Sometimes those scattered artists meet and go together, on foot, to Subiaco. On the road, they scrawl grotesque figures on the walls of the inn at Tivoli. One day, perhaps, some Michael Angelo will be recognised by the charcoal drawing which he will have made on a work of Raphael's.
I would like to have been born an artist: the solitude, the independence, the sunshine amid ruins and master-pieces would suit me. I have no wants; a piece of bread, a pitcher of the Aqua Felice would content me. My life has been wretchedly caught in the thickets on my road; how happy should I have been, had I been the free bird that sings and builds its nest in those thickets!
Nicolas Poussin bought, out of his wife's dowry, a house on the Pincian Hill, opposite another casino which had belonged to Claude Gelée, surnamed Lorraine[597]. My other fellow-countryman, Claude, also died in the lap of the Queen of the World[598]. If Poussin reproduces the Roman Campagna, even when the scene of his landscapes is set elsewhere, Claude Lorraine reproduces the skies of Rome, even when he paints ships and a sunset at sea.
Why was I not the contemporary of certain privileged creatures to whom I feel attracted in the different centuries? But I should have had to rise from the dead too often. Poussin and Claude Lorraine have trodden the Capitol; kings have come there and not been worth so much as they. De Brosses[599] there met the English Pretender[600]; I found there, in 1803, the abdicated King of Sardinia and to-day, in 1828, I see there Napoleon's brother, the King of Westphalia. Rome in her decline offers an asylum to the fallen powers; her ruins are a place of sanctuary for persecuted glory and unfortunate talents.
If I had painted Roman society, a quarter of a century ago, as I have just painted the Roman Campagna, I should be obliged to retouch my portrait; it would no longer be like. Every generation lasts thirty-three years, the life of Christ (Christ is the type of all things); every generation in our western world changes its outward aspect. Man is placed in a picture whose frame is invariable, but whose figures move. Rabelais[601] was in this city, in 1536, with the Cardinal du Bellay[602]; he performed the functions of house-steward to His Eminence; he "carved and handed."
Rabelais, changed into "Friar John of the Funnels," is not of the opinion of Montaigne, who heard scarce any bells in Rome and "fewer than in the most insignificant town in France[603];" Rabelais, on the contrary, hears many in the "Ringing Island" (Rome): "some of us doubted that it was the Dodonian Kettle[604]."
Old-time visitors to Rome.
Four and forty years after Rabelais, Montaigne found the banks of the Tiber planted, and he observed that, on the 16th of March, there were roses and artichokes in Rome. The churches were bare, without statues of saints, without pictures, less ornate and less beautiful than the French churches. Montaigne was accustomed to "the cloudy vastitie and gloomy canopies of our churches[605];" he speaks several times of St. Peter's without describing it, insensible or indifferent as he appears to be to the arts. In the presence of so many master-pieces, no name offers itself to Montaigne's recollection; his memory does not speak to him of Raphael nor of Michael Angelo, not yet sixteen years dead.