... Villa Adolphina.... Adolphina?... Villa Adolphina, _grands et petits
appartements, jardin, vue sur la mer_....
I go in. Everything is clean and nice; there are trees and flowers in
the garden, and English children, fat, soft and rosy, who make you hope
from the bottom of your heart that they will never meet with cannibals.
An old woman comes out, and after asking what I have come for, begins
a conversation by telling me that she is not a servant, but ‘more like
a friend,’ that Madame Adolphine has gone to a hospital, or almshouse,
of which she is a patroness. Then she takes me to see ‘an exceptionally
convenient apartment’ which this season for the first time is unoccupied,
and which two Americans and a Russian princess had been only that morning
to look at—for which reason the old woman who was ‘more a friend than a
servant’ sincerely advised me not to lose time. Thanking her for this
sudden sympathy and solicitude on my behalf, I asked her the question:
‘_Sie sind eine Deutsche?_’
‘_Zu Diensten, und der gnädige Herr?_’
‘_Ein Russe._’
‘_Das freut mich zu sehr. Ich wohnte so lange, so lange_ in Petersburg. I
must say I believe there is no other town like it and never will be.’
‘It is very pleasant to hear that. Is it long since you left Petersburg?’
‘Yes, it is not yesterday; why, we have been living here twenty years. I
have been a friend of Madame Adolphine from my childhood, and so I never
wanted to leave her. She does not care much for housekeeping; everything
is at sixes and sevens in her house with no one to look after it. When
_meine Gönnerin_ bought this little _Paradise_ she sent for me at once
from _Braunschweig_.’
‘And where did you live in Petersburg?’ I asked.
‘Oh, we lived in the very best part of the town, where the _Laute
Herrschaften und Generäle_ live. How many times I have seen the late Tsar
driving by in a carriage or a one-horse sledge _so ernst_.... He was a
real potentate, one may say.’
‘Did you live on the Nevsky or in Morsky Street?’
‘Yes; that is, not quite on the Nevsky, but close by, at the
_Polizei-brücke_.’
‘Enough ... enough, I might have known,’ I thought, and I asked the old
woman to say that I would come to discuss terms with Madame Adolphine
herself. I could never without a peculiar tenderness meet the relics of
old days, the half-ruined monuments from the temple of Vesta or some
other god, it does not matter.... The old woman who was ‘more like a
friend’ escorted me across the garden to the gate.
‘Here is our neighbour, he too lived for years in Petersburg....’ She
pointed to a big, smartly decorated house, inscribed this time in
English: ‘Large and small Apartments, Furnished or Unfurnished....’
‘No doubt you remember Floriani? He was the _coiffeur de la cour_ near
Millionnaya Street; he was mixed up in a very unpleasant affair ... he
was prosecuted and almost sent to Siberia ... you know, for being too
indulgent, there were such severe measures.’
‘Well,’ I thought, ‘she will certainly exalt Floriani into being my
“comrade in misfortune”!’
‘Yes, yes, now I vaguely remember the story; the Procurator of the Holy
Synod and other divines and officers in the Guards had a hand in it....’
‘Here he comes.’
A little dried-up, toothless old man in a small straw hat like a sailor’s
or a child’s, with a blue ribbon round the crown, a short, light
pea-green overcoat and striped breeches, came out to the gate. He raised
his dull, lifeless eyes, and munching with his thin lips, nodded to the
old lady.
‘Would you like me to call him?’
‘No, thank you very much.... I am not in that line—you see, I don’t shave
my beard.... Good-bye. And tell me, please, am I mistaken or not, has M.
Floriani a red ribbon?’
‘Yes, yes, he has subscribed largely to charities!’
‘A very good heart, no doubt.’
In classical times writers were fond of bringing back into this world
the shades of the dead, that they might have a chat about this and that.
In our realistic age everything is on the earth, and even part of the
other world is in _this_ world. The Champs-Élysées extend to the shores
and strands of Elysium, and are scattered here and there by warm or
sulphurous springs at the foot of mountains or the borders of lakes; they
are sold in acres or laid out into vineyards.... Part of a man who has
died to the life of excitement and agitation is here passing through the
first course of the transmigration of souls and the preparatory class of
Purgatory.
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even
two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new
scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of times long
dead appear more frequently on his way, calling up series of shadows and
pictures kept somewhere in readiness in the endless catacombs of the
memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep....
Those who like Faust want to see ‘the mothers,’ and even ‘the fathers,’
need no Mephistopheles; it is enough to take a railway ticket and travel
to the South. By the time Cannes and Grasse are reached, shades of days
long fled stray about, warming themselves in the sun; quietly huddled up,
close to the sea, they wait for Charon and their turn.
On the way to this _Città_, which is not so very _dolente_, the tall,
bent and majestic figure of Lord Brougham stands as keeper of the gate.
After a long and honourable life spent in useless toil, he seems, with
one grey eyebrow lower than the other, like the living embodiment of part
of Dante’s inscription: ‘_Voi che ’ntrate_,’ with the idea of correcting
old-standing historical evils by amateurish means, ‘_lasciate ogni
speranza_.’ Old Brougham, the best of the ancients, the defender of the
luckless Queen Caroline, the friend of Robert Owen, the contemporary of
Canning and Byron, the last unwritten volume of Macaulay, built his villa
between Grasse and Cannes, and he did well to do so. Who, if not he,
should be put as a conciliatory signboard at the portal of the temporary
purgatory to avoid scaring away the living?
Here we are _en plein_ in the world of the tenors, now silent, that set
our bosoms quivering at eighteen—thirty years ago; of the feet which set
our hearts and the hearts of the whole parterre melting and thrilling,
feet now ending their career in down-trodden, home-knitted slippers, that
go flopping after the servant-girl from aimless jealousy or from very
justifiable niggardliness.
And all this, with a few intervals, goes on right up to the Adriatic, to
the shores of Lake Como, and even to some German watering-places. Here is
the Villa Taglioni, there is the Palazzo Rubini, there the Campagne Fanny
Elsner and others ... _du prétérit-défini et du plus-que-parfait_.
Beside the actors retired from the small stage of the theatre, the actors
of the greatest stages of the world, whose names have long ago been
cut out of the playbills and forgotten, live out their days in peace as
followers of Cincinnatus and philosophers against their will. Side by
side with artists who have once magnificently played the parts of kings
are met kings who have played their parts very poorly. Like the dead in
India who take their wives to the other world with them, these kings
have carried off two or three devoted ministers who zealously helped to
bring about their downfall and have themselves come to grief with them.
Among them are crowned heads who were hissed at their début and are still
expecting that the public will return to a juster sense of values and
call them on again. There are others whom the impresarios of the theatre
of history have not permitted even to make their début—the stillborn who
have a yesterday but no to-day; their biography ended on their appearance
in the world; the Aztecs of a long-abolished law of royal inheritance,
they remain the moving monuments of extinguished dynasties.
Then come the generals, famous for the victories they have lost; subtle
diplomats, who have wrecked their countries; gamblers who have wrecked
their fortunes; and grey-headed, wrinkled old women who in their day
wrecked the hearts of these diplomats and gamblers. Political fossils,
still taking their pinch of snuff, as once they took it at Pozzo di
Borgo’s,[52] Lord Aberdeen’s, and Princess Esterhazy’s, discuss with
extinct beauties of the days of Madame Récamier reminiscences of the
salon of Princess Lieven, the youth of Lablache, the débuts of Malibran,
and wonder that Patti dare sing after them ... and at the same time
gentlemen of the green cloth, hobbling and limping, half-crippled with
paralysis, half-drowned in dropsy, talk with other old ladies of other
salons and other celebrities, of reckless stakes, of Countess Kisselyov,
of roulette at Homburg and at Baden, of the late Suhozanet’s[53] play, of
the patriarchal days when the hereditary princes of the German Spas were
partners with the keepers of the gambling-halls and exchanged the risky
mediaeval plundering of travellers for the peaceful practice of the bank
and _rouge et noir_.
And all this world is still breathing, still moving; some lie crippled
in a bath-chair or a carriage under a fur rug, others lean on a servant
by way of a crutch, or sometimes on a crutch for lack of a servant.
The visitors’ lists are like old-fashioned directories or bits of torn
newspapers ‘of the days of Navarino and the Conquest of Algiers.’
Besides the smouldering stars of the three first magnitudes there are
other comets and luminaries with which thirty years ago idle and greedy
curiosity was very busy, thanks to the peculiar bloodthirsty lust which
prompts men to watch the trials that lead from the murdered victim to the
guillotine, and from heaps of gold to hard labour. Among them there are
all manner of criminals acquitted for lack of proof, poisoners, coiners,
as well as men who have completed their course of moral regeneration in
some central prison or penal colony, ‘_contumaces_’ and so on.
The shades least often met with in these warm purgatories are those of
survivors from the revolutionary storms and unsuccessful rebellions.
The gloomy and embittered Montagnards of the Jacobin heights prefer the
austere _bise_, or like stern Spartans hide in the fogs of London....