We have taken part in a canonization—there remained but that—of all the ceremonials on “that stage of the Church” incomparably the most sumptuous we have seen. When I heard that the new saint’s name was La Salle, stirred by memories of Parkman’s “Discovery of the Great West,” I insisted upon having tickets to one of the private tribunes. I confess it was a disappointment to find that we were making a saint of the wrong Lasalle, not our own René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, but another doubtless excellent person described as “a distinguished educator priest.” You have heard about so many ceremonies that I will only speak of the river of bishops! I did not suppose there were so many bishops in the world. They passed down the vast church in a line of seething white and gold, stretching from the entrance down the nave to the very chair of Peter behind the high altar. Every bishop carried a tall white wax torch, whose yellow flame lighted up his white and gold vestments, his gold-tipped mitre and crozier. I shall never forget that dazzling splendor! I have seen so many of these great pageants that I am rather blasée about them, but those gorgeous bishops in their immaculate white and gold robes outshone even the arrogant vermilion cardinals, the purple canons with their gray fur capes—even that man of ivory and iron, Leo XIII., carried aloft in the Sedia Gestatoria, on the shoulders of six crimson lackeys, the triple crown blazing on his head.
On the 31st of May I happened in to Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a dear church, built on the ruins of an ancient temple of Minerva. Fra Angelico is buried here (how can his native Fiesole spare his bones)? There is an ancient Greek sarcophagus, with Hercules taming the Nemean lion in relief; there is a picture of Torquemada, the terrible confessor of Isabella; there is an adorable flower-bespattered tomb carved by that sweetest of statuaries, Mino da Fiesole, and a hundred other “features”! In the piazza outside stands an engaging marble elephant, with the smallest of Egyptian obelisks on his back; altogether the place is a good example of what one is forever harking back to,—Rome’s golden blending of things Greek, Egyptian, classic, pagan, early Christian, renaissance, and rococo!
In the pulpit who should be thundering away, whacking the dusty crimson cushions till the beautiful old carved pulpit shook, but our friend the parroco! He seemed so much in earnest that I paid two cents for a chair and sat down to listen to him. His subject was the erudition of Mary, “the most learned woman,” he said, “who has ever lived. Her knowledge of languages—she spoke at least twenty—proves this. She is known to have talked with Moabites, Samaritans, Egyptians, and other persons, to the number of twenty different nationalities.” The hypothesis that some of these persons may have spoken Aramaic, Mary’s own language, was not admitted by the preacher.
Coming out after church, I overheard one well-dressed contadina—senza cappello (without a hat), a social grade is marked by the wearing of a hat—say to another peasant woman,—
“My son has preached a new sermon on the Madonna on each of the thirty-one days of her month. He has done well.” I thought he had!
It was the parroco’s mother. She had the same soft dark eyes, the same mouth, the same smile—the mother for whose sake, as he himself told us, he became a priest. “Poverella,” he said, “it was her wish; I am all that she has; how could I disappoint her? and she believes that one day I shall receive the cardinal’s hat!”
He had come as he always does, the Saturday before Easter, to bless the house. Pompilia and Filomena had been on their marrow-bones for a week, rubbing, scrubbing, polishing, setting the house in order for the rite. On the kitchen dresser the prescribed food to be eaten on Easter Sunday was neatly arranged: eggs and mortadella for breakfast; lamb, green peas, a certain broth made with lemon and eggs, served only on this day of the year, and the sweet dish already prepared,—what the Italians call zuppa Inglese, and we call Italian cream! In a vase were carefully preserved the blossoms of wall flowers, stocks, and violets, from the sepulchre of Holy Thursday at the church near by in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli; these, according to tradition, must deck our Easter dinner table. It was four o’clock when the parroco reached our house. He was very smart in his neat beretta,—a high, square, black silk cap,—his best white linen cotta trimmed with handsome lace, freshly starched and ironed. It was “done up,” I’ll be bound, by that good brown mother of his. He was followed by an imp of a boy with the oddest snub nose, and hair growing almost down to his eyebrows, who made the responses and carried the silver holy-water vessel by a pair of enchanting wrought handles. We formed a procession, headed by the parroco and the imp; next came the padrona di casa (myself); behind me walked Pompilia the cook in the time-honored striped black silk which I had given to Nena, and she, “per miseria,” had sold to the cook; after her, Filomena, the prettiest girl in the Borgo, in her best blue frock and a rose in her hair; the procession was brought up in the rear by Nena,—the witch, the snuff-taker, the footman, the mainstay and comfort of the whole household. She had borrowed a clean apron, smoothed her rough, gray hair, and redeemed her coral beads and gold earrings from pawn at the Monte di Pieta. There were flowers everywhere in the house, the terrace had been rifled, roses, roses, roses, red, pink, saffron. In the very best vase were a single white rose from my mother’s favorite tree, the Catherine Cook, and one mammoth pink one from Captain Christy. We marched first to the salon, the most honorable room. The parroco dipped a silver sprinkler in the lustral water, which he sprinkled in four directions, north, south, east, west, saying as he did so, “Bless, O Lord, this place, that in it may be health, chastity, victory, virtue, humility, goodness, sweetness, the fulness of law and thanksgiving, and may this blessing abide in this place and upon all those who dwell herein.”
Whether by chance or intention, a few drops fell upon a group of family portraits hanging on the wall. Our dear sunny chamber was next blessed, then the dining-room, the den, finally the servants’ quarters and the kitchen. In each room the prayer was repeated, the water sprinkled. The parroco was in a hurry, he could not wait to taste a gocciatino di vino or a bit of the pizze Filomena’s mother had sent us from her home in Umbria,—there were many more houses to be blessed before nightfall. We went with him to the door, shook hands, slipping into his palm a small envelope—the imp carried openly the silver plate in which I dropped his share of the modest offering, then with hasty bows and smiles and “buona pasqua (happy Easter)” the pair of them clattered down the long travertina staircase, past the recumbent Etruscan ladies, with their button-like eyes, who guard our stair, leaving me to enjoy our clean, sweet-smelling house. On the terrace an hour later, drinking in the glory of the sunset, came an odd sense of the fitness and familiarity of it all. This blessing the house, the food, the penates, the tools, the effigies of ancestors is the Little Ambervalia Pater describes so deliciously in Marius, the Epicurean; there is, too, an echo in it of the Vestalia, the festival in honor of Vesta, held at the house of the Vestal Virgins on the 9th of June, “after which the temple was closed for five days for ceremonial cleansing!” At home, in God’s own country, the ceremony survives under the name of spring cleaning. It was a wonderful stormy sunset; St. Peter’s and the piazza seen in this ferment of light and shadow recalled a curious allegorical design of Bernini’s, in which the two curving wings of his colonnade are made to suggest the arms of Christ’s Vicar, spread out to enfold the world, Angelo’s dome being worked in as a sort of papal tiara floating over the whole.
XIII
THE QUEEN’S VISIT
Palazzo Rusticucci, Rome, Easter, 1900.