MY DANGEROUS PROGRESS
I was fairly diligent during my year of study at Padua, fairly punctual
in attendance at my classes and lectures, fairly regular in my letter-
writing home. I acquired no vices, though there were plenty to be got,
was not a wine-bibber, a spendthrift, nor a rake. I was too snug in the
Casa Lanfranchi to be tempted astray, and any truantry of mine from the
round of my tasks led me back to Aurelia and love. To beat up the low
quarters of the town, to ruffle in the taverns and chocolate houses with
sham gentlemen, half frocked abbes and rips; to brawl and haggle with
vile persons and their bullies, set cocks a-fighting or rattle the dice-
box in the small hours--what were these pleasures to me, who had Aurelia
to be with? From the first she had taken her duties to heart, to mother
me, to keep me out of harm's way, to maintain her husband's credit by
making sure of mine. These things she set herself to do with a generous
zest which proved her undoing. Slowly, and from the purest of motives,
her influence upon me, her intercourse with me grew and spread. Slowly
the hours I spent with her extended--unperceived by her, exquisitely
perceived by me--until, at the date to which I am now come, near a year
after my entering the university, I may say there was not a spare moment
of the day, from my rising to my going to bed, which was not passed with
Aurelia.
To make the full import of this plain to the reader I must particularise
to some extent. My own rooms, I have explained, were in the same house,
two storeys below the Lanfranchi apartment. In them I was served with my
chocolate by old Nonna the servant, and was understood to leave them at
seven o'clock in the morning and not to return until midday, when I
dined with my hosts. The afternoons were my own. I was at liberty to
take horse exercise--and I kept two saddle-horses for the purpose--or to
make parties of pleasure with such of my fellow-students as were
agreeable to me. At six I supped with Aurelia alone, and at seven I was
supposed to retire--either to my own room for study and bed, or into the
town upon my private pleasures. These, I say, were the rules laid down
by Aurelia and her husband at the beginning of my residence in Padua. By
almost imperceptible degrees they were relaxed, by other degrees equally
hard to measure they were almost wholly altered.
The first to go was the practice of taking my chocolate abed. One
morning Nonna was late, and I rose without it. The same thing happened
more than twice, so then I went upstairs to find out what had hindered
her. There I found my Aurelia fresh from Mass and market, drinking her
morning coffee. Explanations, apologies, what-not, ensued; she invited
me to share her repast. From that time onwards I never broke my fast
otherwise than with her. So was it with other rules of intercourse. The
doctor was a machine in the ordering of his life. His chocolate at six,
his clothes at eight; he left the house at nine and returned at noon. He
left it again at two in the afternoon and returned at nine in the
evening; he supped; he went to bed on the stroke of ten. Except on
Sundays, high festivals, the first, the middle, and the last day of
carnival, through all the time of my acquaintance with him, I never knew
him break these habits but once, and that was when his mother died at
Mestre and he had to attend the funeral. On that occasion he must rise
at six, and miss his dinner at noon. He was furious, I never saw a man
so angry.
I cannot tell how or when it was that I first spent the whole of my
afternoons in Aurelia's society, nor how or when it was that, instead of
leaving her house at seven in the evening, I stayed on with her till the
stroke of nine, within a few minutes of the doctor's homecoming. It is a
thing as remarkable as true that nothing is easier to form than a habit,
and nothing more difficult to break. Formed and unbroken these habits
were, unheeded by ourselves, but not altogether unperceived. There was
one member of the household who perceived them, and never approved. I
remember that old Nonna used to shake her finger at us as we sat
reading, and how she used to call out the progress of the quarters from
the kitchen, where she was busy with her master's supper. But my beloved
mistress could not, and I would not, take any warning. It became a sort
of joke between Aurelia and me to see whether Nonna would miss one of
the quarters. She never did; and as often as not, when nine struck and I
not gone, she would bundle me out of doors by the shoulders and scold
her young mistress in shrill Venetian, loud enough for me to hear at my
own chamber door. Aurelia used to tell me all she had said next morning.
She had an excellent gift of mimicry; could do Nonna and (I grieve to
say) the doctor to the life.
The end of this may be guessed. Privilege after privilege was carelessly
accorded by Aurelia, and greedily possessed by me. At the end of six
months' residence those three still evening hours existed, not for the
blessedness of such intercourse alone, but to be crowned by the
salutation of an adorable hand; and when I retired at last, it was not
to my bed, but to my window; to the velvet spaces of the night, to the
rustling trees, the eloquent congress of the stars; to sigh my secret
abroad to those sympathetic witnesses, to whisper her name, to link it
with my own; to tell, in a word, to the deep-bosomed dark all the daring
fancies of a young man intoxicated with first love. And from privilege
to privilege I strode, a fine conqueror. A very few months more, and not
only was I for ever with Aurelia, but there was no doubt nor affectation
of concealment on my part of how I stood or wished to stand before her.
I postulated myself, in fine, as her servant in amours--cavalier I will
not say, for that has an odious meaning in Italy, than which to describe
my position nothing could be wider of the truth. I did but ask liberty
to adore, sought nothing further, and got nothing else. This, upon my
honour, was ever the sum of my offence--up to my last day of bliss.
You would have supposed that she could hardly have misunderstood the
state of my affairs, had I said or done nothing. So quick-witted was
she, it is inconceivable. But as time went on, and success with it, I
quite got out of the way of concealment, and spoke of myself openly as
her slave. She used to laugh at me, pretend to think me an absurd boy;
and now and then threatened (and that half in jest) to tell her husband.
I know very well that she never did. The padron, we used to call him to
each other, having taken the name from old Nonna. It was one of our
little foolish jokes to pretend the house an inn, he the landlord, and
ourselves travellers met there by hazard. We had a many familiar,
private sayings and nicknames of the sort, secret cues to look across
the table when he was there, and smile at each other--as when he railed
(as he was fond of doing) at Tuscan ways and speech, at the usage of
Siena, her own country, or when (after his meal) he made a noise,
sucking his teeth. Sweetly pleasant, dangerous days--were they as lovely
to her as to me? How can I tell? There was no doubt but she knew me
thoroughly. The little pleasant encroachments of mine, stolen upon her
unawares, were now never checked--I am speaking of the end of my first
year, when I could hold her hand unreproved, and kiss it as often as I
pleased. I took and kept, and exhibited to her without embarrassment,
little trifles of hers--a hair-ribbon, a garter, a little trodden Venice
slipper; if she asked for them back, it only provoked me to keep them
closer to my heart. She saw no harm in these foolish, sweet things: she
felt herself to be my senior; by comparison with her position, mine was
that of a child. To the very end she maintained the fiction that she was
my foster-mother, responsible to my parents for my advancement in
education and morals. Assuredly she taught me her tongue and kept me out
of gross iniquity; but equally certain is it that I learned more than
Italian.
I learned, however, to be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of
Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion. All Italy, and above
all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about
everything which owned kinship with her. I was a severe ritualist, as
every lover is: it became a blasphemy in me to think of Aurelia in any
form of words but those of her own honey tongue. And that was of the
purest in the land. She had very little Venetian at any time, and kept
what she had for her husband and household management. To me she
employed her native speech, not the harsh staccato of Florence, a
stringent compound of the throat and the teeth, but the silken caressing
liquids of Siena, the speech of women to their lovers, of St. Catherine
to her Spouse. So I became expert in Tuscan, and after the same fashion
in Tuscany also. She was deeply and burningly proud of that land of art
and letters; she knew something of its history, something (if not much)
of its monuments. Such as it was it sufficed me. Inspired by her, I
began the study of literature, and if at first I read disingenuously, I
went on to read with profit. The "Vita Nova" of Dante enabled me,
perhaps, to touch upon topics with her which I could not have dared to
do without its moving text; but it won me to the heart of the great
poet. I walked the dire circles of Hell, I scaled the Mount of
Purgatory, I flew from ring to ring of the Heaven of pure light. Aurelia
was my Beatrice; but the great Florentine and his lady were necessarily
of the party. And then I began, as men will, to take the lead. Aurelia
had exhausted her little store when she had named Giotto and Dante: I
took her further afield. We read the Commentaries of Villani,
Malavolti's History of Siena, the Triumphs of Petrarch, his Sonnets
(fatal pap for young lovers), the Prince of Machiavelli, the Epics of
Pulci and Bojardo, and Ariosto's dangerously honeyed pages. Here Aurelia
was content to follow me, and I found teaching her to be as sweet in the
mouth as learning of her had been. I took enormous pains and consumed
half the night in preparation for the morrow's work. I abridged
Guicciardini's intolerable History, I hacked sense out of Michael
Angelo's granite verses, weeded Lorenzo of disgustfulness, Politian of
pedantry. The last thing we read together was the Aminta of Tasso; the
last thing I had of her was the "Little Flowers of St. Francis," a
favourite book of her devotion. My Saint, she called St. Francis of
Assisi--as in one sense no doubt he was; but, "Aurelia," I had replied,
kissing both her hands, "you know very well who is my saint. I should
have been named Aurelius." She had said, "It is a good name, Aurelio.
There are many who have it in my country." "You shall call me nothing
else, "said I then; but she shook her head, and hung it down as she
whispered softly, "I like best Francesco," and then, so low as to be
hardly audible, "Checho," the Sienese diminutive for my name of Francis.
Old Nonna came in to hound me from the room. That night--it was my last
but one--Aurelia came to the door with me, and let me kiss her two hands
again.
I have come to the hour of my destruction--the 16th of June, 1722. The
smouldering fires which had laboured in my breast for nine months burst
into a flame which overwhelmed both Aurelia and me. I committed an
unpardonable sin, I endeavoured to repair it with an act of well-nigh
incredible temerity. What occurred on that night is, in fact, the origin
of these Memoirs and their sole justification. The dawn of that
momentous day found her a loving and honoured wife; and its close left
her, innocent as she was, under the worst suspicion which can fall upon
a good woman. It found me a hopeful gentleman of means and prospects;
and I went out of it into the dark, a houseless wanderer, to consort
with profligates, thieves and murderers.