ROME
Rome, the old enchantress, held me enthralled from the moment St.
Peter’s dome floated before my eyes like a faint blue bubble on the far
horizon. We passed the winter of 1878-1879 with my mother’s sister,
Louisa (Crawford) Terry; doubtless the environment of her apartment in
the old Palazzo Odescalchi and the companionship of the Crawford and
Terry cousins--Romans born and bred--had something to do with the spell!
We reached Rome on Christmas Eve. The Corso was crowded with gaily
dressed people. In a narrow side street a group of _piffarari_ from the
hills, clad like satyrs in shaggy goat skins, stood playing their pipes
before a dimly lighted shrine of Mary and the Child. It was so cold in
the streets that we were glad to lift the padded leathern curtain and
enter the Church of St. Peter’s, sweet with the smell of incense, bright
with its scores of golden lamps. The basilica was filled with people
waiting for the midnight mass. A long line stood before the statue of
St. Peter; each in his turn wiped the bronze toe of the saint, kissed
it, wiped it again, and passed on. Just before twelve o’clock several
couples came in together, the men in evening dress wearing orders, the
women in ball gowns sparkling with jewels. As they passed the holy water
basin, a young officer dipped his fingers and offered them to a girl in
a scarlet cloak who lightly touched the gloved finger tips and crossed
herself. I caught a word of their talk.
“You promised me that last dance.”
“I could not help it--Paulo was watching--you shall have the next.”
The gay company sweeps on and is lost in the vast throng of worshipers.
The mass bell tinkles, all drop to their knees, heads are bowed, the
silence almost hurts!
Christmas morning we lingered over the breakfast table till Marion
Crawford routed us out, crying:
“Time to get ready for church--don’t be late! I am going to sing ‘The
Trumpet Shall Sound’ before the sermon.”
Both Crawfords and Terrys were Protestants at this time; later Marion
and two of his sisters “went over to Rome.”
At the American Church in the Via Nazionale we found a meager
congregation and a colorless service, compared to midnight mass at St.
Peter’s. Doctor Nevin, the Nimrod rector, did his best for his flock,
but the odds against him were heavy.
“Did you notice,” Crawford murmured maliciously, “how the Reverend says,
‘Our Father who art in Nevin’?”
Palazzo Odescalchi stands on the Piazza SS. Apostoli, near the Palazzo
Venezia, then the Austrian embassy. The Prince, my aunt’s landlord,
occupied one floor of his palace, renting the other apartments. My room
was part of a ballroom suite. It had a high vaulted ceiling and walls
covered with Nile-green silk painted in arabesques with lunettes of
fruit, flowers, and landscape. My aunt kept open house; one met many of
the prominent people of the day in her salon. Looking back, I seem to
see it like one of Paul Veronese’s pictures, crowded with vivid and
elegant figures. Scraps of gossip forty years old drift back to me.
“Here comes the most beautiful woman in Rome,” some one whispers as both
doors of the salon are thrown open and Giuseppe, the old majordomo,
announces, “Marchesa Theodoli.”
“Yesterday a workman said to her in the street, ‘Are you the Madonna
herself or one of the angels?’--An American? Oh, yes! Lily Conrad,--her
face was her fortune, Theodoli married her without a _dot_.”
“No wonder!”
“The Theodoli” was tall and statuesque, her hair was a golden aureole
about her head, her eyes fiery brown, her color ivory. It was the
fashion to be in love with her. Even after she had children grown, an
infatuated boy shot himself for her sake, standing before her portrait
in a photographer’s studio.
“Monsignor Capel.”
Everybody turned to look at the celebrated English prelate, a fine man
with “a good leg” very obvious in its long purple stocking, vigorous
silver hair, and a silvery voice that somehow does not ring quite true.
This was when he was at the height of his popularity, before the affair
of the bracelet. Some one asked the conundrum of the hour, “Why is
Monsignor Capel like Mme. Récamier?” (The proprietress of a London
beauty parlor.)
“Because he makes Bute a fool (beautiful) forever.” Lord Bute was the
Monsignor’s latest convert among the British aristocracy.
“The Minister of the United States.”
George Perkins Marsh, first American diplomatic representative to United
Italy, was the most important American in Rome, though you would not
have guessed it from his quiet manner. He looked the grave scholar he
was and he talked with my mother and Crawford of matters philological,
on which he was an authority. It was long after that I realized the
great part he played in the history of United Italy. Years later Queen
Margherita spoke of Mr. Marsh as having been the intimate friend of her
father-in-law, Victor Emmanuel, and from others I have learned that he
was frequently consulted and gave much help in framing the “Statuto” as
the Italian Constitution is called.
One keen memory of my first winter in Rome is of a morning spent in the
Forum with Crawford and Augustus Hare, who was at work on his
incomparable “Hare’s Walks.” He had brought with him a copy of
Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, and as we sat on the steps of the
Basilica Julio, he read aloud Marc Antony’s oration.
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!” How the words echoed
in that place!
My last impression of Augustus Hare is of an evening in the red
drawing-room of the Odescalchi, when he told ghost stories till my blood
ran cold. He was a slender, sallow man, with a baleful face, and when,
in the firelight of the darkened room, he ended a ghastly tale with “A
ball of flame broke from his lips!” it seemed as if a ball of fire
actually leaped from his! There was something intensely repellent to me
about Hare, and of this he was instantly conscious.
“Your cousin cannot endure me,” he said to Crawford; “I make her flesh
creep. She is telling your sister about it at this moment,”--and I was!
The Abbé Liszt, who was the guest of Cardinal Hohenlohe at the Villa
D’Este, was much in evidence that winter and from time to time
consented to play at some benefit concert. He was a commanding figure as
he sat at the piano, very elegant in his clerical dress, playing his
“Rhapsodic Hongroise” as I have never heard it played. After the concert
a group of ladies surrounded him. The Abbé dropped a glove; a young
Neapolitan princess picked it up and hid it in her muff.
“The ladies cost the Abbé a pretty penny in gloves,” whispered Crawford.
At this time Crawford was called Frank, or sometimes Fritz, a nickname
given him in Germany, either at Heidelberg or at Lesnian, the home of
his Junker brother-in-law, Eric von Rabé, an officer of the
Franco-Prussian War. Crawford was twenty-four years old, a tall, strong,
handsome young man, with no serious pursuit save the study of languages.
He had plenty of time to devote to my mother and me; to him I owe my
introduction to medieval and ancient Rome, with much else that has
proved useful. In a letter of this time he writes to me:
“No success worth having is got from the uncultivated efforts of
genius, and cultivation means the tritest of trite things, the
daily digging and hoeing of the mind till it brings forth wheat
instead of tares!”
King Victor Emmanuel might be seen on a fine afternoon, driving a smart
pair of horses in a high phaeton. He was a martial figure, full of dash,
with a keen eye that saw more than most. His fierce mustache, twirled at
a truculent angle, set the fashion for the military. We sometimes met
him driving to the Villa Mirafiori, the home of his morganatic wife,
often with a younger man who closely resembled him and was, I think, a
son of this union. Rome was a city divided against itself; the King’s
party were called the Whites, the followers of the Pope Pius Ninth were
known as the Blacks. The two factions managed to rub along together
somehow, as they have done ever since, though the King’s people talked
of “the traitor at the hearthstone” and the Pope’s cursed “Perfidious
Savoy.”
Francesco Crispi, Minister of the Interior, at that time played the
first rôle in Italian politics. He had lately returned from a certain
quiet journey whose results were to prove of vast importance to the
whole world. With the object of sounding the great powers’ attitude
towards Italy, Crispi visited England, France, Austria, and Germany. In
Paris he was coolly received, London was friendly but indifferent,
Vienna as hostile as ever; he returned to Italy feeling that
Bismarck--and Bismarck then meant Germany--was Italy’s only friend. From
this hour the Triple Alliance between Germany and those two
irreconcilables, Italy and Austria, was assured.
Though there was some discussion of political matters at my aunt’s
house, it appeared to me that the two serious things in life from the
Palazzo Odescalchi standpoint were society with a small s, and art with
a big A. Quick as a chameleon to take the local color, I entered the
studio of Giovanni Costa to study painting. Costa, one of the young
artists among the immortal _Mille_ who sailed from Sicily with Garibaldi
and made the great fight for Italian liberty, was the most interesting
painter in Rome, with a large following among English and Americans. In
order to be in time for his class I often stole away before breakfast to
the studio in the Via Margutta, taking a roll in my pocket. I enjoyed my
work and made some progress, learning how to prepare my canvas and lay
on the under color in pale red in a way that satisfied my master. I was
toiling over a study of a branch of lemons when my artistic career was
interrupted by a severe attack of Roman fever, a scourge which then took
its toll every year from the Americans wintering in Rome.
Two new figures now appear in “Memory’s Showcase”, Doctor Liberali, the
old homeopathic physician, and Suora Teresa, the Spanish nun who nursed
me.
Oh, the horrors of those long, sleepless nights when I lay staring at
the shadows cast by the taper on the painted ceiling, waiting for the
first faint gray, for the song of the caged bird outside the opposite
window, for the moment when that casement would open and I could see the
profile of a young monk in a white habit bending over the bird cage. At
long last came a welcome tap at my door and Mariuccia, the merry little
maid, tiptoed to my side with a cheery:
“_Buon Giorno, Signorina._ It will go better to-day. I made a petition
for you at mass.”
Relapse followed relapse. The doctor grew graver, the Suora more
careful, my mother paler.
“The girl will never recover in this room. She must have sun; she must
have fire!” I heard the doctor declare to my aunt.
“It is the truth!” murmured the Sister.
My beautiful Nile-green room was deadly cold; the only heat it ever knew
came from a charcoal brazier whose fumes gave me such a headache that I
preferred the cold. A few hours later my bed was carried into one of the
sunny south drawing-rooms, where an open fire blazed upon the hearth. I
was too much absorbed in the fight for life that followed to think much
of the trouble I was giving; since then I have grilled in my blood at
the memory of that upsetting of the well-ordered existence at the
Palazzo Odescalchi. The splendid sunny reception and living rooms opened
_en suite_, one from the other; what happened on the Wednesday afternoon
receptions and the more intimate Sunday evenings at home?
In preparation for my first sitting up, my mother went to buy some white
cashmere to make a “Nightingale” for me. The clerk had just cut a length
from a piece and was folding it up for another purchaser, a lady in whom
my mother recognized a friend, whose young daughter had died of the
fever the day before; the cashmere was for _her_ last garment!
Shuddering, my mother hurried from the shop.
“Not from that piece of cloth, no!” She would find her material
elsewhere!
As soon as I could be moved, the doctor suggested change of air. On a
mild day of early spring my mother and I, with Marion Crawford for
escort, left Rome. I remember that the peach trees were all in bloom.
“Orvieto is the place indicated,” Marion declared. “Has not its wine
been prescribed? I have an acquaintance at the Aquila Bianca who has the
best rooms and best macaroni in the town.”
Memories of that fortnight at Orvieto remain, when so much is forgotten.
The fine cathedral, the lovely Fra Angelico and Signorelli paintings,
the Etruscan tombs, the view of the Valley of the Tiber and the Umbrian
Mountains, the well of St. Patrizio, with its winding stairway cut from
the rock for water-carrying donkeys, my mother’s delight in my renewed
health, and Crawford’s extraordinary personality coloring everything
with the roseate glow of his _joie de vivre_.
“To-night, I will make you, my aunt, a dish whose like you have never
tasted!” he exclaimed one evening, when the macaroni was scorched, no
lettuce was to be had, and it looked as if we must go to bed fasting. He
called for white bread, olive oil, salt, pepper, and vinegar and
compounded what he called “a bread salad.”
“Impossible to have anything better! Good wine, good oil, good company;
what more do you want?” he cried in triumph, as we praised his dish. We
adjourned to the terrace of the poor little inn.
“We only lack music,” some one suggested.
“I will sing you the song taught me by Amerigo, the old contadino, whose
vines I helped prune this morning.”
Crawford put a new string on his guitar, tuned the instrument, and sang
one of those touching songs of “the people” that are more melodious and
more dramatic in Italy than in any other country.
“_Sor Colonello, me dia il congedo, per andar ne mia ca’,
per andar ne mia ca’,_
_Per veder la mia amorosa che in letto se ne sta!_”
Later, by his novels, Crawford was to teach the English reading world to
love the simple Italian ways. He taught me so much of Italy that I am
glad to find, from an old letter, that he learned something that was
worth while from me,--the American point of view. I was frankly
horrified at the lack of purpose in his life. This handsome, gifted,
brilliant man of twenty-four seemed perfectly content to live at home,
idle, and supported by his mother.
Crawford’s mother, for years “a leader” of the Anglo-American colony,
was much beloved.
“Madama Terry is the most _simpatica_ American I know!” I once heard
Rudolpho Lanciani, the archeologist exclaim. Most people agreed with
him. Her popularity was deserved, for her kindness was unfailing,
[Illustration: FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
At the age of twenty-three]
her generosity unstinted. She was the most romantic of women, always
beautiful, always surrounded by admirers! Her marriage to Thomas
Crawford, the sculptor, in 1846 carried her to Rome, a young bride; from
this time Rome was her home. The four Crawford children were all more
Italian than American. After Uncle Crawford’s death in 1857, my aunt
married Luther Terry, an American painter also settled in Rome. There
are two children of this marriage, Margaret (Mrs. Winthrop Chanler) and
Arthur Terry.
“Every year I break off a bit of my heart and give it away!” my aunt
said to me sadly at the end of a season that had brought several near
relatives and friends to Rome. That was the fly in her ointment--the
brilliant circle at the Odescalchi was inevitably a shifting one--she
missed the intimacy of old friends and relatives; this was part of the
price of exile. She was a faithful correspondent, writing long letters
to her children and sisters, “holding the family together” by her system
of “letter exchange.” They all wrote freely and frequently to her, and
she was tireless in passing on the letters from one to another.
Her two married Crawford daughters, Annie, Baroness Erich von Rabé and
Mimoli, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, came that winter to visit the Odescalchi.
Annie was a unique person, witty, brilliant, and extraordinarily gifted.
Her brother Marion writes of her at this time, “I saw Annie yesterday,
and find her much changed--cordial and affectionate, but nervous and
excitable. She has become much thinner, or I should say slimmer, for her
figure is really almost absolute perfection. She was here for a few days
with her really magnificent children, all affection and smiles, and has
now gone back to her wolves and her Poles and her fine trees at
Lesnian.” The Crawfords were all artistic like their father and romantic
like their mother.
On the ninth of January of this year, 1878, Victor Emmanuel the
Liberator died. I saw his strong face for the last time as he lay in
state at the Quirinal. The _cappella ardente_ was ablaze with candles,
the air was heavy with the smell of incense and flowers. The dead king
was dressed in uniform with the crown and scepter at his feet. Two
Capuchin monks knelt beside him, telling their beads. From early morning
till late night a silent grief-stricken crowd surged though the chapel.
“He received the sacrament! Yes, it was allowed,” a woman of the people
murmured in my ear the words with which Rome rang. There had been some
who doubted if the Church would permit the supreme unction to be
administered. For several days it had been known that while the king lay
dying at the Quirinal, across the Tiber at the Vatican, his old
adversary, Pope Pius Ninth, had been stricken with mortal illness. With
my mother I watched the wonderful funeral _cortège_ pass the American
Consulate. There were tears on the roses she threw before the crimson
velvet funeral car drawn by six magnificent horses. In the great drama
of the _Risorgimento_ she too had played her part. She had, as a girl in
her father’s house and as a wife in her husband’s home, received and
comforted Italians exiled for Liberty’s sake; she had worked for the
cause of Italian liberty with voice and pen. She had labored for Italy,
she had rejoiced with her, and now she mourned with “the ransomed land.”
Chief among the mourners was Garibaldi, old and ill, who came up from
rocky Caprera, where he had lived for some time rather in the shadow. I
saw him pass, lying back in a landau, dressed in the traditional gray
felt hat and red blouse. His bronze hair and beard were silver now, but
his eyes had still the look of a seer. He never for an instant doubted
that Italy would fill that larger destiny of which he dreamed. He saw in
the death of Victor Emmanuel the opportunity to raise once more the cry
for _Italia Irredenta_!
“The call of the patriots of Trieste and Trent must find an echo in the
hearts of all Italians, and the yoke of Austria, no better than that of
the Turk, must once for all be broken from off the necks of our
brethren.”
Forty years were to pass before Garibaldi’s words were realized.
On this, his last visit to Rome, Garibaldi once more urged the Romans to
make a supreme effort to banish the fever from their city by building
the Tiber Embankment and thus preventing the river from rising and
overflowing its banks. The Romans did for Garibaldi what they would not
have done for any other man, and put through that splendid piece of
engineering. Though to-day his statue rides in bronze on the Janiculum,
Rome’s greatest monument to him remains the Tiber Embankment. To-day we
recognize that he, the man of vision, saw the future truer than Crispi
the statesman; it was not so in 1878, when the young King Umberto took
the oath of office. Crispi, his trusted advisor, had fallen under the
sway of the Iron Chancellor, and from that time stood for the Triple
Alliance and German influence. Italy endured a great disappointment this
year at the Congress of Berlin, from which the Italian envoy, Count
Corti, returned to Rome empty handed, when by skillful diplomacy his
country might easily have gained some substantial increase of territory.
I remember Count Corti in the United States, when he was the Italian
Minister. He was an insignificant looking man, with a very small nose,
which may have had something to do with his failure! I recall a story of
a heated argument between Count Corti and Vicenzo Botta, an Italian
exile formerly a monk now married to an American wife. Botta spoke with
great heat, pouring out a flood of invective against the church, the
Pope, and the clerical party. Count Corti, a moderate man, with moderate
ideas and gifts, waited for a pause in the fiery diatribe and then said
with biting irony:
“And _I_ was a Dominican Friar!”
The host changed color, hesitated, and dropped the argument!
King Victor was hardly cold when the German infiltration of Italy showed
a marked increase, that quiet thorough system of penetration, which was
to make Capri, Olevano, and certain other garden spots of Italy seem
like German colonies. In the spring of 1879, the birthday of one of the
royalties was celebrated by _tableaux vivants_ at the German Embassy,
the Palazzo Cafferelli on the Capitoline Hill.
“It makes me shudder to think that the Germans have gained a footing on
the sacred soil of the Capitol!” a young American student said to me, as
we climbed the long steps leading to the summit.
The tableaux were the important social event of that season, and I was
pleased enough when asked to take part. A prize was offered by the
German Ambassador for the best tableau, and the competition among the
artists was intense. Each painter made a sketch of his subject and then
proceeded to find the victims to illustrate it. I have forgotten the
name of my artist, an energetic fellow who gave me my first ideas of
German efficiency. His picture represented a scene in the studio of
Phidias, when the sculptor shows his statue of Minerva to Pericles and
Aspasia; from the hour the part of Aspasia was assigned to me, I was
pursued by that artist, who insisted upon examining every minutest
detail of my costume. A sketch of the dress was given me, and having
followed it, as I thought, closely enough, I presented myself at the
first rehearsal. My artist was far from satisfied:
“It is not enough to indicate the Greek border on the underdress,” he
declared; “it must be carefully embroidered in gold. The hair has not
been properly studied; the ornaments are three centuries late in style.
The mantle is not the right color; it must be blue to harmonize with the
slave’s drapery.”
The slave, Maud Broadwood, later Mrs. Waldo Story, a handsome dark girl,
who was to sit at my feet, seemed discontented with her part. Used to
the rough-and-ready American manner of getting up tableaux, I innocently
exclaimed:
“Let me be the slave and you be Aspasia!”
The artist bristled with anger.
“The young lady has been chosen because Professor Helbig, the first
archeologist in Rome, holds that Aspasia should be represented by one of
her type.”
I was out of my depth and offered no more suggestions. The artist went
on with his lecture:
“Signor Tale, the hairdresser of her Majesty the Queen, will make some
studies from statues at the Vatican for the coiffure. He will first call
upon the young lady, to become familiar with her type.”
Signor Tale, looking more like a prince than a hairdresser, called to
observe my type; called again with half a dozen careful pencil drawings
and measured my head for the golden net he would construct to bind over
the blue fillet which must match the mantle. Rehearsals in hairdressing
followed until both artists were satisfied.
My aunt took me to her friend, Mme. Ristori, to consult about the
mantle.
“It is important it should be correct!” the great actress agreed. She
called her daughter, the lovely Bianca Capranica.
“Ask my woman to bring the blue and gold mantle I wear as Phedra. That
will satisfy even a German archeologue.”
On the Royal birthday, the cast assembled at the embassy. Mme. Ristori,
dressed as Clio, the Muse of History, opened the evening with a
recitation. She had not long retired from the stage; her majestic
presence, her wonderful deep voice, her classic face, thrilled her
audience, as I had known them thrill American audiences in “Marie
Stuart” or in “Lucrezia Borgia.” I was still under the spell of her
grand manner when she came to oversee the draping of her mantle on my
shoulders. She called for a needle and thread and came towards me with a
look so dramatic that I trembled; the needle might have been a dagger
from the intensity of her face and gesture. She herself took the
necessary stitch to stay the mantle’s folds upon my shoulder; as she
left me to take my pose she whispered:
“Forget yourself; remember only that you are Aspasia, that Pericles is
by your side, that Phidias and his statue are before you!”
Just before the curtain was raised, a queen’s jewels lately discovered
in an ancient Etruscan tomb and belonging to Castellani, the great
jeweler archeologue, were handed me. I put the earrings in my ears and
clasped the bracelets on my wrists with a sense of awe.
Our tableau was much applauded, Queen Margherita, who sat in the front
seats with the French Ambassadress, Mme. de Noailles, asked to have it
repeated. We took the prize; this success was not wonderful when I
remember that Adelaide Ristori, Herr Helbig, Guglielmo Castellani,
Signor Tale, and I forget how many other masters of their craft had a
share in it!