A few days later Mrs. Crawshay took me to see Madame Ristori. She was a stately old lady with white hair and a beautiful voice, and I imagine Mrs. Siddons must have been rather the same kind of person. She talked of D’Annunzio making a dramatic version of Paolo and Francesca; whether he had done so then or not, or whether he had only announced his intention of doing so, I forget. In any case Madame Ristori disapproved of the idea. She said Dante had said all there was to say, and then she repeated the six crucial lines from the Inferno about the disiato riso, and I never heard a more melodious human utterance.
Talking of some other poetical play, she asked whether it was a tragedy or not. As we seemed to hesitate, she said: “If it’s in five acts, it’s a tragedy; if it’s in four acts, it’s a drama.”
The beauty of Rome pierced me like an arrow the first day I spent there. On my first afternoon I drove to St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, the Pincio, and the Protestant cemetery, where Shelley and Keats are buried. I was not disappointed. A few days later I drove along the Appian Way into the Campagna. It was a grey day, with a slight silver fringe on the blue hills, and alone in the desolate majesty of the plain, a shepherd tootled a melancholy tune on the flute, as sad as the shepherd’s tune in the third act of Tristan und Isolda. As we drove back, St. Peter’s shone in a gleam of watery light, and I felt that I had now seen Rome.
It was a pleasant Embassy to serve at. Diplomatic life was different at Rome either from life in Paris or Copenhagen. Society consisted of a number of small and separate circles that revolved independently of each other, but in which the members of one circle knew what the members of all the other circles were doing. The diplomats, and there were a great number of them, were most of them an integral part of Roman society, and there were also many literary and artistic people whose circles formed part of the same system as that of the Romans and of the diplomatic world.
Lady Currie lived in a world of her own. She seemed to look on at the rest of the world from a detached and separate observation post, from which she quietly noted and enjoyed the doings of others with infinite humour and serious eyes.
She had a quiet, plaintive, half-deprecating way of saying the slyest and sometimes the most enormous things. She left it to you to take them or leave them as you chose. One day in the Embassy garden the servants had surrounded a scorpion with a ring of fire to see whether, as the legend says, it would stab itself to death. “Leave the poor salamander alone,” said Lady Currie; “it’s not its fault that it is a salamander. If it had its way it might have been an … ambassador.”
To have luncheon or dinner alone with her and Lord Currie was one of the most enjoyable entertainments in the world, when she would talk in the most unrestrained manner, and with gentle flashes of the slyest, the most cunning wit, and a deliciously funny seemingly careless but carefully chosen felicity of phrase.
She used to describe her extraordinary childhood and upbringing, which is depicted in The Adventures of Sophy, and her early adventures in London; and when she said anything particularly funny, she looked as if she was quite unconscious of the meaning of what she had said, as if it had been an accident. She was fond of poetry and used to read it aloud beautifully. She was equally fond of her dogs, and she made splendid use of them as a weapon against bores; by bringing them into the conversation, making them the subject of mock-serious and sentimental rhapsodies, dialogues, monologues, and dramas, and just when the stranger would be thinking, “What a silly woman this is,” there would be a harmless phrase, perhaps only one innocent word, which just gave that person a tiny qualm of doubt as to whether perhaps she was so silly after all. Once when she was travelling to London at the time the restrictions against bringing dogs into England were first applied, she tried to smuggle her dog away without declaring its presence. The dog was detected, and there was some official who played a part in this story and in taking away her dog, whom Lady Currie said she would never forget. Lady Currie had a Turkish maid who had told her of a Turkish curse which, if spoken at an open window, had an unpleasant effect on the person against whom you directed it. She directed the curse against the man whom she considered to be responsible for depriving her of the dog. The next morning she was surprised and not a little startled to read in the Times the death of this public official. She told me this story in London in 1904.
I went on with my Russian lessons in Rome, and I got to know a good many Russians, among others M. and Mme Sazonoff, Princess Bariatinsky, and her two daughters, and a brilliant old lady called Princess Ourousoff, who lived in a little flat and received almost every evening.
Princess Ourousoff had known Tolstoy and been an intimate friend of Tourgenev. She was immensely kind to me and contributed greatly to my education in Russian literature. She read me poems by Pushkin and introduced me to the prose and verse of many other Russian authors. Herr Jagow was at the German Embassy at this time, and he, too, was a friend of Princess Ourousoff’s. So there were at Rome at this time two future Ministers of Foreign Affairs, both of whom were destined to play a part in the war: Herr Jagow and M. Sazonoff.