It is curious to read in Dumont how the master-pieces which we admire were disposed at the time of his journey in 1690: one saw at the Belvedere the statues of the Nile and the Tiber[623], the Antinous[624], the Cleopatra, the Laocoon[625] and the supposed torso of Hercules[626]. Dumont places in the gardens of the Vatican "the bronze peacocks which once adorned the tomb of Scipio Africanus."
Addison travels as a "scholar[627]," his trip is summed up in classical quotations tinged with English recollections; when passing through Paris, he presented his poems to M. Boileau[628].
Père Labat[629] follows the author of Cato: a singular man, this Parisian monk of the Order of Preaching Friars. A missionary to the Antilles, a filibuster, an able mathematician, architect and soldier, a brave gunner levelling the cannon like a grenadier, a learned critic, who had restored the Dieppois to the possession of their original discovery in Africa[630], he had a mind inclined to raillery and a character to liberty. I know of no traveller who gives clearer and more exact ideas concerning the Pontifical Government. Labat walks the streets, goes to the processions, meddles in everything and laughs at nearly everything.
The Preaching Friar relates how the Capuchins, at Cadiz, gave him sheets to his bed which had been quite new since ten years, and how he saw a St. Joseph dressed in the Spanish fashion, sword at side, hat under its arm, powdered hair, and spectacles on nose. In Rome he attends a mass:
"Never," he says, "have I seen so many mutilated musicians together, nor so numerous a symphony. Those who were judges said that there was nothing so fine. I said as much, to make believe that I was a judge too; but, if I had not had the honour to form one of the train of the officiating priest, I should have left the ceremony, which lasted at least three good hours, which seemed to me quite six."
The more I come down to the time at which I write, the more do the usages of Rome begin to resemble the usages of to-day. In the time of De Brosses, the Roman women wore false hair; the custom proceeded from far back; Propertius asks his "life" why she delights in adorning her hair:
Quid juvat ornato precedere, vita, capillo?[631]
The Gallic women, our mothers, supplied the hair of the Severinas, Piscas, Faustinas, Sabinas. Velleda says to Eudorus, speaking of her hair:
"'Tis my diadem, and I have kept it for thee["[632].
A head of hair was not the greatest conquest of the Romans, but it was one of the most lasting: we often take from the tombs of women the whole of that ornament, which has resisted the scissors of the daughters of the night, and we look in vain for the comely brow which it adorned. The perfumed tresses, the object of the idolatry of the lightest of the passions, have outlived empires; death, which shatters all chains, has been unable to break that net. To-day the Italians wear their own hair, which the women of the people plait with coquettish grace.