 | IV. Inklings of adventure |  |
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
gaiety, almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and
courtly favor. The fetes 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
is exhausted in poetical luxury,—here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintien 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
traveling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noon-day 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 finger 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 traveler 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 travelers 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 has idled and bought flowers at the Cafe 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
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 Spirifort, some time attache 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 witout 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 way-worn
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
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 traveler 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 traveler
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,
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.
| IV. Inklings of adventure | |