A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Above all, I exhort you not to allow the malevolent representations of designing men to influence your mind in matters pertaining to the pure religion of Christ."

Olympia little understood yet the nature of the power against which she hoped to prevail. How grimly Caraffa would have smiled at the notion, that his prey could be thus taken from him. A Duke of Ferrara release a convicted and relapsed heretic to pleasure a silly woman, herself more than suspected of sympathy with his errors! Or that that contemptible voluptuary at Rome, simoniacal usurper of Peter's keys, dare to absolve him whom the Holy Inquisition has condemned! Not while John Peter Caraffa keeps watch, as Inquisitor, over the interests of the Church! As to the Duke, it would have been saying that his soul was his own, contrary to all contract, and saying so in a most dangerous and blasphemous manner. And had even indolent, easy–going Julius III. dreamed of dipping the tips of his jewelled fingers in such troubled waters, he would have found, as many a Pope has found, that powerful as the Servus Servorum might be while working in accordance with the powers of the machinery of which he is a part, he was powerless to stop the operation of it. Lavinia della Rovere, her sister–in–law Maddalena Orsini, and the other generous and gentle souls, who dreamed of attempting the absurd quixotism of speaking mercy to a Church in danger, succeeded only in leaving to other and happier times a record, still by no means unneeded, of womanly protest against priestly intolerance.

WITH JOHN SINAPI.

In the same letter to Curione, in which Olympia speaks of her intention not to give up her classical studies, she says that she and her husband would willingly settle at Bâle if there were any prospect of Grünthler's being able to obtain either medical practice or teaching there. For still the future was all uncertain before them; and yet the time was come when they determined on no longer trespassing on the hospitality of their generous host. John Sinapi, now established as physician to the prince–bishop at Würzburg, had pressed them to stay awhile with him; and they accordingly removed from Augsburg to that city. Sinapi had been the master of both husband and wife at Ferrara. His wife, Francesca Bucyronia, had been Olympia's friend at court there; and the reunion of the party, under circumstances so widely different from all that surrounded them in Italy, must have brought back many a recollection of those old times and brilliant scenes, which every one of the party was so thankful to have exchanged for their present pale, and sometimes difficult, northern life.

Sinapi and Francesca had several children. A niece, Bridget, also lived with them; and in one of Olympia's letters of this time we find a Leonora mentioned as one of the inmates of the family, and we get a fleeting glimpse of the party gathered round the good physician's hearth in the evening, with books and learned talk, while Leonora taught the girls embroidery,—"docens ambas acu pingere."

The tenour of this quiet life was one day broken by an accident that happened to the child Emilio. He fell from a high window to the ground on some rough stones, and it was thought that he must be killed. He was little hurt, however; and, as Olympia writes, "lives and is well, to the great surprise of every one." But the incident is only worth mentioning for the sake of Olympia's method of "improving" it. This happened, she writes,[99] "that we might know by experience that God hath given order to his angels to bear up his sons in their hands." And again; "Thus God, who can raise up even the dead from the grave, is wont to defend and preserve his own in safety."

It is painful to find one, for whose character we cannot but have the warmest esteem, and with the feelings of whose heart we can always sympathise, forming for herself such theories of the Divine government of the world. How is it possible, we ask ourselves, that such a one can have supposed the occurrences of life to be arranged by a constant succession of miracles, so that there is no reason to anticipate that similar causes will produce similar effects? How conceivable, that an Olympia Morata should pronounce all those who fall, and do break their bones, to be none of God's own? Her feelings towards her fellow–creatures were assuredly not logically consistent with so monstrous a theory of the Invisible. No! but the creed was held as a creed of the brain; and not arrived at even by the brain by any process of reasoning, but only by intellectual adoption of the theories of others;—probably, even, to a great extent, of their phraseology only. For the most entire sincerity is perfectly compatible with the use of certain phrases imitatively adopted, and believed to be proper to be said in certain conjunctures, the sense, bearing, and consequences of which have never been realised or examined by those who use them.

GOES TO SCHWEINFURTH.

Olympia and her husband remained with John Sinapi, at Würzburg, till the latter part of October, 1551. It was shortly after the accident of Emilio, that Grünthler received an invitation from the senate of his native town of Schweinfurth to settle himself as physician to the garrison of Spanish soldiers quartered there by the Emperor, when he himself went into winter quarters at Innspruck. Though this was not exactly the kind of employment that he would have wished, yet the proposal was acceptable as coming from his own fellow–citizens; and he was not in a position to allow any opportunity of employment in his profession to escape him. He accepted it. And Olympia, for the first time, was about to find herself in a woman's best and happiest position, a home of her own.

It was but an obscure one to which she was going. But her name was already sufficiently well known in Germany to ensure her carrying with her thither the interest of a large circle of the learned world, especially of such as professed her own faith. There is an amusing indication both of the celebrity her name had acquired, and of the uncertainty, that a small distance could in those days throw over facts of the simplest kind, in a letter written about this time by Curione to one Xysto Betuleio, which has been already cited. Curione's correspondent had written to him to ask if the name Olympia Morata was in reality that of a living woman; because it was very generally asserted to be a fictitious nom–de–plume,—"De Olympia nostra scribis te certiorem fieri cupere, quod plerique fictum nomen arbitrantur." And thereupon he proceeds to give that sketch of her career, which has been before quoted.