In 1835, the last year of my stay in Rome, I became quite intimate with a comrade in the Academy named Desroziers. He was a musician and a man of distinguished and very observing mind, who would probably have gone far in his art if malarial fever had not put an end to him the following year. Suddenly the idea took possession of us to go to Sicily, one of the excursions permitted by the rules of the school; but as we were radically “dry,” as they say, we walked about Rome for some time endeavoring to find some means of recruiting our finances. On one of these occasions we happened to pass before the Palazzo Braschi. Its wide-open doors gave access to the passing and repassing of a crowd of persons of all sorts.
“Parbleu!” exclaimed Desroziers, “here’s the very thing for us.”
And without explaining his words or where he was taking me, he made me follow the crowd and enter the palace.
After mounting a magnificent marble staircase and crossing a very long suite of apartments rather poorly furnished,—which is customary in Italian palaces, all their luxury being put into ceilings, statues, paintings, and other objects of art,—we reached a room that was wholly hung with black and lighted by quantities of tapers. It was, of course, a chambre-ardente. In the middle of it on a raised platform surmounted by a baldaquin, lay a thing, the most hideous and grotesque thing you can possibly conceive. Imagine a little old man whose hands and face had reached such a stage of emaciation that a mummy would have seemed to you in comparison plump and comely.
Clothed in black satin breeches, a violet velvet coat cut a la Francaise, a white waistcoat embroidered in gold, from which issued an enormous shirt-frill of point d’Angleterre, this skeleton had cheeks covered with a thick layer of rouge which heightened still further the parchment tones of the rest of his skin. Upon his head was a blond wig frizzed into innumerable little curls, surmounted by an immense plumed hat jauntily perched to one side in a manner which irresistibly provoked the laughter of even the most respectful visitors.
After one glance given to this ridiculous and lamentable exhibition,—an obligatory part of all funerals, according to the etiquette of the Roman aristocracy,—Desroziers exclaimed: “There’s the end; now come and see the beginning.”
Not replying to any of my questions, because he was arranging a dramatic effect, he took me to the Albani gallery and placed me before a statue representing Adonis stretched on a lion’s skin.
“What do you think of that?” he said.
“What?” I replied at a first glance; “why, it is as fine as an antique.”
“Antique as much as I am!” replied Desroziers. “It is a portrait in youth of that wizened old being we have just seen dead.”