Part 1

Produced by Michael Wooff

Franciscus Columna

Charles Nodier (1780-1844)

Perhaps you remember our friend Abbot Lowrich whom we met in Ragusa, in Spalato, in Vienna, in Munich, in Pisa, in Bologna, and in Lausanne. He is an excellent fellow, who is most knowledgeable, but who knows a multitude of things that we would be happy to forget if we knew them like he does: the name of the printer of a bad book, the year of birth of a fool and a thousand other details of trivial importance. Abbot Lowrich has the glory of having discovered the real name of Kuicknackius, who was called Starkius, and not, please note, Polycarpus Starkius, who wrote eight fine hendecasyllables on the thesis of Kornmannus de ritibus (on rites) and on the thesis of Kornmannus de ritibus et doctrina scarabeorum (on rites and the doctrine of scarab beetles), but Martinus Starkius, the man who wrote thirty-two hendecasyllables on fleas. Apart from that, Abbot Lowrich deserves to be well known and liked; he is witty, has his heart in the right place, is actively and sincerely obliging, and he adds to these precious qualities a lively and singular imagination, which greatly embellishes his conversation, as long as it does not fall into enumerating minor biographical and bibliographical details. I am reconciled to this slight peccadillo of his, and whenever I meet Abbot Lowrich in my constant comings and goings across Europe, I run to him from afar. And I last met him no more than three months ago.

I had arrived at night at the Two Towers Hotel in Treviso, but I had only settled in very late, and I had not set foot in the town itself. In the morning, as I was going down the stairs, I saw in front of me one of those strange figures whose faces are visible from every angle. It was wearing a hat that defied all description, adjusted to its head in a way that was maladjusted, a red and green tie knotted like a scarf, a good four inches above the collar of the jacket on the left-hand side and a good four inches below it on the right, a pair of trousers brushed in a slipshod manner on one leg while the other leg billowed over the back of a boot with a sort of coquetry. It had with it a huge irremovable wallet in which lay so many titles of books, so many notices, so many plans, so many sketches, so many priceless treasures for a man of learning that, if he had dropped it, even a rag-and-bone man would not have picked it up. There were no two ways about it, it was Lowrich. "Lowrich!" I exclaimed, and we fell into each other's arms.

"I know where you're going," he said, after we had exchanged a few friendly words, and then, when I had learned that he too had only just arrived: "You asked for the address of a bookseller, and you were given that of Apostolo Capoduro who resides in the strada dei Schiavoni. I'm going there too, but I don't hold out much hope, for I've visited his shop twice in ten years and never found books older than the novels of Abbot Chiari. That old bookshop has died the death, been ruined and sacked by barbarians. But did you have in mind something in particular to ask him for?"

"I'll admit to you," I answered, "that it would pain me to leave Northern Italy without taking with me 'The Dream of Poliphilus', of which I have heard it said that it is a most curious object and is to be found in Treviso if it is to be found anywhere."

"If it is to be found anywhere," he exclaimed, "is, to be sure, a prudent rider, for 'The Dream of Poliphilus', or, better still, Friar Francesco Colonna's 'Hypnerotomachia' is a book that old bibliographers call by the epithet: Albo corvo rarior. All I can say for sure is that if this white crow is to be found in any aviary, as we cannot but assume, it will definitely not be in Apostolo's. I think I'm sure enough of my facts to swear here by the household gods of Aldus Manutius the Elder (God keep him haloed in an everlasting glory) that, if this scamp Apostolo succeeds in providing you with a copy of the book in question in the 1499 first edition, for the second edition belongs, more or less, to the run-of-the-mill type of book, I hereby affirm that I'll make you a present of it out of my own purse, the contents of which this generous action on my part would cause to weigh considerably less."

Just then we entered the shop of Apostolo, who, his quill pen poised over a sheet of paper, seemed absorbed in deep meditation, though he at last grew aware of our presence, and appeared to joyfully recognize the unforgettable face of Abbot Lowrich. "Is it indeed the Lord, dear abbot," he said, hugging him, "who has sent you to extricate me from the most awkward predicament that I have ever found myself in? You cannot but know that I have been publishing, for some months now, the Adriatic Literary Gazette, which is, as all are agreed upon, the most erudite and witty of Europe's journals. Well! This rare scholarly journal, which is destined to have the world admire it and to get me back my fortune, is under threat of not appearing tomorrow for want of six small columns of serial, for which I have had recourse to my imagination tired out by study and business in vain. An evil spirit must have encompassed my ruin and sown disorder in my editor's office. The young muse who used to write my articles on moral education has gone into labour. The composer who was to let me have this morning a brand new type of cantata has written to say that it will take him at least a week to finish it, and the able financier who deals with questions of finance and political economy was sent to jail for non-payment of debt yesterday. For heaven's sake, my dear abbot, sit down at this table where I've sweated blood all night without my brain being able to yield a single line, and jot down five or six pages just as they come to you, if only a short story that won't have been used more than two or three times already."

"Wait one moment," Abbot Lowrich riposted. "We'll have time enough to deal with your affairs after we've dealt with our own. We did not come to you, my friend from Paris, and myself from the fjords of Norway, to make good a missing cantata by a lazy composer, or to dash off a pot boiler, but to see some of these books that are at least worth the trouble and expense of a journey, a good first edition duly documented, a well-preserved cinquecento rarity with its date of publication, a valuable volume printed by the Aldine Press in which its English and French bookbinders have deigned to arrange margins."

"As you please," replied Apostolo. "And I am all the more willing to consent to it as this inspection will not take us long. I have one work only worthy of being examined by connoisseurs like you. But what a work it is," he added, taking out of its triple wrapping an impressive looking folio. "What a work indeed," he went on, looking solemn, after he had quite detached it from its prison of wrapping paper. "A work to marvel at..." And he held out the book to Abbot Lowrich while giving him a look full of confidence and pride.

"Damnation!" murmured Lowrich, after having run his eye, as was his wont, over the unfamiliar treasure. Then he turned to me, but very different from what he had been the moment before, his arms hanging down at his side, his eye downcast, his forehead pale. "Damnation!" he muttered in French in a voice hardly raised and so that he could only be heard by me. "It's that damn book that I undertook to give you if it was here, the first edition of the Poliphilus... It's here, the traitor, and as fine as if it had just been printed. Things like this only happen to me..."

"Calm down," I answered, laughing. "Perhaps we'll get it for a price less than you think. And how much is Master Apostolo asking for this rarity?"

"Ah!" said Apostolo. "Times are hard and money is scarce. In times gone by I'd have asked fifty zecchini for it from Prince Eugene, sixty from the Duke of Abrantès, and a hundred from an Englishman. But today I have to give it away for four hundred wretched Milan pounds, or the exact equivalent of four hundred French francs. I can't even knock two quarantani off the price."

"May four hundred starving rats devour your books from first to last!" Lowrich interrupted furiously. "Who the devil has ever had four hundred francs asked of them for a bad book?"

"How dare you call this a bad book!" Apostolo spat back, almost as agitated as Lowrich. "It's a first edition of 1467, the first to appear in Treviso, and perhaps in Italy, a true masterpiece of typography and engraving, the illustrations in which can only be attributed to Raphael, an admirable work, the name of whose author has remained a mystery up until now, despite all erudite research, a one-off, or almost unique, that you yourself, abbot, perhaps did not know existed. And it pleases you to call that a bad book!"

Lowrich had calmed down during this vehement tirade. He had quietly sat down, placing his hat on the bookseller's table, and was wiping the sweat from his brow like a man exhausted by long and hard effort who has just found a good place to rest at his leisure.

"Have you finished, Apostolo?" he said in a calm tone of voice, in which, however, there could be detected a trace of I know not what malignant satisfaction. "The best thing I can hope for you is that you do no more to harm your kudos and your business interests from now on than you already have done. You have just said four very foolish things in as many words. If you had persisted, it would have taken me more than a day to recapitulate them one by one, and to do that would not leave me enough time to dictate that pot boiler, so, first of all: it isn't true that this book was printed in Treviso in 1467. It's an edition that was printed in Venice in 1499 from which the final page has been taken to deceive you as to the date of publication, and I didn't at first take note of that defect, which reduces the value of your copy by more than half, and therefore consider yourself fortunate in that I am able to remedy this fault, for blind chance allowed me to find the other day among some wrapping paper this precious end flyleaf, which I carefully kept in reserve for an opportunity to use it that I did not think would come so soon, so we'll presently see at what price I can let you have it."

So saying, Abbot Lowrich took from its cardboard cover the missing plagula, and carefully fitted it into the book. "This page fits my book perfectly," said Apostolo, "but I have to admit that it does change the nature of it somewhat. Where the devil did I get the idea that this was a Treviso first edition?"

"Never mind that," Lowrich continued, "we haven't finished yet. Let's get on to the second foolish thing you said: it isn't true that the drawings in this book can be attributed to Raphael, whether the edition dates back to 1467, or was only published in 1499, as has just been proved to you. Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483 and even the greatest admirers of this sublime painter cannot imagine him drawing so correctly and elegantly sixteen years before his birth. It must have been a different Raphael who drew these fine things, and as to him, my good Apostolo, there's only me who knows who he was. Wait. I've only counted up to two so far. Now we come to your third glaring error of fact: it isn't true that the author of this book has been till today a mystery to scholars. On the contrary, all scholars know, and the majority of non-scholars are not ignorant of the fact that it is the work of Francesco Colonna or Columna, a Dominican monk in the monastery of Treviso, where he died in 1467, whatever some scatterbrained writers of life stories have to say on the matter, who confuse him with Doctor Francesco di Colonia, whose name is almost homonymous with him and who survived him for all of sixty years. Both of them are buried only a few hundred paces from your shop, Apostolo. In view of what I've just said, I do not need to show you that you have made a fourth huge mistake, worse than the other three, by imagining that I did not know of the existence of your splendid tome, and I really don't know what's stopping me from proving to you that I know it by heart."

"Just this once," Apostolo replied smartly, "I dare you to recite it, for it is written in a language so heterogeneous that none of my friends from Treviso, Venice or Padua has dared to undertake to decipher a page of it, and if, as you say, you know it by heart, I'll give it you for nothing, a sacrifice besides I would be more than willing to make by reason of the excellent information that you have just given me, for I was on the point of announcing this volume in the Adriatic Literary Gazette in a misleading way and there was enough scope to make me lose forever the good and high flying reputation I enjoy as a bookseller."

"What you have just said yourself on the decidedly very strange style of our author," replied Abbot Lowrich, "and on the wasted efforts of so many scholars who have tried so hard to interpret it, is ample proof that what you are asking me for is a tiresome and fastidious demonstration that would take all day. And where would your pot boiler be if I were to recite the Hypnerotomachia from start to finish? I nevertheless will accept your challenge if you are willing to content yourself with trying an experiment which is no less conclusive, but would be quicker and easier. The chapter headings in your book are already too numerous and would try your patience, so I will only undertake to tell you their initial letters, beginning with the first, on which I see that you have just placed your finger."

"Let it be done as you say it should," said Apostolo. "And the first letter of the first chapter is..."

"A P," said Lowrich. "And now look for the second."

The list was long, but the abbot went down it to the final and thirty-eighth chapter without being disconcerted for a moment and without making a single mistake.

"Guessing an initial letter out of twenty-four to choose from, can be thought of as an outlandish freak of good fortune, with the devil well out of it," Apostolo observed sadly, "but to do that same trick thirty-eight times on the trot, the game must be rigged. Take this tome, abbot, and we'll never talk of it again."

"May God keep me, oh phoenix of bibliophiles," answered Lowrich, "from taking advantage to such an extent of your innocence and candour! What you have just witnessed is nothing more than a trick hardly worthy of a schoolboy, and which shortly you will be able to do just as well as I can. Know then that the author of this book judged it meet to conceal in the initial letters of his chapter headings his name, his profession and his secret love, so that, joined together, these letters make a sentence, the secret of which I cannot advise you to seek in the Universal Biography in Paris, as it would make you lose the wager that I have just won. Besides, that simple and touching sentence is easy to remember: Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit, Friar Francesco Colonna loved Polia very much. Now you know as much about this as Bayle and Prosper Marchand."

"How strange it is," Apostolo said, half to himself. "This friar of the Dominicans fell in love. There's a story there somewhere."

"Why not?" replied Lowrich. "Pick up your quill again and let's look for your pot boiler, being as you have to have one."

Apostolo made himself comfortable on his chair, dipped his quill in the ink, and wrote what follows, starting with the title I have wandered away from in too long a digression:

FRANCISCUS COLUMNA, A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOVELLA.

The Colonna family is certainly one of the most important in Rome and in Italy, but not all its branches were equally prosperous. Sciarra Colonna, a passionate Ghibelline, who made Boniface VIII the prisoner of the Agnani, and got carried away, in the ecstasy of his victory, to the point of slapping the Supreme Pontiff, was made to suffer cruelly for his violence under John XXII. He was exiled from Rome for life in 1328, had his children stripped of their nobility as was he, and all his worldly goods confiscated to enrich Stefano Colonna, his brother, who had never abandoned the party of the Guelphs. The descendants of the unfortunate Sciarra died, as he himself did, in Venice, in obscurity and poverty. By 1444 only one of them was left alive to inherit such misery. Francesco Colonna, born at the start of that year was twice made an orphan, losing his father, killed on the day before he was born, and his mother who died giving birth to him. Francesco, piously adopted by none other than Jacopo Bellini, the famous history painter, and tenderly brought up with his own children, showed himself worthy of the generous care he had had from his adoptive father and from the illustrious brothers of the latter, Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. From the age of eighteen onwards, he repeated in the history of painting the precocious triumphs of the young Mantegna: Giotto had another rival. Fate, however, which did not cease to dog Francesco's life, did not allow his young successes to be wreathed in glory, and it is under the name of Mantegna or one of the Bellinis that the masterpieces of his brush are admired today.

Painting, however, was far from being the exclusive focus of his studies and affections. He only accorded it an importance that was secondary among the arts that beautify man's earthly sojourn. Architecture, on the other hand, which raises monuments to the gods, solemn intermediaries between earth and heaven, took up the greater part of his thoughts, but he did not look for its laws and marvels in the gigantic creations of contemporary art, the bizarre and often grotesque whims and fancies of a fantasy, lacking, according to him, the outward grace of reason and taste. Carried forward by the motion of the Renaissance, which was by then starting to make itself felt in Italy, Francesco only still belonged as far as faith went to this modern world renewed by Christianity. He wholly admired Antiquity and worshipped at its shrine, and a strange alliance had taken place in his mind between the beliefs of a religious man and the aesthetics of a pagan. He took this preoccupation too far to see in modern languages themselves nothing other than rustic jargons more or less totally corrupted by Barbarians, which were only good to allow men to negotiate the material necessities of life, and which were not capable of rising to translate eloquently or poetically ideas and feelings. The result of this was that he had forged for his own usage a sort of intimate dialect in which Italian only served to define certain elements of syntax and the odd soft inflexion, but which was much more redolent of the followers of Homer or of Titus Livius and Lucan than of Petrarch and Boccaccio. This singular turn of mind, which was at that time the defining hallmark of original powers of organisation and a personality destined, to all appearances, to exert a great influence on the century, had isolated Francesco from the rest of the world. He gave to it the general impression of being a melancholic seer who had fallen prey to an illusory genius that had rendered him insensitive to the gentle ways of life in society. He was sometimes seen nevertheless in the palazzo of the illustrious Leonora Pisani, the heiress, at the age of eight and twenty, to the greatest fortune ever known in the whole of the Veneto after that of her cousin Polia, the only daughter of the last of the Poli in Treviso. The house of Leonora was then the sanctuary of poetry and the arts, and this muse's influence caused irresistibly to congregate around her all the talents of her age. It was soon noticed that Francesco was going there more often, although more absorbed in his daydreams and sadder than usual, but his visits suddenly became less frequent, and then he stopped coming altogether.

Polia dei Poli, whom I have just mentioned, was then in the palazzo of the Pisani family, where Leonora had decided her to come to spend the mad weeks of the Carnival. Eight years younger than her cousin, and more beautiful than Leonora was herself, Polia, dedicated, as were a great number of young ladies of noble birth, to serious studies, profited from her sojourn in the capital of the scholarly world to improve herself in areas of knowledge today quite alien to her sex, and the habit of these solemn meditations had imparted to her face something cold and austere which passed for pride. It was not really to be wondered at, however, for Polia was the last surviving remnant of the ancient Lelia family in Rome, from whom she was descended by way of Lelius Maurus, the founder of Treviso. She was brought up under the watchful eye of an imperious and haughty father, so proud of the splendour of his race, that he would have considered the marriage of his daughter to the greatest prince in Italy as marrying below her station, and besides, it was known that the treasures that she would inherit one day could suffice for the dowry of a queen. She had nonetheless granted to Francesco, in their first meetings, a few signs of almost affectionate benevolence, but, as time went on, she seemed to have gradually prescribed for herself a reserve that was severe, not to say disdainful, and when he stopped showing himself at the palazzo Pisani, she no longer bothered with him.

It was during the course of the month of February 1466. Spring, often early in that fair region, was beginning to fill it with all its favours. Polia was about to return to Treviso, and her cousin multiplied around her the various festivities that might enhance her sojourn in Venice and make it harder for her to leave. One day had been taken up by gondola outings on the Grand Canal and on that broad and deep arm of it that separates the Serenissima from the solitude of its Lido. But Francesco had not been overlooked in Leonora Pisani's invitations, and the letter which he had had from her contained such amiable and touching reproaches as to his long absence that for him to refuse would have been inconceivable. Polia was besides, as we have pointed out, on the point of leaving for Treviso, and we may safely assume that Francesco wanted to see her again in spite of the habitual coldness of her welcome. Thinking more and more about the drastic change that had so soon come about in the relations between them, he had ended up by persuading himself that this capricious metamorphosis was due to something other than hate. He found himself then on the steps of the palazzo Pisani, the general assembly point for the departure of the gondolas. The ladies, wearing masks and identical dominos, came out in a crowd from the hallway at the agreed upon signal, and each of them went to choose, as custom decreed, with the familiar decency imparted by disguise, the companion that they were pleased to attach to themselves for the journey. This way of doing things, more gracious and better understood than the one that has taken its place in balls and assemblies, also had less serious disadvantages, women never being more attentive to the preservation of their reputations than on those too rare occasions when they are wholly responsible for maintaining them. So Francesco was waiting, motionless and with downcast eyes, for someone to take notice of him, when a pretty gloved hand came to rest on his arm. He welcomed the unknown woman with modest and respectful assiduity, and led her to the gondola already prepared to receive them. A moment later the elegant flotilla was moving to the rhythmical splash of the oars on the calm and polished face of the canal.