Beaufort, moved by his devotion towards Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of
the world, and to Mary, his glorious Mother, and desirous of procuring
his own salvation and the solace of the suffering souls in purgatory,
assigned to the monastery of Roc Amadour the sum of ten livres annually
from the ferry over the Dordogne at Mount Valent, that a solemn Mass
might be sung every Thursday, at least in plain chant, with three
collects, one in honor of the Holy Ghost, another of the Blessed Virgin,
and the third for the repose of the faithful departed. After Mass the
priest, laying aside his chasuble, was to go daily, with all the clergy
of the chapel, to sing before the statue of Our Lady either the _Salve
Regina_ or the _Regina Cœli_, according to the season, with the _Libera_
or the _De Profundis_, for the repose of his and his wife’s souls and
the souls of his parents.
We could multiply these beautiful examples of devotion to the Blessed
Virgin, but forbear, though it is not useless to recount the deeds of
our forefathers in the faith. They have their lesson for those who know
how to read aright.
Among the glorious prerogatives with which the chapel of Notre Dame de
Roc Amadour is favored is the Grand Pardon, accorded by several popes of
the middle ages, on the feast of _Corpus Christi_ whenever it coincides
with the nativity of St. John the Baptist. This frequently happened
before the correction of the Calendar by Gregory XIII., but it now only
occurs when Easter falls on St. Mark’s day—that is, the 25th of April.
The Grand Pardon comprises all the privileges of a solemn jubilee, and
is gained by all who visit the miraculous chapel on the appointed day,
receive the sacraments with the proper dispositions, pray for concord
among Christian princes, the extirpation of heresy, and the exaltation
of our holy mother the church. So great was formerly the affluence of
the pilgrims on such occasions, as in the jubilee of 1546, the town
could not contain them, and tents were set up in the country round.
Pilgrimages to this ancient chapel are still common.
A remnant of the old palace of the abbot of Roc Amadour is still
standing, but is used for the sale of objects of devotion. Here Arnaud
Amalric, the papal legate, spent the whole winter of 1211, and many
other eminent prelates received hospitality, as the holy martyr St.
Englebert, Archbishop of Cologne. Behind this building a narrow,
dangerous path leads along the side of the cliff to an ancient hermitage
that now bears the title of _Maison à Marie_, where people desirous of
spending a few days in retreat can find an asylum. It hangs like a
bird’s nest on the edge of a fearful precipice, and must be a trying
residence to people of weak nerves. The Sisters of Calvary, who have
charge of it, look like doves in the clefts of the rocks. Still further
along the cliff is their convent.
A winding stair of two hundred and thirty-six steps, hewn out of the
live rock, and lighted only by the fissures, leads from the sacristy of
the church up to the ancient castle, and a scarcely less remarkable
ascent has been constructed zigzag over the cliff. This castle, half
ruined, was bought by the Père Caillau about forty years ago, and
repaired as a residence for the clergy who served the sanctuaries of Roc
Amadour under his direction. The old ramparts remain, affording a fine
view of the whole country around. Bending over them, you look straight
down on the group of churches below, and the village still further down,
while in the very depths of the horrid abyss is a faint line marking the
course of the Alzou along the bottom of the _Vallée Ténébreuse_.
A few years ago the ruined castle and crumbling churches below looked as
if they belonged to the time of King Dagobert, but they have lost in a
measure their air of charming antiquity in the necessary restorations,
by no means complete. Nothing, however, can destroy the singular
grandeur and wild beauty of the site, or the thousand delightful
associations—historic, religious, poetic, and legendary—connected with
the place.
We close this imperfect sketch by echoing the sentiments that animated
the saintly Père Caillau when he entered upon his duties as superior of
Roc Amadour: “With what joy I ascended the mysterious stairs that lead,
O Mary, to thy august sanctuary! With what fervor I celebrated the holy
mysteries at thy altar! With what love and respect I kissed the sacred
feet of thy statue! With what impatience I awaited the hour for
returning! Happy the moments passed at thy feet! The world seemed as
nothing in my eyes. What devotion, what profound silence there was in my
soul! What sweet transports of joy! My heart seemed consumed by a sacred
fire. Why, why were such moments so short? May their remembrance, at
least, abide for ever! And may I never cease to chant thy praise and
exalt thy wondrous mercy!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A SILENT COURTSHIP.
Italian hotels of the old kind are a very pleasant remembrance to
travellers from the north; they have the romance and the forlorn beauty
which one expects to see, and few of the obtrusively modern arrangements
called comforts. The new hotels that have arisen since the age of
progress are very different, and not nearly so pleasant, even to the
traveller with the most moderate expectations of the picturesque. The
less-frequented towns inland have kept the old style of hostelry, as
travel does not increase enough in their neighborhood to warrant the
building of new-fashioned hotels; and though the palace floors and walls
may be cold and look cheerless on a damp winter day, there are a hundred
chances to one that no foreigner will be there to note down such an
experience.
But Macchio, in the Umbrian Marches, once had a hotel more singular than
almost any other. It had no name, such as even the most unmistakable
palazzo generally puts on to show its present destination; it was called
after the name of the old family whose stronghold it had once been; and
as of this stronghold only one part was whole, the hotel was called
“Torre Carpeggio.” It consisted, indeed, of a tower—that is, only the
tower was whole, furnished, and usable; among some ruins of the rest of
the building were a rude kitchen and stables, patched up with modern
masonry not half so solid as the original, and some servants slept in
the lofts above these apologies for “offices,” but the remarkable tower
only was in good repair. The owner, a native of the place, and whose
family had been for generations in the service of the Carpeggios, was an
unsophisticated countryman of the old school, not at all like the
exasperating landlord of city hotels, who has just begun to wake up to
the dignity of his position and to experiment in his behavior towards
his foreign guests. He was the real owner, having paid good money down
for the castle; but he still called the last Carpeggio his young master,
and loved him like his own son. This youth, like some of his remoter
forefathers, was fond of learning, and, seeing no other means of
securing an education and a start in life that should make something
better out of him than a starveling noble of the Marches, had sold his
inheritance to his old retainer, keeping back only one-third of the
vintage produce as a small yearly income to fall back upon, and had gone
to a German university, where even the most exacting of the professors
considered him a modern Pico della Mirandola. The selling of his old
ruined castle had brought down upon him the anger and contempt of
neighbors of his own class, but he was indifferent to local opinion and
despised the disguised meanness of too many of his neighbors. He had in
reality passed through a severe struggle with his own prejudices before
yielding to his better sense and parting with the shadow to pursue the
substance.
If learning should ever bring him money, he meant to reclaim the old
place, which in the meanwhile could not be in safer hands; but on this
he did not reckon, and while he looked down on the sordid poverty that
only prompted his neighbors to sell butter and milk, and take toll from
visitors coming to see the faded frescos or old armor in their ruinous
dwellings, he saw with very different eyes the probable future of
another kind of poverty before him: the pittance and privations of a
student’s lot, the obscure life of a professor or the uncertain one of a
discoverer; but withal the glorious counterweight of intellectual life,
the wealth of vigor and progress, and stimulated, restless thought,
doubling and trebling his interests, and making akin to himself all the
mental processes or achievements all over the world, which would come of
a few years’ study and the sacrifice of his home. Far more patriotic and
far more proud was this youth who sold his inheritance than the
indignant vegetators around him, who all felt the honor of their order
insulted by his unheard-of deed, and their country deprived of another
son unworthy of her because he could see in Germany something more than
a barbarous, hereditary tyrant and enemy!
So it came about that the good Salviani kept a hotel in Carpeggio tower,
the walls of which had always been kept in good repair, and which was
easily furnished, at no great expense, from the contents of various
lumber-rooms and a little intelligent help from the local carpenter,
who, like most Italians, had an intuitive understanding of the artistic.
Tourists who had stopped here for a night or two; artists who had
established their sketching headquarters here; Italians of some fortune
who passed here on their way to their inland _villeggiature_; anglers
and peddlers, friars, and even commercial travellers of various nations
who had begun to experiment on the rural population hereabouts; pilgrims
to the two neighboring shrines hardly known beyond twenty miles around,
and yet the boast of the neighborhood for nearly four hundred years;
wine merchants from the next cities—these and many more could witness to
the satisfactory way in which Salviani kept the only hotel in Macchio.
And of course his prices were moderate—indeed, to a foreigner they
seemed absolutely ridiculous; and he always made it a point to give an
Englishman or an American plenty of water, having found that by
experience a salve to the fault-finding spirit, and his young master
having also accustomed his old attendant to it by requiring it himself
ever since his boyhood. Foreigners with a “turn” for antique furniture
spent more time roaming the old chambers than they did eating at the
landlord’s excellent, if strictly national, table (for Salviani, knowing
that he was ignorant of foreign dishes, never attempted to drive away
his guests by bad imitations). The tower was very high and uncommonly
large in proportion; in fact, it reminded you rather of two Cecilia
Metella tombs raised one above the other than of an ordinary tower; and
it was oddly distributed within. A staircase wound in the centre of the
building, communicating with the rooms on each tier by a circular
corridor on which the doors opened; but from the third floor this
staircase ceased, and from that to the fourth there was no access except
from a winding stair within the thickness of the outer wall. The great
stairs were of stone and uncarpeted, and in the corridor on which the
doors of the rooms opened were placed at intervals pieces of furniture,
such as chairs, tables, stands, bronzes, vases, marble cornices, things
picturesque, but not always available for use, and many sadly injured
and mutilated, yet forming such a collection as sent a thrill of envy to
the heart of a few stray connoisseurs who had come across it and never
been able to bring away even a specimen. Old Salviani had his
superstitions, but, unlike his countrymen in general, he felt that these
forbade him to sell anything belonging to the old family seat,
especially to a foreigner.
One day two travellers stopped at the hotel, a mother and
daughter—“English, of course,” said the landlord with a smile, as he saw
their costume and independent air. The daughter was, equally of course,
in evident and irrepressible raptures about everything she saw in the
place, from the ruinous outhouses to the museum-like interior. Their own
rooms on the first floor, large, marble-paved, and scantily but
artistically furnished with the best preserved of the antique things,
satisfied them only for a short time; they wanted to be shown over the
whole house. The bedrooms were not quite in such good taste, they
thought; and indeed, as Salviani was not perfect, here the “cloven foot”
_did_ appear, for a peddler had once beguiled him into buying some
Nottingham lace curtains with which he disfigured one of the third-story
rooms, and some cheap chintzes which he had made into curtains for some
of the patched-up bedsteads. But as the two strangers went up through
each corridor, looking down at the tier below and at the various
beautiful things beside them, they forgot these blemishes in their
delight at a sight so unusual as this large, inhabited, well-preserved
tower. They had seen nothing like it and could never have imagined it.
It had an air of dignity, of grandeur, of repose, and yet of connection
with the present to which one is more accustomed in old English
country-houses than in Italian palaces.
One of the rooms on the fourth tier was almost unfurnished, having only
two dilapidated bedsteads, one very large and promiscuously heaped with
bed-quilts of equal dilapidation, while the other, in the form of a cot,
or child’s bed, was also much larger than such beds are made now. On
this was thrown an old-fashioned but almost new black mantle trimmed
with silk ribbon. This was the room afflicted with the Nottingham lace
curtains, which were cleaner than seemed natural in such a room. The
view hence was beautiful, and the young Englishwoman was moved to
suggest that they should change their plans a little and stay here a few
weeks, when she would endeavor to learn the language and would make a
study of this tower-nest with the fine view. It would be so out of the
way, and a few antique chairs and a table would be enough furniture to
replace the beds, which could be put into the next room. The mother
smiled; she was used to these sudden schemes growing up full-fledged out
of any pleasant and suggestive-looking circumstances, but the landlord,
seriously entering into the proposal, said he feared the other room was
too small to hold the beds—certainly the big one, which could not be got
through the door, and, in fact, did not take to pieces. This set the
young girl to examining the bed, and suddenly she called her companions
to notice a panel in the tall head-board, which reached nearly to the
ceiling. It seemed movable, she said, and might she not try to find the
spring? Did the signor know anything about it? Salviani turned rather
pale and hastily crossed himself, muttering something in Italian; then,
in bad French, attempted to explain to his guest that there was a story
of a former Carpeggio who was said to have lived alone on this top story
and to have been a wizard, but how long ago he could not tell, nor if
the bed had been there then. The young girl insisted on getting to the
bottom of the secret of the panel, which at last yielded, and revealed a
space between itself and another room of which only a corner was
visible, and a very small grated window high up in the wall. She
scrambled through the panel opening, out into a lot of rubbish which
filled the intervening space and covered the sloping floor several
inches deep. The door into the other room was gone, or else there had
never been one, and there were large hooks on either side of the gap, as
if curtains might once have hung there. The floor was sunk much lower
than this level—quite three feet—giving one the impression of a shallow
well, so that there must have once been some movable way of descent. An
old press or chest, with two drawers at the bottom, filled one corner,
and on it was a faded piece of green silk, looking unmistakably part of
a woman’s dress, and a beautiful, delicate ivory desk lying open, with
many thin plates folding together like the leaves of a portfolio. The
curious girl handled it with a sort of dread, yet eagerly and closely
inspected it, leaving it afterwards in just the position in which she
had found it. As she turned from it she gave a cry of surprise; a chair
stood in the corner, half hidden by the press, and across the back of it
hung a long lock of hair, brown and silky, now fluttering in the
unaccustomed draught from the open panel. Suddenly the intruder was
aware that the walls were covered with books but they were hidden behind
a close, thin green wire netting, which had at first looked like the
pattern of the wall. She eagerly called for a chair to stand on to
examine them; the landlord handed her one through the door, and then for
the first time, fascinated yet afraid, gazed into the room. Many were
the voluble and simple exclamations he uttered; but he was evidently
more concerned as to the risk of touching such uncanny things than
pleased at the discovery of the energetic stranger. Meanwhile, she
looked at the books, which filled up two sides of the room from floor to
ceiling—they were a treasure, as she knew: old Italian and German books
on theological and philosophical subjects; translations into Italian of
some Elizabethan authors—these, perhaps, unique of their kind, and rarer
than originals in either English or Italian; Italian translations of
more modern English books; poetry, science, illuminated manuscripts,
first editions of sixteenth-century printed books—the Italian ones, even
those in black-letter, perfectly clear and legible to a tyro, while a
few English books of a century later were not half so decipherable; a
good many Greek and Latin books, but not so many as of the Italian and
German; and a few Oriental manuscripts, chiefly Hebrew, Arabic, and
Syriac. In two places on the wall, which showed traces of a rough kind
of painting as a background, were hung unframed Chinese landscapes on
wood, and in other parts of the room old engravings, some plainly
framed, some not, but pasted on to boards, and one or two unfinished
etchings. The most interesting purported to be a head of St. Peter—not a
conventional one, but a copy from some old painting, itself copied from
a Byzantine fresco, and claiming to be—so said the quotation at the foot
of the etching—a portrait of the apostle as he really was. The pedigree
of the portrait, however, was the really interesting point, and this was
minutely traced in the foot-note, added by one signing himself Andrea
C., to the unfinished etching of the artist, who, it seems, had died
while engaged on this work.
And here ends the part the strangers took in the affair; for they
continued their journey to Ancona, and often in after-years, in their
quiet English home between lake and rocky fell, wondered what became of
the books of Torre Carpeggio. But the faithful Salviani had written to
his young master at once, and Carpeggio returned a joyous answer, full
of excitement and curiosity, promising a visit as soon as his means and
his studies combined would allow of it. It was a year before he was able
to come—a year during which he had changed and ripened, but which had
left the old tower, and, indeed, the sleepy, beautiful old city, as
unchanged as anything can be where human beings are being born, married,
and buried in due season. Even this inevitable change, however, was
neutralized by the firmly-grooved life which, as each generation grew
up, it placidly inherited from the last and religiously carried out,
undreaming of any other possibilities and ignorant even of its own
dormant energies. This was before the commotions of the last twenty
years, and there was not even a political ferment, much less an
intellectual one, to disturb the even flow of things. One or two of the
cathedral clergy had the reputation of being great scholars, and,
indeed, had the right to be so looked upon, if by scholarship we
understand the kind of knowledge which made the men of the Medici days
fully the equals of the Oxford dons of only one generation ago; but that
sort of scholarship harmonized well with the air of serene drowsiness
that covered the picturesque and half-deserted old city. The old canons
kept much to themselves, and studied in a dainty, desultory, solitary
way, not extending the daintiness to dress or furniture, but keeping up
an unconscious kind of picturesqueness which they chiefly owed to such
details as velvet skull-caps and bits of stray carving, or an old and
precious ivory crucifix or Cellini relic-case—things prized by them for
their meaning rather than for their art-value.
To this quaint, quiet city Emilio Carpeggio came back, after a two
years’ absence, a youth still—for he was only twenty—but a phenomenon,
if any one had known what was passing in his brain. He found the state
of things more deplorable than ever, now that he had had experience of a
different lot; he had thought it hopeless enough before. Practical and
far-seeing, he did not find a panacea in reckless political
disturbances, and in impossible strivings to make citizens and statesmen
out of his easy-going neighbors, so he was saved the loss of time that
clogged the efforts of so many well-meaning men of his acquaintance
abroad; individual mental activity was what he looked forward to as the
thin edge of the wedge that should break up this spell of what he could
not help looking upon as lamentable stagnation, however beautiful the
disguise it wore.
His three months’ holiday came to an end, and he disappeared again,
carrying off his treasures with him to Germany, where they became the
wonder and envy of the professors. But such luck, after all, was only
due, said the kindly old men, to one who had done so much to win
knowledge.
There was one of these men, not nearly so old as the rest, the special
teacher to whom Carpeggio had attached himself, who was the young man’s
best friend. To him only the dreams and hopes and resolves of this
concentrated young mind were made freely known; for, though young as
regards most of the professors, Schlichter was like a father to the
Italian student. He was only forty-two, and already had a European
reputation in his own line—mining engineering. A year after Carpeggio
came back from his visit to Italy his master received an invitation from
a scientific society in England to give a course of lectures in London
during the summer. He proposed to the young man to accompany him,
telling him that there was no knowing what practical advantages might
result from his visit to a country where you needed only energy to grasp
success.
“But you forget the Mammon-worship of the English,” said Emilio, “of
which you yourself have so scornfully told me, and that obscure young
foreigners without interest are not likely to have a chance of showing
off their energy. I think I had better stay and study here another year
or two, instead of deliberately exposing myself to the vertigo of
London.”
“Nonsense!” said Schlichter impatiently. “Society is not likely to
dazzle us, or, indeed, take much notice of us; they know how to keep the
streams separate, even if the fine ladies do play at a little pretty
enthusiasm for science now and then. A lecture nowadays is only another
excuse for a pretty toilette, a change from the breakfast and morning
concert or the afternoon kettle-drum; but that does not imply a real,
personal notice of the lecturer, or, indeed, of any other working-bee.
But, seriously, I know some men in London who might help you, if they
had a mind to do it. You know how many surveys and plans there
are—always some new expedition to far-away places—and young men of
brains are always useful, especially single men, who can leave home
without regret or difficulty. You speak English and other useful modern
languages, and you have every chance, I tell you, if you will only keep
your eyes open. As for study, a man need never say he can find no time
for it, however busy he is. If my evil genius had made me a merchant, I
should have found time for study, and so will you, just as well as if
you stayed at home. It is settled, is it not?”