OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.
_(As it seems Seven Years after.)_
The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city
of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and
memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went,
as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the
encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The
experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary
remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of
rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong
hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.
The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times
of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race
was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most
romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the
twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain
seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself
of a half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the
Convent of San Nicolò; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and,
the permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the
reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who
still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of
the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace
which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the
unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if
in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each
into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicolò, and dying at last
to the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido’s sands.
Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of
the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic
fell at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had
the courage to meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the
conqueror. The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused,
when Napoleon ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the
command of the Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon
the Venetians; and when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain
to one of compliment, and promised that in the general disaster he
was preparing for Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the latter
generously replied that he had been a friend of the French only because
the Senate was so; as to the immunity offered, all was lost to him
in the loss of his country, and he should blush for his wealth if it
remained intact amidst the ruin of his countrymen.
The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some
four centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three
beautiful Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence
on one hand you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far
up towards the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The
architects were those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the
most beautiful work on the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal
inspiration upon these homes of the Giustiniani, building the delicate
Gothic arches of the windows, with their slender columns and their
graceful balconies, and crowning all with the airy battlements.
The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the
Foscari family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo
Foscari, who after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he
never did, at last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who
had consented to this cruel error of the state, and who after a life
spent in its service was deposed and disgraced before his death; and
whither when he lay dead, came remorseful Venice, and claimed for
sumptuous obsequies the dust which his widow yielded with bitter
reproaches. Here the family faded away generation by generation, till,
(according to the tale told us) early in this century, when the ultimate
male survivor of the line had died, under a false name, in London, where
he had been some sort of obscure actor, there were but two old maiden
sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility, were shown to strangers by
the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari; and here in our time was
quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose neatly pipe-clayed belts
decorated the balconies on which the princely ladies of the house had
rested their jewelled arms in other days.
The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two
other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they
were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo
Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first
patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope;
and it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good
man. In his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber,
where he meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he
expired, two monks in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical
harmony in the air: the clergy performed his obsequies not in black,
funereal robes, but in white garments, and crowned with laurel, and
bearing gilded torches, and although the patriarch had died of a
malignant fever, his body was miraculously preserved incorrupt during
the sixty-five days that the obsequies lasted. The other branch of the
family was called the Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of
their dress; but neither palace now shelters any of their magnificent
race. The edifice on our right was exclusively occupied by a noble
Viennese lady, who as we heard,--vaguely, in the right Venetian
fashion,--had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and who now in her
matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the Russian count, and had
gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on the Grand Canal, but
was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty, even as we saw her
from our balcony.
Our own palace--as we absurdly grew to call it--was owned and inhabited
in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the proprietorship being
about equally divided between our own landlord and a very well known
Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This artist was
a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and clock-like
regularity every evening in summer to a certain caffè, where he seemed
to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read the
“Journal des Débats.” In his coming and going we met him so often that
we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his
father’s pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the
palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that
though we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never
did so. But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which
this gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber
windows looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright
and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing
their names; and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming
when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a
breath from the mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with
a light and evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace
walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved
by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These
often walked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders
to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had
flown; and sometimes there came to them there, grave, black-gowned
priests,--for the painter’s was a devout family,--and talked with them
in tones almost as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the
ecclesiastics placidly took snuff,--it is a dogma of the Church for
priests to take snuff in Italy,--and thereafter, upon a prolonged search
for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the
garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am
afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their
priests must have been deplorably small.
Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories
above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but
he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects
I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It
is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the
property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by
the historian of a “Hundred Palaces of Venice,”--a work for which
I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the
author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals
of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole
floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and
sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic
windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below,--a green-mouldy
little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb
of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately _sala_ was
traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of
nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and
gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal,
and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic
windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining
coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the
floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one
of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall
were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have
already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but
still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very
meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another
court, with another cistern, from which the painter’s family drew water
with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth
story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a
noise little less alarming than thunder.
Altogether the most surprising object in the great _sala_ was a
sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its
presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful,
but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless
disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it
had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity
by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian
friends.
The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying,
that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in
our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and
life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping
out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of
upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure
that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation
in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the
principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted
the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy
panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood,
two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our
time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found
worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had
two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle
of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last
were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of
such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less
to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one
of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of
furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs
of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a
monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of Æsculapius; when this
was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of
Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of Æsculapiuses) which no
one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other
artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible
blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern
improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of
marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?
For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with
every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a
day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though
we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay
secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to
keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier
_ménage_ may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house,
for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of
coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters
of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from
a cook’s who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner
of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and
they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I
cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I
sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always
took that at the Caffè Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where
we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world
promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.
Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not
the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for
Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not
worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous
(as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors,
and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian
promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian’s, and
listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to
give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in
our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go
home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over
the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of
the palaces.
We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse
of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black
gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the
thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace
through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnabà, and the campo
before the ugly façade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to
the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the
Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the
stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights
when they returned from an evening’s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed
scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive,
and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation
of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than
its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live
abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact
sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in
furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may
be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if
they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations
there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original
proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought
of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is
everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.
And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in
Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the
patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day,
whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of
sea-bathing from one’s own threshold. From the beginning of June
till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the
amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for
a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures,
bronzed by the ardent sun, against the façades of empty palaces, where
they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge.
It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful
amusement. Fathers of families, like so many plump, domestic drakes,
lead forth their aquatic broods, teaching the little ones to swim by
the aid of various floats, and delighting in the gambols of the larger
ducklings. When the tide comes in fresh and strong from the sea the
water in the Grand Canal is pure and refreshing; and at these times
it is a singular pleasure to leap from one’s door-step into the swift
current, and spend a half-hour, very informally, among one’s neighbors
there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of
ordinary life; and when I used to stand upon our balcony, and see some
bearded head ducking me a polite salutation from a pair of broad,
brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able
to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of
clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast
expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned,
I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its
disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies,
when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front
of the Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the
day, and drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.
I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better
places to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa
Falier, which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch
of the Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here,
too, we had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the
Rialto, there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if
we saw more of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for
I think we had already exhausted this. There was a movement all night
long. If I woke at three or four o’clock, and offered myself the novel
spectacle of the Canal at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go
by to the Rialto, with now and then also a good-sized coasting schooner
making lazily for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for
cooking the morning’s meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our
own breakfast we began to watch for the gondolas of the tourists of
different nations, whom we came to distinguish at a glance. Then the
boats of the various artisans went by, the carpenter’s, the mason’s, the
plasterer’s, with those that sold fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and
fish, to any household that arrested them. From noon till three or four
o’clock the Canal was comparatively deserted; but before twilight it was
thronged again by people riding out in their open gondolas to take the
air after the day’s fervor. After nightfall they ceased, till only at
long intervals a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark surface, gave
token of the movement of some gondola bent upon an errand that could not
fail to seem mysterious or fail to be matter of fact. We never wearied
of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in any way; and when
the moon shone in through the lovely arched window and sketched its
exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy as moonshine could make
us.
Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say,
and I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For
all the entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we
felt the sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable
ways. Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole
year in Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression
of the spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the
place, but I think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old,
ghostly, aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting
our modern world,--serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and
unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh
for the renewal of our own vague life there,--a shadow within the
shadow; but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver
creeps over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who
have spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this
feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a
year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All
changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy;
the day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the
winter not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We
rarely sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about
the present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.
I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her;
but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that,
whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness,
and assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness.
History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence
than you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst
the monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in
secret and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which
I now distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this
sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable
places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange
tradition as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre
upon the present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace
nor analyze.
I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this
impression, but something I have no question. They were then under
Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in
it, there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may
best be described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but
it also made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics;
and as I have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one
declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one
side, and by a heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of
the Austrian troops and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt
dimly constrained by something, we could not say precisely what, and we
only knew what, when we went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and
threw off the irksome caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and
alien tyrants. This political misery circumscribed our acquaintance
very much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four
families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting
constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing
Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a
gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty
faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our
war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with
every other American.
Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with
the people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into
a profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but
his lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not
for literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For
this reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain _attaché_
of the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the
landlord. He was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble
families of Italy,--a family of popes and cardinals, of princes and
ministers, which in him was diminished and tarnished in an almost
inexplicable degree. He was not at all worldly-wise, but he was a man
of great learning, and of a capacity for acquiring knowledge that I have
never seen surpassed. He possessed, I think, not many shirts on earth;
but he spoke three or four languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets in
Italian and German. He was one of the friendliest and willingest souls
living, and as generous as utter destitution can make a man; yet he had
a proper spirit, and valued himself upon his name. Sometimes he brought
his great-grandfather to the palace; a brisk old gentleman in his
nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic and three other
revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a government pension
through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness upon a world
which he seemed likely never to leave.
The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of
housekeeper,--a handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and
liquid black eyes. She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was
going to bring himself up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was
saying mimic masses to an imaginary congregation. She was perfectly
statuesque and obliging, and we had no right, as lovers of the beautiful
or as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever her faults might have been.
As to the gondolier, who was a very important personage in our palatial
household, he was a handsome, bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a
good-natured blue eye and a neatly waxed mustache. He had been ten years
a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, from his own account and from
all I saw of him, one of the least courageous men in the world; but
then no part of the Austrian system tends to make men brave, and I
could easily imagine that before it had done with one it might give him
reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life. Piero had not very
much to do, and he spent the greater part of his leisure in a sort
of lazy flirtation with the women about the kitchen-fire, or in the
gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air. We always liked him;
I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except one that involved
danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to enter our rooms,
and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before the police, he
swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he returned privately
to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct by saying that
if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid that their
friends would jump on his back (_saltarmi adosso_), as he phrased it,
in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked have
long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his dry way,
and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was, when
he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he was
going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of
Austrian society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with
never-failing effect.
More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina,
who came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so
dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro
type; yet she bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she
ever came by it remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the
most pure and entire of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she
was married to a trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name
she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a
woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted.
She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city
did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna.
She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was
venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently
aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character
like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which
Bettina described as “A bit of the Lord, Signor,”--and it was, in fact,
a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up.
To Bettina’s mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races,
Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in some
sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of
Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national
complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw
at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her
ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she
seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain
which a friend of Piero’s had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind
and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the
baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady
ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and
adored. When Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate
dissipation, he took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to
the admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no
church festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and
when Bettina, and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood
assembled on a Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace
(where they dressed one another’s thick black hair in fine braids soaked
in milk, and built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby
was the cynosure of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more
distinguished when, late at night, the household gave itself a feast of
snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious
parents have found her seated in the middle of the table with the bowl
of snails before her, and armed with a great spoon, while her vassals
sat round, and grinned their fondness and delight in her small
tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly lit, with the mystical implements
of cookery glimmering from the wall, showed like some witch’s cavern,
where a particularly small sorceress was presiding over the concoction
of an evil potion or the weaving of a powerful spell.
From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less
interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady,
who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and
for whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed
day and night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady
escaped by a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt
satisfied alike the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and
the political agitator’s love of a mysterious disappearance. It
was understood dimly that she was an author, and had written a book
displeasing to the police.
Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last
very beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son
rather weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his
propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very
red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer
months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice
to make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that
English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and
antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded
Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and
natural condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to
make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these
unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand _sala_, he
introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I
flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which
they received each other’s names carried to our landlord’s bosom a
dismay never before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.
The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was
fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then
he gave a musical _soirée_, which was attended, more or less
surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not
think he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one
occasion a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the
_sala_ in our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided
pantaloons he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was
a party, and that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic
reasons, that he had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very
delightful entertainments, no less from the great variety of character
they afforded than from the really charming and excellent music which
the different amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas,
and the instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the
gayety seemed to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of
the palace, and at least showed us how well it was adapted to social
magnificence and display.
We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the
days were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we
hardly suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer
to the purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air
drew through to the painter’s garden by day; and by night there was
scarcely a mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice.
In winter it was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and
boots lined with sheep-skin,--the woolly side in, as in the song. The
passage of the _sala_, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered
as fleetly through it as we could, and were all the colder for the
deceitful warmth of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor
from the window opening on the court.
I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that
attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police
gave their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a
great many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the
more heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the _genre_
branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds
of safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice
(as they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our
property, and I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge’s
Palace, clerkly men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the
rough official paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic
courtesies, the commissary took my statement of the affair down in
writing, pertinent to which were my father’s name, place, and business,
with a full and satisfactory personal history of myself down to the
period of the attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning
about daylight, when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the
window-sill, and the hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my
wardrobe.
“Excuse me, Signor Console,” interrupted the commissary, “how could you
see him?”
“Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was
open.”
“The window was open!” gasped the commissary. “Do you mean that you
sleep with your windows open?”
“Most certainly!”
“Pardon!” said the commissary, suspiciously. “Do _all_ Americans sleep
with their windows open?”
“I may venture to say that they all do, in summer,” I answered; “at
least, it’s the general custom.”
Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign
to the commissary’s experience; and but for my official dignity, I am
sure that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was,
he threw himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some
moments. Then he recovered himself with another “Per-doni!” and,
turning to his clerk, said, “Write down that, _according to the American
custom_, they were sleeping with their windows open.” But I know that
the commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic
of the times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it
paralyzed his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice,
for I have never heard anything of them from that day to this.
The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better
satisfied with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We
sometimes varied the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of
the mainland; but we always came back to it willingly, and I think
we unconsciously abhorred any interruption of it. The days, as they
followed each other, were wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight
months of summer they were alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed
loveliness; in the autumn, there where the melancholy of the falling
leaf could not spread its contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic
art, the days were alike in their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and
resignation which was as autumnal as any aspect of woods or fields
could have been; in the winter they were alike in their dreariness and
discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far the greater part of our time
in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians
call those that lounge habitually at the Caffè Florian. We went every
evening to the Piazza as a matter of course; if the morning was long, we
went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to do with the afternoon, we
went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us, we went to the Piazza;
if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there was no mood or
circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and fitting thing to
go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops; there were all the
finest caffès; there was the incomparable Church of St. Mark; there was
the whole world of Venice.
Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and
sometimes we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after
another, and studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest
scrap of an old master in their darkest chapel; their history, their
storied tombs, their fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped,
I believe, except such as had been turned into barracks, and were
guarded by an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did
escape, we have a kind of envious longing to this day, and should find
it hard to like anybody who had succeeded better in visiting them. There
is, for example, the church of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted
with more patience than that of the titulary saint: now the sacristan
was out; now the church was shut up for repairs; now it was Holy Week
and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a
sight of San Giobbe’s three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini,
which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked
at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall
still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe.
If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the
immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; if
Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture hid away in
some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at once; if in
entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon anything
that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or
bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what
marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into!
What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate!
I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the
nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people.
Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know
just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim
in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall
for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and
localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for
flirtation, gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the
betrayal of guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful
faces and picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a
large stock of sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with
other articles too numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and
suitable to every style of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor
you buy. Each memory, as I hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle
beauty and value, and turns common and poor in my hawker’s fingers.
Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three
palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet
most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it
place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon
a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top
to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined
it built in the Republic’s declining years by some ruinous noble,
whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that
peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being
worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide
marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came
on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a
barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and
we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble’s
great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent _feste da
ballo_. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the
roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo’s school, which had smiled down
on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy
tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous
populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their
loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and
superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color.
How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude
and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and
systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of
youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was
so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed
ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was
keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when
her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.
There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers
may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming
old Prussian painter, Nerlÿ; the frescos of this are dim and faded and
dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble
proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while
the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his
wife’s necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner,
the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot
that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here,
doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian
carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the
palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the
great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian
sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at
the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded,
and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in
perpetual moonlight.
Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this
is all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof
shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery
encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed,
and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern
girls; through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and
red of a garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in,
make love in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to
which it belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken
old Venice was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune.
It was richly furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with
every caprice and delight of art, and appointed with every modern
comfort The foot was hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by
a thousand beauties and prettinesses. In the grates the fires were
laid and ready to be lighted; the candles stood upon the mantles; the
toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in the luxurious chambers; but
from basement to roof the palace was a solitude; no guest came there,
no one dwelt there save the custodian; the eccentric lady of whose
possessions it formed a part abode in a little house behind the palace,
and on her door-plate had written her _vanitas vanitatum_ in the
sarcastic inscription, “John Humdrum, Esquire.”
Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the
furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in
her curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy,
amidst the objects of _vertu_ and the works of art, was a set of
“Punch,” which she made us admire, and which she prized the more because
she had always been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited
it to everybody else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever
seen this book? She held up the “The Potiphar Papers,” a volume which
must have been inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there,
in that curious little old lady’s hand.
Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre
L------ dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits
of his passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed
to represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the
parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon
arranged so that Padre L------ could play upon them both at once; the
oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking apparatus
of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his inventions
in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and perpetual
motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh one’s
self,--shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think there is
enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of my
reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.
Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in
them; and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces,
how should I hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and
loveliness of Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the
power of Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious
luxury of Titian, nor the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo
Veronese. There hang their mighty works forever, high above the reach
of any palaverer; they smile their stately welcome from the altars and
palace-walls, upon whoever approaches them in the sincerity and love
of beauty that produced them; and thither you must thus go if you would
know them. Like fragments of dreams, like the fleeting
“Images of glimmering dawn,”
I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness
from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal
drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable
delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how
should I undertake?
There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in
their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not
call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had
no result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer
occupation our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to
return home. For my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and
transitory character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit
to serve the government by four years’ residence in Venice, that was
a good reason why the government, according to our admirable system,
should dismiss me, and send some perfectly unqualified person to take my
place; and in my heart also I knew that there was almost nothing for me
to do where I was, and I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving a
salary for no service performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I
must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better
be sooner than later. Therefore, though for some reasons it was the
saddest and strangest thing in the world to do, I was on the whole
rejoiced when a leave of absence came, and we prepared to quit Venice.
Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of
farewell,--this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon it.
As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes
we had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the
Piazza; looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and
lagoons, to church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and
stood long upon the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the
future became as incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had
often felt the incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now,
with tenfold force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live
anywhere else. We had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of
her fantastic personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic
world?
The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to
accompany us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our
noble friend in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina
shedding bitter tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending
over the oar and driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal
shut the Palazzo Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves
and windings brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the
baggage was registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself
up in a line, and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there
might be a remote purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer
to embrace and kiss me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by
a final inspiration they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to
his gondola; the two other men moved aside; Bettina gave one long,
hungering, devouring hug to the baby; and as we hurried into the
waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a stage, standing without the barrier,
supported and sobbing in the arms of Giulia.
It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.