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 lawsuit 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.
And suddenly there was something like an intense and exquisite stateliness of intimacy: a huge bedroom, all gold, with the dim gold of tenderly faded golden tissues. On the walls were gold-coloured tapestries: Venus rising from the gilt foam of a golden ocean, Venus and Mars, Venus and Cupid, Venus and Adonis. The pale-pink nudity of these mythological beings stood forth very faintly against the sheer gold of sky and atmosphere, in golden woodlands, amid golden flowers, with golden cupids and swans and doves and wild boars; golden peacocks drank from golden fountains; water and clouds were of elemental gold; and all this had tenderly faded into a languorous sunset of expiring radiance. The state bed was gold, under a canopy of gold brocade, on which the armorial bearings of the family were embroidered in heavy relief; the bedspread was gold; but all this gold was lifeless, had lapsed into the melancholy of all but grey lustre: it was effaced, erased, obliterated, as though the dusty ages had cast a shadow over it, had woven a web across it.
"How beautiful!" said Cornélie.