Twenty Years in Europe

It was a dangerous time to go to Italy. The cholera was raging in Spezia not less than in Marseilles and Toulon. Many Italians were flying home from the scourge-stricken districts, and at the last moment I learned that a quarantine had been established on the Italian frontier. I hoped, however, to get through at a little village on Lake Maggiore. To my surprise all the lake region was filled with guards and I was soon arrested and cooped up with a thousand others at an old sawmill by the lake.

For ten long days I walked alone up and down the upper floor of that big sawmill, every hour expecting the cholera to break out among the crowd of refugees down in the yard. Once a day a guard was sent to conduct me down to the lake, where I could go in and swim. What a treat that was for me! The guard stood on the shore with fixed bayonet, watching that I did not swim out too far and get away. Mrs. Terry, our good American friend, happened to be spending the summer in the mountains near by. She heard of me and, like a good Samaritan, brought me grapes and other delicacies. We could only stand and talk to each other at a distance with the line of guards between us.

One morning I received a great big document, it looked like a college diploma, saying that I had finished with the quarantine and could proceed on my way.

In the early morning twilight I crossed beautiful Lake Maggiore in a row boat, and like a bird let loose from its cage flew away to Rome.

Once on a time when my wife and I had been in Rome visiting, a lady friend said to us just as we were about leaving: “Come first with me to the fountain of Trevi, throw a penny into the water, and you will return to Rome.” We went one beautiful moonlight night and tossed our coins into the fountain. And now, sure enough, here I was again in the Eternal City.

The officials of the consulate met me at the train. I went through another terrible fumigation for the cholera, and was soon settled down to live in Italy. The office was at once moved to Palazzo Mariani, 30 Via Venti Settembre, and there later we made our home, when it was safe for my family to follow me.

My friends, Congressman Lacey and wife, who seemed to be about the only strangers in Rome, also met me. We stopped at the great, big, empty “Hotel di Roma.” We had it all to ourselves, and we had much amusement with the waiter, who understood none of our lingo, nor we his, further than the word “ancora” (more). The little mugs of milk he brought us for our figs, were but spoonfuls, so we constantly cried “ancora!” He smiled, and the mugs came almost by the dozen. I was no little surprised to see on my bill a long list of repeated charges, sometimes written out, sometimes dotted down, for half a yard. It was the word “ancora,” at a half a franc apiece.

The Laceys left Rome, after taking one long, last look at me at the station, for they believed they were leaving me there to die of the cholera.

Rome was as silent as a grave that summer. Everybody seemed seized with a panic, and fled to the sea or the mountains. I was indeed lonesome, and with just half of an attack of cholera would have probably succumbed. I saw little but closed shop windows, silent streets, and men going about the alleys and corners scattering lime and disinfectants. Everybody I knew or met carried a bottle of “cholera cure” in his coat pocket for there was danger any moment of tumbling over in the street. Away from the office I scarcely met a soul I could talk with. Suddenly I bethought myself of my friend Frank Simmons, the sculptor, and was at once ensconced with him in the rooms above his studio. When not busy at the consulate I could spend my time watching him turn his live models into clay and marble, and in the beautiful summer nights we sat up in his rooms and talked of art, and America, till midnight.

Mr. Hooker, the banker, (what American that ever went to Rome in the last twenty-five years did not know him?) invited Mr. Simmons and myself to supper. He lived in the palace once owned by Madame Bonaparte, the mother of Napoleon. Here she died. The chambers were still filled with paintings and sculpture and other souvenirs of the Napoleon family. That night Mr. Hooker, Mr. Simmons and myself sat till towards the morning round the little table in the very room where Napoleon’s mother spent her evenings thinking of her eight children, seven of whom were kings.

In a few weeks, the scare over, the people commenced returning. Then the cholera broke out in Italy sure enough. It was at Naples now, and with horrible fatality.

The brave King Humbert took train and went there to help and to encourage the afflicted. He went into the hospitals everywhere, took the sick by the hand, and possibly helped many a dying one to take courage and live. He took his own provisions with him, even drinking water, from Rome, and whenever he went among the sick he smoked constantly. His staff complained he was leading them all to death, but they had to follow into dens and holes and hospitals more dangerous than a battle field.

September.-My family have come, and now we are all living at the Consulate, Via Venti Settembre 30.

The King came back to Rome from cholera-stricken Naples a day or two ago. He has become the greatest hero in Italy. I never saw such a reception. The main streets of Rome were packed solid with human beings, trying to touch the King’s extended hand, his horses, the wheels of the carriage. The beautiful Queen Margaret sat at his side smiling and bowing right and left. The young Crown Prince sat on the front seat. I did not know a King could be loved so by his people. But this King was a hero.

The Van Marters had asked me to view the procession from their balcony on the Via Nazionale. They had hung out American flags. The King saw the colors, took off his hat and profoundly greeted them as he passed.

I never saw a President receive half the ovation that this King did, riding through Rome with his Queen and son, and without any escort or signs of royalty whatever. The vast crowd were simply mad with pride, enthusiasm and love for their King and Queen Margaret.

October.-It is easy enough to get acquainted in Rome, at least for an official; besides, there are many of one’s countrymen living here, and parties and receptions are the order of the day and night through the entire social season. The members of the consular and diplomatic corps we soon met, and then there are so many American artists here worth knowing whose studios are open to all lovers of the beautiful. We made immediately the acquaintance of U. S. Minister and Mrs. W. W. Astor at their home in the Rospigliosi palace. There we met many interesting people.

Mrs. Astor is a young and very beautiful woman, and very charming in her manners. They have two pretty children. Mr. W. Waldorf Astor, though a multi-millionaire, personally leads a simple life in Rome. He is a close student. Every bright morning sees him riding with an antiquarian among the outskirts and ruins of the city. He is an acknowledged authority in kindred matters and his papers on the discoveries in Yucatan and elsewhere, read before one of the learned societies here, attracted attention. He is not playing ambassador as an amusement. His legation business is as closely attended to as if he were a poor, hard-working clerk in need of a salary. There is no ostentation about him personally. Officially, he attends to it that the social position of the United States Minister is what it should be.

One night at a dinner party he was relating the incident of a Union soldier who had donned a gray uniform once and entered the Rebel army at Atlanta. He had read a description of this soldier’s experiences and hairbreadth escapes in the Atlantic Monthly, and had been extraordinarily impressed. The soldier’s name, as he remembered it, was the same as my own. Could we be related? I astonished him by saying that I was more than related, that I was the soldier myself, and the article in the Atlantic was my own. Mr. Astor grasped my hand, saying he had thought of that soldier’s action a hundred times. My narrative had made Mr. Astor a friend. He rarely introduced me to a friend after that without adding: “He is the man who went into Atlanta.”

The palace where Mr. Astor lives is the same that our Minister Marsh occupied when I was here some years ago. It is built on the ruins of the Baths of Constantine.

I have looked everywhere trying to find the “hills” of Rome, but almost in vain. They can barely be located, and are not half as defined as the hills of Boston.

*****

Yesterday I went to look at the apartment where the consulate used to be by the Spanish stairway. The consul’s little back room is where the Poet Keats died. I could think I saw him lying there waiting for beautiful death to come, and I seemed to hear him say to his friend Severn: “I already feel the flowers growing over me.” And I saw Severn too, forgetting his easel, to sweep and cook and wait and watch all the nights alone, till the beautiful soul of Keats should take its flight. The room is a poorly lighted common little bedroom where the poet died, but it will be visited many a day in memory of one who lived, not between brick walls, but in high imaginations. We also went to the poet’s simple grave, as we had often done before, and looked at the green sod above one who

Had loved her with a love that was his doom.

It was the love for Fannie Brawn and not the bitter pens of the Quarterlies, that killed John Keats after all. Severn found that out only six short years ago, when the love letters from Keats to Fannie Brawn were placed in the now old man’s hands.

December 28.-Spite of bad weather we are having some wonderful sunsets lately, and strangers in Rome linger long on the Spanish stairway to enjoy a scene they have so often heard of-a sunset by the Tiber.

Last night Madame Bompiani invited us to tea with her. She lives at the Hilda’s tower palace, celebrated by Hawthorne, in the “Marble Faun.” Her husband is a well-known Roman lawyer, and she herself writes interesting letters to the Chicago Interior. We learned much about things in Rome direct from him, and after the supper we were taken up to the tower.

One of the guests was Madame Guyani, a sister of the hostess. She was a fine conversationalist and interested us much. Only a few months ago she was a sufferer in the terrible earthquake at Ischia. She is still lame as a result of the experiences of that fearful night. She told us all about the earthquake. The night of the disaster she wandered or crept about the fields till morning. The parts of the island which were nothing short of an earthly paradise in the evening were only piles of ruins and dead people in the morning. It was as if Eden had been struck by a thunderbolt, only here there was a happy, unsuspecting people to be suddenly hurled out of existence.

Sunday.-Instead of going to church I stay in Mr. Franklin Simmons’ studio and watch him making a bust of Marion Crawford, the novelist. He has a good subject, for Marion Crawford is a large, handsome man with a fine figure and a genial face. There was a joking dialogue going on as to whether it is the great novelist now sitting to the sculptor Simmons or the great sculptor Simmons doing the face of a novelist, each modestly insisting the other only had claims on immortality. I liked Crawford and his genial ways. I had just finished reading his “Roman Singer.”

Frank Simmons seems to me to be the best sculptor in Rome, though he is not yet the most celebrated. He does not seem to try to seek fame; but lets it seek him, which it is doing. Marion Crawford, too, I know, regarded Simmons as the best sculptor living, and some day he will make him the hero of a great novel.

Italy is called the land of art and yet curiously there are few great Italian artists. Its galleries sometimes seem to me like opened coffins, where one beholds among the bones the jewel work of some dead age. I feel here much as I felt in Berlin when looking on the golden necklaces of Helen of Troy, dug up by Schliemann. All the fine paintings and marbles here in Rome seem like the ruins, relics of another time. Foreign artists by the hundred, live and work here for the inspiration they get from the fragments of the past. They taste the wine made good with age and mix some of it in the bottles of new wine of their own making. There are more imitators in Rome than anywhere else in the world.

*****

The duties of the consulate here are nothing compared with Zurich or with any other commercial consulate. The office is often full of callers, but their errands are visits of courtesy or to have passports issued and the like. The trade of Rome with America is insignificant.

There are two regular consular clerks here, burdened with nothing to do. The laws provide for some thirteen of these “regulars” in the consular service, who hold their places for life. They are rarely promoted, and grow gray doing little. One good, hired clerk whose staying in depends on his zeal and fitness and not on his self-importance, is worth a dozen of them. They should be made responsible to somebody. The salary of the Consul General does not pay his expenses in Rome.

Palazzo Mariani, where we live, is a very magnificent structure outside, with great white marble stairways within, leading from floor to floor. But it is cold as a sepulcher. No stoves and no fire-places save one little niche in the wall, where a few burning fagots scarcely change the temperature.

At night we come home (very late, as parties only begin at nine or so), and go to bed in a big cold bedroom with a brick floor. Our so-called cook stove is a little iron box heated with charcoal, in a kitchen about five feet square, but Antoinette seems to know how to broil a kid on it every day.

Our drawing-room is heated (?) by the fagots in the niche in the wall; but even this is too warm for our Italian friends, who, when they call, apologize and go and sit in the back end of the room as far from the so-called fire as possible.

We have our furniture here from Switzerland, and to us that is a comfort. Occasionally a couple of priests come into our house without asking and walk about through all the rooms, sprinkling holy water on the beds as is a custom here. On going out, they indicate their willingness for a fee, which is not surprising in a land where feeing is universal.

Like most modern houses in Rome, our big palace is built on top of a series of old arches that once supported the houses of ancient Rome. From our cellar we can prowl around unknown distances through these mysterious chambers.

The water for the house is still conducted from the Alban hills in one of the old Roman aqueducts. It is a queer combination, this old and new in Rome.

*****

Mr. Astor had written me that last night my wife and I were to be presented at court. At ten we were climbing the magnificent stairs of the Quirinal palace to be presented to Queen Margaret. Gorgeously uniformed sentinels stood on the stairway left and right. We were shortly escorted to one of the great drawing-rooms of the palace, where we found other ladies and gentlemen also waiting to be presented. In a little while we were all directed to stand in line around the walls of the drawing-room. A dead silence ensued, and then the Queen of Italy entered at our right, escorted by the Marchesa Villa Marina, who had in her hand a list of all of our names. A few moments before she had passed along the line whispering to each of us and confirming the correctness of her list. Queen Margaret turned to her left as she passed in and very graciously greeted a young Italian lady, whom she seemed to know personally. She extended her hand to the young lady, who, greatly honored, blushed and looked very pretty. This was the only instance where the Queen gave her hand that evening. As she started along the line toward us she halted before each one. The Marchesa promptly made the presentation, when the Queen bowed very sweetly and made some remarks. I noticed that in each case she spoke the language of the lady or gentleman presented. I could hear her speaking German, Italian, French. Certainly she cannot speak English, I meditated, but in a moment our turn came. Our names were pronounced, and the Queen commenced in very agreeable English. Her manner was extremely winning, kind and simple. She “knew we would like Rome,” she said. “Everybody did, and she hoped our stay would be long and very happy.” She wore an elegant gown, cut extremely low, revealing a fine form. Around her neck was the famous pearl necklace, to which the King adds a string of pearls every birthday. She carried an enormous white fan of ostrich plumes which she constantly waved while she talked with us. She looked the queen, and I thought more German than Italian. Her whole bearing was graciousness. Her smile seemed as sincere as beautiful, and no one but would call her a happy, beautiful woman.

The presentation over, we will now be entitled to invitations to the palace balls and other public functions. There is an American lady here at court whom we knew in Switzerland. It is the Countess Ginotti, formerly Miss Kinney, of Washington. Her husband is a court official and is entrusted with important duties.

Last night we went to our second court ball at the Quirinal. A week following our presentation we had had the customary invitation to the first. We go at ten at night, ascend the same brilliantly lighted stairway as at the presentation, and even more gorgeously uniformed sentinels line the way on left and right.

The dress is prescribed; gentlemen in evening attire of course-there is nothing else a man can do but dress himself in mourning and call it festive; but so many ladies, in their elegant, light gowns and extremely low bodices, with swan white necks and shining diamonds, made a lovely scene. We shortly found ourselves seated among five hundred other guests in a brilliant ballroom of the palace. A raised dais and a royal chair stood at the end in front of us. There was a little gossip with each other, a little wondering at the gorgeous gowns, when suddenly the music from a lofty gallery proclaimed the coming of the court. Instantly, side doors unfolded, and King Humbert with Queen Margaret on his arm, marched toward the raised platform, followed by the court officials and all the Ambassadors in Rome in gala attire. We all rise, the ladies courtesying and the men bowing, as the King gracefully swings Queen Margaret into her seat and takes his place, standing beside her chair. There is some more bowing and smiling and courtesying. The music changes for the dance and the guests look on while the Queen and the Ambassadors and their wives dance the royal cotillon. The Ambassador of Germany, the head of the diplomatic corps, dances with Queen Margaret. It is all very lovely, though some of us guests feel we could beat the dancing all to pieces. In a few moments the Queen is back on the dais talking with the ladies privileged to surround her. The music has changed and some of the five hundred present are swinging in the waltz.

All has been simple and beautiful. Such a ball might take place in the extremest republic in the world. Some formality, some etiquette, there must be everywhere. While the others dance, the Queen and the King talk with the ladies, with the Ministers, and the Ambassadors. I was close to the King at different times in the evening. He was as unpretending as any other gentleman in the room. He seemed to have a bad cough, and his great eyes sometimes glanced around in a strange way. His mustache is almost as big and bristling as was his father’s, Victor Emmanuel. He has a kindly, earnest look, and Italy has in him a patriotic King. At midnight everybody repaired to little marble tables in an adjoining room, where most expensive refreshments were served. Every one seemed to have a bottle of champagne to himself. I never saw such a flowing of wines, yet all managed to keep sober. The ball souvenirs presented to every guest were all made in Paris and of every conceivable and lovely design.

*****

We are not far from the “Porta Pia,” and often go out walking or driving on the Campagna. Much of this barren land was a graveyard once, and splendid broken marble tombs still stretch away for miles. One can guess at the enormous wealth of the old city by walking for hours among the fallen columns and broken tombs of the rich out here on the Campagna. It is as if a wilderness of marble trees had at some past time been torn down by a whirlwind, and only the debris left behind.

The most impressive scene about Rome is the great aqueducts by moonlight, as they stretch across this waste of the Campagna. They are one hundred feet high and built on immense arches. One gets an idea of what the population of Rome must have been, on reflecting that at one time there were twenty-four of these canals through the air for carrying water into the city, and that fifty million cubic feet of water a day flowed into Rome through them. I was surprised to learn that hundreds of miles, too, of these aqueducts were built under ground. A tunnel a few thousand feet long we regard as a wonder at home, but some of these aqueducts were thirty-six miles at a stretch, under ground.

The Campagna was honeycombed in all directions by these strange canals, and the miles of arches above ground to-day impress one more than does the Coliseum.

However desolate the Campagna to-day, in the olden time it must have been a wonder with its catacombs and canals under ground and its magnificent tombs, pillars and aqueducts above ground.

Evenings when the weather is fine we see the Cardinals with their cassocks and hats of flaming red, taking the air. They drive over from the Vatican in closed carriages and when once on the Campagna get out and walk about.

Next to the Cardinals, these Campagna shepherds are picturesque and interesting. They wear leather leggings, sheepskin jackets, goatskin breeches with the long hair outside, a red sash and a rakish hat. They look very much like stage villains, which they are not. When they ride into town, two or three on the same donkey, they make a remarkable figure; but a very miserable one, when the one behind is seen jabbing the donkey with an awl to make him go faster with his load of vagabonds.

January, 1885.-Christmas Day we went to see the magnificent ceremonies in the church called the Santa Maria Maggiore. Its forest of vast marble columns was wrapped in hangings of crimson and gold. The priests, bishops, cardinals and other dignitaries wore the most gorgeous regalia of the church.

At the height of the ceremony a part of the Holy Manger in a crystal chest was borne up and down the aisles, among the kneeling, praying multitudes. Whatever the history of this relic, I think it was regarded that day by every one present as very sacred. I never saw a multitude so impressed with one thought. To many present, death itself could not, I think, have caused deeper emotion.

Great church ceremonies are all the time going on in Rome, and as there are more than three hundred church buildings, one can go to a different place every day in the year. Not at the Sistine Chapel alone, with its “Last Judgment” scenes, its moving music and officiating Pope, need one be interested; in dozens of churches great things are always going on.

*****

A few evenings ago we were invited to a party at the Danish consul’s. Met a number of interesting people, but the lion of the evening was Ibsen, the great dramatic writer. He is a little short man with a big head, a great shock of white hair, and twinkling eyes. I talked with him some in English. Famous as his dramas are, I knew little about them, and our few minutes’ talk was on indifferent subjects, not worth remembering or jotting down; only he talked like a very genial, open-hearted man.

The next day there was an afternoon reception at our own home, and among our guests was Hugh Conway, the author of “Called Back.” He went with me to a little corner in the dining-room, where we had a chat about his famous story, his own past, and his future hopes. He had been an auctioneer in England, and on trying his hand at stories was astonished to find himself suddenly famous. He was simple, kind and communicative as a child. Shortly his wife joined us, agreeable as himself, and they were promising much to themselves from another season, which they intended spending in Rome. And we were going to be friends. He told me of their children in England. We emptied a glass to the children’s health, and the next day they started for Nice. He took a cold on the way, and a little later came the sad news that the lovable man was dead.