Such, indeed, were the masters of that Rome which seers and prophets, drunk with the burning fumes of all the Latin blood that has been shed, have compared to the bow of Ulysses—“One must bend it or die.” But these very seers, who for so long had shone as stars in the heroic heaven of their country, before her liberation, had now become “sordid charcoal, only fit to trace an ugly figure or an unseemly word upon the wall,” according to the atrocious simile of an indignant rhetorician. They, too, gave themselves up to selling and bartering, to legal quibbling and setting of snares, and no one alluded any more to the destroying bow. And there seemed in truth no prospect of the cry suddenly arising to terrify them: “O suitors, devourers of other men’s substance, beware! Ulysses is at hand in Ithaca!”
The best thing to do was to withdraw from the scene for a while. And I left with my horses and my household gods without taking farewell of anybody.
For my dwelling-place I had chosen Rebursa, my favourite among my hereditary estates, as it had been my father’s favourite before me; it was a suitable retreat for a healthy soul, a country with a rocky backbone, peculiarly sober in outline and vigorous in style; fit to welcome and nurse the lordly dream of my ambition, as it had welcomed and nursed my father’s lofty melancholy after the fall of his king, and the death of him who, when living, had seemed to be the light of our house, our surest possession.
Besides, not far from there—at Trigento—I had friends, not forgotten although not seen for many years, friends to whom I was bound by grateful memories of childhood and youth. And the thought of seeing them again cheered my spirit.
At Trigento, in the old baronial palace, surrounded by a garden almost as vast as a park, lived the Capea Montaga, one of the most illustrious and magnificent families in the two Sicilies, a family ruined by ten years’ devotion to the fortunes of their exiled king, and obliged now to live a retired life on the only estate left to them, in the heart of the silent province. The old Prince of Castromitrano—who had enjoyed the highest honours at the Courts of Ferdinand and Francis, and who had faithfully followed the exile to Rome and across the Alps without ever renouncing the pomp of happier times—had been dreaming in the shade for years, and for years waiting in vain for the Restoration; he was now sinking into the grave with premature old age, while his children were fading away in the lifeless monotony of their existence. The madness of the Princess Aldoina alone disturbed this long agony by throwing over it gleams of the fantastic splendour of the Past. And nothing could equal the desolation of the contrast between the miserable reality and the pompous phantoms which issued from the brain of the mad woman.
This great and dying race added a kind of funereal beauty to the rocky country for my soul, which was already seeking to absorb all the soul enclosed within that stony cloister. Already a mysterious presentiment had arisen from the depths of my being that my destiny was approaching and mingling with that lonely destiny. And the names of the three maiden princesses resounded in my memory with a faint magical music: Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante—names in which there seemed to me to be something vaguely visible, like a pale portrait behind a clouded glass; names expressive as faces full of light and shade, in which an infinity of grace, passion, and sorrow was already apparent to me.
II
“Grandissima grazia d’ombre e di lumi s’aggiunge ai visi di quelli che
seggono sulle porte di quelle abitazioni che sono oscure....”
Leonardo da Vinci.