I HAD been travelling, for some days; resting very little in the night,
and never in the day. The rapid and unbroken succession of novelties
that had passed before me, came back like half-formed dreams; and a crowd
of objects wandered in the greatest confusion through my mind, as I
travelled on, by a solitary road. At intervals, some one among them
would stop, as it were, in its restless flitting to and fro, and enable
me to look at it, quite steadily, and behold it in full distinctness.
After a few moments, it would dissolve, like a view in a magic-lantern;
and while I saw some part of it quite plainly, and some faintly, and some
not at all, would show me another of the many places I had lately seen,
lingering behind it, and coming through it. This was no sooner visible
than, in its turn, it melted into something else.
At one moment, I was standing again, before the brown old rugged churches
of Modena. As I recognised the curious pillars with grim monsters for
their bases, I seemed to see them, standing by themselves in the quiet
square at Padua, where there were the staid old University, and the
figures, demurely gowned, grouped here and there in the open space about
it. Then, I was strolling in the outskirts of that pleasant city,
admiring the unusual neatness of the dwelling-houses, gardens, and
orchards, as I had seen them a few hours before. In their stead arose,
immediately, the two towers of Bologna; and the most obstinate of all
these objects, failed to hold its ground, a minute, before the monstrous
moated castle of Ferrara, which, like an illustration to a wild romance,
came back again in the red sunrise, lording it over the solitary,
grass-grown, withered town. In short, I had that incoherent but
delightful jumble in my brain, which travellers are apt to have, and are
indolently willing to encourage. Every shake of the coach in which I
sat, half dozing in the dark, appeared to jerk some new recollection out
of its place, and to jerk some other new recollection into it; and in
this state I fell asleep.
I was awakened after some time (as I thought) by the stopping of the
coach. It was now quite night, and we were at the waterside. There lay
here, a black boat, with a little house or cabin in it of the same
mournful colour. When I had taken my seat in this, the boat was paddled,
by two men, towards a great light, lying in the distance on the sea.
Ever and again, there was a dismal sigh of wind. It ruffled the water,
and rocked the boat, and sent the dark clouds flying before the stars. I
could not but think how strange it was, to be floating away at that hour:
leaving the land behind, and going on, towards this light upon the sea.
It soon began to burn brighter; and from being one light became a cluster
of tapers, twinkling and shining out of the water, as the boat approached
towards them by a dreamy kind of track, marked out upon the sea by posts
and piles.
We had floated on, five miles or so, over the dark water, when I heard it
rippling in my dream, against some obstruction near at hand. Looking out
attentively, I saw, through the gloom, a something black and massive—like
a shore, but lying close and flat upon the water, like a raft—which we
were gliding past. The chief of the two rowers said it was a
burial-place.
Full of the interest and wonder which a cemetery lying out there, in the
lonely sea, inspired, I turned to gaze upon it as it should recede in our
path, when it was quickly shut out from my view. Before I knew by what,
or how, I found that we were gliding up a street—a phantom street; the
houses rising on both sides, from the water, and the black boat gliding
on beneath their windows. Lights were shining from some of these
casements, plumbing the depth of the black stream with their reflected
rays, but all was profoundly silent.
So we advanced into this ghostly city, continuing to hold our course
through narrow streets and lanes, all filled and flowing with water.
Some of the corners where our way branched off, were so acute and narrow,
that it seemed impossible for the long slender boat to turn them; but the
rowers, with a low melodious cry of warning, sent it skimming on without
a pause. Sometimes, the rowers of another black boat like our own,
echoed the cry, and slackening their speed (as I thought we did ours)
would come flitting past us like a dark shadow. Other boats, of the same
sombre hue, were lying moored, I thought, to painted pillars, near to
dark mysterious doors that opened straight upon the water. Some of these
were empty; in some, the rowers lay asleep; towards one, I saw some
figures coming down a gloomy archway from the interior of a palace: gaily
dressed, and attended by torch-bearers. It was but a glimpse I had of
them; for a bridge, so low and close upon the boat that it seemed ready
to fall down and crush us: one of the many bridges that perplexed the
Dream: blotted them out, instantly. On we went, floating towards the
heart of this strange place—with water all about us where never water was
elsewhere—clusters of houses, churches, heaps of stately buildings
growing out of it—and, everywhere, the same extraordinary silence.
Presently, we shot across a broad and open stream; and passing, as I
thought, before a spacious paved quay, where the bright lamps with which
it was illuminated showed long rows of arches and pillars, of ponderous
construction and great strength, but as light to the eye as garlands of
hoarfrost or gossamer—and where, for the first time, I saw people
walking—arrived at a flight of steps leading from the water to a large
mansion, where, having passed through corridors and galleries
innumerable, I lay down to rest; listening to the black boats stealing up
and down below the window on the rippling water, till I fell asleep.
The glory of the day that broke upon me in this Dream; its freshness,
motion, buoyancy; its sparkles of the sun in water; its clear blue sky
and rustling air; no waking words can tell. But, from my window, I
looked down on boats and barks; on masts, sails, cordage, flags; on
groups of busy sailors, working at the cargoes of these vessels; on wide
quays, strewn with bales, casks, merchandise of many kinds; on great
ships, lying near at hand in stately indolence; on islands, crowned with
gorgeous domes and turrets: and where golden crosses glittered in the
light, atop of wondrous churches, springing from the sea! Going down
upon the margin of the green sea, rolling on before the door, and filling
all the streets, I came upon a place of such surpassing beauty, and such
grandeur, that all the rest was poor and faded, in comparison with its
absorbing loveliness.
It was a great Piazza, as I thought; anchored, like all the rest, in the
deep ocean. On its broad bosom, was a Palace, more majestic and
magnificent in its old age, than all the buildings of the earth, in the
high prime and fulness of their youth. Cloisters and galleries: so
light, they might have been the work of fairy hands: so strong that
centuries had battered them in vain: wound round and round this palace,
and enfolded it with a Cathedral, gorgeous in the wild luxuriant fancies
of the East. At no great distance from its porch, a lofty tower,
standing by itself, and rearing its proud head, alone, into the sky,
looked out upon the Adriatic Sea. Near to the margin of the stream, were
two ill-omened pillars of red granite; one having on its top, a figure
with a sword and shield; the other, a winged lion. Not far from these
again, a second tower: richest of the rich in all its decorations: even
here, where all was rich: sustained aloft, a great orb, gleaming with
gold and deepest blue: the Twelve Signs painted on it, and a mimic sun
revolving in its course around them: while above, two bronze giants
hammered out the hours upon a sounding bell. An oblong square of lofty
houses of the whitest stone, surrounded by a light and beautiful arcade,
formed part of this enchanted scene; and, here and there, gay masts for
flags rose, tapering, from the pavement of the unsubstantial ground.
I thought I entered the Cathedral, and went in and out among its many
arches: traversing its whole extent. A grand and dreamy structure, of
immense proportions; golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim
with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and
metals, glittering through iron bars; holy with the bodies of deceased
saints; rainbow-hued with windows of stained glass; dark with carved
woods and coloured marbles; obscure in its vast heights, and lengthened
distances; shining with silver lamps and winking lights; unreal,
fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout. I thought I entered the old
palace; pacing silent galleries and council-chambers, where the old
rulers of this mistress of the waters looked sternly out, in pictures,
from the walls, and where her high-prowed galleys, still victorious on
canvas, fought and conquered as of old. I thought I wandered through its
halls of state and triumph—bare and empty now!—and musing on its pride
and might, extinct: for that was past; all past: heard a voice say, ‘Some
tokens of its ancient rule and some consoling reasons for its downfall,
may be traced here, yet!’
I dreamed that I was led on, then, into some jealous rooms, communicating
with a prison near the palace; separated from it by a lofty bridge
crossing a narrow street; and called, I dreamed, The Bridge of Sighs.
But first I passed two jagged slits in a stone wall; the lions’
mouths—now toothless—where, in the distempered horror of my sleep, I
thought denunciations of innocent men to the old wicked Council, had been
dropped through, many a time, when the night was dark. So, when I saw
the council-room to which such prisoners were taken for examination, and
the door by which they passed out, when they were condemned—a door that
never closed upon a man with life and hope before him—my heart appeared
to die within me.
It was smitten harder though, when, torch in hand, 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 loop-hole in its
massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was placed—I
dreamed—to light the prisoner 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 a 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.
Around this dungeon stronghold, and above some part of it: licking the
rough walls without, and smearing them with damp and slime within:
stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as if the very
stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a smooth road for the
removal of the bodies of the secret victims of the State—a road so ready
that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel
officer—flowed the same water that filled this Dream of mine, and made it
seem one, even at the time.
Descending from the palace by a staircase, called, I thought, the
Giant’s—I had some imaginary recollection of an old man abdicating,
coming, more slowly and more feebly, down it, when he heard the bell,
proclaiming his successor—I glided off, in one of the dark boats, until
we came to an old arsenal guarded by four marble lions. To make my Dream
more monstrous and unlikely, one of these had words and sentences upon
its body, inscribed there, at an unknown time, and in an unknown
language; so that their purport was a mystery to all men.
There was little sound of hammers in this place for building ships, and
little work in progress; for the greatness of the city was no more, as I
have said. Indeed, it seemed a very wreck found drifting on the sea; a
strange flag hoisted in its honourable stations, and strangers standing
at its helm. A splendid barge in which its ancient chief had gone forth,
pompously, at certain periods, to wed the ocean, lay here, I thought, no
more; but, in its place, there was a tiny model, made from recollection
like the city’s greatness; and it told of what had been (so are the
strong and weak confounded in the dust) almost as eloquently as the
massive pillars, arches, roofs, reared to overshadow stately ships that
had no other shadow now, upon the water or the earth.
An armoury was there yet. Plundered and despoiled; but an armoury. With
a fierce standard taken from the Turks, drooping in the dull air of its
cage. Rich suits of mail worn by great warriors were hoarded there;
crossbows and bolts; quivers full of arrows; spears; swords, daggers,
maces, shields, and heavy-headed axes. Plates of wrought steel and iron,
to make the gallant horse a monster cased in metal scales; and one
spring-weapon (easy to be carried in the breast) designed to do its
office noiselessly, and made for shooting men with poisoned darts.
One press or case I saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly
contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men’s bones, and tear
and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were
two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth
upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small
knob or anvil, where the directing devil could repose his elbow at his
ease, and listen, near the walled-up ear, to the lamentations and
confessions of the wretch within. There was that grim resemblance in
them to the human shape—they were such moulds of sweating faces, pained
and cramped—that it was difficult to think them empty; and terrible
distortions lingering within them, seemed to follow me, when, taking to
my boat again, I rowed off to a kind of garden or public walk in the sea,
where there were grass and trees. But I forgot them when I stood upon
its farthest brink—I stood there, in my dream—and looked, along the
ripple, to the setting sun; before me, in the sky and on the deep, a
crimson flush; and behind me the whole city resolving into streaks of red
and purple, on the water.
In the luxurious wonder of so rare a dream, I took but little heed of
time, and had but little understanding of its flight. But there were
days and nights in it; and when the sun was high, and when the rays of
lamps were crooked in the running water, I was still afloat, I thought:
plashing the slippery walls and houses with the cleavings of the tide, as
my black boat, borne upon it, skimmed along the streets.
Sometimes, alighting at the doors of churches and vast palaces, I
wandered on, from room to room, from aisle to aisle, through labyrinths
of rich altars, ancient monuments; decayed apartments where the
furniture, half awful, half grotesque, was mouldering away. Pictures
were there, replete with such enduring beauty and expression: with such
passion, truth and power: that they seemed so many young and fresh
realities among a host of spectres. I thought these, often intermingled
with the old days of the city: with its beauties, tyrants, captains,
patriots, merchants, counters, priests: nay, with its very stones, and
bricks, and public places; all of which lived again, about me, on the
walls. Then, coming down some marble staircase where the water lapped
and oozed against the lower steps, I passed into my boat again, and went
on in my dream.
Floating down narrow lanes, where carpenters, at work with plane and
chisel in their shops, tossed the light shaving straight upon the water,
where it lay like weed, or ebbed away before me in a tangled heap. Past
open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, through
which some scanty patch of vine shone green and bright, making unusual
shadows on the pavement with its trembling leaves. Past quays and
terraces, where women, gracefully veiled, were passing and repassing, and
where idlers were reclining in the sunshine, on flag-stones and on
flights of steps. Past bridges, where there were idlers too; loitering
and looking over. Below stone balconies, erected at a giddy height,
before the loftiest windows of the loftiest houses. Past plots of
garden, theatres, shrines, prodigious piles of
architecture—Gothic—Saracenic—fanciful with all the fancies of all times
and countries. Past buildings that were high, and low, and black, and
white, and straight, and crooked; mean and grand, crazy and strong.
Twining among a tangled lot of boats and barges, and shooting out at last
into a Grand Canal! There, in the errant fancy of my dream, I saw old
Shylock passing to and fro upon a bridge, all built upon with shops and
humming with the tongues of men; a form I seemed to know for Desdemona’s,
leaned down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower. And, in the
dream, I thought that Shakespeare’s spirit was abroad upon the water
somewhere: stealing through the city.
At night, when two votive lamps burnt before an image of the Virgin, in a
gallery outside the great cathedral, near the roof, I fancied that the
great piazza of the Winged Lion was a blaze of cheerful light, and that
its whole arcade was thronged with people; while crowds were diverting
themselves in splendid coffee-houses opening from it—which were never
shut, I thought, but open all night long. When the bronze giants struck
the hour of midnight on the bell, I thought the life and animation of the
city were all centred here; and as I rowed away, abreast the silent
quays, I only saw them dotted, here and there, with sleeping boatmen
wrapped up in their cloaks, and lying at full length upon the stones.
But close about the quays and churches, palaces and prisons sucking at
their walls, and welling up into the secret places of the town: crept the
water always. Noiseless and watchful: coiled round and round it, in its
many folds, like an old serpent: waiting for the time, I thought, when
people should look down into its depths for any stone of the old city
that had claimed to be its mistress.
Thus it floated me away, until I awoke in the old market-place at Verona.
I have, many and many a time, thought since, of this strange Dream upon
the water: half-wondering if it lie there yet, and if its name be VENICE.
BY VERONA, MANTUA, AND MILAN, ACROSS THE PASS OF THE SIMPLON INTO
SWITZERLAND
I HAD been half afraid to go to Verona, lest it should at all put me out
of conceit with Romeo and Juliet. But, I was no sooner come into the old
market-place, than the misgiving vanished. It is so fanciful, quaint,
and picturesque a place, formed by such an extraordinary and rich variety
of fantastic buildings, that there could be nothing better at the core of
even this romantic town: scene of one of the most romantic and beautiful
of stories.
It was natural enough, to go straight from the Market-place, to the House
of the Capulets, now degenerated into a most miserable little inn. Noisy
vetturíni and muddy market-carts were disputing possession of the yard,
which was ankle-deep in dirt, with a brood of splashed and bespattered
geese; and there was a grim-visaged dog, viciously panting in a doorway,
who would certainly have had Romeo by the leg, the moment he put it over
the wall, if he had existed and been at large in those times. The
orchard fell into other hands, and was parted off many years ago; but
there used to be one attached to the house—or at all events there may
have, been,—and the hat (Cappêllo) the ancient cognizance of the family,
may still be seen, carved in stone, over the gateway of the yard. The
geese, the market-carts, their drivers, and the dog, were somewhat in the
way of the story, it must be confessed; and it would have been pleasanter
to have found the house empty, and to have been able to walk through the
disused rooms. But the hat was unspeakably comfortable; and the place
where the garden used to be, hardly less so. Besides, the house is a
distrustful, jealous-looking house as one would desire to see, though of
a very moderate size. So I was quite satisfied with it, as the veritable
mansion of old Capulet, and was correspondingly grateful in my
acknowledgments to an extremely unsentimental middle-aged lady, the
Padrona of the Hotel, who was lounging on the threshold looking at the
geese; and who at least resembled the Capulets in the one particular of
being very great indeed in the ‘Family’ way.
From Juliet’s home, to Juliet’s tomb, is a transition as natural to the
visitor, as to fair Juliet herself, or to the proudest Juliet that ever
has taught the torches to burn bright in any time. So, I went off, with
a guide, to an old, old garden, once belonging to an old, old convent, I
suppose; and being admitted, at a shattered gate, by a bright-eyed woman
who was washing clothes, went down some walks where fresh plants and
young flowers were prettily growing among fragments of old wall, and
ivy-coloured mounds; and was shown a little tank, or water-trough, which
the bright-eyed woman—drying her arms upon her ‘kerchief, called ‘La
tomba di Giulietta la sfortunáta.’ With the best disposition in the
world to believe, I could do no more than believe that the bright-eyed
woman believed; so I gave her that much credit, and her customary fee in
ready money. It was a pleasure, rather than a disappointment, that
Juliet’s resting-place was forgotten. However consolatory it may have
been to Yorick’s Ghost, to hear the feet upon the pavement overhead, and,
twenty times a day, the repetition of his name, it is better for Juliet
to lie out of the track of tourists, and to have no visitors but such as
come to graves in spring-rain, and sweet air, and sunshine.
Pleasant Verona! With its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in
the distance, seen from terrace walks, and stately, balustraded
galleries. With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and
casting, on the sunlight of to-day, the shade of fifteen hundred years
ago. With its marble-fitted churches, lofty towers, rich architecture,
and quaint old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and
Capulets once resounded,
And made Verona’s ancient citizens
Cast by their grave, beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partizans.
With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving
cypresses, and prospect so delightful, and so cheerful! Pleasant Verona!
In the midst of it, in the Piazza di Brá—a spirit of old time among the
familiar realities of the passing hour—is the great Roman Amphitheatre.
So well preserved, and carefully maintained, that every row of seats is
there, unbroken. Over certain of the arches, the old Roman numerals may
yet be seen; and there are corridors, and staircases, and subterranean
passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground and below, as when
the fierce thousands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of
the arena. Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the
walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one
kind or other; and there are green weeds, and leaves, and grass, upon the
parapet. But little else is greatly changed.
When I had traversed all about it, with great interest, and had gone up
to the topmost round of seats, and turning from the lovely panorama
closed in by the distant Alps, looked down into the building, it seemed
to lie before me like the inside of a prodigious hat of plaited straw,
with an enormously broad brim and a shallow crown; the plaits being
represented by the four-and-forty rows of seats. The comparison is a
homely and fantastic one, in sober remembrance and on paper, but it was
irresistibly suggested at the moment, nevertheless.
An equestrian troop had been there, a short time before—the same troop, I
dare say, that appeared to the old lady in the church at Modena—and had
scooped out a little ring at one end of the area; where their
performances had taken place, and where the marks of their horses’ feet
were still fresh. I could not but picture to myself, a handful of
spectators gathered together on one or two of the old stone seats, and a
spangled Cavalier being gallant, or a Policinello funny, with the grim
walls looking on. Above all, I thought how strangely those Roman mutes
would gaze upon the favourite comic scene of the travelling English,
where a British nobleman (Lord John), with a very loose stomach: dressed
in a blue-tailed coat down to his heels, bright yellow breeches, and a
white hat: comes abroad, riding double on a rearing horse, with an
English lady (Lady Betsy) in a straw bonnet and green veil, and a red
spencer; and who always carries a gigantic reticule, and a put-up
parasol.
I walked through and through the town all the rest of the day, and could
have walked there until now, I think. In one place, there was a very
pretty modern theatre, where they had just performed the opera (always
popular in Verona) of Romeo and Juliet. In another there was a
collection, under a colonnade, of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan remains,
presided over by an ancient man who might have been an Etruscan relic
himself; for he was not strong enough to open the iron gate, when he had
unlocked it, and had neither voice enough to be audible when he described
the curiosities, nor sight enough to see them: he was so very old. In
another place, there was a gallery of pictures: so abominably bad, that
it was quite delightful to see them mouldering away. But anywhere: in
the churches, among the palaces, in the streets, on the bridge, or down
beside the river: it was always pleasant Verona, and in my remembrance
always will be.
I read Romeo and Juliet in my own room at the inn that night—of course,
no Englishman had ever read it there, before—and set out for Mantua next
day at sunrise, repeating to myself (in the _coupé_ of an omnibus, and
next to the conductor, who was reading the Mysteries of Paris),
There is no world without Verona’s walls
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence-banished is banished from the world,
And world’s exile is death—
which reminded me that Romeo was only banished five-and-twenty miles
after all, and rather disturbed my confidence in his energy and boldness.
Was the way to Mantua as beautiful, in his time, I wonder! Did it wind
through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing streams, and
dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees! Those purple mountains lay
on the horizon, then, for certain; and the dresses of these peasant
girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver pin like an English
‘life-preserver’ through their hair behind, can hardly be much changed.
The hopeful feeling of so bright a morning, and so exquisite a sunrise,
can have been no stranger, even to an exiled lover’s breast; and Mantua
itself must have broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and
walls, and water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial
omnibus. He made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two
rumbling drawbridges; passed through the like long, covered, wooden
bridge; and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of
stagnant Mantua.
If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place of
residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together in a
perfect fitness of things. It may have been more stirring then, perhaps.
If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his time, and knew what
Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-four. He fasted much, and
that assisted him in his foreknowledge.
I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room
arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest little
tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery surrounding a
court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man looked in, to inquire if
the gentleman would have a Cicerone to show the town. His face was so
very wistful and anxious, in the half-opened doorway, and there was so
much poverty expressed in his faded suit and little pinched hat, and in
the thread-bare worsted glove with which he held it—not expressed the
less, because these were evidently his genteel clothes, hastily slipped
on—that I would as soon have trodden on him as dismissed him. I engaged
him on the instant, and he stepped in directly.
While I finished the discussion in which I was engaged, he stood, beaming
by himself in a corner, making a feint of brushing my hat with his arm.
If his fee had been as many napoleons as it was francs, there could not
have shot over the twilight of his shabbiness such a gleam of sun, as
lighted up the whole man, now that he was hired.
‘Well!’ said I, when I was ready, ‘shall we go out now?’
‘If the gentleman pleases. It is a beautiful day. A little fresh, but
charming; altogether charming. The gentleman will allow me to open the
door. This is the Inn Yard. The court-yard of the Golden Lion! The
gentleman will please to mind his footing on the stairs.’
We were now in the street.
‘This is the street of the Golden Lion. This, the outside of the Golden
Lion. The interesting window up there, on the first Piano, where the
pane of glass is broken, is the window of the gentleman’s chamber!’
Having viewed all these remarkable objects, I inquired if there were much
to see in Mantua.
‘Well! Truly, no. Not much! So, so,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders
apologetically.
‘Many churches?’
‘No. Nearly all suppressed by the French.’
‘Monasteries or convents?’
‘No. The French again! Nearly all suppressed by Napoleon.’
‘Much business?’
‘Very little business.’
‘Many strangers?’
‘Ah Heaven!’