I
I set out to see Italy thoroughly on two occasions, and each time I was
stopped at the frontier and could not get any further. So I do not know
Italy, said my friend, Charles Jouvent. And yet my two attempts gave
me a charming idea of the manners of that beautiful country. Some time,
however, I must visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of
art with which it abounds. I will make another attempt to penetrate into
the interior, which I have not yet succeeded in doing.
You don't understand me, so I will explain: In the spring of 1874 I was
seized with an irresistible desire to see Venice, Florence, Rome and
Naples. I am, as you know, not a great traveller; it appears to me a
useless and fatiguing business. Nights spent in a train, the disturbed
slumbers of the railway carriage, with the attendant headache, and
stiffness in every limb, the sudden waking in that rolling box, the
unwashed feeling, with your eyes and hair full of dust, the smell of
the coal on which one's lungs feed, those bad dinners in the draughty
refreshment rooms are, according to my ideas, a horrible way of
beginning a pleasure trip.
After this introduction, we have the miseries of the hotel; of some
great hotel full of people, and yet so empty; the strange room and the
doubtful bed!
I am most particular about my bed; it is the sanctuary of life. We
entrust our almost naked and fatigued bodies to it so that they may be
reanimated by reposing between soft sheets and feathers.
There we find the most delightful hours of our existence, the hours of
love and of sleep. The bed is sacred, and should be respected,
venerated and loved by us as the best and most delightful of our earthly
possessions.
I cannot lift up the sheets of a hotel bed without a shudder of disgust.
Who has occupied it the night before? Perhaps dirty, revolting people
have slept in it. I begin, then, to think of all the horrible people
with whom one rubs shoulders every day, people with suspicious-looking
skin which makes one think of the feet and all the rest! I call to mind
those who carry about with them the sickening smell of garlic or of
humanity. I think of those who are deformed and unhealthy, of the
perspiration emanating from the sick, of everything that is ugly and
filthy in man.
And all this, perhaps, in the bed in which I am about to sleep! The mere
idea of it makes me feel ill as I get into it.
And then the hotel dinners--those dreary table d'hote dinners in the
midst of all sorts of extraordinary people, or else those terrible
solitary dinners at a small table in a restaurant, feebly lighted by a
wretched composite candle under a shade.
Again, those terribly dull evenings in some unknown town! Do you know
anything more wretched than the approach of dusk on such an occasion?
One goes about as if almost in a dream, looking at faces that one never
has seen before and never will see again; listening to people talking
about matters which are quite indifferent to you in a language that
perhaps you do not understand. You have a terrible feeling, almost as
if you were lost, and you continue to walk on so as not to be obliged
to return to the hotel, where you would feel more lost still because you
are at home, in a home which belongs to anyone who can pay for it; and
at last you sink into a chair of some well-lighted cafe, whose gilding
and lights oppress you a thousand times more than the shadows in the
streets. Then you feel so abominably lonely sitting in front of the
glass of flat bock beer that a kind of madness seizes you, the longing
to go somewhere or other, no matter where, as long as you need not
remain in front of that marble table amid those dazzling lights.
And then, suddenly, you are aware that you are really alone in the
world, always and everywhere, and that in places which we know, the
familiar jostlings give us the illusion only of human fraternity. At
such moments of self-abandonment and sombre isolation in distant cities
one thinks broadly, clearly and profoundly. Then one suddenly sees
the whole of life outside the vision of eternal hope, apart from the
deceptions of our innate habits, and of our expectations of happiness,
which we indulge in dreams never to be realized.
It is only by going a long distance from home that we can fully
understand how short-lived and empty everything near at hand is; by
searching for the unknown, we perceive how commonplace and evanescent
everything is; only by wandering over the face of the earth can we
understand how small the world is, and how very much alike it is
everywhere.
How well I know, and how I hate and almost fear, those haphazard walks
through unknown streets; and this was the reason why, as nothing would
induce me to undertake a tour in Italy by myself, I made up my mind to
accompany my friend Paul Pavilly.
You know Paul, and how he idealizes women. To him the earth is habitable
only because they are there; the sun gives light and is warm because it
shines upon them; the air is soft and balmy because it blows upon
their skin and ruffles the soft hair on their temples; and the moon is
charming because it makes them dream and imparts a languorous charm to
love. Every act and action of Paul's has woman for its motive; all his
thoughts, all his efforts and hopes are centered in them.
When I mentioned Italy to Paul he at first absolutely refused to leave
Paris. I, however, began to tell him of the adventures I had on my
travels. I assured him that all Italian women are charming, and I made
him hope for the most refined pleasures at Naples, thanks to certain
letters of introduction which I had; and so at last he allowed himself
to be persuaded.