CHAPTER XI

ROME

Rome, the old enchantress, held me enthralled from the moment St. Peter’s dome floated before my eyes like a faint blue bubble on the far horizon. We passed the winter of 1878-1879 with my mother’s sister, Louisa (Crawford) Terry; doubtless the environment of her apartment in the old Palazzo Odescalchi and the companionship of the Crawford and Terry cousins--Romans born and bred--had something to do with the spell!

We reached Rome on Christmas Eve. The Corso was crowded with gaily dressed people. In a narrow side street a group of _piffarari_ from the hills, clad like satyrs in shaggy goat skins, stood playing their pipes before a dimly lighted shrine of Mary and the Child. It was so cold in the streets that we were glad to lift the padded leathern curtain and enter the Church of St. Peter’s, sweet with the smell of incense, bright with its scores of golden lamps. The basilica was filled with people waiting for the midnight mass. A long line stood before the statue of St. Peter; each in his turn wiped the bronze toe of the saint, kissed it, wiped it again, and passed on. Just before twelve o’clock several couples came in together, the men in evening dress wearing orders, the women in ball gowns sparkling with jewels. As they passed the holy water basin, a young officer dipped his fingers and offered them to a girl in a scarlet cloak who lightly touched the gloved finger tips and crossed herself. I caught a word of their talk.

“You promised me that last dance.”

“I could not help it--Paulo was watching--you shall have the next.”

The gay company sweeps on and is lost in the vast throng of worshipers. The mass bell tinkles, all drop to their knees, heads are bowed, the silence almost hurts!

Christmas morning we lingered over the breakfast table till Marion Crawford routed us out, crying:

“Time to get ready for church--don’t be late! I am going to sing ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ before the sermon.”

Both Crawfords and Terrys were Protestants at this time; later Marion and two of his sisters “went over to Rome.”

At the American Church in the Via Nazionale we found a meager congregation and a colorless service, compared to midnight mass at St. Peter’s. Doctor Nevin, the Nimrod rector, did his best for his flock, but the odds against him were heavy.

“Did you notice,” Crawford murmured maliciously, “how the Reverend says, ‘Our Father who art in Nevin’?”

Palazzo Odescalchi stands on the Piazza SS. Apostoli, near the Palazzo Venezia, then the Austrian embassy. The Prince, my aunt’s landlord, occupied one floor of his palace, renting the other apartments. My room was part of a ballroom suite. It had a high vaulted ceiling and walls covered with Nile-green silk painted in arabesques with lunettes of fruit, flowers, and landscape. My aunt kept open house; one met many of the prominent people of the day in her salon. Looking back, I seem to see it like one of Paul Veronese’s pictures, crowded with vivid and elegant figures. Scraps of gossip forty years old drift back to me.

“Here comes the most beautiful woman in Rome,” some one whispers as both doors of the salon are thrown open and Giuseppe, the old majordomo, announces, “Marchesa Theodoli.”

“Yesterday a workman said to her in the street, ‘Are you the Madonna herself or one of the angels?’--An American? Oh, yes! Lily Conrad,--her face was her fortune, Theodoli married her without a _dot_.”

“No wonder!”

“The Theodoli” was tall and statuesque, her hair was a golden aureole about her head, her eyes fiery brown, her color ivory. It was the fashion to be in love with her. Even after she had children grown, an infatuated boy shot himself for her sake, standing before her portrait in a photographer’s studio.

“Monsignor Capel.”

Everybody turned to look at the celebrated English prelate, a fine man with “a good leg” very obvious in its long purple stocking, vigorous silver hair, and a silvery voice that somehow does not ring quite true. This was when he was at the height of his popularity, before the affair of the bracelet. Some one asked the conundrum of the hour, “Why is Monsignor Capel like Mme. Récamier?” (The proprietress of a London beauty parlor.)

“Because he makes Bute a fool (beautiful) forever.” Lord Bute was the Monsignor’s latest convert among the British aristocracy.

“The Minister of the United States.”

George Perkins Marsh, first American diplomatic representative to United Italy, was the most important American in Rome, though you would not have guessed it from his quiet manner. He looked the grave scholar he was and he talked with my mother and Crawford of matters philological, on which he was an authority. It was long after that I realized the great part he played in the history of United Italy. Years later Queen Margherita spoke of Mr. Marsh as having been the intimate friend of her father-in-law, Victor Emmanuel, and from others I have learned that he was frequently consulted and gave much help in framing the “Statuto” as the Italian Constitution is called.

One keen memory of my first winter in Rome is of a morning spent in the Forum with Crawford and Augustus Hare, who was at work on his incomparable “Hare’s Walks.” He had brought with him a copy of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, and as we sat on the steps of the Basilica Julio, he read aloud Marc Antony’s oration.

“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears!” How the words echoed in that place!

My last impression of Augustus Hare is of an evening in the red drawing-room of the Odescalchi, when he told ghost stories till my blood ran cold. He was a slender, sallow man, with a baleful face, and when, in the firelight of the darkened room, he ended a ghastly tale with “A ball of flame broke from his lips!” it seemed as if a ball of fire actually leaped from his! There was something intensely repellent to me about Hare, and of this he was instantly conscious.

“Your cousin cannot endure me,” he said to Crawford; “I make her flesh creep. She is telling your sister about it at this moment,”--and I was!

The Abbé Liszt, who was the guest of Cardinal Hohenlohe at the Villa D’Este, was much in evidence that winter and from time to time consented to play at some benefit concert. He was a commanding figure as he sat at the piano, very elegant in his clerical dress, playing his “Rhapsodic Hongroise” as I have never heard it played. After the concert a group of ladies surrounded him. The Abbé dropped a glove; a young Neapolitan princess picked it up and hid it in her muff.

“The ladies cost the Abbé a pretty penny in gloves,” whispered Crawford.

At this time Crawford was called Frank, or sometimes Fritz, a nickname given him in Germany, either at Heidelberg or at Lesnian, the home of his Junker brother-in-law, Eric von Rabé, an officer of the Franco-Prussian War. Crawford was twenty-four years old, a tall, strong, handsome young man, with no serious pursuit save the study of languages. He had plenty of time to devote to my mother and me; to him I owe my introduction to medieval and ancient Rome, with much else that has proved useful. In a letter of this time he writes to me:

“No success worth having is got from the uncultivated efforts of genius, and cultivation means the tritest of trite things, the daily digging and hoeing of the mind till it brings forth wheat instead of tares!”

King Victor Emmanuel might be seen on a fine afternoon, driving a smart pair of horses in a high phaeton. He was a martial figure, full of dash, with a keen eye that saw more than most. His fierce mustache, twirled at a truculent angle, set the fashion for the military. We sometimes met him driving to the Villa Mirafiori, the home of his morganatic wife, often with a younger man who closely resembled him and was, I think, a son of this union. Rome was a city divided against itself; the King’s party were called the Whites, the followers of the Pope Pius Ninth were known as the Blacks. The two factions managed to rub along together somehow, as they have done ever since, though the King’s people talked of “the traitor at the hearthstone” and the Pope’s cursed “Perfidious Savoy.”

Francesco Crispi, Minister of the Interior, at that time played the first rôle in Italian politics. He had lately returned from a certain quiet journey whose results were to prove of vast importance to the whole world. With the object of sounding the great powers’ attitude towards Italy, Crispi visited England, France, Austria, and Germany. In Paris he was coolly received, London was friendly but indifferent, Vienna as hostile as ever; he returned to Italy feeling that Bismarck--and Bismarck then meant Germany--was Italy’s only friend. From this hour the Triple Alliance between Germany and those two irreconcilables, Italy and Austria, was assured.

Though there was some discussion of political matters at my aunt’s house, it appeared to me that the two serious things in life from the Palazzo Odescalchi standpoint were society with a small s, and art with a big A. Quick as a chameleon to take the local color, I entered the studio of Giovanni Costa to study painting. Costa, one of the young artists among the immortal _Mille_ who sailed from Sicily with Garibaldi and made the great fight for Italian liberty, was the most interesting painter in Rome, with a large following among English and Americans. In order to be in time for his class I often stole away before breakfast to the studio in the Via Margutta, taking a roll in my pocket. I enjoyed my work and made some progress, learning how to prepare my canvas and lay on the under color in pale red in a way that satisfied my master. I was toiling over a study of a branch of lemons when my artistic career was interrupted by a severe attack of Roman fever, a scourge which then took its toll every year from the Americans wintering in Rome.

Two new figures now appear in “Memory’s Showcase”, Doctor Liberali, the old homeopathic physician, and Suora Teresa, the Spanish nun who nursed me.

Oh, the horrors of those long, sleepless nights when I lay staring at the shadows cast by the taper on the painted ceiling, waiting for the first faint gray, for the song of the caged bird outside the opposite window, for the moment when that casement would open and I could see the profile of a young monk in a white habit bending over the bird cage. At long last came a welcome tap at my door and Mariuccia, the merry little maid, tiptoed to my side with a cheery:

“_Buon Giorno, Signorina._ It will go better to-day. I made a petition for you at mass.”

Relapse followed relapse. The doctor grew graver, the Suora more careful, my mother paler.

“The girl will never recover in this room. She must have sun; she must have fire!” I heard the doctor declare to my aunt.

“It is the truth!” murmured the Sister.

My beautiful Nile-green room was deadly cold; the only heat it ever knew came from a charcoal brazier whose fumes gave me such a headache that I preferred the cold. A few hours later my bed was carried into one of the sunny south drawing-rooms, where an open fire blazed upon the hearth. I was too much absorbed in the fight for life that followed to think much of the trouble I was giving; since then I have grilled in my blood at the memory of that upsetting of the well-ordered existence at the Palazzo Odescalchi. The splendid sunny reception and living rooms opened _en suite_, one from the other; what happened on the Wednesday afternoon receptions and the more intimate Sunday evenings at home?

In preparation for my first sitting up, my mother went to buy some white cashmere to make a “Nightingale” for me. The clerk had just cut a length from a piece and was folding it up for another purchaser, a lady in whom my mother recognized a friend, whose young daughter had died of the fever the day before; the cashmere was for _her_ last garment! Shuddering, my mother hurried from the shop.

“Not from that piece of cloth, no!” She would find her material elsewhere!

As soon as I could be moved, the doctor suggested change of air. On a mild day of early spring my mother and I, with Marion Crawford for escort, left Rome. I remember that the peach trees were all in bloom.

“Orvieto is the place indicated,” Marion declared. “Has not its wine been prescribed? I have an acquaintance at the Aquila Bianca who has the best rooms and best macaroni in the town.”

Memories of that fortnight at Orvieto remain, when so much is forgotten. The fine cathedral, the lovely Fra Angelico and Signorelli paintings, the Etruscan tombs, the view of the Valley of the Tiber and the Umbrian Mountains, the well of St. Patrizio, with its winding stairway cut from the rock for water-carrying donkeys, my mother’s delight in my renewed health, and Crawford’s extraordinary personality coloring everything with the roseate glow of his _joie de vivre_.

“To-night, I will make you, my aunt, a dish whose like you have never tasted!” he exclaimed one evening, when the macaroni was scorched, no lettuce was to be had, and it looked as if we must go to bed fasting. He called for white bread, olive oil, salt, pepper, and vinegar and compounded what he called “a bread salad.”

“Impossible to have anything better! Good wine, good oil, good company; what more do you want?” he cried in triumph, as we praised his dish. We adjourned to the terrace of the poor little inn.

“We only lack music,” some one suggested.

“I will sing you the song taught me by Amerigo, the old contadino, whose vines I helped prune this morning.”

Crawford put a new string on his guitar, tuned the instrument, and sang one of those touching songs of “the people” that are more melodious and more dramatic in Italy than in any other country.

“_Sor Colonello, me dia il congedo, per andar ne mia ca’, per andar ne mia ca’,_ _Per veder la mia amorosa che in letto se ne sta!_”

Later, by his novels, Crawford was to teach the English reading world to love the simple Italian ways. He taught me so much of Italy that I am glad to find, from an old letter, that he learned something that was worth while from me,--the American point of view. I was frankly horrified at the lack of purpose in his life. This handsome, gifted, brilliant man of twenty-four seemed perfectly content to live at home, idle, and supported by his mother.

Crawford’s mother, for years “a leader” of the Anglo-American colony, was much beloved.

“Madama Terry is the most _simpatica_ American I know!” I once heard Rudolpho Lanciani, the archeologist exclaim. Most people agreed with him. Her popularity was deserved, for her kindness was unfailing,

[Illustration: FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD

At the age of twenty-three]

her generosity unstinted. She was the most romantic of women, always beautiful, always surrounded by admirers! Her marriage to Thomas Crawford, the sculptor, in 1846 carried her to Rome, a young bride; from this time Rome was her home. The four Crawford children were all more Italian than American. After Uncle Crawford’s death in 1857, my aunt married Luther Terry, an American painter also settled in Rome. There are two children of this marriage, Margaret (Mrs. Winthrop Chanler) and Arthur Terry.

“Every year I break off a bit of my heart and give it away!” my aunt said to me sadly at the end of a season that had brought several near relatives and friends to Rome. That was the fly in her ointment--the brilliant circle at the Odescalchi was inevitably a shifting one--she missed the intimacy of old friends and relatives; this was part of the price of exile. She was a faithful correspondent, writing long letters to her children and sisters, “holding the family together” by her system of “letter exchange.” They all wrote freely and frequently to her, and she was tireless in passing on the letters from one to another.

Her two married Crawford daughters, Annie, Baroness Erich von Rabé and Mimoli, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, came that winter to visit the Odescalchi. Annie was a unique person, witty, brilliant, and extraordinarily gifted. Her brother Marion writes of her at this time, “I saw Annie yesterday, and find her much changed--cordial and affectionate, but nervous and excitable. She has become much thinner, or I should say slimmer, for her figure is really almost absolute perfection. She was here for a few days with her really magnificent children, all affection and smiles, and has now gone back to her wolves and her Poles and her fine trees at Lesnian.” The Crawfords were all artistic like their father and romantic like their mother.

On the ninth of January of this year, 1878, Victor Emmanuel the Liberator died. I saw his strong face for the last time as he lay in state at the Quirinal. The _cappella ardente_ was ablaze with candles, the air was heavy with the smell of incense and flowers. The dead king was dressed in uniform with the crown and scepter at his feet. Two Capuchin monks knelt beside him, telling their beads. From early morning till late night a silent grief-stricken crowd surged though the chapel.

“He received the sacrament! Yes, it was allowed,” a woman of the people murmured in my ear the words with which Rome rang. There had been some who doubted if the Church would permit the supreme unction to be administered. For several days it had been known that while the king lay dying at the Quirinal, across the Tiber at the Vatican, his old adversary, Pope Pius Ninth, had been stricken with mortal illness. With my mother I watched the wonderful funeral _cortège_ pass the American Consulate. There were tears on the roses she threw before the crimson velvet funeral car drawn by six magnificent horses. In the great drama of the _Risorgimento_ she too had played her part. She had, as a girl in her father’s house and as a wife in her husband’s home, received and comforted Italians exiled for Liberty’s sake; she had worked for the cause of Italian liberty with voice and pen. She had labored for Italy, she had rejoiced with her, and now she mourned with “the ransomed land.”

Chief among the mourners was Garibaldi, old and ill, who came up from rocky Caprera, where he had lived for some time rather in the shadow. I saw him pass, lying back in a landau, dressed in the traditional gray felt hat and red blouse. His bronze hair and beard were silver now, but his eyes had still the look of a seer. He never for an instant doubted that Italy would fill that larger destiny of which he dreamed. He saw in the death of Victor Emmanuel the opportunity to raise once more the cry for _Italia Irredenta_!

“The call of the patriots of Trieste and Trent must find an echo in the hearts of all Italians, and the yoke of Austria, no better than that of the Turk, must once for all be broken from off the necks of our brethren.”

Forty years were to pass before Garibaldi’s words were realized.

On this, his last visit to Rome, Garibaldi once more urged the Romans to make a supreme effort to banish the fever from their city by building the Tiber Embankment and thus preventing the river from rising and overflowing its banks. The Romans did for Garibaldi what they would not have done for any other man, and put through that splendid piece of engineering. Though to-day his statue rides in bronze on the Janiculum, Rome’s greatest monument to him remains the Tiber Embankment. To-day we recognize that he, the man of vision, saw the future truer than Crispi the statesman; it was not so in 1878, when the young King Umberto took the oath of office. Crispi, his trusted advisor, had fallen under the sway of the Iron Chancellor, and from that time stood for the Triple Alliance and German influence. Italy endured a great disappointment this year at the Congress of Berlin, from which the Italian envoy, Count Corti, returned to Rome empty handed, when by skillful diplomacy his country might easily have gained some substantial increase of territory. I remember Count Corti in the United States, when he was the Italian Minister. He was an insignificant looking man, with a very small nose, which may have had something to do with his failure! I recall a story of a heated argument between Count Corti and Vicenzo Botta, an Italian exile formerly a monk now married to an American wife. Botta spoke with great heat, pouring out a flood of invective against the church, the Pope, and the clerical party. Count Corti, a moderate man, with moderate ideas and gifts, waited for a pause in the fiery diatribe and then said with biting irony:

“And _I_ was a Dominican Friar!”

The host changed color, hesitated, and dropped the argument!

King Victor was hardly cold when the German infiltration of Italy showed a marked increase, that quiet thorough system of penetration, which was to make Capri, Olevano, and certain other garden spots of Italy seem like German colonies. In the spring of 1879, the birthday of one of the royalties was celebrated by _tableaux vivants_ at the German Embassy, the Palazzo Cafferelli on the Capitoline Hill.

“It makes me shudder to think that the Germans have gained a footing on the sacred soil of the Capitol!” a young American student said to me, as we climbed the long steps leading to the summit.

The tableaux were the important social event of that season, and I was pleased enough when asked to take part. A prize was offered by the German Ambassador for the best tableau, and the competition among the artists was intense. Each painter made a sketch of his subject and then proceeded to find the victims to illustrate it. I have forgotten the name of my artist, an energetic fellow who gave me my first ideas of German efficiency. His picture represented a scene in the studio of Phidias, when the sculptor shows his statue of Minerva to Pericles and Aspasia; from the hour the part of Aspasia was assigned to me, I was pursued by that artist, who insisted upon examining every minutest detail of my costume. A sketch of the dress was given me, and having followed it, as I thought, closely enough, I presented myself at the first rehearsal. My artist was far from satisfied:

“It is not enough to indicate the Greek border on the underdress,” he declared; “it must be carefully embroidered in gold. The hair has not been properly studied; the ornaments are three centuries late in style. The mantle is not the right color; it must be blue to harmonize with the slave’s drapery.”

The slave, Maud Broadwood, later Mrs. Waldo Story, a handsome dark girl, who was to sit at my feet, seemed discontented with her part. Used to the rough-and-ready American manner of getting up tableaux, I innocently exclaimed:

“Let me be the slave and you be Aspasia!”

The artist bristled with anger.

“The young lady has been chosen because Professor Helbig, the first archeologist in Rome, holds that Aspasia should be represented by one of her type.”

I was out of my depth and offered no more suggestions. The artist went on with his lecture:

“Signor Tale, the hairdresser of her Majesty the Queen, will make some studies from statues at the Vatican for the coiffure. He will first call upon the young lady, to become familiar with her type.”

Signor Tale, looking more like a prince than a hairdresser, called to observe my type; called again with half a dozen careful pencil drawings and measured my head for the golden net he would construct to bind over the blue fillet which must match the mantle. Rehearsals in hairdressing followed until both artists were satisfied.

My aunt took me to her friend, Mme. Ristori, to consult about the mantle.

“It is important it should be correct!” the great actress agreed. She called her daughter, the lovely Bianca Capranica.

“Ask my woman to bring the blue and gold mantle I wear as Phedra. That will satisfy even a German archeologue.”

On the Royal birthday, the cast assembled at the embassy. Mme. Ristori, dressed as Clio, the Muse of History, opened the evening with a recitation. She had not long retired from the stage; her majestic presence, her wonderful deep voice, her classic face, thrilled her audience, as I had known them thrill American audiences in “Marie Stuart” or in “Lucrezia Borgia.” I was still under the spell of her grand manner when she came to oversee the draping of her mantle on my shoulders. She called for a needle and thread and came towards me with a look so dramatic that I trembled; the needle might have been a dagger from the intensity of her face and gesture. She herself took the necessary stitch to stay the mantle’s folds upon my shoulder; as she left me to take my pose she whispered:

“Forget yourself; remember only that you are Aspasia, that Pericles is by your side, that Phidias and his statue are before you!”

Just before the curtain was raised, a queen’s jewels lately discovered in an ancient Etruscan tomb and belonging to Castellani, the great jeweler archeologue, were handed me. I put the earrings in my ears and clasped the bracelets on my wrists with a sense of awe.

Our tableau was much applauded, Queen Margherita, who sat in the front seats with the French Ambassadress, Mme. de Noailles, asked to have it repeated. We took the prize; this success was not wonderful when I remember that Adelaide Ristori, Herr Helbig, Guglielmo Castellani, Signor Tale, and I forget how many other masters of their craft had a share in it!