spring. The sun growing warmer, and the close season putting an end to
the Marquess's hunting, it was now Odo's chief pleasure to carry his
books to the walled garden between the castle and the southern face of
the cliff. This small enclosure, probably a survival of medieval
horticulture, had along the upper ledge of its wall a grass walk
commanding the flow of the stream, and an angle turret that turned one
slit to the valley, the other to the garden lying below like a tranquil
well of scent and brightness: its box trees clipped to the shape of
peacocks and lions, its clove pinks and simples set in a border of
thrift, and a pear tree basking on its sunny wall. These pleasant
spaces, which Odo had to himself save when the canonesses walked there
to recite their rosary, he peopled with the knights and ladies of the
novelle, and the fantastic beings of Pulci's epic: there walked the Fay
Morgana, Regulus the loyal knight, the giant Morgante, Trajan the just
Emperor and the proud figure of King Conrad; so that, escaping thither
from the after-dinner dullness of the tapestry parlour, the boy seemed
to pass from the most oppressive solitude to a world of warmth and
fellowship.
1.6.
Odo, who, like all neglected children, was quick to note in the
demeanour of his elders any hint of a change in his own condition, had
been keenly conscious of the effect produced at Donnaz by the news of
the Duchess of Pianura's deliverance. Guided perhaps by his mother's
exclamation, he noticed an added zeal in Don Gervaso's teachings and an
unction in the manner of his aunts and grandmother, who embraced him as
though they were handling a relic; while the old Marquess, though he
took his grandson seldomer on his rides, would sit staring at him with a
frowning tenderness that once found vent in the growl--"Morbleu, but
he's too good for the tonsure!" All this made it clear to Odo that he
was indeed meant for the Church, and he learned without surprise that
the following spring he was to be sent to the seminary at Asti.
With a view to prepare him for this change, the canonesses suggested his
attending them that year on their annual pilgrimage to the sanctuary of
Oropa. Thither, for every feast of the Assumption, these pious ladies
travelled in their litter; and Odo had heard from them many tales of the
miraculous Black Virgin who drew thousands to her shrine among the
mountains. They set forth in August, two days before the feast,
ascending through chestnut groves to the region of bare rocks; thence
downward across torrents hung with white acacia and along park-like
grassy levels deep in shade. The lively air, the murmur of verdure, the
perfume of mown grass in the meadows and the sweet call of the cuckoos
from every thicket made an enchantment of the way; but Odo's pleasure
redoubled when, gaining the high-road to Oropa, they mingled with the
long train of devotees ascending from the plain. Here were pilgrims of
every condition, from the noble lady of Turin or Asti (for it was the
favourite pilgrimage of the Sardinian court), attended by her physician
and her cicisbeo, to the half-naked goatherd of Val Sesia or Salluzzo;
the cheerful farmers of the Milanese, with their wives, in silver
necklaces and hairpins, riding pillion on plump white asses; sick
persons travelling in closed litters or carried on hand-stretchers;
crippled beggars obtruding their deformities; confraternities of hooded
penitents, Franciscans, Capuchins and Poor Clares in dusty companies;
jugglers, pedlars, Egyptians and sellers of drugs and amulets. From
among these, as the canonesses' litter jogged along, an odd figure
advanced toward Odo, who had obtained leave to do the last mile of the
journey on foot. This was a plump abate in tattered ecclesiastical
dress, his shoes white as a miller's and the perspiration streaking his
face as he laboured along in the dust. He accosted Odo in a soft shrill
voice, begging leave to walk beside the young cavaliere, whom he had
more than once had the honour of seeing at Pianura; and, in reply to the
boy's surprised glance, added, with a swelling of the chest and an
absurd gesture of self-introduction, "But perhaps the cavaliere is not
too young to have heard of the illustrious Cantapresto, late primo
soprano of the ducal theatre of Pianura?"
Odo being obliged to avow his ignorance, the fat creature mopped his
brow and continued with a gasp--"Ah, your excellency, what is fame? From
glory to obscurity is no farther than from one milestone to another! Not
eight years ago, cavaliere, I was followed through the streets of
Pianura by a greater crowd than the Duke ever drew after him! But what
then? The voice goes--it lasts no longer than the bloom of a flower--and
with it goes everything: fortune, credit, consideration, friends and
parasites! Not eight years ago, sir--would you believe me?--I was
supping nightly in private with the Bishop, who had nearly quarrelled
with his late Highness for carrying me off by force one evening to his
casino; I was heaped with dignities and favours; all the poets in the
town composed sonnets in my honour; the Marquess of Trescorre fought a
duel about me with the Bishop's nephew, Don Serafino; I attended his
lordship to Rome; I spent the villeggiatura at his villa, where I sat at
play with the highest nobles in the land; yet when my voice went,
cavaliere, it was on my knees I had to beg of my heartless patron the
paltry favour of the minor orders!" Tears were running down the abate's
cheeks, and he paused to wipe them with a corner of tattered bands.
Though Odo had been bred in an abhorrence of the theatre, the strange
creature's aspect so pricked his compassion that he asked him what he
was now engaged in; at which Cantapresto piteously cried, "Alas, what am
I not engaged in, if the occasion offers? For whatever a man's habit, he
will not wear it long if it cover an empty belly; and he that respects
his calling must find food enough to continue in it. But as for me, sir,
I have put a hand to every trade, from composing scenarios for the ducal
company of Pianura, to writing satirical sonnets for noblemen that
desire to pass for wits. I've a pretty taste, too, in compiling
almanacks, and when nothing else served I have played the public
scrivener at the street corner; nay, sir, necessity has even driven me
to hold the candle in one or two transactions I would not more actively
have mixed in; and it was to efface the remembrance of one of these--for
my conscience is still over-nice for my condition--that I set out on
this laborious pilgrimage."
Much of this was unintelligible to Odo; but he was moved by any mention
of Pianura, and in the abate's first pause he risked the question--"Do
you know the hump-backed boy Brutus?"
His companion stared and pursed his soft lips.
"Brutus?" says he. "Brutus? Is he about the Duke's person?"
"He lives in the palace," said Odo doubtfully.
The fat ecclesiastic clapped a hand to his thigh.
"Can it be your excellency has in mind the foundling boy Carlo Gamba?
Does the jackanapes call himself Brutus now? He was always full of his
classical allusions! Why, sir, I think I know him very well; he is even
rumoured to be a brother of Don Lelio Trescorre's, and I believe the
Duke has lately given him to the Marquess of Cerveno, for I saw him not
long since in the Marquess's livery at Pontesordo."
"Pontesordo?" cried Odo. "It was there I lived."
"Did you indeed, cavaliere? But I think you will have been at the Duke's
manor of that name; and it was the hunting-lodge on the edge of the
chase that I had in mind. The Marquess uses it, I believe, as a kind of
casino; though not without risk of a distemper. Indeed, there is much
wonder at his frequenting it, and 'tis said he does so against the
Duke's wishes."
The name of Pontesordo had set Odo's memories humming like a hive of
bees, and without heeding his companion's allusions he asked--"And did
you see the Momola?"
The other looked his perplexity.
"She's an Innocent too," Odo hastened to explain. "She is Filomena's
servant at the farm."
The abate at this, standing still in the road, screwed up his eyelids
and protruded a relishing lip. "Eh, eh," said he, "the girl from the
farm, you say?" And he gave a chuckle. "You've an eye, cavaliere, you've
an eye," he cried, his soft body shaking with enjoyment; but before Odo
could make a guess at his meaning their conversation was interrupted by
a sharp call from the litter. The abate at once disappeared in the
crowd, and a moment later the litter had debouched on the grassy
quadrangle before the outer gates of the monastery. This space was set
in beech-woods, amid which gleamed the white-pillared chapels of the Way
of the Cross; and the devouter pilgrims, dispersed beneath the trees,
were ascending from one chapel to another, preparatory to entering the
church.
The quadrangle itself was crowded with people, and the sellers of votive
offerings, in their booths roofed with acacia-boughs, were driving a
noisy trade in scapulars and Agnus Deis, images of the Black Virgin of
Oropa, silver hearts and crosses, and phials of Jordan water warranted
to effect the immediate conversion of Jews and heretics. In one corner a
Carmelite missionary had set up his portable pulpit, and, crucifix in
hand, was exhorting the crowd; in another, an improvisatore intoned
canticles to the miraculous Virgin; a barefoot friar sat selling
indulgences at the monastery gate, and pedlars with trays of rosaries
and religious prints pushed their way among the pilgrims. Young women of
less pious aspect solicited the attention of the better-dressed
travellers, and jugglers, mountebanks and quacks of every description
hung on the outskirts of the square. The sight speedily turned Odo's
thought from his late companion, and the litter coming to a halt he was
leaning forward to observe the antics of a tumbler who had spread his
carpet beneath the trees, when the abate's face suddenly rose to the
surface of the throng and his hand thrust a crumpled paper between the
curtains of the litter. Odo was quick-witted enough to capture this
missive without attracting the notice of his grand-aunts, and stealing a
glance at it, he read--"Cavaliere, I starve. When the illustrious ladies
descend, for Christ's sake beg a scudo of them for the unhappy
Cantapresto."
By this the litter had disengaged itself and was moving toward the outer
gates. Odo, aware of the disfavour with which the theatre was viewed at
Donnaz, and unable to guess how far the soprano's present habit would be
held to palliate the scandal of his former connection, was perplexed how
to communicate his petition to the canonesses. A moment later, however,
the question solved itself; for as the aunts descended at the door of
the rector's lodging, the porter, running to meet them, stumbled on a
black mass under the arcade, and raised the cry that here was a man
dropped dead. A crowd gathering, some one called out that it was an
ecclesiastic had fallen; whereat the great-aunts were hurrying forward
when Odo whispered the eldest, Donna Livia, that the sick man was indeed
an abate from Pianura. Donna Livia immediately bid her servants lift him
into the porter's lodge, where, with the administering of spirits, the
poor soprano presently revived and cast a drowning glance about the
chamber.
"Eight years ago, illustrious ladies," he gurgled, "I had nearly died
one night of a surfeit of ortolans; and now it is of a surfeit of
emptiness that I am perishing."
The ladies at this, with exclamations of pity, called on the
lay-brothers for broth and cordials, and bidding the porter enquire more
particularly into the history of the unhappy ecclesiastic, hastened away
with Odo to the rector's parlour.
Next morning betimes all were afoot for the procession, which the
canonesses were to witness from the monastery windows. The apothecary
had brought word that the abate, whose seizure was indeed the result of
hunger, was still too weak to rise; and Donna Livia, eager to open her
devotions with an act of pity, pressed a sequin in the man's hand, and
bid him spare no care for the sufferer's comfort.
This sent Odo in a cheerful mood to the red-hung windows, whence,
peering between the folds of his aunts' gala habits, he admired the
great court enclosed in nobly-ordered cloisters and strewn with fresh
herbs and flowers. Thence one of the rector's chaplains conducted them
to the church, placing them, in company with the monastery's other noble
guests, in a tribune constructed above the choir. It was Odo's first
sight of a great religious ceremony, and as he looked down on the church
glimmering with votive offerings and gold-fringed draperies, and seen
through rolling incense in which the altar-candles swam like stars
reflected in a river, he felt an almost sensual thrill of pleasure at
the thought that his life was to be passed amid scenes of such mystic
beauty. The sweet singing of the choir raised his spirit to a higher
view of the scene; and the sight of the huddled misery on the floor of
the church revived in him the old longing for the Franciscan cowl.
From these raptures he was speedily diverted by the sight awaiting him
at the conclusion of the mass. Hardly had the spectators returned to the
rector's windows when, the doors of the church swinging open, a
procession headed by the rector himself descended the steps and began to
make the circuit of the court. Odo's eyes swam with the splendour of
this burst of banners, images and jewelled reliquaries, surmounting the
long train of tonsured heads and bathed in a light almost blinding after
the mild penumbra of the church. As the monks advanced, the pilgrims,
pouring after them, filled the court with a dark undulating mass through
which the procession wound like a ray of sunlight down the brown bosom
of a torrent. Branches of oleander swung in the air, devout cries hailed
the approach of the Black Madonna's canopy, and hoarse voices swelled to
a roar the measured litanies of the friars.
The ceremonies over, Odo, with the canonesses, set out to visit the
chapels studding the beech-knoll above the monastic buildings. Passing
out of Juvara's great portico they stood a moment above the grassy
common, which presented a scene in curious contrast to that they had
just quitted. Here refreshment-booths had been set up, musicians were
fiddling, jugglers unrolling their carpets, dentists shouting out the
merits of their panaceas, and light women drinking with the liveried
servants of the nobility. The very cripples who had groaned the loudest
in church now rollicked with the mountebanks and dancers; and no trace
remained of the celebration just concluded but the medals and relics
strung about the necks of those engaged in these gross diversions.
It was strange to pass from this scene to the solitude of the grove,
where, in a twilight rustling with streams, the chapels lifted their
white porches. Peering through the grated door of each little edifice,
Odo beheld within a group of terra-cotta figures representing some scene
of the Passion--here a Last Supper, with a tigerish Judas and a Saint
John resting his yellow curls on his Master's bosom, there an Entombment
or a group of stricken Maries. These figures, though rudely modelled and
daubed with bright colours, yet, by a vivacity of attitude and gesture
which the mystery of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling
impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age
when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic
counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured
image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange
borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through
the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine
tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended
animation, and as he climbed from one shrine to another he had the sense
of treading the actual stones of Gethsemane and Calvary.
As was usual with him, the impressions of the moment had effaced those
preceding it, and it was almost with surprise that, at the rector's
door, he beheld the primo soprano of Pianura totter forth to the litter
and offer his knee as a step for the canonesses. The charitable ladies
cried out on him for this imprudence, and his pallor still giving
evidence of distress, he was bidden to wait on them after supper with
his story. He presented himself promptly in the parlour, and being
questioned as to his condition at once rashly proclaimed his former
connection with the ducal theatre of Pianura. No avowal could have been
more disastrous to his cause. The canonesses crossed themselves with
horror, and the abate, seeing his mistake, hastened to repair it by
exclaiming--"What, ladies, would you punish me for following a vocation
to which my frivolous parents condemned me when I was too young to
resist their purpose? And have not my subsequent sufferings, my penances
and pilgrimages, and the state to which they have reduced me,
sufficiently effaced the record of an involuntary error?"
Seeing the effect of this appeal the abate made haste to follow up his
advantage. "Ah, illustrious ladies," he cried, "am I not a living
example of the fate of those who leave all to follow righteousness? For
while I remained on the stage, among the most dissolute surroundings,
fortune showered me with every benefit she heaps on her favourites. I
had my seat at every table in Pianura; the Duke's chair to carry me to
the theatre; and more money than I could devise how to spend; while now
that I have resigned my calling to embrace the religious life, you see
me reduced to begging a crust from the very mendicants I formerly
nourished. For," said he, moved to tears by his own recital, "my
superfluity was always spent in buying the prayers of the unfortunate,
and to judge how I was esteemed by those acquainted with my private
behaviour you need only learn that, on my renouncing the stage, 'twas
the Bishop of Pianura who himself accorded me the tonsure."
This discourse, which Odo admired for its adroitness, visibly excited
the commiseration of the ladies; but at mention of the Bishop, Donna
Livia exchanged a glance with her sister, who enquired, with a quaint
air of astuteness, "But how comes it, abate, that with so powerful a
protector you have been exposed to such incredible reverses?"
Cantapresto rolled a meaning eye.
"Alas, madam, it was through my protector that misfortune attacked me;
for his lordship having appointed me secretary to his favourite nephew,
Don Serafino, that imprudent nobleman required of me services so
incompatible with my cloth that disobedience became a duty; whereupon,
not satisfied with dismissing me in disgrace, he punished me by
blackening my character to his uncle. To defend myself was to traduce
Don Serafino; and rather than reveal his courses to the Bishop I sank to
the state in which you see me; a state," he added with emotion, "that I
have travelled this long way to commend to the adorable pity of Her
whose Son had not where to lay His head."
This stroke visibly touched the canonesses, still soft from the
macerations of the morning; and Donna Livia compassionately asked how he
had subsisted since his rupture with the Bishop.
"Madam, by the sale of my talents in any service not at odds with my
calling: as the compiling of pious almanacks, the inditing of rhymed
litanies and canticles, and even the construction of theatrical
pieces"--the ladies lifted hands of reprobation--"of theatrical pieces,"
Cantapresto impressively repeated, "for the use of the Carmelite nuns of
Pianura. But," said he with a deprecating smile, "the wages of virtue
are less liberal than those of sin, and spite of a versatility I think I
may honestly claim, I have often had to subsist on the gifts of the
pious, and sometimes, madam, to starve on their compassion."
This ready discourse, and the soprano's evident distress, so worked on
the canonesses that, having little money at their disposal, it was
fixed, after some private consultation, that he should attend them to
Donnaz, where Don Gervaso, in consideration of his edifying conduct in
renouncing the stage, might be interested in helping him to a situation;
and when the little party set forth from Oropa, the abate Cantapresto
closed the procession on one of the baggage-mules, with Odo riding
pillion at his back. Good fortune loosened the poor soprano's tongue,
and as soon as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began
to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though
few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the
motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities--the quarrels between
Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte--the
rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular
comedians--all these peeps into a tinsel world of mirth, cabal and
folly, enlivened by the recurring names of the Four Masks, those
lingering gods of the older dispensation, so lured the boy's fancy and
set free his vagrant wonder, that he was almost sorry to see the keep of
Donnaz reddening in the second evening's sunset.
Such regrets, however, their arrival at the castle soon effaced; for in
the doorway stood the old Marquess, a letter in hand, who springing
forward caught his grandson by the shoulders, and cried with his great
boar-hunting shout, "Cavaliere, you are heir-presumptive of Pianura!"
1.7.
The Marquess of Cerveno had succumbed to the tertian ague contracted at
the hunting-lodge of Pontesordo; and this unforeseen calamity left but
one life, that of the sickly ducal infant, between Odo and the
succession to the throne of Pianura. Such was the news conveyed
post-haste from Turin by Donna Laura; who added the Duke's express wish
that his young kinsman should be fitted for the secular career, and the
information that Count Valdu had already entered his stepson's name at
the Royal Academy of Turin.
The Duke of Pianura being young and in good health, and his wife having
already given him an heir, the most sanguine imagination could hardly
view Odo as being brought much nearer the succession; yet the change in
his condition was striking enough to excuse the fancy of those about him
for shaping the future to their liking. The priestling was to turn
courtier and perhaps soldier; Asti was to be exchanged for Turin, the
seminary for the academy; and even the old chief of Donnaz betrayed in
his grumbling counsels to the boy a sense of the exalted future in which
they might some day serve him.
The preparations of departure and the wonder of his new state left Odo
little space wherein to store his thought with impressions of what he
was leaving; and it was only in after years, when the accretion of
superficial incident had dropped from his past, that those last days at
Donnaz gained their full distinctness. He saw them then, heavy with the
warmth of the long summer, from the topmost pine-belt to the bronzed
vineyards turning their metallic clusters to the sun; and in the midst
his small bewildered figure, netted in a web of association, and
seeming, as he broke away, to leave a shred of himself in every corner
of the castle.
Sharpest of all, there remained with him the vision of his last hour
with Don Gervaso. The news of Odo's changed condition had been received
in silence by the chaplain. He was not the man to waste words and he
knew the futility of asserting the Church's claim to the
heir-presumptive of a reigning house. Therefore if he showed no
enthusiasm he betrayed no resentment; but, the evening before the boy's
departure, led him, still in silence, to the chapel. Here the priest
knelt with Odo; then, raising him, sat on one of the benches facing the
high altar, and spoke a few grave words.
"You are setting out," said he, "on a way far different from that in
which it has been my care to guide you; yet the high road and the
mountain path may, by diverse windings, lead to the same point; and
whatever walk a man chooses, it will surely carry him to the end that
God has appointed. If you are called to serve Him in the world, the
journey on which you are now starting may lead you to the throne of
Pianura; but even so," he went on, "there is this I would have you
remember: that should this dignity come to you it may come as a calamity
rather than a joy; for when God confers earthly honours on a child of
His predilection, He sometimes deigns to render them as innocuous as
misfortune; and my chief prayer for you is that you should be raised to
this eminence, it may be at a moment when such advancement seems to
thrust you in the dust."
The words burned themselves into Odo's heart like some mystic writing on
the walls of memory, long afterward to start into fiery meaning. At the
time he felt only that the priest spoke with a power and dignity no
human authority could give; and for a moment all the stored influences
of his faith reached out to him from the dimly-gleaming altar.
The next sun rose on a new world. He was to set out at daylight, and
dawn found him at the casement, footing it in thought down the road as
yet undistinguishable in a dying glimmer of stars. Bruno was to attend
him to Turin; but one of the women presently brought word that the old
huntsman's rheumatism had caught him in the knee, and that the Marquess,
resolved not to delay his grandson's departure, had chosen Cantapresto
as the boy's companion. The courtyard, when Odo descended, fairly
bubbled with the voluble joy of the fat soprano, who was giving
directions to the servants, receiving commissions and instructions from
the aunts, assuring everybody of his undying devotion to the
heir-presumptive of Pianura, and citing impressive instances of the
responsibilities with which the great of the earth had formerly
entrusted him.
As a companion for Odo the abate was clearly not to Don Gervaso's taste;
but he stood silent, turning the comment of a cool eye on the soprano's
protestations, and saying only, as Cantapresto swept the company into
the circle of an obsequious farewell:--"Remember, signor abate, it is to
your cloth this business is entrusted." The abate's answer was a rush of
purple to the forehead; but Don Gervaso imperturbably added, "And you
lie but one night on the road."
Meanwhile the old Marquess, visibly moved, was charging Odo to respect
his elders and superiors, while in the same breath warning him not to
take up with the Frenchified notions of the court, but to remember that
for a lad of his condition the chief virtues were a tight seat in the
saddle, a quick hand on the sword and a slow tongue in counsel. "Mind
your own business," he concluded, "and see that others mind theirs."
The Marchioness thereupon, with many tears, hung a scapular about Odo's
neck, bidding him shun the theatre and be regular at confession; one of
the canonesses reminded him not to omit a visit to the chapel of the
Holy Winding-sheet, while the other begged him to burn a candle for her
at the Consolata; and the servants pressed forward to embrace and bless
their little master.
Day was high by this, and as the Marquess's travelling-chariot rumbled
down the valley the shadows seemed to fly before it. Odo at first lay
numb; but presently his senses woke to the call of the brightening
landscape. The scene was such as Salvator might have painted: wild
blocks of stone heaped under walnut-shade; here the white plunge of
water down a wall of granite, and there, in bluer depths, a charcoal
burner's hut sending up its spiral of smoke to the dark raftering of
branches. Though it was but a few hours since Odo had travelled from
Oropa, years seemed to have passed over him, and he saw the world with a
new eye. Each sound and scent plucked at him in passing: the roadside
started into detail like the foreground of some minute Dutch painter;
every pendent mass of fern, dark dripping rock, late tuft of harebell
called out to him: "Look well, for this is your last sight of us!" His
first sight too, it seemed: since he had lived through twelve Italian
summers without sense of the sun-steeped quality of atmosphere that,
even in shade, gives each object a golden salience. He was conscious of
it now only as it suggested fingering a missal stiff with gold-leaf and
edged with a swarming diversity of buds and insects. The carriage moved
so slowly that he was in no haste to turn the pages; and each spike of
yellow foxglove, each clouding of butterflies about a patch of
speedwell, each quiver of grass over a hidden thread of moisture, became
a marvel to be thumbed and treasured.
From this mood he was detached by the next bend of the road. The way,
hitherto winding through narrow glens, now swung to a ledge overhanging
the last escarpment of the mountains; and far below, the Piedmontese
plain unrolled to the southward its interminable blue-green distances
mottled with forest. A sight to lift the heart; for on those sunny
reaches Ivrea, Novara, Vercelli lay like sea-birds on a summer sea. It
was the future unfolding itself to the boy; dark forests, wide rivers,
strange cities and a new horizon: all the mystery of the coming years
figured to him in that great plain stretching away to the greater
mystery of heaven.
To all this Cantapresto turned a snoring countenance. The lively air of
the hills, the good fare of Donnaz, and the satisfaction, above all, of
rolling on cushions over a road he had thought to trudge on foot, had
lapped the abate in Capuan slumber. The midday halt aroused him. The
travellers rested at an inn on the edge of the hills, and here
Cantapresto proved to his charge that, as he phrased it, his belly had
as short a memory for food as his heart for injuries. A flask of Asti
put him in the talking mood, and as they drove on he regaled Odo with a
lively picture of the life on which he was about to enter.
"You are going," said he, "to one of the first cities of Europe; one
that has all the beauty and elegance of the French capital without its
follies and excesses. Turin is blessed with a court where good manners
and a fine tone are more highly prized than the extravagances of genius;
and I have heard it said of his Majesty that he was delighted to see his
courtiers wearing the French fashions outside their heads, provided they
didn't carry the French ideas within. You are too young, doubtless,
cavaliere, to have heard of the philosophers who are raising such a
pother north of the Alps: a set of madmen that, because their birth
doesn't give them the entree of Versailles, are preaching that men
should return to a state of nature, great ladies suckle their young like
animals, and the peasantry own their land like nobles. Luckily you'll
hear little of this infectious talk in Turin: the King stamps out the
philosophers like vermin or packs them off to splutter their heresies in
Milan or Venice. But to a nobleman mindful of the privileges of his
condition there is no more agreeable sojourn in Europe. The wines are
delicious, the women--er--accomplished--and though the sbirri may hug
one a trifle close now and then, why, with money and discretion, a
friend or two in the right quarters, and the wit to stand well with the
Church, there's no city in Europe where a man may have pleasanter sins
to confess."
The carriage, by this, was descending the last curves above the valley,
and before them, in a hollow of the hills, blinked the warm shimmer of
maize and vine, like some bright vintage brimming its cup. The soprano
waved a convivial hand.
"Look," he cried, "what Nature has done for this happy region! Where
herself has spread the table so bountifully, should her children hang
back from the feast? I vow, cavaliere, if the mountains were built for
hermits and ascetics, then the plain was made level for dancing,
banqueting and the pleasures of the villeggiatura. If God had meant us
to break our teeth on nuts and roots, why did He hang the vine with
fruit and draw three crops of wheat from this indulgent soil? I protest
when I look on such a scene as this, it is sufficient incentive to
lowliness to remember that the meek shall inherit the earth!"
This mood held Cantapresto till his after-dinner sleep overtook him; and
when he woke again the chariot was clattering across the bridge of
Chivasso. The Po rolled its sunset crimson between flats that seemed
dull and featureless after the broken scenery of the hills; but beyond
the bridge rose the towers and roofs of the town, with its
cathedral-front catching the last slant of light. In the streets dusk
had fallen and a lamp flared under the arch of the inn before which the
travellers halted. Odo's head was heavy, and he hardly noticed the
figures thronging the caffe into which they were led; but presently
there rose a shout of "Cantapresto!" and a ring of waving arms and
flashing teeth encircled his companion.
These appendages belonged to a troop of men and women, some masked and
in motley, others in discoloured travel-stained garments, who pressed
about the soprano with cries of joyous recognition. He was evidently an
old favourite of the band, for a duenna in tattered velvet fell on his
neck with genial unreserve, a pert soubrette caught him by the arm the
duenna left free, and a terrific Matamor with a nose like a scimitar
slapped him on the back with a tin sword.
Odo's glimpse of the square at Oropa told him that here was a band of
strolling players such as Cantapresto had talked of on the ride back to
Donnaz. Don Gervaso's instructions and the old Marchioness's warning
against the theatre were present enough in the boy's mind to add a touch
of awe to the curiosity with which he observed these strange objects of
the Church's reprobation. They struck him, it must be owned, as more
pitiable than alarming, for the duenna's toes were coming through her
shoes, and one or two of the children who hung on the outskirts of the
group looked as lean and hungry under their spangles as the
foundling-girl of Pontesordo. Spite of this they seemed a jolly crew,
and ready (at Cantapresto's expense) to celebrate their encounter with
the ex-soprano in unlimited libations of Asti and Val Pulicello. The
singer, however, hung back with protesting gestures.
"Gently, then, gently, dear friends--dear companions! When was it we
parted? In the spring of the year--and we meet now in the late summer.
As the seasons change so do our conditions: if the spring is a season of
folly, then is the harvest-time the period for reflection. When we last
met I was a strolling poet, glad to serve your gifted company within the
scope of my talents--now, ladies and gentlemen, now"--he drew himself up
with pride--"now you behold in me the governor and friend of the
heir-presumptive of Pianura."
Cries of incredulity and derision greeted this announcement, and one of
the girls called out laughingly, "Yet you have the same old cassock to
your back!"
"And the same old passage from your mouth to your belly," added an
elastic Harlequin, reaching an arm across the women's shoulders. "Come,
Cantapresto, we'll help you line it with good wine, to the health of his
most superlatively serene Highness, the heir-presumptive of Pianura; and
where is that fabulous personage, by the way?"
Odo at this retreated hastily behind the soprano; but a pretty girl
catching sight of him, he found himself dragged into the centre of the
company, who hailed him with fantastic obeisances. Supper meanwhile was
being laid on the greasy table down the middle of the room. The Matamor,
who seemed the director of the troupe, thundered out his orders for
maccaroni, fried eels and sausages; the inn-servants flanked the plates
with wine-flasks and lumps of black bread, and in a moment the hungry
comedians, thrusting Odo into a high seat at the head of the table, were
falling on the repast with a prodigious clatter of cutlery.
Of the subsequent incidents of the feast--the banter of the younger
women, the duenna's lachrymose confidences, the incessant interchange of
theatrical jargon and coarse pleasantry--there remained to Odo but a
confused image, obscured by the smoke of guttering candles, the fumes of
wine and the stifling air of the low-ceilinged tavern. Even the face of
the pretty girl who had dragged him from his concealment, and who now
sat at his side, plying him with sweets from her own plate, began to
fade into the general blur; and his last impression was of Cantapresto's
figure dilating to immense proportions at the other end of the table, as
the soprano rose with shaking wine-glass to favour the company with a
song. The chorus, bursting forth in response, surged over Odo's drowning
senses, and he was barely aware, in the tumult of noise and lights, of
an arm slipped about him, a softly-heaving pillow beneath his head, and
the gradual subsidence into dark delicious peace.
So, on the first night of his new life, the heir-presumptive of Pianura
fell asleep with his head in a dancing-girl's breast.
1.8.
The travellers were to journey by Vettura from Chivasso to Turin; and
when Odo woke next morning the carriage stood ready in the courtyard.
Cantapresto, mottled and shamefaced, with his bands awry and an air of
tottering dignity, was gathering their possessions together, and the
pretty girl who had pillowed Odo's slumbers now knelt by his bed and
laughingly drew on his stockings. She was a slim brown morsel, not much
above his age, with a glance that flitted like a bird, and round
shoulders slipping out of her kerchief. A wave of shyness bathed Odo to
the forehead as their eyes met: he hung his head stupidly and turned
away when she fetched the comb to dress his hair.
His toilet completed, she called out to the abate to go below and see
that the cavaliere's chocolate was ready; and as the door closed she
turned and kissed Odo on the lips.
"Oh, how red you are!" she cried laughing. "Is that the first kiss
you've ever had? Then you'll remember me when you're Duke of
Pianura--Mirandolina of Chioggia, the first girl you ever kissed!" She
was pulling his collar straight while she talked, so that he could not
get away from her. "You will remember me, won't you?" she persisted. "I
shall be a great actress by that time, and you'll appoint me prima
amorosa to the ducal theatre of Pianura, and throw me a diamond bracelet
from your Highness's box and make all the court ladies ready to poison
me for rage!" She released his collar and dropped away from him. "Ah,
no, I shall be a poor strolling player, and you a great prince," she
sighed, "and you'll never, never think of me again; but I shall always
remember that I was the first girl you ever kissed!"
She hung back in a dazzle of tears, looking so bright and tender that
Odo's bashfulness melted like a spring frost.
"I shall never be Duke," he cried, "and I shall never forget you!" And
with that he turned and kissed her boldly and then bolted down the
stairs like a hare. And all that day he scorched and froze with the
thought that perhaps she had been laughing at him.
Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air
of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they
rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already
the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright
champaign was scattered over with farm-houses, their red-tiled
pigeon-cots and their granges latticed with openwork terra-cotta
pleasantly breaking the expanse of maize and mulberry; villages lay
along the banks of the canals intersecting the plain; and the hills
beyond the Po were planted with villas and monasteries.
All the afternoon they drove between umbrageous parks and under the
walls of terraced vineyards. It was a region of delectable shade, with
glimpses here and there of gardens flashing with fountains and villa
roofs decked with statues and vases; and at length, toward sunset, a
bend of the road brought them out on a fair-spreading city, so
flourishing in buildings, so beset with smiling hills, that Odo,
springing from his seat, cried out in sheer joy of the spectacle.
They had still the suburbs to traverse; and darkness was falling when
they entered the gates of Turin. This brought the fresh amazement of
wide lamplit streets, clean and bright as a ball-room, lined with
palaces and filled with well-dressed loungers: officers in the brilliant
Sardinian uniforms, fine gentlemen in French tie-wigs and narrow-sleeved
coats, merchants hurrying home from business, ecclesiastics in
high-swung carriages, and young bloods dashing by in their curricles.
The tables before the coffee-houses were thronged with idlers taking
their chocolate and reading the gazettes; and here and there the arched
doorway of a palace showed some gay party supping al fresco in a garden
hung with lamps.
The flashing of lights and the noise of the streets roused Cantapresto,
who sat up with a sudden assumption of dignity.
"Ah, cavaliere," said he, "you now see a great city, a famous city, a
city aptly called 'the Paris of Italy.' Nowhere else shall you find such
well-lit streets, such fair pavements, shops so full of Parisian wares,
promenades so crowded with fine carriages and horses. What a life a
young gentleman may lead here! The court is hospitable, society amiable,
the theatres are the best-appointed in Italy."
Here Cantapresto paused with a deprecating cough.
"Only one thing is necessary," he went on, "to complete enjoyment of the
fruits of this garden of Eden; and that is"--he coughed
again--"discretion. His Majesty, cavaliere, is a father to his subjects;
the Church is their zealous mother; and between two such parents, and
the innumerable delegates of their authority, why, you may fancy, sir,
that a man has to wear his eyes on all sides of his head. Discretion is
a virtue the Church herself commends; it is natural, then, that she
should afford her children full opportunity to practise it. And look
you, cavaliere, it is like gymnastics: the younger you acquire it, the
less effort it costs. Our Maker Himself has taught us the value of
silence by putting us speechless into the world: if we learn to talk
later we do it at our own risk! But for your own part, cavaliere--since
the habit cannot too early be exercised--I would humbly counsel you to
say nothing to your illustrious parents of our little diversion of last
evening."
The Countess Valdu lived on the upper floor of a rococo palace near the
Piazza San Carlo; and here Odo, led by Cantapresto, presently found
himself shown into an apartment where several ladies and gentlemen sat
at cards. His mother, detaching herself from the group, embraced him
with unusual warmth, and the old Count, more painted and perfumed than
ever, hurried up with an obsequious greeting. Odo for the first time
found himself of consequence in the world; and as he was passed from
guest to guest, questioned about his journey, praised for his good
colour and stout looks, complimented on his high prospects, and
laughingly entreated not to forget his old friends when fortune should
advance him to the duchy, he began to feel himself a reigning potentate
already.
His mother, as he soon learned, had sunk into a life almost as dull and
restricted as that she had left Donnaz to escape. Count Valdu's position
at court was more ornamental than remunerative, the income from his
estates was growing annually smaller, and he was involved in costly
litigation over the sale of some entailed property. Such conditions were
little to the Countess's humour, and the society to which her narrow
means confined her offered few distractions to her vanity. The
frequenters of the house were chiefly poor relations and hangers-on of
the Count's, the parasites who in those days were glad to subsist on the
crumbs of the slenderest larder. Half-a-dozen hungry Countesses, their
lean admirers, a superannuated abate or two, and a flock of threadbare
ecclesiastics, made up Donna Laura's circle; and even her cicisbeo,
selected in family council under the direction of her confessor, was an
austere gentleman of middle age, who collected ancient coins and was
engaged in composing an essay on the Martellian verse.
This company, which devoted hours to the new French diversion of the
parfilage, and spent the evenings in drinking lemonade and playing
basset for small stakes, found its chief topic of conversation in the
only two subjects safely discussed in Turin at that day--the doings of
the aristocracy and of the clergy. The fashion of the Queen's headdress
at the last circle, the marked manner in which his Majesty had lately
distinguished the brilliant young cavalry officer, Count Roberto di
Tournanches, the third marriage of the Countess Alfieri of Asti, the
incredibility of the rumour that the court ladies of Versailles had
taken to white muslin and Leghorn hats, the probable significance of the
Vicar-general's visit to Rome, the subject of the next sacred
representation to be given by the nuns of Santa Croce--such were the
questions that engaged the noble frequenters of Casa Valdu.
This was the only society that Donna Laura saw; for she was too poor to
dress to her taste and too proud to show herself in public without the
appointments becoming her station. Her sole distraction consisted in
visits to the various shrines--the Sudario, the Consolata, the Corpus
Domini--at which the feminine aristocracy offered up its devotions and
implored absolution for sins it had often no opportunity to commit: for
though fashion accorded cicisbei to the fine ladies of Turin, the Church
usually restricted their intercourse to the exchange of the most
harmless amenities.
Meanwhile the antechamber was as full of duns as the approach to Donna
Laura's apartment at Pianura; and Odo guessed that the warmth of the
maternal welcome sprang less from natural affection than from the hope
of using his expectations as a sop to her creditors. The pittance which
the ducal treasury allowed for his education was scarce large enough to
be worth diverting to other ends; but a potential prince is a shield to
the most vulnerable fortunes. In this character Odo for the first time
found himself flattered, indulged, and made the centre of the company.
The contrast to his life of subjection at Donnaz; the precocious
initiation into motives that tainted the very fount of filial piety; the
taste of this mingled draught of adulation and disillusionment, might
have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this
perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of
imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life,
that tinged his most personal impressions with a streak of the
philosophic temper. If this trait did not save him from sorrow, it at
least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties
of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the
past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep
moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show
of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless
youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit
that was to destroy one world without surviving to create another.
Of all this none could have been less conscious than the lad just
preparing to enter on his studies at the Royal Academy of Turin. That
institution, adjoining the royal palace, was a kind of nursery or
forcing-house for the budding nobility of Savoy. In one division of the
sumptuous building were housed his Majesty's pages, a corps of luxurious
indolent young fops; another wing accommodated the regular students of
the Academy, sons of noblemen and gentlemen destined for the secular
life, while a third was set aside for the "forestieri" or students from
foreign countries and from the other Italian states. To this quarter Odo
Valsecca was allotted; though it was understood that on leaving the
Academy he was to enter the Sardinian service.
It was customary for a young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at
the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or
pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him
abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented. The old Marquess
of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending
her to select her son's governor with particular care, choosing rather a
person of grave behaviour and assured morality than one of your glib
ink-spatterers who may know the inside of all the folios in the King's
library without being the better qualified for the direction of a young
gentleman's conduct; and to this letter Don Gervaso appended the terse
postcript: "Your excellency is especially warned against according this
or any other position of trust to the merry-andrew who calls himself the
abate Cantapresto."
Donna Laura, with a shrug, handed the letter to her husband; Count
Valdu, adjusting his glasses, observed it was notorious that people
living in the depths of the country thought themselves qualified to
instruct their city relatives on all points connected with the social
usages; and the cicisbeo suggested that he could recommend an abate who
was proficient in the construction of the Martellian verse, and who
would made no extra charge for that accomplishment.
"Charges!" the Countess cried. "There's a matter my father doesn't deign
to consider. It's not enough, nowadays, to give the lads a governor, but
they must maintain their servants too, an idle gluttonous crew that prey
on their pockets and get a commission off every tradesman's bill."
Count Valdu lifted a deprecating hand.
"My dear, nothing could be more offensive to his Majesty than any
attempt to reduce the way of living of the pupils of the Academy."
"Of course," she shrugged--"But who's to pay? The Duke's beggarly
pittance hardly clothes him."
The cicisbeo suggested that the cavaliere Odo had expectations; at which
Donna Laura flushed and turned uneasy; while the Count, part of whose
marital duty it was to intervene discreetly between his lady and her
knight, now put forth the remark that the abate Cantapresto seemed a
shrewd serviceable fellow.
"Nor do I like to turn him adrift," cried the Countess instantly, "after
he has obliged us by attending my son on his journey."
"And I understand," added the Count, "that he would be glad to serve the
cavaliere in any capacity you might designate."
"Why not in all?" said the cicisbeo thoughtfully. "There would be
undoubted advantages to the cavaliere in possessing a servant who would
explain the globes while powdering his hair and not be above calling his
chair when he attended him to a lecture."
And the upshot of it was that when Odo, a few days later, entered on his
first term at the Academy, he was accompanied by the abate Cantapresto,
who had agreed, for a minimum of pay, to serve him faithfully in the
double capacity of pedagogue and lacquey.
The considerable liberty accorded the foreign students made Odo's first
year at the Academy at once pleasanter and less profitable than had he
been one of the regular pupils. The companions among whom he found
himself were a set of lively undisciplined young gentlemen, chiefly from
England, Russia and the German principalities; all in possession of more
or less pocket-money and attended by governors either pedantic and
self-engrossed or vulgarly subservient. These young sprigs, whose
ambition it was to ape the dress and manners of the royal pages, led a
life of dissipation barely interrupted by a few hours of attendance at
the academic classes. From the ill-effects of such surroundings Odo was
preserved by an intellectual curiosity that flung him ravening on his
studies. It was not that he was of a bookish habit, or that the drudgery
of the classes was less irksome to him than to the other pupils; but not
even the pedantic methods then prevailing, or the distractions of his
new life, could dull the flush of his first encounter with the past. His
imagination took fire over the dry pages of Cornelius Nepos, glowed with
the mild pastoral warmth of the Georgics and burst into flame at the
first hexameters of the Aeneid. He caught but a fragment of meaning here
and there, but the sumptuous imagery, the stirring names, the glimpses
into a past where Roman senators were mingled with the gods of a
gold-pillared Olympus, filled his mind with a misty pageant of
immortals. These moments of high emotion were interspersed with hours of
plodding over the Latin grammar and the textbooks of philosophy and
logic. Books were unknown ground to Cantapresto, and among masters and
pupils there was not one who could help Odo to the meaning of his task,
or who seemed aware that it might have a meaning. To most of the lads
about him the purpose of the Academy was to fit young gentlemen for the
army or the court; to give them the chance of sweating a shirt every
morning with the fencing-master and of learning to thread the
intricacies of the court minuet. They modelled themselves on the dress
and bearing of the pages, who were always ruffling it about the
quadrangle in court dress and sword, or booted and spurred for a day's
hunting at the King's chase of Stupinigi. To receive a nod or a word
from one of these young demigods on his way to the King's opera-box or
just back from a pleasure-party at her Majesty's villa above the Po--to
hear of their tremendous exploits and thrilling escapades--seemed to put
the whole school in touch with the fine gentleman's world of intrigue,
cards and duelling: the world in which ladies were subjugated, fortunes
lost, adversaries run through and tradesmen ruined with that
imperturbable grace which distinguished the man of quality from the
plebeian.
Among the privileges of the foreign pupils were frequent visits to the
royal theatre; and here was to Odo a source of unimagined joys. His
superstitious dread of the stage (a sentiment, he soon discovered, that
not even his mother's director shared) made his heart beat oppressively
as he first set foot in the theatre. It was a gala night, boxes and
stalls were thronged, and the audience-hall unfolded its glittering
curves like some poisonous flower enveloping him in rich malignant
fragrance. This impression was dispelled by the rising of the curtain on
a scene of such Claude-like loveliness as it would have been impossible
to associate with the bug-bear tales of Donnaz or with the coarse antics
of the comedians at Chivasso. A temple girt with mysterious shade,
lifting its colonnade above a sunlit harbour; and before the temple,
vine-wreathed nymphs waving their thyrsi through the turns of a
melodious dance--such was the vision that caught up Odo and swept him
leagues away from the rouged and starred assemblage gathered in the
boxes to gossip, flirt, eat ices and chocolates, and incidentally, in
the pauses of their talk, to listen for a moment to the ravishing airs
of Metastasio's Achilles in Scyros.
The distance between such performances--magic evocations of light and
colour and melody--and the gross buffoonery of the popular stage, still
tainted with the obscenities of the old commedia dell' arte, in a
measure explains the different points from which at that period the
stage was viewed in Italy: a period when in such cities as Milan,
Venice, Turin, actors and singers were praised to the skies and loaded
with wealth and favours, while the tatterdemalion players who set up
their boards in the small towns at market-time or on feast-days were
despised by the people and flung like carrion into unconsecrated graves.
The impression Odo had gathered from Don Gervaso's talk was of the
provincial stage in all its pothouse license; but here was a spectacle
as lofty and harmonious as some great religious pageant. As the action
developed and the beauty of the verse was borne to Odo on the light
hurrying ripples of Caldara's music he turned instinctively to share his
pleasure with those about him. Cantapresto, in a new black coat and
ruffles, was conspicuously taking snuff from the tortoiseshell box which
the Countess's cicisbeo had given him; but Odo saw that he took less
pleasure in the spectacle than in the fact of accompanying the
heir-presumptive of Pianura to a gala performance at the royal theatre;
and the lads about them were for the most part engaged either with their
own dress and appearance, or in exchanging greetings with the royal
pages and the older students. A few of these sat near Odo, disdainfully
superior in their fob-chains and queues; and as the boy glanced about
him he met the fixed stare of one of the number, a tall youth seated at
his elbow, and conspicuous, even in that modish company, for the
exaggerated elegance of his dress. This young man, whose awkward bearing
and long lava-hued face crowned with flamboyant hair contrasted oddly
with his finical apparel, returned Odo's look with a gaze of eager
comprehension. He too, it was clear, felt the thrill and wonder, or at
least re-lived them in the younger lad's emotion; and from that moment
Odo felt himself in mute communion with his neighbour.
The quick movement of the story--the succession of devices by which the
wily Ulysses lures Achilles to throw off his disguise, while Deidamia
strives to conceal his identity; the scenic beauties of the background,
shifting from sculpture-gallery to pleasance, from pleasance to
banquet-hall; the pomp and glitter of the royal train, the melting
graces of Deidamia and her maidens; seemed, in their multiple appeal, to
develop in Odo new faculties of perception. It was his first initiation
into Italian poetry, and the numbers, now broken, harsh and passionate,
now flowing into liquid sweetness, were so blent with sound and colour
that he scarce knew through which sense they reached him. Deidamia's
strophes thrilled him like the singing-girl's kiss, and at the young
hero's cry--
Ma lo so ch' io sono Achille,
E mi sento Achille in sen--
his fists tightened and the blood hummed in his ears.
In the scene of the banquet-hall, where the followers of Ulysses lay
before Lycomedes the offerings of the Greek chieftains, and, while the
King and Deidamia are marvelling at the jewels and the Tyrian robes,
Achilles, unmindful of his disguise, bursts out
Ah, chi vide finora armi piu belle?
--at this supreme point Odo again turned to his neighbour. They
exchanged another look, and at the close of the act the youth leaned
forward to ask with an air of condescension: "Is this your first
acquaintance with the divine Metastasio?"
"I have never been in a play-house before," said Odo reddening.
The other smiled. "You are fortunate in having so worthy an introduction
to the stage. Many of our operas are merely vulgar and ridiculous; but
Metastasio is a great poet." Odo nodded a breathless assent. "A great
poet," his new acquaintance resumed, "and handling a great theme. But do
you not suffer from the silly songs that perpetually interrupt the flow
of the verse? To me they are intolerable. Metastasio might have been a
great tragic dramatist if Italy would have let him. But Italy does not
want tragedies--she wishes to be sung to, danced to, made eyes at,
flattered and amused! Give her anything, anything that shall help her to
forget her own abasement. Panem et circenses! that is always her cry.
And who can wonder that her sovereigns and statesmen are willing to
humour her, when even her poets stoop to play the mountebank for her
diversion?" The speaker, ruffling his locks with a hand that scattered
the powder, turned on the brilliant audience his strange corrugated
frown. "Fools! simpletons!" he cried, "not to see that in applauding the
Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own
abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's
finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first
signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell
them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a
maudlin reconciliation of love and glory--but the whole truth, naked,
cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these
bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress,
and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their
masters!" He paused and drew back with a supercilious smile. "But
doubtless, sir," said he, "I offend you in thus arraigning your sacred
caste; for unless I mistake you belong to the race of demi-gods--the
Titans whose downfall is at hand?" He swept the boxes with a
contemptuous eye.
Little of this tirade was clear to Odo; but something in the speaker's
tone moved him to answer, with a quick lifting of his head: "My name is
Odo Valsecca, of the Dukes of Pianura;" when, fearing he had seemed to
parade his birth before one evidently of inferior station, he at once
added with a touch of shyness: "And you, sir, are perhaps a poet, since
you speak so beautifully?"
At which, with a stare and a straightening of his long awkward body, the
other haughtily returned: "A poet, sir? I am the Count Vittorio Alfieri
of Asti."
1.9.
The singular being with whom chance had thus brought him acquainted was
to have a lasting influence on the formation of Odo's character.
Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, his
desultory years of academic schooling, was probably the most
extraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel's dominion. Of the future
student, of the tragic poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italy
by raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody boy with
his craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for his
own class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice,
must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. It seems
indeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passed
among his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant young
noblemen in a society where idleness and extravagance were held to be
the natural attributes of the great. But in the growth of character the
light on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitory
gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a
Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto's verse.
It was the instant response of Odo's imagination that drew the two
together. Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the same
wing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri's class, and enjoyed an
almost equal freedom. Thus, despite the difference of age, the lads
found themselves allied by taste and circumstances. Among the youth of
their class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, however
obscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide of
renovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to the
same uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger
lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty. Odo
could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro's Aeneid
and Metastasio's opera libretti, Voltaire's Zaire and the comedies of
Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion's sympathy with
his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.
Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the
elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of
possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more vivid
sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of
his own sluggish nature.
The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune,
which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his
fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if
Alfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes
were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are
more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for
what escapes them. Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossible
for the latter to condescend to him; and the equality of intercourse
between the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeited
with adulation.
Of the opportunities his new friendship brought him, none became in
after years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to
the latter's uncle, the illustrious architect Count Benedetto Alfieri.
This accomplished and amiable man, who had for many years devoted his
talents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining the
Academy; and thither, one holiday afternoon, Vittorio conducted his
young friend.
Ignorant as Odo was of all the arts, he felt on the very threshold the
new quality of his surroundings. These tall bare rooms, where busts and
sarcophagi were ranged as in the twilight of a temple, diffused an
influence that lowered the voice and hushed the step. In the
semi-Parisian capital where French architects designed the King's
pleasure-houses and the nobility imported their boudoir-panellings from
Paris and their damask hangings from Lyons, Benedetto Alfieri
represented the old classic tradition, the tradition of the "grand
manner," which had held its own through all later variations of taste,
running parallel with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and the
effeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, in
the company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society where
the revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberality
of Princes and Cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholars
in their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri had
returned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the graceful
and ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;
bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a view
raised but perhaps narrowed by close study of the past: the view of a
generation of architects in whom archeological curiosity had stifled the
artistic instinct, and who, instead of assimilating the spirit of the
past like their great predecessors, were engrossed in a sterile
restoration of the letter. It may be said of this school of architects
that they were of more service to posterity than to their
contemporaries; for while they opened the way to modern antiquarian
research, their pedantry checked the natural development of a style
which, if left to itself, might in time have found new and more vigorous
forms of expression.
To Odo, happily, Count Benedetto's surroundings spoke more forcibly than
his theories. Every object in the calm severe rooms appealed to the boy
with the pure eloquence of form. Casts of the Vatican busts stood
against the walls and a niche at one end of the library contained a
marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their winged
genii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments
of Roman mosaic and Pompeian fresco-painting, roused Odo's curiosity as
if they had been the scattered letters of a new alphabet; and he saw
with astonishment his friend Vittorio's indifference to these wonders.
Count Benedetto, it was clear, was resigned to his nephew's lack of
interest. The old man doubtless knew that he represented to the youth
only the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake of
what his pocket may procure; and such kindly tolerance made Odo regret
that Vittorio should not at least affect an interest in his uncle's
pursuits.
Odo's eagerness to see and learn filled Count Benedetto with a simple
joy. He brought forth all his treasures for the boy's instruction and
the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings,
Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegant
pencil-drawings of classical remains. Like all students of his day he
had also his cabinet of antique gems and coins, from which Odo obtained
more intimate glimpses of that buried life so marvellously exhumed
before him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiar
gestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nor
did the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and for
the first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the great
classical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, and
the divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named without
baring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his first
conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact
with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of
the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had
not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,
Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the
Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo
the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at
Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had
formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected;
and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin
Parnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet
rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or
ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old
Count's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.
Such an initiation was the more precious to him from the indifference of
those about him to all forms of liberal culture. Among the greater
Italian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to new
influences, the most rigidly bound up in the formulas of the past. While
Milan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophic
thought; while Naples was producing a group of economists such as
Galiani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome was
dedicating herself to the investigation of ancient art and polity, and
even flighty Venice had her little set of "liberals," who read Voltaire
and Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capital
lay in the grasp of a bigoted clergy and of a reigning house which was
already preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudal
discipline of the border. Generations of hard fighting and rigorous
living had developed in the nobles the qualities which were preparing
them for the great part their country was to play; and contact with the
Waldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into a
sombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rules
of the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense of
intellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles like
Massimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children his
first and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of his
wife's conventual training by "consecrating to her daily four hours of
reading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner view
was that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in their
son's hearing "the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility" that there is
no need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was the
opinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters of
Casa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of his
duties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of poverty
and ennui, had sunk into a state of rigid pietism; so that the lad, on
his visits to his mother, found himself in a world where art was
represented by the latest pastel-portrait of a court beauty, literature
by Liguori's Glories of Mary or the blessed Battista's Mental Sorrows of
Christ, and history by the conviction that Piedmont's efforts to stamp
out the enemies of the Church had distinguished her above every other
country of Europe. Donna Laura's cicisbeo was indeed a member of the
local Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in the
noble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a pet
canary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whose
Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown Dante to be a writer of
barbarous doggerel; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard less
of Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than of
the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime "heroico-comic" poem
on the infancy of Jesus.
It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, owed her literature and her art, as well as the
direction of her religious life. Though the reaction against the order
was everywhere making itself felt, though one Italian sovereign after
another had been constrained to purchase popularity or even security by
banishing the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained their
hold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastes
they affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious and
political conservatism, against which invisible forces were already felt
to be moving. For the use of their noble supporters, the Jesuits had
devised a religion as elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages of
the aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels in imitation of
great ladies' boudoirs and prescribed observances in keeping with the
vapid and gossiping existence of their inmates.
To Odo, fresh from the pure air of Donnaz, where the faith of his
kinsfolk expressed itself in charity, self-denial and a noble decency of
life, there was something stifling in the atmosphere of languishing
pietism in which his mother's friends veiled the emptiness of their
days. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's
conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his
devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices." It
was in his nature to grudge no sacrifice to his ideals, and he might
have accomplished without question the monotonous observances his
confessor exacted, but for the changed aspect of the Deity in whose name
they were imposed.
As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come
from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned.
Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined
complaisances of his new confessor he felt the distinction to be one
rather of taste than of principle; and it seemed to him that the
religion of the aristocracy might not unfairly be summed up in the
ex-soprano's cynical aphorism: "As respectful children of our Heavenly
Father it behoves us not to speak till we are spoken to."
Even the religious ceremonies he witnessed did not console him for that
chill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served the
mass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yet
uplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adorned
like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in
artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where
the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera
singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed
in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was
gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity,
and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on
wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory--
Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae!
It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.