The French, passing through Rome, left their principles there: that is what always happens when the conquest is accomplished by a people more advanced in civilization than the people which undergoes that conquest, as witness the Greeks in Asia under Alexander, as witness the French in Europe under Napoleon. Bonaparte, when snatching sons from their mothers, when forcing the Italian nobility to leave its palaces and bear arms, was hastening the transformation of the national spirit.
As to the physiognomy of Roman society, on days of concerts or balls one might have thought himself in Paris. The Altieris[658], the Palestrinas[659], the Zagarolos[660], the Del Dragos[661], the Lantes[662], the Lozzanos would not have felt strangers in the drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain: still, some of those women wear a certain frightened air which has, I believe, to do with the climate. The charming Falconieri, for instance, always stands near a door, ready to fly to the Monte Mario if you look at her: the Villa Millini[663] belongs to her; a novel placed in that abandoned lodge, under the cypress trees, in view of the sea, would have its value.
But, whatever the changes in manners and persons, from century to century, in Italy may be, we observe a habit of greatness there which we paltry barbarians cannot approach. There still remains Roman blood in Rome and the traditions of the masters of the world. When one sees foreigners crammed into small new houses at the Porta del Popolo, or lodged in palaces which they have divided into boxes and pierced with chimneys, it is as though one saw rats scratching at the feet of the monuments of Apollodorus[664] and Michael Angelo and gnawing holes into the pyramids.
To-day, the Roman nobles, ruined by the Revolution, immure themselves within their palaces, live parsimoniously and have become their own stewards. When you have the good fortune, which happens very rarely, to be received by them in the evening, you pass through vast halls, unfurnished and scarcely lighted, along which antique statues stand out white against the thick shadow, like phantoms or exhumed corpses. At the end of those halls, the ragged footman who leads the way ushers you into a sort of gynecæum: around a table are seated three or four, old or young, ill-dressed women, plying their needles at fancy-work, by the light of a lamp, and exchanging a few words with a father, a brother, a husband recumbent in the dim background on tattered arm-chairs. Nevertheless, there is something, I know not what, fine, sovereign, appertaining to high breeding, in this assemblage entrenched behind its master-pieces and giving a first impression of a witches' Sabbath. The species of the cicisbei is extinct, although a few shawl-bearing and footwarmer-carrying abbés survive; here and there, a cardinal still fixes himself in a woman's house like a sofa.
Nepotism and pontifical scandals are no longer possible, just as kings can no longer keep titular and honoured mistresses. Nowadays, when politics and the tragic adventures of love have ceased to fill the lives of the great ladies of Rome, how do they spend their time in the interior of their homes? It would be interesting to get to the bottom of these new manners; if I stay in Rome, I shall make it my business to do so.
*
I visited Tivoli in 1803; at that time I said, in a narrative which was printed then:
"This spot is suited to reflection and day-dreams; I go back into my past life; I feel the burden of the present; I seek to penetrate the future; where shall I be, what shall I be doing and what shall I be twenty years hence?"
Twenty years! It seemed a century to me; I thought myself certain of inhabiting my tomb before that century had lapsed. And it is not I that have passed away, but the master of the world and his empire that have sped!
Almost all the ancient and modern travellers saw in the Roman Campagna only what they call "its horror and its nudity." Montaigne himself, who assuredly was not lacking in imagination, says: