When the Sultan’s servant called next day, the volume was not to be found. It was sent for more than once, and the next time the Ambassador had an audience, the Sultan reproached him with duplicity.
Rome in the last decade of the nineteenth century was as fascinating to me as it had been to my mother in 1843, when she came here on her wedding journey. My aunt still held her little court at Palazzo Odescalchi where I met many of the elder artists. Mr. Richard Greenough, the sculptor, rarely failed to appear on her reception days; he was an exquisite man with the old fashioned “hair-trigger breeding” of a Boston gentleman of the early Victorian age. Mr. William Story was at work upon his last statue, the “Genius of Grief”, a kneeling figure of an angel, for his wife’s grave in the Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley wrote, “It might make one in love with death to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
Marion Crawford was living at Sorrento with his wife and four children. He had become famous and, for a writer, rich. I would rather have found him poor and obscure; the price he had paid for fame and fortune was too high. He had an iron constitution and phenomenal powers of work. I have known him to write a book in six weeks and doubt if he ever took more than three months over any novel. He worked under great pressure, with a full head of steam on, day in day out. The pace he had set was beginning to tell on him, but it seemed he could not alter it. He had little sense of self-preservation and was full of whimsies about his diet. We owed our first Roman home to him, for he lent us his apartment in the historic Palazzo Santa Croce, where tradition says Beatrice Cenci lived at one time. During the first part of our stay here I was harried by a recurrent nightmare. Night after night I found myself in a room that my waking eye had never seen, a blind room, without windows or doors, in the center of which stood a funeral catafalque draped in black. This vision obsessed me: even by day I could not wholly escape it.
After a time it happened that certain repairs were needed on the foundations of the palace. In making them, the workmen came upon a small closed cellar filled with human bones. Further search was made, and over the cellar was found an oubliette whose entrance, walled up for centuries, was directly below my room. Two nights after this, as the bells of the Pietà del Monte rang midnight, a funeral car drew up before the palace, the bones were carried away, and buried with whatever ceremony the church allowed. After that I slept in peace.
The tower room where Crawford had worked became J.’s studio. On the walls hung casts from the faces of the great men described in Crawford’s “With the Immortals”, Napoleon, Beethoven, and best of all the famous death mask of Dante. This last so much impressed J. that he made a drawing of it in colored pastels. Dissatisfied with the work, he crumpled up the drawing and threw it in the waste basket. I rescued it, smoothed out the tumbled paper and “unbeknownst” took it to the framer’s. When the drawing came home I hung it up in the salon.
“See how nicely your Dante looks now!” I exclaimed.
“Not nice at all! Don’t let anybody see it!” was the answer.
Crestfallen I took the drawing to my bedroom. One day when I was ill my Uncle Terry came to see me and caught sight of the Dante.
“What a good drawing!” he exclaimed.
Uncle Terry was an excellent draftsman and J. had great respect for his opinion. The Dante came back to the salon. On my next reception day Mrs. David Kimball, a Boston collector, saw it and bought it on the spot. Later Curtis and Cameron reproduced it as a Copley Print; it has gone all over the world, taken prizes in Australia and Japan and is, I believe, the most popular modern portrait of the great Italian poet. I tell this story for the benefit of other artists’ wives, for it has been my experience that artists are often the worst judges of their own work. They seem to value most the work that has cost them the greatest labor, whereas it sometimes happens that things struck off at white heat, quickly and easily, have more of the artist’s personality, which of course is what gives every work of art its value.