 | IV. People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
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
entrée to the court balls, and start fair with noble dames and
gentlemen for grace in courtly favor. The fétes 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
royal cortége, the delighted crowd take their departure, having
seen no class more favored than themselves, and enchanted with
the gracious absence of pretension in the nobilta 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
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 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
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 Fiesolé, 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 dithyrambie. 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 à 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
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 Spirifort, some time attaché to the
Russian embassy at Paris (where he had first sunned his eyes in
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 résumer—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 congé for a couple of years, and I dived presently
under a broad-brimmed 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,” soliloquised 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
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.
The green lamps, glittering by thousands amid the foliage of the
Boboli, had attained their full brightness, and the long-lived
Italian day had died over the distant mountains of Carrara, leaving
its inheritance of light apparently to the stars, who, on their
fields of deepening blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an
unseen host, in the depths of heaven, himself the foremost and the
most radiant. The night was balmy and voluptuous. The
music of the Ducal band swelled forth from the perfumed apartments
on the air. A single nightingale, far back in the wilderness
of the garden, poured from his melodious heart a chant of
the most passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the body-guard,
stationed at the limit of the spray of the fountain, leaned on his
halberd and felt his rude senses melt in the united spells of luxury
and nature. The ministers of a monarch's pleasure had done
their utmost to prepare a scene of royal delight, and night and
summer had flung in their enchantments when ingenuity was exhausted.
The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a blaze of
light scarce endurable from its deeply-sunk windows, looked like
the side of an enchanted mountain laid open for the revels of
sorcery. The aigrette and plume passed by; the tiara and the
jewel upon the breast; the gayly-dressed courtiers and glittering
dames; and, to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed like the
realized raving of the improvisatore when he is lost in some fable
of Araby. Yet, within, walked malice and hate, and the light and
perfume, that might have fed an angel's heart with love, but
deepened in many a beating bosom the consuming fires of envy.
With the gold key of office on his cape, the Grand Chamberlain
stood at the feet of the Dowager Grand Duchess, and, by a
sign to the musicians, hidden in a latticed gallery behind the
Corinthian capital of the hall, retarded or accelerated the soft
measure of the waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the
chairs of state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames nearest
allied to royal blood; one solitary and privileged intruder
alone sharing the elevated place—the lady Geraldine. Dressed
in white, her hair wound about her head in the simplest form,
yet developing its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary,
her eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fringed with
lashes a shade darker than the light auburn braided on her temples,
and the tint of the summer's most glowing rose turned out
from the threadlike parting of her lips, she was a vision of
loveliness to take into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his
soul the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth and
age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Geraldine! thou
wilt read these passionate words from one whose worship of thy
intoxicating loveliness has never before found utterance, but, if
this truly-told tale should betray the hand that has dared to describe
thy beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of Pity, breathe
from those bright lips, a prayer that he may forget thee!
By the side of the Lady Geraldine, but behind the chair of the
Grand Duchess, who listened to his conversation with singular delight,
stood a slight young man of uncommon personal beauty, a
stranger apparently to every other person present. His brilliant
uniform alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diplomacy; and
the marked distinction shown him, both by the reigning Queen of
the Court, and the more powerful and inaccessible queen of beauty,
marked him as an object of keen and universal curiosity.
the Grand Chamberlain had tolerably well circulated the
name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the renowned wit and
elegant of Paris, newly appointed to the court of his royal highness
of Tuscany. Fair eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and
beating bosoms hushed their pulses as he passed.
Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression. Count
Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon the first principle
he kept his place between the Grand Duchess and Lady Geraldine,
exerting his deeply studied art of pleasing, to draw upon
himself their exclusive attention. Upon the second principle,
he was perfectly unconscious of the presence of another human
being; and neither the gliding step of the small-eared princess
S—in the waltz, nor the stately advance of the last female
of the Medici in the mazurka, distracted his large blue eyes a
moment from their idleness. With one hand on the eagle-hilt of
his sword, and his side leaned against the high cushion of red
velvet honored by the pressure of the Lady Geraldine, he gazed
up into that beaming face, when not bending respectfully to the
Duchess, and drank steadfastly from her beauty, as the lotus-cup
drinks light from the sun.
The new Secretary had calculated well. In the deep recess of
the window looking toward San Miniato, stood a lady, nearly hidden
from view by the muslin curtains just stirring with the vibration
of the music, who gazed on the immediate circle of the
Grand Duchess, with an interest that was not attempted to be
disguised. On her first entrance into the hall, the Marchesa del
Marmore had recognised in the new minion of favor her impassioned
lover of the lagoon, her slighted acquaintance of the
cathedral. When the first shock of surprise was over, she looked
of poverty, and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would
have claimed in public the smile she had given him when unobserved,
she recalled with delight every syllable he had murmured
in her ear, and every look she had called forth in the light of a
Venetian moon. The man who had burned, upon the altar of her
vanity, the most intoxicating incense—who had broken through
the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw his homage
at her feet—who had portrayed so incomparably (she believed)
with his love-inspired pencil, the features imprinted on his heart—
this chance-won worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as
she had thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere, and become
a legitimate object of love; and, beautified by the splendor
of dress, and distinguished by the preference and favor of those
incomparably above her, he seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection
of adorable beauty. As she remembered his eloquent
devotion to herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman
whom she hated and had calumniated—a woman who she believed
stood between her and all the light of existence—she anticipated
the triumph of taking him from her side, of exhibiting him
to the world as a falcon seduced from his first quarry; and, never
doubting that so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman of
the Paradise she had so long wished to enter, she panted for the
moment when she should catch his eye and draw him from his
lure, and already heard the Chamberlain's voice in her ear, commanding
her presence, after the ball, in the saloon of Hercules.
The Marchesa had been well observed from the first, by the
wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art (so necessary to his
profession) of seeing without appearing to see, he had scarce lost
a shade of the varying expressions of her countenance; and
read her tell-tale features as if they had given utterance to her
thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph, the effect of his brilliant
position upon her proud and vain heart; watched her while
she made use of her throng of despised admirers to create a sensation
near him, and attract his notice; and, when the ball wore
on, and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance upon
the Lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a momentary curl of
triumph on his lip, as she took up her concealed position in the
embayed window, and abandoned herself to the bitter occupation
of watching the happiness of her rival. The Lady Geraldine
had never been so animated since her first appearance at the
Court of Tuscany.
It was past midnight when the Grand-Duke, flushed and tired
with dancing, came to the side of the Lady Geraldine. Count
Basil gave place, and, remaining a moment in nominal obedience
to the sovereign's polite request, which he was too politic to construe
literally, he looked down the dance with the air of one who
has turned his back on all that could interest him, and, passing
close to the concealed position of the Marchesa, stepped out upon
the balcony.
The air was cool, and the fountain played refreshingly below.
The Count Basil was one of those minds which never have so
much leisure for digression as when they are most occupied. A
love, as deep and profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving
thread for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican; yet,
after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he raised himself
upon the marble balustrade, and, perfectly anticipating the
interruption to his solitude which presently occurred, began to
roof of the Pitti.
“A painter's mistress,” he said, “immortal in the touch of
her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for centuries on these walls
by the pilgrims of art; while the warm perfection of all loveliness—the
purest and divinest of highborn women—will perish
utterly with the eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian,
the Fornarina of Raffaelle—peasant-girls of Italy—have, at this
moment, more value in this royal palace, than the breathing forms
that inhabit it! The Lady Geraldine herself, to whom the sovereign
offers at this moment his most flattering homage, would
be less a loss to him than either! Yet they despise the gods of
the pencil who may thus make them immortal! The dull blood
in their noble veins, that never bred a thought beyond the instincts
of their kind, would look down, forsooth, on the inventive
and celestial ichor, that inflames the brain, and prompts the fiery
hand of the painter! How long will this very sovereign live in
the memories of men? The murderous Medici, the ambitious
Cardinals, the abandoned women, of an age gone by, hang in imperishable
colors on his walls; while of him, the lord of this
land of genius, there is not a bust or a picture that would bring a
sequin in the market-place! They would buy genius in these
days like wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened.
Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a Pope and his
cardinals: Titian was an honored guest for the Doge. The
stimulus to immortalize these noble friends was in the love
they bore them; and the secret in their power to do it, lay half
in the knowledge of their characters, gained by daily intimacy.
Painters were princes then, as they are beggars now; and the
princely art is beggared as well!”
The Marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon the balcony,
leaning on the arm of the Grand Chamberlain. The soliloquizing
secretary had foretold to himself both her coming and her companion.
“Monsieur le Comte,” said the Chamberlain, “la Marchesa del
Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your acquaintance.
Count Basil bowed low, and, in that low and musical tone of
respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit, made him irresistible
to a woman who had a soul to be thrilled, he repeated the
usual nothings upon the beauty of the night; and when the
Chamberlain returned to his duties, the Marchesa walked forth
with her companion to the cool and fragrant alleys of the garden,
and, under the silent and listening stars, implored forgiveness
for her pride; and, with the sudden abandonment peculiar to the
clime, poured into his ear the passionate and weeping avowal of
her sorrow and love.
“Those hours of penitence in the embayed window,” thought
Count Basil, “were healthy for your soul.” And, as she walked
by his side, leaning heavily on his arm, and half-dissolved in a
confiding tenderness, his thoughts reverted to another and a far
sweeter voice; and, while the carressing words of the Marchesa
fell on an unlistening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned back to
the lighted hall.
| IV. People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |