Mr. Curtis’s last mot. In the dining room of the Grand Hotel some one asks the name of a lady extremely décolletée.
“The Princess Chemisoff, née Alloff!” Curtis snapped out.
I am sending you for your birthday two bits of old lace; one is Mechlin, the other Palestrina. I bought them in Venice. Old lace is now almost priceless; there has been a tremendous run on it. Jesurum, the famous lace dealer in Venice, told me that most of the good old lace has gone to America. I got a deal of tutoring about lace from him and now understand something of it. It makes me faint to remember how carelessly I have worn some of your rare old pieces. You must get them together and let me bring them back to be repaired. I have a wonderful lace woman; she wears the most powerful glasses I ever saw. It’s an awful trade, lace making or mending, too often ending in blindness.
April 13. Busy this week with the Lenten services. The tenebrae and miserere very fine, the ceremony of washing the altar and displaying St. Veronica’s handkerchief and other relics impressive and beautiful. Somehow it is all arranging itself in my mind. At first I felt only dismay and bewilderment, now I begin to see the raison d’être. It’s not particularly Christian, but the symbolism is aesthetic and spiritual, a turning from mere material toil and contemplating the unseen and unknown. It’s a sort of theism that seems well suited to the Latins. Hardly a day passes without my going into St. Peter’s or to the Vatican. I take refuge there when too many “oxen come about me, fat bulls of Bashan compass me on every side”!
CHAPTER XIX
A Year of Travel
During our long residence in Rome I made frequent flying trips to America to see my mother. On one of these visits my friends, Captain and Mrs. George Hamilton Perkins, asked me to take their daughter Isabel back with me to Europe. Of the many conversations I had with the parents of this adored only child, one phrase alone hangs in my memory. The gallant Captain said to me in a voice strangely moved with feeling, “I want my little girl to grow up to be a noble woman.”
My letters for the next year tell the story of our travels. I strove to do for my young charge what my mother had done for me nearly twenty years before; above all, I tried to help her live up to her father’s ideal.
[To my Mother.]
Paris. November 5, 1895. We have been in Paris three weeks, weather good for the season and Paris as ever the gayest, bonniest, neatest lass in the sisterhood of cities. We are shopping, sight-seeing, studying French and going to the theater. Last night to the Théâtre Français. The play was “L’Ami des Femmes” by Dumas. Not very “jeune fille” but more so than anything they are likely to give. The acting was exquisite and the hero, Worms, a man of eighty, a fine exemplar of the old school of legitimate drama. Rather trying, though, to see a man of that age in a part for a jeune premier. Compared to the Français I remember, with Mounet-Sully, Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette in their prime, playing the “Sphinx”, “Adrienne”, “L’Étrangère” and “Hernani”, it was slow music. The women were mostly old and the whole atmosphere fossilesque. I wonder if the greed for money doesn’t lure away many of the stars, or whether it was chance that made the performance seem so far below those I remember. The opera is only fair, all the best singers having gone to the United States. If they give the “Train de Plaisir” at home be sure and see it. ’Tis very funny and will give you a good laugh. The latest art news is that a fine new statue of Meissonier has just been unveiled. Paris is so Americanized that it’s tiresome. At the circus and the variety shows English is more spoken than French. At the Folies Bergères the French actors who took part acted in pantomime, while all the dialogue and the songs were in English. Isabel is a dear good affectionate child. If she learns one quarter of what I am learning in trying to teach her, it will be well for her.