The conscription is a grievance. It is the only act of the new Government which is generally felt to be a hardship, and sometimes murmured against as an injustice. Rather more than one in every five of the youths who this year attain the age of twenty-one are being drawn for the army. This is the proportion of those taken from their homes and sent to the depots of different regiments, for all are liable to military service under one category or another. Being inscribed and left at home, however, is no great hardship: it is the separation from home which is dreaded, and therefore the numbers of the first category in the conscription which have alone to be considered. This heavy conscription is something new to the Tuscans. In the palmy days of Grand-ducal Government, before 1848, exemption from military service could be obtained for something less than £4 English; after the Austrian occupation, the conscription having grown severer, the cost of exemption was about doubled; but now it amounts to a sum which none but the wealthy can possibly pay.
The young conscripts, however, become rapidly imbued with the professional pride of their older comrades; and it often happens that lads, who have parted from their home in tears, astonish their quiet parents a few weeks after with letters full of enthusiasm for the Italian army. Enthusiasm on any subject is a rare virtue in Tuscany; and if a military life for six years could infuse into the rising generation some energy and some habits of discipline, the army would prove a more important means of education than all the new schools which are to be introduced.
But how is it that throughout this perambulation of the town of Florence we have not come across a single sign of that touching affection for the late Grand-duke which has been so vividly and so often described in England?
The truth is, that although there is a good deal of discontent with the present Government, there is no regret for the last.
Of all the weak sentiments which exist in Tuscan breasts, loyalty towards the late Grand-duke is certainly the very weakest.
In order, however, that the reader may catch a glimpse of the “Codini” (or “party of the tail,” as the following of the late Grand-duke are called) before they are all numbered among the antiquities of Italy, it will be advisable to take one turn on the banks of the Arno in the “Cascine,” the fashionable walk, or “the world,” of the Florentines.
It is sunset, and the evening chill is making itself felt—in fact, to lay aside all romance about the Italian climate, it is very cold. The upper five hundred come out at dew-fall, when everybody else goes in, apparently for no better reason than because everybody else does go in. There are Russians driving in handsome droschkes, and Americans in livery-stable barouches of an unwieldy magnificence. But our business is not with these; the native gentility of Florence is just arriving—ladies in closely-shut broughams, and young gentlemen, some in open carriages, half dog-carts half phaetons; others, less fortunate, in open fiacres.
They drive down to the end of the Cascine, where old beggar women attend upon them with “scaldine” to warm their fingers over. There men and women alight and promenade at a foot’s pace, despite the cold, after which they all drive home again.
And what can they have been about all day before they came to the Cascine? The masters and mistresses have been sitting in their respective rooms, drawing such warmth as they might from a stove most economically furnished with wood; the servants have been sitting in the antechamber, holding their four extremities over the hot ashes in the “brasero,” a metal vessel something like an English stewpan on a large scale; for the Italian palaces are cold: the architect may have done well, but the mason and the carpenter have been negligent. The walls are joined at any angle except a right one; the windows do not close; the floors are diversified by sundry undulations, so that a space is left beneath the door, through which light zephyrs play over the ill-carpeted floor. Perhaps the lady of the house has been sitting in state to receive her friends; for every Florentine lady is solemnly announced as “at home” to all her friends one day in the week, so as to keep them out of the house all the other six.
This is the married life in the palace. The life of the young men, the bachelor life of Florence, is not a bit more active. In a word, the life of a Florentine in easy circumstances is a prolonged lounge. It is not that they loiter away their time for a few weeks, or for a few months—for “a season,” in short—that is done all the world over; but the Florentines do nothing but loiter. The most active portion of their lives is that now before us,—the life during the carnival. The carnival over, the rest of the year is spent in recruiting finances and health for the next winter.