“Ah, if Ferdinand had not died!” exclaimed the old man, with an almost threatening gesture. “A few hours before he expired he said: 'The crown of Italy has been offered me....’ Don’t you think, Claudio, that a Bourbon might have been wearing it now?”
“Perhaps,” I replied, very respectfully. “And if it were so, the highest honours in the kingdom ought to be bestowed upon the Prince of Castromitrano. Let me tell you how much I admire your dignity and faith! You are one of the very few among our equals who have maintained the sentiment of the virtue of race intact and intense. Rather than renounce your privileges and take up an attitude unsuited to your legitimate pride, rather than appear only a survival of yourself, you retired from the world, but not until you had startled it with the supreme splendour of your magnificence; and you have sought in solitude to await the fortune which Fate may be reserving for your house. Misfortune has treated you as a great man, for sorrow also has its privileges, and yours have been fully acknowledged.”
The Prince’s fatherly face had become grave and attentive. The veneration I felt in my soul for his beautiful white head was far deeper than that expressed in my words; and added to it was a tender feeling so pure that only a feminine presence could have inspired it. The fact was that I felt the presence of Anatolia’s spirit. She had appeared on the threshold of the door at the end of the room, had passed silently along the wall, and had sat down in a shadowy corner, looking white, mysterious, and propitious as a family genius.
“Far away from the world though you are,” I added, “and wrapped in such a thick cloud of sadness, you have yet been able to nourish to this day hope of the resurrection of that which is dead; and the prophecy of your faith still rings in my ears. No doubt that which is dead shall rise again, but it shall be changed. If you were to turn your eyes for a single moment upon the spectacle which the world presents to-day, you would feel your dream fall from your soul like a dry leaf, and you would see that the recovery of his little state, and even the acquisition of Italy, would be useless to Francis of Bourbon. Whether a Bourbon or a Sabaudo be on the throne, the King is equally absent; for that man cannot be called a king who has submitted to the will of the many in accepting a prescribed and narrow office, and who then humbles himself to fill it with all the diligence and modesty of a public clerk who is perpetually spurred on by the fear of being dismissed. Do I not speak truly? Nor would Francis be able to reign in any other way. Directly after his father’s death he wrote out with his own hand an edict to re-establish the results of the abolished constitution. And it was Alessandro Nunziante who prevented its being published. Just think of the lamentable proclamation of the 8th December, dated from the guard-house at Gaeta. Was that the language of a king, and of a vanquished king?”
Prince Luzio had listened in silence, with knitted brows, and now he said, not without a shade of severity—
“One can see that you have the blood of Gian Paolo Cantelmo in your veins.”
“The blood of all my ancestors is in my veins. Ah, dear father (let me call you by that name!), I well know how painful it must be to you to renounce an ideal of justice before which the flame of your loyalty has burned for so many, many years; but I must tell you that for us and our like there is no salvation unless we substitute energetic purpose for empty hopes. Allow me to speak to you plainly and without circumlocution. It is useless to hope that any heroic fire will suddenly arise from the stagnant blood of Saint Louis. I have seen the exile quite recently; he is full of placid resignation, given up to good works and prayer; he remembers his short reign as a far-away, painful dream. Your prophecy would call up a mild, incredulous smile on his lips—that is all. If his spirit sometimes flies towards the bay, not Capodimonte but the height of Camaldoli is its goal. He has grown used to a quiet, pious life; the glitter of the crown no longer disturbs his nights. Let us leave him to sleep peacefully!”
The head of the loyal prince had fallen on his breast, and I saw the lines deepen on his bent brow like furrows full of thoughts.
“It is not for him alone that fate is dark. The twilight of kings is ashy, blinded of all glory. Look even beyond the Latin countries. Under the shadow of artificial thrones you will see false monarchs fulfilling their public duties with the accuracy of automatons, or giving their attention to the cultivation of their childish manias and their petty vices. The most powerful of all, the lord of the hugest multitudes, consumes away alone in his dark misanthropy, his herculean muscles corroded by the moth of suspicion. He has not even the taste for quenching the petty chemical formulas of his rebel subjects in some magnificent massacre by the naked sword, such as might water and fatten his barren lands. He has a truly royal soul, however, which perhaps you may have been able to study near at hand, for he is of the race of Maria Sophia. Wittelsbach attracts me by the immensity of his pride and his melancholy. His efforts to make his life conformable to his ideal are desperate in their violence. All human intercourse makes him shudder with disgust and anger; all pleasure seems nauseous to him unless it is what he himself has planned. Exempt from the venom of love, hostile to all intruders, for years he has held intercourse with no one, save the resplendent heroes which a creator of beauty has given him as companions in super-terrestrial regions. In the depths of rivers of music he slakes his anguished thirst for the divine, and then he ascends to his solitary haunts, where, amidst the mystery of mountains and lakes, his spirit creates the inviolable kingdom over which alone he desires to reign. This profound feeling for solitude, this power of breathing on the highest and loneliest summits, this consciousness of being unique and unapproachable in life, makes Louis of Bavaria truly a king, but king of himself and of his dreams. He is incapable of stamping his will upon the multitude, and of bending it under the yoke of his idea; he is incapable of reducing his inward power to action. At the same moment he appears sublime and childish. When his Bavarian troops were fighting the Prussians, he was far away from the battlefield, hidden in one of his lake islands, where he forgot his shame under one of those ridiculous disguises which he wears to favour his visionary illusions. It would be better for him if, instead of placing a screen between his majesty and his ministers, he could attain to the marvellous nocturnal empire sung by his poet! It seems incredible that he should not have left the world before now, carried away by his flights of fancy....”
The Prince’s head was still bent in such a solemn attitude, that even in the heat of speaking my heart smote me with the fear of having wounded him; and a filial desire came over me to comfort him, to lift up his grand white head, and to see the unwonted light of joy in his eyes. Anatolia’s presence kindled a sort of generous fire in my soul, and made me feel a great desire to reveal what was noblest and strongest within me. She sat motionless and silent in the shadow like a statue, but her attention shone on my soul like a flood of light.