A young married man of Lyons fell in love with a young married woman. They met secretly, adored each other, and agreed to fly together—to put the seas between themselves and their families. But there was a slight difficulty in the way. They had very little money for a long journey, and they wanted to be far, far away—in America for choice. Then the idea came to the man that they would take their small capital of a few hundred francs and go to Monte Carlo, and make it into a fortune—a fortune which would enable them to live in peace and plenty on a far-off shore. So it came that one day, with a small box and a portmanteau, the fugitives arrived at Monte Carlo, and put up in this little hotel, where for eight francs a day you can have bed and board.
They had only a few hundred francs with them. In the letter which they have left behind they explained that from the first their arrangements were complete. They foresaw the possibilities of the situation. They would play until they had won enough to go to America, or they would lose all. And if they lost all they would die together, and give their friends no further trouble about them.
They were a few days only in Monte Carlo. They risked their louis only a few at a time, and they spent the remainder of the days and evenings in strolling about the romantic glades and quiet pathways of the beautiful gardens, whispering together of love, and looking into each other’s eyes.
The end came quickly. One evening they went up in the soft moonlight to the fairy land of MonteCarlo. They entered the Casino. They had come to their last few golden coins. One by one the croupier’s remorseless rake swept them away, and then the lovers went out of the hot, crowded rooms, out from the glare of the chandeliers and the swinging lamps, into the tender moonlight again. Down ‘The Staircase of Fortune’ arm-in-arm they went, along the glorious marble terraces that look upon the sea, on to where at the foot of the great rock on which Monaco stands there lies the Condamine. It was their last walk together. The lovers were going home to die.
That night, in some way which I was unable to ascertain, the guilty and ruined man and woman obtained some charcoal and got it into their bedroom. They then closed the windows and doors, and prepared for death. They wrote a letter—a letter which an official assured me was so touching that, as he read it in the room where they lay dead, the tears ran down his cheeks. Then the girl—she was but a girl—dressed herself in snowy white, and placed in her breast a sweet bouquet of violets. Then the charcoal was lighted, and the lovers laid themselves out for death, side by side, and passed dreamily into sleep, from sleep to death—and from death to judgment.
These are the facts of ‘The Romantic Suicide at Monte Carlo.’ It is not a moral story; it is not a new story. I have told it simply as it happened.
One morning I went over to breakfast with a friend of mine at Roquebrune, a picturesque point near Monte Carlo. The proprietor showed me over his villa and his grounds. While we were in the back garden a Frenchman, who rented a villa in the neighbourhood, came in, in a towering rage, to complain of my friend’s cat trespassing on his grounds. After a heated discussion, the Frenchman exclaimedangrily, ‘Very well, sir, I shall lodge my complaint with the mayor. Where is the mayor?’ My friend’s gardener, who was busy digging up new potatoes, suddenly looked up, and, raising his battered hat, exclaimed with dignity, ‘M’sieu, je suis le Maire de Roquebrune.’ Tableau and curtain.
FromMonte Carlo to Genoa by rail in a hurricane doesn’t sound anything very tremendous, unless you happen to know that the rail runs for almost the entire distance at the extreme foot of the Maritime Alps, on the uttermost verge of the coast; so close, in fact, to the sea, that in many places if you dropped your hat out of the window it would fall into the ocean. To walk along the line would turn many people unaccustomed to exercise upon the tight-rope giddy, for, as well as running along the beach, it occasionally takes the outside edge of precipices, against which the deep waters of the Mediterranean are dashing themselves in their mad fury at not being able to get at the train and swallow it up.
Under ordinary circumstances the journey, which takes ten hours by the ‘omnibus’ train, is romantic. Taken as we took it, with a hurricane spending its full force on the coast, it was absolutely thrilling. Over and over again our trim little engine, as it toiled up cliffs and crept cautiously over massive rocks, was nearly blown to a full stop, and the way in which the whole train rocked from side to side made several of the passengers sea-sick. Our guard told us that he had never made such a journey in all his experience; and, after we had left the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, and had passed San Remo,it began to look as though we should have to let discretion be the better part of valour, and pull up until the storm, which came rushing down the mountains and lashing the sea to fury, had abated. Over and over again the seas dashed up, and flung a great volume of water and small pebbles against the carriage windows. It was a question whether further on the sea would not have made the line unsafe, or perhaps washed it away altogether. But at every station we got the signal that it was all right at present, and that we could come on; and so on we went, recompensed for all our doubts and delays by the grand sight which the storm-swept coast and seething sea presented to our anxious and yet delighted gaze.
It was nearly eleven o’clock at night when we reached Genoa. We had taken eleven hours to perform a journey of about 112 miles, and all that time we had had nothing to eat. There was no buffet all along the line after Ventimiglia until we reached Savona, and then it was past nine o’clock. We grew so desperately hungry about six o’clock that when the train stopped for a few minutes we rushed out into the rain and the hurricane and requisitioned supplies of a small wine-shed by the roadside. All we could get was some dry bread, and some mysterious slices of something, which we were assured was ‘carne,’ or meat. The word isn’t appetizing, and, hungry as we were, we couldn’t tackle the food. It was so strongly impregnated with garlic that after we had given it to a dog our carriage retained the odour, and for days afterwards our clothes reeked of the pungent esculent. In despair we fell back upon the dry bread, and when we had eaten that we tried to remember what people did on rafts, and we unpacked our portmanteaus and looked out our boots, and wondered whether patent leather orordinary walking boots would be the easier of digestion. So ravenous did we become that we sent on a telegram from one of the stations to the hotel at Genoa ordering beefsteaks to be ready for us the instant we arrived, and when at midnight the omnibus deposited us at the Grand Hotel we didn’t stop to wash or take off our overcoats or look at our rooms, but rushed into thesalle-à-mangerand fell on our knees to the head waiter and begged that, ready or not, our beefsteaks ordered by telegram might be brought to us; and when they came we fell upon them with savage glee and short, sharp cries of joy, and the manager and the waiters and the porters came crowding in to watch the extraordinary spectacle. I think they fancied we were mad or cannibals, or that we had escaped from a penal settlement and had not tasted food for months.
Genova la Superba, Genoa the Proud, has indeed something to be proud of. She is proud of her port, of her people, of her palaces, and of her prosperity. Her people, high and low, rich and poor, are brave, independent, and public spirited, and her nobility stands at the head of the nobility of the world for deeds of good citizenship and benevolence. From the days of Christopher Columbus, who, when Genoa was stricken with the plague, wrote to his bankers to give half his fortune to the poor, to the present year of grace, when the Duchess Ferrari-Galliera spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on colleges and hospitals and model dwellings for the poor, the rich and the titled of Genoa have been world-famous for their deeds of noble charity.
Genoa itself is a stately city; seen from the sea, with its villa and palace-crowned amphitheatre of hills, it is superb. It has whole streets of marble palaces, full of wonders for the eye of the connoisseur to feast upon; and beyond its ancient grandeurs andits modern magnificences, its heart pulses with the vigorous, healthy blood of modern progress and prosperity.
Genoa delighted me from the moment I set my foot in it and began to take its measure. I liked its busy port, with thousands of bronzed, red-bonneted porters hard at work upon the huge quays, crowded with merchandise. I liked its blue houses and its pink houses, its yellow and green houses, and its houses painted all over with pictures of lovely ladies. I liked the Municipal Palace, in which I was shown Paganini’s very own fiddle, and several letters written by Christopher Columbus with his very own hand, and I liked its Campo Santo, or cemetery, which is one of the wonders of Italy.
Imagine a glorious garden rising in terraces—a garden all aglow with red and white roses and fragrant with blossom—imagine this garden surrounded with noble open galleries lined with magnificent white marble monuments, and all shut in by great sunny green hills, which stand around it like sentinels guarding the silent and sacred camp of the dead. Imagine all this, then put above the roses and the blossoms and the fragrant trees, and the yellow immortelles and the green wreaths and the glorious marble statuary, a blue sky and a bright sun, and you have a faint idea of ‘Genoa’s Holy Field.’
But you cannot imagine the monuments and the memorial statuary. You must see them to understand them, because they are so utterly unlike anything we have in our cold, prosaic land. In long marble galleries, open to the air and the sun, the monuments at first give the cemetery the appearance of an art exhibition. You fancy you have wandered into a sculpture gallery by mistake; but the wreaths of flowers with broad silk sashes attached, the swinging lamps, and the memorial tablets undeceive you.Each monument has, as it were, an arch of the gallery to itself, and is placed against the back wall. The figures are rarely allegorical. A man in his habit as he lived stands life-size in white marble above his own tomb. A little girl in a short frock, with her lap full of flowers, seems dancing on the column that records her death. Over another beautiful tomb is a family group, life-size. The father is dying. He lies on his deathbed, and the sculptor has realized every detail of drapery. The wife kneels by the bedside, some of her daughters supporting her. The old mother sits in an easy-chair, her eyes raised to heaven, her lips seeming almost to move in prayer. On the other side of the bed the eldest son stands up and supports one of the daughters, who has utterly broken down. It is a marvellous piece of work. It is the ‘Last Adieu’ realized in marble. It is naturalism and it is art. It is realistic, and so perfect in detail that you would recognise any of that group of mourners if you met them in the street.
One turns from the group, and near it is a dear old lady standing alone above her own tomb. She is wrinkled, and wears a big cap and a woollen shawl over her shoulders. No kindred are near her, but she is sincerely mourned, for she was the friend of the poor. In her hand she holds the bread she was in the habit of distributing to them. She is a dear old-fashioned old soul—a typical English ‘granny’ of the Christmas number—and her puckered, smiling face seems to make one at home in the cemetery directly.
Some of the groups are more imaginative. A magnificent vault is faced with a black-and-gold gate. On the steps leading to it a lad and his sister kneel and gaze heavenward. They are watching their mother being carried up into heaven by the angels. The whole scene is reproduced in sculpture, and soexquisitely is it done that the dead woman and the angels actually seem to be floating upward towards the skies.
Over another tomb, where a husband and wife lie buried together, this old couple sit in two armchairs, holding each the other’s hand. On another a man lies dead on his bed, and the young wife reverently raises the sheet and gazes for the last time upon his face. Over another tomb is the statue of the man who lies within. On the steps of the tomb stands his wife, and she holds their little girl in her arms, and lifts her up as though to kiss the dead papa. The door of another vault is represented as half open. The husband lies dead inside. The wife knocks at the door and listens for her dear one’s voice to call her in.
There are hundreds and hundreds of these beautiful groups in the Campo Santo. What makes them the more extraordinary to the English traveller is that the living and the dead are all habited in modern everyday costume, and no detail is spared to make the groups and the single figures triumphs of realism. One remarkable piece of sculpture I have omitted to mention. It is over the tomb of a beautiful Italian lady who died a short time ago. Her bed is represented with a perfection of detail. The lace on the pillows is perfect. The lady is dead, but the angel has come to fetch her. The angel takes the dead lady’s hand, and the lady gets out of bed to go with the angel to heaven. This is the moment depicted by the sculptor. The lady sits on the edge of the bed, and the angel points upwards in the direction they are to travel together.
All this is very beautiful, but its intense realism may jar on some. It did on me after a time. I felt that something of the sublimity of death was taken away in the process, and I turned with a little sigh of relief to some of the humbler graves which dottedthe sunny garden of fragrant roses that lay so bright and beautiful under the blue Italian sky.
Walking in the streets of Genoa one afternoon I met a nice-looking, stout, middle-aged lady in the most wonderful bonnet I ever saw in my life. I was so attracted by the bonnet, which was of the Leviathan order, that I did not notice anything else at first, but presently I saw that she was bowing in answer to many salutes. Then I knew she was a public celebrity, and I inquired who she was. ‘That,’ said my companion, a Genoese, ‘is the daughter of Garibaldi!’
The daughter of Garibaldi is a great favourite in Genoa. She has married a gentleman in the army, but people don’t trouble to remember his name. He is always spoken of as the gentleman who is the husband of the daughter of Garibaldi.
The daughter of Garibaldi is the proud and happy mother of twelve sons. If they are as good as their grandfather, the lady deserves well of her country.
On the same afternoon that I met the daughter of Garibaldi I also met an old gray-haired gentleman and lady trotting quietly along the Via Roma. My Genoese friend pointed them out to me, and told me their story. Twenty years ago a rich Englishman and his wife came to Italy with a foreign courier. In Genoa the gentleman was taken ill and died. He was buried in the town, and his wife stayed on at the hotel. After a time she married the courier, and from that day to this they have lived in Genoa—going in the summer to a villa on the Lake of Como which they purchased. Neither has ever set foot in England for twenty years.
I saw many things in Genoa which most people see, and which are doubtless fully described in the guide-books; but I saw something also of which the guide-books make no mention. I have mentionedthe great public spirit of the Genoese nobility. There is in Genoa a beautiful building on the heights overlooking the sea, which is called the Hotel of the Poor. This was founded and endowed by a Genoese marquis. Here respectable workmen, when they are past work, can come and end their days in perfect peace. Another nobleman, when it was proposed to move the University to Padua for lack of room, instantly gave up his magnificent palace to the town, saying, ‘This is henceforward your University.’ But all deeds of this sort are put into the shade by the princely charities of the Duke and Duchess of Ferrari-Galliera. The Duke, shortly before his death, gave one million pounds sterling towards the building of the new port. The Duchess, continuing his good work, has founded noble charities which are almost unique of their kind. One of them has such direct bearing on the great question of the day—the housing of the poor—that I cannot resist the temptation to give the reader a few particulars.
First let me say that the Ferrari-Galliera fortune is estimated at ten million pounds, and then you will understand how the Opera Pia, or pious works of this noble family, are carried out on such a gigantic scale. I had been told a great deal in Genoa about the Duchess’s scheme for housing the working classes in model lodging-houses, and so, obtaining proper credentials, I called upon the Duchess’s agent, and he most courteously had me personally conducted over the new working class dwellings. Built in blocks, somewhat on the Peabody system, these dwellings are perfect in every detail. The tenant must be a genuine working man, of good character. In the Duchess’s model lodging-house, for the accommodation of himself and family, he has five rooms—five lofty, big rooms: a sitting-room, three bedrooms, and a kitchen, fitted up with a capitalrange and every requisite. Besides these there are cupboard room and a larder. These rooms have all tiled floors, and the walls are painted or whitewashed. The rent iseight francs a month, and this includes all necessary repairs, which are done by a staff of workmen attached to the central office. Every month every room is inspected, and the slightest damage instantly repaired.
My visit to the dwellings was quite unexpected. I drove straight from the office to one of the blocks, and took the inhabitants unawares, so that what I saw must be taken as a fair specimen of the general condition of the tenements. I knocked at a door, was admitted, and made my inspection, much to the astonishment of the children, who wondered why the ‘strange man’ should come prying into their kitchen and walking into their bedrooms. I inspected four blocks, and took a suite on each floor, and everywhere I found the most perfect cleanliness and the greatest comfort. The women were mostly the wives of working men earning from twenty to twenty-five francs a week, but their homes were perfect pictures of neatness and order. The floors were swept and garnished, and the kitchens were little models of tidiness. One good soul was horrified when I asked to see the bedroom. The bed wasn’t made, she explained, and she was afraid I should think she was a careless housewife. As I went over these homes of the Genoese working classes, I could not help thinking of some that I knew at home. What would some hard-working Englishmen and their wives give to get such ‘model lodgings’ as these, and how gladly would they pay double and treble the rent that the lucky Genoese pay for such accommodation!
As I came out of the block I had a look round the big courtyard in the centre. At one end I found alarge public washhouse; at the other end baths fitted up for the inhabitants, and also on the premises I found for their accommodation a bakehouse, in which the frugal wives who make their own bread have it baked free of charge. And what could you wish for more?
The Duchess has founded also, for the education of the poor children of Genoa, a free college. To all who attend it breakfast is given, and also a mid-day meal. Each boy is for one year ‘under observation.’ If his conduct is good, he has a right to stay on and receive a liberal education. If his conduct is bad, he is struck off the school list. A poor boy who is industrious and shows any talent can even choose a profession, and be specially educated free for that profession until the age of seventeen. Young Genoa has certainly a chance to distinguish itself in the future.
But the Duchess’s crowning work is the grandest of all her charities. She has already built and endowed two hospitals—one for children and one for incurables; the third, which was to be a general hospital, was not yet opened, but by the courtesy of the Duchess’s agent I was conducted over the whole building and everything was explained to me. As the hospital is undoubtedly one of the finest and most complete in the world, I must tell you something about it.
But first let me tell you the sad story which is bound up for ever with it—a story which the Duchess herself has handed down to posterity by having it inscribed upon a marble tablet in the grand entrance-hall. This tablet states that the building of the hospital has been delayed for four years, ‘owing to the treachery of my agent. General So-and-So.’ The Duchess names her treacherous agent, who was her own cousin, and so brands him for all time tocome. His treachery was this: He decamped with £800,000, the money paid to his credit by the Duchess for the building of the hospital. Poor old gentleman! He is eighty years of age now, and he is said to have hidden himself from the world in a monastery, there to expiate his fault. They say that the money did him no good—that he is poor. That he took it to save from shame the son he idolized—the son who was leading a life of extravagance, and who had involved himself in such a way that the poor old General had to use the Duchess’s money to save him. Whatever the truth may be, the General used the money, and his treachery is ‘writ large’ upon the walls of the magnificent hospital, the building of which his unhappy act delayed for four long years.
The hospital itself stands in a magnificent position above the sea, and is the perfection of every modern principle. It is so perfect and so full of marvellous appliances and inventions that one feels, in walking about it, that it is one of Jules Verne’s ideas. The glorious halls and corridors, the massive marble pillars, the splendid marble staircases, indicate wealth, but the perfection of the sanitary and scientific arrangements tells of long years of anxious thought and study and research. So perfectly is this marvellous hospital built that, in the event of plague or cholera breaking out to such an extent as to infect the building, the whole of the inside of the hospital can be removed and another hospital will still be left standing as complete as the other. To accomplish this the hospital is being built double, with a space between the walls.
It would not interest the general reader for me to go into technical details of the wonderful arrangements for the patients, and the magnificent system of baths built on the premises, which includes everykind and variety; but the general reader will understand the value of a tramway system over the entire basement for the conveyance of stores, linen, provision stores, officials, patients, etc.; and the advantage of pure air conveyed straight from the adjacent mountains through underground tubes, and distributed all over the building. This palatial hospital looks on to the sea and on to the mountains, and, in order to isolate it and give the inmates gardens and terraces and glorious views, the Duchess has purchased a whole street of houses in the neighbourhood and demolished them, that nothing shall detract from the perfect sanitation of her glorious gift to the city of Genoa.
Genova la Superba! Genoa the Proud! Proud indeed, and with good reason, with such a city, such citizens, and such nobles! In what other town in Europe can you find, as here, a whole street of palaces given up by their owners to the people?
Sometime before I left London, while indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, I was much amused and instructed by the narrative of travel of a distinguishedconfrèrewho had set out in search of sunshine. The writer’s name is a household word in England, and in Italy it is also a ‘household word’ in the most literal manner possible, for you find a ‘Sala’ in nearly every house. I don’t remember whether the ‘Prince of Specials’ found all the sunshine he wanted, but if he did not he had better come out to Florence at once with the biggest bag he can get into the train.
I am writing at the present moment in a room looking on to the Lung’ Arno, and the sunshine is overpowering. In order to write with a slight amount of cool-headedness I have to sit in a bath and to work with an umbrella over me, which is damped at short intervals. For the past week it has been the same—a fierce, blazing, beautiful sunshine, in which you could cook a mutton-chop by holding it out of the window on the end of your walking-stick for ten minutes.
Most of the Italian cities boast of special distinctions. Just as we say ‘Genoa la Superba,’ so Florence has been dubbed ‘Firenze la Gentile,’ ‘Florence the Refined.’
Florence is beautiful to the tourist in search of art, but it is apt to grow monotonous to staid and sober citizens who do not care to risk rheumatics for life in order to see an altar-piece, or to take a certain chill as the price of gazing at the real original Venus de Medici in the icy passages known as the Uffizi. True, that the streets are full of grand and solemn old palaces that carry the mind back through the centuries; true, that every hole and corner is rich with art, but on the Philistine all this palls after a time. I can understand how classical and cultured minds can spend day after day lost in admiration before virgins and martyrs who bear the closest resemblance to each other, and I quite appreciate the rapture with which they gaze at statues which, when all is said and done, are but men and women imitated and undraped. I can worship with the best of them, say, six pictures and six statues per diem, but galleries I cannot endure, and I fear I never shall. As one jam-tart is pleasant to the tooth, and twenty produce nausea, so is one good picture pleasant to the eye, and two hundred are apt to give one headache.
Now, if you flee from galleries and churches, there is little left you in Florence town but the side of the Arno. This is the one place where all day long the sun shines out in splendour, and you can saunter and dream, and ask yourself with the Misses Leamar, ‘Why is the world so gay to-day?’ You turn away from the Arno at your peril. To enter any side street is, to an Englishman, dangerous in the extreme. The long, narrow streets shut out all sun and all light, and you pass into them from the Lung’ Arno as from the kitchen fire to the ice well. I am tired of the Lung’ Arno. I have worn the brim of my hat threadbare bowing to the thousand Florentine princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, who smile atme in the Cascine—the Hyde Park of Florence—and I am going to walk right away from the palaces, the churches, and the galleries, right away over the Arno to the high hills I can see shining in the sunlight far away. Of Art I am tired; a little Nature will do me good. I tell the people in my hotel I want a good ten-mile spin—where had I better go? The Porter crosses himself, and the Director murmurs the name of his patron saint. Ho! but here is a mad Englishman, who, having loose lire in his pocket, wants to walk ten miles. They point me out a way, however, begging me to provide myself with cognac, in case I fall by the road, and I go. I am sure the Director is debating whether he shall have a hot bath, a doctor, and some leeches ready for my return.
Once outside the hotel, the torture of my life in Florence begins. There is a carriage-stand opposite the door, and the moment I show my nose every man wildly whips his horse up, and drives full gallop at me. They are all sure that I want acarrozza. I endeavour to evade them, but they drive round and round me in a circle until I look like the ring-master at Astley’s directing the performance of ‘the flying charioteers.’ At last I make a wild dash between two vehicles and rush up the street. But the enemy is not so easily defeated. The drivers dash after me up the Lung’ Arno, and follow me over the bridge. The pride of the Florentine flymen is stung to the quick. An Inglese has escaped them. The watchword passes, and at every rank we come to the flymen there lash their horses and join in the pursuit. Before I have gone a quarter of a mile there are nearly one hundred flys pursuing me. Panting and breathless, I still urge on my wild career. The honour of England is at stake. In this unequal conflict I must conquer or die, for, asa patriot, the reputation of my countrymen for obstinacy is dear to me. Heedless of my course, I dash down narrow streets, through ancient gateways, and round old squares, and at last I reach the city walls. The Porta Romana is passed, and I am out in the suburbs. The flymen waver. It is all uphill now, and their horses—poor beasts!—are blown and leg-weary. One by one they turn round, and drive slowly back to the city. For one day, at least, I am safe from the flymen of Florence.
I walk my miles on ever-rising ground till all the fertile valley lies at my feet. I wind round and round till I reach the great height whereon stands Galileo’s observatory and the villa in which, under the cruel eyes of the Inquisition, he spent his last years. From this spot the view is worth a pilgrimage that should have lasted a lifetime instead of two hours. All the city of Florence, the distant Apennines (their crests all crowned with snow), the blue waters of the Arno lie before me. I breathe the pure, bracing air, I feel the warm sunshine on my face, and the weight of my years is lifted from me. Give me a green hill, a blue sky, and a square mile of God’s sunshine, and you may have all the pictures and all the statues in all the whole wide world.
I seem to have a speciality for coming upon horrors. In Florence the first night I go out, in a quiet, dark, back street, a gentleman walking ahead of me suddenly reels and falls dead from an apoplectic stroke. I should not allude to the circumstance but that it brought before me a quaint and solemn phase of Italian religious life. The poor man was carried into a confectioner’s shop and a messenger despatched to the Misericordia—the establishment of the Brothers of the Misericordia, a curious order, which renders the last offices to the dead. Presently there arrived a man with a torch, and, following him, half a dozen of the brothers, clothed from head to foot in a black garb and a hood and mask. Nothing is visible of them but their eyes, their features being completely concealed by the masks and hoods which cover the head and face. Weird and solemn beyond description the brothers look in the moonlight in this strange garb, and when presently they came out, bearing the dead in an open bier, and formed in procession, headed by the torch, and slowly moved away into the shadows of the dark, narrow, winding streets, I shuddered, and fancied myself back in the Middle Ages.
The history of the order is curious and interesting. It was formed during the great plague, when people died faster than professional undertakers could bury them. A body of gentlemen then undertook the task, concealing their features while plying their solemn labour, in order that they might not be recognised and shunned by the Italians, who have a great horror of death and all that appertains to it. To this day the order remains a secret one, and the outside world does not know who the masked men are who tend the dying and the dead. The greatest and the smallest belong to it, and the prince and the artisan rub shoulders in it. It is often a refuge for wealthy men who have met with great disappointments, and of talented men whose careers have been blighted, and who want something to do to keep them from nursing their grief and their wrongs.
While in Florence I saw most of the minor theatres. ‘Stenterello,’ the Florentine Punch, has the big part in all the pieces at the people’s theatre, and is a unique specimen of theatrical art. In order to appreciate him thoroughly, I have sat out several evenings’ amusement under rather distressing circumstances. When you pay sixpence to go into atheatre, and sixpence more for aposto distintoor reserved seat, you must not grumble if your neighbours are not of thehaute noblesse. But themanteaux noirsin which the Italian common people wrap themselves during the winter are, when worn with Florentine thrift for, say, thirty years, apt to get unpleasant, and the wearers have besides unpleasant little ways, and are curiously afflicted, and—— But I will not go into details. I have endured much by passing my evenings in the popular parts of popular theatres—I mean the theatres patronized by the masses—but I have gained an experience which ought to be valuable. I shrink at nothing where my favourite study—the people—is concerned.
How shocking—isn’t it?—to waste one’s time studying the people of to-day—living, breathing flesh and blood: tragedy, comedy, and farce all packed together under a ridiculous modern costume—while there lies all around one a whole population of stone and marble and painted ladies and gentlemen, all classically draped or equally classically undraped, and not one of them less than a thousand years old at least! I cannot help preferring the living flesh to the dead marble, the country to the canvas, and all that is wicked and philistine in me rises in rebellion as I peruse the guide-books and catalogues and find nothing but galleries and churches considered worthy of a tourist’s observation. I am not blind to the beautiful in art, I hope. A modern picture gives me often the greatest of pleasure, and so, for the matter of that, does an old one if it has a story to tell, and tells it well; if out of the painted eyes there looks forth a human soul, if in the grouped figures there is some suggestion of human feeling. But the things which are as a red rag to a bull to me are the Virgins and Children, the Holy Families, the saints, the martyrs, the portraits of painters’ mistresses, labelled now a heathen goddess and now a Catholic saint. For tourists to spend as they do day after day contemplating these things, worrying away at a note-book with a pencil, and then chevying off to spend more hours staring at churches and cathedrals and listening to the droned-out lies of the cicerone, while a people as interesting in their manners and customs as any in the wide world live and move around them, under their very eyes, despised, unstudied, and unnoticed, is to me incomprehensible.
At all the theatres, save those where grand opera is given, everything—tragedy, comedy, and farce—is ‘con Stenterello.’ Punch is dressed always the same, no matter what the period of the play may be. He is the low comedy man, and has all the funny lines, but at times he utters noble sentiments, and becomes pathetic over the sorrows of the heroine, who is habitually protected by him.
No matter how tragic or pathetic the situation, Stenterello, with his queer costume and painted face, has a share in it. The bereaved wife wails out to Punch her sorrow for the dear departed, the betrayed maiden reveals to him the name of the villain at whose hands she claims retribution. The Medicis of old cannot plot and plan without Stenterello, the masher of to-day has Stenterello as his companion when he goes a-wooing, and after a round of the Florentine playhouses I was considerably astonished to find that ‘Othello’ was played at the Teatro Tommaso Salvini without a Stenterello. I quite expected to see him turn up as the devoted friend of Desdemona, or as the virtuous foiler of the wicked schemes of Iago.
Stenterello is literally worshipped by the Florentines. In every play he talks in the Florentine dialect—that is to say, in thepatoisof the people.
The late King Victor Emmanuel used to come in the good old days to the little theatres, and roar as loudly as anyone at Punch’s wheezes, and one evening expressed his delight at the performance by making a knight there and then of the Stenterello who had given him so much amusement. The history of these Punches would make a long magazine article. They are classical in Italy. Stenterello is indigenous to Tuscany. Other provinces have their Punch, who appears in nearly all the plays, but in a different garb. In Naples it is Pulcinella who is the omnipresent comic man. Pulcinella is dressed in a loose white costume, and wears a black domino, with a beak to it—a property which deprives the actor most effectually of the aid of facial expression. But Italian actors and pantomimists do not need their faces to tell a story. They use their hands most marvellously, and will tell a whole five-act drama with gesture alone. In one little theatre the other evening I saw amimehold an audience spell-bound for fully ten minutes while she described a tragedy, and showed how it was to be revenged, without uttering a single word.
At the bulk of the Italian theatres you can enter by simply paying fifty centimes or a franc for theingresso. This entitles you to stand in the large vacant space at the back of the stalls, which takes the place of our pit. If you want a numbered seat or a box, of course you pay extra for it. Once having paid youringresso, you can go to all parts of the house where there is room to stand and see. If you have friends in a box, you walk in and sit with them, as each box is sold as a whole, and is never split up into seats. The Italian theatre consists entirely of stalls and private boxes and ‘standing room.’
At many of the theatres smoking is allowed allover the house during the performance. Even the musicians smoke their cigars during theentr’acte, and lay the half-finished ends on their music-stands when the conductor waves his bâton.
To see the reckless manner in which matches are struck and flung about would strike terror to the panic-monger’s heart were it not for the fact that the houses, being built mostly of stone and marble, are not very inflammable. The audience is always a wonderful study. The Italians fling their hearts into the scene. The drama or farce is to them no play, but a reality. They hoot the villain, they encourage the hero with reassuring words, they cap Stenterello’s jokes with original ones of their own, and they keep up a running fire of comment on the story as it develops. They are as loud in their disapproval as they are in their commendation. They will hoot a bad actor or singer off the stage mercilessly, and if the moral of a play or its dénouement does not interest them they will howl with rage till the curtain falls.
One remarkable feature of the popular playhouses is the prompter. This gentleman sits in the centre of the stage, covered over with a green wooden hood. I had a box one night on the stage, and I heard the prompter deliberately read the whole play to the company a line in advance of each actor, who repeated it like a schoolboy. The turn of each actor to take up the text was indicated to him by the prompter’s finger pointing at him. This continuous prompting is, of course, only necessary in minor theatres, where the bill is changed almost nightly, and the actors have little time for study.
I was seriously thinking of buying a title while I was in Florence. Without a coronet one is so insignificant in Italy. I counted one hundred and twenty houses in a straight line in Florence, and onlyeight gates were without a coronet. Go over to the ‘Surrey side’ of the Arno, and it is the same thing. Every ‘slum’ has a dozen palaces, and every palace has a coronet. Prying about, after the manner of my species, in out-of-the-way holes and corners, I became acquainted with the fact that the nobility nearly all sell their own oil and wine. Near the gateway of the palaces there is generally a little hole just large enough to pass a bottle through. Over this is written, in small letters, ‘Cantina,’ and just by the side is hung a board with a tariff of the price of ‘our wine.’
Dukes, marquises, and earls, they all retain the produce of their vineyards and farms. You can buy a bottle of the ordinary for a franc, and my lord’s servant will hand it you with a smile, and take your coin with a condescending ‘Grazie.’ It is very quaint to see a workman come along, stop at a palace about three times the size of Newgate, and suddenly bob his head in—apparently through the stone wall—and presently bob back again with a bottle in his hand.
I was determined to study this phase of noble life myself; so I knocked at the hole in the wall of one of the most magnificent palaces of Florence, and when the little slide was opened I bobbed in my head and asked for a bottle of gingerbeer. ‘Gingebre?’ said the man inside. ‘I do not think that is a wine of our vineyard.’ ‘Oh yes, it is,’ I said. ‘I met an English Duke at the Palazzo Corsini yesterday, and he told me I should get a bottle of gingerbeer here.’ ‘Ah!’ said the ancient servitor, ‘then I will ask the Marquis, my master.’ He was absent for a few minutes, and presently returned with the Marquis, an exquisitely polite old gentleman of the good old school. ‘I fear, illustrious stranger, you have made a mistake. I know not the name of “gingerbeer” asa wine of the country. Certainly I grow it not myself.’ I apologized profusely, and withdrew my head from the aperture just in time to allow an old lady who was waiting, to bob hers in, and ask for two soldis’ worth of the Marquis’s best olive-oil, which she would take in the coffee-cup she held in her hand. And she took it.
I came, I saw, and I—was conquered. For once I prefer the old to the new, and Rome has exorcised the evil spirit that has taken up its residence within me. I came into Rome from Florence on a day that would have passed without attracting attention in Camden Town, Nunhead, or even the Seven Dials. The rain was pouring in torrents, the streets were rivers, and in the filthy byways, much affected by coachmen as short-cuts, the stucco was peeling from tumble-down tenements, and all was dirt and darkness and desolation. I have come into a good many Continental cities, in the course of a long and virtuous life, depressed and dyspeptic and disappointed, but I have never been made so utterly miserable by anything as by my first introduction to Rome. I jumped at once to the conclusion that travellers and guide-books had grossly deceived me, and that the famous capital of the Roman Catholic faith and United Italy had been made, like Somebody’s pills and ointment, by persistent advertisement.
But with the morrow came the sun; the nightmare was over, and a pleasant dream had begun. Pagan Rome had made me—yea, even me, my brother—a little more respectful in my attitude towards antiquity. I came to scoff, and I remained to pray.I have been in the Forum, and when I sat on the great columns I tried to remember my Roman history, and muddled up the Cæsars, and wished that I had paid more attention to my books at school instead of making surreptitious catapults with the elastic I pulled out of my new spring-side boots. I have roamed—should I say Romed?—up the Appian Way, and lost myself in the mighty Baths of Caracalla; I have been down into the Catacombs and seen the bones of some Early Christians, and I have dreamed dreams, and wandered about in fancy in a toga, and given off Latin orations to the winds, and have only been aroused from my reverie by the voice of a fair creature inquiring, with the choicest American accent, if it was in the Forum that Julius Cæsar used to fight with wild beasts and play the fiddle while Rome was burning.
But all the ancient glories, so far as I am concerned, sink into insignificance beside the Colosseum. In this, the mighty ruin of the greatest arena the world has ever seen, the most ordinary mind—mine, for instance—loses itself. The present fades away; the guardian who follows you to see that you do not put stone and marble pillars in your pocket is lost sight of. You are back again in the year 72A.D.You hear the cruel whips of their masters cracking merrily over the 12,000 Jewish captives who laid the first stones of the Colosseum, and in the year 80 it is complete, and Titus dedicates it, and the great arena is soaked with the blood of 5,000 wild beasts. The years go on, and human blood alone can satisfy the cruel thirst of the Romans. Over the seats and benches, now mouldering ruins, you see a mighty populace swarming. In the vast arena, where your modern foot, clad in a buttoned kid boot, now stands, thousands of gladiators, their huge muscles standing out like iron bars, fight, and dye the groundwith their gore. The fiercest beasts stand at bay, with trembling captured slaves, and the nobles and the people—ay, even the women—shriek with delight as quivering flesh is torn, and the life-blood of man and brute spirts out in crimson jets. You can see it all, if you have a spark of imagination—the whole bloody, revolting scene becomes so real that at last you turn away and hide your eyes, and cry ‘Faugh!'—come to your senses, and thank Heaven that such cruel days are over for ever.
And outside, even as you are expressing your gratitude, you will see a long line of weary, wretched animals dragging their heavy loads, while behind them walks a Roman of to-day lashing their quivering, bleeding sides with brutal fury, even goading their poor starved carcases to further effort by thrusting a sharp stick into their open wounds. I can imagine what the Roman horses and mules and oxen would say if they heard anyone rejoicing that cruelty died out with the Pagans and the decay of the Colosseum. I have seen such cruelty to animals under the shadow of St. Peter’s that I doubt if the Colosseum ever saw worse. Beasts had at least a speedy death there. It is reserved for the modern citizen of Christian Rome to make a dumb brute’s torture last its whole life long.
A Roman is very proud of being a Roman, and he does nothing menial. The fly-drivers are Romans, but they do not groom or attend to their horses. They have Neapolitans to do that. There is a good deal of the old dignity still surviving among the people. At a Roman pastrycook’s a Roman waiter brings me an ice with the air of an emperor. An emperor would have done it more quickly, though, as his time would doubtless have been valuable. A Roman is always wrapping himself in an imaginary toga, and that dress is a much better one to pose inthan to bustle about in and perform the vulgar task known as earning one’s daily bread.
Anyone who travels must be struck with the extraordinary way in which the same waiters turn up all over the world. The man who spreads my humble repast of polenta and dried figs in the Hôtel Londra, in Rome, last waited upon me at the hotel at Seaford, in Sussex, a pleasant hamlet, which generally consists of six inhabitants, two visitors, and a pedestrian passing through from Newhaven. In Milan my waiter reminded me that he had often had the honour of waiting upon me at the St. Enoch’s Hotel, at Glasgow, and in a restaurant in Florence I was recognised with a broad grin by the former oberkellner of a pleasant hostelry upon the Rhine, where I sojourned in ’78. Most travellers can multiply instances of this sort of thing, but it is just a little wonderful to meet in Rome your old garçon of sleepy little Seaford, in Sussex.
More wonderful still! I have just been into a coiffeur’s in the Via Condotti to be shaved, and the young gentleman officiating, after lathering me, said in the most unconcerned way possible: ‘Let me see, I thinks that you like him a razor fine, if right I remembers?’ I stared at the man in astonishment, and stammered: ‘Do you know me, then?’ ‘Ah, sare,’ was the reply, ‘I shave you often last year, at the Toilet Club, Brighton. No you remember?’ The world is decidedly small. I am looking about Rome now with some hope of coming upon the cabman to whom I gave a sovereign instead of a shilling in the Old Kent Road in the summer of ’81. I really don’t see why he shouldn’t come round the corner accidentally.
Rome has just recovered from the incursion of the pilgrims to the tomb of Victor Emmanuel, and Society is returning to the capital. The ‘pilgrimage’ business scared many people from the city, for there was a good deal of wild talk about riots and I know not what. You see, this pilgrimage has been an organized Government affair, got up entirely for political purposes. The vast horde of folks who flocked from all parts of Italy came, not to show their attachment and devotion to monarchical institutions, but to see Rome and enjoy themselves. The railway companies brought ‘pilgrims’ at a reduction of 75 per cent. on the regular fares.
Although nothing has appeared in the papers, it is common talk in Rome that one train-load was stoned by the mob, and in several places this ‘loyal’ demonstration was hissed and hooted. Italy teems with dissension and discontent, and how fully the Government is aware of the fact is best proved by the enormous pains that have been taken to organize and carry out this solemn farce of a national pilgrimage to the tomb of the late King.
It is fair to say that this view of the pilgrimage is taken only in clerical and Republican circles. I am assured by many Italians that it has really been a great success, from a political point of view. There is no doubt that the ‘merry jests of King Victor Emmanuel’ endeared him to a large number of his subjects, and the stories that are being told of him now would fill a book.
The stories of his hobnobbing with peasants and boors, and finding his pleasure in bourgeois life, have caused the old canard to be revived about his identity. My waiter in Rome imparted it to me confidentially one morning while I was struggling to eat somegnocchis à la Romainewithout injuring all that is left of my liver for life. I will give it as I received it:
‘Wunst was a fire—big fire, while Vittor Emanuele he was baby in de palace. Real royal baby he wasburn to death. To prevent being found out what happen, de nurse she put her baby in de place of other, and nobody not find out, so Victor Emanuele he really was one of de people, and dat was what make him so fond of sit in beerhouse and eat sausage and bread with a big knife.’
There is a big movement afoot in Rome to revive the Barberi races in the Corso. The Corso, as all my readers are aware, is a long, narrow street in the fashionable quarter of Rome, and the Barberi are poor horses who are let loose at the top with spiked balls fastened to their sides, which goad them almost to madness, and make them fly like the wind. Last year the cruel sport was abandoned, owing to its having caused a terrible accident just under the Queen’s balcony the previous year. This time, however, there is a great outcry for a revival, and the chief sinners are not the cruel Romans, but the humane English and American visitors and residents.
As in these days of extended travel everyone goes to Rome, I should like to say a word about the nonsense that is talked about the unhealthiness of the climate and the danger of malaria. ‘Roman fever’ is a bogey which frightens hundreds of good folk from enjoying one of the greatest treats the world can give. There is very little danger to people who live carefully and don’t rush. If people will go to Rome in the blazing heat of summer, and gallop about from place to place like madmen, now sweltering in the sun, and now burrowing into the icy depths of a ruined temple, or wandering in the cold galleries of a church, chills will follow, and fever may ensue; but in nine cases out of ten fear is the great cause of the illness of English travellers.
The Roman water, again, which some folks warn you not to drink, is the purest water in the whole wide world, and there is a supply, brought throughthe restoration of some of the classical aqueducts a distance of thirty-six miles, which is equal to 300 gallons per day for each inhabitant, and this is flowing day and night uninterruptedly. London Water Companies please note.
There is one thing which makes Rome unendurable to nervous, excitable people, and which, combined with the sirocco, has driven me away. To be harassed and tortured at every turn is death to a rheumatic, dyspeptic, quiet-seeking man whose nerves are champion jumpers. To show what I mean, I will exactly reproduce my last walk in Rome. I have read Mr. Hare’s ‘Walks in Rome,’ but mine is the walk of a Hunted Hare.