You must know that Madame was received with the same tokens of respect from Palermo to Ferrara, notwithstanding the Notes of Louis-Philippe's envoys. M. de Broglie had had the audacity to ask the Pope to send away the outlaw; Cardinal Bernetti replied:
"Rome has always been the asylum of fallen grandeurs. If the family of Bonaparte, in its later days, found a refuge beside the Father of the Faithful, with still greater reason must hospitality be shown to the family of the Most Christian Kings."
I am no great believer in this dispatch, but I was keenly struck by one contrast: in France, the Government lavishes insults upon a woman of whom it is afraid; in Italy, they remember only the name, the courage and the misfortunes of Madame la Duchesse de Berry.
I was obliged to accept my improvised role of First Lord of the Bed-chamber. The Princess was very funny: she wore a gown of greyish cloth, fitting close to her figure; on her head, a sort of little widow's cap or the biggin of a child or naughty school-girl. She ran here, there and everywhere, like a giddy goose; rushed about heedlessly, in the midst of the curious throng, with an air of assurance, just as she had sped through the woods of the Vendée. She looked at no one, recognised no one; I was obliged to catch her disrespectfully by her dress, or to bar her road, saying:
"Madame, there is the Austrian Commandant, that officer. in white; Madame, there is the commandant of the pontifical troops, that officer in blue; Madame, there is the Pro-legate, that tall young priest in black."
She stopped, spoke a few words in Italian or French, not too appropriate, but roundly, frankly, prettily, so that their very unpleasantness was not displeasing. It was a sort of manner resembling nothing that one had ever known before. It made me feel almost ill at ease, and yet I had no anxiety as to the effect produced by the little woman who had escaped from the flames and gaol.
A comical piece of confusion followed. I must say one thing with all modest reserve: the vain noise of my life grows in volume as the real silence of that life increases. I am unable nowadays to alight at an inn, either in France or abroad, without being at once besieged. For old Italy, I am the defender of religion; for young Italy, the defender of liberty; for the authorities I have the honour of being Sua Eccellenza GIA Ambasciadore di Francia at Verona and in Rome. Ladies, all doubtless of rare beauty, have lent the language of Angelica and Aquilante il Nero to the Floridan Atala and the Moor Aben-Hamet. I therefore see scholars arrive, old priests with wide skull-caps, women, whom I thank for their translations and their favours; next, mendicanti, too well-bred to believe that an ex-ambassador is as poor a beggar as their lordships.
Now, my admirers had hurried to the Hôtel des Trois-Couronnes, together with the crowd attracted by Madame la Duchesse de Berry: they got me up into a corner of a window and began to address me in an harangue the end of which they went off to recite to Marie-Caroline. In their mental confusion, the two troops sometimes mixed up the patron and the patroness: I was greeted as "Your Royal Highness," and Madame told me that she had been complimented on the Génie du Christianisme; we exchanged our mutual fames. The Princess was charmed at having written a work in four volumes, and I was proud to have been taken for the daughter of kings.
Suddenly, the Princess disappeared: she went off on foot, with Count Lucchesi, to see Tasso's cell; she was a judge of prisons. The mother of the banished orphan, of the child-heir of St. Louis, Marie-Caroline leaving the Fortress of Blaye and seeking in the town of Renée of France[202] only a poet's prison-cell is an unique thing in the history of fortune and human glory. The venerables of Prague would have passed through Ferrara a hundred times without taking such an idea into their heads; but Madame de Berry is a Neapolitan and a country-woman of Tasso, who said:
"Ho desiderio di Napoli, come l'anime ben disposte del paradiso."