Chapter 12

Eccellenza replied with a foreigner's broken shrug,--a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation.

It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for getting out.

The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy, and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.

Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (_canna_), and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight,--

"It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles,-- It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down."

The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to us,--that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.

Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples,--copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.

We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public conveyance in Italy--and everywhere else--always stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.

We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and, returning at four o'clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de' Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.

* * * * *

On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica. We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck, and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted and drawn off--for it was not in the least injured--forty-eight hours previously; but I suppose it was not _en règle_ to touch it without orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its ultimate ruin:

"Disfecemi Maremma."

We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.

But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our English discourse, asked us,--

"Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage."

AT PADUA

I.

Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers, and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been there?" asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey thither.

Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very vivid for all that.

I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.

I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!

The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.

Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?

On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.

The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.

It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.

But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.

We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.

"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your brougham an hour?"

So and so.

"Show me the tariff of fares."

"There is no tariff."

"There is. Show it to me."

"It is lost, signor."

"I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."

The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee.

The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.

From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.

Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.

As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some _soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan.

If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P----.