We then went behind the scenes to spend some time among the puppets before the play began. First I inquired whether Ferraù had
perished and ascertained that Orlando had duly killed him the night before with la Durlindana. This famous sword was won by Carlo Magno in his youth when he overcame Polinoro, the captain-general of Bramante, King of Africa. Carlo Magno, having another sword of his own and wishing to keep la Durlindana in the family, passed it on to his nephew Orlando. That is Pasquale’s version. Others say that it was given to Orlando by Malagigi the magician. The most usual account is that la Durlindana belonged to Hector. After the fall of Troy it came to Æneas; and from him, through various owners, to Almonte, a giant of a dreadful stature, who slew Orlando’s father. An angel in a dream directed Orlando, when he was about eighteen, to proceed to a river on the bank of which he found Carlo Magno and Almonte fighting. He took his uncle’s part, avenged his father’s death by killing Almonte, threw his gigantic body into the stream and appropriated his enchanted possessions, namely, his horse, Brigliadoro, his horn, his sword and his armour. He had the sword with him when he was defeated at Roncisvalle and threw it from him, about two hundred miles, to Rocamadour in France
where it stuck in a rock and any one can see it to this day.
I do not remember that Homer speaks of Hector’s sword as la Durlindana; perhaps he did not know. But every one knows that horses have had names, both in romance and real life, from the days of Pegasus to our own. Mario calls his horses Gaspare, after one of the Three Kings, and Totò, which is a form of Salvatore. They were so called before he bought them, or he would have named them Baiardo and Brigliadoro. Having no sword, he calls his whip la Durlindana. He assured me that the barber whom he employs calls all his razors by the names of the swords of the paladins, and that the shoe-blacks give similar names to their brushes.
If Pasquale’s statements were at variance with other poetical versions of the story, they were, as might be expected, still more so with the prose authorities. In the books, Carlo Magno was born sometimes in the castle of Saltzburg, in Bavaria, and sometimes at Aix-la-Chapelle; which may be good history, but could not well be represented by the marionettes without a double stage, and even then might fail to convince. The Carlo Magno of romance, son of Pipino,
King of France, and Berta, his wife, was not born until many years after the wedding; for Berta had enemies at the French Court who spirited her away immediately after the ceremony, substituting her waiting-maid, Elisetta, who was so like her that Pipino did not notice the difference. Elisetta became the mother of the wicked bastards Lanfroi and Olderigi, while Berta lived in retirement in the cottage of a hunter on the banks of the Magno, a river about five leagues from Paris. Pipino lost himself while out hunting one day, took refuge in the cottage, saw Berta, did not recognize his lawful, wedded wife and fell in love with her over again. Carlo Magno was born in due course in the cottage, and his second name was given to him, not for the prosaic reason that it means the Great, but because it is the name of the river. The bastards afterwards murder their father, which is a warning to any bridegroom among the audience to be careful not to mistake another lady for his bride upon the wedding night. And thus Romance becomes the handmaid of Morality.
Carlo Magno is now on the throne. I was presented to him, and found him in mourning for a nephew who had been killed
a few evenings before and whose corpse was still hanging on a neighbouring peg, waiting for the slight alteration necessary to turn him into some one else. All the paladins who had recently lost relations were in mourning and wore long pieces of crape trailing from their helmets. Pasquale took me round, told me who they all were and explained their genealogies.
I was in a hades peopled with the ghosts of Handel’s operas. I saw Orlando himself and his cousins “Les quatre fils Aymon,” namely Rinaldo da Montalbano, Guicciardo, Alardo, and Ricciardetto. I saw their father, whose name in Italian is Amone, and their sister Bradamante, the widow of Ruggiero da Risa, and her sister-in-law, the Empress Marfisa, Ruggiero’s sister. These two ladies were in armour, showing their legs, and in all respects like the men warriors, except that they wore their hair long.
“Bradamante will die this evening,” said Pasquale.