Pray send me all the French novels you can find, and a case of Turkish cigarettes. I am in Paradise, but Paradise is a little dull, and exceedingly damp, at least in England. Does it always rain in this country? It has rained here without stopping for seventeen days and a half. I produce upon myself the impression of being one of those larks who sit behind wires on a little square of wet grass. I should like to run up to London. I see you have Jeanne Granier and the others; but I suppose it would be against all the unwritten canons of a honeymoon. What a strange institution. A honeymoon! Who first invented it?
From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Palazzo Fulva, Milano.
Cara Teresina,—
I ought to have written to you long since, but you know I am not fond of writing. I really, also, have nothing to say. Happy the people who have no history. I am like that people. I was made happy two weeks ago; I have been happy ever since. It is slightly monotonous. How can you vary happiness except by quarrelling a little? And then it would not be happiness any longer. It seems to me that happiness is like an omelet, best impromptu. Do not think that I am ungrateful, however, either to fate or to the charming innocent who has become my companion. We have not two ideas in common. She is lovely to look at, to caress, to adore; but what to say to her I confess I have no notion. Love ought never have to find dinner-table conversation. He ought to climb up by a ladder and get over a balcony, and when his ecstasies are ended, he ought to go the same way. I fancy she is cleverer than I am; but, as that would be a discovery fatal to our comfort, I endeavor not to make it. She is extraordinarily sweet-tempered; indeed, so much so that it makes me angry; it gives one no excuse for being impatient. She is divine, exquisite, nymph-like; but, alas, she is a prude! Never was any creature on earth so exquisitely sensitive, so easily shocked. To live with her is to walk upon egg-shells. Of course it is very nice in a wife,—very "proper," as the English say; but it is not amusing. It amused me at first, but now it seems to me a defect. She has brought me down to this terribly damp and very green place, where it rains every day and night. There is a library without novels; there is a cellar without absinthe; there is a cuisine without tomatoes, or garlic, or any oil at all; there is an admirably-ordered establishment, so quiet that I fancy I am in a penitentiary. There are some adorably fine horses, and there are acres of glass houses used to grow fruits that we throw in Italy to the pigs. By the way, there are also several of our field-flowers in the conservatories. We eat pretty nearly all day; there is nothing else to do. Outside, the scenery is oppressively green, the green of spinach; there is no variety; there are no ilexes, and there are no olives. I understand now why the English painters give such staring colors; unless the colors scream, you don't see them in this aqueous, dim atmosphere. That is why a benign Providence has made the landscape aux épinards. I think the air here, inside and out, must weigh heavily; it lies on one's lungs like a sponge. I once went down in a diving-bell when I was a boy; I have the sensation in this country of being always down in a diving-bell. The scamp Toniello, whom you may remember as having played Leporello to my Don Giovanno ever since we were lads, amuses himself with making love to all the pretty maidens in the village; but, then, I must not do that—now. They are not very pretty, either. They have very big teeth, and very long upper lips. Their skins, however, are admirable. For a horse's skin and a woman's there is no land comparable to England. It is the country of grooming.
From the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to Lady Gwendolen Chichester, British Embassy, St. Petersburg.
He laughed at me because I went to church yesterday, and really I only went because I thought it right. We have been here a fortnight, and I have never been to church at all till yesterday, and you know how very serious dear Aunt Carrie is. To-day, as it is the second Sunday I have been here, I thought I ought to go just once, and I did go; but it was dreadfully pompous and lonely in the big red pew, and the villagers stared so, and all the little girls of the village giggled, and looked at me from under their sun-bonnets. Dear Mr. Coate preached a sermon on Marriage. It was very kind of him; but oh, how I wished he hadn't! When I got back, Piero was playing billiards with his servant. I wondered what Mr. Coate would have thought of him. To be sure, English clergymen have to get used to fast Sundays now, when the country houses are full. It is such a dear little yew walk to the church from the house here, not twenty yards long, and all lined with fuchsia. Do you remember it? Even Piero admits that it is very pretty, only he says it is a vignette prettiness,—which, I suppose, is true. "You can see no horizon, only a green wall," he keeps complaining; and his beautiful, lustrous eyes look as if they were made to gaze through endless fields of light. When I asked him yesterday what he really thought of England, what do you suppose he said? He said, "Mia cara, I think it would be a most delightful country if it had one-fifth of its population, one-half of its houses, a tithe of its dinners, a quarter of its machinery, none of its factories, and a wholly different atmosphere!" I suppose this means that he dislikes it. I think him handsomer than ever. I sent you his photograph, but that can give you no idea of him. He is like one of his own marble statues. We came to Coombe-Bysset directly after the ceremony, and we are here still. I could stay on forever. It is so lovely in these Bedfordshire woods in mid-June. But I am afraid—just the very least bit afraid—that Piero may get bored with me—me—me—nothing but me. He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we sing and play in the evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four hours through. I wonder how I could have lived without him. I am longing to see all he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense dream-like villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and the wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always twilight with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody knows everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to Italy. But we were such country mice down at dear old, dull, green, muddy Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be like a poem. It is a great house, all of different-colored marbles, set amidst ilex groves on the mountainside, with cascades like Terni, and gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one is first happy. And, somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely low rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their smell of dry rose-leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces which want a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a fuss about me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am afraid I must seem rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself and has all kinds of talents. You know I never was clever, and really—really—I haven't an idea what to talk to him about when we don't talk about ourselves. And then the weather provokes him. We have hardly had one fine day since we came; and no doubt it seems very gray and chilly to an Italian. "It cannot be June!" he says, a dozen times a week. And when the whole day is rainy, as it is very often, for our Junes are such wet ones nowadays, I can see he gets impatient. He doesn't care for reading; he is fond of billiards, but I don't play a good enough game to be any amusement to him. And though he sings divinely, as I told you, he sings as the birds do,—just when the mood is on him. He does not care about music as a science in the least. He laughed when I said so. He declared it was no more a science than love is. Perhaps love ought to be a science too, in a way, or else it won't last. There has been a scandal in the village, caused by his servant Toniello. An infuriated father came up to the house this morning about it. He is named John Best: he has one of Aunt Carrie's biggest farms. He was in such a dreadful rage, and I had to talk to him, because, of course, Piero couldn't understand him. Only when I translated what he said, Piero laughed till he cried, and offered him a cigarette, and called him "figlio mio," which only made Mr. John Best purple with fury, and he went away in a greater rage than he had been in when he came, swearing he "would do for the Papist." I have sent for the steward. I am afraid Aunt Carrie will be terribly annoyed. It has always been such a model village. Not a public-house near for six miles, and all the girls such demure, quiet little maidens. The terrible Roman valet, with his starry eyes and his mandoline, and his audacities, has been like Mephistopheles in the opera to this secluded and innocent little hamlet. I beg Piero to send him away; but he looks unutterably reproachful, and declares he really cannot live without Toniello; and what can I say?
From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, St. Petersburg, to the Princess di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset.