CHAPTER XLIV
ROME
Only at Rome[1] can a respectable woman, seated in her carriage, say effusively to another woman, a mere acquaintance, what I heard this morning: "Ah, my dear, beware of love with Fabio Vitteleschi; better for you to fall in love with a highwayman! For all his soft and measured air, he is capable of stabbing you to the heart with a knife, and of saying with the sweetest smile, while he plunged the knife into your breast: 'Poor child, does it hurt?'" And this conversation took place in the presence of a pretty young lady of fifteen, daughter of the woman who received the advice, and a very wide-awake young lady.
If a man from the North has the misfortune not to be shocked at first by the candour of this southern capacity for love, which is nothing but the simple product of a magnificent nature, favoured by the twofold absence of good form and of all interesting novelty, after a stay of one year the women of all other countries will become intolerable to him.
He will find Frenchwomen, perfectly charming, with their little graces,[2] seductive for the first three days, but boring the fourth—fatal day, when one discovers that all these graces, studied beforehand, and learned by rote, are eternally the same, every day and for every lover.
He will see German women, on the contrary, so very natural, and giving themselves up with so much ardour to their imagination, but often with nothing to show in the end, for all their naturalness, but barrenness, insipidity, and blue-stocking tenderness. The phrase of Count Almaviva[(30)] seems made for Germany: "And one is quite astonished, one fine evening, to find satiety, where one went to look for happiness."
At Rome, the foreigner must not forget that, if nothing is tedious in countries where everything is natural, the bad is there still more bad than elsewhere. To speak only of the men,[3] we can see appearing here in society a kind of monster, who elsewhere lies low—a man passionate, clear-sighted and base, all in an equal degree. Suppose evil chance has set him near a woman in some capacity or other: madly in love with her, suppose, he will drink to the very dregs the misery of seeing her prefer a rival. There he is to oppose her happier lover. Nothing escapes him, and everyone sees that nothing escapes him; but he continues none the less, in despite of every honourable sentiment, to trouble the woman, her lover and himself. No one blames him—"That's his way of getting pleasure."—"He is doing what gives him pleasure." One evening, the lover, at the end of his patience, gives him a kick. The next day the wretch is full of excuses, and begins again to torment, constantly and imperturbably, the woman, the lover and himself. One shudders, when one thinks of the amount of unhappiness that these base spirits have every day to swallow—and doubtless there is but one grain less of cowardice between them and a poisoner.
It is also only in Italy that you can see young and elegant millionaires entertaining with magnificence, in full view of a whole town, ballet girls from a big theatre, at a cost of thirty halfpence a day.[4]
Two brothers X——, fine young fellows, always hunting and on horseback, are jealous of a foreigner. Instead of going and laying their complaint before him, they are sullen, and spread abroad unfavourable reports of this poor foreigner. In France, public opinion would force such men to prove their words or give satisfaction to the foreigner. Here public opinion and contempt mean nothing. Riches are always certain of being well received everywhere. A millionaire, dishonoured and excluded from every house in Paris, can go quite securely to Rome; there he will be estimated just according to the value of his dollars.
[1] September 30th, 1819.