“She laughed so merrily as she spoke that I could not help exclaiming with envy and surprise:
“‘Livia, how happy you are to be so gay!’”
The sense of humor, so essential to preserve the balance in true mental power, is not wanting in this story. Donna Clelia is lightly and brightly touched. She is everywhere true to herself; self-important, silly, and good-natured, she and her daughters are redeemed from hopeless vulgarity as much by their naïveté and naturalness as by the sheer inability of the author to depict vulgarity—a fact which we notice without comment, leaving our readers to decide whether it be a merit or a fault. Donna Clelia’s intense satisfaction at being able to parade “my niece, the duchess” is one of those touches that throw a character into striking relief. Her enthusiasm for the “view” from the baronessa’s house, where “not a donkey-boy, nor a cart, nor a horse, nor a man, nor a woman could pass in the narrow street but you saw them so plainly you could tell the pattern of their clothes,” gives us the measure of her artistic perceptions,
while her raptures over the situation “with the church on one side and the new theatre on the other … figurateir! so that the baronessa can let herself into the church on the right, and through a passage into her box in the theatre on the left,” is equally characteristic of the manners and minds of the society around her. The description of the splendid pageant of the Carnival, passing under Donna Clelia’s balcony, is as spirited a bit of picturesque writing as we have come upon for a long time. But we hurry on through these gay and vivid scenes, impatient for the crisis that is at hand between Gilbert and Ginevra. Nothing, so far, had prepared our heroine for its approach.
“Apparently,” says Ginevra, “and in reality, our intercourse was precisely what it had always been; every word he said to me might have been said before the whole world. I felt, it is true, that he spoke to me as he did not speak to any one else, and I, on my side, spoke to no one as I did to him. We were seldom alone, but every evening, in the drawing-room or on the terrace, he managed to converse with me for a moment or two when no one was by. He did not disguise from me that these stolen moments were to him the most enjoyable of the evening, and I knew they were the same to me. From time to time something indefinable in his voice, in his glance, even in his silence, made me shudder as at some threat of danger. But as he had never swerved by so much as a word from the position he had assumed towards me—that of a friend—my slumbering conscience did not awake!”
The awakening, however, came at last. The immediate occasion of it was an eruption of Vesuvius, which is described with a dramatic power worthy, if possible, of the sublime and terrible subject. The mountain is on fire; the lava streams forth from a rent in its side, and, strong and pitiless as fate, flows on over
vineyards and villages and smiling gardens, spreading desolation before it. Ginevra, with a large party of friends, goes out to witness the magnificent spectacle from a safe eminence. She and Gilbert are thrown together and climb to the top of a hillock overlooking the scene of the conflagration. The flames rose on all sides as in some vengeful apocalypse, high, fantastic, awful. Ginevra could not take away her eyes from the sight, but gazed on it as on some mysterious apparition that held her spell-bound. At last she exclaimed:
“‘This is truly la città dolente! We have before our eyes a faithful picture of the last day!’
“Gilbert did not answer. He was a prey to some emotion more poignant than mine, and, in glancing towards him in the lurid glare of the fire, I was frightened by the change in his features and their strange expression. ‘Would to heaven,’ he muttered at last, ‘that it were so in reality, and that the last day were come for me! Yes, I wish I could die here, on this spot, near you and worthy of you!’
“In spite of the appalling scene around us, in spite of the roar of the detonations thundering above the dull noise of the lava, the accent of his voice struck upon my ear, and his words made my heart leap up with an emotion mingled with terror.