[Footnote 1: Balzac started for Rome March 20, and returned to Paris
May 1, 1846.]
To MADAME LAURE SURVILLE, _Paris_.
ROME, the Eternal City, April, 1846.
My dear Laure, I feel in advance the pleasure you will enjoy in
thinking that your brother has put his hand to the pen in the city
of the Cæsars, popes, and others. Give you a description of it?--I
could not do it. Read Lamennais ("Affaires de Rome") and you will know
nearly as much as he or I. I have been received with distinction by our
Holy Father; and you must tell my mother that in prostrating myself
at the feet of the father of all faithful people, whose hierarchical
slipper was kissed by me in company with a _podestat d'Avignone_ (a
hideous mayor from the Vaucluse district, who claimed to be his former
subject), I thought of her, and I am bringing her back a little chaplet
prepared by Leo XII. much shorter to recite than the old one. It is
called La Corona, and is blessed by his present Holiness.
I have seen all Rome from A to Z. The illumination of the dome of St.
Peter's on Easter-Eve is alone worth the journey; but as the same might
be said of the benediction given _urbi et orbi_, Saint Peter's itself,
the Vatican, the ruins, etc., etc., my journey really counts as ten
journeys.
I am so content in Rome that I am thinking of passing nearly the whole
of next winter here, for I want to know everything about it. As there
are three hundred churches, you can imagine that I have only been to
see the principal ones. Saint Peter's surpasses all that one expects,
but through reflection. I climbed to the ball above which is the cross.
It would take a week to tell of Saint Peter's. Imagine that your house
could easily be put into the cornice of one of the flat double-columns
of the interior third tier of the dome. Nothing could surpass the
_Miserere_ of the choir, which is so superior to the choir of the
Sistina that I preferred to listen twice to that of Saint Peter's: the
first time, it was the music of angels (Guglielmi); the second time
it was learned music (Fioravanti), which I thought bad, though the
execution was perfect.
Truly, everybody should lay by money and go once in his life to Rome,
or he will know nothing of antiquity, architecture, splendour, and the
impossible realized. Rome, in spite of the short time I have stayed
here, will always be one of the grandest and most beautiful memories of
my life.... I sail on the 22nd for Genoa, and shall go from there as
quickly as possible to Paris.