THE COURTS OF ITALY
I was at Genoa, and one spring morning I strolled through a network of
narrow streets to the harbour. The sea was as blue as a turquoise,
gleaming like a jewel in the sunshine, and I could not resist the
temptation to hire a boat and waste an hour gliding over the enchanted
waves. The boatman who rowed me was a lively fellow. Luckily for me, as
I afterwards realised, he had not the faintest idea who I was, and I let
him chatter to his heart’s content.
“The old Duke of Galliera gave many million lire to make that,” he said,
indicating, with a jerk of his head, the new harbour, hidden from sight
by the building on the Molo Vecchio.
“The Duke of Galliera,” he went on, “was a fine gentleman. The Duchess
was left a widow, and inherited the enormous, the colossal fortune of
her husband. And what did she do? Does the signora know what she did?”
I did know, but I thought it prudent to shake my head.
The man leant on his oars, and looked intently at me.
“The Duchess,” he said, “left the title and every lira she had, and her
palace in Bologna, and all the estates of her Duchy, to foreigners. A
curse on them! And the Duchess belonged to Genoa; she had relatives in
Genoa. Everything went to the Duca di Montpensier, a Frenchman who had
become a Spaniard, and now it belongs to his son.”
“Really,” I said; and I did not mention that the Duc de Montpensier was
my father-in-law, and that I was actually Duchess of Galliera.
“If I could get hold of that man and his wife, although she is an
Infanta of Spain, I would kill them,” he shouted at me fiercely. “I
would show them no mercy.”
On the whole I was not sorry when I found myself on land again, and I am
convinced that the man would have upset his boat and let me drown, if he
had discovered who I was. And I have often wondered who he was; perhaps
a relative of the old Duchess. There was truth in the story he told, a
mystery which neither I nor anybody else is ever likely to solve. The
Duke of Galliera had a son, Philippo Ferrari, who refused absolutely to
use the privileges which his birth bestowed upon him. What were his
reasons, nobody knows. And why in default of the son, one of the richest
duchies in Italy was left to my father-in-law is a question which
remains, and is likely to remain, unanswerable. And partly through the
strange connection of the family into which I married with Italy, partly
through my love of the most beautiful and romantic land in Europe, I
have lived there a great deal. I used to stay often at the magnificent
palace of the Galliera family in Bologna, a sumptuous place with vast
rooms paved with mosaic and glittering with rare marbles. The people of
that city of colonnades and cool courtyards took a kindlier view of the
new owners of the palace than the Genoese boatman did, and the ancient
families of the place had that charm of manner which gives such a
fascination to the cultured society of Italian towns. It was a great
delight to receive them, and I used to enjoy the balls and parties in
that wonderful palace.
In most countries society gathers in the capital, and when there is a
Court it acts as a magnet to draw people from the provinces. The
unification of Italy, and the erection of the Italian kingdom, had not
materially altered the structure of Italian society. It remains what it
was when Italy was divided into a number of small states. Rome and the
Quirinal do not attract the nobles of Venice, or Florence, or Bologna,
or of other historic Italian towns: they continue to spend the winter in
the cities with which their families have been associated for centuries,
giving to them a certain brilliance which is not to be found in the
provincial towns of France or England.
It seems to be the special prerogative of a Queen Mother to be Queen of
Hearts, and Queen Margherita holds the same place in the affection of
the Italian people as beautiful Queen Alexandra--has ever a Queen been
more beloved than she?--holds in England, and the Empress Marie in
Russia. I paid a visit to her and King Humbert at the Castle of Monza,
their summer home in the outskirts of the town in which the kings of
Lombardy were crowned, and, although the etiquette of the Court was
severe, she had a charm which made one tolerate the restrictions of
palace life. Those about her used to complain that she hardly ever sat
down. I have remarked that several queens whom I know have this rather
trying capacity for standing, and, as nobody can sit down while they
stand, their guests and their ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting are
sometimes a good deal fatigued. Numbers of women are not aware that they
owe to Queen Margherita the pretty fashion of wearing a string of pearls
in the daytime. But she did not limit herself to the single string of
pearls worn by women of fashion, she was simply hung with ropes of
pearls morning, noon and night; in fact, I have never seen her without
them.
Although the King of Italy made Rome his capital, the other members of
the Royal Family have never gone to live there, and continue to make
their home in Turin. Among these are the Duke and Duchess of Genoa and
the Duke and Duchess of Aosta, and the exasperating etiquette peculiar
to Royal personages is rigorously maintained in their palaces.
Gentlemen-in-waiting and ladies-in-waiting are always in attendance on
them, and it used to surprise me that people could be found to devote
themselves to such an insufferably dull occupation as that of serving
in miniature Courts, until I remembered that some of them might be glad
to do the work, if work it can be called, for the sake of being
maintained and of receiving the salaries attached to their offices.
English princesses have the daily distraction of opening bazaars, but
little happens to enliven the Courts of Turin. When I have stayed there,
the chief excitement of the day has invariably been a drive to a park
outside the city, where the Royal personages walked for a little,
attended by the inevitable ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting, and after
half an hour of that mild form of exercise, drove back to their homes.
These proceedings did not appear to awaken any great interest in the
citizens of Turin, for in Italy, as in most other countries, the public
has ceased to concern itself about the little doings of princes and
princesses.
The Dowager Duchess of Aosta sometimes shows her independence by freeing
herself from Royal bonds when she is abroad, and I remember her once
arriving in Paris entirely unattended. She was Princess Lætitia
Bonaparte before her marriage, and enjoys the style of Imperial
Highness, while, rather oddly, the young Duchess of Aosta is a Princess
of
[Illustration: INFANTA EULALIA AT WINDOW OF HER APARTMENTS]
the House of Bourbon and sister of the Duc d’Orleans. She is a somewhat
masculine type of woman, and spends a great deal of her time in
Abyssinia. She leaves her husband and two boys and, with no companion
except an elderly Englishwoman, sets out on a hunting expedition. She is
lost in the heart of Africa for months, and then suddenly reappears and
settles down to the humdrum life of her palace. But soon she hears again
the call of the wild, and is away once more. What she does in Abyssinia
nobody knows, if one excepts the elderly Englishwoman. The country seems
to have cast a spell on her, and she cannot resist its fascinations. The
Duke of Genoa, Queen Margherita’s brother, and his wife, who is a
Bavarian Princess, live in the same palace as the Dowager Duchess of
Aosta, but their households are independent and, in point of fact, the
two duchesses rarely see each other. The duke is almost a recluse; he
spends several hours in his private chapel every day, lost in prayer and
meditation.
I was a little surprised the first time I went to Turin to find that the
Piedmontese dialect of Italian was spoken in Royal circles. To
understand what was said sometimes required close attention, even when
one knew Italian well, and I have found a similar difficulty in other
Italian cities. In Bologna, for instance, where I have lived so much,
the cultured classes, as well as the peasants, talked dialect, and
travelling about Italy one seemed constantly under the necessity of
learning new words and phrases.
There are so many beautiful Italian cities in which agreeable society
may be enjoyed that had one to choose one in which to live permanently
it would be difficult to come to a decision. Venice is one of the most
adorable, and the time I spent with the Duke and Duchess of Genoa at the
King’s palace there was a dream of delight. But there is one objection,
and that a serious one to a prolonged stay in Venice, and that is the
difficulty of getting proper exercise. As everybody seemed prepared to
spoil me when I was there, I made it clear that it was essential for me
to do something more vigorous than gliding down silent canals in a
gondola or strolling in the Piazza. It was therefore arranged that I
should play tennis at the Arsenal, and that indulgence gave me the one
thing that seemed lacking in the charming life of the city. Italians
can play tennis very well when they choose, and Monsignor Montagnini,
the Papal Legate who was turned out of France when diplomatic relations
between the Republic and the Vatican were ruptured, was a case in point.
He played an excellent game, and we often had a set together in Paris.
Little did I guess what his means were, and never will I forget his
false behaviour when his papers were captured. In Venice too, I found
some good players, and so managed to get the vigorous exercise I needed.
Apart from this, I lived the life of the Venetians--walked in the Piazza
from half-past eleven to half-past twelve, took the air in a gondola
about half-past five, went occasionally to the opera at the Fenice, that
most exquisite of theatres, and ended the day by dancing in the
enchanted palaces that rise from the sea. It was often sunrise when I
stepped into a Royal barge with gondoliers in scarlet and, to the
rhythmic music of oars that cut the water and the splash of the spray
that fell from their blades, floated through the rosy dawn to the Royal
palace.