joseph, and provisionally amending the scheme of things after a process, despotically philosophic, which was all his own.
The archduke, aetat. 18, concluded a pretty prolonged silence with an aphorism:—
“The last acquirement of ambitious minds, my good Tiretta, is simplicity.”
The gentleman at his side, a humorous, interesting-looking young man of twenty-six or so, heaved a profound sigh.
“At last!” he said. “I may talk, then, again?”
Joseph sniggered. His own lean young face was not without humour, but intrinsically of the pedantic order. He was precociously inclined to that form of superior banter, best described as scholastic jocosity, which consists in demanding subservient laughter from the unamused. That was largely the misfortune of his state. He was a serious, well-intentioned young prince; but since no one might question his conclusions, they were forced to be their own single support. He had Platonic ideals of state, but the individual liberty they embraced included no right to question his personal dictation of them. He would make men tolerant by intolerance, which was exactly what the Jacobins, by savager methods, came to attempt; and necessarily like them he failed. He meant very well, and, under the circumstances, did not do so badly in the end; but he died, after all, in the van of pathetic failure, seeing all his hopes of a world converted by force to reason overthrown. That, however, belongs to another story.
The archduke’s aphorism had capped some discussion, terminated by himself, on the notorious dandyism of the Duke of Parma, through whose territories they were then passing.
“You may talk, Tiretta,” he said. “Why not?”
“God and your Highness know,” answered the young gentleman. “I would rather go without food than speech any day. And yet you impose silence on me; and yet you condescend to call me your friend.”