My journey to Rome.
In revising all this, I have been struck with one thing. On my arrival in the Eternal City, I feel a certain dislike and, for a moment, I believe that everything has changed; little by little, the fever of the ruins overtakes me and I end, like a thousand other travellers, by adoring that which left me cold at first. Nostalgia is the regret of one's native country; on the banks of the Tiber we also suffer from "home-sickness," but it produces an opposite effect to its customary effect: we are seized with the love of solitudes and the distaste for our own country. I had already felt this "sickness" at the time of my first visit, and I was able to say:
Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ[502].
You know how, when the Martignac Ministry was formed, the mere name of Italy had dispelled what remained of my repugnance; but I am never sure of my disposition in matters of joy: no sooner had I set out with Madame Chateaubriand than my natural melancholy joined me on the way. You shall convince yourselves of this by my diary of the road:
"Lausanne, 22 September 1828.
"I left Paris on the 14th of this month; I spent the 16th at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne: what memories! Joubert is gone; the deserted Château de Passy[503] has changed masters; I have been told, 'Be thou the cricket of the nights: Esto cicada noctium.'"
"Arona, 25 September.
"Arriving at Lausanne on the 22nd, I followed the road along which disappeared two other women who wished me well and who, in the order of nature, should have survived me. One, Madame la Marquise de Custine, came to die at Bex; the other, Madame la Duchesse de Duras, was hastening, not a year ago, to the Simplon, flying before the face of death which overtook her at Nice[504]."
"Noble Clara, digne et constante amie,
Ton souvenir ne vit plus en ces lieux;
De ce tombeau l'on détourne les yeux;
Ton nom s'efface et le monde t'oublie[505]!"The last letter which I received from Madame de Duras brings home to us the bitterness of that last drop of life which we shall all have to drain:
"'Nice, 14 November 1828.
"'I have sent you an asclepias carnata; it is a laurel creeper which grows in the open air, is not afraid of the cold, and has a red flower like the camélia, with an excellent smell; plant it under the windows of the Benedictine's Library.
"'I will tell you my news in a word: it is always the same thing; I droop on my sofa all day, that is to say, all the time that I am not driving or walking out, which I cannot do for more than half-an-hour a day. I dream of the past: my life has been so agitated, so varied, that I cannot say that I am violently bored: if I could only do some needle-work or rug-work, I should not feel unhappy. My present life is so far removed from my past life that it seems to me as though I were reading Memoirs or watching a play[506].'
"And so I have returned to Italy deprived of my friends, as I left it five and twenty years ago. But, at that first time, I was able to repair my losses; to-day, who would wish to take part in a few remaining old days? No one cares to live in a ruin.
"At the village of the Simplon itself, I saw the first smile of a happy dawn. The rocks, whose base stretched out black at my feet, gleamed with rose-colour at the mountain-top, struck by the rays of the sun. To issue from darkness, it is enough to rise towards Heaven.
"If Italy had already lost some of its brilliancy for me at the time of my journey to Verona in 1822, in this year, 1828, it appeared to me still more discoloured; I have measured the progress of time. Leaning on the balcony of the inn at Arona, I gazed at the banks of the Lago Maggiore, blazoned with the gold of the setting sun and edged with azure. Nothing was more agreeable than this landscape, which the Castle edged with its battlements. This sight afforded me neither pleasure nor sentiment. The years of spring-time wed their hopes to what they see; a young man goes a-roaming with what he loves, or with the memories of his absent happiness. If he have no bond, he seeks one; he flatters himself at each step that he will find something; thoughts of felicity haunt him: this disposition of his soul is reflected upon surrounding objects.
"However, I notice the littleness of present society less when I find myself alone. Left to the solitude in which Bonaparte has left the world, I scarcely hear the feeble generations which pass and mewl on the edge of the desert."
"Bologna, 22 September 1828.
"In Milan, in less than a quarter of an hour, I counted seventeen hunchbacks passing under the window of my inn. The German flogging has deformed young Italy.
"I saw St. Charles Borromeo[507] in his sepulchre, after touching his birthplace at Arona. He reckoned two hundred and forty-four years of death. He was not beautiful.
An earthquake.
"At Borgo San Donnino, Madame de Chateaubriand came running into my room in the middle of the night: she had seen her clothes and her straw hat fall off the chairs over which they were hung. She had concluded from this that we were in an inn haunted by ghosts or inhabited by robbers. I had noticed no shock as I lay in bed; nevertheless it was the case that an earthquake had been felt in the Apennines: that which overturns cities is able to throw down a woman's clothes. I said as much to Madame de Chateaubriand; I also told her that, in Spain, in the Vega del Xenil, I had passed without accident through a village which had been turned upside down the day before by a subterranean concussion. These lofty consolations did not have the smallest success, and we hastened to leave this cave of murderers.
"The continuation of my journey has displayed to me on every hand the flight of men and the inconstancy of fortune. At Parma, I found the portrait of Napoleon's widow that daughter of the Cæsars is now the wife of Count Neipperg; that mother of the conqueror's son has presented that son with brothers[508]: she allows the debts which she piles up to be guaranteed by a little Bourbon[509] who lives at Lucca and who, if it is expedient, is to inherit the Duchy of Parma.
"Bologna appears to me less deserted than at the time of my first journey. I have been received here with the honours with which ambassadors are pestered. I have visited a fine cemetery: I never forget the dead; they are our family.
"I have never so much admired the Carraccis[510] as in the new gallery at Bologna. It seemed to me as though I were seeing Raphael's St. Cecilia for the first time, so much more divine is it here than at the Louvre, under our sooty sky."
"Ravenna, 1 October 1828.
"In the Romagna, a country which I did not know, a multitude of towns, with their houses coated with marble lime, are perched on the tops of different little mountains, like coveys of white pigeons. Each of those towns possesses a few master-pieces of modern art or a few monuments of antiquity. This canton of Italy contains the whole of Roman history: the traveller should go through it with his Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius in his hand.
Dante's tomb.
"I passed through Imola, the bishopric of Pius VII.[511], and Faenza. At Forli I went out of my road to visit Dante's tomb at Ravenna. As I approached the monument, I was seized with that thrill of admiration which a great renown gives, when the master of that renown has been unfortunate. Alfieri, who bore on his forehead il pallor della morta e la speranza, flung himself prone upon that marble and addressed to it his sonnet, O gran Padre Alighier! Standing before the tomb, I applied to myself this verse from the Purgatorio:
Frate,
Lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui[512]."Beatrice[513] appeared to me; I saw her as she was when she inspired her poet with the longing di sospirare e di morir di pianto[514]:
My plaintive song, take now thy mournful way,
And find the dames and damosels, to whom
Thy sisters, joyful-gay,
Were wont to bear the light of sunny gladness,
And thou, distressful daughter of my sadness,
Go thou and dwell with them in cheerless gloom[515]!"And yet the creator of a new world of poetry forgot Beatrice when she had left the earth! He only found her again, to adore her in his genius, when he was undeceived. Beatrice reproaches him with it, when she is preparing to show Paradise to her lover:
"'These looks,' she says to the powers of Paradise,
These looks sometimes upheld him; for I show'd
My youthful eyes, and led him by their light
In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd
The threshold of my second age, and changed
My mortal for immortal; then he left me,
And gave himself to others[516]."Dante refused to return to his country at the price of a pardon. He replied to one of his kinsmen:
"'If there is no other way of returning to Florence than that which is opened to me, I shall not return there. I can everywhere contemplate the stars and sun.'"
Dante refused the Florentines his days and Ravenna refused them his ashes, even though Michael Angelo, the resuscitated genius of the poet, was resolving to decorate the funeral monument of him who had learnt come l'uom s'eterna.[517]
"The painter of the Last Judgment, the sculptor of the Moses, the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, the engineer of the Old Bastion at Florence, the poet of the sonnets addressed to Dante joined his fellow-townsmen and supported the petition which they presented to Leo X. with these words:
"'Io Michel Agnolo, scultore, il medesimo a Vostra Santità supplico, offerendomi al divin poeta fare la sepoltura sua condecente e in loco onorevole in quest a città.'
"Michael Angelo, whose chisel was disappointed in its hope, had recourse to his pencil to raise another mausoleum to that other himself. He drew the principal subjects of the Divina Commedia on the margins of a folio copy of the works of the great poet; a vessel which bore this two-fold monument from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia suffered shipwreck.
"I returned much moved and feeling something of that commotion, mingled with a divine terror, which I experienced at Jerusalem when my cicerone proposed to take me to Lord Byron's house. Ah, what were Childe Harold and the Signora Guiccioli[518] to me in presence of Dante and Beatrice! Misfortune and the centuries are still lacking to Childe Harold; let him await the future. Byron was badly inspired in his Prophecy of Dante.
At Ravenna.
"I have found Constantinople again at San Vitale[519] and San Apollinare[520]. Honorius[521] and his hen were indifferent to me; I prefer Placidia[522] and her adventures, the memory of which came back to me in the basilica of St. John the Baptist: they form the romance of the Barbarians. Theodoric[523] remains great, even though he put Boethius[524] to death. Those Goths were a superior race; Amalasontha[525], banished to an island in the Lake of Bolsena, strove, with her minister Cassiodorus[526], to save what remained of Roman civilization. The Exarchs[527] brought to Ravenna the decadence of their empire. Ravenna was Lombard under Astolf[528]; the Carlovingians restored it to Rome. It became subject to its archbishop; then it changed from a republic into a tyranny; finally, after having been Guelph or Ghibelline, after having formed part of the Venetian States, it returned to the Church[529] under Pope Julius II.[530] and lives to-day only through the name of Dante.
"This city, which Rome bore in her advanced age, had, from its birth, something of the old age of its mother. Upon the whole, I should not mind living here; I should like to go to the French Column, raised in memory of the Battle of Ravenna. There were the Cardinal de Medici[531] and Ariosto[532], Bayard[533] and Lautrec, brother to the Comtesse de Chateaubriand. There the handsome Gaston de Foix[534] was killed at the age of twenty-four.
"'Notwithstanding all the artillery fired by the Spaniards,' says the Loyal Serviteur, 'the French marched on; never since God created Heaven and earth was a crueller nor fiercer assault between French and Spaniards. They rested in front of one another to recover their breath; then, lowering their visors, began again worse than ever, crying "France!" and "Spain!"'
"Of all those warriors there remained but a few knights who then, become freed-men of glory, put on the frock.
"One saw also in some cabin a young girl who, in turning her spindle, caught her dainty fingers in the hemp; she was not accustomed to that life: she was a Trivulzis. When, through her half-open door, she saw two billows join each other on the bosom of the waters, she felt her sadness increase: that woman had been beloved by a great king. She continued to go slowly, by a lonely way, from her cabin to an abandoned church and from the church to her cabin.
"The old forest through which I passed was composed of solitary pines: they resembled the masts of galleys settled in the sand. The sun was near its setting when I left Ravenna; I heard the distant sound of a bell tolling: it was summoning the faithful to prayer."
Ancona.
"Ancona, 3 and 4 October.
"Returning to Forli, I left it once again without having seen on its crumbling ramparts the place where the Duchess Caterina Sforza[535] declared to her enemies, who were preparing to murder her only son, that she could still be a mother. Pius VII., born at Cesena, was a monk in the admirable convent of Madonna del Monte.
"Near Savignano, I passed across the ravine of a little torrent: when I was told that I had crossed the Rubicon, it seemed to me as though a curtain was raised and that I saw the land of Cæsar's time. My own Rubicon is life: it is long since I cleared its first bank.
"At Rimini, I met neither Francesca nor the other shade, her companion, ‘ who seemed so light before the wind:'
E paion si al vento esser leggieri[536].
"Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia have brought me to Ancona over roads and bridges left by the Augustuses. In Ancona they are to-day keeping the Pope's[537] birthday; I hear the music from Trajan's[538] triumphal arch: a double sovereignty of the Eternal City."
"Loretto, 5 and 6 October.
"We have come to sleep at Loretto. The territory offers a perfectly-preserved specimen of the Roman colonia. The peasant farmers of Our Lady are in easy circumstances and seem happy; the peasant-women, handsome and gay, wear a flower in their hair. The Prelate Governor gave us his hospitality. From the top of the steeple and the summit of some of the eminences of the city one enjoys smiling vistas over the plains, Ancona and the sea. In the evening we had a storm. I took pleasure in watching the valentia muralis and the fumitory beloved by the goats bow before the wind on the old walls. I walked under the double galleries erected after Bramante's[539] designs. Those pavements will be beaten by the autumn rains, those blades of grass will shiver at the breath of the Adriatic long after I shall have passed away.
"At midnight, I had retired to a bed eight feet square, hallowed by Bonaparte; a night-light hardly illumined the darkness of my room; suddenly, a little door opened, and I saw a man enter mysteriously, bringing with him a veiled woman. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at them; he approached my bed and lost no time, bowing down to the ground, in offering me a thousand excuses for thus disturbing the rest of His Excellency the Ambassador: but he was a widower; he was a poor steward; he wished to marry his ragazza, here present: unfortunately he fell somewhat short of the dowry. He lifted up the orphan's veil: she was pale, very pretty, and kept her eyes lowered with becoming modesty. This family man looked as though he wanted to go away and leave the affianced bride with me to finish her story. In this urgent danger, I did not ask the obliging and unhappy man, as the good knight asked the mother of the young girl of Grenoble, if she was a maid; very much flurried, I took some pieces of gold off the table by my bed and gave them, to do credit to the King my master, to the zitella, 'whose eyes were not swollen by dint of weeping.' She kissed my hand with infinite gratitude. I did not utter a word, and, upon my falling back on my immense couch, as though I wanted to sleep, the vision of St. Anthony disappeared. I thanked my patron saint, St. Francis, whose feast it was; I remained in the darkness, half smiling, half regretting, and rapt in a profound admiration of my virtues.
Loretto.
"It was thus, however, that I 'scattered gold,' that I was an ambassador, entertained in pomp and state by the Governor of Loretto, in the same town where Tasso was lodged in a sorry den and where, for want of a little money, he was unable to continue his journey. He payed his debt to Our Lady of Loretto by his canzone:
Ecco fra le tempeste e i fieri venti.
"Madame de Chateaubriand made amends for my transient fortune by climbing the steps of the Santa Chiesa[540] on her knees. After my victory of the night, I had a better right than the King of Saxony to deposit my wedding-coat in the Treasury of Loretto; but I shall never forgive myself, a puny child of the Muses, for having been so powerful and so happy in the spot where the singer of Jerusalem had been so weak and so miserable! Torquato, do not take me in this unusual moment of my inconstant prosperity; riches are not my habit; see me on my way to Namur, in my attic in London, in my infirmary in Paris, in order to find in me some distant resemblance to thyself!
"I have not, like Montaigne, left my portrait in silver at Our Lady of Loretto, nor that of my daughter, Leonora Montana, filia unica[541]; I have never desired to survive myself; but still, a daughter, and one who should bear the name of Leonora!"
"Spoleto.
"After leaving Loretto, passing Macerata, leaving Tolentino[542], which marks a step of Bonaparte and recalls a treaty, I climbed the last redans of the Apennines. The mountain table-land is moist and cultivated as a hop-garden. To the left were the seas of Greece, to the right those of Iberia; I could be pressed by the breath of the breezes which I had inhaled at Athens and Granada. We descended towards Umbria, winding down the curves of the leafless gorges, where live suspended in clusters of woods the descendants of the mountaineers who furnished the Romans with soldiers after the Battle of Trasimenus[543].
"Foligno used to possess a Virgin by Raphael which is to-day in the Vatican. 'Vene' occupies a charming position at the source of the Clitumnus. Poussin[544] has reproduced that warm, suave site; Byron has sung it coldly[545].
"Spoleto gave birth to the present Pope[546]. According to my courier Giorgini, Leo XII. has placed the galley-slaves in that town to do honour to his birthplace. Spoleto dared to resist Hannibal[547]. It displays several works of Lippi the Elder[548] who, nurtured in the cloister, a slave in Barbary, a kind of Cervantes[549] among painters, died at over sixty years of age of the poison administered to him by the relations of Lucrezia[550], whom he was believed to have seduced."
"Civita Castellana.
"At Monte Lupo, Count Potoçki[551] buried himself in charming laurœ; but did not the thoughts of Rome follow him there? Did he not believe himself transported there amid 'choirs of young girls?' And I too, like St. Jerome[552], 'have in my time spent day and night in uttering cries, in beating my breast, until God gave me back my peace.' Plango me non esse quod fuerim.
"After passing the hermitage of Monte Lupo, we began to wind round the Somma. I had already taken that road on my first journey from Florence to Rome over Perugia, when accompanying a dying woman....
"By the nature of the light and a sort of vivacity of the landscape, I should have believed myself on one of the ridges of the Alleghany Mountains, were it not that a tall aqueduct, surmounted by a narrow bridge[553], recalled to me a Roman work to which the Lombard Dukes of Spoleto had put their hands: the Americans have not yet come to those monuments which follow upon liberty. I climbed the Somma on foot, walking beside Clitumnian oxen which dragged Her Excellency the Ambassadress to her triumph. A young goat-girl, as thin, light of foot and pretty as her kid, followed me with her little brother in that opulent country-side, asking me for carità: I gave it her in memory of Madame de Beaumont, whom these spots have forgotten.
Alas, regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day[554].Civita Castellana.
"I saw Terni again and its cascades. A champaign planted with olive-trees brought me to Narni; then, after passing through Otricoli, we arrived and stopped at sad Civita Castellana. I should much like to go to Santa Maria di Faleri to see a city of which nothing is left but its skin, the walls; inside, it was empty: misère humaine à Dieu ramène.[555] Let us wait till my grandeurs are past, and I shall return to seek out the city of the Faliscans. Soon, from Nero's Tomb, I shall be showing my wife the cross of St. Peter's which commands the city of the Cæsars."
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