“Majesty, perhaps you have a right to risk your life, but have you the right to risk ruining me?” The King saw the justice of the plea and sadly retired to his palace. He has looked old and worried lately and above all puzzled. He wanted so much to do the right thing, but did not seem to know how to do it. I believe now he has gone that account will be taken of the giant strides Italy has made during his reign and that he will be found to have been a more significant figure than his critics have realized.
August 5, 1900. It was lumbago. How did you hear about it? Who do you suppose cured me? Henry James. He came to lunch one day early in July. I managed to struggle into an armchair and sit at table. Before he left he told me he had suffered much from this devil and that he had found the only cure for it “perspiration!” only he didn’t use that vulgar word of course; this is what he did say:
“Believe me, dear lady, there is but one cure for lumbago,—transpiration, transpiration. Only transpire freely enough, and it disappears, but alas! it is a malady that returns.”
After he had left with J. I managed to crawl up to the terrace at four o’clock of a broiling July afternoon, found an old broom, and while the heat was positively grilling, swept the terrace from end to end. I got into a perfect bath of “transpiration”, rolled into bed where I gradually cooled off, slept like a top and awoke next day cured.
August 6, 1900. Grave news. The two big canvases have been taken off the stretchers and rolled up. The engineer of the palace forbade J. remaining longer in his studio. The cracks in the walls have been growing wider and wider. The engineer said, and Boni bore him out, that there was danger the roof might fall in any day and destroy both artist and pictures.
August 14, 1900. The packers come to-morrow at nine for the big pictures. They will be shipped August 21st on the Anchor Line steamer Bolivia and will be three weeks reaching Boston. To dine with the Dutch Secretary, de Stirum, who has taken John Loudon’s place. Met the Danish minister who told me that there really are grounds for hoping the Legations (at Pekin) are safe. If this is true, the newspaper correspondents who sent the despatches with the horrid details of the supposed murders ought to have some of the tortures they invented practiced on themselves. Mme. de Lucca (she was Miss Kennedy of New Orleans) the mother of one of the Italian secretaries at Pekin, met me in the street the other day. I suppose my face showed the sympathy I felt for her, as the morning papers stated that all the people at the Legations had been killed.
“Why do you look at me like that?” she asked. “Don’t you suppose I should know if my son were dead? He is perfectly well and safe!”
August 20, 1900. J. decides he wants to go to Oberammergau for the Passion Play. We got right to work at closing up, and shall work like Indians till the last minute. The real hot weather began about mid-July and has kept up steadily. No terrible days like those in Seville where the mercury this month goes up to 110, but a dead level of 85, rising to 90. Nights always cool with a sea breeze coming up about ten o’clock. We dine on the terrace; at night the loss of the flowers does not trouble us. There is always a jug of iced lemonade for callers; as our terrace is voted the coolest place in Rome, we are popular and keep late hours, making up for it next day by the inevitable siesta from one to three. In the shadow of St. Peter’s Dome we watch the constellations march across the sky and think of you at home, looking at the same old Cassiopeia from the piazza at Oak Glen.
For many years I kept up a desultory correspondence with Henry James; we wrote not more than a few times a year and only when we had something particular to say. I ought to have kept his letters with greater care, but in my wandering existence all papers became anathema maranatha. From the few that have survived I chose the following, written after receiving some rather poor photographs of J.’s “Triumph of Time”, which he had watched with such keen interest as it slowly grew into a reality in the Roman studio. It was now in its place on the ceiling of the Children’s Room in the Boston Public Library.
Lamb House,
Rye.