In the evening, there was an illumination of the green alleys and the little square in front of the house, and a band of music for the people. Within, the halls were thrown open for a ball. It was given by the Grand Duke to the Duchess of Litchtenberg, the widow of Eugene Beauharnois. The company assembled at eight, and the presentations (two lovely countrywomen of our own among them), were over at nine. The dancing then commenced, and we drove home, through the fading lights still burning in the trees, an hour or two past midnight.
The Grand Duke is about to be married to one of the princesses of Naples, and great preparations are making for the event. He looks little like a bridegroom, with his sad face, and unshorn beard and hair. It is, probably, not a marriage of inclination, for the fat princess expecting him, is every way inferior to the incomparable woman he has lost, and he passed half the last week in a lonely visit to the chamber in which she died, in his palace at Pisa.
LETTER LXII.
BOLOGNA—MALIBRAN—PARMA—NIGHTINGALES OF LOMBARDY—PLACENZA—AUSTRIAN SOLDIERS—THE SIMPLON—MILAN—RESEMBLANCE TO PARIS—THE CATHEDRAL—GUERCINO'S HAGAR—MILANESE COFFEE.
Milan.—My fifth journey over the Apennines—dull of course. On the second evening we were at Bologna. The long colonnades pleased me less than before, with their crowds of foreign officers and ill-dressed inhabitants, and a placard for the opera, announcing Malibran's last night, relieved us of the prospect of a long evening of weariness. The divine music of La Norma and a crowded and brilliant audience, enthusiastic in their applause, seemed to inspire this still incomparable creature even beyond her wont. She sang with a fulness, an abandonment, a passionate energy and sweetness that seemed to come from a soul rapt and possessed beyond control, with the melody it had undertaken. They were never done calling her on the stage after the curtain had fallen. After six re-appearances, she came out once more to the footlights, and murmuring something inaudible from her lips that showed strong agitation, she pressed her hands together, bowed till her long hair, falling over her shoulders, nearly touched her feet, and retired in tears. She is the siren of Europe for me!
I was happy to have no more to do with the Duke of Modena, than to eat a dinner in his capital. We did "not forget the picture," but my inquiries for it were as fruitless as before. I wonder whether the author of the Pleasures of Memory has the pleasure of remembering having seen the picture himself! "Tassoni's bucket which is not the true one," is still shown in the tower, and the keeper will kiss the cross upon his fingers, that Samuel Rogers has written a false line.
At Parma we ate parmesan and saw the Correggio. The angel who holds the book up to the infant Saviour, the female laying her cheek to his feet, the countenance of the holy child himself, are creations that seem apart from all else in the schools of painting. They are like a group, not from life, but from heaven. They are superhuman, and, unlike other pictures of beauty which stir the heart as if they resembled something one had loved or might have loved, these mount into the fancy like things transcending sympathy, and only within reach of an intellectual and elevated wonder. This is the picture that Sir Thomas Lawrence returned six times in one day to see. It is the only thing I saw to admire in the Duchy of Maria Louisa. An Austrian regiment marched into the town as we left it, and an Italian at the gate told us that the Duchess had disbanded her last troops of the country, and supplied their place with these yellow and black Croats and Illyrians. Italy is Austria now to the foot of the Apennines—if not to the top of Radicofani.
Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by day, however (as not specified in poetry). They are up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with their gurgling and changeful music till twilight. Nothing can exceed the fertility of these endless plains. They are four or five hundred miles of uninterrupted garden. The same eternal level road, the same rows of elms and poplars on either side, the same long, slimy canals, the same square, vine-laced, perfectly green pastures and cornfields, the same shaped houses, the same-voiced beggars with the same sing-song whine, and the same villanous Austrians poring over your passports and asking to be paid for it, from the Alps to the Apennines. It is wearisome, spite of green leaves and nightingales. A bare rock or a good brigand-looking mountain would so refresh the eye!
At Placenza, one of those admirable German bands was playing in the public square, while a small corps of picked men were manœuvred. Even an Italian, I should think, though he knew and felt it was the music of his oppressors, might have been pleased to listen. And pleased they seemed to be—for there were hundreds of dark-haired and well-made men, with faces and forms for heroes, standing and keeping time with the well-played instruments, as peacefully as if there were no such thing as liberty, and no meaning in the foreign uniforms crowding them from their own pavement. And there were the women of Placenza, nodding from the balconies to the white mustaches and padded coats strutting below, and you would never dream Italy thought herself wronged, watching the exchange of courtesies between her dark-eyed daughters and these fair-haired coxcombs.
We crossed the Po, and entered Austria's nominal dominions. They rummaged our baggage as if they smelt republicanism somewhere, and after showing a strong disposition to retain a volume of very bad poetry as suspicious, and detaining us two long hours, they had the modesty to ask to be paid for letting us off lightly. When we declined it, the chef threatened us a precious searching "the next time." How willingly I would submit to the annoyance to have that next time assured to me! Every step I take toward the bounds of Italy, pulls so upon my heart!