Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but
perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal
ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for
lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore--
Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown
people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The
happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--
Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An
old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-
anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella
full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau?
No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years'
residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the
consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions
from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of
tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed
associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take
deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show
their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their
physical sphere.
Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England
for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow
seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly
bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him--an
Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have
imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we
returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal,
America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was
hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best
days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep,
kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might
be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found
himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of
his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament,
combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment
of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end,
I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts."
It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it,
came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it opportunity,
subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and claims
sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself. Yet there
is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a passion for
some beautiful but perilous woman with a past--such as Miriam in The
Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally vigorous and healthy
constitution can risk it without danger. Had my father visited Rome in
his young manhood, he might have both cared for it less and in a sense
have enjoyed it more than he did during these latter years of his life.
But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that, he
was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the most
inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they said (as
they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had been known
for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and after a dismal
ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves of the English
Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where I went to pick
up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours passage across to
Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and so continued all
through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the Mediterranean to
Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long, lonely, bandit-haunted
road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating aggravations, right up to
April, or later. My own first recollection of St. Peter's is that I
slid on the ice near one of the fountains in the piazza of that famous
edifice; and my father did the same, with a savage satisfaction, no
doubt, at thus proving that everything was what it ought not to be.
Either in London, or at some intermediate point between that and Paris,
he caught one of the heaviest colds that ever he had; and its feverish
and debilitating effects were still perceptible in May. "And this is
sunny Italy--and this is genial Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was
like looking forward to the Garden of Eden all one's life, and going
to vast trouble and expense to get there, and, on arriving, finding the
renowned spot to be a sort of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome
are not naturally fitted to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the
colder in them by consequence.
But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting on
board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and drink
a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards remarked
that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the day." But the
wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck occasionally only--as when
I came plunging down the companion-way to tell him, with the pride of a
discoverer, that France was broad in sight, and the sun was shining
on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her, pale
discomfortableness on a sofa, with that radiant smile of hers, and
addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still further under the sinister
influence of those historic alpine fluctuations which have upset so
many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun is shining on France!" Ada never
stirred. She was the most amiable and philosophic of young ladies; but
if thought could visit her reeling brain at that moment, she probably
wondered why Providence had been so inconsiderate as to sever Britain
from its Gallic base in those old geologic periods before man was yet
born to sea-sickness.
Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen
bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was
notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except
the confused mountain of the family luggage on the pier, and afterwards
of its being fed into the baggage-car of the train. Ollendorff abandoned
me thus early in my travels; nor was my father much better off. But Miss
Shepard, now restored to life, made amends for her late incompetence
by discoursing with excited French officials with what seemed to me
preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half doubted whether there were
not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds
which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another.
However, all turned out well, and there we were, in a compartment of a
French railway-train, smelling of stale tobacco, with ineffective zinc
foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of white frost on the window-panes,
which my sisters and myself spent our time in trying to rub off that
France might become visible. But the white web was spun again as fast
as we dissipated it, and nothing was to be seen, at all events, but
long processions of poplars, which interested me only because I imagined
myself using them as lances in some romantic Spenserian adventure of
knight-errantry--for the spell of that chivalric dream still hung
about me. So we came to Amiens, a pallid, clean, chilly town, with
high-shouldered houses and a tall cathedral, and thence went on to Paris
at five o'clock. It was already dusk, and our transit to the Hotel de
Louvre in crowded cabs, through streets much unlike London, is the sum
of my first impressions of the wonderful city.
Then, marshalled by princely yet deferential personages in rich
costumes, we proceeded up staircases and along gilded corridors to a
suite of sumptuous apartments, with many wax candles in candelabra,
which were immediately lighted by an attendant, and their lustre was
reflected from tall mirrors which panelled the rooms. The furniture
thus revealed was costly and elegant, but hardly comfortable to an
English-bred sense; the ceilings were painted, the floor rich with
glowing carpets. But the glow of color was not answered by a glow of any
other sort; a deadly chill pervaded this palatial place, which fires, as
big as one's fist, kindled in fireplaces as large as hall bedrooms, did
nothing to dissipate. Hereupon our elders had compassion on us, and,
taking from the tall, awful bedsteads certain crimson comforters, they
placed each of us in an easy-chair and tucked the comforters in over us.
These comforters, covered with crimson silk, were of great thickness,
but also of extraordinary lightness, and for a few minutes we had
no confidence in their power to thaw us. But they were filled with
swan's-down; and presently a novel and delightful sensation--that of
warmth--began to steal upon us. It steadily increased, until in quarter
of an hour there might be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were
the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a
marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained
with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the
miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen
arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this
treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed
we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep of childhood.
The next morning my father, apparently as an accompaniment of his cold,
was visited by a severe nosebleed; no importance was attached to
it, beyond its preventing him from going forth to superintend the
examination of our luggage at the custom-house--the mountain having been
registered through from London. This duty was, therefore, done by Miss
Shepard and my mother. The next day, at dinner, the nosebleeding began
again. "And thus," observed my father, "my blood must be reckoned among
the rivers of human gore which have been shed in Paris, and especially
in the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotines used to stand"--and
where our restaurant was. But these bleedings, which came upon him at
several junctures during his lifetime, and were uniformly severe and
prolonged, probably had a significance more serious than was supposed.
The last one occurred not many weeks before his death, and it lasted
twenty-four hours; he was never the same afterwards. He joked about it
then, as now, but there was the forewarning of death in it.
But that day lies still unsuspected in the future, six years away.
For the present, we were in splendid Paris, with Napoleon III. in the
Tuileries, and Baron Haussmann regnant in the stately streets. For a
week we went to and fro, admiring and--despite the cold, the occasional
icy rains, and once even a dark fog--delighted. In spirit and in
substance, nothing could be more different from London. For my part,
I enjoyed it without reservation; the cold, which depressed my sick
father, exhilarated me. For Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the
Madeleine, the pictures, and the statues, I cared little or nothing; I
hardly even heeded the column of the Place Vendome or the mighty mass
of the Arc de Triomphe. But the Frenchiness of it all captivated me.
The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in costume and character:
priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures with turbans and other
Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and wearing their dresses
with an air; men with curling mustachios, and with nothing to do,
apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists with soft felt hats
and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty in rags and with
ominous visages, such as are never seen in London; martial music,
marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on horseback, with shining
swords; church processions; wedding pageants crowding in and out of
superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and chatter, all in French,
even down to the babble of the small children. And the background of
this parade was always the pleasant, light-hued buildings, the majority
of them large and of a certain uniformity of aspect, as if they had been
made in co-operation, and to look pretty, instead of independently and
incongruously, as in England. These people seemed to be all playing and
prattling; nobody worked; even the shopkeepers held holiday in their
shops. Such was my boyish idea of Paris. Napoleon had been emperor only
five or six years; he had been married to Eugenie only four or five;
and, so far as one could judge who knew nothing of political coups
d'etat and crimes, he was the right man in the right place. Moreover,
the French bread was a revelation; it tasted better than cake, and
was made in loaves six feet long; and the gingerbread, for sale on
innumerable out-door stalls, was better yet, with quite a new flavor. I
ate it as I walked about with my father. He once took a piece himself,
and, said he, "I desired never to taste any more." How odd is,
sometimes, the behavior of grown-up people!
But even my father enjoyed the French cookery, though he was in some
doubt whether it were not a snare of the evil one to lure men to
indulgence. We dined in the banquet-hall of our hotel once or twice
only; in general we went to neighboring restaurants, where the food was
just as good, but cost less. I was always hungry, but hungrier than ever
in Paris. "I really think," wrote my father, "that Julian would eat a
whole sheep." In his debilitated state he had little appetite either for
dinners or for works of art; he looked even upon the Venus of Milo with
coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of the weather one morning,
"as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were interposed between each
separate atom of our bodies. In all my experience of bad atmospheres,
methinks I never knew anything so atrocious as this. England has nothing
to compare with it." The "grip" was a disease unnamed at that epoch,
but I should suppose that it was very vividly described in the above
sentence. He had the grip, and for nearly six months he saw everything
through its medium.
Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I
went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll
of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were
visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of plain,
New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they have
been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at
Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage
that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept
here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow
circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had
been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris
at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.
We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason,
a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked
like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it
was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted
of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old
judge should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was
anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was
not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his old
age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year.
But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell, the
astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris on her
way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the journey,
though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take care of
herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in Nantucket;
the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face browned by the
sun, of which she evidently was accustomed to see as much as of
the other stars in the heavens. Her mouth was resolute and full of
expression; but her remarkable feature was her eyes, which were dark and
powerful, and had the kindest and most magnetic look of comradeship
in them. Her dark hair was a little grizzled. She was dressed in plain
gray, and was active and energetic in her movements. She was, as the
world knows, a woman of unusual intellect and character; but she had
lived alone with her constellations, having little contact with the
world or practical knowledge of it, so that in many respects she was
still as much a child as I was, and I immediately knew her for my friend
and playmate and loved her with all my heart. There was a charming
quaintness and innocence about her, and an immense, healthy curiosity
about this new old world and its contents. She had a great flow of
native, spontaneous humor, and could say nothing that was not juicy
and poignant. She was old-fashioned, yet full of modern impulses and
tendencies; warmhearted and impulsive, but rich in homely common-sense.
Though bold as a lion, she was, nevertheless, beset with the funniest
feminine timidities and misgivings, due mainly, I suppose, to her
unfamiliarity with the ways of the world. There was already a friendship
of long standing between her and Miss Shepard, and they did much of
their sightseeing during the coming year together, and debated between
themselves over the statues and pictures. Her talk with us children was
of the fine, countrified, racy quality which we could not resist; and in
the evenings, as we journeyed along, she told us tales of the stars
and gave us their names. On the steamer going to Genoa, one night, she
pointed out to me the constellation Orion, then riding high aloft
in glittering beauty, and I kindly communicated to my parents the
information that the three mighty stars were known to men as O'Brien's
Belt. This was added to the ball of jolly as a household word.
[IMAGE: MARIA MITCHELL]
Miss Mitchell's trunk was contributed to our mountain, when we set
out anew on our pilgrimage, with a result at first deplorable, for the
number of our own pieces of luggage being known and registered in the
official documents, it turned out, at our first stopping-place, that
the trunk of our new companion had been substituted for one of our
own, which, of course, was left behind. It was ultimately recovered, I
believe, but it seemed as if the entire world of French officialdom had
to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it.
Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only the
enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors wandering
like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning corners,
extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit only by the
glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be hours on our
journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we reached our rooms,
they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were fain to journey back
again, up and down, along and athwart, marching and countermarching past
regiments of closed doors, until at length we attained the region of
the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least two or three degrees
less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to undertake a third
peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning to get our train.
The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to the length of the
connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood hard by a great,
empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But the meals were not
of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at the railway station
of this town that the loss of the trunk was discovered.
The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone, with
the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more picturesque
than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient castles crowned
many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in the vales, and
presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue and swift as its
traditions demanded, kept us close company much of the way; the whole
range of country was made for summer, and the wintry conditions under
which we saw it seemed all the more improper. It must have been near
midnight when our train rolled into the station at Marseilles, and my
pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become stale.
The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of
Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the shaded
sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the streets were
so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The whole population
seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun, like flies, a very
animated and voluble population and of a democratic complexion; the
proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the number of women, who
seemed to camp out in the squares and market-places, and there gossip
and do their knitting, as other women might at their firesides; but here
the sun is the only fire. But a good deal of the bustle this morning
was occasioned by the news from Paris that an attempt to assassinate
Napoleon III. had been made the day before; had we remained one day
longer in Paris we might have assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles
people seemed to take it comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the
attempt had been made, nor very glad that it had not succeeded. It was
something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got
thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon
the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade
after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would
commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again.
Perhaps they will have it, some day.
There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her
wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our
hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old
rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an
open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do his
marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman handed
him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and soiled
deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I heedlessly
flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water, and, looking
after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see approaching a man
of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible black beard and a
slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck him full on the side
of the face, probably the first time in many a year that he had felt the
impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my head from the window in alarm,
mingled with the natural joy that a boy cannot help feeling at such a
catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt certain that he must have passed
on, I peeped out again, but what were my emotions at beholding him
planted terribly right under the window where he had been baptized, and
staring upward with a blood-thirsty expression. I immediately drew back
again, but too late--our eyes had met, and he had made a threatening
gesture at me. I now felt that a very serious thing had happened, and
that if I ventured out upon the streets again I should assuredly be
assassinated; that it would be no mere attempt, as in the case of the
Emperor, but a pronounced success. I did not tell my fears to any of
my family--I had not, to say the truth, informed any of them of
the incident which had imperilled my life, but I no longer felt any
curiosity to see more of Marseilles, and was sincerely thankful when I
found myself, betimes next morning, on board the Calabrese, bound for
Genoa. I never saw my murderer again, but I could make a fair likeness
of him, I believe, to-day. The trip to Genoa, and onward to Civita
Vecchia, lasted two or three days, the steamer generally pursuing her
course by night and laying up by day.
The first morning, soon after sunrise, found us approaching the bay
of Genoa, with the sun rising over the Mediterranean on our right and
throwing its light upon the curving acclivity on which the city stands.
The water had a beautiful blue-green color and was wonderfully clear, so
that, looking down through it over the ship's side, as we glided slowly
to our moorings, I saw sea-weeds and blocks of marble and other marine
curiosities which reawakened my old passion for aquariums. Indeed, to
be candid with the reader--as is my study throughout this
narrative--nothing in Genoa the Superb itself has, I find, remained with
me so distinctly as that glimpse of the floor of the bay through the
clear sea-water. I did not care to go up into the town and see the
palaces and churches; I wanted to stay on the beach and hunt for
shells--Italian shells--and classical or mediaeval sea-anemones. Of
course, I had to go up into the town; and I saw, no doubt, the churches
and the palaces, with their rooms radiant with the mellow brilliance of
precious marbles and painted ceilings, and statues and pictures,
under the personal conduct of no less an individual than Salvator Rosa
himself--for that was the name of our guide--and for years afterwards
I never doubted that he was the creator of the paintings which, in Rome
and elsewhere, bore his signature. I say I must have seen these things,
but in memory I cannot disentangle them from the innumerable similar
objects which I beheld, later, in other Italian cities; their soft
splendor and beautiful art could not hold their own for me beside that
cool translucence of the Mediterranean inlet, with its natural marvels
dimly descried as'I bent over the boat's side. It was for that, and not
for the other, that my heart yearned, and that became a part of me,
all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is
beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the
will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable
thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready
attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you
might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you
"improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where
Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named the
animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was taking form
from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the knowledge of
good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation and the fall, and
the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and Abel offered their
sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain rose up against his
brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all these set sights in
order that you might reply satisfactorily to the cloud of interviewers
awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you simply throw yourself down
on the grass wherever the angel happened to leave you, and try to see or
to realize or to recall nothing, but passively permit your soul to feel
and experience and grow what way it would, prompted by the inner voice
and guided by the inner light, heedless of what the interviewers were
expecting and of what duty and obligation and the unique opportunity
demanded? It is worth thinking about. It may be conceded that there is
some risk to run.
I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it,
trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I
recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of
Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the
coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the
railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only as
rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three hundred
years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and, indeed, a
robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For miles and
miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and those that we
saw might well have been the harboring-places of iniquity. Moreover, we
were so long delayed in making our start that it was already afternoon
before we were under way, and finally one of our horses gave out ere
we were many miles advanced, compelling us to hobble along for the
remainder of the trip at reduced speed. As the shades of evening began
to fall, we saw at intervals sundry persons lurking along the roadway,
clad in long cloaks and conical hats, with the suggestion of the barrel
of a musket about them, and it is probable that we were preserved from a
tragic fate only by the fortunate accident that we were just behind the
mail-coach and might theoretically have hailed it for help had we been
attacked. Meanwhile, my father, with ostensible pleasantry, suggested
that we should hide our gold coin (of which we carried a considerable
store) in various queer, out-of-the-way receptacles. I remember that
an umbrella was filled with a handful or two of the shining pieces, and
stuck with studied carelessness through the straps in the roof of the
vehicle. This was regarded by us children as excellent sport, though I
think there was a lingering feeling of apprehension in the bottom of
my soul. My father kept a moderate sum in napoleons in his pockets, so
that, should the worst happen, the bandits might fancy it was our all.
But then there was our mountain of luggage, incredibly strapped on the
top of the conveyance, and behind it, and no reasonable bandits, one
would suppose, could have failed to be satiated with that. However,
it was written that we were to reach Rome unscathed, albeit long after
dark, and though we did not get past the Porta del Popolo without
suffering legalized robbery on the part of the custom-house officials.
But by that time we were so weary, downcast, and chilled that
depredation and outrage could not rouse or kindle us.
We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our
travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward
caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome, my
country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau?