Excessive sultriness of Lisbon.--Night sounds of the city.--Public
gala in the garden of the Conde de Villa Nova.--Visit to the Anjeja
Palace.--The heir of the family.--Marvellous narrations of a young
priest.--Convent of Savoyard nuns.--Father Theodore’s
chickens.--Sequestered group of beauties.--Singing of the Scarlati.
29th June, 1787.
The bright sunshine which has lately been our portion, glorious as it
is, begins to tire me. Twenty times a day I cannot help wishing myself
extended at full-length upon the fresh herbage of some shady English
valley, where fairies gambol in the twilights of Midsummer, whispering
in the ears of their sleeping favourites the good or evil fortunes which
await them. It is too hot for these oracular little elvish beings in
Portugal, one must not here expect their inspirations; but would to
Heaven some revelation of this or any other nature had warned me off in
time, from the blinding dust and excessive sultriness of Lisbon and its
neighbourhood. How silly, when one is well and cool, to gad abroad, in
the vain hope of making what is really best, better. Depend upon it,
there is more vernal delight and joy in our green hills and copses, than
in all these stunted olive fields and sun-burnt promontories.
We have a homely saying, that what is poison to one man is meat to
another, and true enough; for these days and nights of glowing
temperature, which oppress me beyond endurance, are the delight and
boast of the inhabitants of this capital. The heat seems not only to
have new venomed the stings of the fleas and the musquitoes, but to have
drawn out, the whole night long, all the human ephemera of Lisbon. They
frisk, and dance, and tinkle their guitars from sunset to sunrise. The
dogs, too, keep yelping and howling without intermission; and what with
the bellowing of litanies by parochial processions, the whizzing of
fireworks, which devotees are perpetually letting off in honour of some
member or other of the celestial hierarchy, and the squabbles of
bullying rake-hells, who scour the streets in search of adventures,
there is no getting a wink of sleep, even if the heat would allow it.
As to those quiet nocturnal parties, where ingenuous youths rest their
heads, not on the lap of earth, but on that of their mistresses, who are
soothingly employed in delivering the jetty locks of their lovers from
too abundant a population, I have nothing to say against them, nor am I
much disturbed by the dashing sound of a few downfalls[14] from the
windows; but these dog-howlings exceed every annoyance of the kind I
ever endured, and give no slight foretaste of the infernal regions.
Nothing but amusement and racket being thought of here at this season
(when to celebrate St. Peter’s festival with all the noise and
extravagance in your power, is not more a profane inclination than a
pious duty,) that simpleton, the Conde de Villa Nova, opened his garden
last night to the nob and mob-ility of Lisbon. There was a dull
illumination of paper lanterns, and a sort of pavilion awkwardly
constructed for dancing, beneath which the prettiest French and English
mantua-makers, milliners, and abigails of the metropolis, figured away
in cotillons with the Duke of Cadaval and some other young men of the
first distinction, who, like many as hopeful in our own capital, are
never at their ease but in low company. Two or three of my servants
accompanied my tailor to the fête, and returned enraptured with the
affable pleasing manners of the foreign milliners and native nobility.
I should have been most happy to remain at home, in the shade of my
green blinds, giving ear, through mere laziness, to any nonsense that
anybody chose to say to me; but we had been long engaged to dine with
Don Diego de Noronha, at the Anjeja Palace.
When we arrived at our destination, we found the heir of the family
surrounded by priests and tutors, learning to look out at the window,
the chief employment of Portuguese fidalgo life. Oh what a precious
collection of stories did I hear at this attic banquet! There happened
to be amongst the company a young oaf of a priest, from I forget what
university (I hope not Coimbra), who kept on during the whole dinner
favouring us with marvellous narrations, such as the late Queen’s
pounding a pearl of inestimable value, to swallow in medical potions;
and that one of the nuns of the Convent of the Sacrament, having
intrigued with old Beelzebub _in propria persona_, had been sent to the
Inquisition, and the window through which his infernal majesty had
entered upon this gallant exploit, walled up and painted over with red
crosses. The same precautionary decoration, continued he, has been
bestowed upon every opening in the façade, so that no demon, however
sharp-set, can get in again. He would fain also have made us believe,
that a woman very fair and plump to the eye, with an overflowing breast
of milk, who took in sucklings to nurse cheaper than anybody else,
regularly made away with them, and was now in the dungeons of the holy
office, accused of having minced up above a score of innocents!
Heaven forbid I should detail any further particulars of our
table-talk; if I did, you would be finely surfeited.
After dinner the company dispersed, some to their couches, some to hear
a sonata on the dulcimer, accompanied on the jew’s harp by a couple of
dwarfs; the heir-apparent to his beloved window; and Verdeil and I to a
convent of Savoyard nuns, at Belem, the coolest, cleanest retirement in
the whole neighbourhood, and blessed into the bargain by the especial
patronage and inspection of Father Theodore d’Almeida. His reverence, it
seems, had been the principal instrument, under Providence, of
transplanting these blessed sprouts of holiness from the Convent of the
Visitation at Annecy to the glowing climate of Portugal.
As I had just received a sugary epistle from this paragon of piety,
recommending his favourite establishment in several pages of ardent
panegyric, he could do no less than come forth from his interior nest,
and bid us welcome with a countenance arrayed in the sweetest smiles,
though I dare say he wished us at old scratch for our intrusion.
“Poor things,” said he, speaking of the chickens under education in this
coop, “we do all we can to improve their tender minds and their
guileless tongues in foreign languages. Sister Theresa has an admirable
knack for teaching arithmetic; our venerable mother is remarkably
well-bottomed in grammar, and Sister Francisca Salesia, whom I had the
happiness to bring over from Lyons, is not only a most pure and
persuasive moralist, but is acknowledged to be one of the first needles
in Christendom, so we do tolerably well in embroidery. In music we are
no great proficients. We allow of no modinhas, no opera airs; a plain
hymn is all you must expect here; in short, we are ill-fitted to receive
such distinguished visiters, and have nothing the world would call
interesting to recommend us; but then, I, their unworthy confessor, must
allow that such sweet, clean consciences as I meet with in this asylum
are treasures beyond all that the Indies can furnish.”
Both Verdeil and myself, conscious of our own extreme unworthiness, were
quite abashed by this sublime declamation, poured forth with hands
crossed on the bosom, and eyes turned up to the ceiling, like some
images one has seen of St. Ignatius or St. Francis Xavier.
It was a minute at least before his reverence relaxed from this
attitude, and, drawing a curtain, condescended to admit us into a
spacious parlour, delightfully cool, perfumed with jasmine, and filled
with little Brazilian doves, parroquets, and canary birds. Such a cooing
and chirping was never heard in greater perfection, except in Mahomet’s
Paradise; nor were the houries wanting, for in a deep recess, behind a
tolerably wide lattice, sat a row of the loveliest young creatures I
ever beheld. A daughter of my friend Don Josè de Brito was amongst the
number, and her eyes, of the most bewitching softness, seemed to acquire
new fascination in this mysterious sort of twilight, beaming from behind
a double grating of iron.
Every now and then the birds, not in the least intimidated by the
predatory glances of Father Theodore, violated the sanctuary, and
pitched upon ivory necks, and were received with ten thousand
endearments by the angels of this little sequestered heaven, which
looked so refreshing, and formed by its sacred calm so inviting a
contrast to the turbulent world without, and its glaring atmosphere,
that I could not resist exclaiming, “O that I had wings like a dove,
that I might fly through those bars and be at rest!”
I need not tell you we passed half-an-hour most delightfully in talking
of music, gardens, roses, and devotion, with the meninas, and had almost
forgotten we were engaged to hear the Scarlati sing. Her father, an old
captain of horse, of Italian extraction, lives not far from the Convent
of the Visitation, so we had not much time during our transit to
experience the woful difference between the cool parlour of the nuns and
the suffocating exterior air.
A numerous group of the young ladies’ kindred stood ready at the
street-door, with all that hospitable courtesy for which the Portuguese
are so remarkably distinguished, to usher the strangers up-stairs into a
gallery hung with arras and sconces, not unlike the great room of an
Italian inn, once the palace of a nobleman. To keep up these post-house
ideas, we scented a strong effluvia of the stable, and heard certain
stampings and neighings, as if a party of hounnyms had arrived to
partake of the concert.
Many strange, aboriginal figures of both sexes were assembled, an
uncouth collection enough, I am apt to conjecture; however, I soon
ceased giving them any notice. The young lady of the house charmed me at
first sight by her graceful, modest manner; but when she sang some airs,
composed by the famous Perez, I was not less delighted than surprised.
Her voice modulates with unaffected carelessness into the most pathetic
tones.[15] Though she has adopted the masterly and scientific style of
Ferracuti, one of the first singers in the Queen’s service, she gives a
simplicity of expression to the most difficult passages, that makes them
appear the effusions of a young romantic girl warbling to herself in the
secret recesses of a forest.
I sat in a dark corner, unconscious of every thing that passed in the
apartment, of the singular figures that entered, or those that went
away; the starings, whisperings, and fan-flirtings of the assembly were
lost upon me: I could not utter a syllable, and was vexed when an
arbitrary old aunt insisted upon no more singing, and proposed a
faro-table and a dance.
Most eagerly did I wish all the kindred and their friends petrified for
the time being by some obliging necromancer, and would have done any
thing, short of engaging my own dear self to the devil, to have obtained
an uninterrupted audience of the syren till morning.