4. IV.
The court of the grand-duke of Florence is perhaps
the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access in
all Europe. The Austrian-born monarch himself,
adopting in some degree the frank and joyous character
of the people over whom he reigns, throws open
his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries, to the
strangers passing through; and in the season of gayety
almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and start
fair with noble dames and gentlemen for grace in
courtly favor. The fêtes at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit
not always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are always
brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the
court, though they draw the line distinctly enough to
their own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the
motley waltz and mazurka, and either from good-nature
or a haughty conviction of their superiority, never
suffer the offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be suspected,
by the multitude who divert them. The
grand-duke, to common eyes, is a grave and rather
timid person, with more of the appearance of the
scholar than of the sovereign, courteous in public, and
benevolent and earnest in his personal attentions to
his guests at the palace. The royal quadrille may be
shared without permission of the grand chamberlain,
and the royal eye, after the first one or two dances of
ceremony, searches for partners by the lamp of beauty,
heedless of the diamonds on the brow, or the star of
nobility on the shoulder. The grand supper is scarce
more exclusive, and on the disappearance of the royal
cortege, the delighted crowd take their departure,
having seen no class more favored than themselves,
and enchanted with the gracious absence of pretension
in the nobilita of Tuscany.
Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo
Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and
sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher stories
of the palace open forth on a level with the delicious
gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of
smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury
which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here
lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and
more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world
in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of royalty
is enclosed a tide of life as silent and unsuspected
by the common inhabitant of Florence as the flow of
the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian
main. Here the invention of the fiery genius of Italy
is exhausted in poetical luxury; here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintein of royal condescension,
and enters with equal arms into the lists of
love and wit; here burn (as if upon an altar fed with
spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncalculating
passions of this glowing clime, in senses refined
by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the
haughty pulses of noble blood; and here—to the
threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure—press all
who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it
in their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passare
is accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its
splendor.
Some two or three days after the repulse of the
signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of
travelling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noonday meal. Loitering
with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via
Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and
looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft
of the Campanile (than which a fairer figure of religious
architecture points not to heaven), they took
their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, proposing
to eat their early dinner at a house named, from
its excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La
Birra. The traveller should be advised, also, that by
paying an extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this
renowned eating-house an old wine sunned on the
southern shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a
certain redolence of Boccaccio—scarce remarkable,
since it grew in the scene of the Decameron—but of a
virtue which, to the Hundred Tales of Love (read
drinking), is what the Gradus ad Parnassum should
be to the building of a dithyrambic. The oil of two
crazie upon the palm of the fat waiter Giuseppe will
assist in calling the vintage to his memory.
A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining
Palazzo arrested the attention of the artists as they
were about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of
a dark-green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of
the duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed
and posed on his seat a la d'Orsay, the signor Basil.
His coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his
gloves were of primrose purity.
The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality
of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their
companion at the gate of Florence, as travellers part,
without question, and they met without reserve to part
as questionless again. The artists were surprised at
the signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of
their refined art would have been so ill-bred as to express
it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall
chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at
home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang
through the gateway, and the marble court of the
palace rang with his prancing hoofs.
He who was idle and bought flowers at the Café of
the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat
in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the
richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Palazzo
Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The
dark old Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye
down upon it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight
with closed vizor to his unbonneted and laughing
page. The crimson curtains of the window opening
upon the terrace, at the time of our story, reminded
every passing Florentine of the lady who dwelt within
—a descendant of one of the haughtiest lines of English
chivalry—resident in Italy since many years for
health, but bearing in her delicate frame and exquisitely
transparent features, the loftiest type of patrician
beauty that had ever filled the eye that looked
upon her. In the inner heaven of royal exclusiveness
at the Pitti—in its constellation of rank and wit—the
lady Geraldine had long been the worshipped and ascendant
cynosure. Happy in a husband without rank
and but of moderate fortune, she maintained the spotless
character of an English wife in this sphere of
conventional corruption; and though the idol of the
duke and his nobles, it would have been like a whisper
against the purity of the brightest Pleiad, to have
linked her name with love.
With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer
cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of
silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a
vase of flowers and the volume from which she had
been reading, the lady Geraldine received the count
Basil Spiriford, some time attaché to the Russian embassy
at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in
her beauty), and at present the newly-appointed secretary
to the minister of the same monarch near the
court of Tuscany.
Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture
of a long absent and favored friend, the count Basil
ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster
fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaintances
of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they
would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may
drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy.
The secretary knew his species, and the lady Geraldine
was one of those women for whom the soul is
unwilling to possess a secret.
After the first inquiries were over, the lady questioned
her recovered favorite of his history since they
had parted. “I left you,” she said, “swimming the
dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come
to shore?”
“Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made
life worth the struggle! For the two extremes, however,
you know what I was at Paris—and yesterday I
was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!”
Lady Geraldine laughed.
“Ah! you look at my curls—but Macassar is at a
discount! It is the only grace I cherished in my incognito.
A resumer—I got terribly out of love by the
end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in
debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and
the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo
kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I
dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a
vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of
wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse,
have been two years looking at life without spectacles
at Venice.”
“And painting?”
“Painting!”
“Might one see a specimen?” asked the lady Geraldine,
with an incredulous smile.
“I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the
possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth
floor of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in
that fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a
drawing or two—”
He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently
brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a wayworn
and thinly furnished portfolio. The lady Geraldine
turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice,
but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start.
“La Marchesa del Marmore!” she exclaimed, looking
at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy
eye.
“Is it well drawn?” he asked quietly.
“Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael.
Do you really draw so well as this, or”—she added,
after a slight hesitation—“is it a miracle of love?”
“It is a divine head,” soliloquized the Russian, half
closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a
distance, as if to fill up the imperfect outline from his
memory.
The lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. “My
dear Basil,” she said seriously, “I should be wretched
if I thought your happiness was in the power of this
woman. Do you love her?”
“The portrait was not drawn by me,” he answered,
“though I have a reason for wishing her to think so.
It was done by a fellow-traveller of mine, whom I wish
to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it
here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons
a nos moutons—la marchesa was also a fellow-traveller
of mine, and without loving her too violently, I owe
her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way.
Will you assist me to pay it?”
Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the
good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments
of gratitude, the lady Geraldine inquired simply how
she could serve him.
“In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Florence,”
he said, “I have put myself, as you will see,
au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks
to my Parisian renown, the duke has enrolled me already
under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow
night I shall sup with you in the saloon of Hercules
after the ball is over. La marchesa, as you well know,
has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to
set foot within those guarded penetralia—soit her malicious
tongue, soit the interest against her of the men
she has played upon her hook too freely. The road
to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold,
and I would take the toll. Do you understand me,
most beautiful lady Geraldine?”
The count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the
fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to
put into his hand the following night the illuminated
ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too generously,
a debt of gratitude; and plucking a flower from
her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at
twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the
gate, he turned on foot toward the church of San
Gaetano, and with an expression of unusual elation in
his step and countenance, entered the trattoria, where
dined at that moment his companions of the pencil.
