LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.
The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of
arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has
always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private
and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections
have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that
Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom
incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony.
Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at
auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably
placed in life, the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take
them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation.
The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts
still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction.
At a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went with their
daughters to a great annual matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello
Olivolo, and the youth of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives
from the number of the maidens. These were all dressed in white, with
hair loose about the neck, and each bore her dower in a little box,
slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was
commonly a previous understanding between each damsel and some youth in
the crowd: as soon as all had paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon
and his benediction, and the young men gathered up their brides and
boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of these occasions, in the
year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with
their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle Marie, already
described, and to Rogers’s poem, which every body pretends to have read.
This going to San Pietro’s, selecting a wife and marrying her on
the spot, out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a
straightforward, practical race. Among the common people betrothals were
managed with even greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in
history; and in the record of a certain trial which took place in 1443
there is an account of one of these brief and unceremonious courtships.
Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a
worthless, idle gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero di
Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, “Madonna, find me some
nice girl.” To which Donna Catarussa replied, “Ugly fool! do you take me
for a go-between?” “No,” said Piero, “not that; I mean a girl to be my
wife.” And as Donna Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she
said, “In faith of God, I know one for you. Come again to-morrow.” So
they both met next day, and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being
asked, “Wouldst thou like to have Piero for thy husband, as God commands
and holy Church?” she answered, “Yes.” And Peter being asked the like
question, answered, “Why, yes, certainly.” And they went off and had
the wedding feast. A number of these betrothals takes place in the last
scene of Goldoni’s “Baruffe Chiozzotte,” where the belligerent women and
their lovers take hands in the public streets, and saluting each
other as man and wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as
possible:--
“_Checa_ (to Tofolo). Take my hand.
“_Tofolo_. Wife!
“_Checa_. Husband!
“_Tofolo_. Hurra!”
The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much
pomp and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the
people, and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations
of the parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded
before the betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person,
when the amount of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having
verbally agreed with the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day
to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the match was published,
and where he shook hands with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed
for signing the contract the bride’s father invited to his house the
bridegroom and all his friends, and hither came the high officers of
state to compliment the future husband. He, with the father of his
betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, and conducted them
to the grand saloon, which no woman was allowed (_si figuri!_) at this
time to enter. When the company was seated, the bride, clad in white,
was led from her rooms and presented. She wore a crown of pearls and
brilliants on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads of
gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may see it in Carpaccio’s
pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of
three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat were bare but for a collar
of lace and gems, from which slid a fine jeweled chain into her bosom.
Over her breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which were
attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to the hand. The formal words
of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to
the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle inclination to each
of the guests; and then returned to her chamber, from which she issued
again on the arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the ceremony.
After all this, she descended to the courtyard, where she was received
by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was
covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, followed by a
fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents in which
there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive
publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity
of the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the
betrothed, preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends,
went at dawn to be married in the church,--the bridegroom wearing a
toga, and the bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with
jewels in her hair, and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of
congratulation followed, and on the same day a public feast was given
in honor of the wedding, to which at least three hundred persons were
always invited, and at which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes
were carefully regulated by the Republic’s laws. On this occasion, one
or more persons were chosen as governors of the feast, and after the
tables were removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and recounted
with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the ancestors of the bride and
groom. The next morning _ristorativi_ of sweetmeats and confectionery
were presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents were returned
in kind.
A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most
splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy
Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He
espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich
and magnificent as Jacopo’s own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of
January 1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts,
the bridegroom, the bride’s brother and eighteen other patrician youths,
assembled in the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct
Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in
crimson velvet and silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers
superbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended them; musicians went
before; a troop of soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to
the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed
the Piazza, and threading the devious little streets to the Campo San
Samuele, there crossed the Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San
Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival at this
place the bride, supported by two Procuratori di San Marco, and attended
by sixty ladies, descended to the church and heard mass, after which
an oration was delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the Doge, the
ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and people, in praise of the
spouses and their families. The bride then returned to her father’s
house, and jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria Formosa and
San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the Piazza San Marco. The
Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies
proceeded to the bride’s palace in the Bucintoro, where one hundred
other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who, seated between
Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic’s armies) and
the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of the people
and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge received her
at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led her to
the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies,
welcomed her. A state supper ended this day’s rejoicings, and on the
following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of
cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the
prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were
processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and
last day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and
Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in
the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament,
and with this the festivities came to an end.
I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a
Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the
church of San Giorgio Maggiore: “After a crowd of nobles,” he says, “in
their usual black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas
appearing, exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a
sable hue, in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in
this place, to prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would
incur; nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome
liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two
ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged
themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar.
At length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led
by the bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she
received the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who
walked at her right hand to the altar, where they and all the company
kneeled. I was often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon
the ground before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation,
while she made her low courtesies from side to side: however, the
ceremony was no sooner performed than she seemed to recover her spirits,
and looked matrimony in the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in
all appearance she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and
aspect were not at all formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the
gondola with great activity and resolution, and the procession ended as
it began. Though there was something attractive in this aquatic parade,
the black hue of the boats and the company presented to a stranger,
like me, the idea of a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation
was raised too high by the previous description of the Italians, who are
much given to hyperbole, who gave me to understand that this procession
would far exceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect upon this
rhodomontade,” disdainfully adds Mr. Drummond, “I cannot help comparing,
in my memory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage with a very
august occurrence of which I was eyewitness in Sweden,” and which being
the reception of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure
the reader will not ask me to quote. With change of government, changes
of civilization following the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among
the Venetian nobles, almost all their splendid customs have passed away,
and the habit of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery
is perhaps the only relic which has descended from the picturesque past
to the present time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles,
but by all commoners according to their means, and are sometimes a
source of very profuse outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in
the elegant and costly paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and
the sum of a thousand florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy
round a moderately large circle of friends.
With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still
greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to
the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that
they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the
poorest, who cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each
other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge
would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the _capa y
espada_ comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with
all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen
interviews.
Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in
their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the
Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at
the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the
military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they
have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent
swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk
indescribably small and commonplace.
They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors
of love.
_Todaro_ (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here!
Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!
_Marco_. But where?
_Todaro_. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.
Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that
beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached
papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically
conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at
a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs
the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.
This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he
knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance
is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to
be debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of
sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now
find out the caffè which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and
to which Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her
loveliness, never making his regard known by any word, till some night,
when he has followed her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in
the street under her balcony,--and looks sufficiently sheepish as
people detect him on their late return from the theatre. [Footnote:
The love-making scenes in Goldoni’s comedy of _Il Bugiarda_ are
photographically faithful to present usage in Venice.] Or, if the
friends do not take this course in their courtship (for they are both
engaged in the wooing), they decide that Todaro, after walking back
and forth a sufficient number of times in the street where the Biondina
lives, shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be disposed to
correspond his love. This billet must always be conveyed to her by her
serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every
juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of
progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her
friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its
intricacy.
It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in
church, whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that
there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan
the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must
be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his
devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and
that to see him everywhere at her heels--to behold him leaning against
the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his
mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation--to
be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or,
turning round at the caffè encounter his pleading gaze--that all
this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and
finger-nails. _Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!_ This is the sole
course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed
acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this
blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last
laboriously ascertained.
Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and
proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is
as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her
father, and after that to make her acquaintance.
One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to
me with a joyous air and said:
“I am in lofe.”
The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person,
I listened with tempered effusion.
“It is a blonde again?”
“Yes, you have right; blonde again.”
“And pretty?”
“Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her--_come si dice!--immensamente.”_ “And
where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?”
“I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every
night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet--only with the eyes.
The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not
much--no. But!”
Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime
prudence to know the lady’s fortune better than herself, before herself?
These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before
they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and
white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After
that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of
friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating
the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write _nobile_ after his
Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and
alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed
by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom’s
friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall
sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by
Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any
public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and
when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every
occurrence--a boy’s success at school, an advocate’s triumphal passage
of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest’s first mass, a nun’s
novitiate, a birth, an amputation--is the subject of tuneful effusion,
and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring
campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around
the victim’s door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break
into _vivas_ that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into
silence. The naïve commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial
transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of
courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as
it stole out in different ways. “You know my friend Marco?” asked an
acquaintance one day. “Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He
doesn’t want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us
to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates
women, and is very hard to suit. _Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!”_
It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony
is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of
the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the
spouses attend five o’clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes
place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and
the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o’clock. Civil marriage
is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the
Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts
from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for
examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when
they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any
civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court
of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking
that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the
Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard
as a President elect in our times at home.
There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility
in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a
profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed,
she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with
sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.
The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and
sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the
relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical
law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony
between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another’s
child. Consequently the _compare_ was usually a client of the noble
parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose
father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane,
in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the
baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of
the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents’ house was
introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather’s part, of giving a
present,--usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most
baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers
of tight little glass cases I have noticed,--half bed and half
coffin,--containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in
mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious
old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ
from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all
religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or
solemnity of any kind.
For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the
_Scuole del Sacramento,_ instituted for that purpose. To one of
these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the
association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the
ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish
in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken
by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty
facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and
bearing the society’s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted
tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the
bier,--with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to
indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended,
and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry
it in the procession.
Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when,
according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having
seen his body deposited in the church, “fell to weeping and howling,
tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that
church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.” Decenter
customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in
the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day
following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the
court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and
expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.
Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The
corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where
the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is
placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly
interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral
at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church
on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth
century it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They
built a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and
gave much erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory
XVI. carried his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The
present church is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so,
and has some indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around
which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and
tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for
the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in
the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps
sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide.
The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of
Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last service for
the dead.
On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects
of interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral
procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The
procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four
pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at
the waist. They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly
countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely
habited in an under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of
red velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all
wore smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon
a bier, and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the
compliments of the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff,
lifted the bier on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the
two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the
Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party
as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent
spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively
little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo
about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly. After which, he
threw off his surplice with the air of one who should say his day’s work
was done, and preceded the coffin into the church.
We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the
nave, when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded
cloaks of coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing
in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his
right hand and a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot
of holy water instead of the book.
They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes,
and graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently
overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand
beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed
of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have
learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive
grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.
A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk
hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while
“His breath to heaven like vapor goes”
on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses,
giving and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the
direction of the coffin. They both bow their heads--shaven down to the
temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still,
the priest has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay
hold of the bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into
procession behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away.
The soul is prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.
The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They
laugh, they call “Ciò!” [Footnote: Literally, _That_ in Italian, and
meaning in Venetian, _You! Heigh!_ To talk in _Ciò ciappa_ is to assume
insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person
addressed. A Venetian says _Ciò_ a thousand times in a day, and hails
every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian
pronoun, but rather a contraction of _Veccio_ (vecchio), _Old fellow!_
It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking
to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother _Ciò_. It
is a salutation between friends, who cry out, _Ciò!_ as they pass in the
street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together
with _“Ah Ciò!”_ Then they kiss on the right cheek _“Ciò!”_ on the left,
_“Ciò!”_ on the lips, _“Ciò! Bon di Ciò!”_] continually, and banter each
other as they trot to the grave.
The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and
trying if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.
We two strangers follow the boys.
But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open
trench, on the left is an open trench.
“Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?” They
discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.
From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave
digger, with his shovel on his shoulder--slouching toward us.
“Ah heigh! Ciò, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?”
“Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right.”
They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin’s gay
upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to
that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger’s arms, where
he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it
slide swiftly to the ground--thump! _Ecco fatto!_
The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it
to the riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of
children,--“Oh, what a beautiful dead!”
The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for
_sciampagnin_, and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.
We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator--
Venetian, this. “Who is the dead man, signore?”
“It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in
there with her.”
It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as
we go back to the city.
For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is
a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their
shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo façade of
the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with
despondency and foreboding.