Léon Chenal remained silent. The women wept. We heard on the box seat the Count d'Etraille, who blows his nose, from time to time. The coachman alone had gone to sleep. The horses, which felt no longer the sting of the whip, had slowed their pace and dragged along softly, and the brake, hardly advancing at all, became suddenly torpid, as if it had been charged with sorrow.
[FRANCESCA AND CARLOTTA RONDOLI]
I
No (said my friend Charles Jouvent), I do not know Italy; I started to see it thoroughly twice, and each time I was stopped at the frontier and could not manage to get any further. And yet my two attempts gave me a charming idea of the manners of that beautiful country. I must, however, some time or other visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of art with which it abounds. I will also make another attempt to penetrate into the interior, which I have not yet succeeded in doing.
You don't understand me, so I will explain myself: In the spring of 1874 I was seized with an irresistible desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. I am, as you know, not a great traveler; it appears to me a useless and fatiguing business. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache, and stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the unwashed feeling with your eyes and hair full of dust, the smell of the coal on which one's lungs feed, those bad dinners in the draughty refreshment rooms are, according to my ideas, a horrible way of beginning a pleasure trip.
After this introduction by the express, we have the miseries of the hotel; of some great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange room, and the dubious bed! I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We intrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers.
There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected, venerated, and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly possessions.