Zorilla has flung forth this sketch of Toledo: “A place black, ruined, sad, and forgotten amid the sands—Great Toledo. Abandoned now, at mercy of the winds, Toledo, and not sufficiently protected by the mantle of royalty. Broken down, furrowed with sorrow and care, a slave, without soldiers to protect it, nor laws, it sleeps wrapped in its glory.
“All it owns is the great name of old, a kind of parody, with which it attempts to wrap then cover its shame—Toledo, once the sumptuous, the free. It has a great temple hid in a hollow, two bridges, and between the ruins and the marble of old armorial blazons, a stupid little village that sleeps on and on....”
Venice pleases me infinitely. I might have written this instead of De Regnier—I, who love Venice.
Like De Regnier, I love its climate, its color, its light. The kind of life men live there is the life that suits my taste.
There I have a happiness I never know elsewhere, a peculiar physical well-being, and in the midst of a great variety of objects that take up pleasantly the space of days. Both my eyes and my thoughts are busy. Even the old history of commerce of Venice is a thing of delight. Not many romances can equal it.
Nowhere else do days drop away so delightedly. Nowhere else is loneliness wholly without bitterness. There is no other spot in the world where I am myself—where neither years nor place, nor people can touch me. There is no other city where I can so happily support the necessary boredom of living.
My first sight of Venice gave me the greatest emotion, I think I have ever felt. I was tired. I had just journeyed through the Austrian Alps, the Bavarian Alps, and a corner of Switzerland. The train into Venice was late. It was cold. It was threatening rain.
We got in at exactly twelve o’clock, at night. It took long to get traveling bags through the customs. We left the trunks for the next day’s struggle.
Long ago the little steamers and the noisy water boats had gone to bed. We signalled a gondola with two oarsmen.
Then began the most amazing ride. We swung suddenly into the black, mirroring water of the Grand Canal, which Napoleon called the finest street in the world.