Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor
Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint
old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade
over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity
for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by
night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers,
and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast
Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in
those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and
many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me
half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour
by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great
sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having
visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do,--for having
been bored and hungry there,--for having had toothache there, upon one
occasion,--for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi's
than in the whole history of Padua,--for having slept repeatedly in
the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia,--for
having been more taken by the _salti mortali_[_Salti mortali_ are
those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian
waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the
product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a
Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has
been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over
the wall of Doctor Rappaccini's garden, how different my impressions
of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual
knowledge. "Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been
there?" asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey
thither.
Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with
a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can
dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the
city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that
flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times
I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had
known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the
swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged
upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather
and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the
ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the
moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters,
but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions
were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies
were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from
museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very
vivid for all that.
I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to
divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay
waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the
Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the
city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and,
uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it
was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the
heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the
parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is
so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more
now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I
saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great
Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of
their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.
I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring
day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses,
through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom,
and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and
I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I
should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with
the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine
itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great
field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy
loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables,
brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing
fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They
sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze,
and wake up with a drowsy "_Comandala_?" as you linger to look
at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales,--the emblem of
Injustice,--and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you
like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them
so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless
these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole
history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman
city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and
one might read of the terror of Attila's sack, a little later, with
the peasant-maid's personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper
who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red
cheeks,--for in that time she was a blooming girl,--and paid nothing
for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the
wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican
times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it
not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these
ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the
Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!
The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the
palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the
same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it,
I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace--the vastest
hall in the world--dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing
in it except at one end Donatello's colossal marble-headed wooden
horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced
Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.
Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the
University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of
the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries
ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to
commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools
from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a
professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her
looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times.
At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at
Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from
the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed
them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the
students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid
oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain
its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred
students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could
not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which
these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good
deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are
driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the
blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used
once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of
horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to
be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen,
posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither
about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a
little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each
other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua
over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll
through the great Botanical Garden,--the oldest botanical garden in
the world,--the garden which first received in Europe the strange
and splendid growths of our hemisphere,--the garden where Doctor
Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?
On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to
Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage
of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed
so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified
to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.
The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent
most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the
churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and
they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance
to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves.
Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine
of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St.
Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other
Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards
that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.
It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which
drew us first to St. Anthony's, and we saw them with the satisfaction
naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since
1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many
centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto's fame was destined
to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to
be compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the
Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and
delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with
roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets
you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor
seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as
a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and
you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener
leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk
of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and
yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open
door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw
lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden
trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred
years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.
But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have
a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you
presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.
We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in
the vicinity of Pedrocchi's, because he had such an honest look, and
was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.
"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
brougham an hour?"
So and so.
"Show me the tariff of fares."
"There is no tariff."
"There is. Show it to me."
"It is lost, signor."
"I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out."
The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just
what the boatman of the ballad received in gift,--thrice his fee.
The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in
Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he
had received his due, and a handsome _mancia_ besides, he was still
unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been
under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very
cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask
for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.
From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa
Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as
this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss
that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan
down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.
Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to
exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder
at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the
sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent
experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea
of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.
As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina
was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about
ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five
years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering
prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to
whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining,
to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan
said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with
knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the
ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring,--a
curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow
prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the
sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of
candle-drippings,--a monument to the fact that faith still largely
exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard
to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw
in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that
he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones
of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the
well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork
there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the
bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence,
particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins
offered for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I threw down some
_soldi_, and thus enthralled the sacristan.
If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him
to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman
near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great
bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in
all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to
the villa of the Signor P----.
It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the
reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more
particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early
half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and
Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess
himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for
that time,--fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy,
and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed
innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin
whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the
Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly
severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for
the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently
against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single
member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and
helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands.
Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole
country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties,--men and women
deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long
been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against
him, and his lieutenant and nephew--more demoniacal, if possible,
than himself--was driven out of Padua while he was operating against
Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against
the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never
failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious
army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him;
and one furious peasant, whose brother's feet had been cut off by
Ecelino's command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head
with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds
alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of
suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing
off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.