My last impression of Augustus Hare is of an evening in the red drawing-room of the Odescalchi, when he told ghost stories till my blood ran cold. He was a slender, sallow man, with a baleful face, and when, in the firelight of the darkened room, he ended a ghastly tale with “A ball of flame broke from his lips!” it seemed as if a ball of fire actually leaped from his! There was something intensely repellent to me about Hare, and of this he was instantly conscious.
“Your cousin cannot endure me,” he said to Crawford; “I make her flesh creep. She is telling your sister about it at this moment,”—and I was!
The Abbé Liszt, who was the guest of Cardinal Hohenlohe at the Villa D’Este, was much in evidence that winter and from time to time consented to play at some benefit concert. He was a commanding figure as he sat at the piano, very elegant in his clerical dress, playing his “Rhapsodic Hongroise” as I have never heard it played. After the concert a group of ladies surrounded him. The Abbé dropped a glove; a young Neapolitan princess picked it up and hid it in her muff.
“The ladies cost the Abbé a pretty penny in gloves,” whispered Crawford.
At this time Crawford was called Frank, or sometimes Fritz, a nickname given him in Germany, either at Heidelberg or at Lesnian, the home of his Junker brother-in-law, Eric von Rabé, an officer of the Franco-Prussian War. Crawford was twenty-four years old, a tall, strong, handsome young man, with no serious pursuit save the study of languages. He had plenty of time to devote to my mother and me; to him I owe my introduction to medieval and ancient Rome, with much else that has proved useful. In a letter of this time he writes to me:
“No success worth having is got from the uncultivated efforts of genius, and cultivation means the tritest of trite things, the daily digging and hoeing of the mind till it brings forth wheat instead of tares!”
King Victor Emmanuel might be seen on a fine afternoon, driving a smart pair of horses in a high phaeton. He was a martial figure, full of dash, with a keen eye that saw more than most. His fierce mustache, twirled at a truculent angle, set the fashion for the military. We sometimes met him driving to the Villa Mirafiori, the home of his morganatic wife, often with a younger man who closely resembled him and was, I think, a son of this union. Rome was a city divided against itself; the King’s party were called the Whites, the followers of the Pope Pius Ninth were known as the Blacks. The two factions managed to rub along together somehow, as they have done ever since, though the King’s people talked of “the traitor at the hearthstone” and the Pope’s cursed “Perfidious Savoy.”
Francesco Crispi, Minister of the Interior, at that time played the first rôle in Italian politics. He had lately returned from a certain quiet journey whose results were to prove of vast importance to the whole world. With the object of sounding the great powers’ attitude towards Italy, Crispi visited England, France, Austria, and Germany. In Paris he was coolly received, London was friendly but indifferent, Vienna as hostile as ever; he returned to Italy feeling that Bismarck—and Bismarck then meant Germany—was Italy’s only friend. From this hour the Triple Alliance between Germany and those two irreconcilables, Italy and Austria, was assured.
Though there was some discussion of political matters at my aunt’s house, it appeared to me that the two serious things in life from the Palazzo Odescalchi standpoint were society with a small s, and art with a big A. Quick as a chameleon to take the local color, I entered the studio of Giovanni Costa to study painting. Costa, one of the young artists among the immortal Mille who sailed from Sicily with Garibaldi and made the great fight for Italian liberty, was the most interesting painter in Rome, with a large following among English and Americans. In order to be in time for his class I often stole away before breakfast to the studio in the Via Margutta, taking a roll in my pocket. I enjoyed my work and made some progress, learning how to prepare my canvas and lay on the under color in pale red in a way that satisfied my master. I was toiling over a study of a branch of lemons when my artistic career was interrupted by a severe attack of Roman fever, a scourge which then took its toll every year from the Americans wintering in Rome.
Two new figures now appear in “Memory’s Showcase”, Doctor Liberali, the old homeopathic physician, and Suora Teresa, the Spanish nun who nursed me.