CHAPTER XVIII
ARTIST LIFE IN ROME
1894
When we arrived in Italy some of our English and American friends said, “You will find Rome dreadfully changed!”
Having known it in the seventies, I welcomed the changes that had brought comfort and health to the modern capital. The old Rome was all there, if you only knew how to look for it!
King Umberto, whom I had seen take the oath of office sixteen years before, reigned at the Quirinal with Queen Margherita, and Leo the Thirteenth at the Vatican. Francesco Crispi, the last of the great figures of the _Risorgimento_, was prime minister and ruled Italy with a firm hand, while Cardinal Rampolla, strong and astute, was the Pope’s Secretary of State.
Mr. Wayne MacVeagh was American ambassador and Larz Anderson first secretary of embassy. The British Embassy in the old Villa Torlonia close by the Porta Pia was a far more attractive meeting place than the American. We had pleasant relations with both American and English diplomats; of the latter I remember most distinctly Lord Currie, who came to Rome from Constantinople. I had known Lady Currie in London when she was Mrs. Singleton, writing under the pseudonym of Violet Fane.
I first met her at a dinner given for my mother by Edmund Yates at the Star and Garter at Richmond. She was gay and handsome then, and I remember her keeping up a brilliant running fire of talk with Louis Jennings and W. H. Mallock. She was graver now, but kept the charm that had made her one of the most sought after women in London.
She still wrote occasionally and was always an omnivorous reader. She often read books for her busy husband. _A propos_ of this, she told me a story of their Constantinople days. Lord Currie had given her a life of the Sultan, recently published in England. Was it interesting? he asked her one day. “Yes,” she said, “but”--and got no further, “people of importance” interrupting. They dined that night with the Sultan; during the dinner the conversation flagging, Lord Currie had a happy inspiration. “Sire,” he said, “an interesting book has just appeared about yourself!” Lady Currie made a frantic effort to reach his foot under the table.
“Ah!” said the Sultan. “I should like to see that book!”
“You shall have my copy!” exclaimed the Ambassador.
The Sultan’s parting words were, “I will send for the book in the morning.” When they were in the carriage Lady Currie said to her husband:
“The book you recommended to the Sultan opens with this sentence, ‘A more loathsome toad than the Sultan Abdul Hamid I never saw!’”
When the Sultan’s servant called next day, the volume was not to be found. It was sent for more than once, and the next time the Ambassador had an audience, the Sultan reproached him with duplicity.
Rome in the last decade of the nineteenth century was as fascinating to me as it had been to my mother in 1843, when she came here on her wedding journey. My aunt still held her little court at Palazzo Odescalchi where I met many of the elder artists. Mr. Richard Greenough, the sculptor, rarely failed to appear on her reception days; he was an exquisite man with the old fashioned “hair-trigger breeding” of a Boston gentleman of the early Victorian age. Mr. William Story was at work upon his last statue, the “Genius of Grief”, a kneeling figure of an angel, for his wife’s grave in the Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley wrote, “It might make one in love with death to think one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
Marion Crawford was living at Sorrento with his wife and four children. He had become famous and, for a writer, rich. I would rather have found him poor and obscure; the price he had paid for fame and fortune was too high. He had an iron constitution and phenomenal powers of work. I have known him to write a book in six weeks and doubt if he ever took more than three months over any novel. He worked under great pressure, with a full head of steam on, day in day out. The pace he had set was beginning to tell on him, but it seemed he could not alter it. He had little sense of self-preservation and was full of whimsies about his diet. We owed our first Roman home to him, for he lent us his apartment in the historic Palazzo Santa Croce, where tradition says Beatrice Cenci lived at one time. During the first part of our stay here I was harried by a recurrent nightmare. Night after night I found myself in a room that my waking eye had never seen, a blind room, without windows or doors, in the center of which stood a funeral catafalque draped in black. This vision obsessed me: even by day I could not wholly escape it.
After a time it happened that certain repairs were needed on the foundations of the palace. In making them, the workmen came upon a small closed cellar filled with human bones. Further search was made, and over the cellar was found an oubliette whose entrance, walled up for centuries, was directly below my room. Two nights after this, as the bells of the Pietà del Monte rang midnight, a funeral car drew up before the palace, the bones were carried away, and buried with whatever ceremony the church allowed. After that I slept in peace.
The tower room where Crawford had worked became J.’s studio. On the walls hung casts from the faces of the great men described in Crawford’s “With the Immortals”, Napoleon, Beethoven, and best of all the famous death mask of Dante. This last so much impressed J. that he made a drawing of it in colored pastels. Dissatisfied with the work, he crumpled up the drawing and threw it in the waste basket. I rescued it, smoothed out the tumbled paper and “unbeknownst” took it to the framer’s. When the drawing came home I hung it up in the salon.
“See how nicely your Dante looks now!” I exclaimed.
“Not nice at all! Don’t let anybody see it!” was the answer.
Crestfallen I took the drawing to my bedroom. One day when I was ill my Uncle Terry came to see me and caught sight of the Dante.
“What a good drawing!” he exclaimed.
Uncle Terry was an excellent draftsman and J. had great respect for his opinion. The Dante came back to the salon. On my next reception day Mrs. David Kimball, a Boston collector, saw it and bought it on the spot. Later Curtis and Cameron reproduced it as a Copley Print; it has gone all over the world, taken prizes in Australia and Japan and is, I believe, the most popular modern portrait of the great Italian poet. I tell this story for the benefit of other artists’ wives, for it has been my experience that artists are often the worst judges of their own work. They seem to value most the work that has cost them the greatest labor, whereas it sometimes happens that things struck off at white heat, quickly and easily, have more of the artist’s personality, which of course is what gives every work of art its value.
Before leaving America, I had arranged to write a syndicate newspaper letter for the _Boston Transcript_, the _Kansas City Star_, the _New Orleans Times Democrat_, a Chicago, and a New York paper. Gathering materials for this correspondence added much to the interest of my life in Rome. I had the sense of being eyes and ears for thousands of readers in different parts of the world. My letters to my family, however, give more intimate glimpses of Rome at this time.
[To my Mother.]
Rome. February, 1894. I see many fine functions at St. Peter’s. I never tire of it all, the arrogant scarlet cardinals, the ermine-tippeted canons, the great feather fans carried before Pope Leo, his extraordinary waxen face where only the eyes seem alive, as he passes through the throng carried high above the people, giving the papal benediction with three fingers of the right hand. The uniforms of the Swiss Guard and the Guardia Nobile, the papal chamberlains, the vested choir, the voices of the Pope’s “angels”, the rich smell of incense are all just as you knew them before I was born. Did you remember that some of the splendid costumes were designed by Michael Angelo?
“St. Peter’s is the theater of the Church,” Monsignor (now Cardinal) O’Connell once said to me. He is right. A function there moves me just like any other great pageant. I hadn’t been here a week when I saw the King, the Queen and the Pope. She is like a queen in a fairy story, tall, beautiful, with golden hair. The King seems better loved by the Romans, the Queen by the diplomats and foreigners. She is very _dévote_, doubtless a fortunate thing for the dynasty. I find matters political very difficult to understand. Mr. Stillman, who is the _London Times_ correspondent and hardly less important a personage than the British Ambassador, tells me that Crispi is a giant and the only man able to hold Italy in hand. He is seventy-four years old and after him “the deluge” is feared.
Yesterday Colonel and Mrs. John Hay gave a pleasant reception at their hotel, where I met the Bishop Potters, Mrs. Edward ditto and Stillman’s tall wife and daughters. Mrs. S. (Marie Spartali) interests me more than any person I have met so far. A superb romantic creature, a hard worker, a good painter, one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelites. I remember your telling me of her when she was the rage of London, the idol of that group. They all painted her,--Morris, Rossetti, Burne-Jones. The last portrait is by Du Maurier. We are convinced she is the original of the Duchess in “Peter Ibbetson.” She has a thousand little tricks he describes, the likeness is too strong to be mistaken.--Cold to-day, _tramontana_ blows and I hug my open fire. I wonder the Romans were ever Christianized; the sun is so all-important for health, happiness, life itself, that it seems strange they could have turned from the altars of Apollo.
* * * * *
Rome, March 5, 1894. At two o’clock to-day Mrs. Potter Palmer and I drove into the courtyard of the Quirinal Palace and got out at the glass doors under the clock. The porter, an immense scarlet-coated person with cocked hat and a long cane of office, received us with ceremonious bows and scrapes.
“Have their Excellencies been summoned for an audience with her Majesty the Queen?”
We “allowed” that we had, whereupon with even deeper salaams he ushered us up a winding stairway with the tiniest steps I ever saw, to the _piano nobile_. Here we passed through several magnificent apartments filled with flunkies in scarlet liveries and silk stockings to an anteroom. The walls and furniture were covered with blue satin brocade, there were many flowering plants, superb hangings and a few good old portraits. Here we found the Marchesa Villamarina, lady in waiting to the Queen _in perpetua_, and the lady in waiting for the month, both of whom wore on the left shoulder a diamond M (the Queen’s initial) on a blue ribbon like an order. As we entered, a little old lady very plainly dressed passed into the inner room.
“That is Mme. ----, the widow of a distinguished general,” the Marchesa said, “your turn is next.”
When the old lady came out we were announced and ushered into the reception room. We courtesied at the entrance, halfway across the room, and again as we stood before the Queen, who received us standing. She was dressed in black velvet embroidered with jet, and wore one string of gigantic pearls. Her earrings, immense, perfectly round solitaire pearls, were in shape and size the twins of Mrs. Palmer’s; Mrs. P.’s were the best I thought.
The room was large and luxuriously furnished with windows looking out on the Quirinal garden. The Queen seated herself and motioned us to sit. She had beside her a little table with silver smelling bottle and writing materials. She opened the conversation by telling Mrs. Palmer that she had seen her mother-in-law some years ago. Mrs. Palmer thinks she meant Mrs. Bryan, who came to Rome to arrange for the loan of the Queen’s collection of laces for the Chicago World’s Fair. The Queen then turned to me and asked if I had written the book about the Woman’s Department of the Fair, presented to her by our Ambassador, Mr. MacVeagh. When I pleaded guilty, she said, with the prettiest accent:
“Thank you for the book. It is very interesting. I hear the Fair was a great success; many Italians went to Chicago and I have heard much about it. They tell me that the Woman’s Building was beautiful and the Italian exhibit well arranged and much admired.”
When we had threshed out the subject of the Fair, there was a pause. In the presence of royalty you must not speak till you are spoken to; this leaves the choice of the topic of conversation to the royal personage. After a moment’s silence the Queen turned to me and asked:
“Are you fond of music?” adding, “It is my greatest pleasure. I had a Steinway piano that I bought in Germany. When Mr. Steinway heard of this he asked me to send it to him and sent me in exchange a piano he thought better. The tone is admirable. The Chickering pianos are also good.” She was evidently aware of the rivalry of the two famous firms.
The Queen had obviously been prepared for our visit, for she spoke to me chiefly on matters of art.
“Your artists in America are doing very good work,” she said, “and what excellent architects you have. I know that from the pictures of your fine houses I see in the illustrated magazines. I enjoy reading them, the literature is so fresh. We see a great many American ladies here, but few gentlemen. Your men, I hear, are too busy to travel. Two of my ladies in waiting are Americans, so I learn many things about your country.”
She rose, shook hands, “hoped to see us again,” and the audience was over. Taking pains not to turn our backs (it wasn’t easy) we courtesied out of the room with three genuflections as on entering.
When she was young, the Queen was a great beauty; she is still handsome, graceful, charming, and took as much pains to be agreeable as if the whole business of holding audiences with strangers was a pleasure and not the unmitigated grind it must be; still she doubtless calls it part of the day’s work and likes to do it well.
* * * * *
June, 1894. We have taken an apartment close to J.’s studio in an old palace built by Sixtus the Fifth. It looks out upon the Square of St. Peter’s and it has a divine terrace. What a view! The whole of Rome and the Alban Hills, St. Peter’s and the fountains, the Vatican and the windows of the Pope’s private apartments just opposite! At the studio J.’s happy family, a pair of pigeons and a falcon, has an addition in the shape of two pretty kittens.
Queen Margherita is a brave woman. She drives about the town constantly, passing this house twice a day with only a lady in waiting beside her. The scarlet liveries of her coachman and footman make the landau a fine target for the anarchist’s knife or pistol, but the Queen is quite fearless. Crispi laughs at the attempts to kill him, and they have begun to say he has a charmed life. The King looks as if he would like to be in anybody’s boots but his own. Some of Crispi’s acts would have brought about a revolution in any other country; the King alone has prevented this, and the unconscious triumph of his simple, honest character is most impressive. He is not a brilliant man, but he loves his people and Italy better than his own dynasty, which he has not scrupled to jeopardize. Crispi is perfectly sincere in the belief that for the country’s sake his government must continue. Whether he is right is another question. No matter what happens, have no fear for us. The Romans are the peaceablest people in the world. At Milan, Naples, Turin, Florence, there may be some excitement, but the Romans do not interest themselves in what is happening in the world to-day and won’t do so for another generation. You can’t make people free in twenty-five years; it takes at least fifty.
On Friday, the day of Santa Lucia, we were bidden to the _festa_ of Signora Villegas. Here they celebrate your saint’s day instead of your birthday. At dinner I sat between Villegas and Adolfo Apolloni, the sculptor. The Signora is Italian, but Villegas is an Andalusian from Seville. There were Spanish guests, Spanish wine and viands, much talk and merriment.
Our home between 1894 and 1900 was the old Palazzo Accoramboni, or, as we called it, the Palazzo Rusticucci. The agent who let us our apartment was an ignorant man, and when we asked the name of the palace he told us it was the Rusticucci. It was only after we had had the name engraved upon our note paper and visiting cards, and had lived there two years, that Crawford told us of our mistake. It seemed too late to correct it, so we kept the name, and now it is a source of satisfaction to me to remember that we are the only people who ever lived in Palazzo Rusticucci! The quarter, properly called the Leonine City, is more familiarly spoken of as the Borgo, and is inhabited chiefly by people connected with the Vatican. Our apartment was both picturesque and comfortable. Our terrace, transformed by J. into a sort of hanging garden of Babylon, where we cut roses every month of the year, became one of the sights of Rome, and strangers often rang our doorbell and asked to see it.
Rome is the most hospitable place I have ever known. From the time of the Empire the chief business of the city has been to entertain strangers; it never had any other business and it has never lost the habit of making strangers feel at home. The society is most amusing, for one only has to “sit tight” and sooner or later every important personage in the world passes your way!
[To my Mother.]
July 5, 1894. Yesterday the Ambassador gave a Fourth of July reception with lots of champagne, American flags and a band playing the Star Spangled Banner. There were one hundred and ten Americans present, so you see we are not the only ones left in Rome. I am brisk and well. If one has to be in any city in summer, Rome is the best. Tuesday night Mariano Benlliure came to dine. He is called the first living Spanish sculptor. He has a strong dash of the Moor, as his genius and his name show; all the Bens are of Moorish descent. We also had Mrs. Taylor, a clever newspaper woman, correspondent of the _London Standard_, sister of Mrs. Augustus Trollope, and Joe Hunt. He has grown a beard and is not quite so cherubic.
I have had two bright letters from William Henry Hurlburt, who is at Cadennabbia on the Lake of Como. He wrote for homeopathic medicines which I sent him. The poor old fellow isn’t long for this world. He has an insight into spiritual truths as keen and as fine as when he was an associate of the Transcendentalists at Cambridge; one hears he has another side, but I have never seen it.
You ask me how I pass my days. Up at five and out for a spin on my bicycle. The other day I rode to Ostia and back before lunch. After my ride I get out stores and linen and settle accounts; everything is under lock and key and every _centesimo_ accounted for. Out again for errands and at my writing by half-past ten or eleven. In the morning I write and read the papers in the _salotto_. The Paris edition of the _New York Herald_ has much home news. Lunch at one. After lunch to bed for a siesta.
I make a rule to be indoors by eleven in the morning and not to go out again till five in the afternoon. After the siesta, I go up to my workroom on the terrace where there is a thorough draft and no sun, and work there till six, when I go over to the studio to see how J.’s painting goes on. For a little stroll, and then dinner on the terrace at eight. We sit there till bedtime--so nice and cool, the stars very homelike and pleasant, the same constellations that you see, and just now many falling stars.
During the years of our life in Rome we spent most of the summers there. As the heat increased, one by one the English and American friends and the more well-to-do Roman friends departed, until our circle narrowed down to a few artists, two or three of the younger diplomats left in charge of the embassies, and certain friendly priests, who found our house a convenient stopping place on the way to the Vatican. I learned more of Rome in these lonely summer months than during the gay season. One August I heard of the death of an elderly American woman whom I had never seen. As I knew her niece, I felt impelled to drive out to the Protestant cemetery to the funeral, for I did not know of any other American in Rome who could be there. The Ambassador, the Consul, the clergymen of both the English and American churches were out of town. When I reached the little chapel, I found a strange clergyman getting into his surplice. The coffin was already there, and a carriage had just stopped containing the niece and the doctor who had attended the dead woman.
“I am a stranger. I only arrived this morning,” said the clergyman. “I do not speak the language, I do not know for whom I am to read the service.”
“I too am a stranger,” I began. The solitary mourner was entering the chapel.
“At least you can tell me,” in an agonized whisper, “whether I am to read the service for a man or a woman.”
“Oh, for a woman!” I gasped.
I think the memory of that lonely funeral had much to do with our coming home to America for the “last heat” of life. Much as I adored Rome, I did not want to grow old and die there!
January 21, 1895. Uncle Terry still goes to teas and flirts desperately with the girls who make much of the dear old fellow. Mrs. John L. Gardner is here with wonderful costumes from Paris and such furs--sables and chinchillas. My syndicate goes better always. I have seven subscribers now. I am very glad of the new ones, _Louisville Courier Journal_ and _St. Paul Despatch_.
February 23. Rome is full of Americans, who keep me very busy. To-day I wrote the first stint of my newspaper carnival letter, then arranged the flowers and put my house in order for a luncheon party for Mrs. Potter Palmer. In the afternoon drove out with Mrs. Gardner to Villegas’ studio where she “acquired” some of his gorgeous stuffs, old Genoese velvet and the like. To tea at Mrs. MacVeagh’s, where I had a good talk with the Ambassador; he looks like his brother Franklin whom we liked so much in Chicago. To-night to a ball at the Artists’ Club. You must read Paul Sabatier’s “St. Francis of Assisi”; it is delicious. I have just suffered Zola’s “Debacle.” One doesn’t read that book, one suffers it.
April 1. Sunday was my reception day; there are only two more of them. They are voted a success. Helen (Gardner) makes the tea. The Price Colliers came. She is a pearl. They are an interesting couple. To-day to lunch with Auntie and Uncle Terry. They have bloomed out with the warm weather and look like a pair of roses. Dear old Mr. Hooker was a sad loss to them; his death has darkened their whole winter. Mr. Story is ill, but his daughter Edith Peruzzi is hopeful. Mr. Hurlbert told me that the reason Mr. Story didn’t recover was that he did not want to. His interest in life died with his wife. It seems that she had taken care of all the material side, his money, wardrobe, every practical detail! Losing her, he finds himself helpless, “perplexed”, as Hurlbert said, “at buying a shoe string.”
Saw Salvini in Alfieri’s “Saul” last night; a great joy. He is unchanged, showed not a trace of having “gone off!” I had hardly hoped for this happiness, as he almost never acts now, having retired after his last tour in the United States, with a handsome fortune. Mme. Modjeska in a stage box, looking lovely but older, the sad “older” that dresses like twenty-five and has the face and expression of fifty. But, bless you, if you want my news, buy the weekly _Transcript_; my letters are pretty apt to turn up in Rome, as many traveling Bostonians subscribe to it. The Barrett Wendell children confronted me with one of my own letters the other day and demanded to be taken to the tapestry factory I had described; fortunately it exists.
May 10. Two weeks ago I went to Sorrento to visit the Crawfords, then to Venice for a week with Mrs. Gardner. The celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Torquato Tasso’s death took me to Sorrento. Crawford made the chief address, prefacing it with an apology for his Italian. The Bishop of Sorrento told me this was rather a jest, as Marion’s Italian was more elegant and correct than that of any other speaker.
In Venice the attraction was the opening of an exhibition of modern pictures. I found time for my old loves, Titian and Veronese, and took on two new ones, Tintoretto and Carpaccio. I was very comfortable at Marion’s, where he and Bessie were kind as kind. Mrs. Gardner has the Daniel Curtis apartment on the Grand Canal. John Sargent had been staying there and he had recommended Mancini to paint a portrait of Mr. Gardner. Mancini’s method of painting is to put a network of squares about two inches large in front of the canvas and to paint the picture through these squares. You sometimes see traces of these threads in Mancini’s work. J. thinks with Sargent that Mancini is a man of genius--he knows him well and I have been to his studio in Rome.
Mr. Curtis’s last _mot_. In the dining room of the Grand Hotel some one asks the name of a lady extremely décolletée.
“The Princess Chemisoff, _née_ Alloff!” Curtis snapped out.
I am sending you for your birthday two bits of old lace; one is Mechlin, the other Palestrina. I bought them in Venice. Old lace is now almost priceless; there has been a tremendous run on it. Jesurum, the famous lace dealer in Venice, told me that most of the good old lace has gone to America. I got a deal of tutoring about lace from him and now understand something of it. It makes me faint to remember how carelessly I have worn some of your rare old pieces. You must get them together and let me bring them back to be repaired. I have a wonderful lace woman; she wears the most powerful glasses I ever saw. It’s an awful trade, lace making or mending, too often ending in blindness.
April 13. Busy this week with the Lenten services. The _tenebrae_ and _miserere_ very fine, the ceremony of washing the altar and displaying St. Veronica’s handkerchief and other relics impressive and beautiful. Somehow it is all arranging itself in my mind. At first I felt only dismay and bewilderment, now I begin to see the _raison d’être_. It’s not particularly Christian, but the symbolism is aesthetic and spiritual, a turning from mere material toil and contemplating the unseen and unknown. It’s a sort of theism that seems well suited to the Latins. Hardly a day passes without my going into St. Peter’s or to the Vatican. I take refuge there when too many “oxen come about me, fat bulls of Bashan compass me on every side”!