My brief residence at Rome sufficed to destroy my illusions.
A Frenchman, a student of medicine, I had, nevertheless, remained an ardent disciple of Catholicism,—the faith in which I had been brought up by a devout mother. She was an Italian, and from her I had inherited an intense, passionate nature, and capacity for belief, which my father’s nationality failed to neutralize. From him, on the other hand, I had received my education, my profession, and a certain large habit of thought, which, disdaining all lesser interests, personal or national, occupied itself exclusively with themes of universal humanity. This habit, extremely characteristic of French intellect, concurred,—perhaps as much as anything else,—in making me an ultra-montanist. As an Italian, I believed in the Church with ardor,—because I believed; as a Frenchman, I demanded a church universal, as alone worthy of attaching my belief. The cause of the Pope was for me identified with the spiritual cause of the world, and the lukewarmness of so-called Liberal Catholics enraged me. I could understand the opposition of materialists, of atheists, or even Protestants. These all occupied a radically different base, and their eyes were turned toward a different horizon. But that a man could face Truth, and voluntarily scrimp his vision to a miserable corner of her robe,—could embrace a principle coldly, with the mere touch of a distant finger,—could pause to balance motives, and haggle over the price of devotion,—this was as incomprehensible to me as repugnant. My own sentiments were equally incomprehensible to the society by which I was surrounded, and the opposition which I constantly encountered served not a little to rivet my convictions, and fan my enthusiasm to passion.
My father died almost immediately after launching me on my medical career,—and my darling mother, two years later. In my unutterable loneliness, I lost all heart for my studies, and breaking away from école and hospitals, wandered in Italy, seeking to quench a quenchless grief. There I married an Italian girl, whose hair and eyes reminded me of my mother, but who expended on the dream of Italian unity such enthusiasm as my mother had lavished for the temporal power of the Pope. I think I was unconsciously attracted by this very difference. Valeria’s opposition to the Pope was so serious and whole-souled, that it seemed to invest his cause with new dignity, and in argument with her I acquired increased respect for my own theories and for myself as capable of sustaining them. Moreover, at the very moment that our intellects were most at variance, we were each conscious of a subtle sympathy of nature; we were animated by the same feeling, though working in different directions. Her antagonism, therefore, never irritated me, but,—when the more profound union had once been established,—fascinated me by a peculiar charm, and led me, by a healthful transition, back to the ruder antagonisms of practical life. For, deprived of the support of my mother’s lofty confidence, and in the weakness following excessive sorrow, I had begun to secretly despair of an ideal, which seemed buried in her all-devouring grave. At the same time I clung to it the more intensely, precisely because it seemed unattainable,—from a sort of morbid craving for whatever had become as unattainable as my mother’s presence. I loathed action, even for the realization of my dreams, and over-concentrated thought threatened to degenerate into a sickly reverie that should presently exhaust the forces of my life, like an unnaturally prolonged sleep. New influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion afforded by Valeria’s counter-enthusiasm and the necessity of making an active defence of my own, roused me, and brought back the blood to the surface of my life. It was, therefore, partly an instinct of self-preservation which led me to Valeria,—and she saved me—my noble wife saved me for other destinies.
We returned to Paris, where I resumed and completed my medical studies, and I had just graduated when the war broke out in Italy.
Four happy, healthful years had completely restored my mental equilibrium. I was no longer an extravagant fanatic, prepared for a cloister or a crusade, but still a tolerably ardent ultra-montanist, pivoted upon the theory of the temporal power of the Pope. Valeria’s influence, in modifying the superficial exuberance of my enthusiasm, had only rendered its energy more practical, more eager for an opportunity to incarnate its ideal in vigorous facts. Now the opportunity had arrived, and the enthusiasm blazed forth afresh; all interests, all consciousness of other ties were absorbed in devotion to the Church of which I felt myself a not unimportant member. My fortune, my time, my life, were all too little to place at its disposal, and I hastened to enrol myself on the medical staff of a regiment of Papal Zouaves. Valeria, who had always reasoned against my theories, was too consistent herself to oppose me in putting them into practice, but she insisted on accompanying me to Italy. We parted at Civita Vecchia, I to go to Rome, she, with our two children, to Naples, where her family had formerly resided. She wrote to me every day, but after several weeks came a blank of three days without a letter. At the same moment arrived the news that the cholera was raging at Naples—news which rendered most ominous this sudden interruption of the correspondence. I obtained leave of absence and hurried south, to learn that my wife and babies were dead—fallen among the very first victims of the pestilence.
Stunned and heart-sick, I returned to Rome, anxious to devote myself to the cause with the more desperate earnestness that it was the only living interest left to me in the world. I arrived just before the battle of Montana, and regretted that fortune had not assigned me a rôle among the soldiers of the cross, among those who might embrace a welcome death, in exchange for the glory of serving the Church. Resolved to approach this honor as nearly as possible, I contrived to obtain an appointment in the ambulance corps, and accompanied the troops to the field. I have no distinct recollection of that day,—the third after Valeria’s funeral,—and which, as my first experience of a battle, assumed to me the magnificent proportions of an Austerlitz or Waterloo. I only know that, intoxicated by the novel excitement of the scene, perhaps by the mere smell of the gun-powder, I forgot the duties to which I was assigned, snatched a musket from a Zouave who had just expired at my feet, and rushed into the heart of the conflict. I received a slight wound in the forehead, staggered, fell, and fainted away. I suppose I must, at the same time, have received the shock from a larger ball than that which grazed my temple, and experienced some concussion of the brain, for I did not fully recover consciousness until I had been transported to the military hospital.
Here I stayed a week, and came, for the first time, into near contact with my fellow-defenders of the faith. The contact, instead of warming, chilled me inexplicably. Instead of belief, I discovered scepticism; instead of enthusiasm, persiflage and eternal quizzing, intolerable in professed martyrs to a sacred cause.
“Que voulez-vous?” they said, shrugging their shoulders at my indignant remonstrances. “The ass who carries all his panniers on the same side stumbles on his own nose. To each man his business; those who believe, don’t fight; and we who fight cannot be expected to believe.”
I was surprised to find that my own loyalty became affected by this indifference, much more than by any influence to which I had hitherto been submitted. Others had sneered because they did not know; but these men precisely because they knew too well. The cause which depended so exclusively upon their bravado was belittled in their own eyes, and presently in mine also. I felt somewhat ashamed of the drops of blood I had lavished so heroically at Montana, and when the gazettes began to flourish the fame of the victory, repeat the dying speeches of fallen braves, and enrol rascally Zouaves on saintly calendars, I could have blushed in the dark—everywhere a little martyrdom, a little battle, and innumerable little apotheoses. I began to doubt the greatness of the cause made up of such infinitesimals. It is easy to serve ideas in which we have ceased to heartily believe, but it is impossible to fight for those that have become to us the least in the world ridiculous. Perhaps Valeria’s death had unconsciously disheartened me for an enterprise which had been, however remotely, its occasion. Perhaps many of her words, whose force I had successfully resisted during her lifetime, now re echoed from her grave with more profound significance. But it is certain that, for the first time, I wavered in affection for my life-long ideal. Alarmed at myself, and determined, if possible, to reinvigorate my failing faith, I went back to Rome, trusting that the Holy City would inspire me afresh. Appointed to a civil office of considerable importance, I was soon introduced into the midst of the Papal Court, and behind the scenes of the magnificent theatrical display that had so long dazzled my imagination. I was initiated into the shameful mysteries of cabal and intrigue, and taught the precious secrets of Pope and Cardinals. On every side I saw falsehood, treachery, and duplicity welcomed as the ablest servitors of truth, the grandest professions assumed as an excuse for the most vulgar villainy, ambition glozed over by degrading humility, and sensuality all the more disgusting from the saintly robes in which it was paraded and but half concealed. My faith, already enfeebled, died of rapid decline, stifled by these monstrous fooleries. Disenchanted, revolted, disgusted, I resigned my position, and abandoned the Pope and his cause forever.
I did not, therefore, enlist under Garibaldi. A tenacious loyalty to the memory of ideas I had once served would always prevent me from more actively attacking them, or from desecrating their graves. Moreover, the revulsion of feeling consequent upon my disillusion was so tremendous, that I was swept entirely out of the region of the questions at issue, and both sides became indifferent to me, both camps dim and shadowy in the distance.