Gondola days

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

And not only behind the palaces facing the Grand Canal, but along the Zattere beyond San Rosario, away down the Giudecca, and by the borders of the lagoon, will you find gay oleanders flaunting red blossoms, and ivy and myrtle hanging in black-green bunches over crumbling walls.

In one of these hidden nooks, these abandoned cloisters of shaded walk and over-bending blossom, I once spent an autumn afternoon with my old friend, the Professor,—“Professor of Modern Languages and Ancient Legends,” as some of the more flippant of the habitués of Florian’s were wont to style him. The old Frenchman had justly earned this title. He had not only made every tradition and fable of Venice his own, often puzzling and charming the Venetians themselves with his intimate knowledge of the many romances of their past, but he could tell most wonderful tales of the gorgeous fêtes of the seventeenth century, the social life of the nobility, their escapades, intrigues, and scandals.

If some fair Venetian had loved not wisely but too well, and, clinging to brave Lorenzo’s neck, had slipped down a rope ladder into a closely curtained, muffled-oared gondola, and so over the lagoon to Mestre, the old Frenchman could not only point out to you the very balcony, provided it were a palace balcony and not a fisherman’s window,—he despised the bourgeoisie,—but he could give you every feature of the escapade, from the moment the terror-stricken duenna missed her charge to that of the benediction of the priest in the shadowed isle. So, when upon the evening preceding this particular day, I accepted the Professor’s invitation to breakfast, I had before me not only his hospitality, frugal as it might be, but the possibility of drawing upon his still more delightful fund of anecdote and reminiscence.

Neither the day nor the hour had been definitely set. The invitation, I afterwards discovered, was but one of the many he was constantly giving to his numerous friends and haphazard acquaintances, evincing by its perfect genuineness his own innate kindness and his hearty appreciation of the many similar courtesies he was daily receiving at their hands. Indeed, to a man so delicately adjusted as the Professor and so entirely poor, it was the only way he could balance, in his own mind, many long-running accounts of, coffee for two at the Calcina, with a fish and a fruit salad, the last a specialty of the Professor’s—the oil, melons, and cucumbers being always provided by his host—or a dish of risotto, with kidneys and the like, at the Bauer-Grünwald.

Nobody ever accepted these invitations seriously, that is, no one who knew the Professor at all well. In fact, there was a general impression existing among the many frequenters of Florian’s and the Quadri that the Professor’s hour and place of breakfasting were very like the birds’—whenever the unlucky worm was found, and wherever the accident happened to occur. When I asked Marks for the old fellow’s address—which rather necessary item I remembered later had also been omitted by the Professor—he replied, “Oh, somewhere down the Riva,” and dropped the subject as too unimportant for further mental effort.

All these various eccentricities of my prospective host, however, were at the time unknown to me. He had cordially invited me to breakfast—“to-morrow, or any day you are near my apartments, I would be so charmed,” etc. I had as graciously accepted, and it would have been unpardonable indifference, I felt sure, not to have continued the inquiries until my hand touched his latch-string.

The clue was a slight one. I had met him once, leaning over the side of the bridge below Danieli’s, the Ponte del Sepolcro, looking wistfully out to sea, and was greeted with the remark that he had that moment left his apartments, and only lingered on the bridge to watch the play of silvery light on the lagoon, the September skies were so enchanting. So on this particular morning I began inspecting the bell-pulls of all the doorways, making inquiry at the several caffès and shops. Then I remembered the apothecary, down one step from the sidewalk, in the Via Garibaldi—a rather shabby continuation of the Riva—and nearly a mile below the more prosperous quarter where the Professor had waved his hand, the morning I met him on the bridge.

“The Signor Croisac—the old Frenchman?” “Upstairs, next door.”

He was as delightful as ever in his greetings; started a little when I reminded him of his invitation, but begged me to come in and sit down, and with great courtesy pointed out the view of the garden below, and the sweep and glory of the lagoon. Then he excused himself, adjusted his hat, picked up a basket, and gently closed the door.

The room, upon closer inspection, was neither dreary nor uninviting. It had a sort of annex, or enlarged closet, with a drawn curtain partly concealing a bed, a row of books lining one wall, a table littered with papers, a smaller one containing a copper coffee-pot and a scant assortment of china, some old chairs, and a disemboweled lounge that had doubtless lost heart in middle life and committed hari-kari. There were also a few prints and photographs, a corner of the Parthenon, a mezzo of Napoleon in his cocked hat, and an etching or two, besides a miniature reduction of the Dying Gladiator, which he used as a paper-weight. All the windows of this modest apartment were filled with plants, growing in all kinds of pots and boxes, broken pitchers, cracked dishes—even half of a Chianti flask. These, like their guardian, ignored their surroundings and furnishings, and flamed away as joyously in the summer sun as if they had been nurtured in the choicest of majolica.