I was seventeen years old when I made the acquaintance of my dearest
friends, in a splendid palace which I see before me as clearly as
though I had left it only yesterday. I see the great courtyard, the
stately porticos, the saloons adorned with columns, statues and
bas-reliefs; and, amidst these beautiful and magnificent objects,
vestiges of the bygone splendors of the ducal residence, the long lines
of bedsteads and school-benches, the hanging rows of uniforms, dirks
and rifles. Five hundred youths are scattered about those courts and
corridors and staircases; a dull murmur of voices, broken by loud
shouts and sonorous laughter, reverberates through the most distant
recesses of the huge edifice. What animation! What life! What varieties
of type, of speech and gesture! Youths of athletic build, with great
moustaches and stentorian voices; youths as slim and sweet as girls;
the dusky skin and coal-black eyes of Sicily; the fair-haired,
blue-eyed faces of the north; the excited gesticulation of Naples, the
silvery Tuscan intonation, the rattling Venetian chatter, a hundred
groups, a hundred dialects; on this side, songs and noisy talk, on that
side running, jumping, and hand-clapping; men of every class, sons of
dukes, senators, generals, shopkeepers, government employees; a strange
assemblage, suggesting the university, the monastery, and the barracks:
with talk of women, war, novels, the orders of the day; a life teeming
with feminine meannesses and virile ambitions; a life of mortal ennui
and frantic gayety, a medley of sentiments, actions, and incidents,
absurd, tragic, or delightful, from which the pen of a great humorist
could extract the materials for a masterpiece.
Such was the military college of Modena in the year 1865.