CHAPTER XLIX
A DAY IN FLORENCE
Florence, February 12, 1819.
This evening, in a box at the theatre, I met a man who had some favour to ask of a magistrate, aged fifty. His first question was: "Who is his mistress? Chi avvicina adesso?" Here everyone's affairs are absolutely public; they have their own laws; there is an approved manner of acting, which is based on justice without any conventionality—if you act otherwise, you are a porco.
"What's the news?" one of my friends asked yesterday, on his arrival from Volterra. After a word of vehement lamentation about Napoleon and the English, someone adds, in a tone of the liveliest interest: "La Vitteleschi has changed her lover: poor Gherardesca is in despair."—"Whom has she taken?"—"Montegalli, the good-looking officer with a moustache, who had Princess Colonna; there he is down in the stalls, nailed to her box; he's there the whole evening, because her husband won't have him in the house, and there near the door you can see poor Gherardesca, walking about so sadly and counting afar the glances, which his faithless mistress throws his successor. He's very changed and in the depths of despair; it's quite useless for his friends to try to send him to Paris or London. He is ready to die, he says, at the very idea of leaving Florence."
Every year there are twenty such cases of despair in high circles; some of them I have seen last three or four years. These poor devils are without any shame and take the whole world into their confidence. For the rest, there's little society here, and besides, when one's in love, one hardly mixes with it. It must not be thought that great passions and great hearts are at all common, even in Italy; only, in Italy, hearts which are more inflamed and less stunted by the thousand little cares of our vanity, find delicious pleasures even in the subaltern species of love. In Italy I have seen love from caprice, for example, cause transports and moments of madness, such as the most violent passion has never brought with it under the meridian of Paris.[1]
I noticed this evening that there are proper names in Italian for a million particular circumstances in love, which, in French, would need endless paraphrases; for example, the action of turning sharply away, when from the floor of the house you are quizzing a woman you are in love with, and the husband or a servant come towards the front of her box.
The following are the principal traits in the character of this people:—
1. The attention, habitually at the service of deep passions, cannot move rapidly. This is the most marked difference between a Frenchman and an Italian. You have only to see an Italian get into a diligence or make a payment, to understand "la furia francese." It's for this reason that the most vulgar Frenchman, provided that he is not a witty fool, like Démasure, always seems a superior being to an Italian woman. (The lover of Princess D—— at Rome.)