This experience has always helped me to believe the account of that strange incident in the history of the Florentines, given, I think, by Macchiavelli, in which it is related that during the Republican days of Florence, when there was a hostile army making an inroad on their territories, the doughty republicans, having gone out to meet it, lay encamped some time not far from Lucca; and that, suddenly, when the enemy was almost upon them, they revolted, turned around, and marched home again, to let their territory and the fortunes of their city take care of themselves, because the Florentine army had unfortunately got out of wine!
Sometimes I spent my evenings at the café, where I always took my breakfast, and where for three soldi,—three cents,—invested in coffee or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers, or listening to the talk of my artist friends. It was always cheaper for me to go to the opera—taking a very high seat, by the way—than to have a light and a fire in my room. I have seen an opera with a hundred or more people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight cents.
Thus I lived on in the city of art and olives. When my money began to give out again, I thought I would condescend to transmit another article to the London magazine which had made my fortune before. I transmitted another article; and at the time when I ought to have heard from it I was reduced to the sum of forty francs.
Receiving, at last, an envelope with the Paternoster mark upon it, I restrained my joy, and opened it leisurely, making merely the mental resolution that I would dine in state that day; for this was a longer article than the first one, and the sum which it would bring must be simply enormous. Then I proceeded to read the following letter:—
“Dear Sir,—Your article entitled —— is respectfully declined”!
This time starvation was sure; but I had set my heart on seeing Rome. I thought there would be a sort of melancholy satisfaction in having visited the capital of the ancient world before going to any other new one. I therefore took the next open-topped car for the sea-shore, having previously put my first rough draft of my unfortunate article into a new wrapper, and shipped it off to the editor of a less pretending periodical, published at Edinburgh.
I do not remember how or why, but the night after I left Florence I had to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money I had at a miserable, cheap trattoria, not far from the famous Leaning Tower. I found a fierce-moustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and extraordinary conduct.
Two days afterward I took a fourth-class, that is, deck passage on the French steamer, sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn. I stayed a week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer. It was, indeed, by a miraculous chance that I ever left the Eternal City. I had not money enough to pay the Pontifical tax on departing travellers.
It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers of the police, and, arriving at Leghorn again, I had not the ten cents to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer.
My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome; so that was out of danger, and came properly to hand afterward.