2. Everyone is in love, and not under cover, as in France; the husband is the best friend of the lover.
3. No one reads.
4. There is no society. A man does not reckon, in order to fill up and occupy his life, on the happiness which he derives from two hours' conversation and the play of vanity in this or that house. The word causerie cannot be translated into Italian. People speak when they have something to say, to forward a passion, but they rarely talk just in order to talk on any given subject.
5. Ridicule does not exist in Italy.
In France, both of us are trying to imitate the same model, and I am a competent judge of the way in which you copy it.[2] In Italy I cannot say whether the peculiar action, which I see this man perform, does not give pleasure to the performer and might not, perhaps, give pleasure to me.
What is affectation of language or manner at Rome, is good form or unintelligible at Florence, which is only fifty leagues away. The same French is spoken at Lyons as at Nantes. Venetian, Neapolitan Genoese, Piedmontese are almost entirely different languages, and only spoken by people who are agreed never to print except in a common language, namely that spoken at Rome. Nothing is so absurd as a comedy, with the scene laid at Milan and the characters speaking Roman. It is only by music that the Italian language, which is far more fit to be sung than spoken, will hold its own against the clearness of French, which threatens it.
In Italy, fear of the "pacha"[(29)] and his spies causes the useful to be held in esteem; the fool's honour simply doesn't exist.[3] Its place is taken by a kind of petty hatred of society, called "petegolismo." Finally, to make fun of a person is to make a mortal enemy, a very dangerous thing in a country where the power and activity of governments is limited to exacting taxes and punishing everything above the common level.
6. The patriotism of the antechamber.
That pride which leads a man to seek the esteem of his fellow-citizens and to make himself one of them, but which in Italy was cut off, about the year 1550, from any noble enterprise by the jealous despotism of the small Italian princes, has given birth to a barbarous product, to a sort of Caliban, to a monster full of fury and sottishness, the patriotism of the antechamber, as M. Turgot called it, à propos of the siege of Calais (the Soldat laboureur[(40)] of those times.) I have seen this monster blunt the sharpest spirits. For example, a stranger will make himself unpopular, even with pretty women, if he thinks fit to find anything wrong with the painter or poet of the town; he will be soon told, and that very seriously, that he ought not to come among people to laugh at them, and they will quote to him on this topic a saying of Lewis XIV about Versailles.
At Florence people say: "our Benvenuti," as at Brescia—"our Arrici": they put on the word "our" a certain emphasis, restrained yet very comical, not unlike the Miroir talking with unction about national music and of M. Monsigny, the musician of Europe.