I hastened to the Princess; I renewed my insistence; the mother of Henry V. said to me:
"Do not desert me."
This word put an end to the struggle; I yielded; Madame appeared over-joyed[216]. Poor woman, she had wept so much! How could I have held out against courage, adversity, fallen grandeur reduced to hide themselves beneath my "protection!" Another Princess, Madame la Dauphine, also had thanked me for my useless services: Carlsbad and Ferrara were two places of banishment, under different suns, where I had gathered the noblest honours of my life.
Madame set out pretty early in the morning, on the 19th, for Padua, where she arranged to meet me; she was to stop at the Catajo, at the Duke of Modena's. I had a hundred things to see at Ferrara: palaces, pictures, manuscripts; I had to be content with Tasso's prison. I started a few hours after Her Royal Highness. I arrived at Padua at night. I sent Hyacinthe to Venice to fetch my luggage, as scanty as a German student's, and I went to bed sadly at the Golden Star, which has never been mine.
Padua, 20 September 1833.
On Friday 20 September, I spent a part of the morning in writing to tell my friends of my change of destination. The persons of Madame's suite arrived in succession.
Having nothing left to do, I went out with a cicerone. We visited the two churches of Santa Giustina and San Antonio di Padova. The first, the work of Jerome of Brescia, is most majestic: from below, in the nave, you do not see a single one of the windows, which are pierced very high above, so that the church is lighted without your knowing whence the light comes. This church contains many good pictures by Paul Veronese, Liberi[217], Palma[218] and others.
Padua.
San Antonio di Padova, known as Il Santo, presents a Grecianized Gothic monument, a style peculiar to the old churches of Venetia. The Cappella del Santo is by Giacomo Sansovino[219] and Francesco[220] his son: one perceives it at once; the ornaments and the form are in the same manner as the loggetta in the steeple of St. Mark.
A signora, in a green gown and a straw hat covered with a veil, was praying before the Cappella del Santo; a servant in livery was also praying, behind her: I presumed that she was offering up her prayers for the relief of some moral or physical ailment; I was not mistaken. I saw her again in the street: she was a woman of about forty, pale and thin, walking stiffly and with a look of suffering; I had guessed her love or her paralysis. She had left the church with hope: during the space of time while she was sending up her fervent orisons to Heaven, did she not forget her pain, was she not really cured?