What I Remember, Volume 2

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I am giving here an account of the first impression my future wife made on me. I had no thought of wooing and winning her, for, as I have said, I was not in a position to marry. Meanwhile she was becoming acclimatised to Florentine society. She no longer looked dowdy when entering a room, but very much the reverse; and the little Florentine world began to recognise that they had got something very much like a new Corinne among them. But of course I rarely got a chance of monopolising her as I had done during that first afternoon. We were however constantly meeting, and were becoming ever more and more close friends. When the Garrows left Florence for the summer, I visited them at Lucerne, and subsequently met them at Venice. It was the year of the meeting of the Scientific Congress in that city.

That was a pleasant autumn in Venice! By that time I had become pretty well over head and ears in love with the girl by whose side I generally contrived to sit in the gondolas, in the Piazza in the evening, etcaetera. It was lovely September weather—just the time for Venice. The summer days were drawing in, but there was the moon, quite light enough on the lagoons; and we were a great deal happier than the day was long.

Those Scientific Congresses, of which that at Venice was the seventh and the last, played a curious part, which has not been much observed or noted by historians, in the story of the winning of Italian independence. I believe that the first congress, at Pisa, I think, was really got up by men of science, with a view to furthering their own objects and pursuits. It was followed by others in successive autumns at Lucca, Milan, Genoa, Naples, Florence, and this seventh and last at Venice. But Italy was in those days thinking of other matters than science. The whole air was full of ideas, very discordant all of them, and vague most of them, of political change. The governments of the peninsula thought twice, and more than twice, before they would grant permission for the first of these meetings. Meetings of any kind were objects of fear and mistrust to the rulers. Those of Tuscany, who were by comparison liberal, and, as known to be such, were more or less objects of suspicion to the Austrian, Roman, and Neapolitan Governments, led the way in giving the permission asked for; and perhaps thought that an assembly of geologists, entomologists, astronomers, and mathematicians might act as a safety valve, and divert men's minds from more dangerous subjects. But the current of the times was running too strongly to be so diverted, and proved too much for the authorities and for the real men of science, who were, at least some of them, anxious to make the congresses really what they professed to be.

Gradually these meetings became more and more mere social gatherings in outward appearance, and revolutionary propagandist assemblies in reality. As regards the former aspect of them, the different cities strove to outdo each other in the magnificence and generosity of their reception of their "scientific" guests. Masses of publications were prepared, especially topographical and historical accounts of the city which played Amphytrion for the occasion, and presented gratuitously to the members of the association. Merely little guide-books, of which a few hundred copies were needed in the case of the earlier meetings, they became in the case of the latter ones at Naples, Genoa, Milan, and Venice, large and magnificently printed tomes, prepared by the most competent authorities and produced at a very great expense.

Venice especially outdid all her rivals, and printed an account of the Queen of the Adriatic, embracing history, topography, science in all its branches, and artistic story, in four huge and magnificent volumes, which remains to the present day by far the best topographical monograph that any city of the peninsula possesses. This truly splendid work, which brought out in the ordinary way could not have been sold for less than six or eight guineas, was presented, together with much other printed matter—an enormous lithographed panorama of Venice and her lagoons some five feet long in a handsome roll cover, I remember among them—to every "member" on his enrolment as such.

Then there were concerts, and excursions, and great daily dinners the gayest and most enjoyable imaginable, at which both sexes were considered to be equally scientific and equally welcome. The dinners were not absolutely gratuitous, but the tickets for them were issued at a price very much inferior to the real cost of the entertainment. And all this it must be understood was done not by any subscription of members scientific or otherwise, but by the city and its municipality; the motive for such expenditure being the highly characteristic Italian one, of rivalling and outdoing in magnificence other cities and municipalities, or in the historical language of Italy, "communes."

Old Rome, with her dependent cities, made no sign during all these autumns of ever increasing festivity. Pity that they should have come to an end before she did so; for at the rate at which things were going, we should all at least have been crowned on the Capitol, if not made Roman senators, pour l'amour du Grec, as the savant says in the Précieuses Ridicules, if we had gone to the Eternal City!

But the fact was, that the soi-disant 'ologists kicked up their heels a little too audaciously at Venice under Austria's nose; and the Government thought it high time to put an end to "science."

For instance, Prince Canino made his appearance in the uniform of the Roman National Guard! This was a little too much; and the Prince, all prince and Buonaparte as he was, was marched off to the frontier. Canino had every right to be there as a man of science; for his acquirements in many branches of science were large and real; and specially as an entomologist he was known to be probably the first in Italy. But he was the man, who, when selling his principality of Canino, insisted on the insertion in the legal instrument of a claim to an additional five pauls (value about two shillings), for the title of prince which was attached to the possessor of the estates he was selling. He was an out-and-out avowed Republican, and was the blackest of black sheep to all the constituted governments of the peninsula. He looked as little as he felt and thought like a prince. He was a paunchy, oily-looking black haired man, whose somewhat heavy face was illumined by a brilliant black eye full of humour and a mouth expressive of good nature and bonhomie. His appearance in the proscribed uniform might have been considered by Austria, if her police authorities could have appreciated the fun of the thing, as wholesomely calculated to throw ridicule on the hated institution. He was utterly unassuming, and good-natured in his manner, and when seen in his ordinary black habiliments looked more like a well-to-do Jewish trader than anything else.

As for the social aspects of these Scientific Congresses, they were becoming every year more festive, and, at all events to the ignoramus outsiders who joined them, more pleasant. My good cousin and old friend, then Colonel, now General, Sir Charles Trollope, was at Venice that autumn. I said on meeting him, "Now the first thing is to, make you a member." "Me! a member of a Scientific Congress!" said he. "God bless you! I am as ignorant as a babe of all possible 'epteras and 'opteras, and 'statics and 'matics!" "Oh! nonsense! we are all men of science here! Come along!"—i.e., to the ducal palace to be inscribed. "But what do you mean to tell them I am?" he asked. "Well! let's see! You must have superintended a course of instruction in the goose-step in your day?" "Rather so!" said he. "Very well, then. You are Instructor in Military Exercises in her B.M. Forces! You are all right! Come along!" And if I had said that he was Trumpeter Major of the 600th Regiment in the British Army, it would doubtless have been equally all right. So said, so done! And I see his bewildered look now, as the four huge volumes, about a load for a porter, to which he had become entitled, together with medals and documents of many kinds, were put into his arms.