Journal from Paris to Venice--The Jura--The Alps--Milan--Verona--The
roll-call of the dead--The Brenta--Incidental remarks--Venice--Venetian
architecture--Antonio--The Abbé Betio and M. Gamba--The rooms in the
Palace of the Doges--Prisons--Silvio Pellico's prison--The Frari--The
Academy of Fine Arts--Titian's _Assumption_--The metopes of the
Parthenon--Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and
Raphael--The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo--The Arsenal--Henry
IV.--A frigate leaving for America--The Cemetery of San Cristoforo--San
Michele di Murano--Murano--The woman and the child--Gondoliers--Bretons
and Venetians--Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni--The tomb of
Mesdames at Trieste--Rousseau and Byron--Great geniuses inspired by
Venice--Old and new courtezans--Rousseau and Byron compared.
7 _to_ 10 _September, on the road._
I left Paris on the 3rd of September 1833, taking the Simplon Road
through Pontarlier.
Salins, lately burnt to the ground, had been built up again; I
preferred it with its Spanish tumble-down ugliness[61]. The Abbé
d'Olivet[62] was born on the banks of the Furieuse; Voltaire's first
master, who received his pupil at the Academy, had nothing in common
with the paternal stream.
The great storm which caused so many shipwrecks in the Channel assailed
me on the Jura. I arrived at night on the "wastes" of the Lévier stage.
The caravanserai built of wooden planks, brilliantly lighted and filled
with travellers taking shelter suggested not a little the keeping of a
witches' sabbath. I refused to stop; they brought the horses. When it
came to closing the lanterns of the calash, a great difficulty arose;
the hostess, an extremely pretty young witch, lent a hand, laughing.
She took care to hold her candle-end, protected by a glass tube, close
up to her face, so as to be seen.
At Pontarlier, my old host, a great Legitimist during his life-time,
was dead. I supped at the inn called the National: a good omen for the
newspaper of that name. Armand Carrel is the chief of those men who did
not lie during the Days of July.
The Castle of Joux defends the approaches to Pontarlier; it has seen
two men succeed one another in its donjons, both of whom the Revolution
will bear in memory: Mirabeau and Toussaint-Louverture[63], the black
Napoleon, imitated and killed by the white Napoleon.
"Toussaint," says Madame de Staël, "was brought to a French prison,
where he died in the most wretched manner. Perhaps Bonaparte does
not so much as remember this crime, because he has been less often
reproached with it than with the others."
The hurricane increased: I encountered its greatest violence between
Pontarlier and Orbe. It increased the size of the mountains, rang the
bells in the hamlets, drowned the roar of the torrents in that of the
thunder, and swept down howling upon my calash, like a heavy squall on
the sail of a ship. When low-lying lightning-flashes cracked across the
heaths, one saw flocks of sheep stand motionless, their heads hidden
between their fore-feet, presenting their tails tucked in and their
shaggy quarters to the showers of rain and hail beaten up by the wind.
The voice of the man calling the time from the summit of a mountain
belfry sounded like the cry of the last hour.
At Lausanne, all was smiling-again: I had often visited that town
before; I no longer know a soul there.
At Bex, while they were harnessing to my carriage the horses which had
perhaps drawn the bier of Madame de Custine, I stood leaning against
the door of the house where my hostess of Fervacques died. She had been
celebrated before the revolutionary tribunal for her long hair. In
Rome, I have seen beautiful fair hair taken from a tomb.
In the Rhone Valley, I met an almost naked little girl, dancing with
her goat; she asked for alms of a rich young man, well-dressed, who
was posting past with a laced courier in front and two footmen sitting
behind the glittering chariot. And you imagine that such a distribution
of property can exist? You think that it does not justify popular
risings?
Sion brings back to me an epoch in my life: after being secretary of
embassy in Rome, I was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Valais
by the First Consul[64].
At Brigg, I left the Jesuits struggling to raise up again what cannot
be raised up[65]: uselessly established at the foot of time, they are
crushed beneath its mass, like their monastery beneath the weight of
the mountains.
This was the tenth time of my crossing the Alps: I had told them
all that I had to tell them in the different years and different
circumstances of my life. Ever regretting what he has lost, ever rapt
in memories, ever marching towards the grave in tears and isolation:
that is man.
The images borrowed from mountain scenery have particularly sensible
relations with our fortunes: this one passes in silence, like the
outpouring of a spring; that one attaches a noise to his course, like
a torrent; that other flings away his existence, like a cataract that
appeals and disappears.
[Sidenote: The Simplon.]
The Simplon already wears an abandoned air, even as the life of
Napoleon; even as that life, it has nothing left but its glory: it
is too great a work to belong to the little States upon which it has
devolved. Genius has no family; its inheritance falls by right of
escheat to the common crowd, which nibbles at it and plants a cabbage
where a cedar grew.
The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador
to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain
are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the
turmoil of waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the
avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why
die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost
sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting
among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I
went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the
Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of
a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me
of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice,
the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the
darkness and the gale.
The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful;
a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was
caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the _aure_: a
sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once
more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828
and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832.
At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and
played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino.
On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees
of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for
plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages:
it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy.
One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and
orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying
the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied
with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a
_fantoccini_ theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the
cradle of Christopher Columbus.
In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is
brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there
that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought
on what the world might have become if that career had not been
interrupted by a contemptible jealousy.
Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of
Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as
completely in its lonely streets as the Court of the Scaligers and the
Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled
with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which
I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture
wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of
rain.
[Sidenote: The roll-call of the dead.]
How many ambitions were stirring among the actors at Verona! How many
destinies of nations were examined, discussed and weighed! Let us call
the roll of those wooers of dreams; let us open the book of the Day of
Wrath: _Liber scriptus proferetur_[66]; monarchs, princes, ministers,
here is your ambassador, your colleague returned to his post: where are
you? Answer.
The Emperor of Russia, Alexander?
"Dead."
The Emperor of Austria, Francis I.[67]?
"Dead."
The King of France, Louis XVIII.?
"Dead."
The King of France, Charles X.[68]?
"Dead."
The King of England, George IV.?
"Dead."
The King of Naples, Ferdinand I.?
"Dead."
The Duke of Tuscany[69]?
"Dead."
Pope Pius VII.?
"Dead."
The King of Sardinia, Charles Felix[70]?
"Dead."
The Duc de Montmorency, French Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
Mr. Canning, English Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
M. de Bernstorff, Prussian Foreign Minister?
"Dead."
M. de Gentz, of the Austrian Chancery?
"Dead."
Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to His Holiness?
"Dead."
M. de Serre, my colleague on the Congress[71]?
"Dead."
M. d'Aspremont, my secretary of embassy?
"Dead."
Count Neipperg, the husband of Napoleon's widow?
"Dead."
Countess Tolstoi?
"Dead."
Her tall young son?
"Dead."
My host in the Lorenzi Palace?
"Dead."
If so many men inscribed with me on the roll of the Congress have had
their names inserted in the obituary; if nations and royal dynasties
have perished; if Poland has succumbed; if Spain is again annihilated;
if I have been to Prague to enquire after the flying remnants of the
great House whose representative I was at Verona: what, then, are
earthly things? No one remembers the speeches which we made round the
table of Prince Metternich; but, O power of genius, no traveller will
ever hear the lark sing in the fields of Verona without recalling
Shakespeare! Each of us, by digging to different depths in his memory,
finds another layer of dead, other extinct sentiments, other illusions
which uselessly he suckled, like those of Herculaneum, at the breast of
Hope.
On leaving Verona, I was obliged to change my measure to compute the
time that was past; I was going back twenty-seven years, for I had
not made the journey from Verona to Venice since 1806. At Brescia, at
Vicenza, at Padua, I passed by the walls of Palladio, Scamozzi[72],
Franceschini, Nicholas of Pisa[73], Friar John.
The banks of the Brenta disappointed my hopes; they had remained more
smiling in my imagination: the dykes raised along the canal conceal
the marches too much. Several villas have been demolished; but a
few very elegant ones still remain. There, perhaps, lives Signor
Pococurante[74], whom the city ladies with their sonnets disgusted, to
whom the two pretty girls began to grow very indifferent, to whom music
grew tiresome after half an hour, who thought Homer mortally tedious,
who detested the pious. Æneas, the boy Ascanius, the silly King
Latinus, the ill-bred Amata and the insipid Lavinia, who saw nothing
extraordinary in Horace' journey to Brundusium and his account of
his bad dinner, who declared that he never read Tully and still less
Milton, that barbarian who spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil.
"'Alas!' said Candid softly to Martin, 'I am afraid this man holds
our German poets in great contempt[75].'"
In spite of my semi-disappointment and many gods in the little gardens,
I was charmed with the mulberry-trees, the orange-trees, the fig-trees
and the softness of the air, I who, such a short time before, was
travelling through the fir-groves of Germany and over the mountains of
the Czechs, where the sun looks ill.
[Sidenote: I arrive in Venice.]
I arrived on the 10th of September, at break of day, at Fusina, which
Philippe de Comines[76] and Montaigne call "Chaffousine." At half
past ten, I had landed in Venice. My first care was to send to the
post-office: there was nothing addressed to me direct, nor indirectly
to Paolo; of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, no news at all. I wrote to
Count Griffi, the Neapolitan Minister in Florence, to ask him to let me
know the movements of Her Royal Highness.
Having everything in order, I resolved patiently to await the Princess:
Satan sent me a temptation. I longed, at his diabolical suggestion, to
stay alone, for a fortnight, at the Hôtel de l'Europe, to the detriment
of the Legitimate Monarchy. I wished the august traveller bad roads,
without reflecting that my restoration of King Henry V. might be
delayed for half a month! Like Danton, I crave pardon for it of God and
men.
VENICE, HÔTEL DE L'EUROPE, 10 _September_ 1833.
Salve, Italuni Regina....
. . . . .
Nec tu semper eris[77].
O d'Italia dolente
Eterno lumine....
Venezia[78]!
In Venice, one can imagine one's self on the deck of a superb galley
lying at anchor, on the _Bucentaur_, where a feast is being given in
your honour and from whose side you see wonderful things all around.
My inn, the Hôtel de l'Europe, is situated at the entrance to the
Grand Canal, opposite the Dogana di Mare, the Giudecca and San Giorgio
Maggiore. When one goes up the Grand Canal, between its two rows of
palaces, so marked by their centuries, so varied in architectural
style, when one moves from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, when one
contemplates the basilica and its domes, the Palace of the Doges, the
Procuratie Nuove, the Zucca, the Torre dell' Orologio, the campanile
of St Mark's and the Column of the Lion, all mingled with the sails
and masts of the shipping, the movement of the crowd and the gondolas,
the azure of the sky and sea, the freaks of a dream or the frolics
of an Oriental imagination present nothing more fantastic. Sometimes
Cicéri[79] paints and collects upon a canvas, for the illusions of the
stage, monuments of all shapes, all times, all countries, all climates:
it is still Venice.
Those double-gilt edifices, so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80],
Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni Bellini[83], Paris
Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles,
granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their
internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland
light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and
noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de
Comines:
"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"
[Sidenote: The glories of Venice.]
And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the
Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice
that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to
Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the
German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable
hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the
citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed
the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of
barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that
served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of
lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90],
Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose
doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice
that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back
from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice
that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the
Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts,
as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once
Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and
floral diadems.
It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to
visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her
voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it
is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a
necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to
existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater
human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of
greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an
old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving
you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a
future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around
you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life
as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations
to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with
flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions
and the enchantment of pleasure.
Venice never knew idolatry: she grew up Christian in the island where
she was reared, far from the brutality of Attila. The women descended
from the Scipios, the Pauli and the Eustochie escaped from Alaric's
violence in the Grotto of Bethlehem. Standing apart from all other
cities, the eldest daughter of ancient civilization without ever
having been dishonoured by conquest, Venice contains neither Roman
remains nor monuments of the Barbarians. Nor does one see there what
one sees in the north and west of Europe, in the midst of industrial
progress: I refer to those new structures, those whole streets built
in a hurry, in which the houses remain either unfinished or empty.
What could one build here? Wretched dens which would show the poverty
of conception of the sons after the magnificence of the genius of the
fathers; white-washed hovels which would not reach to the first storey
of the gigantic residences of the Foscaris and the Pesaros. When one
sees the trowel of mortar and the handful of plaster that have had
to be applied, for an urgent repair, against a marble capital, one
is shocked. Better the rotten planks boarding up Grecian or Moorish
windows, the rags hung out to dry on graceful balconies, than the
imprint of the mean hand of our century.
[Sidenote: The view from my windows.]
Why cannot I lock myself up in this town which harmonizes so well with
my destiny, in this city of poets, where Dante, Petrarch, Byron passed!
Why cannot I finish writing my Memoirs by the light of the sun that
falls upon these pages! At this moment the luminary is still burning my
Floridan savannahs and is setting here at the end of the Grand Canal.
I can no longer see it; but, through an opening in this wilderness
of palaces, its rays strike the ball of the Dogana, the lateen-sails
of the boats, the yards of the ships and the porch of the convent of
San Giorgio Maggiore. The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy
column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is
so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the
chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a
Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in
the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful
woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts
up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the
smiles of nature.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
In Venice, in 1806, there was a young Signor Armani, the Italian
translator or a friend of the translator of the _Génie du
Christianisme._ His sister, as he said, was a nun: _monaca._ There was
also a Jew, on his way to the farce of Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrim[93],
who had his eyes on my purse; then M. Lagarde, the chief of the French
spies, who gave me dinner: my translator, his sister, the Jew of the
Sanhedrim are either dead or no longer live in Venice. At that time,
I was staying at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, near the Rialto; that
hotel has changed its position. Almost opposite my old inn is the
Palazzo Foscari, which is falling. Back, all that old lumber of my
life! I should go mad with ruins: let us speak of the present.
I have tried to depict the general effect of the architecture of
Venice; in order to receive an impression of the details, I have been
up and down and again up the Grand Canal, I have visited and revisited
the Piazza San Marco. It would need volumes to exhaust that subject.
Count Cicognara's[94] _Fabbriche più conspicue di Venezia_ supply the
features of the monuments; but the exposition is not clear. I will
content myself with noting down two or three of the most frequently
recurring arrangements.
From the capital of a Corinthian column is described a semicircle, the
point of which descends upon the capital of another Corinthian column:
exactly in the middle of those shafts rises a third, of the same
dimensions and the same order; from the capital of that central column
two epicycles spring to right and left, the ends of which also come
to lie upon the capitals of other columns. The result of this design
is that the arches, in crossing each other, give birth to ogives at
their point of intersection[95], so that a charming admixture is formed
of two architectural styles, the full Roman arch and the ogive of
Arab-Gothic or "Mediæval" origin; but it is certain that the latter
exists in the so-called Cyclopean monuments; I have seen very pure
specimens of it in the tombs of Argos[96].
The Ducal Palace presents twines reproduced in some other palaces,
particularly in the Palazzo Foscari: the columns support pointed
arches; those arches leave voids between them: between those voids the
architect has placed two roses. The rose depresses the extremity of the
two ellipses. Those roses, which meet at a point of their circumference
in the fore front of the building, become a kind of row of wheels upon
which the rest of the edifice is carried.
In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes
in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact
opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by
light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with
four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one
would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted
building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air.
Remarkable in the Venetian monuments are the architectural masks and
heads. In the Palazzo Pesaro, the entablature of the first storey,
of the Doric order, is decorated with heads of giants; the Ionic
order of the second storey is bound by heads of knights which stretch
horizontally from the wall, with their faces looking towards the
water: some are wrapped in a chin-piece, others have their visors
half-lowered; all wear helmets whose plumes bend round into ornaments
under the cornice. Lastly, on the third storey, of the Corinthian
order, we see heads of female statues with their hair differently
knotted.
[Sidenote: Venetian architecture.]
In St. Mark's, embossed with domes, encrusted with mosaics, loaded with
incoherent spoils of the East, I found myself at the same time in San
Vitale at Ravenna, in St. Sophia in Constantinople, in St. Saviour's in
Jerusalem and in those lesser churches of the Morea, Chios and Malta:
St. Mark's, a monument of Byzantine architecture, composite of victory
and conquest raised to the Cross, is a trophy, as is the whole of
Venice. The most remarkable effect of its architecture is its darkness
under a brilliant sky; but to-day, the loth of September, the deadened
light from the outside harmonized with the gloomy basilica. They were
completing the Forty Hours ordered to obtain fine weather. The fervour
of the faithful praying against rain was great: the Venetians look upon
a grey and watery sky as the plague.
Our prayers were granted: the evening became charming; at night I went
for a walk on the quay. The sea lay smooth; the stars mingled with
the scattered lights of the boats and ships anchored here and there.
The cafés were full, but one saw no _Pulcinelli_, Greeks nor Moors:
everything comes to an end. A Madonna, brightly illuminated at the
crossing of a bridge, attracted the crowd: young girls were devoutly
telling their beads on their knees; they made the Sign of the Cross
with their right hand and stopped the passers-by with their left.
Returning to my inn, I went to bed and to sleep to the singing of the
gondoliers stationed under my windows.
I have as my guide Antonio, the oldest and best-informed of the
_ciceroni_ of the place; he knows the palaces, statues and pictures by
heart
On the 11th of September, I paid a visit to the Abbé Betio and M.
Gamba[97], the keepers of the Library: they received me with extreme
politeness, although I had no letter of recommendation.
As one goes through the rooms of the Ducal Palace, one passes from
wonders to wonders. There the whole history of Venice unrolls itself,
painted by the greatest masters: their pictures have been described a
hundred times.
Among the antiques, I remarked, like everybody else, the group of
_Leda and the Swan_ and the _Ganymede_ ascribed to Praxiteles. The
Swan is prodigious in its embrace and its voluptuousness; Leda is too
compliant. The eagle of the _Ganymede_ is not a real eagle; it looks
the best-tempered beast in the world. Ganymede, charmed at being
carried off, is enchanting: he talks to the eagle, which talks to him.
Those antiques are placed at either end of the magnificent rooms of
the Library. I contemplated, with the sacred respect of the poet, a
manuscript of Dante's and gazed, with the greed of the traveller, upon
the map of the world of Fra Mauro[98] (1460). Africa, however, does not
appear to be traced upon it so correctly as they say. They ought, above
all, in Venice, to explore the archives: they would find invaluable
documents there.
From the painted and gilded halls, I passed to the prisons and the
dungeons; the same palace presents the microcosm of society, joy and
sorrow. The prisons are under the leads, the dungeons on the level of
the water of the canal and on two storeys. A thousand tales are told
of strangulations and secret beheadings[99]; by way of compensation we
hear that a prisoner left those dungeons fat, plump and rosy, after
eighteen years spent in captivity: he had lived like a toad inside a
rock. All honour to the human race! What a fine thing it is!
Plenty of philanthropic phrases stain the vaults and walls of the
underground cells, since the day when our Revolution, so adverse to
blood,
. . . . . . . dans cet affreux séjour
D'un coup de _hache_ a fait entrer le jour[100].
[Sidenote: The Venetian prisons.]
In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by
cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the
shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers
who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who
assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of
humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As
for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility.
No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the
Doges; only it seemed to me that I saw in the cells of the aristocracy
what the Christians saw when they shattered the idols: nests of mice
escaping from the heads of the gods. That is what happens to every
power that is disembowelled and exposed to the light: it lets out the
vermin which we used to adore.
The Bridge of Sighs connects the Ducal Palace with the prisons of the
town; it is divided into two separate passages: through one of these,
the ordinary prisoners entered; through the other, the State prisoners
went before the tribunal of the Inquisitors or the Ten. This bridge
presents a graceful exterior, and the façade of the prison is admired:
beauty cannot be dispensed with in Venice, even for tyranny and
misfortune! Pigeons make their nests in the windows of the gaol; little
doves, all covered with down, flutter their wings and moan at the bars,
while waiting for their mother. In former days, innocent creatures used
to be cloistered almost on leaving the cradle; their parents never saw
them again except through the gratings of the parlour or the wicket of
the door.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
You can readily imagine that, in Venice, I necessarily thought of
Silvio Pellico[101]. M. Gamba had told me that the Abbé Betio was the
master of the Palace and that, by applying to him, I should be able to
make my researches. The excellent librarian, to whom I had recourse one
morning, took a big bunch of keys and led me, along several passages
and up various stair-cases, to the garrets of the author of _Le mie
Prigioni._
M. Silvio Pellico has made only one mistake; he has spoken of his gaol
as of one of those famous prison-cells high up in the air, marked by
their roofing _sotto i piombi._ Those prisons are, or rather were
five in number, in that portion of the Ducal Palace which adjoins the
Ponte della Paglia and the canal of the Bridge of Sighs. Pellico did
not dwell there; he was incarcerated at the other end of the Palace,
near the Ponte degli Canonici, in a building contiguous to the Palace,
which building had been transformed, in 1820, into a gaol for political
prisoners. However, he was also "under the leads," for a plate of that
metal formed the roofing of his hermitage.
The description which the prisoner gives of his first and second room
is exact to the last particular. Through the window of the first room,
one looks out on the roof of St. Mark's; one sees the well in the inner
yard of the Palace, a corner of the Piazza, the different steeples of
the town and, beyond the lagoons, on the horizon, mountains in the
direction of Padua. The second room is recognised by its big window and
by another smaller and higher window: it was through the big one that
Pellico used to perceive his companions in misfortune in a detached
building opposite and, on the left, above, the dear children who used
to talk to him from their mother's casement.
To-day all those chambers are deserted, for men remain nowhere, not
even in the prisons; the bars of the windows have been removed and the
walls and ceilings white-washed. The gentle and learned Abbé Betio,
living in this abandoned part of the Palace, is its peaceful and
solitary guardian.
[Sidenote: Silvio Pellico.]
The rooms which immortalize Pellico's captivity are lofty and airy;
they command a splendid view; they are the prison for a poet; there
would not be much to say about them, admitting the tyranny and
absurdity: but the death sentence for a speculative opinion! The
Moravian[102] dungeons! Ten years taken from life, youth and talent!
And the gnats, those nasty animals by which I myself am being eaten up
at the Hôtel de l'Europe, hardened though I be by the weather and the
mosquitoes of Florida! For the rest, I have often been worse lodged
than was Pellico in his belvedere in the Ducal Palace, notably in the
prefecture of the doges of the French Police, where I was obliged to
climb up on a table to enjoy the light.
The author of _Francesca da Rimini_ thought of Zanze in his gaol; I, in
mine, sang of a young girl whom I had just seen die. I was very anxious
to know what became of Pellico's little guardian. I have set persons to
make researches: if I find out anything, I will tell you.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
A gondola landed me at the Frari, where we French, accustomed as we
are to the Grecian or Gothic exteriors of our own churches, are not
much struck by those outsides of basilicas in brick, ungrateful and
common to the eye; but, in the inside, the harmony of the lines and
the disposition of the masses produce a simplicity and a calmness of
composition that enchant one.
The tombs in the Frari, placed in the lateral walls, decorate the
building without obstructing it The magnificence of the marbles blazes
forth on every side, charming foliage bears witness to the finish of
the old Venetian sculpture. On one of the squares of the pavement in
the nave are these words:
HERE LIES TITIAN, THE RIVAL OF ZEUXIS AND APELLES
This stone is opposite one of the painter's master-pieces. Canova
has his gorgeous sepulchre not far from Titian's flag-stone; this
sepulchre is the replica of the monument which he had conceived for
Titian himself and which he executed afterwards for the Archduchess
Maria Christina[103]. The remains of the sculptor of the _Hebe_ and the
_Magdalen_ are not all collected in this work: thus Canova inhabits the
representation of a tomb made by himself, not for himself, which tomb
is but his semi-cenotaph.
From the Frari, I proceeded to the Manfrini Gallery. The portrait
of Ariosto is speaking. Titian painted his mother, an old matron of
the people, squalid and ugly: the artist's pride shows itself in the
exaggeration of this woman's years and poverty.
At the Academy of Fine Arts, I hurried fast to the picture of the
_Assumption_, discovered by Cicognara[104]: ten large male figures at
the bottom of the picture; observe the man rapt in ecstasy on the left,
watching Mary. The Virgin, above this group, rises in the centre of a
semicircle of cherubs; there is a multitude of admirable faces in that
glory: a woman's head, on the right, at the point of the crescent, of
unspeakable beauty; two or three heavenly spirits flung horizontally
across the sky, in the bold, picturesque manner of Tintoretto. I am not
sure that a standing angel does not experience some feeling of a too
terrestrial love. The Virgin is largely proportioned; she is clad in
a red drapery; her blue scarf floats in the air; her eyes are raised
towards the Eternal Father, who appeared at the zenith. Four positive
colours, brown, green, red and blue, cover the picture: the aspect of
the whole is sombre, the character unideal, but of an incomparable
truth and natural vivacity. Nevertheless, I prefer the _Presentation of
the Virgin in the Temple_, by the same painter, which hangs in the same
room.
Facing the _Assumption_ and very cleverly lighted is Tintoretto's
_Miracle of St. Mark_, a vigorous scene which seems dug out of the
canvas with the chisel and mallet rather than the brush.
I went on to the plaster-casts from the metopes of the Parthenon; these
plasters had a three-fold interest for me: in Athens, I had seen the
voids left by the ravages committed by Lord Elgin[105] and, in London,
the kidnapped marbles of which I found the mouldings in Venice. The
roving destiny of those master-pieces was linked with mine, and yet
Phidias did not fashion my clay.
I was unable to tear myself away from the original drawings by Leonardo
da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael. Nothing is more interesting than
those sketches of genius abandoned alone to its studies and its whims:
it admits you to its intimacy; it initiates you into its secrets;
it informs you by what steps and by what efforts it has attained
perfection: one is enraptured at seeing how it was mistaken, how it
perceived its error and corrected it. Those pencil-strokes drawn on
the corner of a table on a wretched piece of paper retain a marvellous
richness and natural artlessness. When you reflect that Raphael's hand
has passed over those immortal scraps, you are angry with the glass
which prevents you from kissing those holy relics.
[Sidenote: Santi Giovanni e Paolo.]
I refreshed myself, after my admiration at the Academy of Fine Arts,
with an admiration of a different kind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, even
as one rests one's mind by a change of reading. This church, whose
unknown architect followed in the foot-steps of Niccola Pisano, is rich
and spacious. The apse into which the high altar retires represents
a kind of erect shell; two other sanctuaries accompany this shell
laterally: they are tall and narrow, with many-centred vaultings, and
are separated from the apse by rabbeted channels.
The ashes of the Doges Mocenigo[106], Morosini[107], Vendramin[108]
and several other heads of the Republic[109] rest here. Here also is
the skin of Antonio Bragadino[110], the defender of Famagusta, to
whom Tertulliano expression may be applied: "a living skin." Those
illustrious remains inspire a great and painful sentiment: Venice
herself, the magnificent catafalco of her warlike magistrates, the
two-fold coffin of their ashes, is now no more than a living skin.
Stained-glass windows and red curtains, while veiling the light in
Santi Giovanni e Paolo, increase the religious effect. The numberless
columns brought from the East and from Greece have been planted in
the basilica, like avenues of exotic trees. A storm rose while I
was roaming in the church: when will the trumpets sound that shall
rouse all these dead? I said as much under Jerusalem, in the Valley
of Jehoshaphat. Returning to my hotel after those visits, I thanked
God for having transported me from the porkers of Waldmünchen to the
pictures of Venice.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
After my discovery of the prisons in which material Austria tries
to stifle Italian intellects, I went to the Arsenal. No monarchy,
however powerful it be or have been, has presented a similar nautical
compendium.
An immense space, enclosed by crenellated walls, contains four docks
for large ships, yards for building those ships, establishments for all
that concerns the military and merchant navy, from the rope-yard to the
gun-foundry, from the work-shop where they carve the oar of the gondola
to that where they square the keel of a seventy-four, from the rooms
devoted to the old armour captured in Constantinople, in Cyprus, in the
Morea, at Lepanto to the rooms in which modern armour is exhibited: the
whole mingled with galleries, columns, works of architecture raised and
designed by the chief masters.
In the naval arsenals of Spain, England, France, Holland, one sees only
that which is connected with the objects of those arsenals; in Venice,
the arts are allied to industry. The monument to Admiral Emo[111], by
Canova, awaits you beside the carcass of a ship; rows of guns meet your
eye through long porticoes: the two colossal lions from the Piræus
keep the gate of the dock from which a frigate is about to issue for a
world which Athens did not know and which was discovered by the genius
of modern Italy.
[Sidenote: The Arsenal.]
In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer
recalls those lines of Dante:
In the Venetians' arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time
Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while
His bark one builds anew, another stops
The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage,
One hammers at the prow, one at the poop,
This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls,
The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].
All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the
arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the
rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear
witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of
the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads,
one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were
eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least
dream of liberty.
When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the _Bucentaur_, they
wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them
look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened
their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the
Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany
their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms
and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea
and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.
Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of
Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds
of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the _Bucentaur_, Napoleon's
cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on
the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.
A Frenchman coming from Prague to Venice and expecting the mother of
Henry V. must needs be touched at seeing the armour of Henry IV. in
the Venice Arsenal. The sword which the Bearnese wore at the Battle of
Ivry[113] used to be joined to that armour: that sword is no longer
there.
By a decree of the Grand Council of Venice, dated 3 April 1600:
"_Enrico di Borbone IV., re di Francia e di Navarra, con li
figluoli e discenditi suoi, sia annumerato tra il nobli di questio
nostro maggior consiglio._"
Charles X., Louis XIX. and Henry V., descendants of "Enrico di
Borbone," are therefore nobles of the Republic of Venice, which no
longer exists, even as they are Kings of France in Bohemia, even as
they are canons of St. John Lateran in Rome, and always by right of
Henry IV.; I have represented them in this last quality: they have lost
their president's cap and their amice, and I have lost my embassy. And
yet I was so well off in my stall in St. John Lateran! What a beautiful
church! What a beautiful sky! What admirable music! Those songs have
lasted longer than my grandeurs and those of my Canon-King.
My glory annoyed me greatly at the Arsenal; it shines on my
forehead unknown to myself: Field-marshal Pallucci, Admiral and
Commandant-General of the Navy, recognised me by my horns of fire. He
hastened up to me, himself showed me several curiosities and then,
excusing himself for his inability to accompany me any longer, because
of a council over which he had to preside, he placed me in the hands of
a superior officer.
We met the captain of the frigate which was on the point of sailing.
He accosted me without ceremony and said to me, with that sailor's
frankness which I like so much:
"Monsieur le vicomte"--as though he had known me all his life--"have
you any message for America?"
"No, captain: be sure to give her my compliments; it is long since I
saw her!"
I cannot see a vessel without dying of longing to go with her: if I
were free, the first ship sailing for the Indies would have a chance of
carrying me away. How I regretted not to have been able to accompany
Captain Parry[114] to the Arctic regions! My life is at its ease only
in the midst of the clouds and the seas: I always cherish the hope that
it will disappear under a sail. The weighty years which we heave into
the waves of time are not anchors: they do not delay our course.
[Sidenote: The Isola di San Cristoforo.]
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
In the Arsenal, I was not far from the Isola di San Cristoforo, which
serves to-day as a cemetery. This island used to contain a convent of
Capuchins; the convent has been pulled down and its site is nothing
more than a square enclosure. The tombs are not very many in number, or
at least they are not raised above the level and grassy ground. Against
the west wall are fixed five or six stone monuments; little black
wooden crosses, with a white date, are scattered about the enclosure:
that is how they now bury the Venetians whose forefathers rest in the
mausoleums of the Frari and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Society, as it
grows larger, has humbled itself: democracy has overtaken death.
On the edge of the cemetery, on the east side, one sees the vaults of
the Schismatic Greeks and those of the Protestants; they are separated
from each other by a wall and again separated from the Catholic burials
by another wall: sad dissents whose memory is perpetuated in the asylum
where all quarrels end! Close by the Greek cemetery is another recess
which protects a hole into which the still-born children are thrown
to Limbo. Happy creatures! You have passed from the darkness of the
maternal womb into everlasting darkness, without going through the
light!
Near this hole lie bones dug into the ground like roots, as each new
grave is cleared: some, the older ones, are white and dry; others, more
recently disinterred, are yellow and damp. Lizards run about those
remains, glide in between the teeth, through the eyes and nostrils,
come out through the mouth and ears of the skulls, their houses or
nests. Three or four butterflies hovered over the mallow-flowers
entwined with those bones, an image of the soul under that sky which
resembles that under which the story of Psyche was invented. One skull
still had a few hairs of the same shade as my own. Poor old gondolier!
Did you at least steer your bark better than I have steered mine?
A common grave remains open in the enclosure; they had just lowered
a physician beside his old practice. His black coffin was covered
with earth only at the top and its naked side awaited the side of
another dead man to warm it Antonio had stuffed his wife in there, a
fortnight ago, and it was the defunct doctor who had dispatched her:
Antonio blessed a requiting and avenging God and bore his misfortune
patiently. The coffins of private individuals are taken to that dismal
dwelling-place in private gondolas, followed by a priest in another
gondola. As the gondolas look like hearses, they suit the ceremony. A
larger wherry, an "omnibus" of Cocytus, performs the service of the
hospitals. Thus we find renewed the Egyptian burials and the fables of
Charon and his ferry-boat.
In the cemetery beside Venice stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to
St. Christopher[115]. This saint, taking a child on his shoulders at
the ford of a river, found it heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary,
who holds the globe in His hand: the altar-picture represents this fair
adventure.
And I too have tried to carry a child-king, but I did not perceive that
he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for
my arms.
I observed in the chapel a wooden candle-stick: the taper was
extinguished; a holy-water font for blessing the burials; and a
little book: _Pars Ritualis Romani pro usu ad exsequianda corpora
defunctorum_; when we are already forgotten, Religion, our immortal and
never wearied kinswoman, mourns us and follows us: _exsequor fugam._ A
tinder-box contained a steel; God alone disposes of the spark of life.
Two quatrains written on common paper were fastened up on the inner
panels of two of the three doors of the building:
Quivi dell' uom le frali spoglie ascoce
Pallida morte, O passegier, t'addita, etc.
The only somewhat striking tomb in the cemetery was raised in advance
by a woman who subsequently delayed eighteen years in dying: the
inscription informs us of this circumstance; thus this woman for
eighteen years hoped in vain for her sepulchre. What sorrow nourished
this hope within her?
On a little black wooden cross appears this other inscription:
VIRGINIA ACERBI, ANNO 72, 1824.
MORTA NEL BACIO DEL SIGNORE.
The years are harsh to a fair Venetian woman.
[Sidenote: San Michele di Murano.]
Antonio said to me:
"When this cemetery is full, they will give it a rest and bury the dead
in the Isola di San Michele di Murano[116]."
The expression was a correct one: when the harvest is gathered, one
lets the soil lie fallow and ploughs other furrows elsewhere.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
We have been to see that other field awaiting the Great Husbandman.
San Michele di Murano is a smiling monastery with a graceful church,
porticoes and a white cloister. The windows of the convent give a view,
over the porticoes, of Venice and the lagoons; a garden filled with
flowers meets the turf whose compost is still being prepared under the
fresh-coloured skin of some young girl. This charming retreat is given
over to Franciscans; it would better suit nuns singing like the little
pupils of Rousseau's _Scuole_:
"How happy are they," says Manzoni, "who have taken the holy veil
before fixing their eyes on a man's face."
Give me, I entreat you, a cell here in which to finish my Memoirs.
Fra Paolo[117] is buried at the entrance to the church; that seeker
after noise must be very wroth at the silence that surrounds him.
Pellico, when sentenced to death, was lodged at San Michele before
being transported to the fortress of the Spielberg. The president of
the tribunal before which Pellico appeared takes the poet's place at
San Michele; he is buried in the cloister; he will not leave that
prison.
Not far from the tomb of the magistrate is that of a foreign woman
married at the age of twenty-two years, in the month of January; she
died in the month of February following. She did not want to go beyond
the honeymoon; her epitaph says:
CI REVEDREMO.
If it were true!
Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation!
Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but
that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction
of the _ego_, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling
eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no
idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, _ci revedremo!_
I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories
whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not
see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my
eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it
was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the
little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl
had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119].
I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child;
the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are
idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been
Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making
an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long
way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside
the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a
different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but
I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures.
Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was
nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public
papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not
have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion.
Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the
placards which advertise on the same bill the opera of the day and the
Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come
forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the
liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I
dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed,
as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal.
[Sidenote: The gondoliers.]
The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by
the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the
_lazzaroni_ in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships
and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win
the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were
not past.
At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened
to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash
their _barchette_ at the _Traghetti_, just as dragoons curry, brush and
sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and
refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws
water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well
of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to
discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the
cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses
and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and
carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done
without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty
Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola.
When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make
his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red
or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or
mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and
meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has
her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the
wind and serving as a weather-cock, at the top of the monument of the
Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with
oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles
used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders
gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped
like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "_Sia, stati! Sta
longo!_" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the _calle_
will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his _zitella_ the
half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace
Henry V. on the throne.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much,
when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of
kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's
time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: _civitas Venetorum,
civitas Venetica?_ Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the
Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul?
It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were
a colony of the _pescatori_ of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the
mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by
supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and
Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look
upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung
from the horn of Gaul: _cornu Galliæ._[126]
[Sidenote: On the Riva degli Schiavoni.]
Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the
Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream
as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to
the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten
excellent butter at Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights
me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered
me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans;
naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in
naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers
to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like
to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte,
as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the
_Mercure_:
"It was reserved for us to find at the back of the Adriatic the
tomb of two king's daughters[127] whose funeral oration we had
heard delivered in an attic in London. Ah, at least the grave
that holds those noble ladies will have once heard its silence
broken; the sound of a Frenchman's foot-steps will have made
two Frenchwomen start in their coffins! The respects of a poor
gentleman, at Versailles, would have been nothing to princesses;
the prayer of a Christian, on foreign soil, will perhaps have been
agreeable to saints."
Some few years, it seems to me, have passed, since I began to serve the
Bourbons: they have enlightened my fidelity, but they will not tire it
I am breakfasting on the Riva degli Schiavoni, while waiting for the
exile.
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
From the little table at which I sit, my eyes wander over all the
roads: a breeze from the offing cools the air; the tide is rising; a
three-master is coming in. The Lido on one side, the Doge's Palace on
the other, the lagoons in the middle: that is the picture. It is from
this port that so many glorious fleets set sail; old Dandolo sallied
forth in all the pomp of naval chivalry, of which Villehardouin[128],
who began our language and our Memoirs, has left us a description:
"And when the ships were laden with arms, and meats, and knights, and
sergeants, and the shields were arrayed all round in the form of a
frieze, and the banners waved, of which there were so many fair ones,
never did fairer fleets sail from any port."
The morning scene in Venice also puts me in mind of the story of
Captain Olivet and Zulietta, which was so well told:
"The gondola lay to, and I saw a dazzlingly beautiful young woman
step out, coquettishly dressed and very nimble. In three bounds
she was in the cabin and seated at my side, before I perceived
that a place had been laid for her. She was a brunette of twenty
years at the most, as charming as she was lively. She could speak
only Italian; her accent alone would have been enough to turn my
head. While eating and chatting, she fixed her eyes on me and then,
exclaiming, 'Holy Virgin! O my dear Brémond, how long it is since I
saw you!1 she threw herself into my arms, sealed her lips to mine
and pressed me almost to suffocation. Her large, black, Oriental
eyes darted shafts of fire into my heart; and although surprise
at first diverted my senses, my amorous feelings very rapidly
overcame me.... She told us that I was the image of M. de Brémond,
the director of the Tuscan custom-house; that she had been madly
in love with this M. de Brémond; that she was still madly in love
with him; that she had left him because she was a fool; that she
took me in his place; that she wanted to love me, since it suited
her; that, for the same reason, I must love her as long as it
suited her; and that, when she left me in the lurch, I must bear it
patiently as her dear Brémond had done. No sooner said than done....
"In the evening, we escorted her back to her apartments. While we
were talking, I noticed two pistols on her dressing-table.
"'Ah, ah!' said I, taking one up, 'here is a patch-box of a new
construction; may I ask what it is used for?'
"She said, with an ingenuous pride which made her still more
charming:
"'When I am complaisant to those whom I do not love, I make them
pay for the weariness they cause me: nothing can be fairer; but,
although I endure their caresses, I will not endure their insults,
and I shall not miss the first man who shall be wanting in respect
to me.'
'When I left her, I made an appointment for the next day. I did not
keep her waiting. I found her _in vestito di confidenza_, in a more
than wanton undress, which is known only in southern countries and
which I will not amuse myself with describing, although I remember
it too well.... I had no idea of the delights that awaited me.
I have spoken of Madame de Larnage, in the transports which the
recollection of her still sometimes awakens in me; but how old,
ugly, and cold she was, compared with my Zulietta! Do not attempt
to imagine the charms and graces of this bewitching girl; you would
be too far from the truth. The young virgins of the cloister are
not so fresh, the beauties of the harem are not so lively, the
houris of paradise are not so piquant.[129]"
This adventure ended with an eccentricity on the part of Rousseau and
Zulietta's phrase:
"_Lascia le donne e studia la matematica._"
[Sidenote: Zulietta, Margherita Cogni.]
Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the
Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge,"
according to him, "under the _fazzioli._" Sometimes, perturbed by a
feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his
gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed,
from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]:
"Very dark, tall"--it is Lord Byron who speaks--"the Venetian face,
very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old....
"In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido... we were overtaken
by a heavy squall. . . . . . . ....On our return, after a tight
struggle, I found Margarita on the open steps of the Mocenigo
Palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing
through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming,
drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly
exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about
her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and
the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted
from her chariot, or the sybil of the tempest that was rolling
around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except
ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me.... but
calling out to me, '_Ah! can' della Madonna, ne este il tempo per
andar' al' Lido!_--Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to
the Lido?' ran into the house," etc.
In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference
in social position, character and education between the two men.
Through the charm of the style of the author of the _Confessions_ peeps
something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of
expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture.
Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in
habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny
secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears
again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at
their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or
rather whose tears, they were to share.
Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners
and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain,
playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her
to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived
in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown;
everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of
the English commodore[132]: no _cicerone_ could point out to you the
house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid
his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have
lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].
You have seen in these Memoirs what I have said of the relations
of imagination and destiny that seem to have existed between the
historian of _René_ and the poet of _Childe Harold._ Here I point to
another of those conjunctures so nattering to my pride. Does not the
dark-haired Fornarina of Lord Byron bear a certain family likeness to
the fair-haired Velléda of the _Martyrs_, her elder?
[Sidenote: Velléda.]
"'Hidden among the rocks, I waited some time, but nothing appeared.
Suddenly, my ear was struck by sounds which the wind carried to
me from the middle of the lake. I listened and distinguished the
accents of a human voice; at the same time I discovered a skiff
poised on the crest of a wave; it came down again, disappeared
between two billows, and then showed itself once more on the
summit of a heavy swell; it approached the shore. A woman was
steering; she sang as she struggled against the storm and seemed
to sport amidst the winds: one would have thought that they were
in her power, from the manner in which she seemed to defy them. I
saw her throw into the lake by turns, as a sacrifice, pieces of
linen, sheep's fleeces, cakes of wax and little gold and silver
grindstones.
"Soon she touched land, sprang on shore, fastened her bark to the
trunk of a willow and darted into the wood, leaning on the poplar
oar which she held in her hand. She passed quite close to me
without seeing me. Her figure was tall; a dark, short, sleeveless
tunic scarce served to veil her nudity. She carried a golden sickle
slung from a brass girdle and her head was encircled with an oaken
branch. The whiteness of her arms and complexion, her blue eyes,
her rosy lips, her long fair hair that waved dishevelled in the
air bespoke the daughter of the Gauls and contrasted, by their
gentleness, with her proud and fierce gait She sang words full of
terror in a melodious voice, and her uncovered breast rose and fell
like the foam of the waves[134].'"
I should blush to show myself between Byron and Jean-Jacques, without
knowing what place posterity will award me, if these Memoirs were to
appear during my life; but, when they see the light, I shall have gone
and for all time, like my illustrious predecessors, to a distant shore;
my shade will be delivered to the breath of opinion, vain and light
like the little that will remain of my ashes.
Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed
any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music,
does not seem to know that, near Zulietta, there existed pictures,
statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate
with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As
to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he
"spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are
glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of
his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few
mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger
which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice
in all this?
Que d'affectation et de forfanterie[135]!
VENICE, _September_ 1833.
But what, then, is this town in which all the lofty intelligences have
arranged to meet? Some have visited it themselves; others have sent
their Muses there. Something would have been lacking to the immortality
of those talents, if they had not hung pictures on that temple of
voluptuousness and glory. Without again recalling the great poets of
Italy, the geniuses of the whole of Europe placed their creations
there: there breathed Shakespeare's Desdemona, very different from
Rousseau's Zulietta and Byron's Margherita, that chaste Venetian who
declares her love to Othello:
And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her[136].
There appeared Otway's[137] Belvidera, who says to Jaffeir:
Oh smile, as when our loves were in their spring.
. . . . . . . . .
Oh lead me to some desert wide and wild,
Barren as our misfortunes, where my soul
May have its vent, where I may tell aloud
To the high heavens, and every list'ning planet,
With what a boundless stock my bosom's fraught;
Where I may throw my eager arms about thee,
Give loose to love, with kisses kindling joy,
And let off all the fire that's in my heart[138].
Goethe, in our time, has celebrated Venice, and the gentle Marot[139],
who first made his voice heard at the awakening of the French Muses,
took refuge in Titian's native place. Montesquieu wrote:
"Although one had seen all the cities of the world, there might
still be a surprise in store for him in Venice[140]."
When, in too undraped a picture, the author of the _Lettres persanes_
depicts a Mussulman woman surrendered in Paradise to two "heavenly
men," does he not seem to have painted the courtezan of Rousseau's
_Confessions_ and her of Byron's Memoirs? Was not I, between my two
Floridans, like Anaïs between her two angels[141]? But the "painted
girls" and I were not immortal.
[Sidenote: And Corinne.]
Madame de Staël gives Venice over to the inspiration of Corinne: the
latter hears the sound of the cannon that announces "the obscure
sacrifice of a young girl[142] ...a solemn counsel, which a woman
resigned to her fate gives to those who still struggle with destiny."
...Corinne climbs to the top of the tower of St. Mark's, contemplates
the city and the waves, turns her eyes towards Greece "enveloped in
clouds;" at night she sees "nothing but the reflection of the lanterns
which light the gondolas:" they give her the idea of "spectres gliding
upon the water, guided by a little star[143]."
Oswald departs; Corinne darts out of the room to recall him: "The rain
then fell in torrents, a most violent wind arose;" Corinne descends to
the banks of the canal:
"The night was so dark that not a single bark was to be seen....
Corinne called to the gondoliers, who took her cries for those
of some wretch drowning in the tempest; nevertheless none dared
approach to offer assistance, so formidable were the waves of the
Grand Canal[144]."
There again you have Lord Byron's Margherita.
I find an unspeakable pleasure in meeting the masterpieces of those
great masters in the very place for which they were made. I breathe
freely in the midst of the immortal band, like a humble traveller
admitted to the hospitable hearth of a rich and beautiful family.
[60] This book was written on the road from Paris to Venice, between
the 7th and 10th of September 1833, and in Venice, from the 10th to the
15th of September 1833.--T.
[61] Salins suffered from a terrible conflagration in 1825. It was
rebuilt, with regular streets, by public subscription.--T.
[62] Pierre Joseph Thoulier, Abbé d'Olivet (1682-1768) was born at
Salins, on the Furieuse, a tributary of the Loire. He first joined the
Jesuits, where he was known as the Père Thoulier, but soon left the
Company, in order to follow a literary career. Meantime Voltaire had
been his pupil at the college of Louis-le-Grand. He became a member of
the French Academy in 1723; Voltaire in 1746. D'Olivet is the author
of an _Histoire de l'Académie française_, up to 1700, and of several
important grammatical works and translations, and he worked much on the
Dictionary of the French Academy.--T.
[63] Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Castle of Joux, at his father's
instance, in 1775; Toussaint-Louverture (_cf._ Vol. III., p. 191,
n. 3) died there on the 27th of April 1803, after a ten months'
confinement--T.
[64] _Cf._ Vol. II., pp. 246-250.--T.
[65] "When, on the 7th of August 1814, the Bull of _Sollicitudo
omnium ecclesiarum_, came to sanction the work of restoration of the
Company of Jesus, the primitive cantons of Switzerland did not remain
insensible to the joys of Catholicism. Ignace Brocard, Jacques Roh,
Gaspard Rothenflue and several of their fellow-countrymen enlisted
under the banner of the newly-reinstated Order. The Valais gave back to
the Jesuits their old college of Brigg." (CRÉTINEAU-JOLY, _Histoire du
Sunderbund_, Vol. I., p. 428.)--B.
[66] _Dies Iræ_, Stanza 5:
Liber seri plus proferetur,
In quo totum continetur,
Unde mundus judicetur.--T.
[67] Francis I. lived till 1835.--T.
[68] Charles X. lived till 1836.--T.
[69] Ferdinand III. Grand-duke of Tuscany (1769-1824). _Vide supra_ p.
12, n. 1.--T.
[70] Charles Felix I. King of Sardinia (1765-1831) succeeded to the
throne on the abdication of his brother, Victor Emanuel I., in 1821,
the year before the Congress of Verona.--T.
[71] Pierre François Hercule Comte de Serre (1777-1822). He died as
Ambassador to Naples.--T.
[72] Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616), the architect of many of the finest
buildings in North Italy.--T.
[73] Niccola Pisano (_circa_ 1206-1278), one of the greatest Italian
architects.--T.
[74] And not Signor Procurante, as the earlier editions of the Memoirs
have it.--T.
[75] VOLTAIRE: _Candide, ou l'Optimisme_, Part I., Chap. XXV.: _Candid
and Martin pay a Visit to Seignor Pococurante, a Noble Venetian._--T.
[76] Philippe de Comines (_circa_ 1445-1511), the statesman and
historian, author of the valuable _Cronique et hystoire faicte et
composée par messire Philippe de Comines._--T.
[77] JACOPO SANNAZARO.--_Author's Note._
[78] GABRIELLO CHIABRERA, _Canzoni eroiche_, III.: _Per Vittorio
Cappello, Generale de' Veneziani nella Morea_, 10-12.--T.
[79] Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri (1782-1868), a famous French
scene-painter, who executed numbers of stage-scenes for the Royal
Academy of Music, or grand Opera-house, in Paris.--B.
[80] Giorgio Barbarelli (_circa_ 1477-1511), known as Giorgione,
the great Venetian colourist and pupil of Giovanni Bellini (_vide
infra._)--T.
[81] Paolo Cagliari (1528-1588), of Verona, known as Paul Veronese, one
of the most celebrated painters of the Venetian School, went to Venice
in 1555 and remained there. He executed the decorations of the Library
of St. Mark in 1563 and the ceiling of the council-chamber in the
Palace of the Doges in 1577.--T.
[82] Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594), called Tintoretto from the trade of
his father, a dyer, received his first important order in 1546, for the
decoration of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In 1560, he began to paint the
Scuola di San Rocco and the Doges' Palace and, in the same year, seems
to have taken Titian's place as Court painter to the Doges.--T.
[83] Giovanni Bellini (_post_1427-1516), the founder of the Venetian
School of painting and the greatest of the fifteenth-century artists.
Titian and Giorgione were both his pupils.--T.
[84] Paride Bordone (_circa_ 1500-1571), one of Titian's greatest
pupils.--T.
[85] Jacopo Palma the Elder( _circa_ 1480-1528) and Jacopo Palma the
Younger (_circa_ 1544-1628), uncle and nephew.--T.
[86] Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) settled in Venice and presented the
city with his library (1362).--T.
[87] George Gemistus Pletho (_b._ 1390), the celebrated Byzantine
Platonic philosopher and scholar.--T.
[88] Johannes Cardinal Bessarion (1395-1472), Archbishop of Nicæa
(1437), a cardinal (1439), Archbishop of Siponto and Bishop of Sabina
and Tusculum, and Patriarch of Constantinople (1463). Bessarion was a
disciple of Plethon and author of, among many other works of Platonic
philosophy, the famous _Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis_ (1469).--T.
[89] Or Acre: 1104.--T.
[90] 1176.--T.
[91] 1124.--T.
[92] 10 October 1571.--T.
[93] The so-called Grand Sanhedrim of 1806 was a council summoned
by Napoleon for the 20th of October of that year, consisting of
representatives of the chief synagogues of France, Italy and Europe.
The object of its deliberations was to point out to the Government
means of enabling the Jews to participate in the civil and political
rights of England, by modifying such of their habits and doctrines as
kept them isolated from their fellow-citizens. The sittings of the
Grand Sanhedrim, which consisted of 71 members, opened on the 9th of
February and ended on the 9th of March 1807. The most notable clause,
from Napoleon's point of view, in the solemn public declaration issued
on the latter date, is that dispensing Jews who are performing military
service from all religious observances that are irreconcilable with
such military service.--T.
[94] Leopoldo Conte Cicognara (1767-1834), a distinguished diplomatist
and antiquarian. He became President of the Academy of Fine Arts of
Venice in 1812. His principal work, the _Storia della Scultura_, was
published in 1813-1818.--T.
[95] It is clear to my eyes that the ogive, whose so-called mysterious
origin men go so far to seek, was born casually of the intersection
of two semicircular arches; therefore it is found everywhere. Later
architects have done no more than release it from the designs in which
it originally figured.--_Author's Note._
[96] See the previous note.--_Author's Note._
[97] Bartolommeo Gamba (1780-1841), a learned Italian bibliographer and
biographer. His chief work is the _Serie dell' Edizioni dei Testi di
Lingua Italiana_ (1812-1828).--T.
[98] Fra Mauro (_fl._ 15th Century), a monk of the Camaldule Order, who
drew his famous map of the world between 1457 and 1459.--T.
[99] Here for instance, is Charles Dickens' lurid description of the
_Pozzi_, or Prisons, which he pretends to see in a dream:
"I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below
another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite
dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the
old time, every day a torch was placed--I dreamed--to light the
prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering
of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the
blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with the rusty
nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many
generations.
"One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than
four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered
it. Hard by another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the
Confessor came--a monk brown-robed and hooded--ghastly in the day
and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison,
Hope's extinguisher and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the
spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was
strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed
and stealthy--through which the lumpish sack was carried out into
a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a
net." (_Pictures from Italy: An Italian Dream._)--T.
[100]
. . . . . . "Into that hideous den,
With one blow of the axe, admitted light again."--T.
[101] Silvio Pellico (1788-1854) was imprisoned in Milan and Venice
from 1820 to 1822 and at the Spielberg, near Brünn, from 1822 to
1830. His _Mie Prigioni_ had only lately been published (1833)
and Chateaubriand was much struck with them. During his previous
journey to Italy, in a letter dated Basle, 17 May 1833, he wrote to
Madame Récamier:
"Here I am at Basle, safe and sound. You have seen that fine river
pass which is going, for a moment, to bring news of me to you in
France. Travelling always gives me back my strength, sentiment and
thought; I am very busy writing _a new prologue to a_ BOOK. I nave
read the whole of Pellico, cursorily. I am delighted with it; I
should like to write an account of that work, the saintliness of
which will prevent its success with our revolutionaries, who are
free after Fouché's fashion. Are you not enchanted with _Zanze
sotto i Piombi?_ And the little deaf-and-dumb person? And Schiller,
the old gaoler, and the religious conversations through the
window, and our poor Maroncelli? And that poor young wife of the
_sopr'intendente_, who dies so sweetly? And the return to beautiful
Italy?"--B.
[102] Bruno, near which the Spielberg stands, is the capital of
Moravia.--T.
[103] Maria Christina Josephs Johanna Antonia of Austria, Duchess of
Saxe-Teschen (1742-1798), married to Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen in
1766. The Archduchess Maria Christina's monument, by Canova, is in the
church of the Augustines in Vienna.--T.
[104] Titian's _Assumption_, one of the most renowned of existing
pictures, was discovered by Count Cicognara in the church of the Frari,
for which it had been painted as an altar-piece. It was restored and
removed to the _Accademia di Belle Arti_, where it still hangs.--T.
[105] Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and eleventh Earl of
Kincardine (1766-1841) was British Envoy to Constantinople from 1799
to 1802. Between 1801 and 1803, he removed to England from Athens the
so-called Elgin marbles, comprising the bulk of the surviving plastic
decoration of the Parthenon, executed under the direction of Phidias
about 440 B.C. These stolen goods were purchased by the nation in 1816
and are now in the British Museum.--T.
[106] Tommaso Mocenigo, Doge from 1414 to 1423; Giovanni Mocenigo, Doge
from 1475 to 1485; and Luigi Mocenigo, Doge from 1570 to 1577, are all
buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.--T.
[107] Michele Morosini, Doge of Venice for a few months in 1382.--T.
[108] Andrea Vendramin, Doge of Venice (_d._ 1478), became Doge in
1476.--T.
[109] Seventeen doges in all are buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo or
"Zanipolo," as the Venetians pronounce it.--B..
[110] Marco Antonio Bragadino (_d._ 1571), flayed alive by the Turks
after his valiant defense of Famagusta, in Cyprus.--T.
[111] Angelo Emo (1731-1792), the last of the Venetian admirals. He
bombarded Tunis and forced it to sign a truce with the Republic--T.
[112] Cary's DANTE: _Hell_, Canto XXI. 7-15.--T.
[113] Henry IV. defeated the Leaguers at Ivry-la-Bataille on the 14th
of March 1590.--T.
[114] Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855) started on his second polar
expedition in 1821 and his third in 1824. These two expeditions,
neither of which was specially successful, are referred to by
Chateaubriand on page 136 of Vol. I. of the Memoirs. A later
expedition, by way of Spitsbergen, was likewise unsuccessful. From 1823
to 1829, Parry was Acting Hydrographer to the Navy. In 1852, he was
made a rear-admiral and, in 1853, Governor of Greenwich Hospital.--T.
[115] St. Christopher (_fl._ 3rd Century) is said to have lived in
Syria and to have been of prodigious height and strength. As a penance
for having been a servant of the devil, he devoted himself to the
task of carrying pilgrims across a river where there was no bridge.
Christ came to the river one day in the form of a child and asked to be
carried over, but His weight grew heavier and heavier till His bearer
was nearly broken down in the midst of the stream. When they reached
the shore:
"Marvel not," said the Child, "for with Me thou hast borne the sins of
the world."
St. Christopher is usually represented as bearing the Infant Christ and
leaning upon a staff. He was martyred under the Emperor Decius _circa_
250. The Church celebrates the Feast of St. Christopher on the 25th of
July.--T.
[116] The Isola di San Michele contains the modern burying-ground of
Venice.--T.
[117] Pietro Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), known as Fra Paola and surnamed
Servita, a noted Venetian historian, entered the Order of the Servites
in 1565. In 1570, he was made professor of philosophy in the Servite
Monastery in Venice. He was distinguished, in the controversy with Pope
Paul V. (1606-1607), as the champion of free thought. His chief work is
the _Istoria del Concilio di Trento_, published in London in 1619. Fra
Paolo was a member of the Council of Ten and consulting theologian to
the Venetian Republic.--T.
[118] _Cf._ VOL I., p. 76.--T.
[119] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 236.--T.
[120] The _gazetta_ was a Venetian coin, worth about three farthings,
the sum charged for a reading of the first Venetian newspaper, a
written sheet which appeared about the middle of the sixteenth century
during the war with Soliman II.--T.
[121] Aldus Manutius (_circa_ 1450-1515), the celebrated printer
and founder of the Aldine Press in Venice; his son, Paulus Manutius
(1511-1574); and the latter's son, Aldus Manutius the Younger
(1547-1597). All three were distinguished Classical scholars as well as
noted printers.--T.
[122] Antonio Franconi (1738-1836), a native of Venice, began life as a
tumbler and travelling physician. Afterwards he instituted bull-fights
in Lyons and, later, at Bordeaux; and, lastly, went into partnership,
in 1783, with Astley, the English circus-proprietor, who had opened
a theatrical riding-school in Paris, and founded the circus which he
called the Cirque Olympique and which obtained a prodigious success.--T.
[123] The Veneti were an ancient Celtic people living in Brittany, near
the coast of the Bay of Biscay. They were subdued by Cæsar, after a
severe maritime war, in 56 B.C.--T.
[124] A people dwelling near the head of the Adriatic, between the Po
and the Adige.--T.
[125] Vannes, or, in Breton, Gwened is the capital of the Department
of Morbihan and is the ancient Civitas Venetorum, the capital of the
Veneti.--T.
[126] _Cornu Galliæ_, Cornouailles, Cornwall.--T.
[127] Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) and Madame Victoire (1733-1799),
daughters of Louis XV.--T.
[128] Geoffroi de Villehardouin (_circa_ 1160--_circa_ 1215),
the author of a famous chronicle: _Histoire de la conquête de
Constantinople, ou Chronique des empereurs Baudouin et Henri de
Constantinople._ Villehardouin's Chronicle is not only trustworthy
from an historical point of view, but is even more deserving for
its literary excellence, while being one of the oldest monuments of
original French prose. The Fourth Crusade, in which Villehardouin took
part, left Venice in October 1203.--T.
[129] ROUSSEAU: _Confessions_, Part I., Book VII.--T.
[130] The baker's wife.--T.
[131] M. de Montaigu.--T.
[132] Hon. John Byron (1723-1786), second son of William fourth Lord
Byron and grand-father of the poet, entered the Navy as a boy. In 1764,
he was promoted to commodore and commanded two vessels in a voyage of
exploration round the world; he returned in 1766, having accomplished
little beyond some curious observations on the Indians of Patagonia
and the discovery of some small islands in the Pacific Ocean. He was
Governor of Newfoundland from 1769 to 1772; became a vice-admiral
in 1778; and on the 6th of July 1779 fought an engagement with the
French fleet off Grenada, in the West Indies, the result of which was
doubtful.--T.
[133] _Cf._ BYRON, _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, Canto IV.--T.
[134] CHATEAUBRIAND, _Les Martyrs_, Book IX.: _The Story of
Eudorus._--T.
[135] MOLIÈRE, _Tartufe_, Act III. Sc. ii.:
"What affectation and blind real is this!"--T.
[136] SHAKESPEARE: _Othello, the Moor of Venice_, Act I. Sc. iii.--T.
[137] Thomas Otway (1652-1685), the principal tragic poet of the
English classical school. The most famous of his tragedies, _Venice
Preserved_, from which the following quotation is taken, appeared in
1682.--T.
[138] OTWAY: _Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered_, Act I. Sc.
i.--T.
[139] Clément Marot (1497-1544), the poet, when compelled to fly from
France on account of his scandalous life, took refuge in Béarn (1535),
then at the Court of Ferrara, where he was secretary to Renée of
France, and, finally, in Venice (1536).--T.
[140] MONTESQUIEU: _Lettres persanes._ Letter XXXI.: _Rhédi à Usbek, à
Paris._--T.
[141] The incident of Anals will be found in the _Lettres persanes._
Letter CXLI.: _Rica à Usbek à <sup>***</sup>_--T.
[142] The cannon was fired when a nun took the veil.--T.
[143] _Corinne_: Book XV., Chaps, VII. and IX.--T.
[144] _Corinne_: Book XVI., Chap. III.--T.