“Susanna Marchmont,” Cæsar wrote to his friend Alzugaray, “is a
beautiful woman, rich, and apparently intelligent. She has given me to
understand that she feels a certain inclination for me, and if I please
her well enough, she will get a divorce and marry me.
“I have discovered the reasons for her inclination, first in a desire to
revenge herself on her husband by marrying the brother of the woman he
has fallen in love with; secondly, in my not having made love to her,
like the majority of the men she has known.
“Really, Susanna is a beautiful woman; but whereas other women gain
by being looked at and listened to, with her it is not so. In this
beautiful woman there is something cold, utilitarian, which she does not
succeed in hiding by her artistic effusions. Besides she has a great
deal of vanity, but stupid vanity. She has asked me if I couldn’t manage
to acquire a high-sounding, decorative title in Spain.
“If Susanna knew that in my heart I keep up her friendship only through
inertia, because I have no plans, and that her millions and her beauty
leave me cold, she would be dumfounded; I believe that perhaps she
would admire me.
“At present we devote ourselves to walking, talking, and telling each
other our impressions. Any one would say that we intentionally play a
game of being contrary; whatsoever she finds wonderful seems worthy
of contempt to me, and vice-versa. It is strange that such absolute
disagreement can exist. This Sunday afternoon we have been taking a
long walk, half sentimental, half archeological.
“I went to get her at her hotel; she came down, looking very smart, with
an unmarried friend, also an American and also very chic.
“The three of us walked toward the Forum. We passed under the arch of
Constantine. A small beggar-boy preceded us, getting ahead and turning
hand-springs. I gave him some pennies. Susanna laughed. This woman, who
pays bills of thousands of pesetas to her milliner, doesn’t like to give
a copper to a ragamuffin.
“We turned off a bit from the avenue and went up on the right, toward
the Palatine. Among the ruins some women were pulling up plants and
putting them into sacks. At the end of the road, on the slope, there
were Stations of the Cross, and some boys from a school were playing,
guarded by priests with white rabbits.
“It was impossible to go further, and we went down the hill toward the
Piazza di San Gregorio. On the open place in front of the church that is
in this square, some vagabonds were stretched out on the ground; an old
man with a long hoary beard and a pipe with a chain, two dark youths
with shocks of black hair, and a red-headed woman with silver hoops in
her ears and a baby in her arms.
“The two young boys threw me a glance of hatred, and stared at Susanna
and her friend with extraordinary avidity.
“What very false ideas must have been going through their minds! I might
have approached them and said politely:
“‘Do not imagine that these ladies are of different stuff from this red
woman who has the baby in her arms. They are all the same. There is no
more difference than what is caused by a little soap and some money.’
“‘Let us go in and see the church,’ said Susanna.
“‘Good. Come along.’
“The church has a flight of stone steps and two cypresses to one side.
“We went into a court with graves in it, and stayed there a while,
reading the names of the people buried in them. Susanna’s friend is a
sort of little devil with the instincts of a small boy, and she went
springing about in all the corners.
“When we came out of the church we found the square, deserted before,
now full of people. During the time we had stayed inside, a numerous
group of tourists had formed a circle, and a gentleman was explaining in
English what the Via Appia used to be.
“‘These are the things that please you,’ Susanna said to me, laughing.
“I answered with a joke. The truth is that no matter how many
explanations I am given, an ancient Roman always seems a cardboard
figure to me, or at most a marble figure. It is not possible to imagine
how bored I used to be reading _Les Martyres_ of Chateaubriand and that
famous _Quo Vadis_.
“From the Piazza di San Gregorio we took a steep street, the ‘Via di
Santi Giovanni e Paolo,’ which passes under an arch with several brick
buttresses.
“We came out in a little square, in an angle of which there is an
ancient arcaded tower, which has tiles set into the walls, some round
and others the shape of a Greek cross.
“The modern portico of the church has columns and a grated door, which
we found open. Over the door is a picture of Saint John and Saint Paul;
on the sides of it two shields with the mitre and the keys. On one, set
round about, are the Latin words: _Omnium rerum est vicisitudo;_ on the
other is written in Spanish: _Mi corazón arde en mucha llama._
“‘Is it Spanish?’ Susanna asked me.
“‘Yes.’
“‘What does it mean?’
“I translated the phrase into English: ‘My heart burns with a great
flame’; and Susanna repeated it several times, and begged me to write it
in her card-case.
“Her friend skimmed some pages in Baedeker and said:
“‘It seems that the house of two saints martyred by Julian the Apostate
is preserved here.’
“I assured them that that was an error. I happen to have been reading
just a few days ago a book about Julian the Apostate, and it turns out
that that Emperor was an admirable man, good, generous, brave, full of
virtues; but the Christians had reason for calumniating him and they
calumniated him. All Julian’s persecutions of Christians are logical
repressions of people that were disturbing public order, and the phrase,
Vencisti, Galileo, is a pious fraud. Julian was a philosopher, he
loved science, hygiene, cleanliness, peace, in a world of hysterical
worshipers of corpses, who wanted to live in ignorance, filth, and
prayer.
“But Christianity, always a religion of hallucinated persons, of
mystifiers, has never vacillated in singing the praises of parricides
like Constantine, and in calumniating the memory of great men like
Julian.
“Susanna and her friend considered that the question of whether Julian
has been calumniated by history, or not, was of no importance.
“The truth is that I feel the same way.
“From the Via di Santi Giovanni e Paolo we came out into a small square
by a church, which has a little marble ship in front of its porch. We
saw that his street is named after the _Navicella._”