The train that first carried me into Rome was late, overcrowded and
cold. There had been several unexplained waits in an open field, and
midnight found us still moving slowly across the Campagna toward the
faintly-colored clouds that hung above Rome. At intervals we stopped at
platforms where flaring lamps lit up for a moment some splendid
weather-moulded head. Darkness surrounded these platforms, save for
glimpses of a road and the dim outlines of a mountain ridge. It was
Virgil's country and there was a wind that seemed to rise from the
fields and descend upon us in a long Virgilian sigh, for the land that
has inspired sentiment in the poet ultimately receives its sentiment
from him.
The train was overcrowded, because some tourists had discovered on the
previous day that the beggars of Naples smelt of carbolic acid. They
concluded at once that the authorities had struck a case or two of
Indian cholera and were disinfecting the underworld by a system of
enforced baths. The air of Naples generates legend. In the sudden exodus
tickets for Rome became all but unprocurable, and First Class tourists
rode Third, and interesting people rode First.
In the carriage it was cold. We sat in our overcoats meditating, our
eyes glazed by resignation or the glare. In one compartment a party
drawn from that race that travels most and derives least pleasure from
it, talked tirelessly of bad hotels, the ladies sitting with their
skirts whipped about their ankles to discourage the ascent of fleas.
Opposite them sprawled three American Italians returning to their homes
in some Apennine village after twenty years of trade in fruit and
jewelry on upper Broadway. They had invested their savings in the
diamonds on their fingers, and their eyes were not less bright with
anticipation of a family reunion. One foresaw their parents staring at
them, unable to understand the change whereby their sons had lost the
charm the Italian soil bestows upon the humblest of its children, noting
only that they have come back with bulbous features, employing barbarous
idioms and bereft forever of the witty psychological intuition of their
race. Ahead of them lay some sleepless bewildered nights above their
mothers' soil floors and muttering poultry.
In another compartment an adventuress in silver sables leaned one cheek
against the shuddering windowpane. Opposite her a glittering-eyed matron
stared with challenging persistency, ready to intercept any glance the
girl might cast upon her dozing husband. In the corridor two young army
officers lolled and preened and angled for her glance, like those
insects in certain beautiful pages of Fabre, who go through the ritual
of flirtation under futile conditions, before a stone, merely because
some associative motors have been touched.
There was a Jesuit with his pupils, filling the time with Latin
conversation; a Japanese diplomat reverently brooding over a
postage-stamp collection; a Russian sculptor sombrely reading the bony
structure of our heads; some Oxford students carefully dressed for
tramping, but riding over the richest tramping country in Italy; the
usual old woman with a hen and the usual young American, staring. Such a
company as Rome receives ten times a day, and remains Rome.
My companion sat reading a trodden copy of the London Times, real estate
offers, military promotions and all. James Blair after six years of
classical studies at Harvard had been sent to Sicily as archaeological
adviser to a motion picture company bent on transferring the body of
Greek mythology to the screen. The company had failed and been
dispersed, and Blair thereafter had roamed the Mediterranean, finding
stray employment and filling immense notebooks with his observations and
theories. His mind brimmed with speculation: as to the chemical
composition of Raphael's pigments; as to the lighting conditions under
which the sculptors of antiquity wished their work to be viewed; as to
the date of the most inaccessible mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore. Of
all these suggestions and many more he allowed me to make notes, even to
the extent of copying some diagrams in colored inks. In the event of his
being lost at sea with all his notebooks--a not improbable one, as he
crosses the Atlantic on obscure and economical craft, not mentioned in
your paper, even when they founder--it would be my confusing duty to
make a gift of this material to the Librarian of Harvard University
where its unintelligibility might confer upon it an incomputable value.
Presently discarding his paper, Blair decided to talk: You may have come
to Rome to study, but before you settle down to the ancients you see
whether there aren't some interesting moderns.
There's no PhD. in modern Romans. Our posterity does that. What moderns
do you mean?
Have you ever heard of the _Cabala_?
Which one?
A kind of a group living around Rome.
No.
They're very rich and influential. Everyone's afraid of them. Everybody
suspects them of plots to overturn things.
Political?
No, not exactly. Sometimes.
Social swells?
Yes, of course. But more than that, too. Fierce intellectual snobs, they
are. Mme. Agoropoulos is no end afraid of them. She says that every now
and then they descend from Tivoli and intrigue some bill through the
Senate, or some appointment in the Church, or drive some poor lady out
of Rome.
Tchk!
It's because they're bored. Mme. Agoropoulos says they're frightfully
bored. They've had everything so long. The chief thing about them is
that they hate what's recent. They spend their time insulting new titles
and new fortunes and new ideas. In lots of ways they're mediæval. Just
in their appearance for one thing. And in their ideas. I fancy it's like
this: you've heard of scientists off Australia coming upon regions where
the animals and plants ceased to evolve ages ago? They find a pocket of
archaic time in the middle of a world that has progressed beyond it.
Well, it must be something like that with the Cabala. Here's a group of
people losing sleep over a host of notions that the rest of the world
has outgrown several centuries ago: one duchess' right to enter a door
before another; the word order in a dogma of the Church; the divine
right of kings, especially of Bourbons. They're still passionately in
earnest about stuff that the rest of us regard as pretty antiquarian
lore. What's more, these people that hug these notions aren't just
hermits and ignored eccentrics, but members of a circle so powerful and
exclusive that all these Romans refer to them with bated breath as The
Cabala. They work with incredible subtlety, let me tell you, and have
incredible resources in wealth and loyalty. I'm quoting Mme.
Agoropoulos, who has a sort of hysterical fear of them, and thinks
they're supernatural.
But she must know some of them personally.
Of course she does. So do I.
One isn't afraid of people one knows. Who's in it?
I'm taking you to meet one of them tomorrow, this Miss Grier. She's
leader of the whole international set. I catalogued her library for
her,--oh, I couldn't have got to know her any other way. I lived in her
apartment in the Palazzo Barberini and used to get whiffs of the Cabala.
Besides her there's a Cardinal. And the Princess d'Espoli who's mad. And
Madame Bernstein of the German banking family. Each one of them has some
prodigious gift, and together they're miles above the next social
stratum below them. They're so wonderful that they're lonely. I quote.
They sit off there in Tivoli getting what comfort they can from one
another's excellence.
Do they call themselves the Cabala. Are they organized?
Not as I see it. Probably it never occurred to them that they even
constituted a group. I say, you study them up. You ferret it out, the
whole secret. It's not my line.
In the pause that followed, fragments of conversation from the various
corners of the compartment flowed in upon our minds so recently occupied
with semi-divine personages. I haven't the slightest desire to quarrel,
Hilda, muttered one of the English-women. Naturally you made the
arrangements for the trip as best you could. All I say is that that girl
did _not_ clean off the washstand every morning. There were rings and
rings.
And from an American Italian: I says it's none of your goddam business,
I says. Take your goddam shirt the hell outta here. He run, I tell you;
he run so fast you don't see no dust for him he run so.
The Jesuit and his pupils had become politely interested in the postage
stamps and the Japanese attaché was murmuring: Oh, most exclusively
rare! The four-cent is pale violet and when held up to the light reveals
a water-mark, a sea-horse. There are only seven in the world and three
are in the collection of the Baron Rothschild.
Symphonically considered, one heard that there had been no sugar in it,
that she had told Marietta three mornings running to put sugar in it, or
bring sugar, although the Republic of Guatemala had immediately cut
than, a few had leaked out to collectors, and that more musk-melons than
one would have thought possible were sold annually at the corner of
Broadway and 126th Street. Perhaps it was in revulsion against such
small change that the impulse first rose in me to pursue these
Olympians, who though they might be bored and mistaken, had at least,
each of them, "one prodigious gift."
It was in this company then, and in the dejected airs of one in the
morning that I first arrived in Rome, in that station that is uglier
than most, more hung with advertisements of medicinal waters and more
redolent of ammonia. During the journey I had been planning what I
should do the moment I arrived: fill myself with coffee and wine, and in
the proud middle of the night, run down the Via Cavour. Under the hints
of dawn I should behold the tribune of Santa Maria Maggiore, hovering
above me like the ark on Ararat, and the ghost of Palestrina in a soiled
cassock letting himself out at a side door and rushing home to a large
family in five voices; hurry on to the platform before the Lateran where
Dante mixes with the Jubilee crowd; overhang the Forum and skirt the
locked Palatine; follow the river to the inn where Montaigne groans over
his ailments; and fall a-staring at the Pope's cliff-like dwelling,
where work Rome's greatest artists, the one who is never unhappy and the
one who is never anything else. I would know my way about, for my mind
is built upon the map of the city that throughout the eight years of
school and college had hung above my desk, a city so longed for that it
seemed as though in the depth of my heart I had never truly believed I
should see it.
When I arrived finally, the station was deserted; there was no coffee,
no wine, no moon, no ghosts. Just a drive through shadowy streets to the
sound of fountains, and the very special echo of travertine pavements.
During the first week Blair helped me find and fit out an apartment. It
consisted of five rooms in an old palace across the river and within
stone's-throw of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The rooms
were high and damp and bad Eighteenth Century. The ceiling of the salone
was modestly coffered and there were bits of crumbling stucco in the
hall, still tinted with faint blues and pinks and gilt; every morning's
sweeping carried off a bit more of some cupid's curls or chips of scroll
and garland. In the kitchen there was a fresco of Jacob wrestling with
the angel, but the stove concealed it. We passed two days in choosing
chairs and tables, in loading them upon carts and personally conducting
them to our mean street; in haggling over great lengths of gray-blue
brocade before a dozen shops, always with a view toward variety in stains
and unravellings and creases; in selecting from among the brisk
imitations of ancient candelabra those which most successfully simulated
age and pure line.
The acquisition of Ottima was Blair's triumph. There was a trattoria at
the corner, a lazy casual talkative wine-shop, run by three sisters.
Blair studied them for a time, and finally proposed to the intelligent
middle-aged humorous one that she come and be my cook "for a few weeks."
Italians have a horror of making long-term contracts and it was this
last clause that won Ottima. We offered to take on any man she
recommended to help her with the heavier work, but she clouded at that
and replied that she could very well do the heavier work too. The
removal to my rooms must have arrived as a providential solution to some
problem in Ottima's life, for she attached herself passionately to her
work, to me, and to her companions in the kitchen, Kurt the police dog
and Messalina the cat. We each winked at the others' failings and we
created a home.
The day following our arrival, then, we called upon the latest dictator
of Rome and found a rather boyish spinster with an interesting and
ailing face, fretful bird-like motions and exhibiting a perpetual
alternation of kindness and irritability. It was nearly six when we
walked into her drawing-room in the Palazzo Barberini and found four
ladies and a gentleman seated a little stiffly about a table conversing
in French. Madame Agoropoulos gave a cry of joy at seeing Blair, the
absent-minded scholar to whom she was so attached; Miss Grier echoed it.
A thin Mrs. Roy waited until something had been dropped into the
conversation about our family connections before she could relax and
smile. The Spanish Ambassador and his wife wondered how on earth America
could get on without a system of titles whereby one might unerrably
recognize one's own people, and the Marquesa shuddered slightly at the
intrusion of two coarse young redskins and began composing mentally the
faulty French sentence with which she would presently excuse herself.
For a time the conversation blew fitfully about, touched with the formal
charm of all conversation conducted in a language that is native to no
one in the group.
Suddenly my attention was caught by a tension in the room. I sensed the
tentatives of an intrigue without being able to gather the remotest
notion of the objectives. Miss Grier was pretending to babble, but was
in reality quite earnest, and Mrs. Roy was taking notes, mentally. The
episode resolved itself into a typical, though not very complicated,
example of the Roman social bargain, with its characteristic set of
ramifications into religious, political and domestic life. In the light
of information received much later, I call your attention to what Mrs.
Roy wanted Miss Grier to do for her; and what Miss Grier asked in return
for her services:
Mrs. Roy had narrow eyes and a mouth that had just tasted quinine; while
she spoke her ear-pendants rattled against her lean clavicles. She was a
Roman Catholic, and in her political activity a Black of the Blacks.
During her residence in Rome she had occupied herself with the task of
bringing the needs of certain American charitable organizations to the
attention of the Supreme Pontiff. Slander attributed a diversity of
motives to her good works, the least damaging of which was the hope of
being named a Countess of the Papal States. The fact is that Mrs. Roy
was pressing audiences in the Vatican with the hope of inducing His
Holiness to commit a miracle, namely to grant her a divorce under the
Pauline Privilege. This consummation, not without precedent, depended
upon a number of conditions. Before taking any such step the Vatican
would ascertain very carefully how great the surprise would be in Roman
Catholic circles; American cardinals would be asked in confidence for a
report on the matron's character, and the faithful in Rome and
Baltimore, without their being aware of it, would be consulted. This
done it would be well to gauge the degree of cynicism or approval the
measure would arouse in Protestants. Mrs. Roy's reputation happened to
be above reproach, and her right to a divorce indisputable (her husband
had offended under every category: he had been unfaithful; he had lapsed
from a still greater faith; and he had become an _animae periculum_,
that is, he had tried to draw her into an irreverent argument over the
liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius); but the Protestant
_imprimatur_ was needed. Whose opinion would be more valuable for this
purpose than that of the austere directress of the American Colony? Miss
Grier would be approached--and both women knew it--through channels
exquisite in their delicacy and resonance; and if an uncertain note were
sounded from the Palazzo Barberini, the familiar verdict Inexpedient
would be returned to the petitioner, and the question never reopened.
Mrs. Roy having so much to ask from Miss Grier, wanted to know if there
were any service she could render in return.
There was.
No Italian work of art of the classic periods may leave the country
without an enormous export tax. How then did Mantegna's "Madonna between
St. George and St. Helen" ever arrive at the Alumnae Hall of Vassar
College without passing through the customs? It was last seen three
years before in the collection of the poor Principessa Gaeta; it was so
ascribed in the reports of the Minister of Fine Arts for the following
years, in spite of the rumor that it was being offered to the museums of
Brooklyn, Cleveland and Detroit. It changed hands six times, but the
dealers, savants and curators were so taken up with the problem as to
whether or not St. Helen's left foot had been retouched by Bellini (as
Vasari affirms) that it had never occurred to them to ask if it had been
registered at the border. It was finally bought by a mad old Boston
dowager in a lavender wig who, dying, bequeathed it (along with three
spurious Botticellis) to that college with which her vicious spelling
alone would have prevented her association in any capacity save that of
trustee.
The Minister of Fine Arts at Rome had just heard of the donation and was
in despair. When the thing became known his position and reputation
would be gone. All his vast labors for his country (_exempli gratia_: he
had obstructed the disinterment of Herculaneum for twenty years; he had
ruined the facades of twenty gorgeous Baroque churches in the hope of
finding a thirteenth century window; etc., etc.) would avail him nothing
in the storms of Roman journalism. All loyal Italians suffer at the
sight of their art treasures being carried off to America; they are only
waiting for some pretext to rend an official and appease their injured
honor. The Embassy was already in agonies of conciliation. Vassar could
not be expected to give up the picture, nor to pay a smuggler's duty.
Tomorrow morning the Roman editorials would picture a barbarous America
stealing from Italy her very children and references would be made to
Cato, Aeneas, Michelangelo, Cavour and St. Francis. The Senatus Romanus
would sit on every bit of delicate business that America was endeavoring
to recommend to Italian favor.
Now Miss Grier, too, was a trustee of Vassar. She had a flattering
position in the long processions that formed in June among the sun-dials
and educative shrubs. She was ready to pay the fine, but not until she
had placated the city fathers. This could be done by obtaining the
favorable votes of the committee that was to sit that very evening. This
committee was composed of seven members, four of whose votes she already
commanded; the other three were Blacks. For the matter to be dropped in
the interest of the Princess Gaeta a unanimous verdict was necessary.
If Mrs. Roy descended at once to her car, she would have time to drive
to the American College in the Piazza di Spagna and confer with dear
omniscient Father O'Leary. Marvellous are the accoustics of the Church!
Before ten that evening the three Black votes would be decently cast for
conciliation. It was Miss Grier's task over the tea-table to convey this
long exposition to Mrs. Roy and to intimate the ineffable return she,
Miss Grier, would be able to make for any favors. This was complicated
by the necessity of making sure that neither Mme. Agoropoulos nor the
Ambassadress (men don't matter) suspected the least collusion.
Fortunately the Ambassadress could not understand rapid French, and Mme.
Agoropoulos, being sentimental, could be continually distracted from the
main issue by little sops of prettification and pathos.
Miss Grier played these several cards with the economy and precision of
a faultless technique. She had that quality which is a peculiar part of
the genuine that invests great monarchs, and which we see notably in
Elizabeth and Frederick, the power of adjusting threats to just the
degree that stimulates, yet does not antagonize. Mrs. Roy understood at
once what was expected of her. She had been packing committees and
conciliating soured Papal chamberlains and Italian political _dévotes_
these many years; trading in influence was her daily portion. Moreover
joy can exert the happiest sort of influence on the intelligence and she
felt her divorce was at hand. She rose hastily.
Will you excuse me if I run? she murmured. I told Julia Howard I would
call for her at Rosali's. And I have an errand in the Piazza di Spagna.
She bowed to us and fled. What emotion is it that lends wings to such
matter-of-fact feet and blitheness to such thin dispositions? The next
year she married a young French yachtsman, half her age; she settled
down in Florence and gave birth to a son. The Blacks no longer talked
votes when she entered their drawing-rooms. Vassar retains the painting
and in its archives a letter from the Italian Secretary for Foreign
Affairs which reads like a deed of gift. The influence of a work of art
upon the casual passerby is too subtle for determination, but one has
faith to believe that the hundreds of girls who pass beneath the
Mantegna daily draw from it impulses that make them nobler wives and
mothers. At least that is what the Ministry promised the College.
When the others had gone, Miss Grier made a face after them, lowered the
lights and bade us talk about New York. She seemed to take some pleasure
in such exotic company as ourselves, but her mind strayed until suddenly
jumping up, she smoothed out the folds of her gown and bade us hurry
off, dress, and come back to dinner at eight. We were surprised but
equal to it, and dashed off into the rain.
At once I harried Blair for more facts about her. He could give me
little; the portrait of her mind and even of her features lies in the
following account of her ancestry that I made out for myself by reading
between the lines and by studying the photographs of a history of the
Griers, written by a second cousin, for considerations.
It seems that her great-grandfather had gone to New York in 1800,
suffering from ill-health. He took an old house in the country and
intended spending his days like a hermit, studying the prophetic
passages of the Bible and encouraging the multiplication of four pigs
that he had brought across the water in a basket. But his
disposition improving with his affairs, he soon discovered himself to be
married to the heiress of Dawes Corners, Miss Agatha Frehestocken, the
death of whose parents, ten years later, united two farms of
considerable extent. Their children, Benjamin and Anne, were brought up
with such education as fell to them on rainy afternoons at the caprice
of their father. Our Miss Grier's grandfather, a crafty single-minded
country boy, disappeared for many years into a whirlpool of obscure
activity in town, becoming in turn potboy, newspaper devil and
restaurant manager. At last he revisited his parents and forced them to
permit his using their land as security for some railroad investments.
We have his picture at this stage: the daguerreotype of the Dutch yokel
with the protruding lower lip and grinning pugnacious eyes is reproduced
in any history of the great American fortunes. Probably the gentle art
of horsewhipping one's parents was revived that Sunday evening at Dawes
Corners for Anne intimates that she was directed to take her knitting
into the feed-house and sit on sacks until she was recalled. The old
father cursed the son roundly from the imprecatory psalms and had his
curious revenge: the worm of religious introspection was stirred in the
brain of Benjamin Grier and a strain of ill-health in his body. Success
came of it; he became a deacon and a millionaire at about the same time;
he was presently directing five railroads from a wheel-chair. His
parents died in a Washington Square mansion, unforgiving to the end.
Benjamin married the daughter of another magnate, a girl who in another
age and faith would have retired to a convent and eased the poverty of
her mental and spiritual nature in a perpetual flow of damp
unexplainable tears. She bore a sickly son to the world of brownstone, a
son in whom the æsthetic impulse stifled during so many generations of
Griers and Halletts, attained a piteous flowering, a passion for the
operas of Rossini, and for things he fondly took to be Italian, garish
rosaries, the costumes of the peasant of Capri, and the painting of
Domenichino. He married a firm sharp woman, older than himself, who had
deliberately chosen him in the vestry of the Presbyterian Church. They
were incredibly wealthy, with that wealth that increases in the dark
and, untended, doubles in a year. With the affiliation of this
determined Grace Benham one last offspring was made possible to the
Grier line,--our Miss Grier. To the score of governesses that trod
sobbing on one another's heels, she appeared a monster of guile and
virulence. She was dragged without rest from New York to Baden-Baden,
from Vevey to Rome, and back again; and she grew up without forming any
attachment to place or person. Her parents died when she was twenty-four
and finally sheer solitude did what exhortation could not do: her
character softened in an attempt at piteously luring people to talk to
her, live with her, to fill somehow the moneyed emptiness of her days.
Such an account of her extraction, if she read it, would have neither
interested her nor embarrassed her. Her mind lay under the hot breath of
a great fretfulness; she lived to ridicule and insult the fools and
innocents of her social circle. In this fretfulness floated all the
enthusiasms and frustrations of her line: her great-grandfather's gloom,
her grandfather's whip and his dread of the Valley of Bones, her
grandmother's red eyes and her father's repressed loves for the Normas
and Semiramides of the Academy of Music. She was restless too, with the
masculine capacities inherited from her grandfather, the capacities of a
business magnate, that given her sex and situation could find their only
outlet in a passion for making women tremble and a mania for interfering
in the affairs of others. She was with all this a woman of intelligence
and force; she ruled her eccentric and rebellious parish with acrid
pleasure and at her death the drawing-rooms of Rome resounded with a
strange wild murmur of muted joy.
Her portrait is not complete without an account of her strangest habit,
due partly to the sleepless nights of a lifetime of illness, and partly
to the fear of ghosts instilled in her by governesses when she was a
girl. She was never able to sleep until the coming on of dawn. She
feared to be alone; toward one in the morning she could be found urging
her last callers to stay a little longer; _c'est l'heure du champagne_,
she would say, offering them that untimely inducement. When finally they
went away she would devote the rest of the night to music, for like the
German princes of the Eighteenth Century she maintained her own troup of
musicians.
These sessions before dawn were not vaguely and sentimentally musical;
they were to the last degree eclectic. In one night she would hear all
the sonatas of Skriabin or the marches of Medtner; in one night both
volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavichord; all the Handel fugues for
organ; six Beethoven trios. Gradually she won away from the more easily
appreciated music altogether and cultivated only what was difficult and
cerebral. She turned to music that was interesting historically and
searched out the forgotten rivals of Bach and the operas of Grétry. She
paid a group of singers from the Lateran choir to sing her endless
Palestrina. She became prodigiously learned. Harold Bauer would listen
meekly to her directions on phrasing Bach--he averred that she had the
only truly contrapuntal ear of the age--and the Flonzaleys acceded to
her request to take certain pages of Lœffler a little faster.
In time I encountered a number of people who for one reason or another
were unable to sleep between midnight and dawn, and when I myself tossed
sleepless or when I returned late to my rooms through the deserted
streets--at the hour when the parricide feels a cat purring against his
feet in the darkness--I pictured to myself old Baldassare, in the Borgo,
former Bishop of Shantung, Apostolic Visitor to the Far East, rising at
two to study with streaming eyes the Church Fathers and the Councils,
marvelling he said, at the continuous blooming of the rose-tree of
Doctrine; or of Stasia, a Russian refugee who had lost the habit of
sleeping after dark during her experience as nurse in the War, Stasia
playing solitaire through the night and brooding over the jocose
tortures to which her family had been subjected by the soldiers of
Taganrog; and of Elizabeth Grier listening the length of her long
shadowed room to some new work that d'lndy had sent her or bending over
the score while her little troup revived the overture to _Les Indes
Galantes_.
When we remounted the steps an hour later, then, we found the guests
already arrived and awaiting their hostess. Among other privileges Miss
Grier had long reserved to herself a prerogative of royalty, that of
being the last arrival at one's own parties. In the hall the
maître-d'hôtel gave me a note reading: Please take in Mlle de
Morfontaine, a high Merovingian maiden who may invite you to her villa
at Tivoli. In a few moments Miss Grier had slipped in and was greeting
her guests in a hurried zigzag across the room. She was dressed after a
costume-plate by Fortuny, conceived in salamander red and black. About
her neck hung a rare medal of the Renaissance, much larger than any
other woman would have ventured to wear.
As this woman wanted to be in a position to hear every word spoken at
her table Rome had long had good reason to complain of the crowded
arrangements of her dinners; we were packed together like the hurried
diners at Modane. But she had still other conventions to challenge: she
discussed the food; she reversed the direction of conversation from the
right to the left hand at the least convenient opportunities; she talked
to the servants, chattily; she shifted the conversation from French to
English or Italian capriciously; she referred to guests who had been
invited but had not been able to come. One suddenly became aware that
she was not eating the courses that were served to us. She began with a
little bowl of breadcrumbs and walnuts; to this she added later--while
we confronted a _faisan Souvaroff_ dressed with truffles and _foie gras_
and graced with that ultimate dark richness which it is the privilege of
Madeira to confer on game--an American cereal, soaked in hot water and
touched with butter. Nor could she restrain herself from teasing her
guests in a dangerous way, and with almost inspired precision: a
political Duke on his dull speeches; Mrs. Osborne-Cady on the career as
a concert-pianist that she had sacrificed to a more than usually
disappointing home-life. For a moment at the beginning of the meal her
electric eyes paused at my place and she began to murmur ominously, but
thinking better of it she ordered the servant to offer me some more
_œufs cardinal_ adding with a sort of insolence that they were the only
_œufs cardinal_ that one could eat in Europe and that Mémé (the elder
Princess Galitzine) was a little fool to vaunt her chef, who had
received his training in railway-stations, etc., etc.
The high Merovingian maiden at my left was Mademoiselle
Marie-Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine, daughter of Claude-Elzéar de
Morfontaine and Christine Mézières-Bergh; her grandfather Comte Louis
Mézières-Bergh had married Rachel Krantz, the daughter of the great
financier Maxi Krantz and had been the French ambassador to the Vatican
in 1870. She was then, excessively rich, for she owned, they said, more
shares in the Suez Canal than the Rothschilds: She was tall,
large-limbed and bony, without somehow being too thin. Her high white
face, framed between two carnelian ear pendants, recalled some
symbolical figure in a frieze of Giotto, out of drawing, but radiating
gaunt spiritual passions. She had a hoarse voice and a rapt manner, and
for the first ten minutes said many foolish things because her mind was
afar off; one felt vaguely that it would come around in its own time.
This it presently did and with considerable impact. She outlined to me
the whole Royalist movement in France. She seemed to believe as
passionately in its aim as she despised its practice. There can be no
king in France, she cried, until Catholicism has had a great revival
there. France cannot be great save through Rome. We are Latins; we are
not Goths. They are forcing alien systems upon us. Eventually we shall
find ourselves, our kings, our faith, our Latin hearts. I shall see
France return to Rome before I die, she added clasping her hands before
her chin. I replied faintly that both the French and Italian
temperaments seemed to me singularly unrepublican, whereupon she laid
her long pale hand upon my sleeve and invited me to come that week-end
to her villa.
You will hear the whole argument, she said. And the Cardinal will be
there.
I asked which Cardinal? The pain on her face showed me that at least for
the circle in which she moved there were not seventy cardinals, but one.
Cardinal Vaini, of course. The College at present is singularly free of
uninteresting priests, but surely the only cardinal with learning, with
distinction, with charm, is Cardinal Vaini.
I had so often encountered learning, distinction and charm, (to say
nothing of piety) in the lower reaches of the Church that I was shocked
to learn that these qualities were so rare higher up.
Besides she added, what other is friendly to France, the rebellious
daughter? You have not yet met the Cardinal? Such knowledge! And to
think that he will not write! If I may say it without disrespect His
Eminence is afflicted with a sort of--inertia. The whole world is
waiting for an explanation of certain contradictions in the Fathers; he
is the only man who can do it; yet he remains silent. We beg him with
prayers. It is in his power to effect the re-entry of the Church into
literature. Perhaps he might single-handed carry through the cause we
all have so at heart.