THE
HUMOUR OF ITALY

Italian humour, says Mr. J. A. Symonds, died with Ariosto; and, in the face of such a declaration, any attempt to bring together a collection of specimens, some of which at any rate belong to a more recent date, would seem to savour of presumption. Yet, even at the risk of differing from such a recognised authority on Italian literature, we venture to think that a good deal has been produced since the age of Ariosto which may legitimately be defined as humour, though, for various reasons presently to be detailed, there are peculiar difficulties connected with its presentation in a foreign tongue.

It may as well be said at once that the professed humorist, the writer who is comic and nothing else, or, at any rate, whose main scope is to be funny, is all but unknown in modern Italian literature. Strictly speaking, he is perhaps a Germanic rather than a Latin product. The jokes in Italian comic and other papers are not, as a rule, overpoweringly amusing; and if we do come across a book which sets itself forth as Umoristico, the chances are that it turns out to be very tragical mirth indeed. But in novels and tales, even in essays and descriptions, which have no specially humorous intention, you often come across passages of a pure and spontaneous humour, inimitable in its own kind.

Italian humour may be said to fall into two great divisions, or rather—for it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines—to present two main characteristics, which are sometimes present together, sometimes separately. The first of these is what we may call the humour of ludicrous incident—a very elementary kind indeed, comprising what is usually known as “broad farce,” and finding its most rudimentary expression in horse-play and practical jokes of the Theodore Hook kind. The early stages of all literatures afford abundant examples of this; indeed, there xiiare some stories which appear to be so universally pleasing to human nature that they reappear, in various forms, all the world over, sometimes making their way into literature, sometimes surviving in oral tradition to the present day. Boccaccio and his predecessor, Franco Sacchetti, with numberless other writers of the “novelle” or short stories in prose, which very early became a striking feature in Italian literature, afford plenty of examples. Such are the tricks played on the unlucky Calandrino, the various “burle” (historical or not) ascribed to the painter Buffalmacco, and the story of the wicked Franciscan friar, who, after having been caught in his own trap and, as was confidently hoped, exposed before a whole congregation, had the wit to turn the situation to his own profit after all, and preached a most eloquent sermon on the incident. The same tendency is also seen in the “Morgante Maggiore” of Pulci, which in its turn gave birth to a large number of “heroico-comic” poems, most of them celebrating the adventures of some more or less fabulous hero, and also, it must be confessed, somewhat heavy and long-winded, the cumbrous ottava rima contributing not a little to this result.^[1] Ariosto’s great poem, of course, though having some points in common with these—(he had two predecessors in his treatment of the Roland legend in epic form)—stands on an entirely different footing.

The other characteristic is difficult to define, and its best examples are almost impossible to render into another language. It consists in a peculiar, naïve drollery,—a something which reminds one of the Irish way of relating a story, only that it is quieter and more restrained,—a simplicity which seems almost unconscious of the ludicrous side of what it is describing, till we are undeceived by a sly hit here and there. This, though more developed in modern writers, exists side by side with the broader comic element in the older literature. There is a certain childlike quality about the Italian of the age of Dante that lends itself admirably to the expression of this trait.

xiiiThe French are said to possess wit, but not humour; the Italians have humour, but not wit—or, at any rate, more of the former than the latter. True humour is never divorced from pathos; and it is usually allied with the power of seeing the poetry in common things. This one notices in many writers of the present day, such as Verga and Pratesi—whose works are full of humour, though not of a kind that appears to advantage in selections. It is shown in delicate elusive touches of description and narration, and provokes smiles—sometimes sad smiles—rather than laughter. Verga’s humour is often grim and bitter—the tragedy of the hard lives he writes of has its farce too, but even that is a sad one. Something of this grimness comes out in his cynical sketch of the village priest, who was also farmer and money-lender—hated by his flock in one capacity, reverenced in the other, and dreaded in both.

Italy is so intimately associated with music and the drama, that, in such a selection as the following, one might expect to find a large number of quotations from comedies. This, however, is not the case. With hundreds of comedies to choose from, it is almost impossible to find anything adapted for quotation. It is quite true that quoting from a drama must always be more or less like handing round a brick as a sample of the house; but in Shakespeare, for instance, we can find abundance of single passages which will stand well enough by themselves to give a taste of his humorous quality. Had we been able to find in all the works of Goldoni or Gozzi, of Gherardi del Testa, Torelli, or Ferrari, a speech approaching—I do not say in degree, but in kind—any one of some dozen which one might pick out almost at random, on opening Twelfth Night, or Henry IV., or Much Ado About Nothing, the task would have been much easier than it is. But in the best classical plays, such as Goldoni’s, the interest is much more dependent on plot and situation than on character, and no short selection can either give an idea of the whole or be very amusing in itself. The liveliest bits of dialogue lose point apart from their context, and in any case are better adapted for acting than reading. The same might be said of any play worth the name, but it is perhaps peculiarly true of the eighteenth century “comedy of intrigue.”

xivThe comedy of the present day has not quite the same disadvantage. The stereotyped characters are done away with, and there is more play of individuality. But it will be noticed that the specimens given consist of one or more whole scenes, sometimes of considerable length—i.e., there is the same deficiency, or nearly so, of quotable speeches. This, of course, is not a fault from the dramatic point of view; but it is embarrassing for the maker of selections.

Making all these allowances, one finds some of Torelli’s and Ferrari’s plays fairly amusing in the reading, whatever they may be when well acted; but even so the reflection is forced upon one that some of them are lamentable comedies indeed. It is not that they lack spirit and vivacity, but one is astonished at the subjects chosen. That any man should write a play called The Duel, in which the principal incident is a duel, which really does come off, and in which a man is killed, and then call it a comedy, passes one’s comprehension. Not that the subject is made light of; there are comic characters and situations, it is true, but these are subsidiary, and the main treatment is dignified and even pathetic. Again, we have Torelli’s I Mariti,—no tragedy could cause one acuter misery than this drama of ill-assorted marriages and slowly-tortured hearts. La Verità, by the same author, would be a bright and amusing play, were it not for the cynical bitterness of the main idea running through it. The hero, a simple, honest young fellow from the country, gets into trouble by his outspokenness all through the first act or two; then, having found out that honesty does not pay, he takes to lying and flattery, and gets on in the world accordingly. Another example of the same tendency is Ferrari’s Suicidio.

It is true that the word commedia in Italian does not always denote what we mean by a comedy (as witness the Divina Commedia), but that the distinction is to some extent observed in the modern drama is proved by the fact that some plays are designated commedia, others “dramma” or “tragedia.”

There is a peculiarly national development of the drama in Italy, which demands a word or two to itself. I mean the Commedia dell’ Arte, so fully and ably discussed by Mr. Symonds in the introduction to his recent translation of Gozzi’s xvMemoirs. Briefly speaking, this is a play of which the author furnishes only the outline—the plot, the division into acts and scenes, and a certain number of stage directions—the words being wholly or partly extemporised by the actors. In fact, the dialogue of these plays consisted chiefly of “gag,” though the extent to which this was the case appears to have varied, the playwright sometimes supplying hints for every speech, and even entire speeches,—sometimes only indicating the general line taken during the scene. The Commedia dell’ Arte was immensely popular during the first half of the eighteenth century; but then declined, owing to the influence of Goldoni, who introduced the Comedy of Manners, in which he largely followed French models. It is curious that Molière, who thus, one might say, was indirectly instrumental in superseding the Commedia dell’ Arte, should have received his first impulse from this very form of the drama, as brought into France by Italian companies.

Most plays of this description partook rather of the character of farce than of legitimate comedy. The principal personages—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, Coviello, Scaramouch, etc.—who make their appearance in every one, had certain fixed traditional costumes and masks, which were never departed from. The familiar figure of Punch, which has been so completely naturalised as to appear one of the most English of all English institutions, was handed down through many generations of Italian players before he reached our shores. As “Pulcinella” or “Polecenella” he is a typically Neapolitan figure; while Stenterello, another favourite mask, is as typically Tuscan. The name is supposed to be derived from “Stentare” (to be in great want)—the Tuscans, and more especially the Florentines, being famous throughout the Peninsula for economy—not to say meanness—which is a prominent feature in Stenterello’s character.

The Commedia dell’ Arte was eminently suited to the Italian national character, with its fluent eloquence and spontaneous drollery, so much of which depends on facial and vocal expression, on ready repartee and apt allusion, that it loses enormously on being written down.

The scenario, or outline of the acts and scenes, while it kept xvithe action in a definite shape and prevented over-much diffuseness, allowed the most unlimited scope for both the tendencies already described, though perhaps that towards broad farce and practical joking is the most prominent. Indeed, the coarseness into which it has ever been apt to degenerate is throughout unpleasantly prominent. Symonds—surely not a very squeamish critic—speaks of these farces in terms to make one think that the oblivion into which they have fallen is not a matter for regret. Moreover, while the coarseness of the story (independent of what might be incidentally introduced into the dialogue) forms part of the groundwork of the play, and would thus be perpetuated, the subtler play of humour is much more easily lost. The numerous comedies and farces of Francesco Cerlone, if not actually coming within the category of the Commedia dell’ Arte, may be regarded as a development of it. They are real plays, with the speeches written out in full, and usually a plot of the kind found in what is called the “comedy of intrigue,” while the characters are bound by no fixed rules. But there is always a more or less farcical underplot, in which some of the above-mentioned stereotyped personages figure, Pulcinella and Columbine being the principal ones. The greater part of these scenes is in the Neapolitan dialect, traditionally assigned to Pulcinella throughout the Commedia dell’ Arte. Each of the “masks,” by-the-bye, speaks some provincial dialect; and a great deal of humour appears to be got out of the device of bringing two or more speakers of different dialects on the stage at once. Molière has to a certain extent done the same thing, notably in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Further information concerning these masks may be found in that delightful book, Story’s Roba di Roma.

Another development of the Italian drama which must not be passed over without notice is the comic opera, which came into fashion during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Casti (the author of a somewhat dreary satire, “Gli Animali Parlanti,” the sonnet-cycle, “I Tre Giuli,” a good idea worked to death, and some unspeakably vile Novelle) excelled in this line, producing, among others, La Grotta di Trofonio and Il Re Teodoro, which are something like Gilbert and Sullivan’s librettos in their tripping measures and rattling fun. Other xviicomic operas of the same period are Il Paese di Cuccagna, by Carlo Goldoni, and L’Opera Seria by Ramieri Calsabigi, a parody on the serious operas which were just then becoming fashionable. The poet and the composer are introduced respectively as Don Delirio and Don Sospiro (“Sighing”), and the manager asks them in turn, “What the devil is the good of so many sentences just at the crisis of passion?” and “Who can stand all those cadences in the midst of an aria full of action?” More modern works of this kind have been written by Pananti, Gherardini, Lorenzo del Ponte, and Angelo Anelli (died 1820).

“The Italians are good actors,” says Story, “and entirely without self-consciousness and inflated affectation.... They are simple and natural. Their life, which is public, out of doors, and gregarious, gives them confidence, and by nature they are free from self-consciousness. The same absence of artificiality that marks their manners in life is visible on the stage. One should, however, understand the Italian character, and know their habits and peculiarities in order fitly to relish their acting. It is as different from the French acting as their character is different from that of the French.... In character-parts, comedy and farce, they are admirable; and out of Italy the real buffo does not exist. Their impersonations, without overstepping the truth of natural oddity, exhibit a humour of character and a general susceptibility to the absurd which could hardly be excelled. Their farce is not dry, witty, and sarcastic like the French, but rich, humorous, and droll. The primo comico, who is always rushing from one scrape to another, is so full of chatter and blunder, ingenuity and good-nature, that it is impossible not to laugh with him and wish him well; while the heavy father or irascible old uncle, in the midst of the most grotesque and absurdly natural imitation, without altering in the least his character, will often move you by sudden touches of pathos when you are least prepared. The old man is particularly well represented on the Italian stage. In moments of excitement and emotion, despite his red bandanna handkerchief, his spasmodic taking of snuff, and his blowing of his nose, all of which are given with a truth which, at first, to a stranger, trenches not slightly on the bounds of the ludicrous—look out—by an unexpected and exquisitely natural xviiiturn he will bring the tears at once into your eyes. I know nothing so like this suddenness and unexpectedness of pathos in Italian acting as certain passages in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which catch you quite unprepared, and, expecting to laugh, you find yourself crying.

“If one would see the characteristic theatres of the basso popolo, and study their manners, he should go to the Teatro Emiliano in the Piazza Navona, or the Fico, so called from the street in which it is situated. At the former the acting is by respectable puppets; at the latter the plays are performed by actors or personaggi, as they are called. The love for the acting of burattini, or puppets, is universal among the lower classes throughout Italy, and in some cities, especially Genoa, no pains are spared in their costume, construction, and movement to render them life-like. They are made of wood, are generally from two to three feet in height, with very large heads and supernatural, glaring eyes that never wink, and are clad in all the splendour of tinsel, velvet, and steel. Their joints are so flexible that the least weight or strain upon them effects a dislocation, and they are moved by wires attached to their heads and extremities. Though the largest are only about half the height of a man, yet, as the stage and all the appointments and scenery are upon the same scale of proportion, the eye is soon deceived, and accepts them as if life-size. But if by accident a hand or arm of one of the wire-pullers appears from behind the scenes, or descends below the hangings, it startles you by its portentous size, and the audience in the stage-boxes, instead of reducing the burattini to Lilliputians by contrast, as they lean forward, become themselves Brobdingnagians, with elephantine heads and hands.

“Do not allow yourself to suppose that there is anything ludicrous to the audience in the performances of these wooden burattini. Nothing, on the contrary, is more serious. No human being could be so serious. Their countenances are solemn as death, and more unchanging than the face of a clock. Their terrible gravity when, with drooping heads and collapsed arms, they fix on you their great goggle eyes, is at times ghastly. They never descend into the regions of conscious farce. The plays they perform are mostly heroic, romantic, xixand historical.... The audience listen with grave and profound interest. To them the actors are not fantoccini, but heroes. Their inflated and extravagant discourse is simply grand and noble. They are the mighty x which represents the unknown quantity of boasting which potentially exists in the bosom of every one. Do not laugh when you enter, or the general look of surprise and annoyance will at once recall you to the proprieties of the occasion. You might as well laugh in a church....

“At every theatre there are two performances, or camerate, every evening, one commencing at Ave Maria (sunset), the other at ten o’clock. We arrived at the Teatro Emiliano just too late for the first, as we learned at the ticket-office. ‘What is that great noise of drums inside?’ asked we. ‘Battaglie,’ said the ticket-seller. ‘Shall we see a battle in the next piece?’ ‘Eh, sempre battaglie!’ (Always battles) was the reproving answer....

“The bill pasted outside informed us that the burattini were to play to-night ‘The grandiose opera, entitled, Belisarius, or the Adventures of Orestes, Ersilia, Falsierone, Selenguerro, and the terrible Hunchback.’ In the names themselves there was a sound of horror and fear.”

The writer goes on to describe the play in a very humorous fashion, but as the humour is only apparent from the spectator’s point of view, and does not belong to the work represented, we must not digress so far as to quote it at full length. The conclusion, however, may be given. “... Suffice it to say that there was the ‘Serpent-man,’ ending in a long green tail, and a terrible giant with a negro head and pock-marked face, each of which was a Deus ex machina, descending at opportune moments to assist one or the other side, the uomo serpente on one occasion crushing a warrior who was engaged in an encounter with Ersilia, by flinging a great tower on him. What Belisario had to do with this grandiosa opera, besides giving it his name, I did not plainly see, as he never made his appearance on the stage. However, the audience seemed greatly delighted with the performance. They ate voraciously of bruscolini (pumpkin seeds, salted and cooked in a furnace, of which the Romans are very fond) and cakes, partook largely of xxlemonade, and when I left the stage was strewn with cornetti, or paper horns, which they had emptied of their seeds.”^[2]

The use of dialect in the comic drama has been already adverted to. At the present day “dialect stories” are almost as popular in Italy as they have been, for some time past, in the American magazines. The Neapolitan dialect, so closely connected with Pulcinella, has become as much a stock property of the Italian comic muse, as the brogue of the stage Irishman is of the English. A paper, entirely in this dialect, entitled, “Lo Cuorpo de Napole e lo Sebbeto,” was published for some time at Naples, in the early sixties; but its humour was exclusively political, and of a local and temporary character. The Sicilian dialect has been brought into notice by Verga (whose actual use of it, however, is sparing), Navarro della Miraglia, Capuana, and other writers. Goldoni used the Venetian throughout some of his best comedies (Le Baruffe Chiozzote, for instance), but it seems to have fallen comparatively out of favour of late years. D’Annunzio, in his San Pantaleone, and other stories, has made very effective use of the dialect spoken along the Adriatic coast, about Pescara and Ortona, which is a kind of cross between the Venetian and Neapolitan. In Piedmont there appears to be a mass of popular literature in the (to outsiders) singularly unattractive patois which was so dear to Cavour and Victor Emmanuel.

Among the cities of the Peninsula, Milan and Florence enjoy a pre-eminent reputation for humour. The Florentines of the Middle Ages were famous for their biting wit and satirical speeches, their “motti” and “frizzi.” Franco Sacchetti and Luigi Pulci were Florentines, and Boccaccio was next door to one, being a native of Certaldo. Even Dante, though the last man in the world of whom one would expect anything in the way of humorous utterance, was not without a certain grim facetiousness of his own, as when he turned on the jeering courtiers at Verona with a bitter play on the name of Can Grande, or annihilated the harmless bore in Santa Maria Novella, with his “Or bene, o lionfante, non mi dar noia.” Giusti, whose poems are described as “rather satirical than humorous” (though, as satire is one department of humour, it is rather xxidifficult to see the point of the definition), is in many respects a typical Florentine, though not one by birth, his native place being Monsummano, in the Lucca district. His poems exhibit a singular union of caustic sarcasm and irony, fierce earnestness and merry, rattling disinvoltura—light-hearted Tuscan laughter. He wrote chiefly on political subjects, and never did political poet have worthier themes for his verse. The times in which he lived were sufficient to call forth any amount of saeva indignatio, and if the bitterness sometimes ran so high as to leave no heart for mirth at the pitiful incongruity of human affairs (as in A noi, larve d’Italia), no one who cares for freedom, or to whom the name of Italy is dear, can blame him. Irish hearts can understand the note of deep personal pain that breaks out in “King Log,” or “Weathercock’s Toast,” or the scathing scorn of “Gingillino”;—we have nothing quite like it in English literature. The cause is wanting. We see the same thing in looking over a collection of Italian political caricatures extending over the last thirty or forty years. Some of the cartoons in Lo Spirito Folletto are equal (I am not speaking of minor technical details, of which I am no judge) to the best of Tenniel’s, and the ideal figure of Italy is of rare beauty; but they do not give us what, as a rule, we are accustomed to look for in a cartoon. Now and then, in a serious mood, the artist just named gives us a noble drawing, which is in no sense a caricature; but no work of his causes—nor is it in nature that it should do so—the thrill, the serrement de cœur, we feel before the Aspromonte drawing, with its mournful legend, “Behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow;” or that haunting picture of the “Italia Irredenta” riots of 1882, where Italy looks on the dead body of young Oberdank. We have not fought against hopeless odds for a suffering country.

But in spite of this earnestness (which is usually said to be fatal to a sense of humour), the Tuscan love of fun was always bubbling up in Giusti. His letters, in which he was continually falling into the racy idioms of his native hill-country, are full of it; and some of his poems are purely playful, without political or satiric intention—or, if satiric, only in a kindly spirit. Such is the poem of “Love and a Quiet Life,” from which we have given an extract. There seems to be no English version of the xxiibest of Giusti’s works, and these offer peculiar difficulties to the translator. I have not ventured to lay hands on the “Brindisi di Girella”—a process which could only result in spoiling that inimitable poem—and have contented myself with the excellent renderings of “L’Amor Pacifico,” and some stanzas from “Gingillino,” contributed some thirty years ago to the Cornhill Magazine by an anonymous writer.

Tuscan rural life has been admirably painted of late years by, among others, Mario Pratesi and Renato Fucini, both writers of considerable graphic power and a certain “pawky” humour, though they seem to prefer tragedy to comedy. The latter’s sketch of a day in a Tuscan country-house has been included in the present collection.

So much for Florence and Tuscany. Milan is famous in Italy for various things—for its Duomo and the singing at La Scala—for the gallant fight for liberty during the Five Days in ’48—and for the mysterious delicacies known as polpette and panettone. But besides all these things, the Milanese are noted for a love of jokes and laughter, which they endeavoured heroically to suppress in the days of the Austrian dominion. They possess a dialect which seems as though it were intended for the comic stage, and lends itself excellently well to Aristophanic wit; and they have had a dialect-poet of some note—Giacomo Porta, the friend of Grossi and Giusti. Giusti had a great sense of the humorous capabilities of the Milanese dialect, and quoted verses in it (or, more probably, improvised quotations) in letters to his Milanese friends. Unfortunately Porta’s poems are so strictly local, and lose so much by translation, that none of them have been found available for this book.

As a rule, the prose specimens of Italian humour have been more satisfactory (as far as the present work is concerned) than the poetical, for two reasons—first, the latter are more difficult to translate with any degree of point and spirit; and secondly, whether from the choice of metre or other causes, they are apt to become long-winded, if not heavy. The favourite measure for humorous poems, which cannot exactly be described as satires, is a six-line stanza, like that of Horace Smith’s “Address to the Mummy”; in fact, the ottava rima stanza, docked of two lines. xxiiiNow, a division into stanzas is not, as a rule, favourable to rapid or spirited narration, and the longer the stanza the greater the difficulty. Unless the thought exactly fits the limit, it must be either abruptly contracted to bring it within the compass of the stanza, or expanded by feeble paraphrase and repetition; otherwise the enjambements resulting from the carrying on of a sentence from one stanza into another are apt to be awkward and obscure, unless very skilfully managed. Pananti, in his “Poeta di Teatro” (from which I have given a quotation), is very happy in this stanza; the measure flows easily, and the poem is not, in the original, too diffuse, the accumulation of trivial details having a naïvely ludicrous effect, which is lost to some extent in English. Pananti, by-the-bye, was a Tuscan, as was also the genial physician, Redi, whose dithyramb in praise of the wine of Montepulciano (he also wrote a great number of pleasant letters, and some papers on natural history, which show him to have been an accurate observer as well as an enthusiastic lover of nature) has been spiritedly translated by Leigh Hunt. So, too, was another doctor, Guadagnoli, whose collection of Poesie giocose contains some good things, but none in a sufficiently concentrated form for quotation.

In speaking of the humorous literature of Italy, we must not forget to notice the English influence which made itself so strongly felt during the eighteenth century. Swift, Addison, and Sterne found not only eager readers, but imitators. Giuseppe Baretti, the friend of Johnson, who, after a prolonged residence in London, returned to Italy for a few years, probably did something towards popularising the language and literature of his adopted country. Count Gasparo Gozzi (elder brother to Carlo Gozzi, of the Memorie and the Fiabe) founded and carried on for some time, at Venice, a journal called L’Osservatore, avowedly on the model of the Spectator; and though he was no servile imitator, his writings have an unmistakable Addisonian flavour. Sterne’s influence was, perhaps, more widely felt than any other. Ugo Foscolo probably came under it when writing Didimo Chierico; and the frequent allusions to the Sentimental Journey in Italian writers prove it to have been widely read. Leopardi’s intensely original individuality owed little to any writer; yet I cannot help thinking that he may have found xxivSwift, to whom he was in some respects akin, both suggestive and stimulating. Certainly, the masterly dialogues exhibit a bitter saturnine humour very like Swift’s misanthropic irony, though more subtle and refined, and rendered still more striking by that innocent-seeming naïveté of expression which is so peculiarly Italian. The dialogue between the “First Hour and the Sun,” now translated, is one of the best; but “The Wager of Prometheus” is exceedingly fine, though too long to quote entire, and difficult to select from. I have examined the translation of some of these dialogues by Mr. Charles Edwards in Trübner’s Philosophical Library, but, after consideration, found myself unable to make use of them. Apart from a few minor inaccuracies, which could easily have been corrected, it was evident that the translator had his mind fixed on Leopardi’s philosophy, and the peculiar humorous quality of the dialogues had almost disappeared in his version. The bull, which the Edgeworths laboured so hard to prove not indigenous to Ireland, or at least not peculiar to the Green Isle, flourishes vigorously in Italy. It naturally would be of frequent occurrence among a quick-witted people, ready of speech, who, in their haste to reach the salient points which have struck their imagination, omit to express the connecting links, and so make that absurd which is perfectly clear to their own minds. Into the wilderness of definition we will not enter; but there appear to be two principal kinds of bulls,—one in which the man’s idea is sensible enough, though it appears nonsense to others, because of his excessive brevity, as in “He sent me to the devil and I came straight to your honour;” and another in which it is in itself nonsense, because he has overlooked one essential condition. Thus, when the blind man in Pratesi’s Dottor Febo is eagerly asseverating something, he exclaims, “May I become blind if...!” Castiglione records another bull of this kind (it will be found on page 28), which will at once be recognised as an old and familiar friend; and others will be met with in the course of the volume.

It must be confessed that Italian humour is often of the Aristophanic order, not merely in that (as has been already hinted) a great deal of it is concerned with topics usually (among us) omitted from polite conversation, but also in the more xxvthan free-and-easy way in which the Unseen is frequently dealt with. The worship of the saints—whatever may be said to the contrary—stands much upon the same footing among the ignorant and superstitious peasantry of Southern Italy (it is not so true of the Tuscans) as the polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome. And if familiarity bred contempt in the case of Aristophanes (it may not have been so—and we dare not say, in the face of learned commentators, that it was—but it certainly looks like it), like causes have produced like effects in Naples and Sicily. The Neapolitan lazzaroni has scant respect for San Gennaro, when the latter shows no signs of acceding to his wishes, but calls him animale and canaglia, and worse names than that. Capuana has an exceedingly characteristic sketch, entitled “Rottura col Patriarca,” in which a gentleman, who considers himself badly treated by St. Joseph, the patron of married couples (being disappointed in his hopes of an heir, besides numerous other misfortunes), declares that he has formally broken with that saint, and throws his picture out of window. His confessor remonstrates with him for his language on the subject, which is, to say the least, unparliamentary; but the gentleman replies, “As a patriarch, and the husband of the Virgin, I am willing to accord him all due respect, but ... in short, he has behaved very shabbily, and I will have no more to do with him.”

This suggests the subject of ejaculations, oaths, and imprecations, of which the Italians have an infinite variety, and as some of the most characteristic occur untranslated in the following selections, a few words of explanation may not be out of place. The subject has been treated so well by Story, that I cannot forbear quoting him once more, especially as the passage throws curious side-lights on some aspects of the national character.

“... By the way, a curious feature in the oaths of the Italians may be remarked. ‘Dio mio!’ is merely an exclamation of sudden surprise or wonder; ‘Madonna mia,’ of pity and sorrow; and ‘Per Cristo,’ of hatred and revenge. It is in the name of Christ (and not of God, as with us) that imprecations, curses, and maledictions are invoked by an Italian upon persons and things which have excited his rage; and the xxvireason is very simple. Christ is to him the judge and avenger of all, and so represented in every picture he sees, from Orcagna’s and Michael Angelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ down, while the Eternal Father is a peaceful old figure bending over him as he hurls down denunciations on the damned. Christ has but two aspects for him—one as the bambino, or baby, for which he cares nothing, and one as the terrible avenger of all. The oath comes from the Middle Ages, when Christ was looked upon mostly in the latter aspect; but in modern days, He is regarded as the innocent babe upon the lap of the Madonna. Generally, the oaths of the Italians are pleasant, and they have not forgotten some which their ancient ancestors used. They still swear by the loveliest of the heathen deities, the god of genial nature, Bacchus; and among their commonest exclamations are, ‘Per Bacco,’ ‘Corpo di Bacco,’ and even sometimes, in Tuscany particularly, ‘Per Bacco d’India,’ or ‘Per Dingi’ (sometimes Perdinci) Bacco (for Dionigi).” (To this we may add, “Per Diana,” “Corpo di Diana,” which are still common.)

“It is very common among them also to swear by some beautiful plant, as by capers (capperi) or the arbutus fruit (corbezzoli), as well as by the arch-priest, arciprete, whoever he may be. Nor do they disdain to give force to their sentiments on special occasions even by calling the cabbage to witness (Cavolo).”

To this category belongs “Persicomele!” (“Peaches and apples!”) the favourite exclamation of the jolly ecclesiastic in a sketch of Mario Pratesi’s, quoted in this volume. It will also be remembered how another Tuscan writer, Renato Fucini, makes a conscientious priest—shocked at the strong language used by his ecclesiastical superior, who flings “Giuraddio’s” and “Per Dio’s” about him on the smallest provocation—neutralise the effect, so to speak, by adding the milder and more legitimate “Bacco.” The Tuscans are celebrated throughout Italy for profane swearing. Pratesi speaks of “blaspheming according to the brutal Tuscan use,” and a recent writer, spending a few weeks at Sorrento, when in conversation with a boatman, challenged the latter to guess what part of Italy he came from. The man guessed several provinces unsuccessfully, and when told that his fare was a Florentine was unwilling to believe it, xxvii“perchè non avete bestemmiato il Santo nome di Dio.” But in this respect I believe the Sicilians and Neapolitans are not much behind the Tuscans. Their profanity is not like that of the English costermonger or bargeman—a repetition of more or less unreportable “swear-words,” without much coherence or meaning; but rather a system of elaborate cursing, in which the most appalling evils are wished in detail to the offending party, or else a volley of undisguised abuse addressed to the unseen powers, who are apostrophised without any circumlocution whatever. “He went away, blaspheming bad words (bestemmiando parolacce), enough to make heaven and earth tremble,” says Verga.

“But the most general oath,” to continue our quotation, “is accidente, or apoplexy, which one hears on all occasions. This word as ordinarily employed is merely an expletive or exclamation, but when used in anger intentionally as a malediction, under the form ‘Ch’un accidente te piglia’ (May an apoplexy overtake you!), it is the most terrible imprecation that ever came from the lips of a Catholic; for its real meaning is, ‘May so sudden a death strike you that you may have no chance of absolution by the priest, and so go down to hell.’ And as every true Catholic hopes by confession on his death-bed to obtain remission and absolution for all the sins of his life, this malediction, by cutting him off from such an arrangement, puts his soul in absolute danger of damnation; nay, if he have not accidentally confessed immediately before the apoplexy comes, sends him posting straight to hell. The being not utterable to ears polite is seldom referred to in Rome by his actual name, Diavolo, and our phrase, ‘Go to the devil,’ is shocking to an Italian; but they smooth down his name into ‘Diamine,’ or ‘Diascane,’ and thus save their consciences and their tongues from offence.”^[3]

xxviiiAnother Aristophanic feature, and one which seems to have appealed to the mediæval imagination all over Europe, so strongly as to have survived far beyond mediæval times, is the constant insistence on the folly and worthlessness of women. This proves, if anything (as in the fable of the lion and the statue), that it was the men who told the stories and made the proverbs; at the same time, the tendency is perhaps more marked in Italy than in other countries, and in a collection intended to be representative, it seemed right to give a sufficient number of specimens to illustrate it. Such is the rather pointless story about Domenico da Cigoli, preserved in a collection of 1600—and a glance down our two pages of proverbs will show what might otherwise seem an unfair proportion of misogynistic sentiment.

No survey of the humorous literature of Italy would be complete which did not take into account the blighting influence of the censorship, only abolished within the last thirty years. Dangerous, if not fatal, as such an institution must be to literature in general, the humorous genre feels its effects more than any other. It may be said that, considering the astonishing length which the earlier satirists, and even more modern writers of fairly decent repute, have gone in the direction of offences against good taste, to say nothing of morality, it is astonishing that they should have had anything to complain of in the way of restrictions. But the animus of the political censorship seems to have been reserved for anything that savoured of liberalism—a term which included the very mildest approach to a criticism on the Government or its actions; while the Inquisition has always been inclined to regard the faintest suspicion of a heretical dogma in theology as a far worse offence than any amount of mere indecency. Even had the censorship been exercised with more strictness in this direction, the facilities for contraband production would have neutralised its restraints, while it lay like a dead weight on all healthy intellectual activity. For though professedly free in some directions, the human mind is enslaved if fettered in any. The knowledge that politics, religion, or any other topic is a forbidden subject, exercises a paralysing influence on the mind, even of writers who have no particular inclination to take up that line. It is like xxixBluebeard’s prohibition of the hundredth room—not only does the locked door immediately arouse the desire to enter, but the ninety-nine open ones immediately lose all interest. If a practical commentary on Milton’s Areopagitica were needed it might be found in the history of the short-lived Conciliatore, the journal started by Silvio Pellico and his friends at Milan about 1818. Story gives a striking picture of the Roman censorship under the Papal Government previous to 1870.

“Nothing can be either published or performed in Rome without first submitting to the censorship and obtaining the permission of the ‘Custodes morum et rotulorum.’ Nor is this a mere form; on the contrary, it is a severe ordeal, out of which many a play comes so mangled as scarcely to be recognisable. The pen of the censor is sometimes so ruthlessly struck through whole acts and scenes that the fragments do not sufficiently hang together to make the action intelligible, and sometimes permission is absolutely refused to act the play at all. In these latter days the wicked people are so ready to catch at any words expressing liberal sentiments, and so apt to give a political significance to innocent phrases, that it behoves the censor to put on his best spectacles. Yet such is the perversity of the audience that his utmost care often proves unavailing, and sometimes plays are ordered to be withdrawn from the boards after they have been played by permission.

“The same process goes on with the libretti of the operas, and some of the requirements recall the fable of the ostrich, which, by merely hiding its head, fondly imagines it can render its whole body invisible. Imitating this remarkable bird, they have attempted to conceal the offence of certain well-known operas, with every air and word of which the Romans are familiar, simply by changing the title and the names of the characters, while the story remains intact. Thus certain scandalous and shameful stories attaching to the name of Alexander VI. and to the family of the Borgia, the title of Donizetti’s famous opera, which every gamin of Rome can sing, has been altered to that of Elena da Fosca, and under this name alone is it permitted to be played. In like manner I Puritani is whitewashed in Elvira Walton; and in the famous duo of Suoni la Tromba the words gridando libertà (shouting xxxliberty) become gridando lealtà (shouting loyalty)—liberty being a kind of thing of which the less that is said or sung in Rome the better. This amiable Government also, unwilling to foster a belief in devils, rebaptises Roberto il Diavolo into Roberto in Picardia, and conceals the name of William Tell under that of Rodolfo di Sterlink. Les Huguenots in the same way becomes in Rome Gli Anglicani, and Norma sinks into La Foresta d’Irminsac. Yet notwithstanding this, the principal airs and concerted pieces are publicly sold with their original names at all the shops. Oh, Papal ostrich! what bird is more foolish than thou?”

We find, from Minghetti’s Memoirs, that in 1864, at Bologna (then in the Papal State), any publication had to run the gauntlet of no less than seven censorships, and obtain the approval of—(1) The Literary Censor; (2) the Ecclesiastical Censor; (3) the Political Censor; (4) the Sant’ Uffizio (Inquisition). Then came—(5) Permission from the Bishop of the Diocese; (6) Permission from the Police; (7) Final Revision by the Inquisition.

It remains to say a few words about the translations included in this volume. When I could find any existing versions suited to my purpose, I have adopted them, always acknowledging their source; in other cases, I have myself translated the necessary passages. In doing this I have rather aimed at giving a coherent picture of what the author had in his mind, in a style which would at least give some idea of his tone and method of treatment, than at rendering his exact words, and any one having the curiosity to examine the originals would often find considerable liberties taken with the text. I have expanded here and contracted there—sometimes paraphrased, by giving corresponding English idioms or proverbs—sometimes tried to preserve the racy quaintness of the original, by rendering a mode of speech as it stands. “He said he would tie it to his finger till doomsday”—to indicate undying remembrance of an injury; and “It costs the very eyes out of one’s head”—“making a hole in the water” (for labour in vain)—“As pleased as an Easter day” (contento come una pasqua)—are vivid and picturesque locutions which it is a pity to disguise under more commonplace phraseology. The specimens are taken from all xxxiperiods of Italian literature; and represent, as far as possible, all its departments; though, as has been already pointed out, there are some rich and fruitful tracts of country in that wide region, in which we have been able to gather little or nothing. That the collection is in any sense complete or exhaustive cannot be pretended; but a Florilegium of translations can never be other than a very sorry representative of an original literature.

Acknowledgments are due to the following publishing houses for the permissions which they have courteously granted for translations of extracts from works published by them to be included in this volume:—To Mr. Ulrico Hoepli, for permission to include the extract from the Veglie di Neri, by Renato Fucini; to Mr. G. Barbera, of Florence, for permission to include the extract from his edition of In Provincia, by Mario Pratesi, and the extract from San Pantaleone, by Gabriele d’Annunzio; to Messrs. Fratelli Trèves, for permission to include the extracts from Verga and Edmondo de Amicis; and to Messrs. Chapman & Hall, for permission to include the extract from Mr. Story’s Roba di Roma. Thanks are also due to Mr. Luigi Capuana for his courteous permission to include the translations contained in this volume of extracts from his works.

There dwelt not long since in our city of Florence a painter named Calandrino, a man of simple mind, and much addicted to novelties. The most of his time he spent in the company of two brother painters, Bruno and Buffalmacco, both men of humour and mirth, and somewhat satirical. There lived in Florence, at the same time, a young man of very engaging manners, witty and agreeable, called Maso del Saggio, who, hearing of the extreme simplicity of Calandrino, resolved to derive some amusement from his love of the 3marvellous, and to excite his curiosity by some novel and wonderful tales. Happening, therefore, to meet him one day in the Church of St. John, and observing him attentively engaged in admiring the painting and sculpture of the tabernacle which had been lately placed over the altar in that church, he thought he had found a fit opportunity of putting his scheme into execution; and acquainting one of his friends with his intentions, they walked together to the spot where Calandrino was seated by himself, and, seeming not to be aware of his presence, began to converse on the qualities of precious stones, of which Maso spoke with all the confidence of an experienced and skilful lapidary. Calandrino lent a ready ear to this conference, and, perceiving from their loud speaking that their conversation was not of a private nature, he accosted them. Maso was not a little delighted at this, and, pursuing his discourse, Calandrino asked him where these stones were to be found. Maso replied, “They mostly abound in Berlinzone, near a city of the Baschi, in a country called Bengodi, in which the vines are tied with sausages, a goose is sold for a penny, and the goslings given into the bargain; where there is also a high mountain made of Parmesan grated cheese, whereon dwell people whose sole employ is to make macaroni and other dainties, boiling them with capon broth, and afterwards throwing them out to all who choose to catch them; and near to the mountain runs a river of white wine, the best that ever was drunk, and without one drop of water in it.” “Oh!” exclaimed Calandrino, “what a delightful country to live in! But pray, sir, tell me, what do they with the capons after they have boiled them?” “The Baschi,” said Maso, “eat them all!” “Have you,” said Calandrino, “ever been in that country?” “How,” answered Maso; “do you ask me if I were ever there? A thousand times at the least!” “And how far, I pray you, is this happy land from our city?” quoth Calandrino. “In truth,” replied Maso, “the miles are scarcely to be numbered; 4but, for the most part, we travel when we are in our beds at night, and if a man dream aright, he may be there in a few minutes.”... Calandrino, observing that Maso delivered all these speeches with a steadfast and grave countenance, believed them all, and said with much simplicity, “Believe me, sir, the journey is too far for me to undertake, but if it were somewhat nearer, I should like to accompany you thither. But now we are conversing, allow me to ask you, sir, whether or not any of the precious stones you spoke of are to be found in that country?” “Yes, indeed,” replied Maso; “there are two kinds of them to be found in those territories, and both possessing eminent virtues. The one kind are the sandstones of Settigniano and of Montisei.... The other is a stone which most of our lapidaries call heliotropium, and is of admirable virtue, for whoever carries it about his person is thereby rendered invisible as long as he pleases.” Calandrino then said, “This is wonderful indeed; but where else are these latter kind to be found?” To which Maso replied, “They are not infrequently to be found on our Mugnone.” “Of what size and colour is this stone?” said Calandrino. “It is of various sizes,” replied Maso, “some larger than others, but uniformly black.” Calandrino, treasuring up all these things in his mind, and pretending to have some urgent business on hand, took leave of Maso, secretly proposing to himself to go in quest of these stones, but resolved to do nothing until he had first seen his friends, Bruno and Buffalmacco, to whom he was much attached. Having found them, and told them about the wonderful stone, he proposed that they should at once go in search of it. Bruno signified his assent, but turning to Buffalmacco, said, “I fully agree with Calandrino, but I do not think that this is the proper time for our search, as the sun is now high, and so hot that we shall find all the stones on Mugnone dried and parched, and the very blackest will 5now seem the whitest. But in the morning, when the dew is on the ground, and before the sun has dried the earth, every stone will have its true colour. Besides, there are many labourers now working in the plain, who, seeing us occupied in so serious a search, may guess what we are seeking for, and may chance to find the stones before us, and we may then have our labour for our pains. Therefore, in my opinion, this is an enterprise that should be taken in hand early in the morning, when the black stones will be easily distinguished from the white, and a festival day were the best of all others, as there will be nobody abroad to discover us.” Buffalmacco applauded the advice of Bruno, and Calandrino assenting to it, they agreed that Sunday morning next ensuing should be the time when they would all go in pursuit of the stone; but Calandrino entreated them above all things not to reveal it to any person living, as it was confided to him in strict secrecy. Calandrino waited impatiently for Sunday morning, when he called upon his companions before break of day. They all then went out of the city at the gate of San Gallo, and did not halt until they came to the plain of Mugnone, where they immediately commenced their search for the marvellous stone. Calandrino went stealing on 6before the other two, persuading himself that he was born to find the heliotropium; and, looking on every side of him, he rejected all other stones but the black, with which he filled first his breast, and afterwards both of his pockets. He then took off his large painting-apron, which he fastened with his girdle in the manner of a sack, and filled that also; and, still not satisfied, he spread abroad his cloak, which, being also loaded with stones, he bound up carefully, for fear of losing the very best of them. Buffalmacco and Bruno during this time attentively eyed Calandrino, and observing that he had now completely loaded himself, and that their dinner-hour was drawing nigh, Bruno, according to their arrangement, said to Buffalmacco, pretending not to see Calandrino, although he was not far from them, “Buffalmacco, what has become of Calandrino?” Buffalmacco, who saw him close at hand, gazing all round, as if desirous to find him, replied, “I saw him even now before us, hard by.” “Undoubtedly,” said Bruno, “he has given us the slip and gone secretly home to dinner, and, making fools of us, has left us to pick up black stones on these scorching plains of Mugnone.” Calandrino, hearing them make use of these words while he stood so near to them, imagined that he had possessed himself of the genuine stone, and that by virtue of its qualities he was become invisible to his companions. His joy was now unbounded, and without saying a word, he resolved to return home with all speed, leaving his friends to provide for themselves. Buffalmacco, perceiving his intent, said to Bruno, “Why should we remain here any longer? Let us return to the city.” To which Bruno replied, “Yes, let us go; but I vow that Calandrino shall no more make a fool of me; and were I now as near him as I was not long since, I would give him such a remembrance on the heel with this flint stone as should stick by him a month, and give him a lasting lesson;” and ere 7he had well finished the words he struck Calandrino a violent blow on the heel with the stone. Though the blow was evidently very painful, Calandrino still preserved his silence, and only mended his pace. Buffalmacco then, selecting another large flint stone, said to Bruno, “Thou seest this pebble! If Calandrino were but here he should have a brave knock on the loins;” and, taking aim, he threw it and struck Calandrino a violent blow on the back; and then all the way along the plains of Mugnone they did nothing but pelt him with stones, jesting and laughing until they came to the gate of San Gallo. They then threw down the remainder of the stones they had gathered, and, stepping before Calandrino into the gateway, acquainted the guards with the whole matter, who, in order to support the jest, would not seem to see Calandrino as he passed by them, and were exceedingly amused to observe him sweat and groan under his burdensome load. Without resting himself in any place, he proceeded straight to his 8own house, which was near the mills, and was neither met nor seen by any one, as everybody was then at dinner. When he entered his own house, ready to sink under his burden, his wife—a handsome and discreet woman of the name of Monna Tessa—happened to be standing at the head of the stairs, and being disconcerted and impatient at his long absence, somewhat angrily exclaimed, “I thought the devil would never let thee come home! All the city have dined, and yet we must remain without our dinner.” When Calandrino heard these words, and found that he was not invisible to his wife, he fell into a fit of rage, and exclaimed, “Wretch as thou art, thou hast utterly undone me; but I will reward thee for it;” and ascending into a small room, and ridding himself of the stones, he ran down again to his wife, and seizing her by the hair of the head threw her on the ground, beat and kicked her in the most unmerciful manner. Buffalmacco and Bruno, after they had spent some time in laughter with the guards at the gate, followed Calandrino at their leisure, and, arriving at his house and hearing the disturbance upstairs, they called out to him. Calandrino, still in a furious rage, came to the window and entreated they would come up to him. They, counterfeiting great surprise, ascended the stairs, and found the chamber floor covered with stones and Calandrino’s wife seated in a corner, her limbs severely bruised, her hair dishevelled, and her face bleeding; and on the other side Calandrino himself, weary and exhausted, flung on a chair. After regarding him for some time, they said, “How now, Calandrino, art thou building a house, that thou hast provided thyself with so many loads of stones?” and then added, “And Monna Tessa—what has happened to her? You surely have been beating her! What is the meaning of this?” Calandrino, exhausted with carrying the stones, and with his furious gust of passion, and moreover, with the misfortune which he considered had befallen him, could not 9collect sufficient spirits to speak a single word in reply. Whereupon Buffalmacco said further, “Calandrino, if you have cause for anger in any other quarter, yet you should not have made such mockery of your friends as you have done to-day, carrying us out to the plains of Mugnone, like a couple of fools, and leaving us there without taking leave of us, or so much as bidding good-day. But, be assured, this is the last time thou wilt ever serve us in this manner.” Calandrino, somewhat recovered, replied, “Alas! my friends, be not offended; the case is very different from what you think! Unfortunate man that I am! the rare and precious stone that you speak of, I found, and will relate the whole truth to you. When you asked each other the first time what was become of me, I was hard by you, not more than two yards away; and, perceiving that you saw me not, I went before you, smiling to myself to hear you vent your rage upon me;” and recounted all that had happened on his way home, and, to convince them, showed them where he was struck on the back and on the heel; and further added, “As I passed through the gates, I saw you standing with the guards, but by virtue of the stone I carried in my bosom, was undiscovered by you all; and in going through the streets I met many friends and acquaintances, who are in the daily habit of stopping and conversing with me, and yet none of them addressed me, as I passed invisible to them all. But at length arriving at my own house, this fiend of a woman waiting on the stair-head by ill luck happened to see me,—and you well know that women cause all things to lose their virtue,—so that I, who might have called myself the only happy man in Florence, am now the most miserable of all. Therefore did I justly beat her, as long as my strength would allow me, and I know no reason why I should not yet tear her in a thousand pieces, for I may well curse the day of our marriage, and the hour she entered my house.” Buffalmacco and Bruno, when 10they heard this, feigned the greatest astonishment, though they were ready to burst with laughter; but when they saw Calandrino rise in a rage, with intent to beat his wife again, they stepped between them, protesting that she was in no way to blame, but rather he himself, who, knowing beforehand that women cause all things to lose their virtue, had not expressly commanded her not to be seen in his presence all that day, until he had satisfied himself of the real qualities of the stone; and that, doubtless, Providence had deprived him of his good fortune, because, though his friends had accompanied him and assisted in the search, he had deceived them and not allowed them a share in the benefit of the discovery. After much more conversation, they with difficulty reconciled him to his wife, and, leaving him overwhelmed with grief for the loss of the heliotropium, took their departure.

When Dante had dined he went out, and passing by the Porta S. Pietro, heard a blacksmith beating iron upon the anvil, and singing some of his verses like a song, jumbling the lines together, mutilating and confusing them, so that it seemed to Dante he was receiving a great injury. He said nothing, but going into the blacksmith’s shop, where there were many articles made in iron, he took up his hammer and pincers and scales and many other things, and threw them out into the road. The blacksmith, turning round upon him, cried out, “What the devil are you doing? are you mad?” “What are you doing?” said Dante. “I am working at my proper business,” said the blacksmith, “and you are spoiling my work, throwing it out into the road.” 11Said Dante, “If you do not like me to spoil your things, do not spoil mine.” “What thing of yours am I spoiling?” said the man. And Dante replied, “You are singing something of mine, but not as I made it. I have no other trade but this, and you spoil it for me.” The blacksmith, too proud to acknowledge his fault, but not knowing how to reply, gathered up his things and returned to his work; and when he sang again, sang Tristram and Launcelot, and left Dante alone.

Messer Bernabò, Lord of Milan, being outwitted by the clever reasoning of a miller, bestowed upon him a valuable benefice. Now this lord was in his time greatly feared beyond all other rulers, and though he was cruel, yet was there in his cruelty a great measure of justice. Among many cases which happened to him was this—that a rich abbot, for a certain act of negligence (in that he had not properly fed two hounds belonging to the said lord, and so had spoilt their tempers), was by him fined 4000 scudi. At this the abbot began to ask for mercy, and the said lord thereupon said to him: “If thou declarest unto me four things, I will remit everything; and the things are these—I will that thou shouldst tell me how far it is from here to heaven; how much water there is in the sea; what they are doing in hell; and what is the worth of my person.” The abbot hearing this began to sigh, and thought himself in worse plight than before; yet, for the sake of peace and to gain time, he prayed Bernabò that it would please him to grant him a term for the answering of such deep questions. And the lord granted him the whole of the following day, 12and, as one impatient to hear the end of the matter, made him give security that he would return. The abbot returned to his abbey exceeding sorrowful and full of thought, and puffing and blowing like a frightened horse. When he had got thither, he met with a miller who was one of his tenants, and who, seeing him thus afflicted, said: “My lord, what is the matter, that ye puff and blow on this wise?” Said the abbot: “I have good cause, for his lordship is going to be the ruin of me if I do not declare unto him four things, which neither Solomon nor Aristotle could do.” Said the miller: “What things are these?” The abbot told him. Then the miller thought for a while, and said to the abbot: “Sir, I will get ye out of this strait, an ye will.” The abbot replied: “Would to God it might be so!” Said the miller: “I think both God and the saints will be willing.” The abbot, who knew not what he would be at, said: “If thou doest it, take from me what thou wilt, for thou shalt ask me for nothing that I will not give thee, if it be possible.”... Then said the miller: “I must put on your tunic and hood, and I will shave my beard, and to-morrow morning, very early, I will go into his presence, saying that I am the abbot, and I will settle the four questions in such a way that I think he will be content.” The abbot could not wait a moment before he had put the miller in his place, and so it was done. Early in the morning the miller set out, and when he had reached the gate of Bernabò’s house, he knocked and said that such and such an abbot wished to answer certain questions which the lord had put to him. The lord, willing to hear what the abbot had to say, and wondering that he had returned so quickly, had him called. The miller, coming into his presence in a room which was not very well lighted, made his obeisance, holding his hand as much as possible before his face, and was asked by Bernabò whether he were able to answer the four questions. And he replied: “My lord, 13I am. Ye asked how far it is from here to heaven; from this spot it is just thirty-six millions, eight hundred and fifty-four thousand, seventy-two and a half miles, and twenty-two paces.” Said Bernabò: “Thou hast given it very accurately; how wilt thou prove this?” The miller replied: “Have the distance measured, and if it be not even as I say, ye may have me hanged by the neck. In the second place, ye asked how much water there is in the sea. This was very hard to find out, since it is a thing that is never still, and there is always more being added; but I have found out that there are in the sea 25,982,000,000 hogsheads, 7 barrels, 12 gallons, and 2 glasses.” Said the lord: “How knowest thou this?” The miller answered: “I reckoned it as well as I could,—if ye do not believe me, send and fetch barrels, and have it measured. And if it be not correct, ye may have me quartered. In the third place, your lordship asked what was being done in hell. In hell there is hanging, drawing, quartering, and cutting off of heads going on,—neither less nor more than what your lordship is doing here.” Bernabò asked: “What reason dost thou give for this?” He replied: “I have talked with a man who had been there, and it was from this man Dante the Florentine heard what he wrote concerning the things of hell; but this man is dead, and if ye do not believe me, send and ask him. Fourthly, ye would know what was the value of your lordship’s person, and I say that it is worth twenty-nine pence.” When Messer Bernabò heard this, he turned to him in a fury, saying, “May the plague seize thee! Dost think I am worth no more than an earthen pipkin?” The miller replied, and not without great fear: “My Lord, listen to reason; ye know that our Lord was sold for thirty pence,—I am surely right in supposing that ye are worth one penny less than he.” When Bernabò heard this, he imagined that this man could not be the abbot, and, looking fixedly at him, perceiving that he was a man of far more sense than 14the abbot, he said to him: “Thou art not the abbot.” The terror which the miller then had, every one may imagine for himself; he knelt down, and with clasped hands asked for mercy, telling Bernabò that he was the tenant of the abbey mill, and how and why he had appeared before him in this disguise, and that it was rather to please him than from any ill intention. But Bernabò, hearing this, said: “Well, then, since he has made thee abbot, and thou art worth more than he, by the faith of God, I will confirm thee in thine office; and it is my will that from henceforth thou be the abbot, and he the miller, and that thou have all the revenue of the monastery, and he of the mill.” And thus he caused it to be during all the rest of his life, that the miller should be an abbot, and the abbot a miller.

Faustino, of Bologna, was in love with the beautiful Eugenia, but was unable to meet her on account of the hostility of her parents, who kept a very strict watch over her, and debarred her from the very sight of him as much as they possibly could. Yet her mother, being of a religious turn of mind, was unwilling that she should relinquish her usual attendance on divine worship, and herself accompanied her daughter every morning to hear mass at a church near their own house, but at so very early an hour that not even the artisans of the city, much less the young gentry of the place, were stirring. And there she heard service performed by a priest expressly on her own account, though several other persons might happen to be present, who were in the habit of rising early.

Now among these was a certain corn merchant named Ser Nastagio de’ Rodiotti, a man who had driven many a hard bargain and thriven wonderfully in his trade, but of so devout a turn withal that he would not for the world have made an usurious contract, or even speculated to any extent, without having first attended mass. He lost not a single opportunity of showing himself at church among the earliest of the congregation, and was ready for business before a great portion of his fellow-citizens were stirring.

Now in a short time it also reached the ears of Faustino, through the good offices, it is supposed, of the young 16lady, that High Mass was to be heard every morning at a certain church, with every particular relating to the devotees who attended, and the nearest way thither. Rejoiced at this news, her lover now resolved to rise somewhat earlier than he had been accustomed to do, that he might avail himself of the same advantage the lady enjoyed, in beginning the day with religious duties. For this purpose he assumed a different dress, the better to deceive the eyes of her careful mother, being perfectly aware that she only made her appearance thus early with her daughter for the sake of concealing her from his sight. In this way the young lady had the merit of bringing Faustino to church, where they gazed at each other with the utmost devotion, except, indeed, when the unlucky tradesman just mentioned happened to place himself, as was frequently the case, exactly in their way, so as to interrupt the silent communion of souls. And this he did in so vexatious a manner that they could hardly observe each other for a moment without exposing themselves to his searching eye and keen observation. Greatly displeased at this kind of inquisition, the lover frequently wished the devout corn dealer in Purgatory, or that he would at least offer up his prayers in another church. Such an antipathy did he at length conceive to Ser Nastagio, that he resolved to employ his utmost efforts to prevail upon him to withdraw himself from that spot. He at last hit upon a plan which he thought sure to succeed, in a manner equally safe and amusing. He hastened without delay to the officiating priest, whom he addressed as follows:—“It has ever been esteemed, my good Messer Pastore, a most heavenly and laudable disposition to devote ourselves to the relief of our poorer brethren. And this you doubtless know far better than I can tell you.... But there are many who, however destitute, feel ashamed to come forward for the purpose of begging alms. Now I think that I have of late 17observed one of them in a person who frequents your church. He was formerly a Jew, but not long ago he became a Christian, and one whose exemplary life and conduct render him in all respects worthy of the name. There is not a more destitute being on the face of the earth; while such is his modesty that I assure you I have frequently had the utmost difficulty in persuading him to accept of alms. It would really be a meritorious act were you to touch some morning on his cruel misfortunes, relating his conversion to our faith, and the singular modesty with which he attempts to conceal his wants. This would probably procure for him a handsome contribution; and if you will only have the kindness to apprise me of the day, I will bring a number of my friends along with me, and we shall be sure to find this poor fellow seated in your church.”

Our kind-hearted priest cheerfully complied with the wily lover’s request. He proposed the next Sunday morning, when a large number of people would be present, regretting that he had not been sooner informed of the affair. Faustino next gave an exact description of the corn merchant, observing that the poor man always appeared neat and clean, so that he could not possibly mistake him. Then, taking leave of the good friar, he hastened to communicate this piece of mischief to some of his young companions. Punctually next Sunday they were at the church, even early enough to hear the first mass; and there Messer Nastagio was seen at his usual post, surrounded by a crowd of people. After going through the Evangelists and the Creed, and muttering a few Aves, the good priest paused and looked about him; then, wiping his forehead, and taking breath for a while, he again addressed the congregation as follows:—“Dearly beloved brethren, you must be aware that the most pleasing thing you can do in the eyes of the Lord is to show your charity towards 18poorer Christians.... As I know you are not wanting in charity, but rather abounding in good works, I am not afraid to inform you that there is a most deserving yet destitute object before you, who, though too modest to urge your compassion, is in every way worthy of it. Pray take pity upon him. Behold him!” he cried, pointing full at Ser Nastagio: “Lo! thou art the man. Yes!” he continued, while the corn merchant stared at him in the utmost astonishment; “yes, thou art the man! Thy modesty shall no longer conceal thee from the eyes of the people which are now fixed upon thee. For though thou wert once an Israelite, my friend, thou art now one of the lost sheep which are found, and if thou hast not much temporal, thou hast a hoard of eternal wealth.” He addressed himself during the whole of this time, both by words and signs, to Ser Nastagio, yet the poor merchant could by no means persuade himself against the evidence of his own reason that he was the person pointed out. Without stirring, therefore, he somewhat reluctantly put his hand into his pocket, preparing to bestow his alms in the same manner as the rest of the congregation. The first person to present his contribution was the author of the trick, who, approaching the spot where the merchant stood, offered his alms, and, in spite of Ser Nastagio, dropped them into his hat. And though the incensed tradesman exclaimed, “I have a longer purse than thou hast ears!” it availed him nothing. The good priest pursued his theme without noticing Ser Nastagio’s remark, except by saying, “Give no credit to his words, good people, but give him alms, give him alms; it is his modest merit which prevents him from accepting them. Yes, go thrust them into the good man’s pockets; fill his hat, his shoes, his clothes with them, and make him bear away with him the good fruits of your charity.” Then once more directing his attention to the confused and angry merchant, he exclaimed, “Do not look thus ashamed, but 19take them, take them; for, believe me, good friend, many greater and better men have been reduced to the same piteous plight. You should rather consider it as an honour than otherwise, inasmuch as your necessities have not been the consequence of your own misconduct, but solely arise from your embracing the light of truth.”

The priest had no sooner ended than there was a general rush of the whole congregation towards the place where the merchant stood, endeavouring who should be first to deposit their donations in his hands, while he in vain attempted to resist the tide of charitable contributions which now poured in on every side. He had likewise to struggle against his own avarice, for he would willingly have received the money, though he did all in his power to repulse their gifts. When the tumult had a little subsided, Ser Nastagio began to attack the priest in the most virulent terms, until the preacher was inclined to suspect that in some way he had been misinformed. He thus began to make his excuses, as well as he could, for the error into which he had fallen; but the lover’s purpose was accomplished, and the deed could not be recalled. For the story was quickly circulated through the whole city, to the infinite amusement of all its inhabitants, and Ser Nastagio was never known to enter that church again.

In our city there flourished a certain learned advocate, a member of the great Castello family, Messer Dionisio by name. Having occasion to enter into the legal arena with another advocate, whose name I cannot just now recollect, Messer Dionisio was retained as counsel to Signor Giovanni 20de’ Bentivogli. The case was tried before our worthy magistrate, Messer Nicoluzzo de’ Piccoluomini, of Siena; and as it often happens to these gentlemen of the robe, when deeply engaged in the interests of their clients, they became so very personal in the cause of their principals, that at length our friend’s adversary, unable to bear his bitter taunts, fairly challenged his honour and veracity, which so incensed Messer Dionisio that, in a fit of sudden passion, he clenched his fist and smote his learned antagonist very severely on the mouth. The presiding magistrate, greatly scandalised at our friend’s new method of enforcing his arguments, vigorously remonstrated with him, and threatened to enforce the full penalty of the law, assuring him that he dealt too mildly in not committing him on the spot. He would have executed his menace, had not the high qualities and connections of Messer Dionisio restrained him. He replied to the judge’s threats, with the most perfect composure, “Most noble prætor, according to the tenor of our civil law, I believe you will only be able to demand about ten pieces from me;” and putting his hand in his pocket, he drew forth ten broad gold ducats, saying, “Take only what the law allows you, and hand me the remainder back.” But the judge, seizing in a rage upon the whole, cried, “You must apply elsewhere for the remainder;” which again brought the angry counsellor upon his legs. Turning quickly round upon his adversary, now busily employed in repairing the ruins of his jaws, and uttering fierce exclamations for justice, our friend again addressed him: “If this be the case, I must have what I have paid for, over and above;” and he struck him a more violent blow than before upon his left cheek. He then addressed the judge: “My lord, you have made me pay for more than the amount of both the arguments I have applied in the very face of my learned brother; but keep the money—he is a pitiful advocate indeed who would scruple to take advantage of his opponent for the sake of 21ten ducats. I have had my revenge.” And turning his back upon the court, he left his brother advocate quite unable to make any reply, and grievously lamenting and appealing to the magistrate for justice. He was at last obliged to be patient, for though somewhat incensed the court could not refrain from indulging a degree of mirth at Dionisio’s singular arguments. The only sentence obtained that day in court was, “He who received the injury sustained all the loss.”

Buonamico di Cristofano, nicknamed Buffalmacco, was a pupil of Andrea Tafi, and has been celebrated as a jester by Boccaccio. Franco Sacchetti also tells how, when Buffalmacco was still a boy with Andrea, his master had the habit, when the nights were long, of getting up before day to work, and calling his boys. This was displeasing to Buonamico, who had to rise in the middle of his best sleep, and he considered how he might prevent Andrea from getting up before day to work, and this was what occurred to him. Having found thirty great beetles in an ill-kept cellar, he fastened on each of their backs a little candle, and at the hour when Andrea was used to rise, he put them one by one through a hole in the door into Andrea’s chamber, having first lighted the candles. His master awaking at the hour for calling Buffalmacco, and seeing the lights, was seized with terror and began to tremble like a fearful old man as he was, and to say his prayers and repeat the psalms; and at last, putting his head under the clothes, he thought no more that night of calling Buffalmacco, but lay trembling 22with fear till daybreak. The morning being come, he asked Buonamico if, like him, he had seen more than a thousand devils. Buonamico answered, “No,” for he had kept his eyes closed, and wondered he had not been called. “What!” said Tafi, “I had something else to think of than painting, and am resolved to go into another house.” The next night, although Buonamico only put three beetles into Tafi’s chamber, yet he, from the last night’s terror and the fear of those few devils, could get no sleep at all, and, as soon as it was day, left the house determined never to return, and it took a great deal of good counsel to make him change his mind. At last Buonamico brought the priest to him, to console him. And Tafi and Buonamico discussing the matter, Buonamico said: “I have always heard say that demons are the greatest enemies of God, and consequently they ought to be the chief adversaries of painters, because not only do we always make them hideous, but we also never cease making saints on all the walls, and so cause men in despite of the devils to become more and more devout. So these devils being enraged against us, as they have greater power by night than by day, they come playing us these tricks, and it will be worse if this custom of getting up early is not quite given up.” With such words Buffalmacco managed the matter, what the priest said helping him; so that Tafi left off getting up early, and the devils no longer went about the house at night with candles. But not many months after, Tafi, drawn by the desire of gain, and having forgotten his fears, began afresh to get up early and to call Buffalmacco; whereon the beetles began again to appear, until he was forced by his fears to give it up entirely, being earnestly counselled to do so by the priest. And the matter being noised abroad in the city for a time, neither Tafi nor any other painter ventured to get up at night to work.

23While painting the church of the convent of Faenza, at Florence, Buffalmacco, who was very careless and negligent in his dress, as in other things, did not always wear his hood and mantle, as was the fashion at the time; and the nuns, watching him through the screen they had erected, began to complain that it did not please them to see him in his doublet. At last, as he always appeared in the same fashion, they began to think that he was only some boy employed in mixing colours; and they gave him to understand, through their abbess, that they should prefer to see his master, and not always him. To this Buonamico answered good-humouredly that when the master came he would let them know, understanding, nevertheless, how little confidence they had in him. Then he took a stool, and placed upon it another, and on the top he put a pitcher or water-jug, and fastened a hood on the handle, and covered up the rest of the jug with a cloak, fastening it well behind the tables; and having fixed a pencil in the spout of the jug, he went away. The nuns coming again to see the picture through a hole that they had made in the screen, saw the supposed master in his fine attire, and not doubting that he was working with all his might, doing very different work from what that boy did, for several days were quite content. At 24last, being desirous to see what fine things the master had done in the last fortnight (during which time Buonamico had not been there at all), one night, thinking he was gone, they went to see his picture, and were overcome with confusion when one more bold than the rest detected the solemn master, who during the fortnight had done no work at all. But, acknowledging that he had only treated them as they deserved, and that the work which he had done was worthy of praise, they sent their steward to call Buonamico back; and he with great laughter went back to his work, letting them see the difference between men and water-jugs, and that it does not always do to judge a man’s work by his clothes. So in a few days he finished a picture with which they were greatly pleased, except that the faces seemed to them to be too pale and wan. Buonamico having heard this, and knowing that the Abbess had some wine which was the best in Florence, told them that if they wished to remedy the defect, it could only be done by mixing the colours with good wine; and then if the cheeks were touched with the colour, they would become red and of a more lively aspect. The good sisters hearing this, and ready to believe everything, kept him always supplied with excellent wine while he worked; and he, while enjoying the wine himself, to please them, made his colours more fresh and bright.

A certain painter had a picture, wherein was an ox which looked better than the rest. Michael Angelo Buonarotti being asked why the painter had made it more life-like than the rest, replied, “Every painter succeeds best in a portrait of himself.”

Another painter had executed a historical picture, in which every figure was copied from some other artist, insomuch that no part of the picture was his own. It was shown to Michael Angelo Buonarotti, who, when he had seen it, was asked by a very intimate friend of his what he thought of it. He replied: “He has done well, but, at the 26Day of Judgment, when all bodies will resume their own limbs again, I do not know what will become of that historical picture, for there will be nothing left of it.”

I have not been able to get a wink of sleep to-night, for wondering how Callimaco and the rest have been getting on. I have been trying to pass the time, while waiting, by attending to various matters. I said the morning prayers, 27read a chapter of the Lives of the Holy Fathers, went into church and lit a lamp which had gone out, and changed the veil of a statue of the Madonna which works miracles. How many times have I told the monks to keep that image clean? And then they wonder why there is a lack of devotion! I remember the time when there were five hundred images here, and now there are not twenty. This is all our own fault; we have not been able to keep up the reputation of the place. We used to go in procession after service every evening, and have the Lauds sung every Saturday. We always made vows here, so as to get fresh images, and we used to encourage the men and women who came to confession to make vows likewise. Nowadays none of these things are done, and we are astonished that there is so little enthusiasm! What an amazingly small quantity of brains these monks of mine have among them!

There was once at Padua a Sicilian scholar called Pontius, who seeing one day a countryman with a pair of fat fowls, pretending that he wanted to buy them, made a bargain with him and said, “Come home with me, and over and above the price I will give thee some breakfast.” So he led him to a place where there was a bell-tower, which is separate from the church, so that one can go all round it; and opposite one of the four faces of the Campanile was the end of a little street. Here Pontius, having first thought of what he wished to do, said to the countryman: “I have wagered these fowls with one of my comrades, who says that this tower is certainly forty feet in circumference; and I say no. So just at that moment when I met you I had been buying this 28string to measure it with; and before we go home, I want to ascertain which of us has won.” Thus saying, he took the string out of his sleeve, and gave one end of it to the countryman to hold, and saying, “Give here!” he took the fowls from him, and holding the other end of the string, began to go round the tower, as if to measure it, making the countryman stop on that side of the tower which was opposite the end of the little street. When he had reached this side he drove a nail into the wall and tied the string to it, and thus leaving it, went off quietly down the street with the fowls. The countryman remained for a great space of time, waiting till he should have finished measuring; but at last, when he had several times said, “What are you doing so long?” he went to see, and found that the one who held the string was not Pontius, but a nail driven into the wall, which was all that remained to him as payment for the fowls.

The Bishop of Corvia, in order to find out the intentions of the Pope, one day said to him: “Holy father, it is commonly reported in all Rome, and even in the palace, that your holiness is about to make me governor.” Then the Pope replied, “Never mind what they say; they are nothing but low-tongued rascals.”

A certain pleader, to whom his adversary said, in presence of the judge: “What art thou barking for?” replied, “Because I see a thief.”

The Archbishop of Florence once said to Cardinal Alessandrino that a man has nothing but his goods, his body, and his soul; and that the first is ruined for him by the 29lawyers, the second by the doctors, and the third by the theologians. Then Giuliano the Magnificent quoted the remarks by Nicoletto—viz., that it was rare to find a lawyer who would go to law, a doctor who would take physic, or a theologian who was a good Christian.

A miser, who had refused to sell his corn while it was dear, seeing that the price had gone down, hanged himself in despair to one of the beams in his chamber. One of his servants, having heard the noise, ran in, and finding his master hanging from the ceiling, forthwith cut the rope and so saved his life. When the miser had come to himself, he insisted that the servant should pay for the rope which he had cut.

As Duke Frederic of Urbino was one day talking of what was to be done with a large quantity of earth, which had been dug up in order to lay the foundation of his palace, an abbot who was present said: “My lord, I have been thinking where it should be put, and I have a good idea: order a great ditch to be dug, and you may then dispose of the earth without further hindrance.” The duke replied, not without a smile: “What are we to do with the earth which will be dug from this new ditch?” The abbot answered: “Let it be made big enough to hold both.” And thus, although the duke tried to show him that the larger the ditch the more earth would be dug out of it, he could not understand that it could not be made large enough to contain both heaps, but only replied, “Make it so much the larger.”

[Astolfo journeys to the Moon, on the winged steed Hippogrif, to recover the wits which Orlando has lost for love of the Princess Angelica.]

... Now Astolfo was conducted by his guide into a narrow valley between two steep mountains. And in this place there was miraculously collected together everything which gets lost on earth, either through some failing of our own, or by the fault of time or fortune. I mean not only riches and power, but also those things which fortune alone can neither give nor take away. Many 33a reputation lies up there, which time, like a moth, has long been gnawing at here below, and also numberless vows and good resolutions made by sinners. There we should find the tears and sighs of lovers, the time lost in gaming, all the wasted leisure of ignorant men, and all vain intentions which have never been put into action. Of fruitless desires there are so many that they lumber up the greater part of that place. In short, whatever you have lost here below you will find again if you ascend thither.

Our Paladin, as he passed along, now and again asking questions of his guide, saw a mountain of blown bladders, which seemed to be full of noise inside. And he knew that these were the ancient crowns of the Assyrians, and of Lydia, and of the Persians and Greeks, which once were famous, while now their very names are almost forgotten. Close by he saw great masses of gold and silver piled up in heaps, which were those gifts that people made, in hopes of getting a reward, to kings and princes. He saw wreaths of flowers with traps hidden among them, and heard, in asking, that they were flatteries. Verses that men made in praise of their patrons are seen there, under the form of grasshoppers, who have hurt themselves with chirping.... He saw many broken bottles of different kinds, and found that they stand for the service men pay to courts, and the thanks they get for it. Then he came to a great pool of spilt broth, and asking what it was, his guide told him that it represented the alms people direct to be given after their deaths. Then he passed by a great heap of various flowers, which once were sweet-scented, but now have a foul odour; this was the gift (if we may be permitted to say so) that Constantine bestowed on the good Pope Sylvester.

He saw a great quantity of twigs covered with bird-lime, there, O fair ladies, are your beauty! He saw ... but it would be an endless task to count up the things which were shown him there. The only thing he did not find was 34folly: that remains here on earth, for no one ever parts with it.

At last he came to that which we are all so firmly persuaded we possess, that no one ever prayed to have it given him—I mean common sense. There was a huge heap of it, as big as all the other things put together. It was like a clear, soft liquid, which easily evaporates if it is not kept tightly corked, and was contained in bottles of various shapes and sizes, each one being labelled with the name of its owner. Astolfo noticed one which was much larger than the rest, and read on the label, “Orlando’s Wits.” He saw also a great part of his own; but what made him marvel more than anything was the fact that many people whom he had believed to have plenty of sense were now shown to have little or none, the bottles marked with their names being nearly full. Some lose it through love, others in striving after honours; yet others, in seeking for riches by land and sea, or by putting their trust in great lords and princes, or in pursuing after follies of magic and sorcery, or gems or pictures, or anything else which a man values above others. There was a great quantity of the wits of philosophers and astrologers stored there, and also of those of poets. Astolfo took up his own, having received permission to do so, and put the flask to his nose; and it appears that his wits returned to their place right enough, for Turpin confesses that from thenceforth Astolfo lived very wisely indeed for a long time. But afterwards, it is true, he made one mistake which once more deprived him of his brains. Then he took up the large flask which contained Orlando’s, and which was no light weight, and turned to depart....

When I made this speech, there was present that gentleman of Cardinal Santa Fiore’s with whom I had had words, and confirmed to the Pope all that had been told him! The Pope remained swelling with rage, and said nothing. Now I do not wish to fail in stating my reasons in a just and righteous manner. That gentleman of Santa Fiore’s came to me one day, and brought me a little ring all tarnished with quicksilver, saying, “Burnish this ring for me, and make haste about it.” I had a great many pieces of goldsmith’s work in hand, with most valuable jewels waiting to be set, and hearing myself, moreover, ordered about with so much assurance by a man whom I had never seen or spoken to before, answered that I had not a burnisher by me just then, and that he had better go to another. He, without any reason in the world, told me that I was an ass. To these words of his I replied that he did not speak the truth, and that I was a man, on every account worth more than he; but that, if he bothered me, I would certainly kick harder than any ass. He went straight to the cardinal, and made out that I had all but murdered him. Two days after this I was shooting behind the palace at a wild pigeon, which had its nest in a hole, very high up; and that same pigeon I had seen shot at by a goldsmith named Giovan Francesco della Tacca, a Milanese, who had never hit it. On the day when I was shooting, it had become shy, and scarcely showed its head; and because this Giovan Francesco and I were rival marksmen, certain gentlemen and friends of mine who were in my workshop pointed it out to me, and said, “That is Tacca’s pigeon which he has so often shot at. See, the poor bird has grown suspicious, and scarcely shows its head.” I looked up, and said, “It shows quite enough for 37me to hit it, if I only had time to take aim first.” Those gentlemen said that the man himself who invented the firelock could never hit it. I replied I was willing to wager a pitcher of the best Greek wine that I would do so; and, taking aim, and shooting from the arm, without any support for my piece, I did what I had promised, without thinking of the cardinal or anybody else; nay, I had the less reason to do so, as I believed the cardinal to be very much my patron. Thus may the world see what divers ways Fortune takes, when she wishes to be the ruin of a man. To return to the Pope: he remained, all swollen and sulky, brooding over what he had heard....

When we had passed the Mount Simplon aforesaid, we found a river near a place called Indevedro. This river was very wide and rather deep, and crossed by a little narrow bridge without a parapet. There was a hard frost that morning, and when I reached the bridge—for I was in front of the rest, and saw that it was very dangerous—I ordered my young men and the servants to dismount, and lead their horses by the bridle. Thus I passed the said bridge in safety, and went on talking with one of those two Frenchmen, who was a gentleman. The other was a notary, who had remained somewhat behind, and jeered at that gentleman and at me, saying that for fear of nothing at all we had preferred the discomfort of going on foot; to whom I turned, and seeing him on the middle of the bridge, prayed him to come softly, for that it was a very dangerous place. This man, who could not help showing his French nature, said to me in French that I was a man of little 38courage, and that there was no danger at all. While he was saying these words he pricked his horse with the spur, through which means it suddenly slipped over the edge of the bridge, and fell close beside a large stone, turning over with its legs in the air; and as God very often shows compassion to fools, this beast, along with the other beast, his horse, fell into a great and deep hole, wherein both he and his horse went under water. As soon as I saw this I began to run, and with great difficulty leaped upon the stone aforesaid, and, holding on by it and hanging over the brink, I seized the edge of a gown which that man was wearing, and by that gown I pulled him up, while he was still under water; and because he had drunk a great quantity of water, and within a little would have been drowned, I, seeing him out of danger, told him I was rejoiced at having saved his life. Whereat he answered me that I had done nothing—that the most important thing were his parchments, which were worth much money. It seemed that he spoke thus in anger, all soaked through as he was, and muttering confusedly. At this I turned to the guides we had with us, and promised to pay them if they would help this beast. One of the guides valorously, and with great difficulty, set himself to do what he could, and fished up all the parchments, so that he lost nothing; the other would not put himself to any trouble to help him....

Buffalmacco was a famous painter in his day; and in my judgment—and I am not altogether a fool in these matters—he still deserves to be preferred to Titian and the divine Michael Angelo—and one can go no further than that. If you wish, Signor Baldi, to know the reasons and motives of this judgment of mine, do not expect me to say that Buffalmacco was so skilled and perfect a master as to be able to teach the art of painting in its greatest refinements to an ape which the Bishop of Arezzo kept for his pastime; but I shall certainly tell you that Buffalmacco was he who discovered that noble and ever-to-be-remembered and ever-to-be-praised invention of tempering colours, not with water from the well, but with the most brilliant white wine that could ever be produced by the best shoots of the most renowned vines on the Florentine hills. Before Buffalmacco had made this discovery, he used to execute paintings which—you may rely upon it—were exactly like your own face; that is to say, pale, washed-out, and mouldy-looking; and in many of them I fancy I recognise my own portrait, with a face like a mummy, thin, dry, hollow-cheeked, worn to a shadow, and coloured with a certain hue like that of bread-crust or a quince baked in the oven, and so melancholy as to make people weep who were quite ready to laugh. But when this great master of all masters began to use wine with his colours—

and they were all the right sort of folk—jovial, cheerful, wholesome, and good-tempered, so that people talked about them even as far as the gates of Paris, and the ladies of Faenza—certain knowing nuns, whose convent stood where the lower fort is now—had more faith in Buffalmacco than in all the Apelleses and Protogeneses who were in credit with the ancient Greeks. Now, what do I mean by all this screed of nonsense? I mean to draw the conclusion, that since you are so kind as to draw the illustrations to that book of mine, you will most assuredly come to grief unless you mix your colours with Vernaccia or some other good wine, and you will do no work that is worth looking at. And since it is not right that you should be at any expense in consequence of this work of mine, I send you a sample of white wine of Syracuse, with other samples of wine given me by his Serene Highness the Grand Duke; with which, if you mix your colours, you will not only give a good appearance to your pictures, but also get back your former healthy looks, in spite of those disgusting messes which you are made to swallow, every morning, by those two physicians, your friends. Try this new prescription, and you will soon be well.

Col. I am beside myself with joy; the master evidently thinks something of me; he has given me a nag! Now we shall see whether or no it is possible for an idiot of a rustic 50to take Nanon from me. I’ll ornament his face for him! If he is a man of his word, and keeps his appointment, woe to him!

Pul. Perdition! Who is here?

Col. If he comes——! (Threatens him.)

Pul. After all, I am a man—I remember the saying; for necessity teaches one many things.

Col. Oh! bravo! You have kept your word, and come in time.

Pul. Listen, Colbrand. If you want to fight, I am quite ready; but you must tell me, first, how long you have learnt fencing.

Col. What does that matter?

Pul. It matters to me.

Col. Five years.

Pul. I have been learning for ten. I don’t want to take a mean advantage of you; go and take lessons five years more, and then come, and I’ll give you satisfaction.

Col. Ah! you coward!

Pul. Ah! get out of the way!

Col. You shall not go away—you are caught—one of us has to remain here.

Pul. Very well, you remain, and I will go away.

Col. You pretend not to understand me. I mean that one of us has to remain here dead.

Pul. Oh! dead?

Col. Certainly.

Pul. Well, do you remain dead, and then we shall be all right.

Col. Who is to kill me?

Pul. I, if you wish.

Col. No, I do not wish. I shall defend myself to the utmost.

Pul. Come, let’s say no more about it. Is it worth while to kill a man for the sake of a woman?

51Col. These excuses will not serve you—draw your sword, or I will strike.

Pul. (aside). Oh! the devil! I’m dead. (Aloud.) Listen to me. The first time I girt on my sword I made a vow that it should never be stained with blood.

Col. You ass in clothes! You shall either give up Nanon to me, or I will rid the world of you.

Pul. Listen to me. You have a quarrel with me out of jealousy, because I have taken your sweetheart from you; but I have none with you—on the contrary, I am sorry for you; it would be too bad to kill you, after having made a fool of you.

Col. I am not listening to you. Come, this blade shall be your answer.

Pul. I have no quarrel with you.

Col. What am I to do, then?

Pul. Call me some vile names, then I shall get angry, and come to blows with you.

Col. Very well. You are a scoundrel, a ruffian, a cowardly knave.

Pul. Supposing that what you say is the truth, what reason have I to be angry?

Col. You are a dissolute wretch, the son of vile parents.

Pul. I think you must be a gipsy to know this. You are telling me nothing but the truth.

Col. In this way we shall do nothing.

Pul. But if what you say is true?

Col. (aside). Oh! the base wretch! Come on, will you?

Pul. Softly, softly. (Aside.) I see no one coming. Tell me things that are not true, and then I shall fire up like any Englishman. I know what my nature is.

Col. Very well, you are a gentleman.

Pul. A gentleman! I! and when was I ever that?

Col. Yes, a gentleman—a valiant and honourable gentleman.

52Pul. And I am to fight with a pig—a dirty blackguard like you?

Col. This to me! Power of the world! draw your sword this moment, or I’ll strike.

Pul. Steady, steady. Wait a bit—don’t you see I have to get it drawn.

Col. Well, if you do not draw it, I won’t strike. I am waiting for you.

Pul. If I do not draw, you will not strike?

Col. No.

Pul. I am not going to draw for ten years to come at the very least.... Very well, come on. (Draws his sword.) Here I am, quite ready. How do you wish to have it?

Col. At the first blood.

Pul. Very well. Ah! ah! eh! (He strikes at Colbrand, standing as far from him as he can, and crying out loudly.)

Col. Do be quiet. Some one will come, and we shall be disturbed.

[Pulcinella makes more noise than ever, when Logman arrives on the scene, and demands an explanation of the quarrel. The presence of a third person revives Pulcinella’s courage, and he loudly declares his intention of running Colbrand through and through till his person is like a sieve. He then falls to chaffing the pompous steward, who loses his temper, and finally dismisses him. Pulcinella, leaving the stage, asks, “Do you know why I am going?” and candidly adds, “because I am afraid.” While Colbrand, seeing that he is well out of the way, remarks to Logman, “For your sake I will remain quiet—but, another time ...” leaving the terrible threat incomplete.]

A certain Bergamasc, an honest fellow, and ignorant as a log, came up here some years ago, with five or six thousand scudi in cash. He at once encountered certain astute rustics, who, making him believe that black was white, and dazzling him with the most extraordinary promises, soon succeeded in borrowing the greater part of his money. Now, alleging as excuses, sometimes storms, sometimes drought, and then again thunder and lightning, they have managed so to spin out matters that the poor man cannot get back a farthing of his money to this day. Do not imagine, however, that this difficulty causes him any sorrow; on the contrary, it gives him the greatest delight in the world, for it has opened up to him the possibility of unlimited law-suits—a prospect as dear to his heart as sugar to flies. And, not content with civil suits, he worried so long at his debtors that, at last, one of them—better at paying up than the rest—attempted to pay his whole debt at a blow, which he did with a scythe, on the top of the creditor’s head. It was well for him that the blow did not reach the neck, at which it was aimed, and which it would have cut through like a stalk of clover; but glanced off on the forehead, only wounding the skin. You never saw greater joy than he experienced when he felt the blood running down his face, and made sure of it by putting up his hand. I think he would have died of sheer satisfaction, had his delight not been tempered by the disappointed reflection that, after all, he had not had his skull broken. He went off at once to find me,—and, nearly frightening me out of my wits with his ensanguined countenance, shouted, “I am going. I am off to Venice this minute! Give me an introduction to an honest solicitor!” I, seeing the state he was in, thought he was wandering in his mind, and that, 54instead of a solicitor, he meant to ask for a surgeon. But when I had heard what had happened, and understood what his intention was, I promised to do what he asked, and so far pacified him that he allowed the steward’s wife to dress his head with a little white-of-egg and tow, and bandage it with a piece of rag. Then he insisted on telling me his story all over again, and how fortunate he was in having another plea to enter;—he would not, he said, part with his broken head for several ducats—in fact, he was quite ready to pay his debtor a dozen ducats or so for the favour done him. Now, having got together all his documents, and, further, written out on a sheet of paper, in the Bergamasc dialect, the whole history of the quarrel—a curious and valuable manuscript—he is coming to Venice, to get legal advice about it, and be directed how to get back his own, by means of his broken head. Here he is, then, with his spurs on, like a fighting-cock, and I have charged him with this present letter to you; so please to send him to some man with a conscience, who may try and help him get back his money, and also persuade him that he will do well to leave this part of the country—for it is ill jesting with our farmers, and if he tries it, he will soon find himself skinned. I recommend him to you most earnestly, because he is in the right,—because he is a good fellow by nature,—and because of his shocking ignorance. Before sending him to the solicitor, get him to tell you a little about his litigations. I promise you that you will hear words which all the commentators on the Pandects would never have discovered. Besides this, he begins to speak in a big bass voice which gradually rises and ends in a falsetto, so that his conversation is a species of music. His eloquence and arrangement of facts are something marvellous; he will begin by telling you of his broken head, and his disputes with the farmers; he will then go on to say that he has lent them money, and end up by telling you that he was from Bergamo. In short, 55he begins with the death, and goes backwards till he gets to the christening. When you find him a lawyer, be sure, in the first place, to choose one who understands stories told upside down. Help him all you can, and let me know what you think of him when you see him. Good-bye.

In those old-fashioned times, when people lived, so to speak, at haphazard, and when, if a man wished to gain a reputation for learning, he forgot himself and all he had and stuck to his books day and night—the ways of acquiring for one’s self an honoured and illustrious name were very different from what they are now. But in those days the business was a long one, and the path to be trodden was steep and rugged; and few were those who reached the top of the mountain, where Learning sheds abroad her gifts and graces. In our own day, however, we have shortened the journey, and opened a level and easy road, wherein you may walk, as it were, on cotton, with no other trouble than that of elbowing back those rival competitors who are pressing forward too boldly, or firing a snap-shot at those who are spreading their wings too rapidly. If any young man wishes to get on quickly, and to be greatly honoured, let him lay up a good store of mots and jests against his rivals, and have his head so full of them that they may fall from his tongue in showers like hailstones; and let him utter them on every possible occasion, whether in or out of season does not matter. Let him remember, moreover, that it is not enough to speak ill of others, but that he must also speak well of himself, and remember that Horace and Ovid, both of them, said that neither time, nor fire, nor any other calamity could 56destroy their works out of the world. If he cannot imitate those two writers in any other respect, let him do it in this. He should not spend much time and labour in composition, but dash off everything in hot haste; for the file and the foot-rule will spoil all the fire of his writing. Once upon a time the great art was to use art and yet conceal it; nowadays, in order to make no mistake in the using of it, it is considered the safest thing to have none at all. Those who are considered good authors he should leave alone, otherwise he may be accused of plagiarism; let him make capital of himself and his own brain, and fly wherever the latter is disposed to carry him. These are the general principles through following which I promise eternal fame to the young man in question. It is true that in this way a man does not leave a great literary reputation behind him after his death;—but what matters this last vanity, or the glory of an epitaph either?

Jove, having one day drank more nectar than usual, and being in a pleasant humour, the fancy took him to make some present to mankind. And having called Momus, he gave him what he had decided upon, packed in a portmanteau, and sent him down to the earth. “Oh!” cried Momus (when he arrived in a chariot) to the human race, “Oh! truly blessed generation. Behold how Jove, liberal of his benefits towards you, opens his generous hand! Come, hasten, receive! Never complain again that he has made you short-sighted. His gift quite compensates you for this defect.” So saying, he unfastened the portmanteau, and emptied out of it an enormous heap of spectacles. Behold, then, the whole of mankind busy picking them up; every man has his pair—all are content, and thank Jove for having 57acquired so excellent an aid to their eyesight. But the spectacles caused them to see things under a deceitful appearance. To one man a thing seems blue, while another sees it yellow; one thinks it is white, and another black, so that to every one it appears different. But what of that? Every individual was delighted with his pair, and quite taken up with it, and insisted on its being the best. My dear friends, we are the heirs of these people, and the spectacles have fallen to our lot. Some see things one way, and some another, and every one thinks he is right.

[About 1730, the Corsicans rose in rebellion against the Genoese, who had long been masters of the island; and a German baron of the name of Theodor von Neuhoff, who landed with supplies for the insurgents, received the title of king. Being obliged to leave in order to raise additional forces, he was arrested for debt. Casti’s opera is founded on this circumstance, and represents him as coming to Venice, under a feigned name, with his companion Gafforio, in desperate straits for money.]

[Achmet, Sultan of Turkey, dethroned and banished, but plentifully supplied with funds, takes up his quarters at the same hotel as Theodore. The latter’s creditors, hearing he is at Venice, demand his arrest, and he is imprisoned.]

[All Theodore’s friends come to take leave of him, and he adjures them:]

He thought that all the schools of Italy were full, either of mathematicians, who could understand one another without speaking; or of grammarians, who shouted 63themselves hoarse lecturing on the art of eloquence, yet could not make any living soul understand what they said; or of poets, who did their best to deafen those who did not listen to them, and were loud in welcoming every new tyrant who gained power over their nation. This is the reason why, as troublesome fools, they were exiled—with more justice than any other class—by Socrates, who, according to our author, was endowed with the spirit of prophecy—especially as regards the things which are taking place in our own day.

First Hour. Good morning, your Excellency.

Sun. Yes, or rather good-night.

First Hour. The horses are ready.

Sun. Very good.

First Hour. The morning star has been out some time.

Sun. Very good—let her come or go as it suits her.

First Hour. What does your Excellency mean?

Sun. I mean that I want you to leave me alone.

First Hour. But, your Excellency, the night has already lasted so long that it cannot last any longer,—and if we were to wait, you see, your Excellency, it might give rise to some disorder.

Sun. Let come of it what will—I shall not move.

First Hour. Oh! your Excellency, what is this? don’t you feel well?

Sun. No, no—I don’t feel anything, except that I don’t want to move, so you may go about your business.

First Hour. How can I go, if you do not come?—for I am the first hour of the day. And how can there be any day at all if your Excellency does not deign to come out as usual?

Sun. If you are not the first hour of the day, you can be the first hour of the night; or else the night hours can go 64on double duty, and you and your companions may take it easy. Because—I tell you what it is: I am tired of this continual going round and round in order to give light to a few wretched little animals living on a handful of mud, so small that I, though I have pretty good sight, cannot manage to see it. So this night I have made up my mind that I can’t be bothered any more; and if men want light, let them keep their fires burning, or provide it in some other way.

First Hour. But how does your Excellency expect the poor wretches to manage it? And then it will be an enormous expense for them to keep up their lamps and provide candles 65enough to burn all day long. If they had already discovered that kind of air which will burn, and could use it to light up their streets, and rooms, and shops, and cellars, and everything else—and all at a small expense—why, then I should say that the thing was not so bad. But the fact is, that it will be three hundred years, more or less, till men find out that expedient; and in the meantime they will get to the end of all the oil, and wax, and pitch, and tallow, and have nothing more to burn.

Sun. Let them go and catch fireflies, or those little worms which shine in the dark.

First Hour. And how will they provide against the cold?—for without the help they have had from you the wood of all the forests will never be enough to warm them. Besides which they will also die of hunger; for the earth will no longer yield its fruits. And so, at the end of a few years, the race of those poor animals will be entirely lost. They will crawl about for a time, groping in the dark after something to eat and warm themselves at; and, in the end, when the last spark of fire has died out, and they have eaten everything that a human being could possibly swallow, they will all die in the dark, frozen hard like bits of rock crystal.

Sun. And if they do, what business is that of mine? Am I the nurse of the human race?—or perhaps their cook, who has to provide and prepare their food for them? What is it to me that a certain small quantity of invisible animalcules, thousands of miles distant from me, cannot see, or bear the cold, without my light? Besides, even though it were my duty to serve as stove or hearth, so to speak, to this human family, it is surely reasonable that, if the family want to warm themselves, they should come and stand round the stove—not that the stove should walk round the house. And so, if the earth has need of my presence, let her bestir herself, and see that she gets it; for, as far as I am concerned, I want nothing of her, and there is no reason why I should go after her.

66First Hour. Your Excellency means, if I understand aright, that what you did formerly is now to be done by the Earth.

Sun. Yes, now—and henceforward for ever.

Note.—This dialogue is supposed to take place at the date of Galileo’s discovery of the real relations of the Solar System.

Fashion. Madam Death! Madam Death!

Death. Wait till my time comes, and I’ll come without your calling.

F. Madam Death!

D. Go!—and the Devil go with you! I shall come fast enough when you don’t want me.

F. As if I were not immortal!

D. Immortal? Past is already the thousandth year since the days of the immortals were ended.

F. Why, madam, you are talking in the manner of Petrarch, as though you were a lyric poet of the sixteenth—or the nineteenth century.

D. I am very fond of Petrarch’s rhymes, 67because there is my Triumph among them, and the rest of them are nearly all about me too. But, anyway, get out of my sight at once.

F. Come—for the love you bear to the seven deadly sins, stop a little, and look at me.

D. I am looking at you.

F. Don’t you know me?

D. You ought to know that my sight is not good, and that I cannot use spectacles, because the English do not make any that would serve me—and even though they made them, I have no nose to put them on.

F. I am Fashion, your sister.

D. My sister?

F. Yes—don’t you remember that we are both daughters of Decadence?

D. What should I remember, whose business it is to destroy all memory?

F. But I do, and I know that we are both equally busy, continually undoing and changing the things of this world, although you set about this task in one way, and I in another.

D. If you are not talking to your own thoughts, or to some person whom you have inside your throat, do raise your voice a little, and pronounce your words more clearly; for if you go on mumbling between your teeth with that thin cobweb of a voice of yours, I shall take till to-morrow to hear you. My hearing, as you know, is no better than my sight.

F. Although it is not exactly usual,—and in France people do not speak in order to be heard,—yet, as we are sisters, and can drop ceremony between ourselves, I will speak as you wish. I say that the nature and custom of both of us is continually to ruin the world; but you, from the beginning, have thrown yourself on the person and the blood, whereas I mostly content myself with beards, hair, clothes, furniture, palaces, and such-like. It is true that I have not failed to carry on certain games which may well be 68compared to yours—as, for instance, piercing holes in ears, lips, or noses,—burning the flesh of men with red-hot irons, with which I make them mark themselves for the sake of beauty,—forming the heads of babies by means of bandages and other contrivances, so that all the people in a country may have heads of the same shape, as I have done in Africa and in America,—laming people with narrow shoes,—choking the breath out of them, and making their eyes start out of their heads with the tightness of their stays,—and a hundred other things of the same kind. Not only so, but, generally speaking, I persuade and force all people of any position to bear unending fatigue and discomfort, every day of their lives—oftentimes pain and torture; and some of them will even die gloriously for the love they bear to me. I say nothing of the headaches, chills, colds of every kind,—daily, tertian, and quartan fevers, which men get through obeying me,—submitting to shiver with cold and be suffocated with heat, as I please,—to cover their bodies with woollen stuff, and their chests with linen, and do everything in the way I tell them, even though it be to their own hurt.

D. Well,—I am quite willing to believe that you are my sister, and, if you wish to have it so, I will consider it more certain than death—and you need not prove it out of the parish register. But if I stand still in this way, I turn faint; yet, if you have courage to run alongside of me, take care not to kill yourself, as I go at a great pace. If you can run you can tell me all you have to say as we go along; if not, I must leave you with a salutation, and promise you, in consideration of our relationship, to leave you all my property when I die.

F. If we had to run a race together, I don’t know which of us would win; for if you run, I do more than gallop. And as for standing still in one place,—if in turns you faint, it kills me. So then, let us run together, and, as you say, speak of our affairs as we go.

69D. Let it be so. Since, then, you are my sister, it would be the right thing if you could help me somehow or other in my business.

F. I have already done so, more than you think. In the first place, though I am continually destroying or changing all other customs, I have never in any place induced people to leave off dying; and for this reason, you see, the practice has universally remained in force from the beginning of the world up to the present day.

D. It is a mighty miracle that you should not have done what you cannot do.

F. What I cannot do? You do not seem to know the power of fashion.

D. Well, well—it will be time to talk about this when the fashion of not dying has come in. But meanwhile, I should like you, as a good sister, to help me to obtain the contrary result more easily and quickly than I have hitherto done.

F. I have already told you of some of my work which is very profitable to you. But that is a trifle in comparison with what I am going to tell you. For your sake I have gradually—especially in the later times—caused people to disuse and forget the exercises which are beneficial to health, and brought in other customs which weaken the body and shorten life. Besides which, I have introduced into the world such rules and customs, that life itself, as well for the body as the soul, is rather dead than alive, so that this century may truly be called the Age of Death.... Besides, whereas formerly you used to be hated and abused, nowadays, thanks to me, things have reached such a pass, that whoever has any intellect at all values and praises you, preferring you above life, and turns his eyes to you as to his greatest hope. Finally, seeing that many had made their boast of living after death in the memories of their fellow-men, ... I have abolished this habit of seeking after immortality, and of conferring it in case there should 70be any who deserved it.... These things, which are neither few nor small, I have, up to now, accomplished for the love of you, wishing to increase your state and power on earth, as has, in fact, been the case. I am disposed to do as much as this, and more, every day, and it was with this intention I set out to seek you; and I think it would be well that, for the future, we should remain together. Thus we could lay our plans better than formerly, and also carry them out more effectually.

D. You speak truly; and I am quite willing we should do so.

[But a walking-tour is not without its inconveniences. The poet dwells on the discomforts of heat, cold weather, and muddy roads.]

[Respectable inns always have some excuse for refusing to entertain the wayfarer. Some one at last takes pity on him and points out a low pot-house, with a green branch for a sign, where every one is welcome. Here too, however, he is contemptuously received. The landlord looks at the dust on his boots, and hesitates about admitting him; the chambermaids address him, not as “Sir,” but as “You, there!” and when dinner is served he is not asked to sit down to table.]

[Yet these inconveniences are not the invariable rule; and, after all, they are outweighed by the advantages of travelling on foot. One is perfectly independent, and can do as one likes, which is not always the case with wealthy people.]

Well done! Signor Grossi! Well done, indeed! Your lordship is over there enjoying yourself; and nobody even dreams of talking about a poor wretch like me, who is neither here nor there. But don’t you feel a singing in your ears from morning to night? You, I mean, you lazy, luxurious, thankless, forgetful wretch! Is it so much trouble to write on a piece of paper, “I am well—the family ditto, and we all remember you”? Is this what comes of your having a good time—eh? Now my gentleman is at Bellano, in his own house, away from everything that can possibly worry him, surrounded with every earthly blessing, and thinks he has the Pope in his pocket.... As for his friends, they are “out of sight, out of mind,” with him. Only let me come to Milan again, and you shall see. If ever you dare to try your old tricks again in my presence, I shall say to you, with a face a yard long—

79But, joking apart, what infernal airs are these you are giving yourself in not answering? Are all the pens used in your house made of lead? I, who am one of the laziest men living under the vault of heaven, have written you people letters upon letters, and you are no more to be moved than so many blocks. Only M. has had pity on me; but he is so upset on account of a certain promise of ——’s, that, out of a page and a half of letter, there were only about three lines for me. But even this is something, and something is better than nothing. But against you I have a grudge—one big enough to make me do something outrageous....

I ought not to say so—because not one of the whole lot of you deserves it—but the parting from you threw me into a deep melancholy, which still continues. My liver, or some other fiend who has his dwelling under the ribs, has again got out of order,—and no one knows how much trouble it will give me before getting right again. If I had to endure another winter like the last, Job might be said to have lived and died in the greatest comfort in comparison with me. I do not wish to have anything more to do with doctors—I have always found them just like the fog, which leaves the weather as it finds it. I trust in the climate of Pisa, and if there is anything that I wish for, it is a little bottle of “Never-mind-it,” which is a medicine good for many diseases. Though, I think, when one has it, one must prepare it for himself, and measure out his own doses; and I have never been a skilled apothecary as regards this particular drug. On the contrary, it has always been a failing of mine to thrust my head too deeply into the affairs of this ridiculous world,—and my own, which are the most ridiculous of all,—and once in, it is no easy matter to get it out again. How many times I have made up my mind to think only of myself, and let things go as they like! and every time I do so, this idiotic heart, which, through no fault of my own, I have to drag about with me, has made 80me look like a fool of the first magnitude. Certainly it is quite evident that I was intended by nature for burlesque; since every time I have taken a thing seriously, I have been sure, sooner or later, to act the harlequin before my own eyes. So that now, whenever I have to do with worthy people who are firm and solid, and (so to speak) all in one piece, I am always secretly in dread lest one day or other they should belie their natures and turn out the veriest quicksilver. Do you know that in the end it really cannot be such a very great misfortune to leave this puppetshow that they call life? Surely it cannot be that we shall have people playing Punch and Judy tricks in the other world! Either we shall all have become wise, or at least, if we are destined to carry with us a grain or so of folly and ridiculousness, I do believe that we shall be permitted to divide into sets according to our own particular fancy. And, look you, if, when I have arrived up there, I happen to see two or three men that I know of, I shall join that clique at once, and stay there per omnia sæcula sæculorum. With these certain ones I should hope that (the weakness of our mortal nature being once left behind) a thing once said would be looked upon as settled, and that we should have an end of—

But I hope you understand that I want neither you nor Sandrino Manzoni near me, either in this world or the next; for I shall never forget the way you have treated me, letting me go without so much as a “Good-bye”—not even a “Go and be hanged to you.” I have made a note of it, and shall remember it against you till Doomsday.

Why is it that rascals like you can always put honest men in the wrong? In the very act of closing this letter I receive yours of the 2nd! Well, well, that is not so bad, but I have yet to see Manzoni’s; and you, by promising it, have done me more harm than good.

81Let us hope that our dear Alessandro Manzoni (who, by-the-bye, is a——; never mind, I won’t write it!) will be able to come to Pisa with Donna Teresa and Vittorina. Apropos of Vittorina, is it true that she has not been well of late? Arconati told me she had a cold when she left: I should be very sorry to think she was suffering from anything worse. Remember me to every one, not forgetting our friends Torti and Rossari; I have been going to write to them over and over again. I am glad to hear you are all well at home; were it not that I am still angry with you for that silence of a month and more, I should be inclined to tell you that you deserve this and every other good fortune. Well, good-bye, you rascal, and since there are some wrongs for which it is useless to claim compensation, I may as well send you my love.

P.S.—As for work, I have a great number of irons in the fire, but I am terribly afraid my stock of wood will not last long enough to heat them. When a perfect anarchy of plans and projects comes to life in my brain, this is a sign that it is not a time for finishing anything at all at all. Meanwhile, I shall dawdle along, reading this and that, as it happens,—and when the hour for production strikes, I shall produce.

... He quickened his pace, recited a verse in a louder tone, composed his countenance to all the calm and cheerfulness he could summon up for the moment, made every effort to prepare a smile, and when he found himself right in front of the two swashbucklers, he ejaculated, mentally, “Now we’re in for it!” and stopped short.

“Your Reverence!” said one of the two, looking him full in the face.

“Who wants me?” replied Don Abbondio, raising his eyes from his book, and holding it open in both hands.

“You intend,” pursued the other, with the threatening and angry look of a man who has caught his inferior in the commission of a crime—“you intend to perform the 83ceremony of marriage, to-morrow, between Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella.”

“That is ...” answered Don Abbondio, in a quavering voice—“that is ... gentlemen, you are men of the world, and you know how these matters take place. The poor priest has nothing whatever to say in the business; they arrange everything between themselves, and then ... then they come to us, as you would come to a bank to draw out your money, and we—well, we are the servants of the congregation.”

“Well, then,” said the bravo, in an undertone, but with an impressive air of command, “this marriage is not to take place, either to-morrow, or at any other time.”

“But, gentlemen,” expostulated Don Abbondio, in the meek and gentle voice of a man trying to persuade an impatient listener—“but, gentlemen, do be good enough to put yourselves in my place. If the thing depended on me, now ... you see perfectly well that it matters nothing to me, one way or the other.”

“Come!” interrupted the bravo; “if the business had to be settled by talk, you would have us all, in a moment. We know nothing more about it, and do not want to. A man warned ... you understand?”

“But, gentlemen, you are too just, too reasonable——”

“But,” interrupted the second bravo, who now spoke for the first time—“but either the marriage will not take place, or—or the man who performs it will not repent of doing so, because he will not have time, and——” he finished off his sentence with a good round oath.

“Hush!” returned the first speaker; “his Reverence knows the ways of the world; and we are gentlemen, and do not want to do him any harm, if he will only have a little common sense. Your Reverence, the most illustrious Signor Don Rodrigo, our master, sends you his most respectful salutations.”

84This name was like a flash of light in the darkness and confusion of Don Abbondio’s mind, but only served to increase his terror. He instinctively made a low bow, and said, “If you could suggest to me....”

“Oh! Suggest to you who know Latin!” interrupted the bravo, with a laugh which was half ferocious and half foolish. “That is your business. And, above all, never let a word escape you about this hint which we have given you for your good; otherwise ... ahem!... it would be the same thing as if you were to perform that marriage. Come! What message do you wish us to give to the illustrious Don Rodrigo?”

“My respects.”

“Explain yourself, your Reverence!”

“... Disposed ... always disposed to obedience....” In uttering these words he did not quite know, himself, whether he was giving a promise, or merely bestowing a commonplace compliment. The bravoes took it—or appeared to do so—in the more serious sense.

“Very good. Good-night, your Reverence,” said one of them, and turned, with his comrade, to depart. Don Abbondio, who a few minutes before would have given one of the eyes out of his head to get rid of them, now would have liked to prolong the conversation. “Gentlemen,” he began, shutting his book with both hands; but, without listening to him, they took the road by which he had come, singing the while a ditty better not transcribed, and were soon out of sight. Poor Don Abbondio remained for a moment with his mouth wide open, as if spell-bound; then he turned up the lane leading to his house, walking slowly, and seeming scarcely able to drag one leg after the other....

[Don Abbondio, by finding one excuse after another for deferring the marriage, has driven Renzo nearly to despair. At last, having discovered the reason for the priest’s hesitation, in Don Rodrigo’s hostility, he eagerly adopts a suggestion of Lucia’s mother, Agnese, to the effect that a perfectly legal, though irregular, marriage may be performed by the parties severally pronouncing, before a priest, and in the presence of witnesses, the words, “This is my wife,” and “This is my husband.” Renzo easily secures two witnesses, in the persons of his friend Tonio and the latter’s half-witted brother. Tonio owes Don Abbondio twenty-five lire, for which the priest holds his wife’s necklace in pledge, and Renzo secures his co-operation by giving him the amount of the debt. The five start at dusk for Don Abbondio’s house. Agnese engages the priest’s housekeeper in conversation outside the front door, and the others slip upstairs unnoticed—the bride and bridegroom waiting on the landing, while Tonio knocks at the door of Don Abbondio’s sitting-room.]

“Deo gratias!” said Tonio, in a loud voice.

“Tonio, eh? Come in,” replied a voice from within.

Tonio opened the door just wide enough to admit himself and his brother, one at a time, and then closed it after him, while Renzo and Lucia remained silent and motionless in the dark.

Don Abbondio was sitting in an old arm-chair, wrapped in a dilapidated dressing-gown, with an ancient cap on his head, which made a frame all round his face. By the faint light of a small lamp the two thick white tufts of hair which projected from under the cap, his bushy white eyebrows, moustache, and pointed beard all seemed, on his brown and wrinkled face, like bushes covered with snow on a rocky hillside seen by moonlight.

“Ah! ah!” was his salutation, as he took off his spectacles and put them into the book he was reading.

“Your Reverence will say we are late in coming,” said Tonio, bowing, as did Gervaso, but more awkwardly.

“Certainly it is late—late in every way. Do you know that I am ill?”

“Oh! I am very sorry, sir!”

“You surely must have heard that I am ill, and don’t know when I can see any one.... But why have you brought that—that fellow with you?”

“Oh! just for company, like, sir!”

“Very good—now let us see.”

“There are twenty-five new berlinghe, sir—those with Saint Ambrose on horseback on them,” said Tonio, drawing a folded paper from his pocket.

“Let us see,” returned Abbondio, and taking 87the paper, he put on his spectacles, unfolded it, took out the silver pieces, turned them over and over, counted them, and found them correct.

“Now, your Reverence, will you kindly give me my Tecla’s necklace?”

“Quite right,” replied Don Abbondio; and going to a cupboard, he unlocked it, and having first looked round, as if to keep away any spectators, opened one side, stood in front of the open door, so that no one could see in, put in his head to look for the pledge, and his arm to take it out, and, having extracted it, locked the cupboard, unwrapped the paper, said interrogatively, “All right?” wrapped it up again, and handed it over to Tonio.

“Now,” said the latter, “would you please let me have a little black and white, sir?”

“This, too!” exclaimed Don Abbondio; “they are up to every trick! Eh! how suspicious the world has grown! Can’t you trust me?”

“How, your Reverence, not trust you? You do me wrong! But as my name is down on your book, on the debtor side, ... and you have already had the trouble of writing it once, so ... in case anything were to happen, you know...”

“All right, all right,” interrupted Don Abbondio, and, grumbling to himself, he opened the table drawer, took out pen, paper, and inkstand, and began to write, repeating the words out loud as he set them down. Meanwhile, Tonio, and, at a sign from him, Gervaso, placed themselves in front of the table, so as to prevent the writer from seeing the door, and, as if in mere idleness, began to move their feet about noisily on the floor, in order to serve as a signal to those outside, and, at the same time, to deaden the sound of their footsteps. Don Abbondio, intent on his work, noticed nothing. Renzo and Lucia hearing the signal, entered on tiptoe, holding their breath, and stood close behind the two brothers. Meanwhile, Don Abbondio, who had finished writing, read over the document attentively, without raising his eyes from the paper, folded it, and saying, “Will you be satisfied now?” took off his spectacles with one hand, and held out the sheet to Tonio with the other. Tonio, while stretching out his hand to take it, stepped back on one side, and Gervaso, at a sign from him, on the other, and between the two appeared Renzo and Lucia. Don Abbondio saw them, started, was dumfoundered, became furious, thought it over, and came to a resolution, all in the time that Renzo took in uttering these words: “Your Reverence, in the presence of these witnesses, this is my wife!” His lips had not yet ceased moving when Don Abbondio let fall the receipt, which he was holding in his left hand, raised the lamp, and seizing the table-cloth with his right hand, dragged 89it violently towards him, throwing book, papers, and inkstand to the ground, and, springing between the chair and table, approached Lucia. The poor girl, with her sweet voice all trembling, had only just been able to say “This is ...” when Don Abbondio rudely flung the table-cloth over her head, and immediately dropping the lamp which he held in his other hand, used the latter to wrap it tightly round her face, nearly suffocating her, while he roared at the top of his voice, like a wounded bull, “Perpetua! Perpetua! treason! help!” When the light was out the priest let go his hold of the girl, went groping about for the door leading into an inner room, and, having found it, entered and locked himself in, still shouting, “Perpetua! treason! help! get out of this house! get out of this house!” In the other room all was confusion; Renzo, trying to catch the priest, and waving his hands about as though he had been playing at blindman’s buff, had reached the door, and kept knocking, crying out, “Open! open! don’t make a noise!” Lucia called Renzo in a feeble voice, and said supplicatingly, “Let us go! do let us go!” Tonio was down on his hands and knees, feeling about the floor to find his receipt, while Gervaso jumped about and yelled like one possessed, trying to get out by the door leading to the stairs.

In the midst of this confusion we cannot refrain from a momentary reflection. Renzo, raising a noise by night in another man’s house, which he had surreptitiously entered, and keeping its owner besieged in an inner room, has every appearance of being an oppressor,—yet, after all, when you come to look at it, he was the oppressed. Don Abbondio, surprised, put to flight, frightened out of his wits while quietly attending to his own business, would seem to be the victim; and yet in reality, it was he who did the wrong. So goes the world, as it often happens; at least, so it used to go in the seventeenth century.

Nowadays, things are not what they were.

There are no children,—no boys; instead, we have a swarm of little politicians as yet unchristened—a crowd of Machiavellis seen through the wrong end of an opera-glass, who, if they do go to school every day, only do so for the sake of teaching their masters something—the latter being sorely in need of instruction.

What is it that has exterminated our boys from off the face of the earth?

The reading of political papers!

This is a warning to fathers and mothers.

Fathers of families, of course, are perfectly at liberty to buy a daily paper—or two, or five, or ten. For newspapers, even if taken to excess, are like tamarind jelly—if they do no good, they cannot do much harm. They are quite safe, if you know 91how to read them—the right way of the stuff, like English broadcloth.

But the mischief is this: fathers of families, when they have glanced over the paper, usually leave it on the table, or the sofa, or the mantelpiece—in short, in one of many places that are within sight and reach of small boys. This is great imprudence; because we must remember that our boys are victims to a gluttonous, eager, devouring passion for the reading of political papers. Perhaps this is an outcome of that inborn instinct which shows itself at a very early age in the love for fables and fairy tales.

Then begin the troubles in the family.

A small boy comes with the newspaper in his hand and asks, his mother—

“Do tell me, mamma, what is the difference between ‘Authentic News’ and ‘Various News’?”

“‘Authentic,’” replies the mother at random, “is what really happens, and ‘Various’ is what the journalists invent to fill up the paper.”

“Oh! what story-tellers!”

“Well, then, you should be very careful always to tell the truth; if you don’t, you will go to Purgatory for seventy years, and in this world every one will take you for a journalist!”

Amid the infinitely varied ranks of youth there are many who, through innate depravity, and a fatally precocious hankering after political life, carry their reckless temerity so far as to read all the Parliamentary reports, from the first line to the last!

Let us say it once for all. When a boy gives himself up without restraint, and without shame, to the reading of the Parliamentary debates, it is all up with him! Good-bye to candour; good-bye to innocence, and the simple language of the age of infancy.

92One day Cecco receives a maternal reprimand, because, with his customary negligence, he has omitted to wash his hands.

“I repudiate the malignant insinuation,” replies the culprit, immediately hiding the two inconvenient “documents” in the pockets of his knickerbockers.

Another day Gigino refuses to go to school unless his mother will give him the money to buy a cardboard Punch.

“Yes, dear,” says his mother; “go away to school, and I will buy you the Punch when you come home.”

“No, no, no; I want it now! And if I don’t get it, I will make it a Cabinet question!”

The poor mother, at this speech, finds her understanding failing her, and remains open-mouthed. Then enters Raffaello, the elder brother, who says to the younger—

“Instead of thinking about Punches, you would do better to study your grammar. Remember how yesterday the master, after having three times called you a donkey, ‘passed on to the order of the day, pure and simple.’”

Gigino was about to reply with an impertinence, but, unwilling to fail in respect towards his elder brother, he contented himself with making faces at him.

Mamma (who has meanwhile recovered): “Is that the 93way you treat your brother? He is older than you, and you ought to respect him.”

Gigino (raising his voice): “I have all possible esteem and respect for the honourable member who has just preceded me”—(the Debates again!); “but, on the other hand, as far as I am concerned, he will always be a liar and a spy....”

Beppino is made of quicksilver. While carrying out one trick he is already thinking of a new one, so that neither in school nor at home is there any peace to be had for him.

At last his father, unable to stand it any longer, called him into the study for a parental lecture.

During the first division of the lecture Beppino was surreptitiously gnawing a dried plum. At the opening of the second division he removed the stone, and shot it at the nose of a plaster Dante on the writing-desk. At the third head Beppino lost all patience, and began to yell—

“Enough! enough! The closure!”

“Closure or no closure!” cried his infuriated parent; “if you interrupt me again with your impudence—rascal, street-boy, chatterbox——”

“Order! order!” cried Beppino, pulling at the bell-rope.

“I’ll order you——”

But, just as his father was about to rise, Beppino snatched the smoking-cap from his head, and, putting it on himself, remarked, in a nasal voice—

“Gentlemen, the President has put on his hat, and the discussion is adjourned.”

The violent ringing of the bell summons the mother, two aunts, the housemaid, and the lady’s little dog. These having heard the narrative of Beppino’s unparalleled insolence, are seized with such indignation that they begin to laugh like mad.

94The little dog, being unable to laugh like the rest, barks, and evidences his share in the family joys and sorrows by beginning to gnaw his dear master’s embroidered slippers.

“He who sleeps catches no fish,”—but he who keeps awake catches crabs every moment of his life.

All professions can yield a man enough to live on,—except professions of faith.

When attending the performance of some modern operas, it has struck me that the conductor was only beating time because he could not beat the composer.

If in the sight of the law all men are equal, Heaven save us from getting into its sight.

When you want to get rid of a dog, you take off his collar;—when the king wants to get rid of a minister, he gives him the collar—of the Order of the Annunziata.

The place where they ruin people’s voices, and throw aside all the canons of art, is called the Conservatoire; and a hospital full of sick people is called a “house of health” (Casa di Salute).

Among the many motives which induce me to stay away from the theatre is the utter absence of all motive in modern operas.

How many old phrases are required to make a new electoral programme!

All musical notes may express cheerful ideas; it is only the notes of creditors which arouse none but melancholy reflections.

I entered the shop of a pork-butcher at the moment when 95his son, aged eight, was returning from school. The poor boy was weeping bitterly.

“The old story!” exclaimed his parent; “I suppose you did not learn your lessons, and the master called you an ass, as you deserved!”

“Yes!” replied the child, sobbing, “he did call me an ass,—and then——”

“Well,—and then—what else?”

“He said, ‘Well, after all, it is no wonder—like father, like son!’”

“Did he, indeed? the animal!” exclaimed the pork-butcher. “And to think that perhaps he has not yet eaten the whole of those two sausages I sent him at Christmas!”

We have been told over and over again that “the style is the man.”

I would substitute for this “The instrument is the man.”

And whereas the proverb runs, “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are,” I would amend it thus, “Tell me what you blow into or scrape upon, and I will tell your fortune.”

After this, I must request professional gentlemen, employed in orchestras and otherwise, not to suspect any malicious intent in my remarks, which are principally aimed at amateurs—those who murder some instrument or other out of pure conviction,—all who began to twang the guitar when they were studying medicine, or to practise on the cornet after a year’s experience of matrimony.

This instrument consists of a severe cold in the head, contained in a tube of yellow wood.

The clarionet was not invented by the Conservatoire, but by Fate.

A chiropodist may be produced by study and hard work; but the clarionet player is born, not made.

The citizen predestined to the clarionet has an intelligence which is almost obtuse up to the age of eighteen—an epoch of incubation, when he begins to feel in his nose the first thrills of his fatal vocation.

Then his intellect—limited even then—ceases its development altogether; but his nasal organ, in revenge, assumes colossal dimensions.

At twenty he buys his first clarionet for fourteen francs; and three months later his landlord gives him notice. At twenty-five he is admitted into the band of the National Guard.

He dies of a broken heart on finding that not one of his three sons shows the slightest inclination for the instrument with which he has blown all his wits.

The man who plays on this instrument is always one who seeks oblivion in its society—oblivion of domestic troubles, or consolation for love betrayed.

The man who has held a metal tube in his mouth for six months finds himself proof against every disillusion.

At the age of fifty he finds that, of all human passions and feelings, nothing is left him but an insatiable thirst.

Later on, if he wants to obtain the position of porter in a gentleman’s house, or aspires to the hand of a woman with a delicate ear, he tries to lay aside his instrument, but the taste for loud notes and strong liquors only leaves him with life. 97Finally, after a harmonious career of seventy-eight years, he is apt to die of grief because the public-house keeper will not let him have a glass of wine on credit.

This is the first instrument of youth and innocent hearts.

The individual in question begins playing it in the back room of his father’s shop—the latter, as a rule, is a chemist by profession—and continues it up to the age of fifteen. At this period, if he does not die, he deserts the accordeon for the

This instrument, on account of the nature of its monotonous sounds and its tremendous plaintiveness, acts on the nerves of those who hear, and predisposes to melancholy those who play it.

The harmoniflautist is usually tender and lymphatic of constitution, with blue eyes, and eats only white meats and farinaceous food.

If a man, he is called Oscar; those of the other sex are named Adelaide.

At home, he or she is in the habit of bringing out the instrument at dessert, and dinner being over, and the spirits of the family, therefore, more or less cheerfully disposed, will entertain the company with the Miserere in Il Trovatore, or some similar melody.

The harmoniflautist weeps easily. After practising on the instrument for fifteen years or so, he or she dissolves altogether, and is converted into a brook.

This complicated and majestic instrument is of a clerical character, and destined, by its great volume of sound, to drown the flat singing of clergy and congregation in church.

98The organist is usually a person sent into the world with the vocation of making a great noise without undue expenditure of strength; one who wants to blow harder than others without wearing out his own bellows.

He becomes at forty the intimate friend of the parish priest, and the most influential person connected with the church. By dint of repeating the same refrains every day at matins and vespers, he acquires a knowledge of Latin, and gets all the anthems, hymns, and masses by heart. At fifty he marries a devout spinster recommended by the parish priest.

He makes a kind and good-tempered husband; his only defect in that capacity being his habit of dreaming out loud on the eve of every ecclesiastical solemnity. On Easter Eve, for instance, he nearly always awakens his wife by intoning, with the full force of his lungs, “Resurrexit.” The good woman, thus abruptly aroused, never fails to answer him with the orthodox “Alleluia!”

At the age of sixty he becomes deaf, and then begins to think his own playing perfection. At seventy he usually dies of a broken heart, because the new priest, who knows not Joseph, instead of asking him to dine at the principal table with the ecclesiastics and other church authorities, has relegated him to an inferior place, and the society of the sacristan and the grave-digger.

The unhappy man who succumbs to the fascinations of this instrument is never one who has attained the full development of his intellectual faculties. He always has a pointed nose, marries a short-sighted woman, and dies run over by an omnibus.

The flute is the most fatal of all instruments. It requires a peculiar conformation and special culture of the thumb-nail, with a view to those holes which have to be only half closed.

99The man who plays the flute frequently adds to his other infirmities a mania for keeping tame weasels, turtle-doves, or guinea-pigs.

To play the ’cello you require to have long, thin fingers; but it is still more indispensable to have very long hair falling over a greasy coat-collar.

In case of fire, the ’cellist who sees his wife and his ’cello in danger will save the latter first.

His greatest satisfaction, as a general thing, is that of “making the strings weep.” Sometimes, indeed, he succeeds in making his wife and family do the same thing in consequence of a regimen of excessive frugality. Sometimes, too, it happens to him to make people laugh and yawn, but this, according to him, is the result of atmospheric influences.

He can express, through his loftily-attuned strings, all possible griefs and sorrows, except those of his audience and his creditors.

An immense apparatus of wood and sheepskin, full of air and of sinister presages. In melodrama the roll of the drum serves to announce the arrival of a fatal personage, an agent of Destiny; in most cases, an ill-used husband. Sometimes this funereal rumbling serves to describe silence—sometimes to indicate the depths of the prima donna’s despair.

The drummer is a serious man, possessed with the sense of his high dramatic mission. He is able, however, to conceal his conscious pride, and sleep on his instrument when the rest of the orchestra is making all the noise it can. In such cases he commissions the nearest of his colleagues to awaken him at the proper moment.

On awaking, he seizes the two drum-sticks and begins 100to beat; but, should his neighbour forget to rouse him, he prolongs his slumbers till the fall of the curtain. Then he shakes himself, perceives that the opera is over, and rubs his eyes; and if it happens that the conductor reprimands him for his remissness at the attack, he shrugs his shoulders and replies, “Never mind, the tenor died all the same. A roll of the drum more or less, what does it signify?”

Of this it is quite unnecessary to speak. It is the instrument of the age; and ministers, deputies, men of science, poets, hairdressers, and dentists have all learned to perform on it to perfection.... The multitude will always answer the summons of its “boom! boom!”—and he will always be in the right who thumps it hardest.

“My dear boy,” said Giuntini, almost seriously, “I lost all my illusions at eighteen. At that epoch I believed that I possessed a sweetheart; I was also guilty of the audacity of writing verses to her. I lived on blue sky, diluted with milk and honey. Afterwards I found out that my verses were based on a false supposition, and that the girl I loved had married a custom house officer. This contributed in great part to the catastrophe which took place in my sentiments. At the present moment I have been writing in the papers for seventeen years. I get 250 francs a month here, on the Progressist; eighty francs from a paper at Udine, whose politics I do not even know; another sixty from the Courier of Fashion; and beside that, I send leading articles, at five francs apiece, to the Radical Phrygian Cap, of Rimini, and others to the Catholic Banner, of Genoa, which 101pays me eight francs for each. Add to this a sermon written now and then for the parish priest of our village at home—a conceited old fanatic who wants to be thought eloquent. Then I have to compile the Young Wife’s Almanac every year, and the Sportsman’s and Angler’s Calendar for the publisher, Corretti; so that, taking one month with another, I can reckon on about 500 francs. I say nothing of contriving to advertise various tradesmen and contractors, in the course of my daily paragraphs, which brings me in nice little sums now and then. Very well; every month I manage not to spend more than 200 francs, the rest I put aside. I don’t go to the theatre; I am not to be seen at cafés; as for lending money to my friends, you have perceived——”

“I have, alas!”

“There you have the explanation of my easy life. My dear fellow, the world is for him who knows how to take it.”

“It may be,” said Lauri; “the fault is mine. I don’t deny it. Sometimes, do you know, I think of the little village at the foot of the Alps, all white with snow in winter.... What a fuss they used to make over me when I came home for the holidays!... How my father used to rest his great rough hand on my head, and say, “There’s plenty inside here!” ... Well, and then came Sixty-six. Venice! Venice for ever! Garibaldi! Italy! Liberty!... In those days, as you know, we believed in all that—and I went to the Tyrol after Garibaldi. There was no holding me after that. I thought I had the whole world at my feet. I never even thought of the University Entrance Examination. To think of it! A warrior who has smelt powder to go back to a schoolboy’s tasks!... I could not even dream of such a thing—and of returning to the village even less. I should have had to talk politics with the chemist and the police-sergeant, when I had in my own person contributed to the unity of Italy. I do not know myself what grand dreams were shaping themselves in this stupid brain 102of mine. I went to Florence, and passed some months in wearing out the pavement of Via Tornabuoni and Via Calzaioli, and my father, poor dear old man! used to send me postal orders.... But I was going to make a career at Florence! I was always in company with some of my old comrades of the Tyrol, all of them fervent patriots, who passed most of their time in speaking ill of their neighbours on the sofas of the Bottegone. I began to make the acquaintance of deputies and journalists, lounged about the editorial offices of the Diritto and the Riforma, and talked glibly about the crisis, Reconstruction, and the fusion of parties. In short, I was well on the way to imbecility; and from thence to journalism is, as you know, but a step. And now, as I’ve made my bed, I’ve got to lie upon it, or throw myself out of the window.... There’s no father to send me postal orders now....”

Giuntini suddenly interrupted the flow of his reflections.

“I say, Manfredo, do you know it’s ten o’clock, and you have not written a line of the daily ‘summary’ yet?”

Lauri shook himself, re-lit his cigar, which had gone out, and once more began turning over the papers. Giuntini, too, had gone back to work; but he, like all journalists, could cut all Europe to pieces, though his thoughts were wandering in the sphere of the moon.

“What telegrams has the Times to-day?” he asked while scribbling away.

“None; neither the Times, nor the Daily News, nor the Temps, nor the Nord; they are all empty as my pockets. I don’t in the least know how to make up this evening’s Foreign Intelligence. There is a little about Afghanistan in the République, but all stale matter hashed up for the third or fourth time. I shall have to end by translating the latest Assembly scandal from the Figaro.”

It is said among business men that it requires twelve Jews to cheat a Genoese; but twelve Genoese are not enough to cheat a Greek.... Only one person, that I ever heard of, enjoys the not very enviable distinction of having cheated—not merely one Greek, but two.

He was a Bari man.

He was returning to Italy, but had no boots—or rather, the things he had were no longer boots. He carefully counted up his money, found that he had not enough to buy a new pair, and so quieted his conscience. Then he went to a shoemaker’s in the Street of Hermes.^[11]

“I want a pair of shoes by Monday morning, to fit me exactly, with round toes,” etc.; in short, he gave the fullest directions.

“Certainly, sir. You shall have them without fail. They shall be sent to your house at ten on Monday morning.”

The Bari man left his address and departed.

In the Street of Æolus he entered another shoemaker’s shop and ordered a precisely similar pair of shoes in the same terms.

“Have I made myself understood?”

“Perfectly. Let me have the address, and on Monday at ten——”

“I shall not be in at ten. Don’t send them before eleven.”

“At eleven you may count on having them, without fail.”

On Monday at ten the first victim appeared. The gentleman tried on the shoes; the right was a perfect fit, the left was fearfully tight over the instep; it wanted stretching a little.

“All right,” said the obliging tradesman; “I will take it away, and bring it back to you to-morrow.”

104“Very well; and I will settle your account then.”

The shoemaker bowed himself out with the left shoe.

At eleven, punctual as a creditor, arrived the second predestined victim. The same scene was repeated; but this time it was the right shoe that did not fit.

“You will have to put it over the last again, my friend.”

“We’ll soon set that right, sir.” And this shoemaker, more knowing than the other, was about to take both shoes away with him.

“Leave the other,” said the Bari man. “It’s a fancy of mine ... if you take them both, some one may come in and find that they fit him, and you will sell them to him, and I shall have to wait another week.”

“But I assure you, sir——”

“No, no, my friend; I know how things go. I want this pair of shoes and no other, and I insist on keeping the one.” The shoemaker bowed his head with a sigh, and went away to stretch the right shoe.

An hour later the Bari man and his shoes were already on board the Piræus steamer; and on the following day the two victims met on his doorstep, each with a shoe in his hand, and looked into each other’s rapidly lengthening faces.

About a week after my arrival at Athens I was enjoying a tête-à-tête, at the Samos Restaurant, with a lamb cutlet of most unexampled obduracy, when there entered a stout individual, somewhere on the wrong side of fifty, dressed with great care, and sporting a gold chain of such length and massiveness that it might have served to fasten up a mastiff. His hands were covered with rings; and, in entering, he made noise enough for ten. Accosting a waiter who could speak Italian, he roared—

105“Giuraddio! What has become of my place?”

“This way,—this way, sir; there are four places at this table.”

It was the one where I was sitting.

The stout gentleman contorted his features with disgust, uttered language which would have been enough for any Arian, and came and sat beside me, remarking—

“Giuraddio! I don’t want my place taken!”

Every one present was looking at him, and smiling compassionately.

Before he had finished unfolding his napkin he was already asking me—

“Are you Italian, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Been in Athens long?”

“A few days.”

“I have been here three months. Every one knows me.”

“I should think so, if you always make as much noise as that.”

“You see how they are looking at me?”

“I have noticed it.”

“I ... I suppose you know who I am?”

“I have not that honour.”

“I am the celebrated Spalletti.... You will know——”

“No. I confess my ignorance.”

“Giuraddio! half the newspapers in the world have noticed me.”

“I read very few newspapers.”

“Why?”

“Because I am a journalist.”

“I am here. I have already given six representations of Le Prophète.”

106“And you are——”

“The celebrated tenor, Spalletti.”

“Blessed be modesty!”

“Eh!—What?”

“Nothing—only a remark on my part. A fine opera, Le Prophète.”

“Yes—so they say!”

“How—they say? Have you never heard it?”

“I!—I have other things to do. I get through my scenes, and that’s enough.”

“But have you not even read the words?”

“I have read my part,—and even that is too much. However, I think I will read it over one evening when I am going to bed, because I want to know who on earth this Prophet is.”

Yet it was this very part of the Prophet which he had just enacted for the sixth time!

He then told me that he had been engaged to sing in Thomas’s Omeleto—I should not have been surprised had he said omelette—and left, after telling me that he put up at the Gran Bretagna, and requesting me to come and see him there.

At the door he turned back, and said—

“You must come and hear me at the theatre to-night! I am quite convinced I shall make you shed tears.”

I went—and found that the worthy man was right. His performance was such that it would have drawn tears from a stone.

I afterwards heard that the same gentleman had been asked to sing at a charity concert, and, being told that in this way he would perform an act of philanthropy, had replied that it was unfortunately impossible, because he was not acquainted with the play of that name, and therefore could not sing in any act of it.

There was a long-standing rivalry—and one that was not professional alone—between the telegraph clerks of Pietranera and Golastretta. It is said to have begun at the Technical College, when the former carried off a silver medal hotly contested by the other; but this is not quite certain.

What is certain is that Pippo Corradi could not undertake the smallest thing but Nino d’Arco immediately proceeded to do likewise. Thus when the former took a fancy to become an amateur conjurer, Nino at once went in search of the necessary apparatus for amusing his friends with the miracles of white magic. He was not a success; he raised many a laugh by his want of skill; but this did not prevent him from throwing away more money still on boxes with false bottoms, pistols to shoot playing cards instead of balls, wonderful balls which multiply and grow larger in your hands, and the like. Cost what it might, he was determined to astonish his Golastretta friends, who extolled in his presence the portents they had seen accomplished at Pietranera by Corradi, and derided him by way of contrast.

Then when Pippo Corradi, who was of a strange fickleness in his tastes, gave up white magic in order to devote himself to music, and the study of the clarionet in particular, Nino d’Arco suddenly laid aside the magic toys, which had already wearied him not a little, took music lessons from the parish organist, bought a brand new ebony clarionet, and rode over on a donkey to call on Corradi, under the pretext of consulting him on his choice, but with the sole intention of humiliating him. It was the only time he ever succeeded. He found him blowing into the mouthpiece of a box-wood instrument, which he had bought second-hand for a few francs from an old clarionet player 108in the town band. Nino swelled visibly with satisfaction at seeing the admiration and envy in his rival’s eyes when he opened the leather case and showed him the polished keys of white metal, shining even more than the freshly varnished wood.

Nino put the instrument together delicately, and set it to his mouth, thinking to astonish Pippo with a scale in semitones, but he unluckily broke down in the middle. Then was Corradi able to take his revenge; and not content with having played scales in all tones, major, minor, diatonic, and chromatic, suddenly, without warning Nino, who kept staring at his fingers manœuvring over the holes and keys, he dashed point-blank into his pièce-de-résistance, La Donna 109è Mobile, tootling away quite divinely, till checked by the imperative need of taking breath. His eyes were nearly starting out of his head; his face was purple—but that was nothing! He chuckled inwardly at Nino’s crestfallen look; and the latter, taking his instrument to pieces, put it back in the case, thus declaring himself vanquished.

Nino, returning to Golastretta, vented his vexation on his ass, because she would not go at a trot—just as though it had been she who taught Corradi to play La Donna è Mobile. So true it is that passion renders man unjust! He rushed at once to his master to learn La Donna è Mobile for himself, so as to be able, in a short time, to play it before his hated rival. The latter, however, had another great advantage, besides that of being able to murder Rigoletto; he was the local post-master. In this point it was useless trying to rival him, however much Nino might dream of a spacious office, like 110that at Pietranera, where Corradi, between the sale of one stamp and the next, between registering a letter, and administering a reprimand to the postman, could divert himself by blowing into his clarionet to his heart’s content! Whereas he, Nino, was forced to escape from the house if he wished to practise and remain at peace with his family! Corradi, in his post-office, disturbed no one.

Nino did not know what a torment for the neighbourhood that clarionet was, shrilling from morning to night, with Corradi’s usual obstinacy in anything he undertook. The shopkeeper opposite, poor wretch, swore all day long worse than a Turk, and did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet every time that Pippo began to repeat the Donna è Mobile—that is to say, swore seven or eight times in the day. He made mistakes in his weights, he counted his change wrong;—though it is only fair to say that these errors were oftener in his own favour than in that of his customers. And if by any chance he saw Corradi at the window, he raised his hands towards him with a supplicating gesture, pretending to be jocular.

“You want to make me die of a fit! Good Lord!”

Of all this Nino d’Arco was quite ignorant when he started for Pietranera a month later, to surprise Corradi with Mira Norma, which he had learnt, in addition to the air which first roused his emulation. He found Pippo adding up his monthly accounts, and not disposed to talk about music or anything else. The fact was that the shopkeeper opposite had indeed fallen down dead in a fit at the third or fourth rendering of La Donna è Mobile, as he had said, just as though he had had a presentiment of what was to happen. The occurrence had such an effect on Pippo that he felt as if he had killed the man, and could not bear to touch the clarionet again. He would not even mention the subject. Nino bit his lips and returned home, without having so much as opened his clarionet case. Once more 111it was the ass who paid the penalty. He had to relieve his feelings on some one or something.

If there were any need of an instance to prove that emulation is the most powerful agent in the development of the human faculties, this one would suffice. Seeing that Corradi had renounced the clarionet and all its delights, Nino no longer felt the slightest inclination to go on wasting his breath on his instrument, though it were of ebony, with keys of white metal. As a faithful historian, I ought to add that for one moment he was tempted by the idea of trying to attain to the glory of causing some one’s death by a fit; but whether the Golastretta people had harder tympanums than those of Pietranera, or whether he himself was not possessed of the necessary strength and perseverance, certain it is that no human victim fell to Nino d’Arco’s clarionet. And the fact of having no death on his conscience made him feel degraded in his own eyes for some time.

These had been the preludes to deeper and more difficult contests with his old schoolfellow.

Golastretta was situated between the central office of the province and the rival station of Pietranera; and thus it was Nino’s duty to signal to his hated colleague the mean time by which he was to regulate his clock—a supremacy which Corradi could never take from him. But this was a joy of short duration.

Having very little to do, he was wont, after he had finished reading the Gazette or the last paper-covered novel, to snatch forty winks at his ease in the office. One morning, when he least expected it, the machine began clicking, and would not stop. It was his dear friend at Pietranera who kept sending despatches on despatches, and would not let him drop off comfortably.

By listening attentively, he soon made out what was the matter. The village of Pietranera had begun, on the 112previous evening, to dance like a man bitten by the tarantula, set in motion by earthquake-shocks repeated from hour to hour. The Syndic was telegraphing to the Vice-Prefect, the Prefect, the Meteorological Office of the province, in the name of the terrified population. And Corradi, too, was telegraphing on his own account, signalling the shocks as fast as they occurred, and indicating their length, or the nature of the movement—in order to gain credit with his superiors, said Nino d’Arco, vexed that Golastretta should not have its half-dozen earthquakes as well.

How cruelly partial was Nature! Scarcely twenty kilomètres away she was rendering Corradi an immense service with eight, ten, twenty shocks—between day and night—within the week; and for him not even the smallest vestige of any shock whatever. He could get no peace, and kept his ear to the instrument.

One day, behold! there passed the announcement of a scientific commission on its way to Pietranera in order to study these persistent seismic phenomena. A few days later he became aware of the transit of another despatch appointing the Pietranera telegraph-agent director of the Meteorologico-Seismic station, which the commission had thought it advisable to establish at that place. In a month from that time the speedy arrival of a large number of scientific instruments was wired down from headquarters.

Nino d’Arco could stand it no longer; nothing would serve but he must go and see with his own eyes what under the canopy that Meteorologico-Seismic Observatory could be which would not let him live in peace.

He could not recover from the astonishment into which he was thrown by the sight of all these machines already set up in position, whose strange names Pippo Corradi reeled off with the greatest ease, as he explained the working of each. Rain-gauge, wind-gauge, barometers, maximum and minimum thermometers, hygrometers, and 113besides that a tromometer, and all sorts of devilries for marking the very slightest shocks of earthquake, indicating their nature, and recording the very hour at which they occurred, by means of stop-watches.... Nino was very far from understanding it all, but made believe to do so; and, at last, he remained quite a time gazing through a magnifying-glass at the pendulum constructed to register the movements of the earthquake by marking them with a sharp point on a sheet of smoked glass placed beneath it.... The pendulum was at that moment moving, sometimes from right to left, sometimes backwards and forwards, but with so imperceptible a movement that it could not be discerned by the naked eye.... Suddenly—drin! drin!—there is a ringing of bells, the pendulum quivers....

“A shock!” And Pippo, triumphant, rushes to the telegraph instrument to announce it.

“I did not feel anything!” said Nino d’Arco, white with terror.

And he hastened to go. But he was simply knocked to pieces by all those machines and the satisfied air of his colleague. The latter already signed himself “Director of the Meteorologico-Seismic Observatory at Pietranera,” and seemed a great personage—reflected Nino—even to him, who knew very well who he was, a telegraph clerk just like himself!

All along the homeward road, when he had finished settling accounts with the ass, he ruminated over the hundreds of francs which all that apparatus must have cost.... The seismographic pendulum, however, was only worth eighteen.... He would like to have at least a pendulum.... What would he do with it when he had it? No one could tell; least of all himself. But the pendulum kept vibrating in his brain all the week, backwards and forwards, right and left, scratching the smoked glass at every stroke. Nino seemed 114to himself to be always standing behind the magnifying-glass, as he had done at Pietranera. It was a diabolical persecution!

He had to humble himself before his detested colleague, in order to get information, explanations and instruments; but after all, in the end, the pendulum was there in its place, near the office window. It had cost him nearly half his month’s salary. But what of that? Now, he too could telegraph the most beautiful earthquakes, on occasion.

But just look at the perversity of things! That infamous pendulum—as if on purpose to spite him—remained perfectly motionless, even if one looked at it through the magnifying-glass. Nino, who passed whole days ruining his eyes with that glass, anxious to observe the first trace of movement, so as to signal it, and thus begin his competition with the Pietranera observatory, ground his teeth with rage. Especially on the days when his fortunate rival seemed to be mocking him with the ticking of the messages which announced to the Provincial Office some little shock recorded by the instruments at Pietranera. For an earthquake—a real earthquake—Nino would have given, who can tell what? perhaps his very soul. In the meantime he dreamt of earthquakes, often awaking terrified in the night, uncertain whether it were a dream, or the shock had really taken place; but the pendulum remained stern and immovable. It was enough to drive the veriest saint desperate. Ah! Was that the game? Did the earthquakes obstinately refuse to manifest themselves? Well, he would invent them. After all, who could contradict him? And so that unlucky parish, which had been for centuries quietly anchored to the rocky mountain-side, began to perform in its turn—in the Reports of the Meteorological Office at Rome—an intricate dance of shocks, slight shocks, and approaches to shocks; there was no means of keeping it still any longer. And as Nino could 115not forego the glory of showing his friends the sheet where his name appeared in print beside those of several famous men of science, the report spread through the country that the mountain was moving, imperceptibly, and threatened to come down in a landslip.

“Is it really true?” the most timid came to ask.

“True, indeed!” replied Nino solemnly, and pointed to the pendulum; but he would allow no one to examine it at close quarters.

Just as though it had been done on purpose, the Pietranera observatory no longer signalled any disturbances since Golastretta had begun to amuse itself by frequent vibrations; and Pippo Corradi, suspecting the trick of his colleague, was gnawing his own heart out over all the false indications which were quietly being foisted in among the genuine ones of the official report, and making a mock of Science.

He, for his own part, did his work seriously and scrupulously, even leaving his dinner when the hour for observation came; and his reports might be called models of scientific accuracy. Ought he to denounce his colleague? to unmask him? He could not make up his mind. The latter, as bold as brass, went on making his village quake and tremble, as though it were nothing at all.

This time the proverb that “lies have short legs” did not hold good; for the lies in question reached Tacchini at Rome, and Father Denza at Moncalieri. Perhaps, even, they confused the calculations of those unfortunate scientists, who were very far from suspecting, in the remotest degree, the wickedness of Nino.

But one day, all of a sudden, the Golastretta pendulum awoke from its torpor, and began to move behind the magnifying-glass, although to the naked eye its motion was scarcely perceptible.

Nino gave a howl of joy. “At last! at last!”

To the first person who happened to come into the office he said, with a majestic sweep of the arm, “Look here!”

“What does it mean?”

“We shall have a big earthquake!” and he rubbed his hands.

“Mercy!”

The man, who had felt his head turning round with the continued agitation of the pendulum, and was struck with consternation to find that it could scarcely be perceived without the magnifier, rushed at once to spread the terrible news in streets, shops, and cafés. In an hour the telegraph office was invaded—besieged. Everybody wished to see with his or her own eyes, so as to be certain, and then take a resolution. And the people who had seen frightened the others with their accounts, exaggerating matters, giving explanations more terrifying than those they had received and half understood, and so increasing 117the panic, which now began to seize on the most sceptical spirits. An extraordinary success for Nino d’Arco! He seemed to see before him the image of his colleague, jaundiced with envy, and again rubbed his hands with delight. Outside, the street was full of people discussing the affair with comments. Women were crying, boys shouting, “Is it still moving?” “Worse than before.” “Oh! blessed Madonna!” The parish priest hastened to the spot, frightened as badly as the rest by the news which had been carried to him by the sacristan; and scarcely had he looked through the glass than he sprang from his chair as if he had felt the ground rocking under his feet.

“It is the judgment of God, gentlemen! On account of our sins, gentlemen!”

Then the people began to get away as fast as they could.

There was a banging of shutters, a hurried closing of doors, a rushing about, a shouting of each other’s names. “Is it still moving?” “Worse than ever!” So that at last Nino d’Arco himself no longer felt easy. And from time to time he turned back to look once more at the pendulum, which continued to vibrate. It was the first time that Nino found himself indeed, as it were, face to face with a distant indication of earthquake, after the hundred or so of shocks, of all sorts, strengths, and sizes, which he had invented and caused to be published in the Report at Rome. And now it was not exactly an amusing thing—that dumb menace, to which his ignorance gave a false significance. Pendulum of the devil! Would it never be still? A beautiful invention of science, calculated to kill a peaceful citizen with anticipatory fear! Who ever heard of the earth being shaken without people becoming aware of it?

It seemed to him that the vibrations increased from hour to hour, and that the danger of a general fall of buildings became more imminent every minute. He was alone in the office,—there was not a soul to be seen in the street,—every 118one had left the village, to seek safety in the open plain. And his duty, as telegraph operator, forbade him to move!

Towards evening he closed the office, and went out into the plain himself. The people were standing about in groups, telling their beads and chanting litanies. When they saw him they were near falling upon him, as the cause of the mischief. Was it not he who had turned the whole village upside down, with that accursed pendulum of his? The whole scene had a depressing effect on him, however much he might try to keep up his courage, and convince his fellow-townsmen of the great benefits of his warning, which might, for all they knew, have been the saving of many lives.

But at noon on the following day nothing had yet happened.

Every quarter of an hour some one of the bravest came in from the country to the telegraph office, to find out how things were going. The pendulum still vibrated—but there were no news of the predicted earthquake.

The evening came. Not the ghost of an earthquake! 119A few, here and there, began to turn the thing into ridicule. The syndic—who had a head on his shoulders—had sent a boy to the Pietranera. When the boy returned with Pippo Corradi’s answer, “It’s all nonsense—make your minds easy!” there was an explosion of “Oh!—oh!—oh!” and those who had been most frightened, and felt that they had been made fools of, began to yell, “Imbecile! Blockhead! Idiot!”

They rushed in a tumultuous noisy crowd to the telegraph office; and had they not met with the lieutenant of the Carbineers, who had hastened up on receipt of a cipher telegram from the chief constable, who knows how the matter might have ended for Nino d’Arco?

“What on earth have you been doing?” said the lieutenant. “You have been disturbing the public peace.”

Nino was petrified for a moment; then, seeking to excuse himself by proof positive, pointed to the pendulum.

“Well?” said the lieutenant.

“Look—it moves!”

“You must be seeing double. There is nothing moving here.”

“Do look carefully.”

“Allow me.... Nothing moving!”

In fact, the pendulum had stopped. Nino would not believe his own eyes.

“I confiscate it, for the present!” cried the lieutenant.

And, raising the glass of the case, he took out the tube in which the pendulum was fixed.

“When one is as ignorant as you, sir, ...” Every one present applauded vigorously. “And I shall report the matter to headquarters.”

To Nino it mattered nothing that the crowd should applaud and hiss, or that the lieutenant of the Carbineers should report him at headquarters. He was thinking only 120of Pippo Corradi, and how he would laugh behind his back when he heard it; and the tears stood in his eyes.

And, as though all this had not been enough, behold, on the following day, the following message clicked along the wires from Corradi:—

“To-day, 2 P.M., upward shock of first degree, lasting three seconds; followed, after interval of seven seconds, by undulatory shock, south-north, also first degree, lasting five seconds. No damage.”

“Infamous fate!” stammered Nino d’Arco. And he shut off the current, to escape from the clicks which seemed to deride him.

Poor Don Mario! No sooner was he seen coming round the corner with his rusty, narrow-brimmed, stove-pipe hat, nearly a foot high, and his overcoat with long tails fluttering in the wind, than every one—first the boys, then the men, the loafers on Piazza Buglio, and even the gentlemen at the Casino—began to salute him, on every side, with the cry of the quail, “Quacquarà! Quacquarà!” just because they knew that it enraged him.

He stopped and stood at bay, staring round, brandishing his great cudgel, and shaking his head threateningly. Then he would take two or three steps forward, looking fixedly at them, in order to discover one or other of the impudent wretches who so far forgot the respect due to him, the son and grandson of lawyers—to him who stood a hundred times higher than all those gentlemen of the Casino.... But in vain! On the right hand and the left, before and behind, rose the shouts and whistles, “Quacquarà! Quacquarà!”

122“Don’t excite yourself! Let them shout!”

“If I do not kill some one, they will never be quiet!”

“Do you want to go to the convict prison for nothing?”

“I will send them there!”

He became red as a turkey-cock, raving and gesticulating and foaming at the mouth.

“They would be quiet enough, if you did not get angry.”

“They are cowards! Why don’t they come out like men, and say it to my face?”

“Quacquarà!”——

“Ah! would you hit a child?” This time, if they had not stopped him, he would have broken the head of the barber’s boy, who had boldly approached him near enough to utter the objectionable cry under his very nose. There was trouble enough before Don Mario would let himself be dragged away into the chemist’s shop, which was filled with a laughing crowd. Vito, the chemist’s young man, came forward, very seriously, and said to him—

“What does it matter if they do say Quacquarà to you? You don’t happen to be a quail, do you?”

Don Mario turned furious eyes on him.

“Well; it’s not as if they called you a thief!”

“I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman.”

“Well? What does Quacquarà mean? Nothing at all. Quacquarà let it be!”

The chemist and the others present were writhing in convulsions of suppressed laughter at the serious countenance of Vito, who, under the pretext of lecturing Don Mario for his folly, kept on repeating the quail’s cry to his very face, without his perceiving that it was done on purpose.

“Now I,” said he, “if a man were to cry Quacquarà after me, I would give him a halfpenny every time. Quacquarà! Quacquarà! Shout yourselves hoarse, if you like!”

“And, meanwhile, you scoundrel, you’re repeating it to my face,” yelled Don Mario, as he raised his cudgel, perceiving 123at last that he had been made a fool of. At this point the chemist, who was terrified for the safety of his plate-glass windows, thought it time to interfere; and, taking his arm, drew him out of the shop, condoling with his grievances, and soothing his ruffled feelings as well as he could.

“Come out this way; no one will see you.”

“Am I to hide myself? To please those louts? I am a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman!”

True—very true! The Majori had always been respectable people, son succeeding father in the notary’s office from generation to generation, up to the year 1819; in which year there issued forth from the infernal regions that judgment of Heaven called the Code Napoléon, specially created for the despair of the notary Majori, Don Mario’s father, who never could understand it, and was forced to retire from his profession.

“What? No more Latin formulas?... And documents to be headed ‘In the King’s Name’! But what has his Majesty the King to do with private contracts?”

And he relieved his conscience by having no more to do with the whole business. And so the ink had dried up in the great brass inkstand in his office, and the quill pens were all worn out; and the quiet in the house contrasted strangely with the bustle there had been formerly, when every one came to consult him, for he was honesty in person, and never set down on the papers a single word more or less than the interested parties wished. And thus, Don Mario, who had hitherto acted as clerk in his father’s office, and knew by heart all the Latin formulas, without understanding a syllable thereof, found his occupation gone. So did his brother Don Ignazio, who was not much more capable than himself; and after the old notary had died of a broken heart, on account of that unholy Code which had no Latin formulas, and insisted 124on having documents headed In the King’s Name, the two brothers eked out a sordid livelihood on the little they inherited from him. But they were proud in their honourable poverty, and rigidly faithful to the past, even in their dress, continuing for a time to wear their old clothes, carefully brushed and mended, regardless of the fact that they were out of fashion and excited ridicule.

Don Ignazio, however, could not stand it long. When his beaver hat seemed to him quite useless, and his overcoat too threadbare, he bought a second-hand hat for a few pence from Don Saverio, the old-clothes dealer, and a coat which had also been worn already, but presented a better appearance than his old one. Don Mario, on the other hand, stood firm, and went about in his rusty tall hat and long coat of half a century ago, shabby and darned, but without a spot. He was not going to derogate from his past—he, the son and grandson of notaries.

Then came hard times,—bad harvests,—the epidemic of 1837,—the cholera,—the revolution of ’48;—and the two brothers passed disagreeable days and still more unpleasant nights, racking their brains for the means of procuring a glass of wine for the morrow, or a little oil for the salad or the soup.

“To-morrow I will go to So-and-so,” Don Mario would say. “Meanwhile we must sweep out the house.”

They did everything themselves; and while Don Ignazio cut up an onion to put into the evening’s salad, Don Mario, in his father’s indoor coat, all faded and mended, began carefully to sweep the rooms like a housemaid. He dusted the rickety tables and the old ragged, leather-covered arm-chairs; and then, having gathered up all the dirt into a basket, he would cautiously open the door, to make sure there was no one within sight, and, late at night, carried it out and deposited it behind the wall of a ruined house which had become the dust-bin of the neighbourhood.

125And on the way he would pick up stones, cabbage-stumps, bits of orange or pumpkin-peel, so as to clean up the street also, seeing that no one troubled about it, every one being too much occupied with his or her own business to pay any attention to cleanliness. Cleanliness was his fixed idea—indoors and out. It often happened that Don Ignazio, finding that he was late in coming home, was forced to go out and call him in to supper.

“You are not the public scavenger, are you?”

“Cleanliness is a commandment of the Lord!” Don Mario would reply.

And, having washed his hands, he sat down to the meagre supper of onion salad and bread as if it had been the daintiest of dishes.

“This is Donna Rosa’s oil; and do you know there is no more left?” said Don Ignazio one evening between two mouthfuls.

“To-morrow I will go to the Cavaliere!”

“But his father was a peasant farmer!”

“His grandfather was a day labourer!”

“And now he is made of money!”

“His grandfather became the Prince’s agent—and made his fortune.”

“Let us go to bed; the light is going out.”

They had to economise even their candles. But afterwards, in the dark, the interrupted conversation was continued—not very consecutively—from one bed to another.

“Have you seen the band in their new uniforms?”

“Yes.... Farmer Cola has got in a hundred bushels of grain this year.”

“Who knows if it is true? Much good may it do him!”

“To-morrow I will go to the Cavaliere for some oil.”...

“The wine is all gone, too.”

“I will go for the wine as well.... Ave Maria!”

“Pater Noster!” And so they went to sleep.

126In the morning, after carefully brushing his shabby and much-mended coat and his rusty hat, Don Mario dressed hastily and began his day by going to mass at San Francesco.... This ceremony over, he proceeded on his errand, hugging the oil-flask tightly under his coat.

He presented himself with humble and ceremonious courtesy.

“Is the Cavaliere at home?”

“No, but his lady is.”

“Announce me to the lady.”

Now all the domestics in the place knew perfectly well the meaning of a visit from Don Mario, and at most houses they would leave him to wait in the anteroom, or say to him without more ado—

“Give me the bottle, Don Mario.”

It often happened that while they were filling it for him he could not control himself at the sight of the disorder in the room where they left him. He would mount a chair in order to remove, with the end of his stick, the cobwebs clustering on the ceiling; and if he found a broom within reach of his hand—what was to be done? he could not resist!—he began to sweep the floor, to dust the pictures, or to pick up the scraps of paper or stuff scattered about.

“What are you doing, Don Mario?”

“The Lord has commanded us to be clean.... Thank the lady for me!”

Donna Rosa, who was amused with him and his ways, always had him shown up to the drawing-room, and asked him to sit down.

“How are you, dear Don Mario?”

“Well, thank God. And how is your Excellency?”

“As well as most old women, dear Don Mario!”

“None are old but those that die. Your Excellency is so charitable, that you ought to be spared for a hundred years to come.”

127Donna Rosa kept up the conversation as though she had no idea of the real object of this visit; and Don Mario, still hugging his bottle, awaited the favourable moment for presenting his request without appearing troublesome. From time to time, after wriggling on his chair, as if in pain, for a few minutes, he would rise, and with “Excuse me, my lady!” wipe the dust from a table, or stoop to pick up a flake of wool, or bit of thread from the floor, and throw it out of the window,—as though the sight of these things actually made him feel ill.

“Oh! never mind, Don Mario!”

“The Lord has commanded us to be clean.... I had come....”

“How does your brother like his new employment?” Donna Rosa interrupted him, one day.

“Very much indeed.”

“You ought to try and get appointed inspector of weights yourself. There is one wanted at the Archi mill.”

“But the addition, madam! the addition! Ignazio knows how to do it!”

He turned up his eyes, with a sigh—as if this arithmetical process were a most complicated calculation.

“Poor Ignazio!” he went on. “He comes back from the mill so tired! Just imagine, madam—four miles uphill, on foot!... I had come for this....”

And he produced the flask.

“With pleasure!” Who was there that could say “No” to Don Mario?

But when that unfortunate addition was mentioned, not even the gift of a bottle of wine could restore him to good humour. He had tried so many times to do an addition sum. The tens were the difficulty.

“Nine and one are ten.... Very good!... But ... put down nought and carry one.... Why carry one if there are ten?”

128He had found it utterly impossible to understand this. And yet he was no fool. You should have heard him read, quite correctly, all those old legal documents, with their strange Latin abbreviations, which the modern notaries and advocates could not succeed in deciphering. It is true that he recited them parrot-fashion, without understanding them; but all the same he could earn half a franc at a time when required for this service; and this meant two litres of wine and half a kilo of lamb—quite a festive meal, although, nowadays, with Don Ignazio’s position, the two brothers were not quite so badly off as before.

They would even have been happy if it had not been for the irritating behaviour of the street boys. One day matters reached a crisis. Don Mario, administering a cuff to an ill-conditioned fellow who assaulted him with the cry of Quacquarà, received the same back with interest, and got his coat torn into the bargain. The magistrate, before whom the case was brought, kept the vagabond under arrest for a couple of hours, and got up a subscription at the Casino, to present Don Mario with a new coat and hat. But the latter would never consent to be measured for it, and when the coat—cut out by guess-work—was sent him, together with the most spick and span of hats, he thanked the donors politely, and sent the whole back.

“You have been a fool!” said his brother, who, on his return from the mill that evening, found him intent on repairing his ancient garment. “You can’t go out again in that.”

“I shall stay at home,” replied Don Mario loftily.

And he was no longer seen about the town.

He passed his days sitting on the front doorstep, talking to the neighbours, or wandering through the many empty rooms of the dilapidated house. No repairs had been undertaken for years past; the shutters were loose on their hinges. Two floors had given way, and had to be passed 129by means of planks, laid like bridges from one room to another; and the tiles were off the roof in many places, so that some of the upper rooms were flooded when it rained.

“Sell half the house,” said one of the neighbours; “it is much too large for you two alone!”

But that evening, discussing the matter at supper, Don Mario and Don Ignazio found themselves greatly embarrassed.

“Sell! Easily said.... But what? The room that had been their father’s office?”

“Oh!” exclaimed Don Mario indignantly.

It is true that the big volumes, bound in dark leather, were no longer in the shelves all round the walls. The government had taken possession of them, as though they had been its property, and not that of the notaries, who had drawn up all those documents. But what matter? The shelves, moth-eaten and rickety, reduced to receptacles for dishes, frying-pans, and utensils of all sorts, remained, to their eyes, living witnesses, as it were, to past glories. The two brothers looked at one another.

“Was it possible?... Well.... What should they sell? Their grandmother’s room?”

A mysterious chamber, which had been kept locked for seventy years, and of which now even the key was lost. Their grandfather’s wife—a saint on earth—had died there, and the widower had ordered it to be shut up, in sign of perpetual mourning. Every night the mice kept up a terrible racket there. But what matter? A master notary—one of the Majori—had willed that no one should open it and no one had done so. Were they to profane it? They were both agreed ... it was impossible!

“What then? The portrait-room?”

There were arranged on its walls half-a-dozen canvases, blackened with years and smoke, on which you could make out—here, the severe profile of Don Gasparo Majori, 1592; there, the grey eyes, white moustache, and pointed beard 130of Don Carlo, 1690; beside it, the wig and round shaven face of Don Paolo, 1687; and further on, the lean and narrow head of Don Antonio, 1805, framed in an enormous collar, with white neckcloth, and showy waistcoat with watch-chain and seals dangling from its pockets. Don Mario knew by heart the life, death, and miracles of each one, and so did Don Ignazio.

Could they turn them out of their own house? No; it was impossible. Better let the whole fall into ruins.

They went to bed and put out the light.

“Well, it will last our time. We are old, Mario!”

“You are two years older than I!”

“... To-morrow, Notary Patrizio is coming to get an old deed read out to him.”

“So we shall be able to buy half a kilo of meat.”

“Saverio the butcher cheats in his weights. I shall keep my eyes open.”

“I have lent the rolling-pin to Comare Nina.”

“I will get the wine from Scatá.... Vittoria wine this time.... Pater Noster!”

“Ave Maria!”

So they went to sleep.

They were growing old. Ignazio was right.

Don Mario sometimes wondered which of the two would die first, and the thought left him sad and depressed.

“I am the younger.... But, after me, the house will go to distant relatives, ... they will divide it up and sell it.... But, after all, what does it matter to us? We shall both be gone then.... We are the real Majori; when we are dead, the world is dead!”

Yet he went on sweeping out the tumble-down old house with the same tenderness and care as ever, removing the cobwebs from the walls, and dusting the moth-eaten and ragged remnants of furniture; driving a nail into the back 131of a chair or the leg of a table; pasting a sheet of oiled paper in the place of a missing window-pane, and carrying out the dust and rubbish as usual, late at night.

Moreover, since he now frequently went to sleep in the daytime—with the loneliness, and having nothing to do—he sometimes passed the night out of doors, sweeping the whole length and breadth of the street, and pleased to hear the wonder of the neighbourhood next morning, and have people say to him—

“The angel passed by last night. Is it so, Don Mario?”

He would smile, without replying. He was now quite resigned to his voluntary imprisonment, as he could no longer wear his old coat and hat, which were still there, quite spotless and free from dust, though perfectly useless.

One day, however, Don Mario lost all his peace of mind.

Standing at a window in the portrait-room, he had been looking along the street at Reina’s house, with its fantastically-sculptured gateway and the twisted stone monsters.

“A fine palace—quite a royal one,” said Don Mario, who had never seen anything richer or more beautiful in his life.

“Yet, how was it the proprietor had never noticed those tufts of pellitory growing between the carvings over the arch of the great gateway, quite spoiling the building? It was a sin and a shame!”

Scarcely had Don Ignazio come home from the mill that evening, tired and out of breath, when his brother said to him—

“Look here; you ought to go to Signor Reina. He is letting nasty weeds grow between the carvings of the gateway, under the middle balcony. It quite worries one to see them.”

“Well?”

132“You ought to tell him of it—at least when you meet him again.”

“I will tell him.”

Don Ignazio, quite worn out with his long walk, had other matters to think of; he wanted to have his supper and go to bed.

But from that day he too got no peace. Every evening, when he came home, Don Mario never failed to ask him, even before he had laid aside his stick: “Have you spoken to Reina?”

“No.”

“Go and tell him at once. It is a pity; those weeds are spoiling the building.”

They were quite an eyesore to him; he could not make out how Reina could put up with such a sacrilege. And several times a day he would go to the attic window, mounting a pair of steps at the risk of his neck, in order to look out. Those weeds were always there! They grew from day to day; they made great bushes that waved in the wind. If they had been fungous growths in the interior of his own system, he could not have suffered more from them.

“Have you told Reina about them?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He swore at me.”

That night Don Mario never closed his eyes. As soon as he found that his brother was snoring, then he lit the lamp, dressed himself, took the steps on his shoulder, which they nearly dislocated, and made his way to Reina’s house, keeping in the shadow of the wall, and avoiding the moonlight, as if he had been a burglar.

As indeed the gendarmes thought him when they came upon him, perched on the top of the gateway, pulling away for dear life at the parasitic herbs, in spite of the proprietor, who did not care whether they grew there or not.

133“What are you doing up there?”

“I am pulling out these weeds.”

“Come down.”

“Let me finish.”

“Come down, I tell you!”

At this unceremonious summons poor Don 134Mario had to descend, leaving several bushes of pellitory to spoil the beautiful building unchecked....

They were nearly taking him off to the police station!... And all for a good action! He died within three months, with the nightmare of those weeds weighing on his heart.... Poor old Don Mario!

Ever since he had taken it into his head to “take off the charm,” in the Grotto of the Seven Gates, Mastro Rocco had given up his pork-butcher’s shop, and was always on the top of the hill, baking his hump-back in the sun, digging here and there from morning to night, to find some trace of the treasure which the Saracens had enchanted in that neighbourhood.

Mastro Rocco used to talk as though he had seen it with his little red-rimmed eyes, and touched it with the horny hands which now wielded the spade both day and night, excavating ancient tombs,—by day on his own little plot of ground which looked like the destruction of Jerusalem—all yawning holes and heaps of earth;—by night, on his neighbours’ farms, by moonlight, or by that of a lantern, when there was no moon; for the neighbours did not like their ground cut up, and laughed at his finds of useless earthen vessels, and old coins with which you could not even buy a pennyworth of bread.

Mastro Rocco laughed to himself at these ignorant rustics who understood nothing. He knew, and had proved it, that those earthen vases, especially if they had figures on them, and that oxidised money, could be speedily converted into good coin of the realm, when he carried them to Baron Padullo, who put on his spectacles to examine them, and 135then opened certain huge books, as big as missals, and full of pictures, to make comparisons. Thus he had become convinced that the trade of selling ham and sausages was far inferior to that of digging up antiquities....

One day he found some beautiful terra-cotta figures, for which the baron paid him ten scudi. Who could tell what they might be worth, when the old gentleman could bring himself to give as much as that.

After that he went much more frequently to the baron’s house, accompanied by a little old man, whom Mastro Rocco called his assistant. But they always brought figures exactly like the first ones, all soiled with the earth they had been dug from; and at last, one day, the baron said—

“Mastro Rocco, if you do not find something different, you might as well save yourself the trouble of coming. Look here, I have a whole cupboard full of these.”

He pointed to a number of statuettes of Ceres, seated with her hands on her knees, arranged in rows behind the glass doors, along with Greek vases, lamps, bronzes of every sort, and antique coins of every size....

It was a long time before Mastro Rocco was seen again at the baron’s. When he next presented himself, along with the little old man, he carefully set down a basket full of hay which he had carried up under his arm, and began to gesticulate vehemently as he pointed out the precious objects reposing in the basket and covered with the hay.

“Ah! signor barone! what a novelty! what a novelty! Your worship will be enchanted, upon my word of honour!”

The baron had put on his spectacles in order the better to admire; and when he saw some half-dozen figures of Ceres, exactly like the others, but with unmistakable pipes in their mouths, instead of being enchanted, he roared aloud—

136“Ah! Mastro Rocco, you thief! Ah! you scoundrel!”

And he would have put a pistol-bullet through the head of each if they had not jumped from the window regardless of possible broken necks; though, after all, it was not very high. Mastro Rocco only broke his arm, and had a mass said to his patron saint for assistance rendered in this extremity. With his arm in a sling he imprecated curses on his rascally partner, who had suggested the charming novelty of the pipes!

“Was it not enough to have imitated the form of the little idols well enough to take in even Baron Padullo?”

All of a sudden, while San Rocco was quietly proceeding on his way, under his baldachin, with a number of wax candles lit all round him, and the band, and the procession, and the crowd of devout people—there came to pass a general helter-skelter, tumult, and confusion worse confounded. There were priests running away, with the skirts of their cassocks flying wildly, drummers and fifers upset on their faces, women screaming, blood flowing in streams, and cudgels playing even under the very nose of the blessed San Rocco. The Prætor, the Syndic, the Carbineers all hastened to the spot;—the 138broken bones were carried off to the hospital,—a few of the more riotous members of the community were marched off to pass the night in prison,—the saint returned to his church at a run rather than a processional step,—and the festival ended like the comedies of Pulcinella.

And all this through the spite of the people in the parish of San Pasquale. That year the pious souls of San Rocco had been spending the very eyes out of their heads in order to do things in grand style;—they had sent for the band from town,—they had let off more than two thousand squibs,—and they had now got a new banner, all embroidered with gold, which, it was said, weighed over a quintal, and tossed up and down in the midst of the crowd, like a wave crested with golden foam. Which thing, by sheer contrivance of the Evil One, was a thorn in the sides of the followers of S. Pasquale,—so that one of the latter at last lost patience, and began, pale as death, to yell at the top of his voice, “Viva San Pasquale!” Then it was that the cudgels began to fly.

Because, after all, to go and cry “Viva San Pasquale” in the very face of San Rocco, is really a good, sound, indisputable provocation;—it is just like going and spitting in a man’s house, or amusing yourself by pinching the girl who is walking arm in arm with him. In such a case there is no longer any sense of right and wrong,—and that slight amount of respect which people still have for the other saints—who, after all, are all related to each other—is trampled under foot. If it happens in church, seats are flung into the air,—if during a procession, there are showers of torch stumps like swarms of bats, and at table the dishes fly.

“Santo diavolone!” cried Compare Nino, panting, heated, and dishevelled. “I’d like to know who has the face to cry Viva San Pasquale again!”

“I!” yelled Turi the tanner, who looked forward to being his brother-in-law, quite beside himself with rage, and 139nearly blinded by a chance blow received in the mêlée. “Viva San Pasquale till death!”

“For the love of Heaven! for the love of Heaven!” shrieked his sister Saridda, throwing herself between her brother and her betrothed. All three had been going for a walk in all love and good fellowship up to that moment.

Compare Nino, the expectant bridegroom, kept crying in derision, “Long live my boots—viva San Stivale!”

“Take that!” howled Turi, foaming at the mouth, his eyes swollen and his face like a tomato. “Take that for San Rocco, you and your boots! There!”

In this way they exchanged blows which would have felled an ox, till their friends succeeded in separating them by dint of cuffs and kicks. Saridda, who by this time had grown excited on her own account, now cried Viva San Pasquale, and was very nearly coming to blows with her lover, as if they had already been husband and wife.

At such times parents quarrel most desperately with their sons and daughters, and wives separate from their husbands, if by misfortune a woman of the parish of San Pasquale has married a man from San Rocco.

“I won’t hear another word about that man!” cried Saridda, standing with her hands on her hips, to the neighbours, when they asked her how it happened that the marriage had not come off. “I won’t have him, if they give him to me dressed in gold and silver from head to foot! Do you hear?”

“Saridda may stay where she is till she turns mouldy, for all I care!” said Compare Nino, in his turn, as he was getting the blood washed from his face at the public-house. “A parcel of beggars and cowards, over in the tanner’s quarter! I must have been drunk when it came into my head to look for a sweetheart over there!”

“Since it is this way,” had been the Syndic’s conclusion, “and they can’t carry a saint out into the square without 140sticks and fighting, so that it’s perfectly beastly,—I will have no more festivals, nor processions, nor services; and if they bring out so much as one single candle—what you may call a candle—I’ll have them every one in gaol.”

In time, the matter became important; for the bishop of the diocese had granted to the priests of San Pasquale the privilege of wearing copes. The parishioners of San Rocco, whose priests had no copes, had even gone to Rome to raise an outcry at the foot of the Holy Father, carrying with them documents on stamped paper, and everything else; but all had been in vain, for their adversaries of the lower town—who, as every one remembered, had once been without shoes to their feet—had now grown as rich as Jews, through this new industry of tanning. And, in this world, one knows that justice is bought and sold like the soul of Judas.

At San Pasquale they were awaiting Monsignor’s delegate, who was a person of importance, and had silver buckles on his shoes weighing half a pound apiece—and a fine sight they were to see—and he was coming to bring the copes to the canons. And for this reason, they, in their turn, had now sent for the band, and they were going to meet Monsignor’s delegate three miles outside the town; and it was said that in the evening there were to be fireworks in the square, with Viva San Pasquale over and over again, in letters as big as those on a shop-front.

The inhabitants of the upper town were therefore in a great ferment; and some, more excited than others, were trimming certain staves of pear and cherry wood, as big as clothes-props, and muttering—

“If there is to be music, we shall want to beat time!”

The Bishop’s delegate ran a great risk of coming out of his triumphal entry with broken bones. But the reverend gentleman was cunning enough to leave the band waiting for him outside the town, while he, taking a short cut, 141quietly walked to the parish priest’s house, whither he summoned the principal men of the two parties.

When these gentlemen found themselves face to face—after all this time that the feud had lasted—each man began to look into the whites of his neighbour’s eyes, as if he could scarcely keep his nails out of them; and it required all the authority of his Reverence—who had put on his new cloth soutane for the occasion—to get the ices and the other refreshments served without accidents.

“That’s right!” said the Syndic approvingly, with his nose in his glass. “When you want me for the cause of peace, you’ll always find me on the spot.”

The delegate, in fact, said that he had come for the sake of conciliation, with the olive-branch in his mouth, like Noah’s dove, and made his exhortation, distributing smiles and hand-clasps all round, and saying, “Gentlemen, will you do me the favour of coming into the sacristy to take a cup of chocolate on the day of the festival?”

“Do leave the festival alone!” said the Vice-Prætor; “if not, more mischief will come of it.”

“Mischief will come of it if this tyranny is to be allowed—if a man is not to be free to amuse himself as he likes, and pay for it with his own money!” exclaimed Bruno, the carter.

“I wash my hands of the matter. The orders of the Government are explicit. If you celebrate the festival I shall send for the Carbineers. I am for order.”

“I will answer for order!” said the Syndic, tapping the ground for emphasis with his umbrella, and looking slowly around.

“Bravo! as if we did not know that it is your brother-in-law Bruno who blows the bellows for you in the Town Council!” retorted the Vice-Prætor.

“And you have joined the opposition party only on account of that bye-law about the washing, which you can’t get over!”

142“Gentlemen! gentlemen!” entreated the delegate. “We shall do nothing if we go on in this way.”

“We’ll have a revolution, that we will!” shouted Bruno, gesticulating with his hands in the air.

Fortunately the parish priest had quietly put away the cups and glasses, and the sacristan had rushed off at the top of his speed to dismiss the band, who, having heard of the delegate’s arrival, were already hastening up to welcome him, blowing their cornets and clarionets.

“In this way we shall do nothing at all!” muttered the delegate, worried to death by the thought that the harvest was already ripe for cutting in his own village, while he was wasting his time here talking to Compare Bruno and the Vice-Prætor, who were ready to tear one another’s souls out. “What is this story about the prohibition of the washing?”

“The usual interference. Nowadays one can’t hang a handkerchief out of the window to dry without getting fined for it. The Vice-Prætor’s wife—feeling safe because her husband was in a position of trust, for till now people always had some little regard for the authorities—used to hang out the whole week’s washing—it was not much to boast of—on the terrace.... But now, under the new law, that’s a mortal sin; and now even the dogs and fowls are prohibited, and the other animals^[12]—saving your presence—that used to do the scavenging in the streets; and now the first rain that comes it will be Heaven’s mercy if we don’t all get smothered in the filth. The real truth is that Bruno, the assessor, has a grudge against the Vice-Prætor, on account of a certain decision he has given against him.”

The delegate, in order to conciliate the local mind, used to sit boxed up in his confessional, like an owl in its nest, from morning till evening, and all the women were eager to be shriven by the Bishop’s representative, who had powers 143of plenary absolution for all sorts of sins, just as though he had been Monsignor in person.

“Your Reverence,” said Saridda, with her nose at the grating, “Compare Nino makes me commit sin every Sunday in church.”

“In what way, my daughter?”

“He was to have married me, before there was all this talk in the place; but now that the marriage is broken off, he goes and stands near the high altar, and stares at me, and laughs with his friends, all the time holy mass is going on.”

And when his Reverence tried to touch Nino’s heart the countryman replied—

“No, it is she who turns her back on me whenever she sees me—just as if I were a beggar!”

He, on the other hand, if Gnà Saridda passed across the square on Sundays, gave himself airs as if he had been the brigadier, or some other great personage, and did not even seem to see her. Saridda was exceedingly busy preparing little coloured paper-lanterns, and put them out in a row on the window-sill, in his very face, under the pretext of hanging them out to dry. Once they found themselves together in church, at a christening, and took no notice of each other, just as though they had never met before; nay, Saridda even Went so far as to flirt with the godfather.

“A poor sort of a godfather!” sneered Nino. “Why the child’s a girl! And when a girl is born, even the beams of the roof break down!”

Saridda turned away, and pretended to be talking to the baby’s mother.

“What’s bad does not always come to do harm. Sometimes, when you think you’ve lost a treasure, you ought to thank God and St. Pasquale; for you can never say you know a person till you have eaten seven measures of salt.”

“After all, one must take troubles as they come, and the 144worst possible way is to worry one’s self about things which are not worth the trouble. When one Pope’s dead they make another.”

“It’s fore-ordained what sort of natures children are to be born with, and it’s just like that with marriages. It’s far better to marry a man who really cares for you and has no other ends to serve, even though he has no money or fields, or mules or anything.”...

On the square the drum was beating to give notice of the festival.

“The Syndic says we shall have the festival,” was the murmur that went through the crowd.

“I’ll go to law till doomsday, if it should leave me as poor as holy Job, with nothing left but my shirt; but that five francs’ fine I will not pay! not if I had to leave directions about it in my will!”

“Confound it all!” exclaimed Nino. “What sort of a festival are they going to have, if we are all to die of hunger this year?”

Since March not a drop of rain had fallen, and the yellow corn, which crackled like tinder, was “dying of thirst.” Bruno, the carter, however, said that when San Pasquale was carried out in procession it would rain for certain. But what did he care about rain? or all the tanners of his neighbourhood either? In fact they carried San Pasquale in procession to east and to west, and set him upon a hill to bless the country on a stifling May day, when the sky was covered with clouds,—one of those days when the farmers are ready to tear their hair before the burnt-up fields, and the ears of corn droop as if they were dying.

“A curse on San Pasquale!” cried Nino, spitting in the air, and rushing about among his crops like a madman. “You have ruined me, San Pasquale; you’ve left me nothing but the reaping-hook to cut my throat with!”

The upper town was a desolate place enough. It was one 145of those long years when the hunger begins in June, and the women stand at their doors with their hair hanging about their shoulders—doing nothing—staring with fixed eyes. Gnà Saridda, hearing that Compare Nino’s mule was to be sold in the public square, to pay the rent of his farm, felt her anger melt away in an instant, and sent her brother Turi in hot haste, with the few soldi they had put aside, to help him.

Nino was in one corner of the square, with his eyes averted and his hands in his pockets, while they were selling his mule, with all its ornaments and the new headstall.

“I don’t want anything,” he replied sullenly. “My arms are still left me, please God. A fine saint that San Pasquale of yours, eh?”

Turi turned his back on him, to avoid unpleasantness, and went on his way. But the truth is that people’s minds were thoroughly exasperated, now that they had carried San Pasquale in procession to east and west, with no more result than that. The worst of it was that many from the parish of San Rocco had been induced to walk with the procession too, thrashing themselves like asses, and with crowns of thorns on their heads, for the sake of their crops. Now they relieved their feelings in exceedingly bad language; and the Bishop’s delegate was obliged to leave the town, as he entered it, on foot, and without the band.

The vice-prætor, by way of retaliation on his opponent, telegraphed that people’s minds were excited, and the public peace compromised; so that one fine day a report went through the town, that the soldiers had arrived, and every one could go and see them.

“They have come on account of the cholera,” others; said, however. “Down in the city, they say, the people are dying like flies.”

The chemist put up the chain of his shop door, and the 146doctor left the place as speedily as possible, to escape being knocked on the head.^[13]

“It will not come to anything,” said the few who had remained in the place, having been unable to fly into the country like the rest. “The blessed San Rocco will watch over his own town.”

Even the lower town folks had begun to go barefoot to San Rocco’s church. But not long after that, deaths began to come thick and fast. They said of one man that he was a glutton, and died of eating too many prickly pears, and of another, that he had come in from the country after nightfall.^[14] But, in short, there was the cholera, there was no disguising it,—in spite of the soldiers, and in the very teeth of San Rocco,—notwithstanding the fact that an old woman in the odour of sanctity had dreamed that the saint himself had said to her—

“Have no fear of the cholera, for I am looking after that. I am not like that useless old ass of a San Pasquale.”

Nino and Turi had not met since the mule was sold; but scarcely had the former heard that the brother and sister were both ill, than he hastened to their house, and found Saridda, black in the face, and her features all distorted, in a corner of the room. Her brother, who was with her, was recovering, but could not tell what to do for her, and was nearly beside himself with despair.

“Ah! thief of a San Rocco,” groaned Nino. “I never expected this. Gnà Saridda, don’t you know me any more? Nino, your old friend Nino.”

Saridda looked at him with eyes so sunken that one had to hold a lantern to her face before one could see them, and Nino felt his own running over.

“Ah! San Rocco,” said he, “this is a worse trick than the one San Pasquale played me!”

147However, Saridda in time got better, and as she was standing at the door, with her head tied up in a handkerchief, and her face yellow as new wax, she said to Nino—

“San Rocco has worked a miracle for me, and you ought to come too, and carry a candle at his festival.”

Nino’s heart was too full to speak, and he nodded assent. But before the festival came round, he too was taken with the pestilence, and lay at the point of death. Saridda tore her face with her nails, and said that she wanted to die with him, and she would cut off her hair and have it buried with him, and no one should ever look her in the face again as long as she lived.

“No, no,” replied Nino, his face all drawn with agony. “Your hair will grow again, but it will be I that will never see you again, for I shall be dead.”

“A fine miracle that San Rocco has worked for you!” said Turi, by way of comforting him.

Both of them slowly recovered; and when they sat sunning themselves, with their backs to the wall and very long faces, kept throwing San Rocco and San Pasquale in each other’s teeth.

One day Bruno, the carter, coming back from the 148country after the cholera was over, passed by them, and said—

“We’re going to have a grand festival to thank San Pasquale for having saved us from the cholera. We shall have no more demagogues and no more opposition, now, that the vice-prætor is dead. He has left the quarrel behind him in his will.”

“All very well; a festival for the dead!” sneered Nino.

“Perhaps it was San Rocco that kept you alive?”

“There!—do have done with it!” cried Saridda. “If you don’t, we shall need another cholera to make peace between you!”

He no longer went about now with the long beard and scapulary of the begging friar. He got shaved every Sunday, and went for a walk in his best soutane of fine cloth, with his silk-lined cloak over his arm. When he looked at his fields, his vineyards, his cattle, and his ploughmen, with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth, if he had remembered the time when he washed up the dishes for the Capuchin fathers, and they put him into the frock out of charity, he would have crossed himself with his left hand.

But if they had not taught him, for charity’s sake, to read and write and say mass, he would never have succeeded in fixing himself in the best property in the village, nor in getting into his books the names of all those tenants who worked away and prayed for a good harvest for him, and then blasphemed like Turks when settling-day came round. “Look at what I am, and don’t ask who my parents were,” says the proverb. As for his parents, every one knew about 149them; his mother swept out the house for him. His Reverence was not ashamed of his family—not he; and when he went to play at cards with the Baroness, he made his brother wait for him in the anteroom, with the big lantern to light him home with.... He was popular as a confessor, and always ready for a little paternal gossip with his female penitents, after they had relieved their consciences and emptied their pockets, of their own and other people’s sins. You could always pick up some useful information, especially if you were given to speculating in agricultural matters, in return for your blessing!

Good gracious! He did not pretend to be a saint—not he! Holy men usually died of hunger—like the vicar, who celebrated, even when his masses were not paid for, and went about poor people’s houses in a ragged soutane which was a perfect scandal to religion. His Reverence wanted to get on, and get on he did, with the wind right aft, though a little hampered at first by that unlucky monk’s frock, which would get in his way, till he escaped from it by means of a suit before the Royal Courts. The rest of the brethren backed him up in his application, only for the sake of getting rid of him; for, as long as he was in the monastery, there was a free fight in the refectory every time a new Provincial had to be elected, and the forms and dishes flew about with such goodwill that Father Battistino, who was sturdy as a muleteer, had been half-killed, and Father Giammaria, the guardian, had had his teeth knocked down his throat. His Reverence, after having stirred up the fire all he could, always retired to his cell on those occasions, and remained quiet there; and it was in this way that he had succeeded in becoming “His Reverence” with a complete set of teeth, which served him exceedingly well; while of Father Giammaria, who had been the man to get that scorpion up his sleeve, every one said: “Serves him right!”

And Father Giammaria was still only guardian of the 150Capuchins, without a shirt to his back or a sou in his pocket,—hearing confessions for the love of God, and making soup for the poor.

When his Reverence was a boy, and saw his brother—the one who now carried the lantern—breaking his back with digging, and his sisters finding no husbands who would take them even at a gift, and his mother spinning in the dark to save lamp-oil, he said, “I want to be a priest.” His family sold their mule and their little plot of ground to send him to school, in the hope that if ever they attained to having a priest in the house, they would get something better than the land and the mule. But more than that was required to keep him at the seminary. Then the boy began to hang about the monastery, hoping to be taken on as a novice; and one day when the Provincial was expected, and they were busy in the kitchen, they called him in to help. Father Giammaria, a kind-hearted old fellow, said to him, “Would you like to stay here?—so you shall.” And Fra Carmelo, the porter—who was bored to death, sitting for hours on the cloister wall, with nothing to do, swinging one sandal against the other—patched him up a scapulary out of old rags which had been hung out on the fig-tree to scare away the sparrows. His mother, his brother, and sister protested that if he became a monk it was all up with them—they would lose the money they had paid for his schooling, and never get a brass farthing out of him in return. But he shrugged his shoulders and replied, “It’s a fine thing if a man is not to follow the vocation to which God has called him.”

Father Giammaria had taken a fancy to him because he was active and handy in the kitchen, and at all other work; and served mass as though he had never done anything else in his life, with his eyes cast down, and his lips primmed up like a seraph. Now that he no longer served the mass, he still had the same downcast eye and compressed lips, when it 151was a question of some scandal among the gentry, or of the common lands being put up to auction, or of swearing the truth before the magistrate.

No one dared to go to law with him; and if he cast his eyes on a farm for sale, or on a lot of the common land up at auction, the magnates of the place themselves, if they ventured to bid against him, did so with obsequious bows, offering him pinches of snuff. One day he and no less a person than the Baron himself were at it a whole day—pull devil, pull baker. The Baron was doing the amiable, and his Reverence, seated opposite to him, with his cloak gathered up between his legs, at every advance in the bidding offered him his silver snuff-box, sighing, “What are you going to do about it, Baron?” At last the lot was knocked down to him, and the Baron took his pinch of snuff, green with vexation.

This sort of thing quite met the views of the peasants; they were used to seeing the big dogs fight among themselves over a good bone, and leave nothing for the little ones to gnaw. But what made them complain was that this man of God ground them down worse than the very Antichrist, when they had to share the crops with him; and he had no scruples about seizing his neighbour’s goods, because the apparatus of the confessional was all in his hands, and if he fell into mortal sin he could easily give himself absolution. “It is everything to have the priest in one’s own house,” they sighed. And the shrewdest of them denied themselves the very bread out of their mouths, so as to send one of their sons to the seminary.

“When one gives himself up to the land, one has to do it altogether,” his Reverence used to say, as an excuse for considering no one. The mass itself he only celebrated on Sundays, except when there was nothing else to do; he was not one of those wretched starveling priests who have to run after the three tari of the mass fee. He had no need 152of it. So much so that the Bishop, arriving at his house on a pastoral visit, and finding his breviary covered with dust, wrote thereon with his finger, “Deo gratias!” But his Reverence had other things to think of besides wasting his time in reading the breviary, and laughed at the Bishop’s reproof. If the breviary was covered with dust, his oxen were sleek and shining, his sheep were thick in fleece, and the crops as tall as a man, so that his tenants, at any rate, could enjoy the sight of them, and build fine castles in the air—till they had to settle accounts with their landlord. It was a relief to their hearts, poor souls. “Crops that are like witchcraft! The Lord must have passed by them in the night! One can see that they belong to a man of God, and it is a good thing to work for him who has the mass and the blessing in his hand!” In May, at the season when they watched the sky with anxious looks for every passing cloud, they knew that their landlord was saying mass for the harvest, and was a better protection against the Evil Eye and the bad season than pictures of saints or blessed loaves. As for the latter, his Reverence would not have them scattered about among the crops, because, as he said, they only served to attract sparrows and other noxious birds. Of sacred pictures he had his pockets full; he got as many as he wanted, of the best kind, in the sacristy, without spending a penny, and made presents of them to his labourers.