The boat which we took to descend the lake to the town of Como had three rowers. The chief, whom I remembered from last year, groaned bitterly over the war, because there were so few strangers.
"Trade, you see, is conservative," said I to Edmund.
"Como is conservatism itself," he tranquilly replied.
"We live upon the strangers," continued Giovanni Battista, the boatman, with a simplicity and truthfulness that made us laugh; "and this year nobody comes. The Italians are driven away, and the foreigners are frightened."
He had not been to Como for two months, although his business is plying upon the lake, and his winter depends upon his summer. "The war is bad for all of us," he said, "and after all the Germans are back again."
... Farther on, and nearer Como, the shore is covered with handsome villas, of which the most remarkable for beauty and fame are Madame Pasta's, a magnificent estate, and Taglioni's, which is not yet finished, and the stately Odescalchi. As we passed Madame Pasta's the old boatman shrugged his shoulders and trilled with his voice. "That's the way the money came there," he said, contemptuously. He was clearly of opinion that only the decaying and decayed families whose names he had heard all his life, and whose ancestors his fathers knew, were to be spoken of with praise.
"Whose villa is that?" asked I.
"Eh! che! nobody's," he replied; "if it were anybody's we should know."
At five o'clock we rounded the point over which I had stood upon the height the year before on a still September afternoon hearing the girls sing in a boat below, and so came to the shore at Como.
Everywhere there was an air of consternation. The Austrians had just re-occupied the town, and the streets were full of the "hated barbarians," rattling about with long swords and standing on guard at the doors of public buildings. The walls bristled with military notices. Among others I read one exhorting all well-disposed people to surrender arms of every kind by a certain day at a place named. The people seemed to be stupefied, and gazed in dull wonder upon the soldiers.