The first time I saw Rome, it was the end of June: the hot season increases the abandonment of the city; the visitors fly, the inhabitants of the country remain indoors; you meet no one in the streets during the daytime. The sun darts its rays upon the Coliseum, where grasses hang motionless and nothing stirs save the lizards. The earth is bare; the cloudless sky appears even more desert than the earth. But soon the night brings the inhabitants out of their palaces and the stars out of the firmament; earth and the heavens become repeopled; Rome revives; that life silently recommencing in the darkness, around the tombs, has the air of the life and movement of the shades which redescend to Erebus at the approach of day.
And in the Campagna.
Yesterday I roamed by moonlight in the Campagna, between the Porta Angelica and the Monte Mario. A nightingale was singing in a narrow dale railed in with canes. I there, for the first time, found that melodious sadness of which the ancient poets speak in connection with the bird of spring. The long whistle which we all know, and which precedes the brilliant flourishes of the winged musician, was not piercing like that of our nightingales; it had a veiled sound like the whistle of the bullfinch of our woods. All its notes were lowered by a half tone; its burden was transposed from the major to the minor key; it sang softly; it appeared to wish to charm the sleep of the dead and not to wake them. Over this untilled common-land had passed Horace' Lydia, Tibullus' Delia, Ovid's Corinna; only Virgil's Philomela remained. That hymn of love was potent in that spot and at that hour; it gave an indescribable longing for a second life: according to Socrates, love is the desire to be born again by the agency of beauty; it was this desire that a Greek girl inspired in a youth when she said to him:
"If I had nothing left to me but the thread of my necklace of pearls, I would share it with thee."
If I have the happiness to end my days here, I have arranged to have a retreat at Sant' Onofrio adjoining the chamber where Tasso breathed his last. In the spare moments of my embassy, I shall continue my Memoirs at the window of the cell. In one of the most beautiful positions on earth, among orange-trees and evergreen oaks, with all Rome under my eyes, every morning, as I sit down to work, between the deathbed and the tomb of the poet, I shall invoke the genius of glory and misfortune.
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In the early days after my arrival in Rome, wandering in this way at random, I met a school of young boys between the Baths of Titus and the Coliseum. They were in charge of a master in a slouched hat, a torn and draggle-tailed gown, resembling a poor brother of Christian Doctrine. As I passed near him, I looked at him and thought he had a false air of my nephew, Christian de Chateaubriand, but I dared not believe my eyes. He looked at me in his turn, and without showing any surprise, said:
"Uncle!"
I rushed at him, quite moved, and pressed him in my arms. With a motion of the hand, he stopped his obedient and silent flock behind him. Christian was at the same time pale and brown, worn away with fever and burnt by the sun. He told me that he was prefect of studies at the Jesuit College, then taking its holiday at Tivoli. He had almost forgotten his language, and expressed himself with difficulty in French, talking and teaching only in Italian. My eyes filled with tears, as I looked at my brother's son, become a foreigner, clad in a black, dusty, worn-out coat, a school-master in Rome, covering with an old cenobite's hat the noble brow which so well became the helmet.
I had seen Christian born; a few days before my emigration, I assisted at his baptism. His father, his grandfather, the Président de Rosanbo, and his great-grandfather, M. de Malesherbes, were present. The last stood sponsor for him and gave him his own name, Christian. The Church of Saint-Laurent was deserted and already half devastated. The nurse and I took the child from the priest's hands.