Venice, Hôtel de l'Europe, 10 September 1833.
Salve, Italuni Regina....
. . . . .
Nec tu semper eris[77].
O d'Italia dolente
Eterno lumine....
Venezia[78]!
In Venice, one can imagine one's self on the deck of a superb galley lying at anchor, on the Bucentaur, where a feast is being given in your honour and from whose side you see wonderful things all around. My inn, the Hôtel de l'Europe, is situated at the entrance to the Grand Canal, opposite the Dogana di Mare, the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. When one goes up the Grand Canal, between its two rows of palaces, so marked by their centuries, so varied in architectural style, when one moves from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, when one contemplates the basilica and its domes, the Palace of the Doges, the Procuratie Nuove, the Zucca, the Torre dell' Orologio, the campanile of St Mark's and the Column of the Lion, all mingled with the sails and masts of the shipping, the movement of the crowd and the gondolas, the azure of the sky and sea, the freaks of a dream or the frolics of an Oriental imagination present nothing more fantastic. Sometimes Cicéri[79] paints and collects upon a canvas, for the illusions of the stage, monuments of all shapes, all times, all countries, all climates: it is still Venice.
Those double-gilt edifices, so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80], Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni Bellini[83], Paris Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles, granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de Comines:
"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"
The glories of Venice.
And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90], Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts, as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and floral diadems.
It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions and the enchantment of pleasure.
Venice never knew idolatry: she grew up Christian in the island where she was reared, far from the brutality of Attila. The women descended from the Scipios, the Pauli and the Eustochie escaped from Alaric's violence in the Grotto of Bethlehem. Standing apart from all other cities, the eldest daughter of ancient civilization without ever having been dishonoured by conquest, Venice contains neither Roman remains nor monuments of the Barbarians. Nor does one see there what one sees in the north and west of Europe, in the midst of industrial progress: I refer to those new structures, those whole streets built in a hurry, in which the houses remain either unfinished or empty. What could one build here? Wretched dens which would show the poverty of conception of the sons after the magnificence of the genius of the fathers; white-washed hovels which would not reach to the first storey of the gigantic residences of the Foscaris and the Pesaros. When one sees the trowel of mortar and the handful of plaster that have had to be applied, for an urgent repair, against a marble capital, one is shocked. Better the rotten planks boarding up Grecian or Moorish windows, the rags hung out to dry on graceful balconies, than the imprint of the mean hand of our century.