BOOK XII[500

My Embassy to Rome--Three kinds of materials-Diary of the road--Letters to Madame Récamier--Leo XII. and the Cardinals--The ambassadors--The old artists and the new artists--Old Roman society--Present manners of Rome--Town and country--Letter to M. Villemain--Letter to Madame Récamier--Explanation concerning the memorandum I am about to quote--Letter to M. le Comte de La Feironnays--Memorandum on Eastern Affairs--Letters to Madame Récamier--Letter to M. Thierry--Dispatch to M. le Comte de La Ferronnays--More letters to Madame Récamier--Dispatch to M. le Comte Portalis--Death of Leo XII.--Dispatch to M. le Comte Portalis--Letter to Madame Récamier.

The preceding book, which I have just written in 1839, joins this book of my Roman Embassy, written in 1828 and 1829, ten years ago. My Memoirs, as Memoirs, have gained by the story of Madame Récamier's life: other persons have been brought upon the scene; we have seen Naples under Murat, Rome under Bonaparte, the Pope set free, returning to St. Peter's; unpublished letters of Madame de Staël, Benjamin Constant, Canova, La Harpe, Madame de Genlis, Lucien Bonaparte, Moreau, Bernadotte, Murat are preserved; the narrative of Benjamin Constant shows him in a new light. I have introduced the reader to a little "out-of-the-way canton" of the Empire, while that Empire was accomplishing its universal movement; I now find myself brought to my Roman Embassy. The distraction of a fresh subject will have been a relief from myself: all has been to the reader's advantage.

For this book of my Roman Embassy there has been no lack of materials; they are of three kinds:

The first contain the story of my innermost sentiments and of my private life, as related in the letters addressed to Madame Récamier.

The second set forth my public life: those are my dispatches.

The third are a medley of historical details concerning the popes, old Roman society, the changes that have taken place from century to century in that society, and so on.

Among these investigations are thoughts and descriptions, the fruit of my rambles. All this has been written in the space of seven months, the time of the duration of my embassy, in the midst of festivities or serious occupations[501]. Nevertheless, my health was impaired. I could not lift up my eyes without feeling dizziness; to admire the sky, I was obliged to place it around me by climbing to the top of a palace or a hill. But I cured the lassitude of the body by means of mental application: the exercise of my thought renewed my physical vigour; what would kill another man gives me life.

[Sidenote: My journey to Rome.]

In revising all this, I have been struck with one thing. On my arrival in the Eternal City, I feel a certain dislike and, for a moment, I believe that everything has changed; little by little, the fever of the ruins overtakes me and I end, like a thousand other travellers, by adoring that which left me cold at first. Nostalgia is the regret of one's native country; on the banks of the Tiber we also suffer from "home-sickness," but it produces an opposite effect to its customary effect: we are seized with the love of solitudes and the distaste for our own country. I had already felt this "sickness" at the time of my first visit, and I was able to say:

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ[502].

You know how, when the Martignac Ministry was formed, the mere name of Italy had dispelled what remained of my repugnance; but I am never sure of my disposition in matters of joy: no sooner had I set out with Madame Chateaubriand than my natural melancholy joined me on the way. You shall convince yourselves of this by my diary of the road:

"LAUSANNE, 22 _September_ 1828.

"I left Paris on the 14th of this month; I spent the 16th at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne: what memories! Joubert is gone; the deserted Château de Passy[503] has changed masters; I have been told, 'Be thou the cricket of the nights: _Esto cicada noctium._'"

"ARONA, 25 _September_.

"Arriving at Lausanne on the 22nd, I followed the road along which disappeared two other women who wished me well and who, in the order of nature, should have survived me. One, Madame la Marquise de Custine, came to die at Bex; the other, Madame la Duchesse de Duras, was hastening, not a year ago, to the Simplon, flying before the face of death which overtook her at Nice[504]."

"_Noble Clara_, digne et constante amie, Ton souvenir ne vit plus en ces lieux; De ce tombeau l'on détourne les yeux; Ton nom s'efface et le monde t'oublie[505]!

"The last letter which I received from Madame de Duras brings home to us the bitterness of that last drop of life which we shall all have to drain:

"'NICE, 14 _November_ 1828.

"'I have sent you an _asclepias carnata_; it is a laurel creeper which grows in the open air, is not afraid of the cold, and has a red flower like the camélia, with an excellent smell; plant it under the windows of the Benedictine's Library.

"'I will tell you my news in a word: it is always the same thing; I droop on my sofa all day, that is to say, all the time that I am not driving or walking out, which I cannot do for more than half-an-hour a day. I dream of the past: my life has been so agitated, so varied, that I cannot say that I am violently bored: if I could only do some needle-work or rug-work, I should not feel unhappy. My present life is so far removed from my past life that it seems to me as though I were reading Memoirs or watching a play[506].'

"And so I have returned to Italy deprived of my friends, as I left it five and twenty years ago. But, at that first time, I was able to repair my losses; to-day, who would wish to take part in a few remaining old days? No one cares to live in a ruin.

"At the village of the Simplon itself, I saw the first smile of a happy dawn. The rocks, whose base stretched out black at my feet, gleamed with rose-colour at the mountain-top, struck by the rays of the sun. To issue from darkness, it is enough to rise towards Heaven.

"If Italy had already lost some of its brilliancy for me at the time of my journey to Verona in 1822, in this year, 1828, it appeared to me still more discoloured; I have measured the progress of time. Leaning on the balcony of the inn at Arona, I gazed at the banks of the Lago Maggiore, blazoned with the gold of the setting sun and edged with azure. Nothing was more agreeable than this landscape, which the Castle edged with its battlements. This sight afforded me neither pleasure nor sentiment. The years of spring-time wed their hopes to what they see; a young man goes a-roaming with what he loves, or with the memories of his absent happiness. If he have no bond, he seeks one; he flatters himself at each step that he will find something; thoughts of felicity haunt him: this disposition of his soul is reflected upon surrounding objects.

"However, I notice the littleness of present society less when I find myself alone. Left to the solitude in which Bonaparte has left the world, I scarcely hear the feeble generations which pass and mewl on the edge of the desert."

"BOLOGNA, 22 _September_ 1828.

"In Milan, in less than a quarter of an hour, I counted seventeen hunchbacks passing under the window of my inn. The German flogging has deformed young Italy.

"I saw St. Charles Borromeo[507] in his sepulchre, after touching his birthplace at Arona. He reckoned two hundred and forty-four years of death. He was not beautiful.

[Sidenote: An earthquake.]

"At Borgo San Donnino, Madame de Chateaubriand came running into my room in the middle of the night: she had seen her clothes and her straw hat fall off the chairs over which they were hung. She had concluded from this that we were in an inn haunted by ghosts or inhabited by robbers. I had noticed no shock as I lay in bed; nevertheless it was the case that an earthquake had been felt in the Apennines: that which overturns cities is able to throw down a woman's clothes. I said as much to Madame de Chateaubriand; I also told her that, in Spain, in the Vega del Xenil, I had passed without accident through a village which had been turned upside down the day before by a subterranean concussion. These lofty consolations did not have the smallest success, and we hastened to leave this cave of murderers.

"The continuation of my journey has displayed to me on every hand the flight of men and the inconstancy of fortune. At Parma, I found the portrait of Napoleon's widow that daughter of the Cæsars is now the wife of Count Neipperg; that mother of the conqueror's son has presented that son with brothers[508]: she allows the debts which she piles up to be guaranteed by a little Bourbon[509] who lives at Lucca and who, if it is expedient, is to inherit the Duchy of Parma.

"Bologna appears to me less deserted than at the time of my first journey. I have been received here with the honours with which ambassadors are pestered. I have visited a fine cemetery: I never forget the dead; they are our family.

"I have never so much admired the Carraccis[510] as in the new gallery at Bologna. It seemed to me as though I were seeing Raphael's St. Cecilia for the first time, so much more divine is it here than at the Louvre, under our sooty sky."

"RAVENNA, 1 _October_ 1828.

"In the Romagna, a country which I did not know, a multitude of towns, with their houses coated with marble lime, are perched on the tops of different little mountains, like coveys of white pigeons. Each of those towns possesses a few master-pieces of modern art or a few monuments of antiquity. This canton of Italy contains the whole of Roman history: the traveller should go through it with his Livy, Tacitus and Suetonius in his hand.

[Sidenote: Dante's tomb.]

"I passed through Imola, the bishopric of Pius VII.[511], and Faenza. At Forli I went out of my road to visit Dante's tomb at Ravenna. As I approached the monument, I was seized with that thrill of admiration which a great renown gives, when the master of that renown has been unfortunate. Alfieri, who bore on his forehead _il pallor della morta e la speranza_, flung himself prone upon that marble and addressed to it his sonnet, _O gran Padre Alighier!_ Standing before the tomb, I applied to myself this verse from the _Purgatorio_:

Frate, Lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui[512].

"Beatrice[513] appeared to me; I saw her as she was when she inspired her poet with the longing _di sospirare e di morir di pianto_[514]:

My plaintive song, take now thy mournful way, And find the dames and damosels, to whom Thy sisters, joyful-gay, Were wont to bear the light of sunny gladness, And thou, distressful daughter of my sadness, Go thou and dwell with them in cheerless gloom[515]!

"And yet the creator of a new world of poetry forgot Beatrice when she had left the earth! He only found her again, to adore her in his genius, when he was undeceived. Beatrice reproaches him with it, when she is preparing to show Paradise to her lover:

"'These looks,' she says to the powers of Paradise,

These looks sometimes upheld him; for I show'd My youthful eyes, and led him by their light In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd The threshold of my second age, and changed My mortal for immortal; then he left me, And gave himself to others[516].

"Dante refused to return to his country at the price of a pardon. He replied to one of his kinsmen:

"'If there is no other way of returning to Florence than that which is opened to me, I shall not return there. I can everywhere contemplate the stars and sun.'"

Dante refused the Florentines his days and Ravenna refused them his ashes, even though Michael Angelo, the resuscitated genius of the poet, was resolving to decorate the funeral monument of him who had learnt _come l'uom s'eterna._[517]

"The painter of the Last Judgment, the sculptor of the Moses, the architect of the dome of St. Peter's, the engineer of the Old Bastion at Florence, the poet of the sonnets addressed to Dante joined his fellow-townsmen and supported the petition which they presented to Leo X. with these words:

"'_Io Michel Agnolo, scultore, il medesimo a Vostra Santità supplico, offerendomi al divin poeta fare la sepoltura sua condecente e in loco onorevole in quest a città._'

"Michael Angelo, whose chisel was disappointed in its hope, had recourse to his pencil to raise another mausoleum to that other himself. He drew the principal subjects of the _Divina Commedia_ on the margins of a folio copy of the works of the great poet; a vessel which bore this two-fold monument from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia suffered shipwreck.

"I returned much moved and feeling something of that commotion, mingled with a divine terror, which I experienced at Jerusalem when my _cicerone_ proposed to take me to Lord Byron's house. Ah, what were Childe Harold and the Signora Guiccioli[518] to me in presence of Dante and Beatrice! Misfortune and the centuries are still lacking to Childe Harold; let him await the future. Byron was badly inspired in his _Prophecy of Dante._

[Sidenote: At Ravenna.]

"I have found Constantinople again at San Vitale[519] and San Apollinare[520]. Honorius[521] and his hen were indifferent to me; I prefer Placidia[522] and her adventures, the memory of which came back to me in the basilica of St. John the Baptist: they form the romance of the Barbarians. Theodoric[523] remains great, even though he put Boethius[524] to death. Those Goths were a superior race; Amalasontha[525], banished to an island in the Lake of Bolsena, strove, with her minister Cassiodorus[526], to save what remained of Roman civilization. The Exarchs[527] brought to Ravenna the decadence of their empire. Ravenna was Lombard under Astolf[528]; the Carlovingians restored it to Rome. It became subject to its archbishop; then it changed from a republic into a tyranny; finally, after having been Guelph or Ghibelline, after having formed part of the Venetian States, it returned to the Church[529] under Pope Julius II.[530] and lives to-day only through the name of Dante.

"This city, which Rome bore in her advanced age, had, from its birth, something of the old age of its mother. Upon the whole, I should not mind living here; I should like to go to the French Column, raised in memory of the Battle of Ravenna. There were the Cardinal de Medici[531] and Ariosto[532], Bayard[533] and Lautrec, brother to the Comtesse de Chateaubriand. There the handsome Gaston de Foix[534] was killed at the age of twenty-four.

"'Notwithstanding all the artillery fired by the Spaniards,' says the _Loyal Serviteur_, 'the French marched on; never since God created Heaven and earth was a crueller nor fiercer assault between French and Spaniards. They rested in front of one another to recover their breath; then, lowering their visors, began again worse than ever, crying "France!" and "Spain!'"

"Of all those warriors there remained but a few knights who then, become freed-men of glory, put on the frock.

"One saw also in some cabin a young girl who, in turning her spindle, caught her dainty fingers in the hemp; she was not accustomed to that life: she was a Trivulzis. When, through her half-open door, she saw two billows join each other on the bosom of the waters, she felt her sadness increase: that woman had been beloved by a great king. She continued to go slowly, by a lonely way, from her cabin to an abandoned church and from the church to her cabin.

"The old forest through which I passed was composed of solitary pines: they resembled the masts of galleys settled in the sand. The sun was near its setting when I left Ravenna; I heard the distant sound of a bell tolling: it was summoning the faithful to prayer."

[Sidenote: Ancona.]

"ANCONA, 3 and 4 _October._

"Returning to Forli, I left it once again without having seen on its crumbling ramparts the place where the Duchess Caterina Sforza[535] declared to her enemies, who were preparing to murder her only son, that she could still be a mother. Pius VII., born at Cesena, was a monk in the admirable convent of Madonna del Monte.

"Near Savignano, I passed across the ravine of a little torrent: when I was told that I had crossed the Rubicon, it seemed to me as though a curtain was raised and that I saw the land of Cæsar's time. My own Rubicon is life: it is long since I cleared its first bank.

"At Rimini, I met neither Francesca nor the other shade, her companion, ‘ who seemed so light before the wind:'

E paion si al vento esser leggieri[536].

"Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia have brought me to Ancona over roads and bridges left by the Augustuses. In Ancona they are to-day keeping the Pope's[537] birthday; I hear the music from Trajan's[538] triumphal arch: a double sovereignty of the Eternal City."

"LORETTO, 5 and 6 _October._

"We have come to sleep at Loretto. The territory offers a perfectly-preserved specimen of the Roman _colonia._ The peasant farmers of Our Lady are in easy circumstances and seem happy; the peasant-women, handsome and gay, wear a flower in their hair. The Prelate Governor gave us his hospitality. From the top of the steeple and the summit of some of the eminences of the city one enjoys smiling vistas over the plains, Ancona and the sea. In the evening we had a storm. I took pleasure in watching the _valentia muralis_ and the fumitory beloved by the goats bow before the wind on the old walls. I walked under the double galleries erected after Bramante's[539] designs. Those pavements will be beaten by the autumn rains, those blades of grass will shiver at the breath of the Adriatic long after I shall have passed away.

"At midnight, I had retired to a bed eight feet square, hallowed by Bonaparte; a night-light hardly illumined the darkness of my room; suddenly, a little door opened, and I saw a man enter mysteriously, bringing with him a veiled woman. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at them; he approached my bed and lost no time, bowing down to the ground, in offering me a thousand excuses for thus disturbing the rest of His Excellency the Ambassador: but he was a widower; he was a poor steward; he wished to marry his _ragazza_, here present: unfortunately he fell somewhat short of the dowry. He lifted up the orphan's veil: she was pale, very pretty, and kept her eyes lowered with becoming modesty. This family man looked as though he wanted to go away and leave the affianced bride with me to finish her story. In this urgent danger, I did not ask the obliging and unhappy man, as the good knight asked the mother of the young girl of Grenoble, if she was a maid; very much flurried, I took some pieces of gold off the table by my bed and gave them, to do credit to the King my master, to the _zitella_, 'whose eyes were not swollen by dint of weeping.' She kissed my hand with infinite gratitude. I did not utter a word, and, upon my falling back on my immense couch, as though I wanted to sleep, the vision of St. Anthony disappeared. I thanked my patron saint, St. Francis, whose feast it was; I remained in the darkness, half smiling, half regretting, and rapt in a profound admiration of my virtues.

[Sidenote: Loretto.]

"It was thus, however, that I 'scattered gold,' that I was an ambassador, entertained in pomp and state by the Governor of Loretto, in the same town where Tasso was lodged in a sorry den and where, for want of a little money, he was unable to continue his journey. He payed his debt to Our Lady of Loretto by his _canzone_:

Ecco fra le tempeste e i fieri venti.

"Madame de Chateaubriand made amends for my transient fortune by climbing the steps of the Santa Chiesa[540] on her knees. After my victory of the night, I had a better right than the King of Saxony to deposit my wedding-coat in the Treasury of Loretto; but I shall never forgive myself, a puny child of the Muses, for having been so powerful and so happy in the spot where the singer of Jerusalem had been so weak and so miserable! Torquato, do not take me in this unusual moment of my inconstant prosperity; riches are not my habit; see me on my way to Namur, in my attic in London, in my infirmary in Paris, in order to find in me some distant resemblance to thyself!

"I have not, like Montaigne, left my portrait in silver at Our Lady of Loretto, nor that of my daughter, _Leonora Montana, filia unica_[541]; I have never desired to survive myself; but still, a daughter, and one who should bear the name of Leonora!"

"SPOLETO.

"After leaving Loretto, passing Macerata, leaving Tolentino[542], which marks a step of Bonaparte and recalls a treaty, I climbed the last redans of the Apennines. The mountain table-land is moist and cultivated as a hop-garden. To the left were the seas of Greece, to the right those of Iberia; I could be pressed by the breath of the breezes which I had inhaled at Athens and Granada. We descended towards Umbria, winding down the curves of the leafless gorges, where live suspended in clusters of woods the descendants of the mountaineers who furnished the Romans with soldiers after the Battle of Trasimenus[543].

"Foligno used to possess a Virgin by Raphael which is to-day in the Vatican. 'Vene' occupies a charming position at the source of the Clitumnus. Poussin[544] has reproduced that warm, suave site; Byron has sung it coldly[545].

"Spoleto gave birth to the present Pope[546]. According to my courier Giorgini, Leo XII. has placed the galley-slaves in that town to do honour to his birthplace. Spoleto dared to resist Hannibal[547]. It displays several works of Lippi the Elder[548] who, nurtured in the cloister, a slave in Barbary, a kind of Cervantes[549] among painters, died at over sixty years of age of the poison administered to him by the relations of Lucrezia[550], whom he was believed to have seduced."

"CIVITA CASTELLANA.

"At Monte Lupo, Count Potoçki[551] buried himself in charming _laurœ_; but did not the thoughts of Rome follow him there? Did he not believe himself transported there amid 'choirs of young girls?' And I too, like St. Jerome[552], 'have in my time spent day and night in uttering cries, in beating my breast, until God gave me back my peace.' _Plango me non esse quod fuerim._

"After passing the hermitage of Monte Lupo, we began to wind round the Somma. I had already taken that road on my first journey from Florence to Rome over Perugia, when accompanying a dying woman....

"By the nature of the light and a sort of vivacity of the landscape, I should have believed myself on one of the ridges of the Alleghany Mountains, were it not that a tall aqueduct, surmounted by a narrow bridge[553], recalled to me a Roman work to which the Lombard Dukes of Spoleto had put their hands: the Americans have not yet come to those monuments which follow upon liberty. I climbed the Somma on foot, walking beside Clitumnian oxen which dragged Her Excellency the Ambassadress to her triumph. A young goat-girl, as thin, light of foot and pretty as her kid, followed me with her little brother in that opulent country-side, asking me for _carità_: I gave it her in memory of Madame de Beaumont, whom these spots have forgotten.

Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond to-day[554].

[Sidenote: Civita Castellana.]

"I saw Terni again and its cascades. A champaign planted with olive-trees brought me to Narni; then, after passing through Otricoli, we arrived and stopped at sad Civita Castellana. I should much like to go to Santa Maria di Faleri to see a city of which nothing is left but its skin, the walls; inside, it was empty: _misère humaine à Dieu ramène._[555] Let us wait till my grandeurs are past, and I shall return to seek out the city of the Faliscans. Soon, from Nero's Tomb, I shall be showing my wife the cross of St. Peter's which commands the city of the Cæsars."

You have glanced through my diary of the road, you shall now read my letters to Madame Récamier, interspersed, as I announced, with pages of history. Alongside of these, you will find my dispatches. Here will appear distinctly the two men that exist in me.

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, 11 _October_ 1828.

"I have crossed this beautiful country, filled with your memory; it consoled me, without being able to take from me the sadness of all the other memories that I encountered at every step. I have seen again that Adriatic Sea which I crossed more than twenty years ago, in what a disposition of soul! At Terni, I had stopped with a poor expiring woman. Finally I entered Rome. Its monuments, as I feared, appeared less perfect to me after those of Athens. My memory of the places, astonishing and cruel at once, had not allowed me to forget a single stone....

"I have seen no one yet, except the Secretary of State, Cardinal Bernetti[556]. To have somebody to talk to, I went to call on Guérin[557] yesterday, at sunset: he seemed delighted with my visit. We opened a window upon Rome and admired the horizon. It was the only thing that had remained, for me, such as I had seen it; either my eyes or the objects had changed, perhaps both[558]."

[Sidenote: Leo XII.]

The first moments of my sojourn in Rome were employed in official visits. His Holiness received me in private audience; public audiences are not customary and cost too dear. Leo XII., a prince of tall stature and of an air at once serene and melancholy, is dressed in a plain white cassock; he maintains no pomp, and keeps to a poor room, almost unfurnished. He eats scarcely anything; he lives, with his cat, on a little _polenta._ He knows that he is very ill and sees himself waste away with a resignation that partakes of Christian joy: he would be quite willing, like Benedict XIV., to keep his coffin under his bed. When I come to the door of the Pope's apartments, I am taken by a priest through dark passages to the refuge or sanctuary of His Holiness. He does not allow himself the time to dress, for fear of keeping me waiting; he rises, comes towards me, will never allow me to touch the ground with my knee to kiss the hem of his robe instead of his slipper, and leads me by the hand to the seat placed on the right of his own poor arm-chair. We sit down and talk.

On Monday I go at seven o'clock in the morning to the Secretary of State, Bernetti, a man of affairs and pleasure. He has an intimacy with the Princess Doria; he knows his century, and has accepted the cardinal's hat only in self-defense. He has refused to enter the Church, is a sub-deacon only by patent, and by giving back his hat can get married to-morrow. He believes in revolutions, and goes so far as to think that, if he lives long enough, he has a chance of seeing the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy.

The cardinals are divided into three factions:

The first consists of those who try to march with the times; among these are Benvenuti[559] and Oppizoni[560]. Benvenuti has become famous through his extirpation of brigandage and his mission to Ravenna after Cardinal Rivarola[561]; Oppizoni, Archbishop of Bologna, has conciliated the various shades of opinion in this industrial and literary town so difficult to govern.

The second faction is formed of the _zelanti_, who try to go backwards: one of their leaders is Cardinal Odescalchi[562].

Lastly, the third faction comprises the immovable men, old men who will not or cannot go either forwards or backwards: among these old ones is Cardinal Vidoni[563], a kind of gendarme of the Treaty of Tolentino: tall and fat, with a red face, and a skull-cap worn on one side. When you tell him that he has a chance of the Papacy, he replies, "_Lo santo Spirito sarebber dunque ubriaco!_" He plants trees at Ponte-Mole, where Constantine made the world Christian. I see those trees when I leave Rome by the Porta del Popolo to return by the Porta Angelica. The moment he catches sight of me at a distance, the cardinal shouts, "_Ah! ah! Signor Ambasciadore di Francia!_" and then flies out against the men who plant his pines. He does not follow the cardinalist etiquette; he goes out accompanied by a single footman in a carriage to his fancy: people forgive him everything, content to call him Madama Vidoni[564].

My ambassadorial colleagues are Count Lützow, the Austrian Ambassador, a polished man; his wife sings well, always the same air, and is always talking of her "little children;" the learned Baron Bunsen[565], the Prussian Minister, and friend of Niebuhr[566] the historian (I am in treaty with him to have the lease of his palace on the Capitol cancelled in my favour); Prince Gagarin, the Russian Minister, exiled among the past grandeurs of Rome by reason of banished loves: if he was preferred by the beautiful Madame Narischkine[567], who for a moment inhabited my hermitage at Aulnay, there must be some charm in his bad temper; we prevail rather through our defects than our good qualities.

M. de Labrador[568], the Spanish Ambassador, a faithful man, talks little, walks about alone, thinks a great deal, or does not think at all, I cannot make out which.

Old Count Fuscaldo represents Naples as winter represents spring. He has a great cardboard placard on which he studies, through his spectacles, not the rose-fields of Pæstum, but the names of suspicious foreigners to whose passports he must not put his visa. I envy him his palace (the Farnese), an admirable unfinished structure, crowned by Michael Angelo, painted by Annibale Carracci, aided by his brother Agostino, and sheltering under its portico the sarcophagus of Cæcilia Metella, who has lost nothing by the change of mausoleum. Fuscaldo, ragged in mind and body, is said to have a mistress.

The Comte de Celles[569], Ambassador of the King of the Netherlands, was married to Mademoiselle de Valence[570], who is now dead. He has had two daughters by her, who are consequently great-grand-daughters of Madame de Genlis. M. de Celles has remained a prefect because he used to be one; his character is that medley of the gossip, the petty tyrant, the recruiting sergeant and the steward which one never loves. If you meet a man who, instead of acres, yards and feet, talks to you of hectares, metres and decimetres, you have laid your hand on a prefect.

[Sidenote: My ambassadorial colleagues.]

M. de Funchal, the semi-acknowledged Ambassador of Portugal, is a little, fat man, excitable, grimacing, green as a Brazil monkey and yellow as a Lisbon orange: he sings his negress, however, this modern Camoëns. A great lover of music, he keeps a sort of Paganini[571] in his pay while awaiting the restoration of his King[572].

Here and there I have caught glimpses of little sly-boots of ministers of various little States, very much scandalized to see how cheaply I hold my embassy: their buttoned-up, solemn and silent importance walks close-legged and with short steps: it looks ready to burst with secrets which it does not know.

As ambassador in England in 1822[573], sought out the places and men that I had formerly known in London in 1793; as Ambassador to the Holy See in 1828, I hastened to visit the palaces and ruins, to ask after the persons whom I had seen in Rome in 1803: of the palaces and ruins I have found many there; of the persons, few.

The Palazzo Lancellotti, formerly let to Cardinal Fesch, is now occupied by its real owners, Prince Lancellotti[573] and the Princess Lancellotti[574], daughter of Prince Massimo[575]. The house in which Madame de Beaumont lived, on the Piazza d'Espagna, has disappeared. As to Madame de Beaumont, she has remained in her last asylum and I have prayed with Pope Leo XII. at her tomb.

Canova has also taken leave of the world[576]. I twice visited him in his studio in 1803; he received me mallet in hand. He showed me, with the simplest and gentlest air, his enormous statue of Bonaparte and his Hercules and Lichas: he was anxious to persuade you that he was able to achieve energy of form; but even then his chisel refused to dig deep into anatomy; the nymph lingered in the flesh in spite of him, and Hebe reappeared in the wrinkles of his old men. I have met the first sculptor of my time upon my road; he has fallen from his scaffold, as Goujon[577] fell from the scaffold at the Louvre: death is always there to continue the eternal St. Bartholomew and to lay us low with its darts.

But there is one still alive, to my great delight, and that is my old Boquet, the oldest of the French painters in Rome. Twice had he tried to leave his beloved _campagne_; he has gone as far as Genoa; his heart has failed him, and he has returned to his adopted home. I have cockered him up at the Embassy, as well as his son, for whom he has the tenderness of a mother. I have begun our old walks over again with him; I notice his old age only by the slowness of his steps; I feel a sort of emotion when I mimic a little child and measure my strides by his. We have neither of us much longer before us to see the Tiber flow.

[Sidenote: The Roman artists.]

The great artists, at their great period, led a very different life from that which they lead now: attached to the ceilings of the Vatican, to the walls of St. Peter's, to the partitions of the Farnese, they worked at their master-pieces suspended with them in mid-air. Raphael walked surrounded by his pupils, escorted by cardinals and princes, like a senator of Ancient Rome, preceded and followed by his clients. Charles V. sat thrice to Titian[578]. He picked up his brush, and yielded the right to him when walking, even as Francis I. attended Leonardo da Vinci[579] on his death-bed. Titian went in triumph to Rome; the immense Buonarotti received him there: at the age of ninety-nine, at Venice, Titian still held with a firm hand his century-old brush, the conqueror of the centuries.

The Grand-duke of Tuscany[580] secretly disinterred Michael Angelo, who had died in Rome after laying, at the age of eighty-eight, the coping-stone of the cupola of St. Peter's. Florence, with a magnificent funeral, expiated on the ashes of its great painter the neglect which it had shown to the ashes of Dante, its great poet.

Velasquez[581] twice visited Italy, and Italy twice rose to greet him. The precursor of Murillo[582] resumed the road to Spain laden with the fruits of that Ausonian Hesperia, which had fallen into his hands: he carried away a picture by each of the twelve most celebrated painters of that time.

Those famous artists spent their days in adventures and feasting; they defended towns and castles; they built churches, palaces and ramparts; they gave and received mighty sword-thrusts, seduced women, took refuge in the cloisters, were absolved by the popes and saved by the princes. In an orgy described by Benvenuto Cellini we see the names figure of Michael Angelo and of Giulio Romano[583].

To-day the scene has greatly changed; the artists in Rome live poor and in retirement. Perhaps this life contains a poetry which is as good as the first. A society of German painters[584] has set itself to carry painting back to Perugino[585], in order to restore to it its Christian inspiration. Those young neophytes of St. Luke[586] maintain that Raphael, in his second manner, became a pagan and that his talent degenerated. Be it so; let us be pagans like the Raphaelite Virgins; let our talent degenerate and grow enfeebled as in the picture of the _Transfiguration!_ This creditable error of the new sacred school is none the less an error; it would follow that the stiffness and bad drawing of the forms would be a proof of intuitive vision, whereas that expression of faith which we observe in the works of the painters who precede the Renascence comes from the fact, not that the figures are posed squarely and motionless as sphinxes but that painting believed as did its century. It is the thought, not the painting, of the century that is religious; so true is this, that the Spanish School is eminently pious in its expression, notwithstanding that it has the grace and movement of the painting subsequent to the Renascence. Whence does this come? From the fact that _the Spaniards are Christians._

I go to see the artists separately at work; the pupil sculptor lives in some grotto, under the evergreen oaks of the Villa Medici, where he finishes his marble child giving a serpent to drink out of a shell. The painter inhabits a dilapidated house in some deserted spot; I find him alone, taking through his open window some view of the Roman Campagna. M. Schnetz's[587] _Brigand's Wife_ has become the mother asking of the Madonna the cure of her son. Léopold Robert[588], returning from Naples, passed through Rome recently, bringing with him the enchanted scenes of that lovely clime, which he has simply stuck on to his canvas.

[Sidenote: Guérin, Horace Vernet, Quecq.]

Guérin has retired, like a sick dove, to the top of a pavilion of the Villa Medici. He listens, with his head under his wing, to the sound of the wind from the Tiber; when he wakes up, he makes a pen-drawing of the Death of Priam.

Horace Vernet[589] is struggling to change his manner: will he succeed? The snake which he twines round his neck, the dress which he affects, the cigar which he smokes, the masks and foils with which he surrounds himself remind one too much of the bivouac.

Who has ever heard speak of my friend M. Quecq[590], the successor of Julius III.[591] in the cabin of Michael Angelo, Vignola[592] and Taddeo Zuccaro[593]? And yet he painted the _Death of Vitellius_ none too badly, in his nymphic grotto seized under distress. The waste garden-plots are haunted by a crafty animal which M. Quecq occupies himself in hunting: it is a fox, the great-grandson of Reynard the Fox, first of the name, and nephew of Ysengrin the Wolf.

Pinelli[594], between two fits of drunkenness, has promised me twelve scenes of dances, gambling and robbers. It is a pity that he starves the big dog which lies at his door. Thorwaldsen[595] and Camuccini[596] are the two princes of the poor artists of Rome.

Sometimes those scattered artists meet and go together, on foot, to Subiaco. On the road, they scrawl grotesque figures on the walls of the inn at Tivoli. One day, perhaps, some Michael Angelo will be recognised by the charcoal drawing which he will have made on a work of Raphael's.

I would like to have been born an artist: the solitude, the independence, the sunshine amid ruins and master-pieces would suit me. I have no wants; a piece of bread, a pitcher of the _Aqua Felice_ would content me. My life has been wretchedly caught in the thickets on my road; how happy should I have been, had I been the free bird that sings and builds its nest in those thickets!

Nicolas Poussin bought, out of his wife's dowry, a house on the Pincian Hill, opposite another _casino_ which had belonged to Claude Gelée, surnamed Lorraine[597]. My other fellow-countryman, Claude, also died in the lap of the Queen of the World[598]. If Poussin reproduces the Roman Campagna, even when the scene of his landscapes is set elsewhere, Claude Lorraine reproduces the skies of Rome, even when he paints ships and a sunset at sea.

Why was I not the contemporary of certain privileged creatures to whom I feel attracted in the different centuries? But I should have had to rise from the dead too often. Poussin and Claude Lorraine have trodden the Capitol; kings have come there and not been worth so much as they. De Brosses[599] there met the English Pretender[600]; I found there, in 1803, the abdicated King of Sardinia and to-day, in 1828, I see there Napoleon's brother, the King of Westphalia. Rome in her decline offers an asylum to the fallen powers; her ruins are a place of sanctuary for persecuted glory and unfortunate talents.

If I had painted Roman society, a quarter of a century ago, as I have just painted the Roman Campagna, I should be obliged to retouch my portrait; it would no longer be like. Every generation lasts thirty-three years, the life of Christ (Christ is the type of all things); every generation in our western world changes its outward aspect. Man is placed in a picture whose frame is invariable, but whose figures move. Rabelais[601] was in this city, in 1536, with the Cardinal du Bellay[602]; he performed the functions of house-steward to His Eminence; he "carved and handed."

Rabelais, changed into "Friar John of the Funnels," is not of the opinion of Montaigne, who heard scarce any bells in Rome and "fewer than in the most insignificant town in France[603];" Rabelais, on the contrary, hears many in the "Ringing Island" (Rome): "some of us doubted that it was the Dodonian Kettle[604]."

[Sidenote: Old-time visitors to Rome.]

Four and forty years after Rabelais, Montaigne found the banks of the Tiber planted, and he observed that, on the 16th of March, there were roses and artichokes in Rome. The churches were bare, without statues of saints, without pictures, less ornate and less beautiful than the French churches. Montaigne was accustomed to "the cloudy vastitie and gloomy canopies of our churches[605];" he speaks several times of St. Peter's without describing it, insensible or indifferent as he appears to be to the arts. In the presence of so many master-pieces, no name offers itself to Montaigne's recollection; his memory does not speak to him of Raphael nor of Michael Angelo, not yet sixteen years dead.

For the rest, ideas on the arts, on the philosophic influence of the geniuses which have magnified or protected them, were not yet born. Time does for men what space does for monuments; we judge both one and the other correctly only at a distance and from the point of view of perspective; viewed from too near, we do not see them; from too far, we no longer see them.

The author of the _Essayes_ looked in Rome only for Ancient Rome:

"The buildings in this bastard Rome, which the moderns were raising upon, or appending to, the glorious structures of the antique world, though they sufficed enough to excite the admiration of the present age, yet seemed to him to bear a close resemblance to those nests which the rooks and the swallows construct upon the roofs and walls of the churches in France, which the Huguenots have demolished[606]."

What sort of idea had Montaigne of Ancient Rome, if he regarded St. Peter's as a swallow's nest, hung on to the walls of the Coliseum?

The new Roman citizen by an "authenticke bull" of the year 1581 A.D.[607] had remarked that the Roman ladies wore no masks, as they did in France; they appeared in public resplendent with pearls and precious stones, but "they had the waist exceedingly loose, which gives them all the appearance of being with child." The men were dressed in black, and although they were "dukes, marquisses, counts," they "are somewhat mean-looking[608]."

It is not singular that St. Jerome remarks the gait of the Roman women, which gives them the appearance of being with child: _solutis genibus fractus incessus?_

Almost every day, when I go out through the Porta Angelica, I see a mean house not far from the Tiber with a smoky French sign-board representing a bear; it was there that Michael Lord of Montaigne landed on arriving at Rome, not far from the hospital which served as an asylum to that poor madman[609], "one most fitted under the ayre of true ancient poesie," whom Montaigne saw "in so piteous a plight" at Ferrara, and "rather spited than pitied him[610]."

It was a memorable event when the seventeenth century deputed its greatest Protestant poet and its most serious genius to visit great Catholic Rome in 1638. Leaning against the Cross, holding the Old and New Testaments in her hands, with the guilty generations driven from Eden behind her and the redeemed generations descended from the Garden of Olives before her, she said to the heretic born of yesterday:

"What do you want of your old mother?"

Leonora[611], the Roman, bewitched Milton[612]. Has it ever been remarked that Leonora appears once again in the Memoirs of Madame de Motteville[613], at the concerts of Cardinal Mazarin[614]?

[Sidenote: Milton, the Abbé Arnold.]

The order of dates brings the Abbé Arnauld[615] to Rome after Milton. This abbé, who had borne arms, relates an anecdote which is curious on account of the name of one of its persons, while, at the same time, it brings before us the manners of the courtesans. The "hero of the fable," the Duc de Guise[616], grandson of the Balafré, going in search of his Naples adventure, passed through Rome, in 1647: he there knew Nina Barcarola. Maison-Blanche, secretary to M. Deshayes[617], Ambassador to Constantinople, took it into his head to become the rival of the Duc de Guise. It was a bad business for him; they substituted (it was at night, in an unlighted room) a hideous old hag for Nina:

"If the laughter was great on one side," says Arnauld, "the confusion on the other side was as great, as may well be imagined. The Adonis, extricating himself with difficulty from his divinity's embraces, ran quite naked out of the house, as though the devil were at his heels."

The Cardinal de Retz tells us nothing on the subject of Roman manners. I prefer "little" Coulanges[618] and his two journeys of 1656 and 1689: he celebrates those "vineyards" and "gardens" whose mere names possess a charm. When I walk to the Porta Pia, I meet almost all the persons named by Coulanges: those persons? No: their grandsons and grand-daughters!

Madame de Sévigné receives verses from Coulanges; she replies to him from the Château des Rochers in my poor Brittany, at ten leagues from Combourg:

"What a sad date after yours, my amiable cousin! It suits a solitary like myself, and that of Rome suits you, whose star is a wandering one. How gently has fortune treated you, as you say, even though it have fastened a quarrel on you!!!"

Between Coulanges' first journey to Rome, in 1656, and his second journey, in 1689, thirty-three years elapsed: I reckon only twenty-five years wasted between my first journey to Rome, in 1803, and my second journey, in 1828. If I had known Madame de Sévigné, I should have cured her of the grief of growing old.

Spon[619], Misson[620], Dumont[621], Addison[622] successively follow Coulanges. Spon, with Wheler, his companion, acted as my guide over the ruins of Athens.

[Sidenote: Dumont, Addison, Labat.]

It is curious to read in Dumont how the master-pieces which we admire were disposed at the time of his journey in 1690: one saw at the Belvedere the statues of the Nile and the Tiber[623], the Antinous[624], the Cleopatra, the Laocoon[625] and the supposed torso of Hercules[626]. Dumont places in the gardens of the Vatican "the bronze peacocks which once adorned the tomb of Scipio Africanus."

Addison travels as a "scholar[627]," his trip is summed up in classical quotations tinged with English recollections; when passing through Paris, he presented his poems to M. Boileau[628].

Père Labat[629] follows the author of Cato: a singular man, this Parisian monk of the Order of Preaching Friars. A missionary to the Antilles, a filibuster, an able mathematician, architect and soldier, a brave gunner levelling the cannon like a grenadier, a learned critic, who had restored the Dieppois to the possession of their original discovery in Africa[630], he had a mind inclined to raillery and a character to liberty. I know of no traveller who gives clearer and more exact ideas concerning the Pontifical Government. Labat walks the streets, goes to the processions, meddles in everything and laughs at nearly everything.

The Preaching Friar relates how the Capuchins, at Cadiz, gave him sheets to his bed which had been quite new since ten years, and how he saw a St. Joseph dressed in the Spanish fashion, sword at side, hat under its arm, powdered hair, and spectacles on nose. In Rome he attends a mass:

"Never," he says, "have I seen so many mutilated musicians together, nor so numerous a symphony. Those who were judges said that there was nothing so fine. I said as much, to make believe that I was a judge too; but, if I had not had the honour to form one of the train of the officiating priest, I should have left the ceremony, which lasted at least three good hours, which seemed to me quite six."

The more I come down to the time at which I write, the more do the usages of Rome begin to resemble the usages of to-day. In the time of De Brosses, the Roman women wore false hair; the custom proceeded from far back; Propertius asks his "life" why she delights in adorning her hair:

Quid juvat ornato precedere, vita, capillo[631]?

The Gallic women, our mothers, supplied the hair of the Severinas, Piscas, Faustinas, Sabinas. Velleda says to Eudorus, speaking of her hair:

"'Tis my diadem, and I have kept it for thee[632]."

A head of hair was not the greatest conquest of the Romans, but it was one of the most lasting: we often take from the tombs of women the whole of that ornament, which has resisted the scissors of the daughters of the night, and we look in vain for the comely brow which it adorned. The perfumed tresses, the object of the idolatry of the lightest of the passions, have outlived empires; death, which shatters all chains, has been unable to break that net. To-day the Italians wear their own hair, which the women of the people plait with coquettish grace.

De Brosses, the traveller magistrate, bears, in his portraits and writings, a false air of Voltaire, with whom he had a comical dispute about a field. De Brosses often sat chatting on the edge of the bed of a Princess Borghese. In 1803, I saw in the Borghese Palace another princess who was shining with all the brilliancy of her brother's glory: Pauline Bonaparte is no more[633]! Had she lived in the days of Raphael, he would have represented her in the form of one of those Loves which recline on the backs of the lions in the Farnese Palace, and the same languor would have carried off the painter and the model. How many flowers have already passed away in those plains in which I made Jerome and Augustine, Eudorus and Cymodocœa roam!

[Sidenote: De Brosses, King James III.]

De Brosses represents the English on the Piazza d'Espagna much as we see them to-day, living together, making a great noise, eyeing poor mortals from head to foot, and returning to their brick-red dog-hole in London, after scarce so much as glancing at the Coliseum. De Brosses obtained the honour of paying his court to James III.:

"Of the two sons of the Pretender," he says, "the elder[634] is about twenty years old, the younger[635] fifteen. I have heard say by those who know them thoroughly that the elder is worth by far the more and is better loved in private; that he has a good heart and great courage; that he feels his position keenly and that, if he does not escape from it one day, it will not be for want of fearlessness. I was told that, being taken, when quite young, to the siege of Gaeta[636], at the time of the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples by the Spaniards, during the crossing his hat came to fall into the sea. They wanted to pick it up:

"'No,' said he, 'it is not worth while; I shall surely have to go to fetch it myself one day.'"

De Brosses believes that, if the Prince of Wales attempts anything, he will not succeed, and he gives his reasons. Returning to Rome after his gallant exploits, Charles Edward, who bore the name of Count of Albany, lost his father[637]; he married the Princess of Stolberg-Gedern[638] and settled in Tuscany. Is it true that he secretly visited London in 1753 and 1761, as Hume tells us, that he was present at the coronation of George III., and that he said to some one who recognised him in the crowd:

"The man who is the object of all this pomp is he whom I envy least?"

The Pretender's was not a happy union; the Countess of Albany separated from him and fixed her residence in Rome: it was there that another traveller, Bonstetten[639], met her; the Bernese gentleman, in his old age, gave me to understand, at Geneva, that he had letters written in the first youth of the Countess of Albany[640].

Alfieri saw the wife of the Pretender at Florence, and fell in love with her for life:

"Twelve years afterwards," he says, "at the moment I am writing, and at an age when the illusions of the passions have ceased to operate, I feel that I become daily more attached to her, in proportion as time destroys the brilliancy of her fleeting beauty, the only charm which she owes not to herself. Whenever I reflect on her virtues, my soul is elevated, improved and tranquillized, and I dare to affirm that the feelings of her mind, which I have uniformly endeavoured to fortify and confirm, are not dissimilar to my own[641]."

I have met Madame d'Albany at Florence; age had apparently produced in her an effect contrary to that which it generally produces: time ennobles the countenance and, when it belongs to an old race, imprints some trace of that race on the brow which it has marked; the Countess of Albany was thick-set, with expressionless features and a common air. If the women in Rubens' pictures were to grow old, they would be like Madame d'Albany at the age at which I met her. I am sorry that that heart, "fortified and confirmed" by Alfieri, should have had need of another support[642]. I will here recall a passage from my Letter on Rome to M. de Fontanes:

"Do you know that I only once saw Count Alfieri in my life, and could you guess how? I saw him laid in his bier: I was told that he had hardly altered; his physiognomy appeared to me to be noble and grave; death doubtless gave it an added severity; the coffin was a little too short, and they bent the dead man's head upon his breast, which caused him to make a terrible movement."

Nothing is so sad as, at the end of our days, to read what we have written in our youth: all that was in the present is now in the past.

[Sidenote: King Henry IX.]

I saw for a moment in Rome, in 1803, the Cardinal of York, Henry IX., that last of the Stuarts[643], then seventy-nine years of age. He had had the weakness to accept a pension from George III.: the widow of Charles I.[644] had in vain begged one from Cromwell. Thus the House of Stuart took one hundred and nineteen years to die out after losing the throne which it never recovered. Three pretenders have handed on to one another in exile the shadow of a crown; they had intelligence and courage: what did they lack? The hand of God.

Besides, the Stuarts consoled themselves at the sight of Rome; they were but one slight accident the more in those vast fragments, a small shattered column raised in the midst of a great burial-ground of ruins. Their House, in disappearing from the world, enjoyed yet this further comfort: it saw the fall of old Europe; the fatality clinging to the Stuarts dragged other kings with them to the dust, among whom was Louis XVI., whose grandfather had refused an asylum to the descendant of Charles I.[645], and Charles X. has died in exile at the age of the Cardinal of York, and his son and his grandson are wanderers on the face of the earth!

Lalande's[646] Journey in Italy, in 1765 and 1766, remains the best and the most exact as regards the Rome of the arts and of antiquities:

"I like to read the historians and poets," he says, "but one could not read them with more pleasure than when treading the soil which bore them, climbing the hills they describe, and watching the flow of the rivers they have sung."

That is not so bad for an astronomer who used to eat spiders.

Duclos[647], who is almost as lean and dry as Lalande, makes this shrewd observation:

"The plays of the different nations give a fairly correct image of their manners. Harlequin, the valet and the principal character in the Italian comedies, is always represented with a great desire for eating, which comes from an habitual need. Our own comedy valets are commonly drunkards, which may imply debauchery, but not penury."

The declamatory admiration of Dupaty[648] offers no compensation for the aridity of Duclos and Lalande; still it makes one feel the presence of Rome; one feels by reflex that eloquence of descriptive style is born under the breath of Rousseau, _spiraculum vitæ._ Dupaty approaches the new school which was soon to substitute sentimentality, obscurity and mannerism for the truthfulness, clarity and naturalness of Voltaire. Nevertheless, across his affected jargon, Dupaty observes correctly; he explains the patience of the people of Rome through the age of their successive pontiffs:

"A pope," he says, "is always to them a dying king[649]."

Dupaty sees night approach at the Villa Borghese:

"There remains but one ray of day... it is expiring on the brow of that Venus[650]."

Would the poets of our day say better? He takes leave of Tivoli:

"Adieu, thou valley!... I am a stranger; I do not inhabit your beautiful Italy; I shall never behold you more: but perhaps my children, some at least of my children, will come to visit you one day; appear but as charming in their eyes as you have to their father[651]."

"Some of the children" of the scholar and poet have visited Rome, and they could have seen the last ray of sunlight expire on the brow of the Venus Genitrix of Dupaty[652].

[Sidenote: Dupaty, Goethe.]

Scarce had Dupaty left Rome when Goethe came to take his place[653]. Did the president of the Parliament of Bordeaux ever hear speak of Goethe? And nevertheless the name of Goethe lives on this earth whence that of Dupaty has vanished. It is not that I love the mighty genius of Germany; I have little sympathy for the poet of matter: I feel Schiller, I understand Goethe. There may be great beauties in the enthusiasm which Goethe experiences in Rome for Jupiter: excellent critics think so; but I prefer the God of the Cross to the God of Olympus. I look in vain for the author of _Werther_ along the banks of the Tiber; I find him only in this phrase:

"My present life is as it were a dream of youth; we shall see if I am fated to enjoy it, or to recognise that this too is vain, as so many others have been."

When Napoleon's eagle allowed Rome to escape from its claws, she fell back into the bosom of her peaceful pastors: then Byron appeared at the crumbling walls of the Cæsars[654]; he flung his distressed imagination over so many ruins, like a mourning cloak. Rome, thou hadst a name, he gave thee another; that name will cling to thee; he called thee:

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago[655]."

After that last storm of poetry, Byron was not long in dying[656]. I might have seen Byron at Geneva, and I did not see him; I might have seen Goethe at Weimar, and I did not see him; but I saw Madame de Staël die, who, disdaining to live beyond her youth, passed swiftly to the Capitol with Corinne: imperishable names, illustrious ashes, which have associated themselves with the name and the ashes of the Eternal City[657].

Thus have the changes in manners and persons proceeded from century to century in Italy; but the great transformation has been worked, above all, by our two occupations of Rome.

The "Roman Republic," established under the influence of the Directorate, ridiculous as it was with its two "consuls" and its "lictors" (scurvy _facchini_ taken from the populace), for all that, made excellent innovations in the civil laws: it was from the prefectures, invented by that "Roman Republic," that Bonaparte borrowed the institution of his own prefects.

[Sidenote: The "Roman Republic."]

We brought to Rome the germ of an administration which had no existence; Rome, become the chief town of the Department of the Tiber, was superlatively well ruled. Its mortgage system it owes to us. The suppression of the convents, the sale of ecclesiastical property sanctioned by Pius VII. have diminished the faith in the permanence of the consecration of religious things. The famous _Index_, which still makes a little noise on our side of the Alps, makes none at all in Rome: for a few _bajocchi_ you obtain permission to read the forbidden work with a safe conscience. The _Index_ is one of those works which remain as evidences of the old times in the midst of the new. In the Republics of Rome and Athens, were not the titles of "King," the names of the great families adhering to the Monarchy respectfully preserved? It is only the French who foolishly take offense at their tombs and their annals, who hurl down the crosses, devastate the churches, out of grudge against the clergy of the Year of Grace 1000 or 1100. There is nothing more puerile or more stupid than those reminiscent outrages; nothing which would tend more to the belief that we are incapable of anything serious whatsoever, that the true principles of liberty will for ever remain unknown to us. Far from despising the past, we ought, as all nations do, to treat it as a venerable greybeard, who sits by our fireside telling what he has seen: what harm can he do us? He instructs and amuses us with his stories, his ideas, his language, his manners, his habits of former days; but he is without strength, and his hands are weak and trembling. Can it be that we are afraid of that contemporary of our fathers, who would already be with them in the tomb, if he could die, and who has no authority, save that of their dust?

The French, passing through Rome, left their principles there: that is what always happens when the conquest is accomplished by a people more advanced in civilization than the people which undergoes that conquest, as witness the Greeks in Asia under Alexander, as witness the French in Europe under Napoleon. Bonaparte, when snatching sons from their mothers, when forcing the Italian nobility to leave its palaces and bear arms, was hastening the transformation of the national spirit.

As to the physiognomy of Roman society, on days of concerts or balls one might have thought himself in Paris. The Altieris[658], the Palestrinas[659], the Zagarolos[660], the Del Dragos[661], the Lantes[662], the Lozzanos would not have felt strangers in the drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain: still, some of those women wear a certain frightened air which has, I believe, to do with the climate. The charming Falconieri, for instance, always stands near a door, ready to fly to the Monte Mario if you look at her: the Villa Millini[663] belongs to her; a novel placed in that abandoned lodge, under the cypress trees, in view of the sea, would have its value.

But, whatever the changes in manners and persons, from century to century, in Italy may be, we observe a habit of greatness there which we paltry barbarians cannot approach. There still remains Roman blood in Rome and the traditions of the masters of the world. When one sees foreigners crammed into small new houses at the Porta del Popolo, or lodged in palaces which they have divided into boxes and pierced with chimneys, it is as though one saw rats scratching at the feet of the monuments of Apollodorus[664] and Michael Angelo and gnawing holes into the pyramids.

To-day, the Roman nobles, ruined by the Revolution, immure themselves within their palaces, live parsimoniously and have become their own stewards. When you have the good fortune, which happens very rarely, to be received by them in the evening, you pass through vast halls, unfurnished and scarcely lighted, along which antique statues stand out white against the thick shadow, like phantoms or exhumed corpses. At the end of those halls, the ragged footman who leads the way ushers you into a sort of gynecæum: around a table are seated three or four, old or young, ill-dressed women, plying their needles at fancy-work, by the light of a lamp, and exchanging a few words with a father, a brother, a husband recumbent in the dim background on tattered arm-chairs. Nevertheless, there is something, I know not what, fine, sovereign, appertaining to high breeding, in this assemblage entrenched behind its master-pieces and giving a first impression of a witches' Sabbath. The species of the _cicisbei_ is extinct, although a few shawl-bearing and footwarmer-carrying abbés survive; here and there, a cardinal still fixes himself in a woman's house like a sofa.

Nepotism and pontifical scandals are no longer possible, just as kings can no longer keep titular and honoured mistresses. Nowadays, when politics and the tragic adventures of love have ceased to fill the lives of the great ladies of Rome, how do they spend their time in the interior of their homes? It would be interesting to get to the bottom of these new manners; if I stay in Rome, I shall make it my business to do so.

*

I visited Tivoli in 1803; at that time I said, in a narrative which was printed then:

"This spot is suited to reflection and day-dreams; I go back into my past life; I feel the burden of the present; I seek to penetrate the future; where shall I be, what shall I be doing and what shall I be _twenty years hence_?"

Twenty years! It seemed a century to me; I thought myself certain of inhabiting my tomb before that century had lapsed. And it is not I that have passed away, but the master of the world and his empire that have sped!

Almost all the ancient and modern travellers saw in the Roman Campagna only what they call "its horror and its nudity." Montaigne himself, who assuredly was not lacking in imagination, says:

"Far away on the left lay the Apennines; the aspect of the foreground was exceedingly unpleasant to the eye, hilly, with every here and there deep marshes... the country ...open, barren, and altogether destitute of trees, and almost equally so of houses[665]."

The Protestant Milton casts upon the Roman Campagna a look as dry and barren as his faith. Lalande and the Président De Brosses are as blind as Milton. Only in M. de Bonstetten's _Voyage sur la scène des six derniers livres de l'Énéide_, published at Geneva in 1804, one year after my Letter to M. de Fontanes (printed in the _Mercure_ at the end of the year 1803), do we find any true sensations of that admirable solitude, and even they are mingled with objurgations:

"What a pleasure to read Virgil under the sky of Æneas and, so to speak, in the presence of the gods of Homer!" says M. de Bonstetten. "What a profound solitude in these deserts in which we behold only the sea, ruined woods, trees, great meadows, and not one inhabitant! In a vast extent of country, I saw but a single house, and that house was near me, on the summit of a hill. I went to it, it had no door; I climbed a stair-case, I entered a sort of chamber, a bird of prey had built its nest there....

"I stood some time at the window of that abandoned house. I saw at my feet that declivity, so rich and so magnificent in Pliny's day, now uncultivated."

Since my description of the Roman Campagna, they have passed from disparagement to enthusiasm. The English and French travellers who have followed me have marked all their steps from the Storta to Rome by ecstasies. M. de Tournon[666], in his _Études statistiques_, enters the road of admiration which I had the happiness to open:

"The Roman Campagna," he says, "unfolds more distinctly, at each step, the serious beauty of its immense lines, its numerous plains and its fine frame of mountains. Its monotonous grandeur impresses and elevates the thought."

I have no need to mention M. Simond[667], whose journey reads like a wager, so much does he amuse himself by looking at Rome upside down. I was at Geneva when he died almost suddenly. A farmer, he had just cut his hay and gaily reaped his first grain, when he went to join his mown grass and his gathered harvest.

We have a few letters of the great landscape painters; Poussin and Claude Lorraine do not say a word about the Roman Campagna. But, if their pen is silent, their brush speaks; the _Agro Romano_ was a mysterious source of beauty, at which they drew, while hiding it by a sort of avarice of genius and as it were in fear, lest it should be profaned by the vulgar. Strange that it should be French eyes that best saw the light of Italy.

[Sidenote: Vandalism in the Campagna.]

I have read again my Letter to M. de Fontanes on Rome, written five and twenty years ago, and I confess that I have found it so exact that it would be impossible for me to take away or add a word to it. A foreign company has come this winter (1829) to propose to clear the Roman Campagna: ah, gentlemen, spare us your cottages and your English gardens on the Janiculum! If ever they were to disfigure the waste lands against which the ploughshare of Cincinnatus struck, on which all the grasses bend before the breath of the centuries, I should fly Rome, never to set foot in it again. Go to drag your improved ploughs elsewhere; here the earth grows and must grow only tombs. The cardinals have closed their ears to the calculations of the commercial adventurers hastening to demolish the ruins of Tusculum, which they mistake for the castles of aristocrats: they would have made lime with the marble of the sarcophagus of Æmilius Paulus, even as they have made water-shoots with the lead of the coffins of our ancestors. The Sacred College clings to the past; besides, it has been proved, to the great confusion of the economists, that the Roman Campagna paid the owners five per cent, as pasture-land and that it would not yield more than one and a half in corn. It is not through idleness, but through practical interest, that the cultivator of the plains gives the preference to _pastorizia_ over _maggesi._ The produce of an acre in the Roman territory is almost equal to the produce of the same measure in the best French departments: to convince one's self of that, one has but to read the work of Monsignore Nicolaï[668].

*

I have told you that, at first, I had a sense of weariness, at the commencement of my second journey to Rome, and that I ended by recovering under the influence of the ruins and the sun. I was still under my first impression when, on the 3rd of November 1828, I wrote to M. Villemain:

"Your letter, monsieur, was very welcome in my Roman solitude: it has stayed my home-sickness, from which I was suffering badly. That complaint is nothing else than my years, which deprive my eyes of the power of seeing as they saw before: my own ruin is not great enough to find consolation in that of Rome. When I now wander alone amid all these remains of the centuries, they no longer serve me as a scale by which to measure time: I go back into the past, I see what I have lost and the end of the short future that lies before me; I count all the joys which I might have left, I find none of them; I make an effort to admire what I used to admire, and I admire it no longer. I come home to undergo my honours, overcome by the _sirocco_ and stabbed by the _tramontane._ There you have all my life, save only a tomb which I have not yet had the courage to visit. We pay great attention to crumbling monuments: we keep them up; we rid them of their plants and flowers; the women whom I had left young have become old, and the ruins have become young again: what would you have one do here?

"Well, I assure you, monsieur, that I long only to return to my Rue d'Enfer, never again to leave it. I have fulfilled all my engagements towards my country and my friends. Once you and M. Bertin de Vaux have entered the State Council, I shall have nothing more to ask, for your talents will soon carry you higher. My retirement has, I hope, done a little to bring about the cessation of a formidable opposition; public liberty has been won for France for ever. My sacrifice must now end with my role in life. I ask nothing but to return to my 'Infirmary.' I have nothing but praise for this country; I have been admirably received, I have found a government full of tolerance and very well informed of affairs outside Italy; but, when all is said and done, nothing pleases me more than the idea of disappearing entirely from the world's scene: it is good to be preceded to the tomb by the silence which one will find there.

"I thank you for being so good as to speak to me of your labours. You will write a work which will be worthy of you and increase your reputation[669]. If you have any researches to make here, have the kindness to tell me of them: a rummage in the Vatican might furnish you with treasures. Alas, I saw but too much of that poor M. Thierry[670]! I assure you that I am haunted by his memory: so young, so full of love for his work, and to go! And, as always happens with real merit, his mind was improving and reason, with him, taking the place of system: I still hope for a miracle. I have written on his behalf; I have not even had an answer. I have been more fortunate for you, and a letter from M. de Martignac gives me to hope at last that justice, although tardy and incomplete, will be done you. I no longer live, monsieur, except for my friends; you must permit me to include yourself in the number of those who are still left to me.

"I remain, monsieur, with as much sincerity as admiration,

"Your most devoted servant[671],

"CHATEAUBRIAND."

[Sidenote: Augustin Thierry.]

TO MADAME RÉCAMIER

"ROME, _Saturday_, 8 _November_ 1832.

"M. de La Ferronnays informs me of the surrender of Varna[672], which I knew. I believe that I once told you that the whole question seemed to me to lie in the fall of that place, and that the Grand Turk would not dream of peace until the Russians had done what they did not do in their earlier wars. Our newspapers have been wretchedly Turcophile these last times. How can they ever have been able to forget the noble cause of Greece and to fall into admiration before the barbarians who spread slavery and pestilence over the country of great men and the fairest portion of Europe? That is what we are, we French: a trifle of personal discontent makes us forget our principles and the most generous sentiments. The Turks, when beaten, will perhaps arouse some pity in me; the Turks victorious would fill me with horror.

"So my friend M. de La Ferronnays remains in power. I flatter myself that my determination to follow him has got rid of the competitors for his office. But, after all, I shall have to leave this; I now long only to return to my solitude and to quit the career of politics. I thirst for independence in my last years. New generations have arisen, they will find the public liberty established for which I have fought so hard: let them then lay hold of, but let them not misuse my inheritance, and let me go to die in peace near you.

"I went two days ago to walk in the grounds of the Villa Panfili: what a beautiful solitude!"

"ROME, _Saturday_, 15 _November._

"There has been a first ball at Torlonia's[673]. I met all the English on earth there; I thought myself still Ambassador in London. The Englishwomen appear to me to be _figurantes_ who are engaged to dance in the winter in Paris, Milan, Rome, Naples, and who return to London in the spring, when their engagements have expired. The hoppings on the ruins of the Capitol, the uniform manners which 'great' society puts on everywhere are very strange things: if even I had the resource of escape into the deserts of Rome!

"What is really deplorable here, what clashes with the nature of the place is that multitude of insipid Englishwomen and frivolous dandies who, holding each other linked by the arm, as the bats do by the wing, parade their eccentricity, their boredom and their insolence at your receptions, and make themselves at home in your house as at an inn. This vagrant and swaggering Great Britain makes for your seats at public solemnities, and boxes with you to turn you out of them: all day long it hastily swallows pictures and ruins and, in the evening, it comes to swallow cakes and ices at your parties, feeling that it confers a great honour upon you in doing so. I do not know how an ambassador can endure those unmannerly guests, nor why he does not show them his door."

[Sidenote: My Memorandum on the East.]

I have spoken in the _Congrès de Vérone_ of the existence of my Memorandum on Eastern Affairs. When I sent it, in 1828, to M. le Comte de La Ferronnays, then Minister for Foreign Affairs, the world was not what it is: in France, the Legitimacy existed; in Russia, Poland had not perished; Spain was still Bourbon; England had not yet the honour of protecting us. Many things, therefore, have become old in this Memorandum: to-day, my foreign policy would, in many respects, be different; twelve years have altered diplomatic relations, but the basis of the truths has remained the same. I have inserted this Memorandum in its entirety in order once more to revenge the Restoration for the absurd reproaches which continue to be obstinately addressed to it, in spite of the evidence of facts. The Restoration, so soon as it had chosen its ministers from among its friends, never ceased to occupy itself with the independence and honour of France: it protested against the Treaties of Vienna; it demanded protective frontiers, not for the vain-glory of pushing itself to the banks of the Rhine, but to ensure its safety; it laughed when they talked to it of the equilibrium of Europe, an equilibrium so unjustly broken where it was concerned: that was why it first wished to cover itself on the south, because it had pleased the others to disarm it on the north. At Navarino, it recovered a navy and the liberty of Greece; the Eastern Question did not take it unawares.

I have kept three opinions on the East from the time at which I wrote that Memorandum:

First, if Turkey in Europe is to be broken up, we must have a share in that distribution in the shape of an increase of territory on our frontiers and the ownership of some military point in the Archipelago. To compare the partition of Turkey with the partition of Poland is an absurdity.

Secondly, to regard Turkey, as it was during the reign of Francis I., as a useful power to our policy, is to do away with three centuries of history.

Thirdly, to pretend to civilize Turkey by giving her steamboats and railways, by disciplining her armies, by teaching her to work her fleets, is not to extend civilization to the East, but to introduce barbarism into the West. Ibrahims to come would be able to carry back the future to the time of Charles the Hammer or to the time of the Siege of Vienna, when Europe was saved by that heroic Poland on whom weighs the ingratitude of kings.

I must remark that I was the only one, with Benjamin Constant, to point out the improvidence of the Christian governments: a people whose social order is based upon slavery and polygamy is a people that must be sent back to the steppes of the Mongols.

In the last result, Turkey in Europe, become a vassal of Russia by virtue of the treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi[674], no longer exists: if the question is to be decided at once, which I doubt, it would perhaps be better that an independent empire should have its seat in Constantinople and form Greece into a whole. Is that possible? I do not know. As for Mehemet Ali[675], the relentless tax-gatherer and custom-house officer, Egypt, in so far as French interests are concerned, is better guarded by him than she would be by the English.

But here am I exerting myself to demonstrate the honour of the Restoration: why, who troubles himself about what it has done, who, above all, will trouble himself about it some years hence? It would be as well worth my while to become excited over the interests of Tyre and Ecbatana: that past world is gone, never to return. After Alexander, the Roman power commenced; after Cæsar, Christianity changed the world; after Charlemagne, the feudal night gave birth to a new society; after Napoleon, nothing: we see no empire come, nor religion, nor barbarians. Civilization has risen to its highest level, but it is a material civilization, an unfruitful civilization, which can produce nothing, since life can be given only by moral means; we can arrive at the creation of peoples only by the roads of Heaven: railways will lead us only more swiftly to the abyss.

You now have the prolegomena which seemed to me necessary for the understanding of the Memorandum which follows, and which is also to be found at the Foreign Office.

[Sidenote: To M. de La Ferronnays.]

LETTER TO M. LE COMTE DE LA FERRONAYS

"ROME, 30 _November_ 1828.

"In your private letter of the 10th of November, my noble friend, you said:

"'I send you a brief summary of our political situation, and you will be kind enough to let me, in return, have your ideas, which are always so useful to know in matters of this sort.'

"Your friendship, noble count, judges me too indulgently; I do not in the least believe that I shall be enlightening you by sending you the Memorandum annexed: I merely obey you."

MEMORANDUM