She stepped outside and saw Gilio. He was sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the lake. He came up to her:
“I was almost sure that you would come this way,” he said. “Aren’t you tired? May I show you round? Have you seen our Mantegnas? They have suffered badly. They were restored at the beginning of the century.[1] They look rather dilapidated, don’t they? Do you see that little mythological scene up there, by Giulio Romano? Come here, through this door. But it’s locked. Wait....”
He called out an order to some one below. Presently an old serving-man arrived with a heavy bunch of keys, which he handed to the prince.
“You can go, Egisto. I know the keys.”
The man went away. The prince opened a heavy bronze door. He showed her the bas-reliefs:
“Giovanni da Bologna,” he said.
They went on, through a room hung with tapestries; the prince pointed to a ceiling by Ghirlandajo: the apotheosis of the only pope of the house of San Stefano. Next through a hall of mirrors, painted by Mario de’ Flori. The dusty, musty smell of an ill-kept museum, with its atmosphere of neglect and indifference, stifled the breath; the white-silk window-curtains were yellow with age, soiled by flies; the red curtains of Venetian damask hung in moth-eaten rags and tatters; the painted mirrors were dull and tarnished; the arms of the Venetian glass chandeliers were broken. Pushed aside anyhow, like so much rubbish in a lumber-room, stood the most precious cabinets, inlaid with bronze, mother-of-pearl and ebony panels, and mosaic tables of lapis-lazuli, malachite and green, yellow, black and pink marble. In the tapestries—Saul and David, Esther, Holofernes, Salome—the vitality of the figures had evaporated, as though they were suffocated under the grey coat of dust that lay thick upon their worn textures and neutralized every colour.
In the immense halls, half-dark in their curtained dusk, a sort of sorrow lingered, like a melancholy of hopeless, conquered exasperation, a slow decline of greatness and magnificence; between the masterpieces of the most famous painters mournful empty spaces yawned, the witnesses of pinching penury, spaces once occupied by pictures that had once and even lately been sold for fortunes. Cornélie remembered something about a law-suit some years ago, an attempt to send some Raphaels across the frontier, in defiance of the law, and to sell them in Berlin.... And Gilio led her hurriedly through the spectral halls, gay as a boy, light-hearted as a child, glad to have his diversion, mentioning without affection or interest names which he had heard in his childhood, but making mistakes and correcting himself and at last confessing that he had forgotten:
“And here is the camera degli sposi....”
He fumbled at the bunch of keys, read the brass labels till he found the right one and opened the door, which grated on its hinges; and they went in.