My ambassadorial colleagues.
M. de Funchal, the semi-acknowledged Ambassador of Portugal, is a little, fat man, excitable, grimacing, green as a Brazil monkey and yellow as a Lisbon orange: he sings his negress, however, this modern Camoëns. A great lover of music, he keeps a sort of Paganini[571] in his pay while awaiting the restoration of his King[572].
Here and there I have caught glimpses of little sly-boots of ministers of various little States, very much scandalized to see how cheaply I hold my embassy: their buttoned-up, solemn and silent importance walks close-legged and with short steps: it looks ready to burst with secrets which it does not know.
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As ambassador in England in 1822[573], sought out the places and men that I had formerly known in London in 1793; as Ambassador to the Holy See in 1828, I hastened to visit the palaces and ruins, to ask after the persons whom I had seen in Rome in 1803: of the palaces and ruins I have found many there; of the persons, few.
The Palazzo Lancellotti, formerly let to Cardinal Fesch, is now occupied by its real owners, Prince Lancellotti[573] and the Princess Lancellotti[574], daughter of Prince Massimo[575]. The house in which Madame de Beaumont lived, on the Piazza d'Espagna, has disappeared. As to Madame de Beaumont, she has remained in her last asylum and I have prayed with Pope Leo XII. at her tomb.
Canova has also taken leave of the world[576]. I twice visited him in his studio in 1803; he received me mallet in hand. He showed me, with the simplest and gentlest air, his enormous statue of Bonaparte and his Hercules and Lichas: he was anxious to persuade you that he was able to achieve energy of form; but even then his chisel refused to dig deep into anatomy; the nymph lingered in the flesh in spite of him, and Hebe reappeared in the wrinkles of his old men. I have met the first sculptor of my time upon my road; he has fallen from his scaffold, as Goujon[577] fell from the scaffold at the Louvre: death is always there to continue the eternal St. Bartholomew and to lay us low with its darts.
But there is one still alive, to my great delight, and that is my old Boquet, the oldest of the French painters in Rome. Twice had he tried to leave his beloved campagne; he has gone as far as Genoa; his heart has failed him, and he has returned to his adopted home. I have cockered him up at the Embassy, as well as his son, for whom he has the tenderness of a mother. I have begun our old walks over again with him; I notice his old age only by the slowness of his steps; I feel a sort of emotion when I mimic a little child and measure my strides by his. We have neither of us much longer before us to see the Tiber flow.
The Roman artists.
The great artists, at their great period, led a very different life from that which they lead now: attached to the ceilings of the Vatican, to the walls of St. Peter's, to the partitions of the Farnese, they worked at their master-pieces suspended with them in mid-air. Raphael walked surrounded by his pupils, escorted by cardinals and princes, like a senator of Ancient Rome, preceded and followed by his clients. Charles V. sat thrice to Titian[578]. He picked up his brush, and yielded the right to him when walking, even as Francis I. attended Leonardo da Vinci[579] on his death-bed. Titian went in triumph to Rome; the immense Buonarotti received him there: at the age of ninety-nine, at Venice, Titian still held with a firm hand his century-old brush, the conqueror of the centuries.