A Friend in Rome—A Story of Two Ways of Loving—Aglaë
and Boniface—Become Christians—A New Life—Boniface
Endures Terrible Tortures—Martyrdom—Death of
Aglaë—Church of St. Boniface—Alexis, the Pilgrim—His
Travels—Return to Rome—A Ragged Beggar—His Death and
Burial in St. Boniface’s Church—St. Alexis’
Monastery—Trials of the Church After Constantine—Rome’s
Lowest Ebb—Growth of the Spiritual City—Benedict the
Blessed, and Scholastica.
Norcia in the Sabines—A Matrona—The Twins, Benedict and
Scholastica—Benedict Goes to Rome—Conversion of
Placidus—Benedict’s Retirement to La Mentorella—Life in
a Cave—Temptations—Visit of St. Francis—Benedict’s
Ministering—Real Founder of Monastic Life—Growth of His
Order—Placidus and Maurus—St. Benedict’s Personality and
Conversions—His Ideal of the Religious Life—His Greatest
Miracles—His Sister, Scholastica—The Last Day
Together—His Ascension.
Birth and Lineage of St. Gregory—Path from the World to
the Cloister—Prayer, Study, and Charity—His Cat—A
Prophecy—A Cardinal Deacon—Mission to
Constantinople—Eutyches’ Heresy—Rome in
Pestilence—Gregory Elected Pope—His Unbelievable
Accomplishments—His Life as Pope—Championship of
the Oppressed—Bond with English-speaking People—The Great
Procession During the Pestilence—Gregory’s Successors.
The Pantheon—Hadrian’s Best Monument—Long Idle—Consecrated
as St. Mary of the Martyrs—The Cathedral, the Symbol
of the Soul—Its Purification—Continuity of the Church—A
Priest’s Visit—The Alabaster Square—Procession of the
Martyrs’ Relics—Giovanni Borgi, the Workman—Italian
Guilds—Giovanni’s Selflessness—His Rescue of the Forsaken
Children—Care of Them—Crusade in Behalf of All the Waifs
of Rome—His Work of Love—Giovanni’s Successor,
Later Pius IX.
Birth in 1792—A Happy Family—His Youth—Epilepsy—The
Church at the Time of Napoleon—Abduction of Pius to
Avignon—Napoleon’s Downfall—Return of the Pope to
Rome—His Reception—Prophecies Regarding Pius IX—His
Journey to Chile—Ocean Trip—Across the Andes—Failure
of Mission—Rounding Cape Horn—English Settlement on the
Cape—“Love-of-the-Soil”—The Falkland Islands.
Director of Ospizio di San Michele—A Splendid
Record—Archbishop of Spoleto—A Turbulent
Populace—Order Restored—Revolution in Europe—Spoleto
Saved—The Earthquake in Umbria—New Post at Imola—Secret
Societies—A Cardinal—Attack upon the Three Prelates—The
Cardinal’s Bravery—How the Saints Forgive—Pope Pius
IX—His Charity and Justice—Defenders of the Poor—Anecdotes
of the Cardinal’s Generosity.
Lebzeltern, the Ambassador of the Austrian Emperor—Origin
of His Mission—Napoleon’s Anger Against Pius VII—Arrest
of the Pope—Protests from the Church—Napoleon
Excommunicated—Vain Efforts to Evade the Bull—Instructions
for the Mission—“Do All, or Else, Do Nothing”—Pius
VII in His Sixty-eighth Year—The Interview—The Pope’s
Position—His Generosity—Message to Napoleon—Continued
Captivity—Return to Rome—Napoleon’s Expiation.
Castel Gandolfo—Its Gardens—The Sabine Hills—The
Reverendo—An Expedition into the Hills-The Campagna in the
Early Morning—“Our Lady of Good Counsel”—Ancient
Præneste—Italy’s Landscape—Struggles of the
Colonna—Destruction of Palestrina—Boniface’s Revenge
and Expiation—Olevano, the Haunt of Artists—“Picturesque
Utility”—The Wrong Train—Romance of a Pebble—The Work
of the Saints.
The Apennines—View from a Peak—Real
Hospitality—Polenta—Woods of Sabina—A Hill Family—The
Cook—A Queer Adventure—People of the South—A Night
Festival in the Abruzzi—The Journey—The Old Organ—Marion
Crawford’s Boys—Juvenile Theatricals.
A Follower of the Condottieri—The Raw Recruit—Division of
the Dukedom of Milan—Carmagnola’s Turn—Growth in
Wealth and Power—Disaffection—Venice Acquires His
Services—War with Milan—A Leisurely Campaign—Carmagnola
at the Height of His Glory—Fortune Turns Against the
Venetians—Stirrings of Suspicion—Reception in Venice—The
Senate Chamber—Growing Dusk—The Attack—End of His Part in
the World—Another Story of the North—St. Raniero, the Patron
of Pisa—The Power of Temperance.
A Conspicuous Feminine Sinner—Marriage of State—Her
Beauty—Her Hungarian Husband—Petrarch and the Monk—Joan’s
Ascent to the Throne—The Naples Succession—Her
Favourites—The Churches of Naples—Joan’s Lovers—Factions
of Naples—Charles of Durazzo—A Bold Proposal—Charles’
Ambitious Plots—War of the Factions—Disappearance of
Maria—Becomes the Wife of Charles—Joan’s Horror.
Pact Between Charles and Andrew of Hungary—Joan’s Homage
to the Papal Legate—Andrew Ignored—Arrival of Andrew’s
Mother—Andrew Upheld by the Pope—His Reprisals—“The
Man Must Die”—The Queen’s Conspiracy—Last
Meeting of Charles and Andrew—The Hunting Expedition—The
Banquet in the Monastery—The Murder—Tempest Breaks
over Joan’s Head—An Evil Blow at Charles—Trial of Andrew’s
Murderers—A Nightmare of Cruelty and Fear.
Charles’ Further Acts as Dictator—Rise of the Favoured
Louis of Taranto—Civil War—A Scheme of the Empress of
Constantinople—Interference of the King of Hungary—The
Empress Again to the Rescue—Hungary’s Advance—Death of
the Empress—Flight of the Neapolitan Nobles—Joan and
Her Husband in Provence—Charles’ Well-merited Fate—The
King of Hungary’s Vengeance—Government by Execution.
Joan Detained at Aix—Greeted as a Queen—Joan Pronounced
Innocent—Plans to Regain Naples—Sale of a City—Return to
Naples—Indecisive War—Proposal for Personal
Conflict—Flight of the Royal Family—Maria’s Narrow
Escape—Hungarians Repulsed—Pope Clement as
Intermediary—Departure of the King of Hungary—Festivity
in Naples—Death of Louis and Joan’s Further Marital
Adventures—Joan in Trouble—Her Untimely End.
Beauty of Naples—Figures of Its History—St.
Januarius—Murat, King of Naples—Achievements as King—The
Carbonari—England’s Promises—Napoleonic Diplomacy—Rise
of the Bourbons—Alliance with Austria—Murat’s
Indecision—Distrust of the Allies—Murat’s
Statesmanship—Talleyrand’s Diplomacy—Naples, the
Gay—Conspiracy in the Palace—The Escape from
Elba—Ideal Government—War Against Murat—Advance of
the Austrians—Murat Driven to Naples—Interview with His
Wife—Last Instructions to His Ministers—Escape.
Naples in Anarchy—Entrance of Austrians—Murat’s Repulse
by Napoleon and by Louis—His Demon of
Ill-luck—Ship-wrecked—Aid in Corsica—Emperor of Austria’s
Proposal—Attempt Against Naples—Murat Betrayed into
Ferdinand’s Hands—Murat’s “Trial”—Letter to His
Wife—Before His “Judges”—A Brave Death—Ferdinand, the
“Butcher King.”
Our Moods and the Seas—Memories in Landscapes—The Healing
of the Sea—A Vision in the Bay of Naples—Marion Crawford’s
Yacht Expected—The Family Together at Leghorn—Lady
Paget—A Bathing Scene—Hugh Fraser—“Spannocchi” for
Dinner—The Avenging Boatman—Livorno, An Anomaly—Sunset
on the Mare Ligure—Bay of Spezia, a Splurge of Colour and
Light—A Hail Storm in Venice—The Joy of a Gondola—Moods
of Venice—A Giorgione Beauty—The Nurseries of Venice—Her
Shops—Saints and Heresies of the Thirteenth Century.
Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests
of Stone-pine—Smiles and Tears—The Need of a Little
Misfortune—Monte Gargano—Millions of Spanish
Merinos—Primæval Forest—A Forest Miracle—Church of the
Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions of the
Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round
Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden”
Fortress of France.
CHAPTER I SAINTS OF THE CHURCH
A Friend in Rome—A Story of Two Ways of Loving—Aglaë and Boniface—Become
Christians—A New Life—Boniface Endures Terrible
Tortures—Martyrdom—Death of Aglaë—Church of St. Boniface—Alexis,
the Pilgrim—His Travels—Return to Rome—A Ragged Beggar—His
Death and Burial in St. Boniface’s Church—St. Alexis’ Monastery—Trials
of the Church After Constantine—Rome’s Lowest Ebb—Growth
of the Spiritual City—Benedict the Blessed, and Scholastica.
It was my good fortune, many years ago, to make
friends with a woman whose name was as beautiful
as her mind—Mary Grace. We met in another hemisphere,
under the Southern Cross, and for many days lived
together in Chile’s one little paradise, Viña del Mar.
There, in shady patios trellised with jessamine and bougainvillea,
we talked of the impossible—of meeting in
Rome and going together to the holy places and making
better acquaintance with the Saints. Two or three years
later the impossible happened. My Mary, with her
daughter Lilium, floated into my mother’s drawing-room
in the Odescalchi one April afternoon, when the swallows
were whirling above the courtyard and the house seemed
all roses and sunshine. In the weeks that followed all
our dream programme was realised; together we went to
the Pope’s Mass, together knelt at his feet while Leo
XIII laid his hand on Lilium’s golden head and blessed
us and promised to pray for us and all our dear ones;
and together we wandered from place to place in the
Eternal City, I, who had known it all my life, learning
many things from her who came there for the first time,
as so often happens. Of all those pleasant inspiring
hours the one we both remembered most appreciatively,
I think, was that of our visit to a lonely spot on the
Aventine—the hill that somehow has always kept its
character and is even to-day very little hurt by the destructions
that have defaced most of the other quarters
of the town.
My friend was Irish, “pur sang,” and her appreciations
were extremely individual ones; things that other
people felt obliged to rave about left her quite cold; but,
when she had caught and joined the links of some beautiful
story that the world had overlooked or forgotten,
she became a veritable flame of enthusiasm, and every
tiny detail and souvenir she could connect with it had to
be sought out and stored in the big warm shrine of her
heart. I think, though I am not certain, that she knew
the story of the house on the Aventine before she came
to Rome. Anyway, it was she who took me there, and
we went over story and house together, and were exceedingly
loath to come away when the Ave Maria
rang over the city and all respectable people turned their
faces homewards.
Here is the story, a story of two ways of loving. It
is in two parts, and I only learnt the first long after I
was familiar with the second. The beginning takes us
back to the last years of the Third Century, to the oft-mentioned
reign of Diocletian. At that time, although
the Aventine had never been one of the most distinguished
quarters of Rome, it contained a few dwellings
of nobles, who, doubtless, overlooked the mass of poorer
houses that swarmed about its base, for the sake of the
view, both over the city and towards the sea, from which
comes always the pleasant west wind that we Romans
love. I have spoken of the palace of the good Marcella,
where in her old age she was so roughly treated by
Alaric’s Goths; before Marcella’s time there lived another
noble lady on the Aventine, with very different
ideas as to the conduct of life. Her name was Aglaë,
not a Roman name, and I fancy she must have come of
Greek parentage, although she is spoken of as a noble
Roman matron. Of her husband, who seems to have
died before the story begins, we are told nothing; her
whole existence was wrapped up in a quite unsanctified
passion for a handsome pagan called Boniface, a man
of generous heart, as the sequel shows, but a sensualist,
like most of his class at that time. He adored Aglaë,
and the two must have passed some enchanting hours
wandering on the terraces of the Aventine villa or sitting
hand in hand to watch the sun sinking red into the
distant sea. No thought of the future seems to have
come to them there, nor any gleam of a scruple as to
their way of life. Youth and beauty and love were theirs;
this world was sweet, and they had never heard of another.
Then something happened. We are not told what it
was—perhaps some miracle witnessed by Boniface at
the martyrdom of some obscure Christian, one of those
miracles which so often converted a crowd of brutal,
mocking bystanders into Christians on the spot. Whatever
it was, it rent his soul, summoned his intelligence,
and claimed him for ever. If Aglaë was not with him
at the moment, he must have rushed to her for one last
visit to tell her of it, for her conversion was simultaneous,
and sudden as his own. From that moment the lovers
renounced each other for the love of Christ, and the
remainder of their lives was devoted to atoning for their
guilt in the past. Aglaë, in her lonely palace, gave herself
up to prayer and penance; Boniface at once joined
himself to the band of Christians who made it their business
to gather up and bury the bodies of the martyrs.
In no other way could he assuage the tumult of pain and
repentance that filled his heart at the remembrance of his
sins. Diocletian’s persecution was not confined to Rome,
but was raging in many other parts of the Empire, notably
in Asia Minor, and thither Boniface travelled with some
devoted companions, in order to help and cheer the poor
Christians in their sufferings.
On arriving at Tarsus, St. Paul’s city, he got separated
from his fellow-travellers, and, wandering around, found
that a great number of the Faithful were being cruelly
tormented that day, in divers ways, for the name of
Christ, and his heart was both torn with compassion for
their pains and admiration for their heroism. Approaching
them, he kissed their chains and encouraged them to
endure these passing tortures for the sake of Him who
would so quickly and splendidly reward them by an
eternity of joy. Of course he was at once arrested, and
the tormentors seem to have tasked their ingenuity in
inventing agonies for him to bear. His sins of the flesh
were expiated by having his whole body ploughed with
hooks of iron, and by spikes of wood run in under his
nails and on his limbs; he had spoken sinful words; they
poured molten lead into his mouth; he had sinned in
the lust of the eyes and the pride of life; the executioners
plunged him head downwards in a cauldron of
boiling pitch. But from this the Lord delivered him.
When they drew him forth, his eyes were clear, his brow
unscarred, and he looked once more—his last look—on
the fair world where he had been so sinfully happy,
and through it all he praised God aloud, saying, “Lord
Jesus Christ, Son of God, I thank Thee!” Then came
the order—so usual when all the torments had failed and
the dear spirit still clung to the lacerated body—“Behead
him!”
As the axe fell, there was a terrific earthquake, and
many of the bystanders were converted then and there,
but no one was allowed to touch his body. Meanwhile
his friends, who had been seeking for him everywhere,
learnt of his martyrdom, and came to gather up his
remains. But a strict watch had been set, and it was
only after paying five hundred pieces of silver that they
could obtain possession of the dear corpse. With love
and tears, they anointed it with precious balms and
wrapped it in costly coverings and transported it to Rome.
During these months Aglaë had been living a life of such
whole-hearted repentance that our dear Lord had taken
her into great grace; and now, by an exquisite, Divine
bit of indulgence—one of those flashes of hot sympathy
that come straight from the Sacred Human Heart of
Him in Heaven to some poor, broken human heart on
earth—He sent an Angel to tell her that her Boniface’s
body was returning to Rome and that she could go and
meet it. So Aglaë, in her sombre penitential dress, her
beautiful face covered with a veil, went forth, and, at a
given place, saw the little procession approaching from
the sea. There was no danger for her in looking at the
beloved features now. Very quiet and strong she seems
to have been as she met the wayfarers, bade them pause
with their holy burden, and then led them back to her
own house. There, where he and she had loved and
sinned, she received him, who was to leave her no more.
Those who had brought him told her of his glorious
end, and she thanked the Lord for it again—for the
Angel had not let her wait so long for the story. And
when she had shown her gratitude by most loving hospitality
and precious gifts to those who had brought his
body, they went away and left her alone with her beloved.
Ask any loving woman what she did then!
Which of us would not place our dear tortured dead
in our hall of honour, and burn sweet spices round them,
and light tall tapers, and fill the place with every fragrance
and loveliness that the garden has to give?
All this, we may be sure, Aglaë did for Boniface; but
she did that from which most women are debarred. She
turned her palace into a Church for his tomb, and prayed
near it till she died, and then the poor and suffering,
who had been her one care from the day of her conversion,
came there and prayed for her soul. But we know
that that went straight to Heaven.
So there stood the Church of St. Boniface, and, some
two hundred years later, a most noble Roman family had
established their own palace close to it, and the Church,
as we know it, now includes a part of the house of Alexis.
For this is where a great saint grew to manhood, the
loved son of rich and affectionate parents. Alexis had
every gift of mind, with beauty of countenance and
strength of body; and, when the time was ripe, his father
and mother betrothed him to a bride of their choosing,
good and sweet, and very fair to see. In this they
had, for the first time, met with stubborn opposition from
the boy, who had never opposed them before. He told
them that he had vowed himself to a single life for God’s
service, and that no earthly bride, however beautiful,
should make him swerve from that allegiance. But they,
like many other good parents, persisted in their project,
convinced that they knew what was good for their
son; and the preparations for his marriage went merrily
forward, each day but adding to the young man’s grief
and perplexity. Rome was Rome still; he could protest,
but he had to obey his father’s direct commands, and
obey he did; but his vow had been made to a still higher
authority, and he meant to keep it, and prayed for grace
and guidance to do so, nor were grace and guidance refused
him, who, as the Breviary puts it, “was of Rome’s
noblest, but nobler yet through his great love for
Christ.”
On the night of his wedding, when the feasting and
singing and congratulating were over, and the matrons
conducted the bride, probably a child of thirteen or fourteen,
to the lighted, perfumed bridal chamber, Alexis
would not so much as touch her hand, but, like one Galahad
of another time and clime, bade her farewell and
departed, having received from God a special command
to go on a pilgrimage to the “illustrious Churches of
the Universe.” He left all behind, riches and servants,
and even his name, and for seventeen long years, with
no companion but the Lady Poverty, wandered, a nameless
poor pilgrim, through all the Holy Places, praising
the Redeemer for His great mercies and praying for
the hastening of the Kingdom of Heaven.
At the end of those seventeen years, he was one day
praying fervently before an image of the Blessed Virgin
in the great Church at Edessa, when a voice came from
the image, proclaiming his name and rank. The people
were greatly excited and wished to show him honour,
both for his own sake and because Our Lady Herself
seemed to wish it. But Alexis knew better. That strange,
sweet voice had not rung in his ears to lure him back to
things of earthly pride, and for him the disclosure of his
identity was the command to depart from that land. He
fled, and boarded the first ship he could find to carry
him away from Syria. He never asked the vessel’s destination;
it was enough for him that he was obeying a
command, but he was being led back to where the second
phase of his spiritual career awaited him—in his old
home in Rome.
As the ship sped north and west, and one by one the
lovely Greek islands seemed to come floating towards him,
like opals on the shifting sapphire of the sea, he still
kept silence, still prayed and praised. What cared he
whither her course was set? The white sails might have
been angel’s wings—so sure was Alexis that God was
leading him. Then, when the Apennines swam up blue
from the bluer water, and scents of violet and orange
blossom were wafted out to greet the wanderer, he knew
that this was Italy—and home. Still he spoke not—questioned
not; past the isles of the Sirens, past Circe’s
Promontory, still on, past all that shore of coral and
pearl, of palm and ilex and olive, with Vesuvius’ dark
smoke hanging like a menace in the background, the little
Syrian galley held her way, and at last the helmsman
turned her prow to the land, the sails were all furled but
one; the enormous oars worked her up against a rushing
yellow current till the long quay was reached, and with
a rattling of chains the weary galley slaves shipped their
oars and bent down to look, each through his little opening,
at “the port of Rome.”
With the merchants and the free seamen, Alexis stepped
on shore, and gazed at the city of his birth. He had
been brought back—for what? Blindly, joyfully, obediently,
he had gone forth, to fare alone with God, and
alone with God he was still to be. An hour or so later
a haggard mendicant stood at the gate of a palace on
the Aventine, asking for charity. That was never refused
in that house, and the servants brought him in,
showed him a dark corner under a stairway close to the
entrance, where they told him he might sleep, and gave
him some scraps of food. Humbly and gratefully he
accepted it all; he heard them speak of the master and
the mistress and the “widow” of the eldest son who was
long since dead; and that day or the next he must have
seen his father and mother, and the maid who had never
been a wife, passing through the courtyards or lingering
in the garden. God’s ways are not our ways. When He
covets the love of certain souls for Himself, He will
not share it with any one, and that Divine jealousy leads
the chosen soul through hard paths. The hearts that love
God intensely are the very ones that are the most loving
of their fellows, especially of all who hold close to them
in the sacred ties of family affection. But these ties have
to be snapped on earth when the Divine Lover so wills—and
Saints like Alexis, and poor sinners like the rest
of us, have to leave the broken ends in His Hands, knowing
that the pain we are made to cause our dear ones
is as necessary for them as that which we suffer is for us,
and that every pang of theirs is a golden strand in the
garment of their immortality. Alexis’ parents had sinned
against him and Heaven in trying to force him to break
his vow of virginity; their son had long forgiven them,
but Heaven in its mercy was allowing them to expiate
their sin here instead of hereafter, and, through their
obstinacy, the young girl who might, wedded to another
spouse, have become a joyful mother of children, had
to spend her life in their sad house, waiting upon them,
and with the prospect of a very lonely age before her
when they should have passed away.
We may be sure that many and many a time Alexis
longed to emerge from his despised obscurity and comfort
them all three, but it was not for that God had
brought him back. The command of silence was never
lifted, and so the son—the heir—lived on, a ragged
beggar, laughed at and also abused by his father’s servants,
praying in St. Boniface’s Church by day, sleeping
in the cranny under the stairs at night, allaying his hunger
by the scraps the servants threw him, and always
blessing them and praising God, who thus satisfied His
own servant’s hunger for poverty and suffering and humiliation.
This second trial, this exile of the heart, lasted
also seventeen years. At that time the very existence of
Rome was threatened by Alaric the Goth; once and twice,
he had turned from its gates laden with the ransom exacted
for not entering them; he was threatening to
approach again, and this time he had sworn to enter and
destroy. The population was crowding the Churches to
pray for deliverance, when a mysterious voice rang out
in each separate Church, “Seek ye the man of God, that
he may pray for Rome!” Terror fell upon the suppliant
masses, and none dared speak or move. Then the same
voice cried, “Seek in the house of Euphemian.”
There was a rush to the Aventine, for all knew the
great noble’s dwelling. The Pope, Innocent I, had heard
the command and himself went thither, followed by all
his ecclesiastics and the Senators as well. When they
reached Euphemian’s house it was the Pope who led them
to the dark corner under the stairs—dark no longer, but
flooded with celestial light, where the nameless beggar
lay dying alone. His hands were already cold, but in one
he held a crucifix, in the other a slip of parchment which
no one could make him relinquish, though many tried to
take it away from him. Then Innocent commanded him,
in the Name of God, to give it up, and immediately Alexis
let him take it with his own hand. And the Pope, standing
up beside the dying man, opened the slip, and read
aloud therefrom the name and family of the beggar; and
a great cry went through the house that it was Alexis,
the son who had been mourned for dead these many
years. And father and mother and wife threw themselves
down beside him, embracing him and weeping bitterly,
for in that moment his soul had gone to God.
Then Innocent buried him in the Church of St.
Boniface, and it was called both by his name and that of
Alexis for many years. Both their bodies rest there, and
a chapel was thrown out at one side to take in the stairway,
which, now covered with glass, remains to this day.
Both Boniface and Alexis had travelled and prayed and
suffered in the East, and their Church came to be a
heritage of both East and West; for, five hundred years
after the July day on which Alexis died, a great monastery
called after him and built close to the Church on
the hill of the “house of Euphemian,” sheltered monks
of the Basilian and Benedictine orders at the same time,
an innumerable spiritual family “to replace the fair family
he had renounced to this world.”
The Aventine has been little touched by time and is
still one of the quietest and loveliest spots in Rome. At
certain seasons it suffers from malaria—blown up from
the marshes near Ostia—and for that reason both mediæval
and modern builders have generally avoided it.
But it is full of gardens. That of St. Alexis’ Convent, now
an Asylum for the Blind, is famous for its orange and
lemon trees; and one can trace the dispositions of the
terraces and courts of the old house in the approaches to
the Church. I do not think that when my friend and I
were wandering there we noticed one curious feature
which, however, still exists to give one a glimpse of old
Roman domestic ways—the queer little cells, one on
each side of the inner porch of Euphemian’s house, where
the slave porter, and his companion the watchdog, were
chained, opposite to each other, to their respective posts!
What queer and sympathetic confidences they must have
exchanged sometimes!
Alexis surely prayed for his native city, but all the
prayers of all her Saints could not avert the trials that
were to visit on Rome her past sins. Constantine the
Great believed that he had left the Church in the West
impregnable in strength and assured of peace; and for
nearly three centuries after his death she was forced to
fight for her existence almost as stubbornly as she had
during the three centuries preceding it. In 361, only
twenty-four years after the death of Constantine, Julian
the Apostate reversed his edicts and strained every nerve
to reëstablish the worship of the Olympian deities. Paganism
was dead, and he failed in his iniquitous efforts
to restore animation to its corpse, but much suffering did
he bring to the Church, and it was only at the price of
blood that she conquered in the end. After Julian came
the Barbarians—Alaric, Genseric, Odoacer, Totila—during
the short space of one hundred and thirty years
Rome was taken and ravaged five separate times, so that
when, in 553, Narses, the prototype of Napoleon, abolished
the Senate and annexed the city to the Eastern Empire,
she had reached the lowest point in her history and
was scarcely regarded as a prize even by the Lombards,
when, in response to the invitation of Narses himself,
they overran Italy from the Alps to the sea, only to be
finally expelled by Charlemagne some two hundred years
later.
But the Church had realised the truth of the saying
that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. The
high courage that had come unscathed through such appalling
conflicts rose gallant and audacious in its certainty
of final victory, and, at the very moment when Rome
seemed to be annihilated, decreed to it such a triumph
as the world had never seen before.
In 568, just a year after Narses, to gratify a personal
spite, had invited the hornet swarm of Lombards to cross
the Alps, he died in the city he had insulted. We must
remember that there were two Romes: the corporeal city,
depopulated and impoverished, despoiled and dying—the
city of the government of the once proud “Senatus
Populusque Romanus,” which had failed signally at every
point, and had crawled to the feet of every conqueror;
and the spiritual city, ruled by strong and holy men,
who patiently went on with their invisible building, adding
stone to stone with such calmness and patience that
in contemplating their work one is almost led to believe
that they were unconscious of the material ruin around
them. During the forty years that followed the death
of Narses there was growing up in Rome a phalanx of
learned and holy ones to replace the leaders who had
been found wanting, and we of to-day are still the inheritors
and possessors of the treasures they amassed.
While the grass grew unchecked in the streets and all who
could migrated to happier lands; while commerce and
war turned aside from the now worthless prize, and the
poor tethered their few goats and sheep in the courtyards
of the great ruined houses, the Benedicts, the Gregorys,
the Bonifaces, with their clear-eyed, disciplined
cohorts, were building the Liturgy, building the monastic
orders, building the polity that guides and rules the
Church and the Faithful to-day. Nothing escaped them;
whether it were a question of the right antiphon for one
of the psalms of a Nocturn, the placing on the Index
some doubtful legend of a Saint (like that of our St.
George, which the popular fancy was turning into a grotesque
myth), the annihilation of some startling new
heresy which was raising its poisonous head, or the question
of bringing Constantinople to its senses by bold
remonstrance with the Emperor—to every detail was
brought the thoroughness and directness of trained minds,
the compelling force of superior courage and invincible
intellect.
And this work had been going on silently and infallibly
from the moment that official persecution ceased.
Through sieges and invasions, desertions and desolations,
the mills of God were grinding the grain and filling the
great storehouses with golden wealth. In 480, in the
little town of Nursia, high among the fastnesses of the
Abruzzi, where the snow lay thick in winter, as in the
Alps, there was born to the lord of the place a son,
who was christened Benedict—“the Blest,” and a little
daughter, whom the father, a great admirer of learning,
called Scholastica. When these two passed away, sixty-three
years later, Literature and Saintliness were throned
in Europe, and hold their thrones still in the innumerable
fortresses manned by the spiritual descendants of the
Nursian twins. Outside the Church few, comparatively,
knew their names when they died. Learning and piety
would scarcely exist for us had they not lived.
CHAPTER II FOUNDER OF MONASTICISM
Norcia in the Sabines—A Matrona—The Twins, Benedict and Scholastica—Benedict
Goes to Rome—Conversion of Placidus—Benedict’s Retirement
to La Mentorella—Life in a Cave—Temptations—Visit of St. Francis—Benedict’s
Ministering—Real Founder of Monastic Life—Growth
of His Order—Placidus and Maurus—St. Benedict’s Personality
and Conversions—His Ideal of the Religious Life—His Greatest
Miracles—His Sister, Scholastica—The Last Day Together—His
Ascension.
In the heart of the Sabines, where the Nar breaks out
from the rock near the mountain called the Lioness,
there has been since very early times a little town, too
inaccessible to tempt the spoiler and the invader, too
sturdy and independent to serve long as a footstool for
mediæval tyrants. It was well fortified, however, and
the ancient walls encircle it still, in good repair, as witnesses
to its immunity from the fate that has annihilated
so many other little old cities, its neighbours. Nature,
stern and wild enough here, helped to protect it. Even
now it can only be reached by a carriage journey,
a lengthy, tedious business in the winter time, when the
snow almost cuts it off from communication with the outside
world. The townsfolk have long memories, however.
The chief square is called Piazza Sertorio, after
the Roman General, Quintus Sertorius, who was born
here in the second century before Christ, and the only
public monument in Norcia is a statue of their other distinguished
citizen, St. Benedict, in the same square. People
from other places do not interest the good burghers
of Norcia. They have accorded a passing notice to a
gentleman named Vespasian, known elsewhere as a fairly
successful Emperor, but as they would tell you, “a person
quite without education,” that is to say, with no manners;
nevertheless, they have allowed a hill in the vicinity to
be called Monte Vespasio, because his mother was a decent
woman and owned a farm there.
I fancy life in Norcia is in its essentials very much
what it was when, in the year of grace 480, the lord
of the manor was informed that his good wife had
borne him twins, a son and a daughter. It is easy, knowing
the ways of the people, to call up the picture of the
“matrona” in her best gown—the midwife is the most
honoured woman in every Roman town—coming down
from the lady’s apartment in the tower, to the head of
the house, sitting, quite forgotten and rather lonely, in
the hall, waiting for news from the centre of interest
upstairs. His own servants would only approach with
signs of submission and respect; not so the all-important
matrona! Conscious of her dignity and grave as a
judge, she would advance a few steps and wait for him
to rise. Then, as he approached on tiptoe and with some
timidity, she would turn back the woollen covering from
the unexpectedly large bundle on her left arm, and, without
a word, show him two little pink faces where he
only expected one.
“Yes,” she would say, in answer to his exclamations
of delight and astonishment, “two has Domine Dio sent
to this noble house. Two will be the gifts my lord must
bestow on his lady”—this to remind him as well of
the double remuneration due to herself. “Pretty? Oh,
no, but they are not bad—thanks be! Will it please my
lord to send for the priest—the ‘femminuccia’ is the
younger—and seems not over-strong! I thank my
lord!”
My lord has been feeling in his pouch and has slipped
two of his few gold pieces into her hand, and, seeing that
he is inclined to admire the babies, she covers them up
and stalks away. Her demeanour has been rhadamanthine
throughout. There must be no expression of admiration,
no kissing or fondling of the little creatures before
they are baptised. That would call the attention of the
Devil to the small unregenerates who are still his property.
When the taint of original sin has been washed
away they will be angels of innocence, beautiful cherubs
to be shown proudly to all and sundry—but not before!
So my lord sent for the priest and pondered meanwhile
on the names he would give the new son and
daughter, little dreaming, good man, that fifteen centuries
later those names would be household words to every
Catholic ear and perpetuated in the colossal literature of
sanctuaries of holiness and learning. He fixed on Benedict
for the boy, and Scholastica for the girl, and, so far
as I can trace, it was the first time the names had been
used. Benedict means the “Blest” or “Well Spoken”;
Scholastica signifies a lover of learning, or “the Well
Taught,” so we may infer that the lord of Norcia (it
was called Nursia then) was a man of more education
than most country gentlemen of those rough times, times
of which history says: “Europe has perhaps never known
a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than
that which reached its climax at this date, the year 480.
Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere;
social dismemberment seemed complete. In all
the ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who
was not either a pagan, or an Arian, or a Eutychian. In
temporal affairs, the political edifice originated by Augustus—that
monster assemblage of two hundred millions
of human creatures, ‘of whom not a single individual
was entitled to call himself free’—was crumbling into
dust under the blows of the Barbarians.”[1]
Nevertheless, Rome still continued to be looked upon
by the surrounding provinces as the centre of education;
there was none, at any rate, to be had anywhere else
within reach; and thither the lord of Norcia, a descendant
of the great family of the Anicia so often mentioned
in the Roman chronicles, sent his son to be instructed
in philosophy and law—the two subjects which
still promised some kind of a career to an intelligent
youth. Benedict was scarcely that yet—he was certainly
not more than twelve years old, so much of a child that
his nurse, Cyrilla, was sent with him to take care of him.
Doubtless she found some respectable people with whom
to lodge, and indeed one feels some pity for the simple
countrywoman, charged with such a heavy responsibility
in a strange and, as it must have seemed to her, a very
wicked, great city.
So it seemed to the boy, too. He studied, tried to carry
out his father’s instructions as faithfully as he could, but
all he saw around him inspired him with such a horror
of the world and its ways that life became insupportable
to him, and he resolved to fly into the wilderness and
seek for God. He was only fourteen years old, but he
knew with certainty that his life was not to lie in the
crowded places. The devout nurse did not oppose his
decision; his will was hers, and together they left Rome
and took the road towards their old home. I fancy that
the boy only then told her that Norcia was not to be
their destination. Before reaching it he would find the
place where Heaven willed him to stay. Thus they travelled
on, till they came to La Mentorella, one of the
strangest spots in all those strange mountains. Its parent
is Guadagnolo, the highest standing town in the whole
of Romagna, perched on a peak four thousand feet high,
and yet shut in on every side with a wall of rock that
completely hides it from the outer world. Just below
the town a ledge of the precipitous rock juts out abruptly
and affords foothold for a Church and hermitage, built
here in memory of the conversion of St. Eustace, the
mighty hunter. He was called Placidus then, and was
a soldier, a noble and a good man, a commander-in-chief
much trusted by his Emperor, Trajan, and very upright
and charitable in all his dealings with his fellow-men.
It has been thought by scientific historians that it is of
him that Josephus spoke when recounting the exploits of
the Tribune Placidus in the war with the Jews. There
are links which seem to connect Placidus with the Octavian
family, thus making him a relation of Augustus,
and some writers see in the young Placidus, whom his
father, Tertullus, confided to Benedict’s care, a descendant
of the gallant soldier and hunter of Trajan’s time.
Be all that as it may, we do know that in the days of
his pagan prosperity, Placidus, hunting in the mountains,
sighted a magnificent stag and pursued it madly through
the narrow defiles till it fled up to the summit of an
apparently inaccessible rock, and there turned and stood
still, gazing down on him. Then Placidus fell on his
knees in mortal fear, for between the creature’s antlers
was a crucifix of fire, from which shot forth rays of
such brilliance that they lighted up all the hillside. And
from it came a voice saying: “Placidus, why dost thou
pursue Me? I am Christ, whom thou hast hitherto
served without knowing Me. Dost thou now believe?”
Yes, indeed, Placidus believed, and his whole house
with him, and in the after years was privileged to suffer
great things for his till then unknown Master. But, for
me, I never got much further with his story than that
blessed word, “Whom thou hast served without knowing
Me.” When I read it I think of all the good, brave souls
who thus served in past ages and of those who are serving
thus now, all over the world, truly and successfully,
by the inner light which is imparted to all, of every clime
and every faith, so long as they are sincere and have
the “single eye” to which Christ promised that “the
body shall be full of light.”
Placidus, on becoming a Christian, took (or began
to use, it may have been his already) the name of Eustace.
Either in his time or soon afterwards a Church was built
on the site of his vision and the bell-tower of the “Madonna
della Vulturella,” although its name has been shortened
to “La Mentorella,” still carries on its summit a
gigantic pair of antlers in commemoration of the miracle.
Until a few years ago (it may be so even now) the
feast of St. Eustace attracted great crowds of pilgrims
to the wild and beautiful spot. His day—the day of
his martyrdom under Trajan, who, after all his great
services could not forgive him for refusing to sacrifice to
the gods on the occasion of the Triumph which Eustace
had won for him—falls on the 20th of September, that
ominous “date which marks one of the blackest steps
of history,” as Dom Guéranger says—and the martyr’s
feast has been combined with that of St. Michael on the
29th. Then the lonely rocks of Guadagnolo resound to
hymns and litanies, and at night are all lit up with bonfires,
one to every little group of pilgrims, who make a
point of passing the night there, each family sleeping
round its own well-stacked fire. For the autumn nights
are keen among those wild precipices, with two cold
mountain streams, the Girano and the Siciliano, roaring
along their deep beds in the impenetrable darkness below;
and also the crags used to be the haunts of naughty
brigands who might well covet the gold chains and silver
buttons, the rich cloth and lace of the peasants’ costumes.
So some of the men kept watch, with their old-fashioned
muzzle-loaders across their knees, while their rosaries
slipped through their fingers—and the Blessed Madonna
and St. Eustachio were pleased with their faith and kept
the robbers away, for never yet has the pilgrimage been
disturbed by those sons of Belial.
It was to La Mentorella that Benedict came, in the
year 494, and there he remained for a while, praying
to be delivered from the snares of the world. And the
faithful Cyrilla staid with him and, their little store of
money being exhausted, begged food from the good people
round about, for herself and him. For she had not
the courage to send and ask for money at home, now
that the boy had broken away from teachers and parents
to follow the higher call. And the neighbours gave
gladly, and lent her utensils to cook with. One day she
was grinding meal in a little sieve (a stone bowl pierced
with holes). To her dismay she let it drop and it
shivered in pieces at her feet. What should she say to
the lender? Hearing her lamentations, Benedict came
to see what was the matter. He picked up the broken
pieces and at once they welded themselves together in his
hands, and he gave her back the sieve, whole. Her delight
got the better of her prudence, or else some one
witnessed the miracle, for immediately the people cried
out that they had a Saint in their midst, and they hung
the stone bowl up in the Church as a sacred thing.
Their laudations horrified Benedict, and he ran away,
alone this time, to find a place where no such temptations
could assault his humility. At last he came to a solitary
ravine with steep rocky walls through which rushed a
turbulent little river, which four hundred years earlier
had served Nero unwillingly, being dammed up and made
to spread out into pleasure lakes for his gardens a little
further on. All was deserted now, and Benedict, being
an active, agile boy, crept along the face of the cliff and
found a cave, so deep that the light of day never penetrated
beyond the entrance; and here he remained, sure
of the food his soul needed, solitary communion with
God—and royally careless about sustenance for his
body. But a kindred heart found him out. Lower down
on the course of the Anio, a company of monks had established
themselves on the ruins of Nero’s villa. There
were many such communities then, living apart from
the world to pray and do works of charity and penance,
under no fixed rule, and therefore insufficiently organised,
but many of them leading very holy lives all the same.
One of these monks of Sub Laqueum (as the place was
called from the artificial lakes), Romanus by name, found
out Benedict’s hiding-place and took it upon himself to
provide him with food. He told none of his companions
about the ardent young recluse, but every day he cut his
one loaf of bread in two, and, going to the edge of the
cliff, he let down the half loaf on a string, to which
he had attached a little bell so that Benedict should know
when to come to the mouth of the cave and reach out
to catch the bread. Romanus had given him a hair shirt
and a monastic habit made of skins. He slept on the bare
ground and waged constant war on all the impulses of
the flesh. That rebelled, fiercely. Many a temptation
assailed him. The remembered beauty of one woman
in Rome continually haunted him and very nearly
dragged him forth from his cave to go and find her;
but when that thought came to him, he pulled off his fur
robe and rolled his young body in a clump of thorns that
grew on the platform of his cave, till it was all one
bleeding wound, and his soul regained the mastery.
Seven centuries afterwards St. Francis came from
Assisi to visit the spot. He knelt there long and shed
many tears over the thicket of thorns. Then he planted
two rose trees there, and the thorns gave place to roses
that have bloomed for eight hundred summers, and were
blooming when I saw them, with never a thorn on their
stems. But every leaf of their foliage has a little white
line zigzagging across it—to mark the flight of the
defeated Serpent from St. Benedict’s Eden. There is
a pretty story that tells how, after nearly three years,
the hermit’s retreat was discovered. Sometimes the
Devil, in sheer spite (or maybe the chafing points of rock
on which Romanus was letting down the bread), would
cut the string and then, as Romanus could not come back
till the next day, poor young Benedict, his whole supply
for twenty-four hours whirled away into the river below,
would grow faint and hungry before his benefactor could
reach him again.
The Devil is always rampantly busy at holy seasons—it
enrages him to see everybody trying to be good, and
when Benedict had held out against him for three solid
years, he selected Easter Sunday for one of these wicked
tricks. Romanus’ string snapped, the loaf plunged into
the river, and Benedict, always blessing God, resigned
himself and went on with his prayers. The pangs of hunger
made themselves felt with painful persistence, but
he tried to take no notice of them. Not so his kind
Creator. In His love for this faithful child He spoke
to a good parish priest who was sitting down to his
Easter dinner at that moment with a glad heart: “How
canst thou enjoy these luxuries whilst a servant of God
is pining for food?”
The good priest sprang up, gathered together all that
he could carry, and, leaving his own dinner untouched,
started out to find the suffering recluse. He knew not his
name or his dwelling, but angels guided his steps and
helped him to reach the inaccessible cave. There, instead
of some aged penitent, he found a tall boy, with beautiful
serious eyes, and lithe and strong though his body,
clothed in tattered skins, was terribly thin.
Benedict was as much surprised as his visitor. The
latter spread the good things before him and bade him
eat.
“Nay, friend,” said Benedict, “thou bringest meat,
eggs!—How can I partake of such luxurious food in this
season? It is Lent.”
“Lent!” replied the priest. “No, indeed, my son!
Lent is over. This is Easter Sunday!”
Then the boy fell to, rejoicing. He had lost count
of the day in his solitude.
The priest stayed some time with him and questioned
him of his way of life, and Benedict answered in all
humility; and the visitor went away convinced of the
truth proclaimed by the mysterious voice when it called
him a servant of God.
Now some of the shepherds of that country—doubtless
in seeking for some strayed kid of the goats—had
caught sight of Benedict in his dark cave, and his matted
hair and robe of skins had so terrified them that they
fled, thinking they had seen a strange wild beast. Now
their pastor told them about him, and the poor people
began to come to him to ask for his prayers. And those
who felt called to a higher life gathered themselves to
him for guidance, and the fame of his sanctity and the
miracles he wrought went abroad so that certain monks
of Vico Varo begged him to come and rule over them.
He consented at last and came, but when they realised
that he meant to enforce a strict rule instead of letting
them follow their own varying inclinations, their admiration—it
had never been love—turned to hatred.
Satan entered in amongst them, and they resolved to poison
him. When the fatal cup was handed to Benedict,
he took it without a word—and made the sign of the
Cross over it. It was shivered to fragments on the instant.
Then he left these false brethren and returned
to his grotto, but never more to his solitude. Many came
to him, some praying that he would guide their steps
in religion, some to confide to him their sons to educate.
This multitude could not be housed in the clefts of the
rock, so he built twelve monasteries at Sub Laqueum, on
the ruins of Nero’s villa, and placed in each twelve
monks, who bound themselves to live under certain plain
and simple rules—much prayer, much labour, fasting
and penance; active charity, life-long chastity, and finally
poverty, for no individual might own property of any
kind. Thus began the monastic life of the West. Up
to Benedict’s time, as I have said, the religious life was
indeed led by many devout persons, but also by many
who lacked true devotion and brought the calling into
some disrepute. The Founder par excellence appeared,
and immediately it took on the character by which we
recognise it now.
Its deepest and strongest foundation was in its humility.
In Benedict nature had been wholly subdued; his
self-abasement was complete. No vision of the future
had been granted him as yet, no breath of prophecy
had whispered that in the years to come thirty thousand
monasteries in Europe would be called by his name.
Meanwhile his twelve little houses at Sub Laqueum—our
Subiaco—prospered exceedingly, and the numbers
of his subjects increased daily. The times were so terrible
that men who loved God and His peace were overjoyed
to find a spot where war and murder came not and
where they could serve God with quiet hearts. There
were some such among the Barbarians themselves, and
more than one Goth asked to be enrolled among Benedict’s
spiritual children. All had to work, and the Goths,
big honest fellows but dense and unskilful, joined the
band of builders and cultivators of the soil. The country
was thickly wooded then and there was much felling
to be done. One day a Goth, hewing away at a tree,
let his axe slip and fall into the lake. Immediately he
began to weep and lament, for the implements were few
and precious. Benedict came to him, saw what had happened,
and made the sign of the Cross over the water.
At once the heavy axe floated to the surface, and the
Saint drew it forth and gave it back to the poor man, saying:
“Ecce, labora, et noli contristare!”—“There, work,
and be not afflicted!”
“Symbolical words,” says Montalembert, “in which
we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples
lavished by the monastic order on so many generations
of conquering races! ‘Ecce, labora!’”
In the miserable and confused condition of public affairs
it was difficult for parents of the better classes to
procure proper education for their sons, and, as soon
as the fame of Benedict’s holiness spread abroad, young
boys of noble families were brought to him at Subiaco
and confided to his care, in the hope that they, too, would
devote themselves to the service of God. Two of these,
Placidus and Maurus, were especially dear to him and
were destined to become in a special manner his disciples
and helpers. Placidus, the younger of the two, was the
son of Tertullus, the feudal lord of Subiaco and of many
other towns, and a great benefactor to the infant community.
But Benedict would allow no distinctions of rank
to interfere with the training in obedience and humility
which is the only sure foundation for the religious life,
and the two young patricians had to perform their share
of menial labour like all the rest.
One day Placidus had been sent to fetch water from
the lake, and as he stooped to lift out his heavy pitcher
he lost his balance and fell into the water, which at that
spot formed a dangerous whirlpool. St. Benedict witnessed
the accident and, running to Maurus, who stood
horrified beside him, said, “Go, my son, and save thy
companion.”
Without an instant’s hesitation Maurus walked across
the water with a step as firm as if it had been dry land,
drew the drowning boy out of the whirlpool, and set him
safely on the bank. St. Gregory, in his life of St. Benedict,
says: “To what shall I attribute so great a miracle?
To the virtue of the obedience, or to that of the commandment?”
“To both,” says Bossuet. “The obedience had grace
to accomplish the command, and the command had grace
to give efficacy to the obedience.”
St. Gregory gives us a beautiful picture of St. Benedict’s
loving training of these two predestined souls. He
kept them always near him, and would walk along the
woody banks of the Anio leaning on Maurus and leading
Placidus by the hand, discoursing so wisely and yet so
clearly that the appeal to the more mature intelligence
of the one was as convincing as to the child-like mind of
the other. They witnessed his many miracles, trembled
at the punishments that fell on some unfaithful members
of the community, and stored up all his words in their
hearts—Placidus to be the Apostle of Sicily and the
first martyr of the order, Maurus to become the founder
of the religious life in France, where he died at the
age of seventy after having, as the Breviary puts it, “seen
already more than one hundred of his spiritual children
precede him to Heaven.”
Those first years at Subiaco were very happy and consoling
ones for St. Benedict, but wicked men, some envious
of his fame, some the open enemies of all virtue, tried
by all means in their power to injure him and corrupt
his followers. He took no notice of their calumnies, was
unmoved by the attempt of one wretch to poison him; as
long as he only was attacked, he went calmly on his way.
But when the conspirators sent a crowd of abandoned
women to invade the garden where the monks were working,
he felt the time had come when he should depart
and draw the attacks away from his beloved disciples.
So, having set all things in order and adjured the mountain
community to be faithful to its vows, he travelled
southwards, surely with a heavy heart, and did not pause
till he had put nearly a hundred miles between himself
and his beloved retreat at Subiaco.
About eighty-five miles from Rome, where the ever-capricious
Apennines sink to a rounded plain and rise in
its centre in a natural fortress of rock, there stood, in Roman
times, the little town of Cassinum, once the home
of Varrus, whom Cicero called “sanctissimus et integerrimus,”
one of those who served God without knowing
Him. The place was in ruins when St. Benedict reached
it, but he cared nothing for that; what arrested him was
the sight of the poor country people climbing the hill
to sacrifice to Apollo in the temple on the summit. Pagans
yet! He stayed to teach them Christianity, and very
soon the temple and grove of Apollo gave place to a
Church and monastery—the most famous in the world,
the monastery of Monte Cassino.
St. Benedict must have possessed even more than the
Saint’s usual gift of divine magnetism, for wherever he
went eager disciples sprang up around him—many faithful,
some few less so, but all irresistibly attracted to the
man himself. As it had been at Subiaco, so it was here.
Very quickly he converted the poor people of the district,
signs and wonders too many to recount “confirming the
word,” and his inexhaustible charity making the harried
peasants feel that they had found a father, a doctor, a
protector, in the benignly gentle monk. The great heart
that was utterly empty of self felt for all their sorrows
and hardships; the eyes that, as St. Gregory tells us, had
already been opened to the vision of the Godhead, saw,
as mortals do not see, into the hearts of men, and showed
events taking place hundreds of miles away as clearly
as those close by, so that when his monks returned from
the missions on which he sent them it was he who told
them all they had said and done and thought on the way.
He seems to have understood that God would spare him
further wandering, and accepted Monte Cassino as the
cradle of the order he was called to found. Here he
composed the Rule which became the model of all succeeding
orders, and in its simple completeness contains
the essence and ideal of the religious life. That, according
to St. Benedict, must include prayer and praise
and penance, labour, and unbounded charity, but it does
not consist in them. They are its garment, its inevitable
expression, so to speak, but the life is the life of the
heart in constant union with God. He was opposed to
all undue extremes in outward observances, though inflexible
as to the keeping of the Rule. “Let this,” he
said, “be arduous enough to give the strong something
to strive for, but not so hard as to discourage the
weak!”
He worked at Monte Cassino as if for eternity, yet it
was revealed to him that forty years after his death the
Lombards would destroy the convent and disperse the
monks. It puzzles one to understand that perfect trust
and obedience. The knowledge saddened him, but it
never made him desist from his labours, so splendidly justified
by after events. “I have obtained from the Lord
this much,” he told the frightened disciples, “when the
Barbarian comes he will take things, not lives—res, non
animas.” But other Barbarians were overrunning the
country, left now to its fate by its supine and helpless
rulers in Constantinople. The Goths were everywhere;
many indeed became devout followers of Benedict, but
their Arian brethren pillaged and persecuted, burnt and
ravaged, unchecked, and terribly did the people suffer.
St. Benedict, who foresaw the great destinies of these
Northern races when they should become enlightened,
stood between the conquerors and the conquered as judge
and protector, and both in the end always bowed to his
ruling.
There is a wonderful story that I must set down, because
it shows his power over nature, both animate and
inanimate things. To me it seems more impressive than
all his other miracles, even those of restoring the dead
to life. A particularly fierce Goth robber, named Galla,
“traversed the country panting with rage and cupidity,
and made a sport of slaying the priests and monks who
fell under his power, and spoiling and torturing the people
to extort from them the little they had remaining.
An unfortunate peasant, exhausted by the torments inflicted
upon him by the pitiless Goth, conceived the idea
of bringing them to an end by declaring that he had
confided all that he had to the keeping of Benedict, a
servant of God, upon which Galla stopped the torture
of the peasant, but, binding his arms with ropes and
thrusting him in front of his own horse, ordered him
to go before and show the way to the house of this
Benedict who had defrauded him of his expected prey.
Both thus pursued the way to Monte Cassino, the peasant
on foot, with his hands tied behind his back, urged on by
the blows and taunts of the Goth, who followed on horseback.
“When they reached the summit of the mountain, they
perceived the Abbot, seated alone, reading at the door
of his monastery. ‘Behold,’ said the prisoner, ‘there
is the Father Benedict of whom I told thee.’
“Then the Goth shouted furiously to the monk: ‘Rise
up, rise up, and restore quickly what thou hast received
from this peasant!’ The man of God raised his eyes
from his book and, without speaking, slowly turned his
gaze first on the Barbarian on horseback, and then upon
the husbandman bound and bowed down by his cords.
Under the light of that powerful gaze the cords which
tied his poor arms loosed of themselves, and the innocent
victim stood erect and free, while the ferocious Galla,
falling on the ground, trembling and beside himself, remained
at the feet of Benedict, begging the Saint to pray
for him. Benedict called his brethren and directed them
to carry the fainting Barbarian into the monastery and
give him some blessed bread. And when he had come
to himself the Abbot represented to him the injustice and
cruelty of his conduct, and exhorted him to change it
for the future. The Goth was completely subdued.”[2]
The picture of the holy abbot sitting and reading in
the doorway is one which recurs several times in his
history, and it is good to know that the doorway is one
of the very few fragments remaining of Benedict’s home
at Monte Cassino. It still contains, I believe, an inscription
to that effect. The Lombard destruction left this
archway standing, and also the little tower whence Benedict’s
bell called the monks to work and prayer. One
loves even to touch the stones that knew his presence at
Monte Cassino. Subiaco is full of him indeed, but it was
at Monte Cassino that his greatest work was done; over
its foreseen destruction he wept bitterly and it was there
that he died.
A yet more notable encounter than the one with Galla
took place at the arched doorway, in 542, one year before
Benedict’s death. Totila, the Ostrogoth, swept down
through Italy to retrieve the losses and defeats inflicted
on his predecessor by Belisarius. It was a triumphal
progress. He was on his way to Naples when the whim
took him to see for himself the venerated prophet of the
holy mountain. But first he wished to test the prophet’s
powers. So he caused the captain of his guard to be
dressed in all his own royal robes, down to the famous
purple boots, gave him three noble counts for his attendants
and a great escort of soldiers, and told him
to go and pass himself off on Benedict as the real Totila.
We are not informed how the unlucky captain regarded
his mission—probably with fear and reluctance—but it
failed dismally. As he approached the monastery St.
Benedict perceived him from afar and called out: “My
son, put off the dress you wear! It is not yours.”
The captain, terrified, threw himself on the ground.
Then re-mounting, he and his whole company turned
round and galloped away at full speed to tell Totila that
it was useless to attempt to deceive the man of God. And
Totila understood, and came himself, very humbly, and
saw the Abbot sitting as usual in the doorway, reading
a holy book. The conqueror was afraid. He threw himself
face downward on the sward and dared not approach.
Three times Benedict bade him rise—still he
lay prone. Then the Saint left his seat and came and
raised Totila up and led him to the house and talked
long and earnestly with him, reproving him for the wrong
he had done and showing him that he must treat his conquered
subjects kindly and justly. Also, St. Benedict,
mercifully moved thereto by the sincerity of the Barbarian,
told him what lay in store for him: “You shall
enter Rome; you shall cross the sea; nine years you shall
reign, and in the tenth you shall die.”
And Totila repented of his many evil deeds and begged
the seer to pray for him, and went back to his camp
a changed man. Thenceforth he protected the weak, restrained
his followers, and showed himself so mild and
wise that the delighted Neapolitans, who had been expecting
a repetition of the awful massacres ordered by
Belisarius, said that Totila treated them as if they were
his own children. From that time the tenth year was
ever before his eyes, and when it came he died, contrite
and resigned.
One gleam from home was shed on St. Benedict at
Monte Cassino. His sister Scholastica had long since
followed his example and given herself to God. It was
not permitted to women to take the final vows before
the age of forty, but that did not prevent them from preparing
for the irrevocable dedication by living together
in religious communities, under a fixed rule, from their
early youth, when they were so inclined. Such a life
Scholastica had led, somewhere in the solitudes of the
Sabines—perhaps in her own home at Norcia; but she
came at last to Monte Cassino and built a convent there
for herself and her companions, so as to be near the
brother she loved. Only once a year did they meet, and
then they spent the day together in a hut on the side of
Benedict’s mountain, he coming down with a few of the
brethren, and she accompanied by some of the nuns. All
their discourse was of holy things and much they spoke
of the longed-for joys of Heaven.
Now, in the year 543, they had thus passed the day
together and evening was drawing on. St. Benedict rose,
saying that he and his companions must return to the
monastery, but Scholastica, for the first time in all those
years, begged him to remain with her till the morning.
The Saint was horrified. “Do you not know, my sister,”
he exclaimed, “that the Rule forbids a monk to pass the
night out of the monastery? How can you ask me to
do such a thing?”
Scholastica did not reply. She bowed her head on her
hands on the table that had served for their repast and
wept, praying to God that her brother might stay, for
she knew that they were to meet no more in this world.
She wept so heartbrokenly that her tears flooded the
table and made little rivers on the ground. It was a
mild February evening, and the sun had sunk away from
a calm and cloudless sky. But suddenly a fearful tempest
arose, the thunder roared, the rain came down in
torrents, the lightning seared the heavens from side to
side.
“Sister, what have you done?” St. Benedict exclaimed,
fearing that the storm was a manifestation of the Divine
displeasure.
Scholastica raised her head and smiled at him through
her tears. “God has granted what you refused,” she
said. “Go back to the monastery now, brother, if you
can!”
But there was no going back through that tempest, and
St. Benedict, perceiving that the Lord was on Scholastica’s
side, stayed with her till morning, and they had
great sweetness of holy converse all night long. And
when the sun rose, Scholastica asked for his blessing and
said farewell for the last time, and she and her nuns
went down the hill to their own convent, looking back
many times, I think, to that other one on the hill. And
three days later she died, and her brother saw her soul
mount to Heaven under the appearance of a spotless
dove, and he called his monks and said to them, with
great rejoicing: “My sister is with God. Go and bring
her body hither that we may bury it with honour.”
Which they did, and Benedict made her a grave at the
foot of the altar in his Church.
Now he knew that his own end was approaching, and
he disposed all things rightly, and mightily exhorted his
brethren to persevere and to be faithful to their Rule.
And he more than ever afflicted his body with penance
and abounded in charity to the poor. And thirty-four
days after Scholastica had departed, a great fever seized
him, so that he had no strength and suffered much. But
he never ceased from praying and bade all his monks
pray that God would have mercy on his soul. On the
sixth day of the fever he bade them carry him into the
Church, where he had already caused his sister’s grave
to be opened to receive him. There, on the edge of the
grave, supported by his disciples, he received the Holy
Viaticum, and then bade them lift him to his feet. He
stretched out his arms, praised God once more for all
His goodness, and died—standing, like the gallant warrior
he was!
They buried him beside Scholastica. Two of his
monks, whom he had sent forth on a mission, were very
far away from Monte Cassino when they saw, in the dead
of night, a vast number of the stars of heaven run together
to form a great bridge of light towards the east.
A voice spoke to them, saying, “By this road, Benedict,
the beloved of God, has ascended to Heaven.”
CHAPTER III ST. GREGORY THE GREAT
Birth and Lineage of St. Gregory—Path from the World to the Cloister—Prayer,
Study, and Charity—His Cat—A Prophecy—A Cardinal
Deacon—Mission to Constantinople—Eutyches’ Heresy—Rome in
Pestilence—Gregory Elected Pope—His Unbelievable Accomplishments—His
Life as Pope—Championship of the Oppressed—Bond with
English-speaking People—The Great Procession During the Pestilence—Gregory’s
Successors.
Three years before St. Benedict and his sister
Scholastica passed away, there was born, in a palace
on the Cœlian Hill, a child who was christened
Gregory, a name which signified “Vigilant.” His lineage
was exceedingly illustrious, his parents belonging to the
great old Gens Anicia, a family of nobles which had been
respected and honoured ever since the days of the Republic,
and in which, to use the words of a chronicler of
Gregory’s time, “the men seemed all to have been born
Consuls, and the women Saints.”
Gregory’s mother was St. Silvia, and I have seen the
garden on the quiet Cœlian Hill where as a child he ran
about at her side, asking a thousand questions, as clever
children will, while she tended her flowers and gathered
healing herbs—the “basilica” and “Madrecara” and
“erba della Madonna” still dear to Roman apothecaries—to
make into medicines for the sick poor who thronged
her charitable doors. Mothers see a long way, and,
while Gregory’s father was planning a great career in
the world for his only son, Silvia was praying that God
would keep him pure, and make him great in His sight.
And her prayers prevailed, as mothers’ prayers generally
do, and, though she had to wait a little, she lived to see
their fulfilment.
As the boy grew up he threw himself heart and soul
into his father’s plans; he studied hard, and his naturally
brilliant gifts brought him much distinction. He rejoiced
in all the pleasant things that birth and wealth had
bestowed on him—good looks, popularity, rich garments,
and sparkling jewels—and no doubt was immensely
pleased and flattered when, being still quite
young, he was made Proctor of Rome. That charge,
however, was a grave one at the time, as the Lombards,
the most cruel and brutal of all the savage tribes that
had threatened the Eternal City, chose the period of
Gregory’s proctorship to descend upon her and make her
feel the weight of their heavy hand. There were
religious troubles, too, and Gregory, who through all his
busy official life in the world was an ardent Christian, was
deeply exercised and distressed by them. But the world
was only to claim him for a little while, in his early
manhood. Then he was withdrawn from it to be prepared,
through many long years of prayer and penance
and study, to step forth towards the end of his life as
its rescuer and ruler. Little by little the inner call came,
faint at first, sometimes resisted, but ever stronger, till
Gregory understood and obeyed.
His heart had gone out at once to the Benedictine
monks, when, on the destruction of Monte Cassino by
the Lombards, they had sought refuge in Rome. Some
of them became his most intimate friends and their encouragement
smoothed his path from the world to the
cloister. From the moment when he recognised and embraced
his vocation, all hesitation left him. He sold all
his goods, distributed the larger part to the poor, and,
as if to atone for what the Lombards had destroyed,
built and endowed six new monasteries, placing twelve
Benedictines in each, in Sicily. That done, he converted
his home on the Cœlian into a seventh, where he gathered
another community about him, of the same learned
Order. His father was dead, and his mother, on becoming
a widow, had already built a convent close by, where
she had taken the veil herself.
Gregory now devoted himself to three things—prayer,
study, and charity. For his own use—he was quickly
elected abbot of the monastery—he reserved a small
cell, where he could enjoy the solitude he now so greatly
desired, but—a delightfully human touch!—he could
not get on without his favourite cat, and one can see him,
in imagination, pausing from his writing to smooth her
velvety head when she sprang upon the table and rubbed
it against his cheek! I had a little cat once who would
sit motionless on a chair beside me all night while I
was writing, but the instant I laid down the pen she was
on my lap or my shoulder, talking in her own way, most
intelligently and cheeringly; so I was mightily pleased
when I read about St. Gregory’s cat!
The Benedictine Rule provided for all hospitality to
strangers and the poor, but at the same time directed
that the monks themselves were not to be disturbed from
prayer and study. St. Gregory, however, seems to have
received all who wished to see him, perhaps as an exercise
of patience. Now there was a poor ship-wrecked
sailor who seemed inclined to abuse the privilege. He
came again and again, and was never turned away, but
on the occasion of what proved to be his last visit Gregory
had not a single thing left to give him. He was
looking round his rough cell in perplexity, when a messenger
appeared bringing the silver basin full of porridge,
which was the only food he allowed himself and
which his mother sent him every day! Here was what
was needed! The next moment the needy sailor man was
walking away with the hot porridge and the silver porringer.
What St. Silvia said when she heard of the incident
has not been recorded—but Gregory never gave
the matter another thought until one day, long after,
when the importunate sailor appeared to him in his true
character, that of an Angel of light, and told him that
God had taken note of his charity and—an alarming
prophecy for the Saint—that he would be elected Pope
and do great things for the Church.
All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery,
where he was putting his whole heart into living the life
of a model monk. In his ardour against himself, he carried
his penances too far and fasted so rigorously that
he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he
paid ever after in broken health and in being debarred
from fasting at all. He complains pitifully of having
to “drag about such a big body with so little strength,”
but this was the least of the trials that awaited him.
In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven
years of age, the reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him
and insisted upon making him one of the Cardinal
Deacons to whom was entrusted the jurisdiction of the
seven “Regions” into which the city was divided. Gregory
protested, but had to take on the charge, and from
that time forward he belonged less to himself than to
others. He was too necessary and valuable to be spared.
The next year, Pope Benedict being dead, his successor,
Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a very difficult
and important mission to the Emperor Tiberius Constantinus
at Constantinople, where trouble of all kinds seemed
to be brewing. Although Gregory bewails this “thrusting
out from port into the storm,” one cannot but feel
how the alert fighting spirit in the man leaps to the
call. The born leader may persuade himself that he
is happiest in the seclusion he thinks good for his soul,
but when the call to arms comes every repressed fibre of
his being wakes and cries for action.
When Gregory, taking with him several of his monks,
sailed away from Italy, he little dreamed that years were
to pass before he should return. On his arrival in Constantinople,
the first matter to claim his attention was
the ugly new heresy started by Eutyches, who had drawn
the Emperor and many others into the path of error by
declaring that there was to be no resurrection of the
flesh. Gregory was politely received by the Emperor,
and instantly requested the latter to call a conference in
which the dogma should be discussed. Tiberius consented,
and there followed the famous conference in
which Gregory’s fiery eloquence and invincible logic
quashed the heresy at once. When he had finished speaking,
the Emperor commanded that a fire should be lighted,
and with his own hands and in the presence of a vast
concourse burnt the book which Eutyches had written
to propound the heresy, and declared himself now and
for ever the faithful son of the Church. Eutyches,
touched to the heart by Gregory’s arguments, accepted
defeat and rebuke as but small punishment for his fault,
and when he was dying, soon afterwards, pulled up the
skin of one poor emaciated hand with the fingers of the
other and cried to those around him, “I confess that in
this flesh we shall rise from the dead!” Gregory proved
a successful ambassador in every way. The relations between
the Church and the imperial court had been badly
interrupted by the Lombard invasion, but he welded them
smoothly and firmly together. Tiberius died while Gregory
was in Constantinople, and his successor, Maurice,
was badly disposed to the Church. Gregory brought
him to a better mind and obliged him to rescind an edict
he had just issued forbidding any member of the army
to embrace the monastic life.
At last, after six years of what must have been the
most anxious work, requiring all that the great man had
of wisdom and firmness and tact, he returned to Italy—to
find his beloved Rome in terrible distress from a
visitation of the pestilence. Gregory at once devoted
himself to the care of the sick and dying, and one can
fancy how the poor people’s eyes lighted up when he appeared
among them again. Then the good Pope Pelagius
succumbed to the disease, and at once all eyes turned
to Gregory, who was unanimously elected as his successor.
Gregory was honestly horrified. He refused, he
pleaded, he argued, but no one would listen to him. Then
he fled. Disguised as a peasant, he slipped away and hid
himself in a secret cave in the hills, entreating the Lord
to protect him from the awful honour which his fellow-citizens
wished to thrust upon him. They meanwhile
were searching for him in every direction, and would
have failed in their quest had not Heaven put itself
visibly on their side. From very far off they beheld a
tall pillar of light resting before the fugitive’s cave—they
rushed to it, dragged him forth, and made him Pope.
Seeing that his fellow-citizens would not listen to him,
he wrote to the Emperor Maurice, begging him not to
confirm the election, but the Romans intercepted the letter;
the Emperor was informed of the election in the
usual way and was only too glad to give it the imperial
sanction, still required then from Constantinople. For
once the “Vox Populi” had proved itself what it never
is, nowadays, the “Vox Dei,” and for fourteen years
Gregory reigned, in virtue and wisdom and glory, for
the everlasting good of the people of God. Every gift
that Heaven had bestowed upon him vindicated its unerring
designs. He accomplished in those fourteen years
so many wonderful things that cold sense almost refuses
its adherence to the visible facts. His colossal labours
for the Church gave us the Gregorian chant, the Sacramentary
of the missal, and the Breviary; his correspondence,
so vast that, like Napoleon and Julius Cæsar,
he is supposed to have dictated to several secretaries at
once, embraces every point that required treating of at
home and abroad. His sermons, day after day, instructed
the ignorant in the plain truths of salvation,
while they no less amazed and illuminated the minds of
the most learned; and through it all his soul was never
disturbed from the calm heights of union with God, his
heart never closed to a single cry from the suffering and
the weary. The much abbreviated list of “some of his
labours,” as the Breviary puts it, would stagger the grasp
of any modern scholar or ruler. In a few lines he is
shown to us reëstablishing the Catholic Faith in many
places where it had suffered, repressing the Donatists
in Africa, the Arians in Spain, expelling the Agnostics
from Alexandria, and refusing the “Pallium” (the sign
of pontifical investiture) to Syagrius, the Bishop-elect of
Autun, until he had turned the “heretic Neophytes”[3]
out of Gaul; quelling the audacity of John, the Patriarch
of Constantinople, who had dared to call himself the
“Head of the Universal Church,” and so on, preaching,
writing, praying, and through it all suffering constantly
and acutely.
There is a legend to the effect that all these pains and
sicknesses had been voluntarily accepted in order to deliver
a certain soul from Purgatory. The legend is only
a legend, unsupported by the authority of the Church—but
it would have been just like St. Gregory to do it!
In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as
well as in every effort to reorganise and restore, his name,
his presence is dominant. After becoming Pope, he lived
chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the official Papal residence,
and they still keep there the narrow pallet that
served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern
schoolboys!—the little rod which he had to use to keep
his dark-eyed, rampageous young choristers in order!
The men who can govern others with the most unerring
wisdom are often entirely mistaken in their appreciation
of themselves. Only the other day the local and most
successful Superior of a great missionary order in
America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the
Bishop he was making a dreadful mistake in making me
the Rector,” he declared. “It is not my work—I was
not intended to govern and lead! I am a born free-lance—I
want to travel all over the country seeking out
the lost souls. I am no good at anything else!”
But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the
great crowd of clergy and laity who designated Gregory
for the Papacy. What he accomplished during his
pontificate has been well summed up by Montalembert:
“Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by universal
consent, the double surname of Saint and Great,
will be an everlasting honour to the Benedictine order,
as to the Papacy. By his genius, but especially by the
charm and ascendency of his virtue, he was destined to
organise the temporal power of the Popes, to develop and
regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their paternal
supremacy over the new-born crowns and races
which were to become the great nations of the future,
and to be called France, Spain, and England. It was he,
indeed, who inaugurated the middle ages, modern society,
and Christian civilisation.” The task he undertook was
a gigantic one, for on the one side he had to contend
with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt and
decrepit Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal
rulers of Rome and his own secular masters; on the other,
with the great new forces let loose on the world in the
increasing vigour and supremacy of the Lombards and
other northern nations, more than half barbarous still,
but, as Gregory clearly perceived, possessed of an intelligence
and vitality which only required training and
instruction to grow into great, new polities which would
replace the already dead Roman Empire.
To appreciate his labours one would have to read that
colossal correspondence which has fortunately been preserved
entire. Besides the mighty matters of Church and
Empire which it sets forth, there shows all through the
most tender and minute care for the lower and therefore
unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls.
Slavery, in every form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation,
and his most earnest efforts were devoted to
restoring slaves to the rank of human beings. The
peasants on the great, estates were serfs—practically
slaves. He decreed that their marriages should be inviolable,
their property their own, their wills valid; that
wherever possible the Church revenues should be devoted
to buying the freedom of slaves and that never,
on any plea, should Christians be sold to Jews or pagans.
At the same time he enacted that neither Jews nor pagans
should be baptised by force, and commanded that
the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to them
and that they should be allowed freedom of worship.
Always humble and diffident about asking anything for
himself, it is amusing to find him severely reprimanding
a Bishop who had authorised or permitted extortionate
exactions to be practised against an obscure farmer in
Sardinia, and at the same time writing meekly to the
overseer of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a
stud farm where were kept four hundred stallions: “You
have sent me one bad horse and four asses. I cannot
ride the horse, because it is bad, nor the asses, because
they are asses. If you would assist to sustain me, send
me something that I can use!”
But, after all, the special bond between St. Gregory and
English-speaking peoples lies in the memorable act by
which England was evangelised, after the Faith first
planted there had been annihilated by the pagan Barbarians,
Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom she fell
an easy prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions
and abandoned her to her fate.
It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent
beauty of a group of English children, standing, dazed
and frightened, in the market to be sold, that first touched
his heart to such warm pity for their country. He was
then living as the abbot of the community he had founded
on the Cœlian Hill, and enough has been said to show
how happy he was in his quiet life there.
It must have been some unusual necessity which took
him far down into the town on a certain day and through
the noisy, crowded slave market. But on seeing the children,
with their blue eyes full of tears and their long
golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was forgotten;
he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.
“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer,
given indifferently enough. The keeper knew that the
big, dark-faced monk was not a slave-buyer.
“Angles! They are born to be angels!” cried Gregory,
and straightway he flew to the Pope and besought
permission to go with some of his monks to Britain to
preach the Gospel. The Pope, taken by surprise, consented,
and before he had time to think over the matter
Gregory, with his volunteers, had put three days of travelling
between himself and Rome. Then the news leaked
out, and the people rose like one man and rushed to the
Pope, who was on his way to St. Peter’s, and, arresting
his progress, burst into indignant cries: “You have offended
St. Peter! You have ruined Rome in allowing
Gregory to leave us!”
Pelagius saw his mistake and sent messengers in all
haste to call Gregory back. Of course he obeyed; he
never forgot England, but it was only in the sixth year
of his own pontificate (596) that he could carry out his
design, and then he could not himself take part in the
expedition. He found a noble substitute in St. Augustine,
and it must have been with a glad heart that he sent him
forth, and gave him and his forty Benedictines the final
blessing, as they knelt (so we are told) on the grassy
stretch below the steps of Gregory’s own convent on the
Cœlian Hill. The grass grows there still; still the green
trees shadow the enclosure called St. Gregory’s park,
through which one approaches the Church, and still the
flowers bloom in Silvia’s garden where he played as a
little boy. Even modern Rome has been loath to encroach
on the place so dear to him who loved Rome so
much.
I have often wondered what became of the little English
children he saw and, seeing, loved. Surely he rescued
them and placed them with kind people to be cared
for. His quick notice of them reminds one of our own
Pius IX, who could never pass an English child without
stopping to bless it, and, while blessing the child,
to pray for England, whom Augustine and his companions
made “the Isle of Saints” and the “Dowry of
Mary.” Poor England! she threw her glory to the
winds at the command of an adulterous King and his
unspeakable daughter, and, now that even the moth-eaten
rags of her heresies will no longer hold together, dares
to call her crumbling simulacrum of a Church the
“Church of Saint Augustine”! That never died, in
reality; and all honour to those of her children who,
through three hundred years of abominable persecution
and oppression, kept the Faith, and prepared the way for
its splendid renaissance to-day!
One more picture of St. Gregory must close this humble
sketch of his great life. As already related, after
he had been elected Pope he sent a letter to the Emperor
Maurice, imploring him not to confirm the decision
of the people. And just then, as if jealous of all
the good work that was going forward, the Powers of
Evil let loose a terrible outbreak of the pestilence in
Rome. They could not touch the spiritual city—Rome
invisible, the Sanctuary of the Faith, but the material one
seemed to be delivered into their hands and terrible were
its sufferings. Poverty and neglect, and the ruin of ceaseless
wars, had made it vulnerable at every point; the
pestilence had swept it again and again, but this was the
most frightful visitation of all. Gregory and his monks,
and many other charitable persons, devoted themselves
to the sick and dying; the lazarets and hospitals were
crowded—every day with new sufferers as the dead were
carried out; but it became impossible to bury the dead
fast enough. Neither prayer nor effort seemed of any
avail, and dull despair settled on all hearts. Apparently
this was to be the end.
Then Gregory instituted the first of those great processions
which, in moments of stress, have moved across
the pages of history ever since, awing us a little by the
whole-hearted faith and trust of our ancestors in the
mercy of Heaven. Gregory decreed that all, Clergy
and Laity, who could stand on their feet should put on
the garments of penitence and follow him through the
stricken streets to pray at the Tomb of St. Peter. And
all who could obeyed like one man. What a sight that
must have been when the Saint, “the strong, dark-faced
man of heavy build,” led his afflicted people from the
“Mother of Churches” at the Lateran Gate down past
all the ruined pomp of the Palatine and the Colosseum
and the Forum towards the river and the great Basilica
of Constantine beyond! How the response of the Major
Litanies must have thundered up from all those breaking
hearts to the “skies of brass” that hung over Rome!
The ever-repeated “Te rogamus, audi nos!” and
“Libera nos, Domine” even now bring tears to one’s
eyes with their almost despairing simplicity; then they
were the last appeals of a crushed and ruined race for
one more chance to repent and atone for its heaped misdeeds.
And the chance was granted. As the endless
procession moved along towards St. Peter’s its leader
paused before the Mausoleum of Hadrian, that huge
monument of pagan ambition, and raised his eyes and
heart in supplication, offering we know not what of his
own life and destiny for his people’s sins.
Suddenly he stood transfigured. The chanting ceased;
all eyes followed Gregory’s gaze, all ears were strained
to catch the heavenly melody that floated, high and clear,
fresh as the song of birds at dawn, over the sorrowing
city:
“Regina Cœli laetare,
Quia quem meruisti portare,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit!”
It was the chant of the Resurrection!
“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst
from that great multitude, as the angels’ voices grew
fainter and were lost in the depths overhead. And then,
on hearts bursting now with relief and joy, there fell
the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the Heavenly
Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress,
stood the radiant Archangel—and he was sheathing his
flaming sword.
The pestilence was over. Once more God had had
mercy on His people. And, since the angels’ song was addressed
to the Queen of Heaven, we know that it was
she whose prayers had stayed the arm that had clung
round her neck in Bethlehem.
St. Gregory passed to his reward on the 12th of March,
604, having reigned nearly fourteen years. The mourning
city chose Sabinianus of Volterra to succeed him, but
only three years had elapsed when Sabinianus in his turn
made place for a Boniface (III), who lived but one year
after his election, and then came another Boniface, a
Saint, a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the
world found out that, though imperial Rome was indeed
dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their
fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century
of apparent eclipse had taken root below and shot
out branches above and had become as a mighty tree affording
guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole
Christian world.
Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special
mission to fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds
its individual lustre on his memory. No doubt or hesitation
seems to accompany the acceptance and fulfilment
of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible
Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the
Faith for all time. It was Boniface, the fourth of
that name, who decreed and carried out the Triumph
of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a big
subject and it must have a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER IV MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON
The Pantheon—Hadrian’s Best Monument—Long Idle—Consecrated as
St. Mary of the Martyrs—The Cathedral, the Symbol of the Soul—Its
Purification—Continuity of the Church—A Priest’s Visit—The
Alabaster Square—Procession of the Martyrs’ Relics—Giovanni Borgi,
the Workman—Italian Guilds—Giovanni’s Selflessness—His Rescue of
the Forsaken Children—Care of Them—Crusade in Behalf of All the
Waifs of Rome—His Work of Love—Giovanni’s Successor, Later
Pius IX.
If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look
down from the spot where St. Peter was crucified, you
will see, rounding up in the low-lying heart of the city,
a dome, white, huge, uncrowned, standing out from the
darker buildings round it like an enormous mother-of-pearl
shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the
air, taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the
Pantheon, and thus it has stood, reflecting every mood
of the Roman sky, since the days of Hadrian, who became
Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the magic
dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the
gigantic lettering on the pediment over the portico.
Ninety years before his time Marcus Agrippa, the intimate
friend and (for his sins!) the son-in-law of Augustus,
erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths which
still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of
which my brother has told the touching story in “Ave,
Roma Immortalis.” Agrippa must have forgotten to
properly propitiate the gods; we moderns should say that
he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple was soon
struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance
when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to
restore it.
This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had
done with it, the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” all-holy)
must indeed have dazzled the eyes of the beholders,
for the dome was entirely covered with tiles
of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it
seem a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The
gilt tiles were stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor,
Constans II, who took them away to Syracuse,
whence the Saracens successfully looted them a few years
afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-pearl
is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead,
when the Heavens have looked on it long enough, may
become a thing of life and beauty. When Hadrian had
finished his building there was nothing left of Agrippa’s
original one except the portico; but Hadrian, with rare
moderation, left the original founder’s name on that.
The Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most
perfect pagan monument in Rome,” seems to have been,
in its beginnings, unfortunate, for only sixty-four years
after Hadrian’s death it again stood sadly in need of
repair, if we may believe the magniloquent inscription
left on its front by Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla,
when they had carried out their pious designs of
further restoration.
But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially
what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast
and perfect dome, a place where the winds of Heaven
may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet
across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of
the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered
the shock of a single angle on their way. And
for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain
has fallen and the sun has shone and the stars have
looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great
opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers
in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the
vault of Heaven above. But for two hundred years—as
if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution
which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed
and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years
during which the silence was never broken, and stars and
sun and winds had their way in the stupendous, empty
fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory
who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same
that guard it now, (and perhaps this and a few other
such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer,
should be remembered to his attenuated credit)—preferring
to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for
the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach,
from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told
the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to
wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a Church of
the Lord.
Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now
and then to surprise us by some memorable action—said
the Pope was right, and gave him the building to do
with it as he liked. And then Boniface carried out the
great plan which must have been simmering in his brain
for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the
seven planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies
of the Saints and be consecrated to the one True God,
under the tide of “St. Mary of the Martyrs.” Under
that perfect dome of exactly equal height and diameter
(one hundred and forty-two feet) he would finally lay
to rest all the sacred remains which were still buried in
the Catacombs all round the city. But there was much
to do first. The rich architectural disposition of the
interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a
High Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would
not close; when dust and rubbish were cleared away the
material preparations were over, but the tremendous
ceremony of purification and consecration had yet to be
accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of
Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of
such profound meaning and glorious diction as remains
matchless in the annals of the Liturgy.
We can only see it now with the eyes of the spirit,
but, even while trying to do that, we must not let the
magnificence of the external function make us forget that
which the Church so lovingly and repeatedly impresses
upon us—first, that there is but one Sanctuary worthy
of the Most High, His Throne and dwelling in the inaccessible
light of the Fixed Heaven, round which all
universes that the human mind can grasp revolve, like
starry spindrift round a living sun; and, secondly, that
the home God has built for Himself on earth and loves
with the most passionate tenderness is the heart of the
Christian, where He will abide for time and eternity if
it do not cast Him out. The chief object of ecclesiastical
architecture is to symbolise the grandeur of the union
between the soul and its Creator; as such, and as the
storehouse and dispensary of graces, the banqueting hall
where He feeds us with Himself, the arsenal where He
arms us for the combat and trains us for His soldiers,
where, in His surpassing love and mercy, He deigns to
remain in the adorable Eucharist, the consecrated Church
is the crown of human production, and rightly do we
strain every nerve to make it rich and noble and fair.
When that is done, and all that men can give has been
lavished on beautifying and enriching it, it has to be
cleansed from every blemish of earthy contact before
it can be offered to the service of God. When we wander
through the Cathedrals of the world—Westminster Abbey,
Strasburg, Notre Dame, Milan—asking ourselves
how mere men ever attained to the production of such
beauty and grandeur, do we ever stop to think that those
towering walls were washed from vault to pavement,
within and without, with holy oil, on the day of
consecration?
The Cathedral was the symbol of the soul, and every
act and prayer of the ceremonial depicted for our forefathers—so
well instructed in the truths we first take for
granted and then forget—the processes by which God
confers on us the gift of immortality. On the eve of the
great day all left the building, the new doors were closed,
no step sounded on the pavement, no voice might break
the stillness of the place. It was a dead thing waiting
for life, as the soul that is not united to God waits, under
its inherited burden of sinfulness, for regeneration.
Outside the precincts a great tent has been erected,
and here, all through the night, the Bishop and his assistants
have been praying, the prayers of David the
great penitent. All night long the penitential psalms have
been going up, beseeching the Lord to wash away the sins
of His people, His exiles on earth who are waiting without
the camp, and entreating Him to take them into grace
and bring them to their Father’s home. With the first
faint light of dawn the prayers cease, the supplicants
arise, and the Bishop puts on his vestments, one by one
and with a special prayer for each, because he thus figures
the Son of God putting on the garment of our
humanity. And because Christ, as man, prayed to His
Father and ours, the Bishop comes forth from the tent
and prostrates himself before the steps of the Church
in fervent prayer, with all his clergy kneeling around
him.
Now the natural soul is cold and blind, and closed to
Grace; so the Church stands, unlighted and with fast
closed doors. And because the Spirit of God is all gentleness
and mercy, and condescends to most patient
stratagems to capture the heart He covets, the Bishop
goes three times round the great building, praying and
knocking softly at its doors, while the clergy follow him
and pray, too, as the angels pray for us. At last the
first barrier falls; the doors open, reluctantly as it were.
The Bishop crosses the threshold saying, “Peace eternal
to this House, in the Name of the Eternal.” The procession
passes within, the shadows swallowing up the
gold and crimson of the vestments that had been sparkling
in the sun. A strange sight the empty Church
presents now. On the pavement two broad paths of
ashes traverse its entire length and breadth, in the form
of a Greek Cross. The assistants stand in silent groups
while the Bishop, slowly moving down from the apse to
the entrance, and then across from one transept to the
other, traces in the ashes the Latin and Greek alphabets,
with his crozier. Why? Because the first need of the
soul is instruction. “How shall they know except they
first be taught?” And, since God will not take possession
of a soul without its own concurrence and consent,
it must know Him before it receives Him.
Knowledge brings the desire for purification from sin,
original or actual; and now the Church, the symbol of
the soul, must be purified. The Bishop mingles wine
with water, to denote the Humanity and the Divinity of
Christ; to these he adds ashes to commemorate His
death, and salt as an emblem of His resurrection; the
mystic flood is poured in waves over the Altar, and thence
all down the pavement of the Church, while hundreds of
acolytes scale the ladders placed against the walls and
the mystic liquid runs down them in glistening sheets to
mingle with the mimic ripples on the floor. Let it run.
When it has drained away, the holy oil flows golden and
fragrant over the carved and gleaming walls, and pious
hands are applying it to the exterior of the building—sometimes
even to its roof—in copious floods. Now
indeed the Church is ready for its destiny, even as the
Christian emerges from Baptism ready for his God.
The chants swell louder and sweeter, the Alleluia rings
out triumphantly from a thousand hearts, the incense
sends up its first perfumed spirals to hang among the
fretted arches of the deep vault; the sub-deacons approach
the Pontiff and offer for his blessing the rich
vessels and vestments which are the wedding presents of
the Faithful to the new-born Bride of Christ—the House
is ready for the Master and His guests.
The guests are waiting still in the exiles’ tent, with
Knights and Prelates for their Guard of Honour. Such
nobility could not be entertained save in a spotless mansion.
Their names? Oh, they had many—Greek and
Latin and Persian and Armenian—besides the “wonderful
new names” that had been given them in Heaven,
for these guests were Holy Martyrs, and their relics
were to be placed in the stone of the High Altar, because
the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must always be offered
on them to-day, even as when the fervent yet trembling
Christian knelt before their tombs in the Catacombs,
and the doomed Priest asked the Lord to accept the Sacrifice
in honour of those whom perhaps he had laid there
an hour before.
Oh, the adorable continuity of the Church! In my
eyrie in the Rockies, one of the loneliest spots on earth,
there came to my door quite unexpectedly one summer
evening—it was the 28th of June—a missionary priest,
very tired. He had driven some hundred and fifty miles
to get to us; his game little horses, his buggy, his coat—everything
about him was covered with dust, but his eyes
beamed with benevolence as he said, “I have come to say
Mass for you.” We could have kissed his feet. The
next morning, very early, in the sitting-room that was
a bower of wild flowers, my son and I knelt and watched
him prepare the altar. From his worn portmanteau the
first thing he drew out was a square of white alabaster
of which the centre had been removed, replaced, and
sealed with a cross sunk into the stone. Very reverently
he slipped it under the white linen “corporal,” lighted
the blest candles on either side—and began “Introibo
ad altare Dei.”
The alabaster square contained relics of the Martyrs;
and our humble home-made altar was, through them, His
friends, as worthy of Him who was about to descend
upon it as the High Altar of St. Peter’s on that morning
of his Feast in Rome.
When St. Boniface cleansed and consecrated the
Pantheon, he showed, in the name he gave it, that it was
to be the shrine of many valiant ones, a shrine of which,
more truly than of any of our battlefields, it could be
said:
“On Fame’s eternal camping ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards, with solemn round,
The Bivouac of the Dead!”
But one almost doubts whether the Pontiff himself appreciated
the magnitude of the task he had undertaken.
In person he went through the many Catacombs,
for he was resolved that no smallest, humblest hero of
the Lord should miss his share of the final triumph. He
had had great cars prepared, decked with all possible
richness, to convey the precious remains which had so
long held the outposts of the city, to the Pantheon in its
very heart; but when he had gone through all the dark,
intricate passages of the underground cemeteries, tapping
at the walls and examining every atom of surface
that might conceal a once proscribed tomb, I think his
artificers must have had to build more chariots for the
returning army than they had expected, for it was very
great. At last, however, all was ready. It was the 13th
of May, Anno Domini 609, and a glorious morning,
when the converging processions set forth, met, and entered
the city in triumph. The Pontiff in his splendid
vestments led the procession, swelled as it went along by
all the inhabitants of Rome. Long serried ranks of prelates,
priests, and monks followed him, carrying tall
lighted tapers that gleamed but faintly in the Roman sun;
the air was sweet with fragrances that grew stronger as
the convoy passed along the flower-strewn streets, and
the perfume of hundreds of censers swung up on the
bright air. Rome was poor then, but the Romans had
still found blue and crimson tapestries to hang from the
windows, and every portico and window was crowded
with eager onlookers who, as the procession approached,
took up the roar of welcome with which the city greeted
its dead. But I think a hush fell when the dead came
into sight at the turn of the street or the entrance of
the Square, and the enormous cars moved nearer, their
dear, terrible burden piled high above the sides, and
covered with silks and flowers, through which here and
there showed just enough of a coffin’s outline to wring
the heart and let loose a rain of tears. “Twenty-seven
great cars, filled with the bones of the Martyrs, did Boniface
the Pope bring to the Pantheum, now consecrated
to the Service of God and the honour of the Blessed
Virgin.”
Truly may that splendid temple, open to the sky, claim
its title of “St. Mary of the Martyrs,” and rightly did
the Pontiff and his followers as they brought them in
raise the triumphant shout: “The Saints shall rejoice in
their beds! Arise, ye friends of God, and enter into the
glory He has prepared for His elect!”
After all these great names it seems strange to have
to record a very humble one, that of a poor workingman,
in connection with the Pantheon, but I can never pass the
famous Church without remembering a certain Giovanni
Borgi, whose memory was held in great benediction in
Rome in my young days.
During the preceding century the city was really in
a fairly peaceful and prosperous condition, but the many
institutions of charity which flourished under Gregory
XVI and Pius IX had not reached the point where they
could provide night refuges for its many waifs and
vagrants. There were numbers of poor boys—street
arabs, as we should call them—who wandered about
in the daytime, earning a little here and there but subsisting
chiefly on charity and having no fixed dwelling-place
of any kind. To these the broad steps and portico
of the Pantheon offered at least shelter from the weather,
and they used to gather there in crowds after dark and
sleep—as boys can sleep—on the stones.
Now there was in Rome, towards 1780 or thereabouts,
a poor mason called Giovanni Borgi. He belonged to
the “opera di San Pietro”: that is, he was one of the
workmen engaged for life by the administration of St.
Peter’s for the maintenance and repair of the Basilica,
the Vatican Palace, and its many dependent buildings.
The “opera” was a close corporation and included artisans
of every necessary craft, from mosaic workers to
bricklayers, plumbers, and carpenters. Of course the
privileges were largely hereditary, the Italian traditions
of Guilds leading the son to follow the trade or profession
of his father whenever possible, but high character
and a blameless record were also indispensable qualifications
for every appointment. Giovanni Borgi, though
poor and almost illiterate, had worked all his life in the
holy places and was regarded by his fellows as very nearly
a saint. While he worked he prayed, and when working
hours were over he went regularly to the great Hospital
of Santo Spirito in the “Borgo,” and sat up late into the
night nursing the sick and comforting the dying. The
only reproach ever addressed to him was that he sometimes
got sleepy over his work the morning after some
unusually long vigil by the bedside of some sufferer who
had entreated him to remain with him. Everybody loved
the queer little man, and he loved all the world but himself.
To this person he never gave a thought. Heaven
had made him short and stumpy—but he could walk as
well as the youngest; he had but one eye—but its sight
was perfect; a funny bald head—but somebody had
given him an old wig to cover it with; what was there
to complain about? So, being empty of itself, his heart
had room for others, and he took his fellow-beings’ wants
and sufferings very seriously.
One evening, before going to the hospital, he was accompanying
a religious procession through the streets,
when he noticed the dark forms of a little crowd of
sleepers on the steps of the Pantheon. Coming nearer,
he found that they were boys of various ages, ragged and
forlorn, huddled together for warmth, and sound asleep.
A little further on, under the tables where fowls were
sold in the daytime, more of these waifs had taken refuge.
The sight grieved the good mason deeply. He
could not pass on and leave them thus. Rousing some
of them, he asked many questions and learnt that not
one of them had a home or a guardian. Orphans, runaway
boys from the hill villages, waifs of one sort and
another—here was one of those collections of abandoned
children who would later become criminals unless some
kind hand were stretched out to save them. Giovanni
did not hesitate for a moment. He bade the little crowd
follow him to his lodging. There was one of those great
ground-floor rooms only used for storing properties or
cattle—no Roman will sleep near the ground if he can
help it, for fear of fever—and in this barn-like place
Giovanni bestowed his ragged guests after giving them
whatever he could beg or buy for their supper.
I do not think he went to the hospital at all that
night. I fancy he sat long in the brick-floored room,
staring at the three wicks of the “lucerna” and begging
Heaven to show him what to do next. In the morning
he had to let his flock out, promising them some supper
if they would come back at nightfall and exhorting them
to be good meanwhile. The poor little creatures needed
no second invitation and turned up faithfully, their numbers
swelled by others to whom they had spoken of their
good luck. Giovanni saw that he would soon have a community
on his hands, and went to tell some priests, who
were his friends, that he must be helped to teach and
govern, as well as to maintain the forsaken children. For
their food—breakfast and supper—he begged, and the
kind-hearted neighbours responded generously. His first
care was to teach them the Catechism, sitting among them
in the evening and getting them to talk about themselves;
he also taught them what little he knew of reading and
writing; but it hurt him sorely to turn them out to face all
the temptations of the streets during the daytime.
Very soon, the priests and some other charitable persons
raised money to rent a part of an old palace, somewhat
in ill-repair, but providing luxurious quarters in
comparison to the Church steps and the fowl market.
The priests offered to devote their evenings to teaching
the boys, and found their efforts well rewarded, for the
waifs, under the kind, firm rule of old Giovanni, were
eager to make the best of their wonderful new advantages.
He very soon solved the question of occupation
during the daytime by placing them out in a number of
workshops, where they could learn useful trades and earn
something towards their own maintenance. He sent them
out in the morning, giving each a loaf of bread to take
with him for dinner; then he went to his own work at
St. Peter’s. During the dinner hour he would rush round
from one workshop to another to see that his “children”
were behaving themselves and that none had played truant.
Then in the evening he would go and fetch those
of whose steadfastness he had any doubts, and by nightfall
the whole big family was safely housed in the corner
of the old Palazzo.
Whatever they had earned during the day had to be
rendered up to “Tata Giovanni” (Daddy John), as they
had come to call him, and very dearly they came to love
their queer, kind protector. Old people used to describe
his taking them all out to Villa Borghese on holidays, and
said it was wonderful to see the old fellow flying round,
playing ball with the rest, his wig all awry and his mighty
laugh showing how happy he was with his children.
His good work had found friends and supporters from
the beginning, and, being brought to the notice of Pius VI,
the Pontiff bought the Palazzo Ruggia as a permanent
home for it and constituted himself its chief protector.
Thus encouraged, Tata Giovanni started on a crusade
which had for its object nothing less than the reclamation
of all the good-for-nothing boys in Rome! He used
to seek them out and follow them up, and if persuasion
proved unavailing the dogged old man would seize them
by the arm and march them off to his “Asilo” without
more ado. Vagrancy, mendicancy, gambling roused his
ire to such an extent that his name became a terror to
all youthful evildoers, and they would fly at the mere
mention of it. Life at the Asilo was conducted on lines
of military precision. The youngsters rose early, heard
Mass, got a good breakfast, and marched away to their
work, where, as I have said, their guardian looked in on
some of them—and they never knew which it would be —during
the course of the day. When the Ave Maria
rang they all came home, and as they passed into the
house Tata Giovanni stood at the door with a bag in
his hand, and into this they had to drop their earnings—not
a baiocco was to be spent on the way or kept back!
Then came the lessons, followed by the rosary, and
supper, this last the crown of the day for the tired,
healthy young people. The old ideals still found many
followers in those days, and it was not at all unusual
to see some great Cardinal “gird himself with a towel”
and trot humbly a score of times between the kitchen
and the refectory to wait on the boys. There were a
hundred of them by this time, and great was Daddy
John’s preoccupation as to their morals. Long inured to
shortening his hours of sleep, he would pace the dormitories
all night long to see that all was as it should be,
only sleeping himself for a short hour in the morning;
and certainly Heaven blessed his efforts, for as years
went on, and his waifs grew old enough to go out into
the world on their own account and others took their
places, not one that I ever heard of brought discredit
on his education.
The sick at the hospital were not forgotten amid all
these new labours and responsibilities; Tata Giovanni
(no one ever called him anything else) went to them
whenever he could, and, when he could not, he would send
some of the older boys in his place, thus teaching them
the lesson which had been the moral of his whole life—that
no one must live for himself alone, and that the
poorest and most ignorant can always find some sufferer
to cheer and console. He died at last—the good, humble
old workman—fifteen years after he had strayed from
the procession to inspect the ragged sleepers on the steps
of the Pantheon. He passed away on the 28th of June,
1798. The whole city mourned for him, and his boys
were broken-hearted. His work of love had become a
public institution and incorporated with another, of the
same kind, lived till a few years ago, when it was swept
aside and swallowed up with hundreds of other beneficent
foundations in the “indiscriminate brigandage” of
Rome’s latest rulers.
Several years after Tata Giovanni’s death a young
gentleman of noble birth, who came from Sinigaglia, was
appointed the director of the Asilo. It was not a distinguished
appointment by any means; of course no salary
was attached to the position—it was not till the recent
laïcisation of charity that any but unpaid volunteers
attended to the wants of the poor in the Eternal City.
That made no difference to this handsome young man,
for he came of a wealthy family, but his father, who
had had great ambitions for his son, was by no means
pleased to see him buried in an orphan asylum. The
young man himself was suffering under great despondency.
He desired with all his heart to be a priest, but his health
was so bad that the Bishop did not think it wise to ordain
him. As a child he had suffered a severe shock from
falling into the water and narrowly escaping drowning,
and ever since his early youth he had suffered from sharp
attacks of epilepsy, terrible in themselves and yet more
terrible in the constant dread that hung over their victim,
who never knew when he might be struck down by
the fearful visitation.
Very gladly did Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti of
Sinigaglia accept the charge of the Asilo which he had
already constantly visited as a helper and instructor.
And here, for four years, he who was to become Pius IX
lived with the orphans, subsisted on their rough fare, and
devoted all his powers to making forsaken lads into good
Christians and useful citizens. Workshops were now installed
in the Asilo itself, and the higher arts went hand
in hand with humble trades, each boy’s talent and inclinations
being carefully observed and consulted. Many
good artists and good workmen were given to the world
by the orphanage which had such humble beginnings, but
for many of us its chief interest lies in its connection with
the Pope, to whom it furnished the first opportunity of
developing those gifts of organisation and command that
later served humanity so well. Here he waited, a humble
postulant on the threshold of the priesthood; here he
prayed, as we know, those fervent, almost heart-broken
prayers, that God would remove the infirmity which darkened
his life and barred his way to the Altar; it was to
his little room in the Asilo that he was brought back one
night, apparently dying, having been struck down by one
of those fearful attacks in the street. From here he used
to go, day after day, to one or another of the city’s holy
places to pray for relief or resignation; from here he
started on the pilgrimage to Loreto, where the first light
broke across the darkness and he received the Divine
assurance that his prayers were heard, that the affliction
was about to pass away. It was, finally, in the little
Church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami (St. Joseph of
the Carpenters), close to the Orphanage of Tata Giovanni,
that he said his first Mass, on Easter Sunday,
April 11, 1819. It was a very quiet affair, only a few
near relations and his beloved orphans assisting at it.
His uncle, Paulinus, who was a Canon of St. Peter’s and
who had been his tutor in sacred studies, stood beside
him all through, for the Pope had only consented to
the young man’s ordination on condition that he would
never celebrate the Holy Mysteries unless accompanied by
another priest. This command the Pontiff rescinded soon
afterwards at Father Mastai’s earnest request. He felt
assured that his malady would trouble him no more, and
Pius VII, in reply, said, “I also believe that, my son.”
From that moment, during his long and eventful life,
Giovanni Maria Mastai never suffered from any recurrence
of the attacks which had, to outward seeming, saddened
so many years of his life, but in reality had preserved
and prepared him for his true vocation.
CHAPTER V EARLY LIFE OF FATHER MASTAI
Birth in 1792—A Happy Family—His Youth—Epilepsy—The Church
at the Time of Napoleon—Abduction of Pius to Avignon—Napoleon’s
Downfall—Return of the Pope to Rome—His Reception—Prophecies
Regarding Pius IX—His Journey to Chile—Ocean Trip—Across the
Andes—Failure of Mission—Rounding Cape Horn—English Settlement
on the Cape—“Love-of-the-Soil”—The Falkland Islands.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since the day
when the young priest who was to be the best
loved and the worst hated man in Europe said his first
Mass, and Time’s heavy wings have already blurred his
memory in their flight, to a fading outline for the present
generation. Very few now know anything about his early
years, and in the story of them the finger of God is so
clear that it seems to be worth while to make a brief
record of the steps by which he was prepared for the
burdens and honours of his Pontificate. In reading about
his childhood one seems to be carried back not one, but
many centuries, so sharply does it contrast with the ideals
placed before children in these latter days. It seems to
be a road on which there is no returning, but there can
be no harm in glancing back at it for a moment.
It was on the 13th of May, 1792, that Pius IX was
born, in the Umbrian seaport of Sinigaglia, in the Papal
States. His father, Count Mastai-Ferretti, was the descendant
of a long line of noblemen who had come thither
from Crema in Lombardy towards the end of the Fourteenth
Century. Home-loving but public-spirited men
they had been, and for a long time their fellow-citizens
had confided to them the chief interests of the town, one
of the family always filling the office of Mayor, which
had thereby become practically hereditary, to the advantage
and convenience of all concerned. So Count
Mastai was Mayor of his native city at the time that
his youngest son came to make the eighth in the house
already filled with the laughter and play of three sons
and four daughters. The mother of this large family
was Caterina Solazzo, one of those noble ladies of whom
there were yet so many in Italy when I was a child—a
woman of high education and devout soul, who saw
in her maternal duties the highest honour to which woman
could aspire, and fulfilled them with whole-hearted joy
and ardour. That meant work such as the modern woman,
who thinks she is an example to toilers for the benefit
of the race, would shrink from; the Countess had to rise
very early so that she should be the first to approach
her children’s bedsides when the rising sun woke the
nursery to the frolic and laughter of a new day, and from
that moment till all were tucked up and asleep at night
she never let them out of her sight. The first words
they had ever spoken were the Holy Names, the first
conscious movement of each baby hand had been trained
to make the sign of the Cross.
They were all good and happy children, and the
mother-heart prayed and watched and taught, doubtless
forming noble plans for all, but as the youngest grew
older his sweetness and goodness filled her with the hope
that he might be called to the special service of God.
Even as a tiny child his charity was of the alert, all-embracing
kind that generally spells saintship in the end;
toys, sweets, money—the little boy always found poor
children to bestow them upon and would beg for his
protégés when his own stores were exhausted. Naturally
of a particularly cheerful and sociable disposition—as
indeed he remained all his life—yet he pondered much
on the stories he heard and took things to heart in a way
very unusual for a child of his age. All devout and loyal
subjects of the Papacy were grieving at that time over
the trials inflicted by Napoleon on Pius VII, kept a prisoner
far from his own dominions and subjected to many
insults and privations. The Countess one evening told
her son that he must pray for the Holy Father, thus suffering
at the hands of wicked men. The child was deeply
impressed, he obeyed, and prayed with tears for the
Pope, and then, in his young logic, proposed to pray
for the prompt punishment of his persecutors. Great
was the surprise of the ardent little champion when his
mother pointed out that that would be wrong—he must
pray for their conversion instead!
Giovanni Maria was about ten years old when, romping
about the grounds of his father’s country house, he
fell into a pond and was nearly drowned. At first the
accident seemed to have had only slight effects, but the
malady which showed itself a little later and from which
he suffered so long was, probably with reason, ascribed to
that cause. It was a great sorrow to his father, who was
bent upon his son’s entering the army, a desire which the
boy was ready to satisfy through filial sentiment, but
which went contrary to all his own wishes and to those
of his mother. He was sent to an ecclesiastical school, of
course—no other could be thought of then for a gentleman’s
son—and in spite of bad health worked hard
and attained much distinction. As he grew up—tall,
handsome, and brilliantly intelligent—his father repeatedly
applied for a commission in the Noble Guards for
him, but Prince Barberini, then the chief authority in the
Papal army, sternly refused to grant it, saying that an
officer subject to epileptic attacks would be a danger to
himself and others.[4]
By the time he was seventeen, it was fairly clear to all
that he could never be a soldier, a relief to him and to
his mother, though a terrible disappointment to the old
Count. They had already brought him to Rome, and under
the care of his Uncle Paulinus, a Canon of St. Peter’s,
he worked assiduously at his theological studies, always
hoping and praying that the strange malady which had
kept him out of the army would not, in the end, keep
him out of the Church. Those early years in Rome were
illuminated with the crowning joy of seeing Pius VII
return in triumph to the Throne of St. Peter, an event
which threw the Romans, gentle and simple, into a state
of delirious joy. Pius VI had died in captivity at Valence,
on the 29th of August, 1799; his, successor, Cardinal
Chiaramonti, was elected at Venice (Rome being in the
hands of the French) on the 16th of March, 1800, and
on the 3d of July of the same year the French, having
been expelled from the Papal States by the Neapolitans
and Austrians, the new Pope, who had taken the name of
Pius VII, came back to his own. Everybody believed that
once more “the Church would have peace”; Napoleon,
whose genius realised that there was no governing a nation
of atheists, had restored Religion to her public place,
and was preparing, by the Concordat, to harmonise
Church and State as far as the times would allow. But
the Napoleon whose unerring eye showed him the necessity
of Religion for mankind had counted without the
other Napoleon, whose towering ambition demanded the
sacrifice of all other claims to itself. With his coronation
as Emperor all barriers seemed to break down; the Pope
was to become his submissive vassal or cease to reign.
His demands became more imperious and unreasonable
every day and reached the limit of arrogance when he
decided that the centre of Christendom was to be transferred
to Avignon; France was to enjoy that glory instead
of Italy, and the Pope, no longer an independent
sovereign, was to rule the Church for the advantage and
according to the caprices of the Emperor.
This proposition was first made soon after the election
in Venice, when Napoleon had brought the Pope
to Paris to crown him in Notre Dame. Pius VII replied,
in an outburst of righteous indignation, that rather than
so degrade his office he would resign it, and cause another
election to be carried through; Napoleon could then
do as he pleased with the obscure Benedictine monk who
would be left on his hands!
Surprised at his firmness, the Emperor yielded for the
moment and permitted him to return to Rome, but, amidst
all the rejoicings with which he was greeted, the good
Pope’s heart was heavy. He knew the character of his
adversary too well. On the day of his coronation, at
the foot of the altar, Napoleon had solemnly sworn to
uphold and protect the Church. Immediately afterwards
had come the insulting proposal to transfer the seat of
her government to his own dominions. Who could say
what he would do next?
That question did not long wait for its answer. The
notion of having the Papacy established at Avignon was
too alluring to be renounced. Again and again was it
put forward, each time accompanied by some outrageous
demand. The Pope was informed that he was to close
all the Roman ports to British vessels; that he was to
declare war (!) on Great Britain; that he was to annul
the marriage of Jerome, the Emperor’s brother, with a
Protestant lady in America; and so on. And always Pius
VII replied by his quiet “non possumus”—“we cannot.”
Then the great break came. The Emperor permitted
himself an outburst of temper in which all considerations
of policy and decency were thrown to the winds.
On the 13th of May, 1809, the trembling world was
informed that the States of the Church had become part
of the French Empire. On the 10th of June all the
Pope’s insignia in Rome were torn down and replaced
by the heraldic réchauffé, which now represented the arms
of France; Rome was elevated to the dignity of being
proclaimed “a free French city”!
The outraged Pontiff responded by laying the usurper
and his supporters under the major excommunication,
and then came the crowning atrocity, the one which Napoleon,
a contrite prisoner in St. Helena, called the
beginning of his own downfall.
In the darkness of a soft summer night the Vatican was
surrounded by French troops, and General Radet, sickly
frightened at the task laid upon him, made his way with
a detachment of soldiers to the Pope’s bedroom. The
horrified attendants in the corridors and anterooms were
forcibly silenced, and Pius VII was roused from his sleep
by the sudden entrance of this sinister company. He was
a brave man, and, although it seemed only too probable
that they had come to murder him, he lost neither his
nerve nor his dignity. He asked them what the errand
was which caused them thus to transgress on the rules of
respect. At first the General and his aides stood dumb,
trembling with fear before the helpless old man. At last
Radet found his tongue and delivered his master’s orders.
The Pope was to rise at once and come downstairs, where
a coach was waiting to take him into France. The instructions
were that he was to be taken by force if he
resisted, but so great was the awe inspired by his sacred
person that, even in pronouncing the arrest, Radet could
not bring himself to touch his victim.
There was no question of physical resistance. Gathering
courage from the Pontiff’s calm demeanour, Radet
gave him a few minutes to put on his clothes, and then
hurried him downstairs surrounded by the soldiers. Only
two attendants were allowed to follow him, he was hustled
into the coach; mounted guards closed in on every
side, and the party galloped at full speed out of the Porta
del Popolo, heading for the north. By this time the
people had learnt what was happening, and they came out
in crowds and ran beside the coach, entreating with tears
and sobs that their Father might not be taken away from
them. The Pope blessed them from the carriage window
as he was whirled along; soon all the mourning crowd
was left behind, but at each town that he passed through
in his dominions the same heart-rending scenes were renewed.
His captors dared not pause—some attempt at
a rescue might yet snatch him from their grasp—and
it was only when they reached Grenoble that they stayed
their flight. From there he was transferred to Savona,
where he passed three melancholy years of captivity;
when Napoleon was preparing to start on the Russian
Campaign, he brought the Pope to Fontainebleau for
safer keeping, and there Pius VII remained for nearly
two years more.
The first care of the Allies after the taking of Paris
on the 31st of March, 1814, was to officially reinstate
the Pope in his temporal sovereignty, and secure it from
future molestation, but Pius VII was even then approaching
his own frontier. After Leipsic and the train of disasters
which marked the close of 1813, Napoleon had
informed his prisoner that he was free to go whither
he chose. But it was not until the 25th of January
following that the preparations for his journey were sufficiently
completed for the Pope to leave Fontainebleau,
and then, worn out with suffering of mind and body, he
had to travel by stages of only a few miles at a time
and to rest for long periods on the way. He finally
reached Rome in May of that year, a few weeks after
Napoleon had signed his abdication at Fontainebleau.
Then for Napoleon came Elba,—the hundred days,—the
short triumph, the irrevocable eclipse, and the five
years at St. Helena. “Qui mange du Pape en meurt.”
I used to have among my possessions a number of old
coloured drawings, the original designs for the decorations
put up in Rome for the return of Pius VII. It
was a triumph not decreed by politicians, but a spontaneous
outburst of overwhelming joy. For five years
the entire government of the Church had been suspended;
not once had the Pontiff been allowed to make his
voice heard in her affairs. There is something strangely
sinister in that silence, during which no Bishops were
appointed, and not a single line was added to the ecclesiastical
archives. The fear and depression that weighed
down Catholic hearts was indescribable, and the relief
when the cloud lifted almost too overwhelming to be
borne. The Papal States had suffered much during those
years, and the Pope’s own city worst of all. Business was
at a standstill, more than a third of the population had
migrated elsewhere, preferring exile to the tyranny of
the French rule. Those who remained were frightfully
impoverished by heavy taxation and by the general paralysis
of commerce which Napoleon’s wars and blockades
had brought not only on Italy but on the whole of Europe.
The populations turned out en masse to meet their
sovereign as he travelled home, and as he neared Rome
many nobles who had retired to their estates came to
accompany him on the last stages of his journey. Among
these were Count Mastai-Ferretti and his son, Giovanni
Maria, now eighteen years of age. The event made a
profound impression on the young man. As a child he
had wept and prayed for the Holy Father in his captivity;
through the first years of his youth the thought of Pius
VII, a helpless prisoner, had ever been present to his
mind and many a fervent prayer had gone up for his
sovereign’s and his country’s deliverance. Now it had
come, and to him, not yet illuminated with knowledge of
the future, as well as to all those around him, it seemed
as if all trouble were passed away and the sun that shone
so gloriously on that 24th of May, when the people took
the horses from the Pope’s carriage and themselves
dragged it through the rejoicing streets, were but an earnest
of unbroken peace and happiness to come. Rome
had seen many festivals, but none so spontaneously, madly
joyful as this. From every window floated crimson and
blue silk draperies rich with gold; the thousands of balconies
were wreathed in flowers, and the vast procession
moved along in a rain of roses and lilies and violets showered
from above; music was everywhere, but it was
drowned in the shouts and hosannas of the multitude
that had gone out to meet the traveller with palms in
their hands and now thronged the way before, beside,
behind him. The women were weeping for joy and
audibly thanking God for this great day; a hundred thousand
persons knelt to receive his blessing, and many, many
of them must have remembered how they knelt to receive
it last, as the coach was whirled along the highway in the
summer’s dawn and the weeping supplicants just caught
a glimpse of the pale face and the blessing hand as it
flashed by. Every town in the dominions had raised its
triumphal arches, gathered all its flowers for his progress,
but Rome surpassed them and all the records of herself
that day. The “Te Deum” was sung in all the
Churches as it had never been sung before, Rome’s thousand
bells rang as if they would never cease; and when
darkness fell, St. Peter’s gathered the stars to itself,
and the magic dome, a hive of breathing gold, glowed
through the night, a beacon of joy to the dwellers in
a hundred mountain towns of Sabina and Latium and all
the country round.
Thirty-two years were to elapse before the youth kneeling
beside his father to receive the Pope’s blessing on
that day would himself ascend the Papal Throne, but,
strange to say, Pius VII himself had already foreseen the
event. Pius IX had been reigning for some years when,
through the merest accident, the written prophecy was
discovered. Pius VII, while a prisoner at Fontainebleau,
one day handed to his bodyservant a sealed packet, saying
that it was not to be opened until 1846. The man
religiously regarded the prohibition and put the packet
away carefully. Before his own death he gave it to his
son, repeating the Pope’s instructions. Eighteen forty-six
was still far off, and the son laid the thing aside and
had forgotten all about it when the year in question came
round. Having occasion, however, to look through a
number of old papers, he came across this, and broke the
seal. Inside, in Pius VII’s handwriting, were these words:
“The prelate who fills the office of Bishop of Imola in
1846 will be elected Pope and will take the name of
Pius IX.”
Another prophecy, that of the venerable servant of
God, Anna Maria Taigi, uttered in 1823, is very full and
clear. After describing minutely the revolution of 1848
and all the sufferings that Rome and its ruler would undergo
at that time, she added, “The Pope whose destiny
this is, is now a simple priest and far beyond the sea.”
After minutely describing the personal appearance of
Pius IX, she continued: “He will be elected in a very unusual
way and contrary to his own and general expectation.
He will inaugurate many wise reforms, which, if
gratefully and wisely accepted by the people, will bring
great blessings upon them. His name will be honoured
throughout the world.” She spoke much of the great
trials that he was to undergo in defence of the Church,
and of the special assistance Heaven would give him to
sustain them, and also of the gift of miracles which
would be bestowed on him during the latter years of
his life. All that came to pass precisely as the Saint foretold,
and the present generation seems to be seeing the
beginning of the fulfilment of her closing prophecy: “At
last, after many and varied trials and humiliations, the
Church shall achieve, before the eyes of the world, such
a glorious triumph that men will be struck silent with awe
and admiration.”
The famous prophecy of St. Malachy, the Archbishop
of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in the arms of his
friend, St. Bernard, in 1148, designated the title of Pius
IX as “Crux de Cruce”—“Cross of a Cross”—and
certainly that prediction, supposed to refer to the Cross
of Savoy, was fulfilled!
Anna Maria Taigi’s mention of a “simple priest then
beyond the sea” refers to the mission to Chile, undertaken
by Pius IX when he was as yet only Father Mastai,
the director of Tata Giovanni’s orphanage. It is an
episode of his history so generally forgotten that it seems
worth while to recall it briefly to the minds of Catholic
readers. The Republic of Chile was just five years old—it
concluded its victorious struggle with Spain for independence
in 1818—when the government sent a respected
prelate, Canon Cienfuegos, to Rome to ask Pius
VII to reorganise ecclesiastical matters in Chile, where
everything had been left in a very unsatisfactory condition
after the separation from the Mother Country.
Pius VII gladly complied with the request. The mission
would require delicate handling and he singled out a
diplomatist prelate, Monsignor Muzi, then Auditor of
the Nunciatura at Vienna, for its accomplishment. In
order that his rank should be consonant with its dignity,
Monsignor Muzi was made Archbishop of Philippi, and
then appointed Vicar Apostolic of Chile. He asked that
Father Mastai might accompany him as Auditor, a post
corresponding to that of “Conseiller d’Ambassade” in
a secular embassy; and another well-known ecclesiastic,
Father Sallusti, was named as the secretary.
Long years afterwards, one of the “boys” described
the last evening of Father Mastai at the Asilo. He had
as yet said nothing to them of his approaching departure,
but at supper they noticed that he seemed very sad.
When the meal was over and they were about to leave
the table, he motioned to them to sit down again, as he
had something to say to them. Then he told them that
the next day he must leave them, to travel far away on
the business of the Church. There were a hundred and
twenty boys, big and little, in the hall, and there broke
from them one simultaneous cry of grief. Sobbing and
wailing, they threw themselves upon him, the little ones
climbing up into his arms and clinging to his knees, others
catching at his garments as if to hold him back by
force, and those who could not reach him through the
press lifting up their voices in supplication that the “Caro
Padre” would not leave them. The Father wept, too,
as he caressed and embraced the “piccolini,” and, when
at last he tore himself away and shut himself up in his
room, a number of the older boys broke in and insisted
on staying with him all night. The dear patient man did
not resent thus being robbed of his rest; he let them have
their way, and talked to them long and earnestly of their
present duties and their future lives. He would return
some day, and how eagerly he would enquire for every
one by name, how rejoiced he would be at a good report,
how immeasurably grieved at a bad one.
With the dawn he had to leave them, and, as the narrator
said, “We were orphans more than ever before.”
Great as was the grief of “Tata Giovanni’s” boys
on losing their beloved Director, it did not equal the
despair and indignation of Countess Mastai when she
learnt that her son had been picked out for a journey
which was full of perils and hardships so late as twenty
years ago, and in those early days was veritably appalling.
To the ardent young priest, this fact had only added
to the readiness he felt in carrying out the Pope’s wishes;
he asked nothing better than to suffer in such a cause, but
his mother, without saying anything to him, flew to Cardinal
Consalvi, then Secretary of State, and implored that
the appointment might be cancelled. Pius VII, however,
refused to yield to her entreaties, and, when Father
Mastai came to receive his final blessing before departing,
he told him of the Countess’s request and added, “I assured
her that you would return safe and sound.”
The embassy was to embark at Genoa, and it was there,
while waiting for the final preparations to be made, that
its members received the sad news of the death of Pius
VII. This caused delay, and it was only after the election
of Leo XII and his confirmation of Archbishop
Muzi’s powers that the mission finally sailed from Genoa,
on the 5th of October, 1823. Ninety years ago! The
world has shrunk since then; the voyage that I made in
1885 in three weeks took Monsignor Muzi and his companions
three months to accomplish. The “good barque
Eloïse,” manned by “thirty experienced seamen,” had
been chartered for the expedition, but one’s heart aches
to think of what those three good ecclesiastics must have
suffered in one way and another on board of her. Very
few Italians of their class are good sailors and all the
horrors of seasickness were certainly theirs, combined with
the unsavoury and unwholesome food that was all people
had to depend upon during sea-journeys before the discovery
of steam and cold storage. Storm after storm
broke over the little vessel; she was nearly wrecked off
Teneriffe; one dreadful night, the 5th of November, she
was waylaid by pirates, who overhauled her from stem
to stern seeking for plunder, and only abandoned her—in
furious disgust—when Father Mastai had shown them
that there was not a single article of value on board.
Then came a sad encounter with a Brazilian slave trader,
packed with unfortunate negroes, a sight most grievous
and terrible to the kind-hearted priests; and then, after
two long months’ sailing, a fearful storm which lasted
eight days, during which the Eloïse was so beaten about
that no one hoped to escape alive. It was all a searching
dispensation for quiet, stay-at-home Italian gentlemen
who had followed their pious way hitherto along the
most familiar lines!
They reached Monte-Video on New Year’s Day, 1824,
stopped a few days for repairs, and made Buenos Ayres
soon after, their joy at finding themselves on terra firma
much tempered by the extremely rude reception accorded
to them by the civil authorities. But Buenos Ayres was
merely the starting-point for the most difficult part of
the journey, the crossing of the Andes. Had the good
Countess Mastai-Ferretti had the slightest idea of what
her cherished son was to encounter there, I believe she
would have died of anxiety before his return! I only
met one or two Europeans, when I was in Chile, who had
accomplished the feat, and they told me that nothing
would induce them to attempt it again. I have described
some of the terrors of the passes in former works,[5] and
will not enlarge upon them here. Suffice it to say that
for two whole months Monsignor Muzi and Fathers
Sallusti and Mastai rode through those appalling solitudes,
over the bridle-paths cut in the face of the rock
that towers thousands of feet above and sinks sheer down
thousands of feet below, paths where one false step means
death, and so narrow in some places that, if two parties
meet, it is usual for them—if they are not the fighting
sort—to decide on the spin of a coin which shall dismount,
pitch its mules over the precipice, and crawl past
the winners as best they can—to continue the journey
on foot!
The resting-places are even now the haunts of outlaws
and robbers. The members of the Roman Embassy of
1824 only escaped being murdered en masse, because,
through some unforeseen occurrence, they changed the
time of their departure from a hamlet called Desmochadas.
Had they waited till the hour first fixed upon, they
would have shared the fate of a party of merchants who,
on that day, were massacred, to a man, by a band of robbers.
It was Father Mastai who discovered—and
stayed behind to take care of—a sick English officer,
named Miller, forsaken in a wayside inn; and it was Father
Mastai, the others said, who had during the whole
journey sustained their courage by his unfailing fun and
good-humour. It seems to me that this is not the least
glorious note in all his wonderful record, and because
few, even of those who most loved and venerated him
in his later years, have ever heard of it I have written
it here. The whole thing, somehow, is so absolutely
Pius IX!
Very sore and weary, the travellers reached Santiago
on the 17th of March, only to encounter every kind of
obstacle and annoyance in the attempt to carry out the
object of their mission. The government had changed,
and the party in power had no desire to come to an
understanding with the Holy See. The people, indeed,
received the envoys most enthusiastically, but Chile in
1824 was apparently much what I found it in 1885—a
country of ardent believers ruled by atheists. Let some
expert explain the problem, I cannot! For seven months
Monsignor Muzi remained in Santiago, perseveringly
trying to clear matters up and reach some modus vivendi
between Church and State. But his efforts were nullified
by the hostility of the President and his supporters, and
at last he had to acknowledge his defeat and withdraw
from the conflict.
The Eloïse meanwhile had successfully rounded Cape
Horn and reached Valparaiso, and on the 19th of October
the Archbishop and his party embarked once more
on the gallant little vessel and started for home. Of
course no sailing vessel can pass through the twisting
narrows and rocks of the Straits of Magellan, so for
three weeks—surely the most miserable of their lives—those
poor priests, children of Italy and the sun, shivered
in the awful cold of those frozen regions, where
the sea is the colour of cold steel, and the sailors, as they
have often told me, come down from the deck at night
with their garments frozen stiff, and have to work their
way into them, still frozen stiff as boards, in the morning.
My own travelling in that part of the world did
not include the rounding of Cape Horn, but even the
passage of the Straits, in a big liner, with the water
smooth as glass, was such a freezingly wretched experience
that, having made it once, the prospect of its repetition
took something away from my eagerness to go
home. But outside the Horn, with the Antarctic Ocean,
unbroken from the South Pole, flinging its icy rollers
against a little sailing vessel that took three weeks to
beat up on the other side—that, the skippers have told
me, furnishes merchant seamen with their best nightmares
to their dying day! Most of the coal supply for the
West Coast is carried by this route, and by the time it
has reached the Horn the coal, loaded under the damp
English skies, has ignited and the remainder of the trip
is made with hatches battened down and the pleasing
knowledge that a puff of air finding its way into the hold
will send the whole mass into a blaze!
Yet, there is a little English colony that lives and
flourishes in these cold seas some two hundred and fifty
miles to the east of the Horn, and we, in England, wear
its wool and eat its mutton quite habitually. I never
could learn my geography properly until I began to travel
round the world. From that time maps became a special
recreation of mine, and I had, when travelling through
the Straits of Magellan, thought with both curiosity
and pity of the handful of islands so much more exposed
than even we were in those comfortless days. I was
told the place was a purgatory—that it was just possible
to carry on life, and that no one stayed there who
could help it. Some time afterwards, when we were established
in Santiago, a card was brought up and I gazed
at it for a moment in some bewilderment—“The Governor
of the Falkland Islands!” Then it was true! Our
indomitable fellow-countrymen had really added another
mesh to the net of Empire which Great Britain has cast
over the world. My reflections were interrupted by the
entrance of a big, handsome man, who looked as if he
had just come out of Yorkshire. His clear blue eyes,
ruddy cheeks, and joyful bearing belied the sad tales I
had heard, and when, in the course of conversation, I
asked some timid questions about his frozen place of
exile, he laughed in a way that was good to hear.
Frozen? Exile? Why, he would not live anywhere else
for the world! A grand climate, pleasant society, and
better pasturage for sheep than could be found anywhere
else! “Pasturage!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean to
say that anything will grow in that latitude?” “Grow?
I should think so!” he replied. “We get the back wash
of the Gulf Stream down there, and our sheep can graze
all winter in the open. Why, I have three trees, real
trees, on Stanley Island! I wish you and Mr. Fraser
would come and pay me a visit there. My wife and
daughters would be so delighted to see you.” Then, turning
to my husband, he continued: “Our flocks are getting too
big for their feeding grounds, so I have come to ask the
Chilean Government to rent us five hundred thousand
acres in Patagonia for a supplementary run. The pasturage
is not as good as that in the Falklands, but it will
be better than nothing.”
Of course we instantly invited our visitor to dine. An
English face was always a joy to look at where one saw
so few, and this man brought the very atmosphere of the
North Country with him. He told us many interesting
details about his little domain, the management of which
he took very seriously and evidently accomplished with
much success. “Of course I could do more,” he said
regretfully, “if it were not for the blind hostility of
the Opposition.” “Does it reach so far?” I asked politely.
“I should have thought there was quite enough
to keep it busy at home.”
“Oh, I don’t mean the little crowd at Westminster,”
he replied indignantly. “Please understand, Mrs. Fraser,
that I have an opposition of my own!”
“I do congratulate you,” I said; “that is certainly a
triumph! What Britisher could ask more?”
There is a little plant of which every Englishman carries
the seeds about with him. It is called Love-of-the-soil.
Give him a bit of land anywhere—the best or the
worst, a vast fertile tract or a few miles of desert island;
tell him it is his very own to do as he likes with, and,
before you can turn round, every grain of its dust is
sprouting with Love-of-the-soil. He sees, knows, loves
only that spot. He will fight for it, work for it, cheat
for it if need be, perhaps even slay; for to him it has
taken on the sacred character of the mother country, it
is his piece of England and woe to any one who tries to
take it away from him! That is why English colonies
succeed. And it is the lack of this passion for the land
which makes bad colonists of men of other nationalities.
The Americans are simply brutal about their possessions.
Out here in the Northwest one is horrified at the general
callousness. I have watched people making what we
should call a home, breaking new land, building a charming
house, working hard to make everything within and
without as perfect as they know how. A cloud of dust
shows up on the road, a motor-car full of “land grabbers”
kicks and coughs and stinks at the gate; the next
minute the hard-eyed hucksters are being shown into all
the sacred arena of airy rooms, and flowering garden,
are fingering, valuing, depreciating; there follows an hour
or two of hard bargaining, and then your neighbour’s wife
flies across lots to tell you, with shining eyes, “We’ve sold
the place!” “Sold the place?” I cry. “Why, I thought
it was to be your home!” “What does that matter?”
she retorts, huffed, “I got my price! We can easily build
another house that we shall like just as much.”
I suppose it is a form of the disease now diagnosed as
Americanitis, the feverish restlessness that would rather
“trek” anywhere than stay put for more than a year
or two. But is a terrible disqualification for building a
State. Since I have seen it at close quarters, I have often
thought of the contrast presented by that handful of
North Country shepherds and their descendants, in the
Falklands,[6] so proud of doing their best with the best
they could get, pleased with their drizzly climate (it
rains two hundred and fifty days in the year), because it
is so English, proud of their thriving little country, sending
out their pelts and mutton by the once-a-month
steamer, actually growing their pelargoniums and fuchsias
in the open air, and so furiously interested in their miniature
politics that the Government and the Opposition are
ready to knock each other forty ways from Sunday every
time they meet! Good luck and long life to you, my
incorrigible brothers! The secret of success is certainly
yours, and it all comes from the little plant called Love-of-the-soil.
CHAPTER VI POPE PIUS IX
Director of Ospizio di San Michele—A Splendid Record—Archbishop of
Spoleto—A Turbulent Populace—Order Restored—Revolution in
Europe—Spoleto Saved—The Earthquake in Umbria—New Post at
Imola—Secret Societies—A Cardinal—Attack upon the Three Prelates—The
Cardinal’s Bravery—How the Saints Forgive—Pope Pius IX—His
Charity and Justice—Defenders of the Poor—Anecdotes of the
Cardinal’s Generosity.
After his return from Chile, Father Giovanni Maria
Mastai was appointed Director of the Ospizio
di San Michele, a position which could not be called a
great advancement in the eyes of the world, but which
carried with it a most weighty burden of responsibility.
Some idea of this charge can be grasped when we explain
that the so-called “Hospital” embraced six separate
large establishments: namely, an orphanage for
boys, another for girls, both containing complete schools
for general education as well as for the learning of
trades and arts; a home for the aged poor, a “protectory”
for unruly boys, a reformatory for fallen women—and
a prison for political offenders. The endowments
of the Ospizio, together with its earnings, rendered an
income of fifty thousand dollars a year, then considered
an ample sum for providing for the wants of some thousands
of persons. It will readily be understood that this
left little or nothing over for salaries to those in charge,
but, fortunately, in those days these were not needed, as
all the employés, except a few servants, were priests and
religious, who gave their services for nothing except food
and shelter.
In his own financial affairs, Father Mastai was the
worst manager possible; he never kept any money longer
than was needed to give it away; but where other funds
were concerned he made no mistakes, and his administration
was as wise and careful as possible. His friends
and family seem to have been a little surprised when his
labours and trials during the South American mission
received no more public recognition than this appointment
to a burdensome task, but he himself was delighted.
He had looked back to the years spent with “Tata Giovanni’s”
boys with homesick regret; the work at San
Michele was of the same kind on a much larger scale,
more orphans to train, more poor to cherish, more sinners
to help and save, and his generous heart was fully
satisfied. The Holy Father, Leo XII, watched the new
Director closely during the two years he left him in
charge. At the end of that short time the improvement
in all the different departments of the Ospizio was fully
evident, and its self-supporting funds had increased, in
spite of the innovation introduced by the new Director,
who ordained that a fair share of the inmates’ earnings
should be set aside for their own after use and benefit.
Leo XII was now satisfied that he had not been mistaken
in his judgment of Father Mastai’s abilities and
virtues, so, without any intermediate promotion, on the
21st of May, 1827, he appointed him Archbishop of
Spoleto, the Pope’s own native town. Great was the
grief of the vast family at San Michele on learning the
news, for whether as simple priest, powerful prelate, or
Supreme Pontiff, Pius IX was always enthusiastically
loved by all who approached him.
Spoleto, as we know it to-day—but how can I describe
it? One magic pen has pictured the Umbrian cities
with such divine felicity that the rest of us must be for
ever mute. Read what Edward Hutton says about
Spoleto—“a beautiful city of rose colour set on a high
hill.”—“Spoleto, like a tall and sweet maiden,—kneeling
at the head of her long valley under the soft sky.” Read
all that that pure-souled genius has written about Umbria
and Tuscany, and you will know whatever your mind
can grasp of that which the poet and the mystic and the
artist feel in that immortal region; my business is not
with them, but with the “anima latina” of a holy, hard-working
prelate sent in troublous times to govern a turbulent
populace already inoculated with the fever of revolution,
and preserving, in its murderous hatreds, the best
traditions of the late Middle Ages.
This was what the new Archbishop saw before him as,
with his two brothers, he approached Spoleto towards
the end of June, 1827: “A violent party feud raging
between two factions, finding its way into families, separating
father from son, brother from brother, sister from
sister. Even the clergy had allowed themselves to be
drawn into the unhappy conflict, and, as a natural consequence,
the interests of religion were suffering lamentably.”[7]
So the new Archbishop had no light task before
him. I fancy, however, that his was a nature which was
happiest in strenuous effort. There are people, even in
the modern world, who seem out of place unless they
are leading a forlorn hope. We had a friend long years
ago, the Marquis de Bâcourt, a delightful French
diplomatist, with whom, after the vagrant manner of
diplomatists, we foregathered in various parts of the
world before meeting him again in Chile, which certainly
just then was not a bed of roses for foreign representatives.
I was bewailing our own luck and commiserating
his, when he interrupted me by exclaiming: “Oh, but I
am really enjoying myself! I love difficult and disagreeable
affairs!”
Of these we know that Monsignor Mastai found many
to adjust in his new charge, and that he was signally successful
in smoothing them out. Within two years faction
had died in the pretty Umbrian city on the hill, enemies
were reconciled, order restored, and the clergy aroused
to new zeal and regularity under his wise, strict rule.
At the end of those two years he held the people’s hearts
in his hands, and well it was for them that he did, for thus
he was enabled to save the town and its inhabitants from
the terrible danger which suddenly threatened to overwhelm
Spoleto in 1830. Leo XII had died on the 10th
of February of the preceding year, and had been succeeded
by Pius VIII, whose beneficent reign was ended
all too soon by death on the eve of All Saints’, 1830.
The gentle old man had, during his short Pontificate,
attacked and handled with vigour and wisdom some of
the most important questions of the day, notably in his
regulations for mixed marriages and in his stern condemnation
of the secret societies; these had, during the last
momentous year of his life, produced the harvest of revolution
which convulsed Europe more or less from Warsaw
to Rome; yet worse was to come, but Pius VIII was
spared the trial of witnessing it. That was reserved for
his successor, Gregory XVI, sturdy, imperturbable, broad-shouldered,
bringing with him the breezes of the Julian
Alps and the hard good sense of the Venetian from the
mountains and the sea. He needed it all, for, as I have
said elsewhere, the storm that had muttered so long broke
loose even before his election; the henchmen of anarchy,
who had long been secretly busy in the Papal States,
started a revolution in Rome itself in February, 1830;
this was promptly quelled, but the trouble in the more
northerly provinces was very serious and the Pope had
to appeal to Austria to subdue it.
Spoleto had by no means escaped the general infection,
but the Archbishop had, by constant watchfulness and
his great personal influence, succeeded in preventing any
open outbreak of the revolutionary spirit which lurked
there; what was his horror and that of the citizens when
it became known that a body of four thousand insurgents,
retreating before the Austrians, were approaching
the town with the intention of holding it against their
pursuers! The place was in a panic—the inhabitants
already saw themselves trampled down and massacred in
the bloody conflict that would take place—saw the stern
punishment that the Austrians would inflict upon them
for harbouring the desperate revolutionaries. It was in
this emergency that Giovanni Maria Mastai showed the
coolness of a statesman and the courage of a soldier.
At the risk of his life he drove at full speed to the Austrian
headquarters and insisted on interviewing the Commander.
To the surprised General he explained that the
armed insurgents who were demanding Spoleto’s hospitality
at the point of the bayonet were strangers to her,
that she was in no way responsible for them and that
she disclaimed all part in their designs. This point being
made clear, he undertook to bring the rebels to submission,
single-handed, if the General would promise not to
let his own men enter Spoleto. The promise was, naturally,
most readily given, the irritated commander being
only too glad to relinquish an unpleasant job. And then
the Archbishop, getting into his carriage again, rushed
off to intercept the revolutionaries in their march on the
town.
To them he spoke only in words of tenderest pity.
He said he knew that they had been misled and deceived
by wicked men, that their hearts were not in this conflict,
but really loyal to their sovereign, the Pope; he told
them that he could sympathise with their present situation,
brought about by despair at finding themselves far
from their houses, without means of returning, and threatened
with the reprisals of the Austrians. He showed
them the hopelessness of the struggle into which they
had been drawn, and promised them, if they would lay
down their arms, not only a free pardon, but the means
of returning to their homes. His fatherly kindness carried
all before it. Touched and grateful, they surrendered
their funny old muskets and cannon; the Archbishop went
to his palace, scraped together all the money he had or
could borrow on his own credit, and came back with
twenty thousand francs which he distributed amongst
them according to their needs, and had the joy of seeing
them all depart, pacified and sober, for their respective
provinces.
History does not say that the people of Spoleto suggested
any refunding of that big sum of money, but they
showed their gratitude and delight in very enthusiastic
ways, illuminating the city, having processions and fireworks
in honour of him who had obtained its deliverance,
and cheering to the skies whenever he showed himself,
all of which was doubtless most gratifying to their
kind Pastor’s heart; but he was almost too busy to think
much about such things at that moment, having been
charged by the Secretary of State with the conduct of
all civil matters in Umbria, the proper authorities—to a
man—having fled at the approach of the Austrians.
Talking of those penniless rebels, I ought to say that
there was one among them whom the Archbishop did not
send home, because the man had no home to go to. So
he brought him into his own house, kept him there in
safety and comfort, and, regardless of what was sure to
be said in Rome about his interceding for such a character,
sent to beg the Pope to give him a passport which
would take him across the frontier. The passport was
granted, and the next time any communication passed between
the charitable host and his quondam pensioner the
former had become Pius IX and the latter Napoleon III,
Emperor of the French.
In 1832 the whole province of Umbria was desolated
by a destructive earthquake, in which a great number of
lives were lost and many thousands of persons rendered
homeless. Spoleto suffered severely and once more the
good Archbishop was the comfort and mainstay of his
people. He seemed to be everywhere at once and called
up doctors, nurses, and provisions with miraculous celerity,
finding money somehow for all the dreadful needs
and sending aid of every kind to the more distant places
where he could not go himself. Other pastors were doing
all they could for their own flocks, but Monsignor
Mastai’s zeal and charity were so conspicuous as to draw
down the special and enthusiastic commendation of Gregory
XVI, who immediately promoted him to the Archbishopric
of Imola, a far more important See than that
of Spoleto. Naturally the Spoleto people were frantic
at the idea of losing him and sent a deputation of their
most notable citizens to Rome to beg the Pope to change
his mind. But they failed in their object, and at the
appointed time their Archbishop received their last farewells—a
tumult of tears and blessings—and set out
for his new post, stopping on the road at Loreto to ask
for Heaven’s assistance, as he had asked for it in his
early youth, when his malady appeared to be barring his
way to the priesthood.
He found even more to do at Imola than he had at
Spoleto in the matters of reorganisation and reform, and
he threw himself into the work with all the ardour of
his brave energetic soul, encountering many trials, but
coming victoriously through them all. Of course he made
bitter enemies, for his boundless charity to the poor broke
out in a blaze of indignation whenever he found that they
were being oppressed or defrauded. In such cases instant
retribution overtook the offender, and no amount of apparent
contrition could ever obtain office for him again
if it depended on the decision of the Archbishop.
The secret societies, following their usual programme,
had decided to “remove” Monsignor Mastai without
delay. He was sitting in his study one morning when his
faithful old servant, Baladelli, who had accompanied him
everywhere, entered to say that a lady, who seemed in
a great hurry, begged him to grant her a few minutes’
“conversation.”
“Ask her to wait a little,” said the Archbishop, as
he rose and went into his private chapel. Some time
passed and the servant came and found his master on his
knees.
“Monsignor, will you not speak to that lady now?”
he asked.
“Tell her to wait a little longer,” was the reply.
The man retreated, to return more than once; Monsignor,
still on his knees, always gave the same message,
and at last Baladelli, after the manner of old servants,
lost his temper and exclaimed: “For goodness’ sake, come
and speak with that poor woman! She has been waiting
for hours.”
Then the Archbishop looked around at him and said,
very quietly, “I speak with the living, not with the dead.”
The frightened domestic rushed into the anteroom
where the petitioner had been left, and beheld a tumbled
heap on the floor. Calling his fellow-servants to help
him, he raised it up. The heavy veil had slipped from the
face. The “lady” was a man, with a great sharp knife
concealed in his feminine garments. He was stone dead.
Monsignor Mastai was made a Cardinal (with the
titular of the Church of St. Peter[8] and Marcellinus) on
the 14th of December, 1840, to the great happiness of
his mother, a widow since 1833. During her lifetime
he made a point of going once or more every year to visit
her at Sinigaglia in the old house where his childhood had
been passed. He frequently was obliged to come to Rome
on business, and so long as he was Archbishop of Spoleto,
he lodged at the orphanage of Tata Giovanni on these
occasions. That was no longer possible after he had
been promoted to the more important See of Imola, as
he was then expected to travel with a larger suite, for
whom the Orphanage did not provide fitting quarters.
He resented the expense of these more ostentatious journeys,
complaining that the money they cost would have
been better spent among his poor at Imola, but he had no
choice in the matter and had to submit to custom and
tradition.
A very unpleasant adventure marked the third year
of his cardinalate. In the heat of the summer he and
two of his colleagues in the Sacred College arranged to
take a few weeks of rest in a small and lonely villa in
a remote part of the country. They knew, of course,
that the revolutionary agents were abroad and at work,
but it had not occurred to any of the trio that their own
illustrious persons might be designated as worthy objects
of attack. But a certain Riotti, a Piedmontese, deep-dyed
in conspiracy, conceived the brilliant idea of kidnapping
the three prelates and holding them as hostages, to be
ransomed at the price of his own immunity should his
treasonable designs be discovered. So, in the dead of
night this hero, with six of his fellow-conspirators, broke
into the villa, and the unfortunate prelates were roused
from their sleep to find themselves confronted with a band
of desperate men armed to the teeth. The two other
Cardinals were not fighters, but Giovanni Maria Mastai
was. What weapons he used I know not—he had none
at hand except his high courage and biting tongue, but
the outcome was that the ruffians fled from his presence
and were heard of no more. His companions said that
it was entirely owing to his bravery that the whole party
was saved.
One spring day at Imola, while the Carnival was roaring
through the streets, the Archbishop was down on his
knees in the Church praying for his people that they
might not sin in their mirth. Alas! even his fervent
prayers could not altogether avert that calamity! A sudden
tumult of cries and footsteps came from the sacristy
and he rushed thither to almost fall over a young man,
who lay gasping in his blood on the pavement. At the
same moment his pursuers broke in after him, three men
with knives in their hands, furiously intent on finishing
their victim. The Cardinal instantly placed himself before
him and, holding up the gold cross which he wore
on his breast, forbade them to come a step nearer. In
a torrent of burning eloquence he reproached them with
their atrocious cruelty and sacrilege of which they had
been guilty, and ordered them to quit the Church. They
stood for a moment cowed and broken, then they fled,
and he turned to the poor boy on the ground. Very tenderly
he knelt down beside him, and soothed and comforted
him, pillowing his bleeding neck on his arm, while
the attendants who had arrived on the scene ran for
a physician. The latter came promptly, but said that the
wound was mortal—there was nothing to be done.
Then, still kneeling on the ground and holding the poor
dying boy in his arms, the Cardinal helped him to make
his confession, called one of the priests of the Church
to administer the last Sacraments, and knelt there till the
young soul passed away, comforted and at peace.
Where injuries or insults were offered to himself, Cardinal
Mastai forgave as only the Saints can forgive. The
chief magistrate of Imola, a hard and cruel man, had
conceived the most bitter hatred of him for his gentle
methods and broad, progressive views, and expressed his
hostility with much violence. The Mayor’s wife, a good
devout woman, was much distressed at his attitude, and
sought by every means in her power to heal the one-sided
feud. A child was born to her, and she secretly begged
the Cardinal to volunteer to be its godfather—she was
sure her husband’s heart would be softened at such an evidence
of condescension and good-will! Nothing loath,
the good Cardinal approached the Mayor, personally,
and with much gentleness and humility asked if he would
permit him to stand sponsor for the baby. Whereupon
the Mayor flew into a passion and exclaimed: “You!
You presume to suggest such a thing! You, who are a
friend of malcontents and rebels! No, indeed! You are
too liberal for me!” Then he turned his back on his
Archbishop and left him—a suppliant refused!
The Archbishop accepted both the insult and the
calumny without a word of protest. A month later he
changed his name and assumed that of Pius IX. Learning
that his old enemy was in Rome with his family at
the time, he sent him word that, although he had refused
to allow the Archbishop of Imola to stand godfather to
his child, he might not feel the same objection to the
Pope, who, if the infant were not yet baptised, would
be glad to be its sponsor. En passant one is struck with
wonder that, amid all the preoccupation and inevitable
excitement of that great change in his life, Pius IX should
have found time to think of the man at all. Naturally,
he had conquered, and his old enemy could scarcely express
his gratitude at receiving such an honour. Even
then the Pope remembered him again, and very soon afterwards
seized an opportunity of conferring on him a
great material benefit. That is how the Saints forgive!
Naturally he had conquered, and the favour was received
with almost unbelieving joy.
Oh, they were a good family, those Mastai-Ferrettis.
After the accession of Pius IX, his brother, Cardinal
Ferretti, a most wise and saintly man, acted as his Prime
Minister for a time, before the revolution. His memory
was greatly venerated in Rieti, of which place he was
Cardinal Bishop. A terrible thing happened while he
was there. One of the Churches was broken into at night,
the Tabernacle violated, and the pyx containing the
Blessed Sacrament stolen. On learning of this frightful
sacrilege the next morning, the Cardinal called all his
clergy together, and he and they, with bare feet and ropes
round their necks, went in procession to the public square.
The entire population gathered round them, and then the
Cardinal, standing bareheaded and barefooted under the
noonday sun, preached a sermon, taking for his text the
cry of Mary Magdalene on Easter morning: “They have
taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have
laid Him.”
When the sermon ended the people were kneeling on
the stones, sobbing like children. That night the door
of the Church was left open, and the pyx was restored;
its sacred contents were intact.
Pius IX early let his family know that they were to
expect neither wealth nor promotion from his hands.
One ambitious relation asked him for a title. “You
have not the income to maintain it, my dear fellow,” the
Pope replied, “and I shall not provide you with one.
Stay as you are.” Another, a young nephew, was idling
about Rome, giving himself no end of airs because his
uncle was on the throne. His uncle sent him back to
Sinigaglia to learn sense in obscurity. Yet the poorest
and meanest could always obtain aid and sympathy from
Pius IX. I remember seeing the people push forward
their written petitions as he used to drive through the
city or walk in the environs. The queer, often dirty,
scraps of paper were received by one of the Cardinals
or the chamberlain who accompanied the Pope on these
occasions, and every one was examined, the circumstances
verified, and genuine cases relieved within twenty-four
hours. Only one class dreaded the approach of the Holy
Father—neglectful or fraudulent officials. He relied
on no reports of public or private institutions, but descended
on them at all hours of the day or night, in person
and without giving the slightest warning, to see for himself
how things were being managed. Like Haroun-al-Raschid
he would slip out alone, dressed as a layman,
and dive unrecognised into hospitals, schools, and prisons,
only revealing his rank when he could not obtain
admittance otherwise; and where he found anything out
of order, correction, and in serious cases heavy retribution,
instantly followed. One night, dressed as a private
gentleman, he was thus going through the wards of the
great Hospital of Santo Spirito, where, as in most of
the Roman hospitals, charitable visitors were always free
to come and cheer or tend the sick. That night a poor
French artist was dying, and he called for a priest. The
attendants looked everywhere for the Almoner or Chaplain
of the Institution, but he was not to be found. The
Pope said, “I will take his place,” and to him the dying
man made his confession, from him received the last
Sacraments, and passed away, comforted and in peace.
The next morning the Almoner was dismissed.
One day the Holy Father, walking in the Quirinal
Gardens, passed a sentry on duty. The man silently held
out a loaf of bread for his inspection. Pius IX took it,
examined it, and asked one question, “Do you always get
bread as bad as this?” “Always, Santo Padre,” was the
reply. A sudden descent on the Commissariat department
showed that he had spoken the truth. When the sun rose
again the cheating commissary was repenting of his sins
in prison. There is a beautifully practical side to autocratic
government!
Justice had nothing to blush for in the Rome of those
days, and the poor could obtain it as promptly and easily
as the rich. There were three separate institutions devoted
entirely to the legal defence and protection of persons
who could not pay for the services of a lawyer. One
was the Arch-Confraternity of St. Ives, thus named after
the Saint still so dear to the people of Brittany, the lawyer
who was a priest and who devoted all his talents to
the defence and protection of the poor. But long before
his time (he died on the 19th of May, 1303) St. Gregory
had instituted in Rome seven official defenders of the
poor, one for each Region of the city. They were called
“defensori”; some eight hundred years later their official
descendants, the College of Procurators, took the
title of “the Rights of the Poor,” and there was also
a civil office established by Urban VIII, of which the
holder, who had to be a noble and a layman, took the
title of “Advocate of the Poor,” exercising his powers
in cases that came outside any ecclesiastical administration.
The Congregation of St. Ives remained the great
standby of the lower classes down to my own time. It
was partly a religious sodality, comprising both prelates
and lawyers, who met every Sunday for pious exercises,
which were followed by a careful examination of such
appeals as had been laid before them during the week.
They took up all just and genuine claims and defended
them at their own expense. Besides looking after the
rights of their humble fellow-countrymen, they undertook
the cases of all poor strangers who got into trouble in
the city.
There was a third body, the Arch-Confraternity of
San Girolamo, that devoted itself to the defence and aid
of prisoners and, more especially, of poor widows. The
gentlemen composing it—and they were the flower of
the aristocracy, ecclesiastical and social—made it their
business to assist impecunious prisoners in every possible
way, paying their fines, if such had been imposed on them,
and arranging matters with their creditors if they had
been imprisoned for debt. The members had free access
to all the prisons and they took their duties very seriously,
some of their number examining the food every day of
the year, and enquiring into all matters connected with
the treatment of the prisoners. Indeed some of the most
important prisons were confided to their sole charge.
They did no end of good, particularly in bringing about
amicable settlements of disputes which would otherwise
have caused fierce litigation.
Our blessed Pius IX had a tender sympathy for poor
debtors and often came to their assistance. He was constantly
in money difficulties himself—as generous people
so often are—during the earlier part of his career.
When he became Archbishop of Spoleto he had to borrow
a goodly sum, on his brother’s security, from a
Roman money-lender to defray the expenses of his installation,
and he was so recklessly charitable that again
and again there was not wherewithal to buy food.
His old housekeeper at Spoleto used to weep over the
bare shelves of her larder—everybody was fed, she declared,
except her master and his household! It was
hoped that things would be better when he moved to
Imola, where the Episcopal revenue was double that of
Spoleto, but the master’s ways were hopeless and he only
laughed when his people remonstrated with him. There
came a day at Imola when the distracted steward, ready
to tear his hair, exclaimed: “Eminenza, there was a hundred
dollars in the treasury this morning, and it is all
gone! I have not a cent for the ‘spese’” (the current
expenses); “what shall we do?”
The Cardinal reminded him that the good God had
promised daily bread to His children. “That is true,
Eminenza,” said the poor man, “but—I am in terrible
difficulty, all the same!”
“Well,” said his master, “to-morrow is a fast day.
I know you have some cheese in the house. Serve that
for dinner.”
“But the next day, Eminenza?”
“Oh, I will take care to leave enough for the next
day!” was the Cardinal’s reply.
On another occasion he was about to entertain a distinguished
party at dinner. The gentlemen were already
gathered in the drawing-room when their host was informed
that a man wished to speak with him on urgent
business. He excused himself and came into the dining-room,
where he found one of his parishioners in frantic
distress. He wanted a loan to save him from immediate
bankruptcy. “I have not a single dollar in my possession,
my poor friend,” said the Cardinal, “but——” He
glanced round the room, where all his best plate was laid
out in preparation for the coming feast, and pounced on
a great gold soup tureen, a cherished gift from his
mother. “Take this,” he said, putting it into the man’s
hands, “it will pay your debts.”
With sublime carelessness he returned to his guests,
and they and he soon began to wonder why dinner was
not served. A long time passed, and then the steward,
pale as death and with tears in his eyes, came and informed
him that somebody had stolen the gold soup
tureen! He had looked everywhere, searched the servants’
rooms—the household was in an uproar—but the
tureen was gone!
“Oh, is that all?” he laughed. “I stole it myself!
Get the old china one and let us eat.”
CHAPTER VII CAPTIVITY OF POPE PIUS VII
Lebzeltern, the Ambassador of the Austrian Emperor—Origin of His
Mission—Napoleon’s Anger Against Pius VII—Arrest of the Pope—Protests
from the Church—Napoleon Excommunicated—Vain Efforts
to Evade the Bull—Instructions for the Mission—“Do All, or Else,
Do Nothing”—Pius VII in His Sixty-eighth Year—The Interview—The
Pope’s Position—His Generosity—Message to Napoleon—Continued
Captivity—Return to Rome—Napoleon’s Expiation.
One beautiful evening of early summer in the year
1810, the packet-boat plying between Genoa and
Savona reached the latter port after a fair but exciting
passage; for, albeit the sea was scarcely ruffled by the
breeze—which in itself was barely sufficient to fill the
sails—yet during the whole of the voyage from Genoa
a couple of British frigates had accompanied the packet-boat,
keeping however, much to the surprise of the voyagers,
at a considerable distance and without manifesting
any hostile intention. And when, at last, the packet-boat
was safe at anchor in the harbour of Savona, the frigates
likewise lay to, within about a cannon-shot of the land,
and began, apparently, to make all snug for the night.
Among the passengers who now walked down the
gang-plank of the packet-boat on to the quay, thankful
for once to British eccentricity for its unaccountable generosity
in letting them go their way unmolested, was a
man, still young, with an expression of imperturbable
good-nature not unmixed with a certain bland shrewdness.
This person, after directing a servant, by whom he was
accompanied, to have his baggage taken to an hotel—possibly
the “Roma”—betook himself alone and on
foot to the “Vescovado,” the palace of the Bishop of
Savona, “a fairly large house,” as Napoleon had described
it in a letter in which he had attempted to
excuse himself for the choice of it as a residence for his
prisoner, Pope Pius VII.
The traveller, on arriving at the door of the Vescovado,
found his further way barred by a couple of gendarmes
who were mounting guard there; to them, on
their asking his business, he replied that he desired an
interview with the Sovereign Pontiff, and requested that
they would let him pass. For all answer they stared at
him, open-mouthed, taking him for an eccentric; when
their commander, a Colonel Thévenot, who chanced to
be passing, took the matter out of their hands.
“Who are you, sir, and what do you want?” he
enquired.
“I wish to see the Holy Father, as soon as possible,”
replied the other. “Allow me”—handing the Colonel
a visiting card inscribed:
“Le Chevalier de Lebzeltern,
Conseiller d’Ambassade
de
Sa Majesté l’Empereur d’Autriche et Roi
Apostolique de Hongrie.”
Having read the card, Thévenot glanced suspiciously
at the owner of it; then, seeing that he had indeed to do
with a serious person, he turned rather red in the
face.
“Tut-tut, my dear sir, surely you cannot expect to
obtain admission to the Pope in this rough-and-ready
way,” he stammered. “It is really quite out of the question,
you know,” with a wave of the hand to where, in
the courtyard, a corporal’s guard of fusiliers was preparing
to relieve the sentries posted in all the approaches
of the building.
“Ah, the guard of honour, I suppose, for His Holiness,”
returned the Austrian, with the vestige of a
smile; whereat Colonel Thévenot’s equanimity gave
way.
“Frankly, sir,” he broke out, “please understand that
no living being is allowed to enter here without a written
order from General Berthier, the commandant of the
town.”
“Frankly, sir,” retorted Lebzeltern in his turn,
“that does not apply to myself, and I am going to
enter.”
Happily for all concerned, the situation was dispelled
at that moment by the sound of heavy firing from the
direction of the harbour, where the British frigates had
suddenly come in closer towards the town in the intention
of ascertaining the range of the French artillery, especially
of some large cannon on a new fort. The orders
of Napoleon himself, who was acquainted with this custom
of the British, were positive in regard to such provocations;
and it was strictly enjoined upon his officers to
take no notice of them except in the event of a serious
attack. Nevertheless, the garrison of Savona lost its
head upon this particular occasion and opened an extensive
fire upon the two inquisitive ships. As Lebzeltern
described it:
“It was a splendid sight; the weather was superb, the
sea like a mirror, the whole coast, as well as the English
ships, being turned to gold in the sunset. On the side of
Savona thundered the cannon, their smoke shot with
flame; from the English, though, there came no sound
except that of their bands playing their well-known air
of, ‘Go to bed, go to bed, and get up as quickly as you
can!’”
In the confusion of what the French imagined to be
the preliminaries of an action, the gates of the Vescovado
were closed, and Lebzeltern, thus forced to abandon his
quest for the moment, turned his footsteps towards the
hotel. There was nothing for it, as he saw, but to obtain
General Berthier’s permission to see the Pope, with whom
alone his mission to Savona was concerned. Having
dined, therefore, he despatched a messenger to the Papal
“maestro di camera,” Monsignor Doria, bearing a letter
from Count Metternich, the Austrian Ambassador in
Paris, under whose instructions he was acting, together
with a formal request for an audience of the Holy
Father.
Some explanation is necessary of the origin of Lebzeltern’s
mission to Savona; and so I trust the reader will
not take it amiss if I venture upon the attempt.
When, in the summer of 1809, Napoleon sent orders
to Rome for the arrest of the Pope, he did so under the
impulse of one of those blind rages of his which upset
all the calculations of his wisest advisers, and which only
ended in raising up insurmountable barriers in the way
of his ultimate triumph. For years he had been angered
by the Pope’s refusal either to close the ports of the
Papal States against English ships and merchandise, or
to expel the English residents in his dominions. In answer
to the Emperor’s repeated demands, Pius VII had
said that, as the Universal Spiritual Father of all the
Christian family, he absolutely refused to close their
home and his (i.e., the Papal States) against his English
children. Whereupon, in 1807, Benevento and Pontecorvo
were taken from the Papal States and erected into
French Duchies for Talleyrand and Bernadotte, to be
held by them as fiefs of the Empire. The next year,
Rome itself was occupied by French troops, and the
“legations” of Ancona, Urbino, Macerata, and Camerino
seized by Napoleon’s orders; and, in 1809, the
Eternal City was declared to be annexed to the Empire
as the capital of the French département or county of
Rome. Finally, in the night of July 5-6, 1809, Pope Pius
VII was arrested by General Radet and taken as a prisoner
to Savona.
Napoleon’s idea, in thus imprisoning the Pontiff and
isolating him from his accustomed friends, counsellors,
and surroundings, was to wring from him by suffering
that compliance with the imperial diplomacy which the
good old man had hitherto refused so uncompromisingly.
To be sure, now that Rome and the Papal States were
in the hands of his soldiers, the Emperor had no difficulty
either in expelling or arresting the English residing
there, or in closing the whole of Romagna to British merchandise;
but, in his haste and anger, he had reckoned
without the religious difficulties of the new situation.
To begin with, in thus laying violent hands upon the
person of the Pope, he struck a blow not only at a fellow-Sovereign,
but at the Head of the Catholic Church on
earth; and, in so doing, wounded the whole of the Church
in its tenderest feelings, stirring up against himself a resentment
that knew no bounds, not only in France, Belgium,
and Italy, but, also, in Spain and Austria; as well
as throughout the Catholic parts of Germany and the
Netherlands. Protests multiplied on every hand, becoming
increasingly violent, until Napoleon was forced to
admit to himself that he had made a terrible mistake,
and that his glory and power were insufficient to seduce
the souls of men from their religious allegiance to the
successor of St. Peter. Moreover, the dangers and discomforts
of his situation were rendered intolerable by
a Bull of Excommunication issued against him in that
summer of 1809, in the tour of his triumph over the
Austrians at Wagram; which Bull was served upon him
in person, whilst surrounded by his marshals, by a solitary
ecclesiastic who, true to his mission, did not honour
him with any kind of salutation, but merely delivered the
parchment into the Emperor’s hand, turned his back upon
him, and walked away. Napoleon, indeed, feigned to
make light of the excommunication, asking of those about
him whether the Pope expected the muskets to fall from
the hands of his, the Emperor’s, soldiers; but, in his
heart, he was greatly troubled. He had known for some
time that such a Bull was on its way to him, but had contrived
to evade the service of it on him. For Lebzeltern,
himself, who was Secretary of the Austrian Embassy in
Rome at the period of the Holy Father’s arrest, and
who had long been a valued and intimate friend of Pius
VII, had been entrusted with another such document at
his departure from Rome on an order transmitted to him
from Napoleon through General de Miollis, ordering
him (albeit a foreign diplomatist) to quit French territory
immediately. Bearing with him, therefore, the Bull
of Excommunication, Lebzeltern had departed from
Rome, being escorted on his way to Vienna as far as
Klagenfurt in Styria by a French officer. On reaching
Schönbrunn, however, he was arrested by the French
military police; his baggage and, even, his person was
submitted to a degrading search, and, at length, every
other means of purloining the Bull having been tried in
vain, Lebzeltern was threatened with being shot unless
he gave up the document—for Napoleon would appear
to have entertained a superstition that, if only he could
escape from having the Bull served on him, its effect
would be annulled! But nothing would induce Lebzeltern
to reveal its hiding-place; and so he was sent off
as a state prisoner to Munich, with a special recommendation
to the Bavarian Government to treat him as
harshly as possible. Having passed some months there,
however, he was exchanged against a Baron d’Arétin,
and came to Vienna, believing himself to be free at last;
but now Wagram had been fought, and Napoleon was
master there; and Lebzeltern was again arrested on a
trumped-up charge of seeking to escape from giving satisfaction
to a French officer in an affair of honour! Nor
would Napoleon let him go until compelled to do so by
the insistent demands of Metternich, who was just then
negotiating the peace preliminaries at Altenburg. At
long length, however, Lebzeltern was released, and joined
the Austrian headquarters near Schönbrunn a few days
before the signing of the treaty of Vienna; and it was he
to whom Emperor Francis unburdened himself with tears
in his eyes on the subject of the Treaty.
Soon afterwards, Lebzeltern went to Paris as Secretary
of Embassy under Metternich; and when, in the late
spring of 1810, Napoleon asked Metternich to find him
a man to entrust with the errand of persuading the Holy
Father to accede to his views (i.e., the removal of the
Excommunication and the abdication of the Temporal
Power in favour of the Napoleonic dynasty), Metternich
recommended Lebzeltern as the one person qualified to
speak to the Pope with any chance of being accorded a
favourable hearing.
The whole hinge of the matter was the Pope’s renunciation
of the Temporal Power; only in return for which
would Napoleon (as he made perfectly clear to Metternich)
allow the Pontiff to return to Rome, whence,
alone, it was possible for Pius VII to direct the way of
the Catholic Church. And, unless the Pope would surrender
the patrimony of Peter, he should never see Rome
again; and the Emperor would nominate another Pontiff
in his stead. The position was certainly simple
enough, according to Napoleon.
But Metternich had added, in private, a little word
of his own in the ear of his estimable subordinate on
the eve of the latter’s departure for Italy. “Do all,”
said he, with a peculiar emphasis, “or else, do nothing.”
And Lebzeltern, grasping the significance of the words,
had bowed, smilingly, before withdrawing to prepare for
the journey. He perfectly understood; what Metternich
meant was that he was either to effect “in toto” what
both of them knew to be impossible or else he was to
effect nothing at all. That is to say, he was not to attempt
any compromise by which the Pope might be hoodwinked
into doing what Napoleon wanted; for it was
perfectly certain that Pius VII would refuse to meet
the Emperor’s views as laid down by the Emperor himself
for transmission by Lebzeltern. And, as Metternich
realised, the salvation, not only of Austria but of all
Europe, depended upon the Pope’s holding out against
Napoleon; for the only thing that must inevitably, sooner
or later, bring about the Emperor’s downfall, was the
sense of their outraged religion in the hearts of the
vanquished.
After sending in his request for an audience to
Monsignor Doria, Lebzeltern went to call upon General
Berthier, who was the commandant of Savona and the
Pope’s gaoler. Berthier had heard of his arrival, and
began by telling Lebzeltern—who had told him that
the object of his mission was to discuss some Austrian
religious business with the Holy Father—that he could
only be allowed to converse with Pius VII in the presence
of witnesses. To this Lebzeltern replied that it was impossible
for him to speak freely of the affairs of the
Austrian Court in the presence of any third party whomsoever;
that, according to Napoleon himself, the Pope
was under no kind of restraint; and, lastly, that Napoleon
both knew and approved of his, Lebzeltern’s, mission.
But it was not until Lebzeltern threatened to go
back to Paris immediately and to complain of the obstacle
placed in his path that Berthier finally surrendered the
point—albeit not without a violent scene in which he
complained bitterly of the Emperor for placing him (as
was true enough) in so equivocal a position by first forbidding
him to allow any one to have access to the Pope
without direct orders to do so from Paris, and then sending
Lebzeltern thus (underhandedly and without as much
as a line from any French official excepting a passport)
to match, as it were, his, Berthier’s, intelligence against
his obedience. Finally, he himself decided to give the
preference to his intelligence.
So it was all of four days after his arrival at Savona
that Lebzeltern was ushered by Monsignor Doria into
the Pope’s presence.
At that time, Pius VII, although in his sixty-eighth
year, looked considerably younger, his hair being still
jet-black and abundant, and his dark eyes full of life and
light. The smile, too, which rarely left his pale, kindly
face, was peculiarly winsome in its frankness and its
serenity. The only signs about him of what he had endured
of late at the hands of the French administration
were a weariness in his voice and a marked stoop like that
of a very old or very tired man. On seeing Lebzeltern,
though, he showed a greater animation and pleasure than
he had done for many months; especially was he delighted
to learn that their interview was to be an absolutely private
one—for this he regarded as a great indulgence on
the part of his gaolers, it being the first time in his captivity
(then nearly a year old) that he had been allowed
to speak with any except in the presence of a third party.
At first, records Lebzeltern, the Holy Father spoke of
his sufferings in the journey from Rome and of all he
had endured since being torn from the Eternal City; also,
he expressed his sympathies for his visitor in what the
latter had undergone of unjust imprisonment at the hands
of the French and the Bavarians. In return[9] Lebzeltern,
as he tells himself, gave the Pontiff an outline of public
events since their last meeting in Rome, prior to the battle
of Wagram—the Treaty of Vienna and its results;
the progress of the war in Portugal; and the marriage of
Napoleon to the Archduchess Marie-Louise. All of
which events Lebzeltern, a professional diplomatist and
an Austrian official, believed to be hitherto unknown to
the Pope—wherein lies one of the most curious points
of modern history. For, if Pope Pius VII was supposed,
even by such men as Metternich and Lebzeltern, to be
still, in May, 1810, in ignorance of the marriage of
Napoleon to Marie-Louise, how can it be claimed that
the Supreme Pontiff’s sanction had ever been given to
that marriage? Apparently to Lebzeltern’s surprise,
Pius VII had, however, actually learned of the imperial
marriage through some secret channel: “... outwitting
the watchfulness of his gaolers, he received news day by
day...!” For, amongst other indignities, no letters
were ever permitted to reach or issue from the Holy Father
except such as had been approved by Berthier and
by a certain Chabrol, Prefect of the “département” of
Montenotte, by whom the Papal correspondence was always
read and censored; so that it was evidently Napoleon’s
purpose to keep his august prisoner in total ignorance
of the majority of the world’s events.
Nevertheless, Pius VII spoke with no bitterness, but
only with great grief of the French Emperor, expressing
the most sorrowful tenderness towards the man whom
he had crowned Emperor at Notre Dame a few years
previously. And all he asked was that he might be
allowed to go back to Rome in order to be able to do
his duty by the Church as her Pastor.
At this point Lebzeltern made known the real object
of his coming to Savona: namely, that Napoleon was
anxious to come to an understanding with the Pope. To
the latter this was, indeed, a most welcome surprise; but,
almost immediately, he seemed to realise that he was suddenly
in the presence of some sort of insidious temptation
which was preparing to attack him. And here
Lebzeltern, by turning the talk during some minutes to
Austrian affairs, sought to give his listener time in which
to recover from the first effects of his surprise. And so,
for a while, they spoke of the dangers of a schism that
threatened the German episcopate, so long deprived by
Napoleon of the guidance of their Shepherd. And then,
as the Pope began more clearly to divine the probable
intentions of the Emperor towards him, he reverted to
the subject of his captor:
“I want nothing for myself,” he said, by way of warning
Lebzeltern that it would be of no use for him to
offer any personal advantage to the Pope (as such) as
the price of a reconciliation with Napoleon. “I am old,
and have no need of anything; I have sacrificed all I had
to my duty. I have nothing left to lose. Therefore, no
personal consideration can make me turn aside from the
narrow road along which the sacred voice of my conscience
has so far led me. I want no pension; the alms
of the faithful will suffice me.... All I insist upon—and
with all my strength—is that I be allowed free
communication with the Bishops and the faithful.” Once,
too, he seemed uncertain of even the diplomatist’s own
intentions towards him. “At Rome, my dear Lebzeltern,”
he reminded him, “I opened my heart to you in
the conviction that you were incapable of abusing my confidence
...”—speaking rapidly in Italian.
And now, as Lebzeltern felt, the moment had come
when he could no longer defer the revelation of what it
was that Napoleon proposed to the Pope as the only
possible basis of an agreement between them—that is
to say, the only price he would accept to let Pius VII out
of prison. It was by no means easy, as he gives one
to understand, for the young Austrian to do this thing;
but, at length, he forced himself to the point. After assuring
the Holy Father once more of his own devotion
to him, as well as of that of Metternich and the Emperor
Francis, Lebzeltern proceeded to explain that Napoleon
had in no way abated his desire to be the lord
of Rome, which had long been one of the principal objects
of his ambition; also, that he had in no way changed his
mind in regard to the Pope’s surrender of the Temporal
Power; and that, although Napoleon would not
insist upon a formal deed of renunciation on the part
of Pius VII, yet, at the same time, he must insist that
the Pope should maintain an attitude of absolute submission
in the matter, an attitude which should in no
way recall the past political position of the Papacy, and
which at bottom should be, in fact, an acknowledgment
of the suzerainty of the French Emperor.
The words were scarcely out of Lebzeltern’s mouth
when the Pontiff took him up with an amazing energy for
so delicate a man.
“Is not Napoleon already, de facto, the master of
Rome?” he demanded. “Does he not parcel out my
States as he pleases? Do not his troops already hold
my ports, camp in my capital, and live at my expense?
And all I can do is to oppose a few protests to his armed
force. But I know him; he is a man who never really
wants what he says he wants—and what he really wants
he will never admit to a living soul beforehand.”
To which Lebzeltern, in order to restore the Pope’s
equanimity, replied by telling him how Metternich, in
speaking to Napoleon, had declared himself openly on
the side of the Holy Father; and, moreover, had emphatically
impressed upon the Emperor the unchangeable
principles[10] of the Austrian Government in regard to the
Catholic Church and its visible spiritual Head on earth.
“I should indeed be grateful for any help that Austria
could give me,” said the Pope. “All I ask is that
Napoleon will let me go back to Rome and that he will
allow me to keep about me a sufficient number of people
for the business of consistories and councils—and that
my relations with the faithful may be free and unhampered.
I have no means of compelling Napoleon to restore
the dominions of which he has robbed me—very
well, all I can do is to protest. Beyond that I can do
nothing.”
Here Lebzeltern, it must be recorded, made some attempt
to persuade the Holy Father to make what he
called “sacrifices” in the interests of the distracted
Church—but of what nature, precisely, he did not
specify. But Pius VII, reading his mind, replied that
the duty imposed upon him by his conscience of defending
the rights of the Holy See and the patrimony of the
Church—which patrimony he was bound by his oath as
Pope to transmit intact, in so far as in him lay, to his
successors—forbade his remaining silent under Napoleon’s
iniquity: his silence would be understood, by his
enemies, to be a tacit abdication of the Temporal Power,
and would be considered by the faithful as a cowardly
surrender.
From this point in the conversation the two men understood
each other’s position and standpoint clearly—and
yet, both did their best to avoid the blind-alley into
which the talk was surely leading them.
“Let Napoleon only allow me to return to Rome,”
pleaded the Pope—“the Catacombs will be enough for
me, they have served as a shelter before now for other
Pontiffs.... As to my sustenance, as I said before, the
faithful will take care of it. No doubt Napoleon would
offer me a revenue from the funds of the religious orders
he has suppressed—in the same way that, when
I went to Paris to crown him, he offered me some
eighteen or twenty million francs of such stolen money—an
unspeakable suggestion which I refused with horror
and indignation! But, indeed, now that I think of it—how
could I possibly hold my tongue as he proposes I
should do, and not protest, while he would go on suppressing
convents and religious orders under my very
eyes, as well as introducing innovations that I could not
pass over in silence without becoming his accomplice in
the face of all Christendom?”
In response Lebzeltern submitted that, possibly, Napoleon’s
malevolent dispositions towards the Church
might be beneficially affected by the removal of the ban
of excommunication under which he still lay.
“But Napoleon would be excommunicated without
any Bull of mine,” replied the other. “For he is, ipso
facto, as a persecutor of the Church, outside her pale.
Even if I had never issued any such ban against him, he
would still be excommunicated by his own acts.”
Lebzeltern now proposed that the Holy Father should
write a letter to Napoleon, demanding with all gentleness
and moderation to be set at liberty and allowed to
resume his apostolic functions. “I would even ask his
help to that end,” pursued the Austrian, “and I would
publish the letter. Such a letter would in no way disparage
the Vicar of Christ, ever ready to forgive sinners;
and, at the same time, it would place Napoleon
in an exceedingly embarrassing situation before the world.
By so doing, your Holiness would infallibly destroy at
a single blow those weapons of calumny which he is
employing against you, and which he means to go on
employing.”
“Listen, Lebzeltern. You know that I am willing
to concede all that it is possible to concede; but where
my conscience is concerned, you behold me perfectly resigned
to remain as I am, a prisoner. If my captivity
were a thousand times harsher—if I had, even, to mount
the scaffold—I should not deviate by so much as a hair’s
breadth from what my duty demands of me. And it would
be an unworthy betrayal of that duty if I were to remove
the ban of excommunication from Napoleon without good
and sufficient reason. As to the letter you propose that
I should write to him—a kind of encyclical, as it were—frankly
I feel that, in sending such a thing to a man
like Napoleon, who is capable of changing the wording
of it, and then of publishing it to my detriment and his
own ends, I should do wrong in taking so grave a risk
without first consulting the Sacred College.”
And, on Lebzeltern’s arguing that it was the Pope’s
duty to make the first move towards a reconciliation with
the Emperor, Pius VII was silent for a moment, as though
deliberating upon his next words. At last he spoke again:
“If Napoleon shows a desire to become reconciled to
the Church, and if he will prove his sincerity by some
deed, the thing can be arranged—and I assure you that
no one is more desirous of it than I.”
And with that the first interview came to an end.
Lebzeltern did not see the Pontiff again until two days
later; on May 18, he found him in a condition of great
fatigue from overwork (as may easily be understood
when one remembers that the entire business of the
Church had fallen upon the shoulders of the venerable
Pontiff, deprived by Napoleon’s orders of assistance of
any kind in the transaction of that stupendous task!) and
having before him a letter recently received from Cardinal
Fesch. In this letter the Cardinal had written of
the Emperor’s intention—unless an agreement were
speedily come to between himself and the Holy Father—of
settling the question by choosing Bishops that would
do his will from among the French clergy, Bishops who
would administer their dioceses in accordance with Napoleon’s
instructions alone and without any reference to
the Pope. In answer, the Holy Father had condescended
to write back to the Cardinal to say that the Emperor
was evidently bent upon making impossible any reconciliation
between them; and that any Episcopal Council
that the Emperor might call together upon his own initiative
would be absolutely null and void. Nevertheless,
he, the Pope, being unwilling to refuse any chance of
reconciliation, the Cardinal was to exhort Napoleon upon
the subject; to assure him of his glory in this world and
in the next if he would but sincerely become reconciled
to the Church; and, equally, to threaten him with condign
punishment upon himself and his dynasty, if he should
persist in his persecution of the Church.
Lebzeltern now had to recognise that the Sovereign
Pontiff had, in his heart, lost all confidence in Napoleon’s
good intentions; for Pius VII now spoke of yet further
pains and penalties that he had not made use of and
which were still at his disposal. Lebzeltern, though, undiscouraged,
only tried the harder to incline the Pope
towards an understanding with the Emperor.
“If Napoleon will do something in favour of the
Church, then, and not before, will I withdraw my excommunication
of him,” replied the Pontiff. “To gain
absolution, one must do penance——”
“Surely, Holy Father—but, generally speaking, the
absolution precedes the penance”—a specious argument,
this, of the diplomatist, seeing that the fruit of the absolution
is dependent upon the performance of the penance.
All preliminaries being exhausted, it only remained for
Lebzeltern to disclose the absolutely last possible basis
of an understanding between the Pope and the Emperor.
“If the Emperor were willing to forego any formal
act of abdication of the Temporal Power on the part of
your Holiness,” he ventured, “might he count in return
upon your absolute silence as to the past?”—By which
Lebzeltern meant that the Pope should by his silence give
a tacit sanction to all the things that Napoleon had done
to the Church and her ministers—his imprisonment of
the Pope and many of the Cardinals, his sequestration of
countless Church moneys, his closing of the multitudes
of religious houses, and his throwing of their occupants,
destitute and homeless, upon the world.
“Out of the question,” said the Pope. “I could never
feel sure of any pact with Napoleon.” Presently, however,
he added: “The guarantee, though, of a third party
to any treaty I might make with him would certainly ease
my mind considerably—especially if Austria would furnish
the guarantee.” And then, in an access of reconciliation,
he continued: “I have already told you what I
would be disposed to do on my side towards healing the
breach between Napoleon and the Church. What more
does he want of me? Does he wish me to recognise him
as Emperor of the West? Very well, I am willing to
do so. Does he wish me to crown him as such at Rome?
Very well, again I am quite ready to do so. For that
would not in any way be contrary to my conscience, provided
only that he makes his peace with the Church and
ceases from persecuting her; but I insist upon it that he
shall respect her earthly Head in that Head’s unchangeable
capacity as the spiritual chief of Christendom!”
Lebzeltern was, indeed, astounded at the Pope’s
generosity.
“Most Holy Father,” he stammered, “you have given
too much not to give just one little thing more—merely
to allow your subjects to obey the present Government in
the Papal States, and to order them expressly to do so.”
There followed a gesture of such pain on the part of
the Sovereign Pontiff, expressing so eloquently his repugnance
to this proposal, that Lebzeltern was penetrated
with a shaft of regret for having made it. Moreover,
as he says himself, “I trembled at the thought of all I
had obtained from him!”
At the same time, Lebzeltern felt convinced of the uselessness
of the Pope’s concessions. He knew that Napoleon,
unless he could obtain the one thing on which his
heart was set—the actual sovereignty of the Papal
States, and that with the Pope’s consent and blessing,—would
not for a moment consider anything else that might
be offered him instead.
So Lebzeltern parted from the Holy Father for that
day, his heart full of indefinable misgivings for the dark
future in which the power of Napoleon loomed so vast
and menacing, and in which there was no great light visible
to him of the Church, save only here and there, so
to speak, where the feeble red glow of a few distant, wide-scattered
sanctuary-lamps starred the mirk of the new
Europe.
On May 20, Lebzeltern went for the last time to the
Vescovado, to take leave of the august prisoner within
its walls.
On this last occasion of their meeting at Savona, the
diplomatist found Pius VII in a very strange frame of
mind. Not by any means inclined to withdraw the concessions
he had made in the previous interview with
Lebzeltern, but only regretting them bitterly; hoping they
might not satisfy Napoleon and so be rejected by him.
On Lebzeltern’s presenting for his consideration a written
outline of the concessions in question, the Pontiff,
after considering them a little while, rose suddenly from
his chair and spoke as follows:
“I have made known to you, Lebzeltern, many of my
most secret thoughts and sentiments which I would never
have entrusted to another living man except my confessor;
and I do not regret it, because I am perfectly certain that
you will never abuse the confidence I have placed in you.
Nevertheless, please bear in mind that I only authorise
you to report of me to Napoleon and Metternich what I
am now going to tell you, and which is just what you
yourself have seen and heard—that I am perfectly resigned
to God’s Will regarding me and that I humbly
place my cause in His hands. Say that no consideration
of any kind shall induce me to disobey my conscience
and the Divine law. Tell them that I am calm and serene,
and that all I ask of the Emperor—for whom I only
hope and pray that he may be granted the grace to make
his peace with our holy mother the Church—is that he
will allow me the means of communicating freely with
the faithful, and that he will no longer deprive them of
the services of their father and servant. Tell the Emperor
that I entreat him to remember that the glory of
this world is in itself no passport to Heaven; that, albeit
I yearn with all my heart to be reconciled with him, yet,
that I will never be so at the price of my conscience. Assure
him very earnestly that I have not the smallest personal
feeling against him; that I forgive him with my
whole heart all that he has done to me; and that nothing
could hurt me more than that he should imagine me
capable of harbouring resentments—which in themselves
are forbidden by God and have no place either in my
heart or in my inclination.”
Presently, among other things, he went on to speak of
the private misgivings with which Napoleon’s character
inspired him: “Between ourselves, Lebzeltern, I am convinced
that Napoleon is not in good faith when he says
that he wishes to become reconciled with me.... If only
he would let me have some one here, at Savona, to help
me in my work, which is really and truly overwhelming;
moreover, there is a vast amount of specialist and technical
business which I cannot possibly transact by myself
without consulting my expert advisers. And, to make
matters worse for me, my health and my eyesight are
giving out; I do not feel that I shall be able to carry
my burden of solitary labour very much longer; besides,
it is bad for my temper, which I confess, frankly, I often
have great difficulty in curbing.”
Nor is there anything wonderful in this when one remembers
the Pope’s situation after being imprisoned
nearly a year in the house of the Bishop of Savona, shut
off from the Cardinals (of whom the only news he had
was that they had been imprisoned and maltreated in
French fortresses by order of Napoleon) and from the
faithful. Alone with his doubts and difficulties and age
and ill-health; and the insidious temptations put before
him by the Emperor’s instruments (conscious, some of
these, as was Fesch; unconscious, again, as was Lebzeltern)—what
is there astonishing or blamable in this
“great difficulty” so well and simply confessed by the
most benignantly human Barnabo Chiaramonte?
Presently he spoke again, to utter a final warning to
Napoleon:
“If Napoleon continues to make war upon religion
(even although he does so under the guise of extending
to it his hypocritical perfidious protection); if he attempts
to have me dragged to Paris; if he goes on spreading the
lie of my sacrificing the real interests of the Church to
secondary matters and to worldly motives; if he persists
in forcing me to more active reprisals, then—I shall have
to use the last weapons that remain to me and which would
make a stir in the world that he does not yet dream of.
The only regret I should have in that case would be that
some others—who have been less unkind to me than
he—might suffer, too. As to the precise nature of those
weapons, it is possible that their effect might be very different
from anything you could imagine. But, make your
mind easy; have no fear that I shall employ them unless
I am absolutely obliged to do so. Do not be afraid of
my doing anything precipitately, for I pray constantly for
grace and strength sufficient to enable me to carry my
cross patiently. But if you only knew the unvarying torment
of my nights as well as of my days, Lebzeltern—the
unceasing anguish of my solitude—you would not
wonder at what must sometimes appear to you incomprehensible
inconsistencies in my attitude towards many
things—as must have been noticeable in the talks between
us!”
And with that he dismissed Lebzeltern, who was as
much moved as he; for they now shared the same conviction
of the utter emptiness of Napoleon’s professions
of a desire for reconciliation.
And, as it proved, the doors of Savona did not open
for Pius VII until the next year, 1811—and then only
to allow of his deportation to another prison at Fontainebleau,
where he was to remain until Napoleon’s downfall.
Once only did the Sovereign Pontiff weaken (with none
but the purest of good intentions) when, in 1813, he consented,
for a moment, to renounce the Temporal Power,
in order that he might be allowed to go back to Rome,
thence to direct the Church. But in vain, for Napoleon
would not let him out of his hands, and Pius VII, perceiving
the mistake he had made, announced to all whom
it might concern his resumption of the inalienable dominions
and Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes. And, in
1814, he returned to his rightful throne in the Vatican
amid the rejoicings of his subjects.
But what must have been his reflections in regard to
his oppressor during the five years (the exact duration
of Napoleon’s crime against him) that were consumed
in the terrific expiation of St. Helena? And his awe
and amazement at the stupendous vindication of his trust
in the providence of Heaven?—for, as the Italian saying
has it, “God does not pay wages day by day, but
only on Saturdays—and then He pays in full with
interest!”
Pius VII’s own revenge on Napoleon took the form
of offering safe and honoured homes, and the means to
live, to his mother and his entire family after his downfall.
Whereby many descendants of the Bonapartes are
counted among the Roman nobles at this day.
CHAPTER VIII IN SABINA
Castel Gandolfo—Its Gardens—The Sabine Hills—The Reverendo—An
Expedition into the Hills—The Campagna in the Early Morning—“Our
Lady of Good Counsel”—Ancient Præneste—Italy’s Landscape—Struggles
of the Colonna—Destruction of Palestrina—Boniface’s
Revenge and Expiation—Olevano, the Haunt of Artists—“Picturesque
Utility”—The Wrong Train—Romance of a Pebble—The Work of
the Saints.
We had chosen Castel Gandolfo for our summer
quarters and had spent two delightful months in
the Villa Brazzà, situated on the lower edge of the town,
which climbed up the gentle slope behind, and having
for ourselves the open view of all the Campagna below
us, before. The house did not look large from the road,
but very little of it showed itself to the road at all. When
one had passed under the arched “portone,” one found
a great rambling residence with a long terraced wing
stretching down into the garden, and in the garden itself
pavilions, grottoes, terraces, all bowered in flowers and
so artistically disposed that every one seemed isolated and
only approached by long winding walks delightfully shady
and green. Where the chief sitting-room opened towards
the garden there was a small terrace, completely
shaded from the morning sun, with a fountain so disposed
that it fell all down one wall like a waterfall,
and round it clambered and waved the wreaths of a
hundred creepers, ivy and stephanotis and jessamine and
maidenhair fern, all wet and blooming in the gentle moisture
of its spray. To the left the wing, in which my
own rooms were situated, ran far down, affording shade
and coolness; a stairway led up to its roof, where vast
beds of petunias gave out their sweet perfume and were
visited every evening at sunset by humming-bird moths,
who fed on the honey in the white and purple chalices
till they could scarcely fly away.
The house had been full of guests through July and
August and the summer had been divinely bright and cool.
Through it all I had looked, day after day, over towards
the Sabine Hills, so remote and mysterious for all their
nearness to Rome, and a great desire was upon me to
penetrate into those blue fastnesses. They had been
friends—at a distance—all my life, since I could remember
anything, and probably before that, for the big
eastern window of the room where I was born looked
straight towards them, and doubtless their sun-smitten
peaks were the first outside objects my eyes ever beheld.
They are our Sibyls, in Rome. They reflect every change
of sun and wind, and very early I learnt to tell the signs
of the coming weather which they infallibly gave us.
I made up my mind to reach them at last, and with
some difficulty persuaded my brother and my stepfather
to come with me. We were joined by a friend, an elderly
English clergyman, much loved by us and always known
as the “Reverendo.” He came of exceedingly well-known
people, but was a younger son with no money—and
no encumbrances, and he had long amused us with his
quaint ways. He was rather elderly, very tall, with a
paganly handsome head—and a quiet way of saying incredible
things that made me love him much, and work
him hard, for I was a rather spoilt young person in those
days and allowed myself unlimited whims, which my
blessed family helped me to carry out in the most exemplary
way. I always had a very tender spot for the
“Reverendo,” and it became something uncomfortably
near pity when I heard, from our servants, of certain
straits to which he was put in order to appear properly
at the little gatherings to which we were always inviting
him. He lived a long way from our house, and his means
quite forbade the luxury of cabs, so in all weathers he
came on foot. The carefully turned-up evening trousers
could be kept out of the mud, but not so the shoes below;
so the Reverendo brought clean ones—and evening socks—with
him. The porter’s lodge was just inside the porte
cochère, and he would turn in there, regardless of what
the inhabitants might be doing, sit down, pull off the condemned
foot-gear, toss it into various corners, put on
the clean things, and walk upstairs—all without a single
word to the porter’s wife and children, who put him
down, quite smilingly, as another “mad Englishman.”
When the function upstairs was over he would reappear,
change once more, and depart, always in perfect silence.
But one evening Mrs. Porter told my maid she could have
wept for the poor gentleman! He came in as usual, sat
down and pulled off boots and socks, flung them away,
and then discovered that he had forgotten to bring fresh
ones. Quite meekly he gathered up the muddy articles,
put them on, and disappeared into the night, to return,
nearly an hour later, with his forgotten properties and
go through the whole ceremony over again.
Like so many quiet, cultivated Englishmen whom circumstances
more than taste have landed in the “Establishment”
for life, he had the social instinct very strongly
developed, loved bright society, and never refused an invitation.
He caught gladly at the idea of riding through
Sabina with us, and I knew that our expedition would be
a success, which it might not have been without the little
spice of interest that an outsider always brings into an
otherwise too strictly family party.
So, one divine September morning we four rode forth,
my dear mother almost crying at our temerity in facing
the brigands who were then supposed to haunt the Eastern
Hills. “Do bring back your ears with you!” was
her parting recommendation, and I know that during the
days of our absence she constantly dreaded receiving
the grim packet of severed ears which the old-time brigands
were in the habit of sending, with their little account
for ransom, to the relatives of those they had captured.
Years before, when we children were making expeditions
from Rocca di Papa, we had, to our immense joy, been
provided with big formidable-looking toy pistols, which
we were enjoined to carry “in evidence”—so that the
report might go about that the party was always strongly
armed! The only brigand we ever caught sight of in
our rambles through the lonely country would be an occasional
outlaw who had escaped from the police to take
hiding in the woods (where he was charitably maintained
by his sympathising fellow-townsfolk) and who would
scuttle away like a startled hare at the approach of a
big party of young foreigners whose yells would probably
reach to Rome itself if anybody interfered with
them. The brigand of Romagna is, or was, a poor creature,
very easily disposed of; his cousin in Calabria or
Sicily is quite a different kind of person, a resolute, unscrupulous
gentleman whom it is not at all pleasant to
meet.
In one of his Roman books, Mr. Hare speaks of the
unearthly beauty of the Campagna and its surrounding
hills in the first moments of the dawn, and deplores the
fact that so many travellers come and go away again
without ever having risen early enough to see it. I think
dear Mr. Hare made the discovery late in life himself,
for, if I remember rightly, it was during a journey of
exploration that we made together somewhere that the
fact struck him—and I and my sister regarded him then
as distinctly middle-aged. My poor Annie was always
a late riser, and vehemently deprecated the unripe hours
of the morning, as she did every other kind of discomfort;
but to me they were hours of purest romance, and
seldom have they seemed more perfect than on the day
when I and my three cavaliers rode away from Castel
Gandolfo through the woods towards Genazzano (not
Genzano) where we were to halt on our way to
Palestrina.
Have you ever ridden through deep chestnut woods
when the sun is still so low that it only strikes the under
branches of the trees, and creeps up their trunks like a
rising bath of gold? When every dell is still a mist of cool
emerald, and on the banks the level beams are kissing open
the tightly whorled fronds of the fern, filling the tiny cups
of the moss with topaz wine and turning its million-feathered
spikelets into an upstanding frieze of fairy
spears, each strung with a yellow pearl?
Where some stream has cut its way deep through the
rich soil, the forget-me-nots have grown so high and thick
that they almost meet across the water; their blue is too
dreamy yet to reflect the sky; they look up to that with
the calm unseeing innocence of a newborn child that as
yet knows not day from night. Ah, look well then, for
later in the day the jealous treetops will take all the light
to themselves, and every lovely detail, below, only visible
in that first fleeting hour, will be lost in the deep forest
shadow that is neither light nor darkness, but all one
quivering mysterious green.
We four rode through the woods silently, drinking in
the crystal freshness of the air; and then, almost before
we knew it, we were out in a blaze of heat, leaving the
Alban Hills behind and crossing the plain that divides
them from the Sabines, one of the old roads to Naples.
In that first week of September it was like an unroofed
hot-house, vines and corn and pomegranates crowding
against each other till one would hardly have known
where to get in the shears or the sickle; the dust from
our horses’ feet rose in golden clouds as we went along,
and everywhere was the whirr of wings and the long
droning note of the cicala. We were glad enough to
reach Genazzano and pause in the shade before the old
Church; but we had had some difficulty in penetrating so
far, the Piazza and every street leading to it being full
of peasants, who had come in from all the surrounding
district to pay their respects to the Madonna del Buon
Consiglio, on this the 8th of September, our Blessed
Lady’s birthday. Of course the greatest concourse takes
place here on April the 25th, the especial feast of Our
Lady of Good Counsel, but the people are always glad
to repair to this famous sanctuary, and on the day we
visited it the little town was full of the brilliant costumes
which one very rarely sees now. The picture round
which so much devotion centres is a very sweet one,
rather Byzantine in character, as is natural, for it came
to Italy from the other side of the Adriatic—miraculously
transported, probably at the time when all that
country came under Moslem rule. It was thus that the
Holy House of Loreto, when the Holy places of Jerusalem
fell into the hands of the Turks, was carried by the
Angels to Christian shores, and thence to Italy, the
dwellers near its last Eastern resting-place mourning despairingly
round the deserted spot from which it disappeared
between dark and dawn on the night of the 9th of
December, 1294. I am writing of Genazzano and not
of Loreto just now, but I must pause to remark that this
miracle of the transportation of the house of the Blessed
Virgin is far more clearly attested than many events in
our own modern history; yet there are people, who would
stake their lives on the truth of those events, who dismiss
the miracle of Loreto with a smile of incredulity.
This picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel would not
interest them. Yet I would advise even such persons to
go and have a look at the beautiful copy of it in St. John
Lateran’s. It is quite small, a half length or less; the
Blessed Mother holds the Child in her arms, and he is
reaching up to whisper in her ear; she listens, with her
heart in her deep sweet eyes, and the “counsel” is stored
up for the children who appeal to her in their perplexities.
There is an exquisite expression of confidence and
familiarity on both the celestial Faces. Our Holy Father
Pius X has such a great devotion to Our Lady of
Good Counsel that, as all Catholics know, he has added
the invocation “Mater Boni Consilii, ora pro nobis,”
to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.
From Genazzano we went on to Palestrina, arriving
there in time to go and watch the sunset from the ruined
terraces of the Temple of Fortune. The place has passed
from hand to hand, used as a fortress at one time and
another since the fourth century before Christ; but to
me its interest never lay in those comparatively modern
developments. It is the story of times lost in the mist
of ages, when those first cyclopean blocks were fitted together
without the aid of cement—when a race, whose
only traces are these mute huge stones that suggest all
and tell nothing, lived and fortified itself on this outpost
of the mountains—that is the story that I want to hear.
There at Palestrina, when the sun was sinking into the
level gold of the sea—forty miles away, but so clear
and calm—I leaned over the stone bulwark, red in the
sunset, hot to my hand (had it not baked in four or five
thousand years of sunshine?), and felt that unearthly
thrill of a revelation palpitatingly near, yet still withheld.
It has come only a few times in my life—once at
Torcello, once among the lost tombs of Etruria, there
at Palestrina, and in the great hall of the unmarked
sepulchre of the last Ming Emperor in Pechilia. That
was modern, indeed, a Seventeenth Century affair, but
the ancient spirit was there—something that brooded
over a lonely, mighty country, unchanged, untampered
with, before the beginnings of history.
At Palestrina—or to give the place its right name,
Præneste—the Emperors were mere upstarts; Camillus,
who took it and made it an appanage of Rome four hundred
years or so before this time—Marius and Sulla,
and the Roman ladies who had summer villas here and
left those amazing “vanity boxes” (such arsenals of cosmetics
and beautifiers as surprise even our modern beauty-artists)
behind them—all these seem vulgar intruders on
that sacredly ancient ground.
For, of all the cities of Romagna, Præneste has, I
think, the most perfect situation. It seems to have grown
out of the wall of the hills to watch over the southern
roads to Rome. Before it the Campagna stretches away
to the sea and to the north, the horizon there brokenly
outlined by the low Volscian and Ciminian Hills. Not so
towards the sea; in the near distance a castle or a single
tower breaks the plain, midway Rome shimmers like a
net of pearls thrown down across the Tiber; but the
West is the empty West always, left to the sun and the
wind, with the wide Heavens above and that one long
sword of light laid on its further bound where the tideless
Mediterranean laps against the shore. To the south,
at an almost direct angle, rise the Alban Hills, near, familiar,
friendly, with their symmetrical volcanic slopes
so restful to the eye; where they sink to the plain farthest
from Palestrina the Appian Way leads on to Naples,
and that is the way most of the world travels; but the
more beautiful road is the one which leads, right past
the foot of the Sabines, through the level valley which
separates them from the Alban range, to Anagni and
Valmontone and Frosinone, following the classic Liris
as it takes an almost straight course through the garden
it has ploughed and watered. Seen from the Campagna,
the Albans seem to be a range running east and west,
thrown up to make a frame and background for Rome;
but travel down the Liris and you will realise that all
we see from Rome, Monte Cavo, and his lesser brethren,
with their scores of white towns, is simply the culmination
of a long branch of the Apeninnes, set up like a screen
between the central range and the fever-haunted seaboard
called Maremma. When about two-thirds of the
distance to Naples is accomplished, the range rises in
the isolated peak of Rocca Monfina to the height of
nearly four thousand feet and becomes merged in the
central Apeninnes once more. The railway runs through
now, but it is still a wild, remote country, very feudal
in its ways, with half-ruined castles on every point of
vantage, scowling down on a land that needs them no
longer, where fighting has ceased, and the good soil that
has had its way for centuries has brought forth those
stores of corn and wine and oil which seem to be South
Italy’s inalienable dower.
From Palestrina, looking down on that September
evening, the bursting richness of it all seemed almost
incredible. Right at the foot of the hills a deep, abandoned
watercourse was a golden river of standing corn,
bordered far on either side with dense greenery fringing
off into vineyards so teeming with fruit that, seen from
above, it was like a great mantle of dark amethyst patterned
here and there, where the white grapes grew, with
jade. The woody slopes of the Sabines sank into the
rich carpet, and rose, away to the north, in stormy outlines,
now softened into dreamy rose and lilac, against
the clear evening sky. As the sun sank, even the cold
silver of the olive trees, standing tier above tier on their
shallow terraces, took on the flush, as if bathed in wine,
and the darker foliage of oak and chestnut burned with
sombre yet vivid intensity. Then the sun touched the sea—lingered,
a ball of living crimson, for an instant, and
plunged out of sight. One star hung its newborn silver
against the paling west; another and another answered
it, till all the dying blue overhead was pierced and patterned
with the faint sparklets in their eternal dance.
Then from behind the wall of peaks a broad fan of misty
silver was thrown up against the sky, growing, spreading,
washing purple and crimson to one untinted sheen; another
moment, and the harvest moon heaved a golden
shoulder over the crags, rolled up, rounded itself, and
hung, a great honey-coloured globe, flooding the hills
and the Campagna and the distant sea with calm, all-embracing
effulgence.
At the time of my first visit to Palestrina I was still
sufficiently attracted by the Middle Ages to find much
romance in the struggles of the Colonnas and their contemporaries,
struggles which dragged the harrow over
the vast Temple of Fortune—reputed the biggest in the
world,—threw its stones one upon another, and left the
place merely a beautiful tomb. Since then, I confess, my
interest has died away. I can feel no sympathy with the
noble cut-throats—Sciarras, Colonnas, Orsinis—whose
deeds are written in blood over every page of the time.
I used to weep over the sufferings they inflicted on Boniface
VIII, but, apart from the outrage on his sacred
office, which can never be condoned, one cannot help
feeling that he deserved something of what he got, and
that, in spite of his high courage and notable intellect,
he had treated those his enemies very basely and cruelly.
His election in 1217 had been bitterly opposed by two
Colonna Cardinals—Giacomo and Pietro—who were
furious at the thought that the Papal chair should be
filled by one of the Gaetonis of Anagni, the hereditary
rivals and enemies of their own family. The election
went through, in spite of them, and they, fearing the new
Pope’s wrath, fled to Palestrina, taking every member
of the family with them. This was an open declaration
of war, and the Pope realised that there would be no peace
for his realm till they were subdued. With truly mediæval
promptitude, he at once confiscated all their estates
and called on all good Christians to take up arms against
them. Their other strongholds fell one by one into his
hands, but Palestrina, with its tremendous defences and
commanding position, resisted every attack of the besiegers.
It seemed impregnable. Then Pope Boniface
remembered that the most victorious and ruthless leader
of the day, Guido de Montefeltro, was down on his knees
in a convent at Ancona, praying to be forgiven some of
his deeds of blood before death should call him to judgment.
He commanded him to leave his retreat and come
to give his advice as to the reduction of Palestrina. Very
unwillingly the old soldier obeyed, and returned to that
world which he had left just in time to save his wicked
soul. He went and looked at the Colonna fortress, examined
the defences with the eye of an expert, and returned
to the Pope, who was at Rieti. He told him
that there was no hope of taking Palestrina by force of
arms. “What, then, am I to do?” cried Boniface. Guido
knew, but was unwilling to say. The Pope insisted on his
giving his opinion, and the crafty old fighter proffered the
counsel for which Dante with some justice put him
in Malebolge—“Prometter lungo e tenere corto!”
“Promise much—fulfil little,” it would run in English.
Boniface instantly acted on the advice. The Colonnas
were promised full forgiveness. They thought it wise
to accept and submit. In all the habiliments of mourning
repentance they issued from the stronghold they were
never to see again, and came in a body to Rieti. The Pope
received them, pronounced their crimes against himself
forgiven, and kept them at Rieti as his guests. But prudence,
as he apprehended it, forbade that he should leave
that eyrie and refuge of rebellion standing for them to
fly to the next time they picked a quarrel with him. So,
while they were sunning themselves in his favour in the
mountain city of the South, he secretly despatched a faithful
friend, Ranieri, the Bishop of Pisa, to wipe Palestrina
off the face of the earth. Nothing was to be spared, except
the Cathedral. And very thoroughly did Ranieri
do his work. Every vestige of the fortress and palace
and the big town which had grown up with them was
destroyed—“a plough was driven over the ruins, the
ground was sown with salt, and even the famous marble
staircase of a hundred steps, up which people could ride
their horses into the palace,” was swept away.
Then the Colonnas, landless, homeless, penniless, understood
how much the Pope’s forgiveness was worth,
and they fled from his domains to nurse their wrongs and
wait for revenge.
That came in good, or rather very evil, time, and
Boniface paid in full during the awful days at Anagni,
days so dreadful that one quarrels with Dante for not
regarding them as sufficient expiation for the harassed
Pontiff’s one great sin. He was driven into a quarrel
with Philippe le Bel, the King of France, and Sciarra
Colonna, the Head of the proscribed House, caught at
the chance and offered his services to the French. In
company with their leader, William de Nogaret, he broke
into Anagni, Boniface’s own city where he had taken
refuge, and, but for the opposition of Nogaret, he would,
apparently, have murdered his great enemy on the
spot.
Here Boniface showed all the valour of his race and
place. He prepared to meet death with the dignity of a
priest and the courage of a soldier. “If I am to die,
I will die like a Pope,” he said. Every friend, every
Cardinal and chaplain and courtier fled as the shout of
“A Colonna, a Colonna!” rose from the lower streets
of the mountain town. Not a soul was left in the palace
but the Pope. He put on his pontifical vestments, placed
the tiara on his head, and mounted his throne, where he
sat like a statue, awaiting certain death. Colonna and
Nogaret, with three hundred steel-clad men at their heels,
clanked into the hall, and stood dumb for a moment at
the sight of their great enemy, who neither spoke nor
moved. Then they rushed upon him and Sciarra Colonna
assailed him with a fiery torrent of abuse, his anger feeding
on itself till it ran through him like a flame, and he
struck the Pontiff on the face with his mailed hand. Nogaret
protested—Boniface said no word. He meant to
suffer for his sins in silence, because so had the Redeemer
suffered for sins not His. They dragged the Pope from
his throne, hustled him out into the Square, all black with
the gaping, cowardly crowd of his own subjects, put him
on a vicious horse with his face to the tail, and led him
with outbursts of derision through the streets. Not a
hand was raised to defend him, not a protest was heard.
Then his conquerors brought him back to his palace and
locked him up, without food or drink, for three miserable
days, during which they sacked not only the palace, but
every house in the town, riding away at last glutted with
plunder, destroying what they could not carry off, and
leaving literally nothing but bare walls behind them.
Then, all danger being past, Boniface’s loving subjects
bethought themselves of letting him out. They found
him fainting from exhaustion, crying like a starved child
for a morsel of bread and a cup of water. The women
wept over him then, and ran to minister to his wants;
not so much as a water-jar had been left in the palace,
and they emptied their bronze concas into a wooden chest.
Boniface died soon after, in Rome, broken-hearted, and
the carnival of anarchy in high places, with its raging
hate and its fury of bloodshed, went on for many a long
year afterwards.
Truly, mediæval history makes depressing reading!
How gladly the mind reverts from it to the dawn of
the centuries, when men fought for their cities and their
wives and children, but not for mere hatred of their kind.
And what a relief it is to turn from the endless carnage
of the later Middle Ages to the history that is not written
in blood and that charms and dominates us still, the
history of strange holy lives every pulse of which was an
act of love to God and mankind. It is but a step from
one to the other—from Boniface VIII and the Colonnas
and the Orsinis to Benedict and Scholastica—from smitten
Palestrina to cloistered Subiaco behind it in the
hills.
On the way thither one stopped for a day in Olevano,
to me the least Italian, the most completely “foreignised”
spot in all that country. It has been for so many
years the haunt of artists of every nationality that it has
none left of its own. Its beauty there is no denying; it
laughs in sunshine and prosperity, and for that, in these
bad times, one is grateful to it. But it is no more Italian
than a fine piece of staging at the Haymarket. The
background is perfect, and the inhabitants are healthy
and handsome, but the moment they see a traveller coming
they throw themselves into paintable attitudes; all
naturalness seems gone; everything and everybody is harnessed
to the service of picturesque utility. The famous
inn, about which Gregorovius and Mr. Hare raved so
enthusiastically, resounds with Northern tongues and with
that ear-splitting affliction known as German Italian. The
walls are a visitors’ book, of untold price, where almost
every notable artist of the last hundred years has left his
signature in sketch or portrait. At every turn you are
tripped up by easels, wet canvases, and artists’ umbrellas,
and in the evening the beer flows freely and the jolly
brotherhood talks about itself at the top of its German
voice, till Italy—our shy, melancholy Italy—fades into
the background, and a weary traveller trying to sleep,
in one of the bedrooms which all open out of the central
dining-room, is led to believe that he has taken the wrong
train and been transported unawares to the scene of a
“Kneipe” in Munich or Dresden.
Talking about “wrong trains” reminds me of an absurd
incident that happened in England. A wayfarer
who had taken a little more than was good for him
wandered into Victoria Station, having quite forgotten
the name of the place he wished to make for. But he
could remember what it was not. Into every train that
came along he climbed—and then asked the guard for
what point it was bound. None of the answers satisfied
him and he tumbled out on the platform again and again,
wailing, “Wrong train! wrong train!” At last, however,
he struck the right one, the guard’s answer to his
query brought back the memory of his domicile, and,
much relieved, he sank down against the cushions and
began to smoke. At the first station on the road a clergyman
got into the compartment, and the train steamed on.
Harder and harder the reverend gentleman stared at his
companion, who showed all too plainly the evidences of
his spree. Pretty soon, just as they were pulling into
another station, the Christian’s conscience bade him admonish
his erring brother.
“My friend,” he began in solemn tones, “do you know
where you are going to?” The overtaken one was all
attention at once, and his monitor went on, “You are going
straight to Hell!”
“Oh, Lord!” moaned the sinner on the opposite seat.
“Wrong train again!” And he sprang out of the carriage
and stood weeping on the platform while his one
chance of getting home sped away from him into the
night.
We were little troubled by railways in the Sabines in
my young days; such innovations had not ever been contemplated,
and all our travelling was done on horses or
mules. It was rather a long ride from Olevano to
Subiaco and I was very tired and stiff when our little
party straggled into the road leading up to the town.
But—what is youth without some impossible romance?
My “romance” had marched that way the year before,
with his company of Zouaves, condemned to garrison
duty for three dreary months in the hills; and this (“parents,
do you think you know your children?”) was the
utterly idiotic motive which had made me drag my three
unsuspecting men to Subiaco! I wanted to pick up a
stone that had been touched by the adored one’s foot!
Very gingerly I climbed down off my weary beast, selected
a fine smooth pebble from the side of the road where I
knew my idol must have passed, and, with much difficulty,
scrambled up again. The pebble was afterwards polished,
cut, and set in Etruscan gold, as a pendant, marked
with a mystic inscription signifying a challenge to fate
to lessen the ardour of my attachment; and when I found
it among my trinkets, long years after my real fate had
found and claimed me, I could have wept for the delicious
rainbow-tinted sorrows of first youth!
But the treasure once secured, and the luxury of tears
reserved for some future unoccupied moment, I gave myself
up to the magic of the consecrated cleft in the hills,
and, in spite of my own profound ignorance in those
days, in spite of the sceptical attitude of my Presbyterian
stepfather and the Anglican Reverendo, and my dear
Marion’s bubbling fun and laughter—for he was a mere
boy then, of the most irrepressible kind—the “Sacro
Speco” made a profound impression on me.
It was as if a door leading out of some gay ballroom,
all lights and flowers and dance music, had suddenly been
opened and I had passed through it from the things of
time to those of eternity. Fifteen hundred years were
wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called from
the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men
to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most
wonderful thing in the lives of the great Founders—they
had not at first the smallest forethought of their
mission. They only knew that they must save their souls
in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew
from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification.
It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most
of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in
the eyes of the world. Our question is, “How much
pleasure and amusement can I get in without actually falling
into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission
we grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors,
that refused would have prevented, or at least delayed,
a hundred falls. It is so terribly easy to do what all the
rest are doing—to go and see the problem play, read
the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the country
house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the
old snares for our destruction and his own! We know
all about it; it has happened so often; but we go ahead,
telling our hearts the lie they know so well: “Oh, it
doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!” Steeped
in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory
awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our
already huge burden and imagine we can lay it down
with a good deathbed confession and slip into Paradise
with the best!
Very different was the point of view of the great Saints.
For one who was converted late in life, we read of scores
to whom Perfection called in the very dawn of reason;
and it is precisely these, who never committed a mortal
sin in their lives, who were most severe with themselves—most
nervous, as we should say—about their final
salvation.
Their sight, never clouded by any consent to evil, saw
even in the most trifling failings a heinous offence against
the Divine Majesty, and Its infinite Purity, visible to
them, made their own fallen nature black by contrast.
So they took that nature in hand, these athletes (called
Benedict, and Francis, and Anthony, and many another
blessed name written in the “Libro d’Oro” of the recording
Angel), and thought a lifetime would not be too
much to give to the task of subduing it. And the Heavenly
Father bade them go on and be of good courage; and
never, till the predestined moment came, did He let them
dream that their years of prayer and fasting were just
a preparation for generalship in His army, that in humbly
striving to save their own souls they were fitting themselves
to save millions and millions of others. The first
symptom one notices about them is their complete disregard
of the natty little idol we call “respectability”—the
Church calls it “human respect.” We quite understand
that great men should kick it out of the way—whoever
heard of Wellington or Kitchener asking, “What
are people going to say?” Their gifts and their calling
place them above the reach of considerations by which
we ordinary mortals are content to regulate our actions.
We admire, rave over, their splendid carelessness. But
when it comes to the Saints we take our shrunken measure,
try to fit it to their conduct, and shake our heads.
Their whole-heartedness is eccentricity, they thought
nothing of inflicting most damaging shocks on public
opinion—what a pity! And if we see any of our acquaintances
beginning to follow in their steps we look
the other way, as if the poor dears had come out into
the street half dressed. I wonder how many of her
friends cared to bow to the late Countess of Denbigh
when, a few years ago, she took Bridget’s place at the
crossing near Farm Street and swept it diligently, and
stretched out her blessed hand for the pennies, and never
thought she was doing anything heroic—just keeping old
Bridget’s crossing for her while she went to Mass! I
believe the very Angels wanted to throw down their shining
mantles for her to walk over when she went to
Heaven—but I am sure some of her friends on earth
thought she was putting them in a most embarrassing
position.
Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in her “Life of Santa
Francesca Romana,” has described very truly and sympathetically
these—to us—puzzling stages in the development
of saintship. They vary in degree, of course,
in each individual case, but the same note runs through
all: “Permission to labour first,—the result far distant,
but clear; the vision of that result when once He had said,
‘Begin and work.’ To tarry patiently for that signal,
to obey it unhesitatingly when once given, is the rule of
the Saints. How marvellous is their instinct! how accordant
their practice! First, the hidden life, the common
life; the silence of the house of Nazareth; the carpenter’s
shop; the marriage-feast, it may be, for some;
and, at last, ‘the hour is come,’ and the true work for
which they are sent into the world has to be done, in the
desert or in the cloister, in the temple or in the market-place,
on Mount Tabor or on Mount Calvary; and the
martyr or the confessor, the founder or the reformer of
a religious order, comes forth, and in an instant, or in a
few years, performs a work at which earth wonders and
angels rejoice.”
CHAPTER IX PEOPLE OF THE HILLS
The Apennines—View from a Peak—Real Hospitality—Polenta—Woods
of Sabina—A Hill Family—The Cook—A Queer Adventure—People
of the South—A Night Festival in the Abruzzi—The Journey—The
Old Organ—Marion Crawford’s Boys—Juvenile Theatricals.
How much our Italy of Rome and Naples owes to
the Apennines! How gratefully should lovers of
romance and history regard that mighty chain that runs,
an inland sea of crag and peak, forest and ravine, between
shore and shore! Physically and morally, it is the backbone
of the country, the fortress of tradition, the nurse
of what our modern cant calls, “Plain living and high
thinking.” Its hard, yet beneficent, climate, with sharp
delimitations of season, its passes so obdurate to the
tainting allurements of railways, its hundreds of sturdy,
self-contained little towns, each with its story of its own
saints and heroes, its ancestry of tradition that laughs at
the flight of centuries—all this has bred a race of men
and women of whom modern Italy knows little, but who
form the residue by which the mixed enfeebled masses of
her cities and plains will in the end be saved. Faith is
strong; morals, though often transgressed, still clear and
commanding. New fads, make-believe religions, free
love and race suicide presented as twin benefits to humanity,
the worship of materialism—all the old crimes
that come dressed up as new virtues—find no foothold
here. The “pale-pink uplift” of these modern shams
would be laughed to scorn by our people of Sabina and
Abruzzi and Ciocciarìa. Their parish priests tramp
round amongst them as friends and mentors. The
“parroco” and the apothecary may be the only persons
in a whole community who can read, but the child of ten
knows the commandments of God and the Church, and
the innovator who attempts to make little of these meets
with a very cold reception. The people have many faults
and many weaknesses, but they are all human ones, and,
frankly, I would rather have to do with the man who has
slain a rival or a sweetheart in a fit of jealous anger than
with a railway magnate or a prophet of the Decadent.
The murderer’s record is probably a good deal cleaner
than theirs.
So my inheritance of Sabina has always been very
precious to me. Many weary years have passed since
I set foot there, but the remembrance of young days spent
in those high rich solitudes comes still as a fresh breeze
across the dusty wastes of the world, and very gladly shall
I return to them before I die. I have travelled so far
and seen such strange and endless varieties of scenery
that I think I have a right to say that there are few
places on earth where nature has done more to rejoice
and strengthen the body and soul of man.
From Rome the Sabines are merely a noble chain of
peaks, culminating in the calm Lion profile of the couchant
“Lionessa,” her face to the north, waiting through
the long blue days of summer for the crown of snow
that the winter lays on her brow. The slopes and spurs
that descend towards the Campagna are smiling enough—as
they should be, turned everlastingly to the sun and
the sea. One must pass beyond all that, climb by rough
and narrow paths to the great tossed heart of the hills,
and stand on some peak like Guadognolo to take in the
amazing grandeur of the Sabines. Even from lower
places—Olevano, for instance—you may look east and
west and south and north, and feel as if you were standing
on an island crag in an ocean of long sapphire billows
rolling away, breaker beyond breaker, into infinity,
a sea that in some moment of surpassing pride raised
its breast too near the sky and froze to stone in that
passion of ambition; and your heart, the heart of the
native-born, tells you that every hollow between the
breakers holds its rivers and lakes smothered in olives
and vines and corn, its walled town and ancient Church,
its old fortified farmhouses, dazzlingly white against the
sun-warmed rock of the mounting ridge—farmhouses
with broad brick loggias garlanded with festoons of scarlet
and orange, the bursting red “pepperoni” as big as
citrons, and strings of flame-coloured maize like golden
spear-heads, all drying in the sun for the winter’s needs.
Stop at one of these houses and ask for hospitality, and
you will find out what the word really means. I have
often thought of it when I was sitting through huge official
dinners where the great ones of the earth were arranging
its destinies over the champagne and truffles—with
the murder of a nation in their hearts. The commanded
smile, and the cold watchful eyes—the men
fencing with words for rapiers, and we women watching
every play of the shrouded steel and pretending to talk
amiable nothings to each other; the gasp of relief at parting,
and the consignment to everlasting perdition of the
adversary, which broke from our worried mate when the
door of the brougham had been clapped to and we could
sink back on the cushions as we rolled away! Then would
return a vision of some halt in the hills at home, of the
dark cavernous kitchen with its freshly sprinkled brick
floor and its bunches of herbs hanging from the high
blackened beams overhead shedding their dry fragrance
on the air, so cool and refreshing on entering from the
burning midday sunshine outside. “Favorisca!” cries
the “Sposa”—she may be eighteen or eighty, but that
is her title from her wedding day forward.—“Condescend
to enter! Let the signori be accommodated!”
The rush-bottomed chairs are set out on the loggia in
the shade, the boys are sent to fetch ice-cool water from
the well, and, as the bucket goes splashing down into the
invisible flood and comes up all diamonds in the sun,
“Sposa” brings out four or five heavy glasses, freshly
rinsed, in the fingers of one hand and a straw-bound
fiaschetta of her own wine in the other. “Vino sincero,
signori miei!” she assures you as she sets it down on
the deal table already spread with the clean cloth that
smells of rosemary. Ay, a “sincere wine,” with no
“dope” in its crimson or topaz depths, and the welcome
is as sincere as the wine. She pours it out, smiling, her
handsome head and rich costume standing out picturesquely
against the dark doorway behind her, within
which one of her girls is kneeling on the bricks, washing
freshly pulled lettuce for your salad in a great copper
bowl, hand-beaten and reflecting the light from every one
of its red-bronze facets. Everything in the kitchen is of
beaten copper; these people would as soon think of cooking
in any other metal as of sleeping in cotton sheets—a
degradation the poorest scorns to put up with.
“Sposa” disappears within the kitchen and one of the
girls comes out to entertain the visitors while the dinner
is cooking. She stands with one hand on the back of a
chair, the other fingering her blue and yellow apron, pink
with shyness, but devoured with curiosity. Every detail
of one’s dress, every bit of jewellery is being taken in—to
be described to all the other girls of the place when
they meet at Church on Sunday—but she answers one’s
questions with a confident smile. How old? Oh, “in
seventeen”—that is, sixteen last birthday. Her name?
Candiduccia, at the Signora’s service! Betrothed! A
pinker flush and an indescribable little movement of
the shoulders, and then down goes her head, while
“Mammà,” whose sharp ears have heard all, replies in
her deep sonorous tones, from among the pots and pans:
“A good youth, but he is getting a bad bargain! This
lazy one has not spun half her linen yet. I had mine
all spun and woven by the time I was fourteen! Here,
thou! come and fetch the plates! The illustrious ones
are hungry!”
Candiduccia dives into the kitchen, and a moment later
your dinner is before you—a big dimpled omelet, trout
from the stream fried in olive oil, and crisp salad in a
big majolica bowl. Sposa cuts the fresh rough bread—first
making the sign of the Cross over the loaf—and
serves you cream cheese, made from goat’s milk, instead
of butter. Butter and cow’s milk do not enter into the
Sabina bill of fare; our mountain people do not care
about these things, but it is a feast for the gods, all the
same.
When the time comes to go, you give Sposa what you
think right, and she takes it rather unwillingly, but very
gratefully, and as you ride away she and her girls stand
at the door and wave their hands and say, “La Madonna
v’accompagni”; and the boys, young rascals, will race
your horses to the foot of the hill or the turn in the road,
knowing well that you will give them a few coppers for
their very own as soon as you are out of sight of
“Mammà,” who, you may be sure, will never hear of
the transaction.
If one is an invited guest at some important farmhouse,
an elaborate feast is prepared, and there are heart-burnings
if the guests do not eat heartily of everything.
I remember once going with the Cavalettis to the “bene”
of one of their tenants, for dinner—a really mediæval
repast which staggered even my robust young appetite.
It began with the “polentata,” a curious first course
which is de rigueur in Sabina when guests of honour are
being entertained. The chief table was already set out
with a dozen kinds of fresh and dried fruits, “alicetti”
(the tiny local sardines), smoked ham, and home-made
liqueurs, all intended to stimulate the appetite. But before
sitting down to that we were led to a small pinewood
table at one side of the room and requested to take
our seats around it. Then the mistress of the house advanced
with a huge cauldron of polenta, which, to my
consternation, she poured out on the freshly scrubbed
table-top, so deftly that it exactly covered the entire
surface. I stared, wondering what was to happen next;
but my companions took no notice of me, and the
Marchese, whom his peasants adored—as did everybody
else who knew him—leant back in his chair and discussed
the condition of the game in the woods with “Sor
Giacomo,” while the wife, a piece of new string in her
hands, watched the polenta cool and fix to about the consistency
of cream cheese. Then, suddenly leaning over
my shoulder, she cut it swiftly across and across with the
string in symmetrical divisions nearly a foot square, one
for each person, solemnly handed us each a spoon, and,
bowing gracefully, begged us to eat!
It was a searching preparation for a hearty meal!
On another occasion we were invited to dinner at the
house of a country notable many miles away, but still
connected with the Cavaletti domains. It was early autumn,
and we had an enchanting ride in the bright cool
morning through the deep woods, where the chestnut
burrs came padding down on the moss with soft thuds as
we passed, and here and there some delicate ash or birch
was already flaming into orange with the first touch of
the frost. They looked like torches alight in the forest.
They are so deep and green, those woods of Sabina, rich
with oak and chestnut, elm and beech, a fairyland of moss
and fern below, a world of sun and shadow above! The
flowers are very delicate, too, harebells like thin amethyst,
and the dainty wild pansy that lifts her little startled head
like a Louis XV beauty who has lost her way; and there
are stars of Bethlehem, growing always apart and lonely,
five white petals with a touch of greenish gold for a
heart, swinging in the breeze on a long translucent stem;
and wild strawberries—snowy flower and crimson berry
springing side by side among the broad trefoil leaves;
and wild garlic, a mass of spotless bloom, and magic elder
with great posies of perfumed level rime; and fern so
tall that one could lose oneself in it, seeking for the
threaded turquoise of forget-me-nots that grow beneath;
and thousands more, fragile, exquisite things blooming in
the deep peace of the undergrowth, while far overhead
the strong tree-tops laugh in the wind and take all the sun.
I remember how sorry I was when we left the woods
behind that day and reached a tiny walled town with, of
course, a Church, a piazza, a fountain, and one big house
standing aggressively square to the street, a typical Italian
house with as many windows as could possibly be put
into it, all green-shuttered, and most of them balconied.
That was all I saw, for as we drew rein at the entrance
we were surrounded by the whole family, all grown-up
men and women, who lifted us girls down from our saddles,
took possession of all our belongings, and all but
carried us up to a big cool room on the first floor, with
many expressions of sympathy for our supposed fatigue
after the long ride. I believe they thought us rather daring
for venturing ourselves on the shaggy mountain ponies
at all, for few Italian women in the country ever mount
anything more frisky than a tried and sober donkey.
Having settled us on the “canapé”—a very large
sofa covered with green and scarlet checks—and provided
us with rosolio and cakes to keep us good, all the
ladies disappeared together. The men were buzzing
around the Marchese, who, like the lover of horses he
was, insisted on seeing the animals housed and fed; then a
kind of electric thrill ran through the house, the Signora
and her daughters came to fetch us from the salone, and
everybody moved towards the dining-room. I was a little
surprised to see so few seats at the table, which was
covered with every kind of dainty and very prettily arranged;
but the matter was explained when it became
evident that the ladies of the family were to wait upon
us and their own men in approved feudal fashion. I say
“ladies” advisedly, for these were people as far removed
from the peasant class as they considered themselves from
that of the Marchese. They had never worn the costume
of the contadine; they belonged to the great respectable
middle class, from which most of the professions are supplied;
both men and women spoke without a trace of dialect,
and their manners were perfect—but then, thank
Heaven, Italy is the natural home of good manners! I
shall never forget the gentle, unobtrusive sweetness of
those women, as they moved about in perfect silence, in
their black Sunday frocks and little bits of ancient jewellery,
attending to all our wants so carefully and deftly, but
refusing to take any part in the conversation. That was
not what was expected of them!
The long elaborate feast had gone from “ante-pasto”
and vermouth right through to the sweets; my girl friend
and I looked at each other questioningly. We were growing
fidgetty and wondered who was to give the signal to
rise, since we were the only women at the table—when,
to our dismay and despair, the whole meal began all over
again! Course after course, in regular sequence, we had
to sit it through and pretend to taste the new varieties of
fish, flesh, and fowl which came in a steady stream from
the kitchen. It was like some crazy dream! I think we
had sat at that table nearly four hours before we were
invited to take our coffee in the salone. The sun was sinking
then, and, to our intense relief, the Marchese announced
that we must be moving or we should not reach
home that night. The farewells were elaborate, and our
gratitude for all the trouble the dear people had taken
was very real; they packed a whole hamper of ancient
Roman dainties for us to take along lest we should faint
by the way; but our joy when we got into the open air,
with our faces towards home, was inexpressible. As we
entered the woods—less alluring in the dusk than in the
fresh morning hours—a shadowy fourth joined our
party, a smiling little man on a very small donkey. In
two minutes the Marchese had made friends with him
and called out to us in English: “Girls, think up some
compliments! This is the man who cooked the dinner.
They sent twenty miles for him—and he wants to know
if you liked it!”
A woman noted for the charm and variety of her entertainments
once said to me: “I do try to give respectable
parties, but somehow they always turn into school feasts!”
I am afraid the same kind of thing happens to me in
regard to serious subjects. With the best intentions in
the world I start to tell the story of some great person
who has kindled my admiration—and in the middle of
the tale the sun strikes on my page—a child laughs across
the street—or some old refrain comes lilting to my ears,
and farewell to the historic train of thought! My hero
or saint recedes into the shadows and relinquishes the canvas
to a thousand amiable little sprites of memory, who
hold it till they have frisked through the very last step
of their dance!
I do not know why, on this sunny July morning, there
should rise before me a picture of a dark old house in
the steep street of a Sabina town, where we drew rein
after a long day’s ride to ask for rooms. The night was
falling, there was no inn in the place, and somebody had
told us that perhaps the people here would take us in.
Our party was that with which I left Castel Gandolfo
some chapters ago—my stepfather, Marion, and the
Hon. and Rev. G—— C——, who had already several
times saved my life by stopping my runaway steed,
a wall-eyed old crock given to me because he looked so
reassuringly tame. He was quiet enough at that moment;
we were both stiff and tired; and I slid to the ground,
resolved not to go a step further, whatever the people
of the house should say. The padrona came down and
looked us over critically. Yes, she could take in the gentlemen
if they would all sleep in one room, but it was
impossible to receive the signorina—there was really
nowhere to put her! I replied by walking into the house,
and sitting down on the first chair I could find, and defying
her to turn me out. She stood and looked at me,
considering. “Well,” she said at last, “there is a room—it
belongs to my little boy—perhaps he will not come
home to-night. Yes, you may sleep there, Poverina! I
see you are tired out.”
She led me down a long twisting passage and threw
open a door, holding the brass “lucerna” high to light
me in. I saw a bed and a chair, and what I took to be
a highly variegated wallpaper. “It will do beautifully,”
I said. “Tell the gentlemen that I don’t want any supper—I
am going straight to bed!”
“Buon riposo, bella mia!” (A good rest, my beautiful!)
she replied, and shutting the door tramped away
till her footsteps were lost in the distance. Then I looked
round. “What a funny room for a little boy!” I thought.
Guns and hunting knives hung on racks all about, and what
I had thought was wallpaper turned out to be a gigantic
collection of the pictures off the French match-boxes,
which had just begun to find their way into our part of
the world, and which were not admitted into our house
because they were so improper. The little boy had covered
the walls with them from top to bottom! Well,
it was none of my business, and I prepared to lie down
and forget them, but when I went to lock the door I found
that it had no key and would hardly close at all. Fatigue,
however, got the better of nervousness—it was a respectable
house, after all.
I was almost ready to get into bed, when a heavy step
came along the passage, accompanied by the cheerful
whistling of an old opera air. I sprang up, too late to
prevent the door being thrown wide open—and found
myself staring at a tall young man in town clothes and
a red tie, who jumped back as if he had been shot. I
screamed—he swore—and then we both broke into
peals of laughter. As soon as he could get his breath
he apologised abjectly for the intrusion—“Mammà”
had not told him about any guests—I was a thousand
times welcome to his room—and would I permit him
to look for some necessary articles before he relieved
me of the inconvenience of his presence? I tried to bow
with proper dignity, sitting on the edge of the bed with
a cloak around me, and he scuttled about, dived into various
drawers for garments, tobacco, matches, and took
his leave with careful courtesy, never having even glanced
in my direction after the first startling encounter. The
country dandy was quite as much of a “blue-rose” as the
Austrian Prince who earned his name among the girls in
Rome—but that paladin belongs to another story.
As one travels southward the character of the people
changes, and in the later years of my life I have felt
more at home with my fellow-beings of the South than
with the inhabitants of Romagna. Their outlook is simpler,
more indulgent, and their religious faith far more
fervent. I think the southern custom of going on pilgrimages
was a very valuable one to the contadini of the
“Regno.” It used to be rare to find middle-aged people
of the labouring class in the province, who had not travelled
a little in that way and thus learnt that the world
was not confined to their own small town or hamlet. I
suppose the good custom will die out in time, like so many
others, but it will not suffer much diminution while such
wonderful new centres of attraction spring up as, for instance,
the “Santuario” of New Pompeii, which I described
in a former book.[11] But many an unforgotten
shrine in the more remote hills has, like La Mentorana in
the Sabines, its one day or night of glory in the year,
when the peasants come in great bands, even from far
away, and the chants and litanies go up all night long in
and around some dim old Church. Such a festival takes
place at San Salvatore in the Abruzzi, in the late summer,
and is the scene of a great gathering of the people
of the Penisola Sarrcutina.
A night expedition is always alluring; and, besides, I
had wanted to see this particular festa for years, so
I took one of the servants with me—a broad-shouldered
woman of the people, strong enough to carry me if need
be—and we set out, in a carrozzella, on a moonless night
towards nine o’clock. Very soon we had left Sorrento
and its lights behind and were climbing by steep narrow
roads into the wild mountains that cluster round Monte
Sant’ Angelo. The chain of the Abruzzi that runs out
into the sea as the backbone of the Penisola rises sharp
and high from the rounded cup of the Piano di Sorrento,
and, elsewhere, gives way but little on either side to the
needs of men. From the “Piano” and the narrowing
strip of level land, the cliffs facing the north plunge clear
into the water which has worn them into huge caves,
each with its tiny cove of sand, divided from one another
by great outstanding buttresses of rock. As soon
as one turns inland one is lost in the twisting defiles that
scar the mountains through and through; and the deep
old roads, narrow and steep, crawl up away from the regions
of vines and olives till they reach wild, empty highlands,
where only the hardiest shrubs and flowers will
grow. It is an impressive experience to travel through
these forgotten roads on a starlit night, further and
further from the sound of the sea and the haunts of men.
The loneliness is enormous, earth recedes from sight, and
one is conscious of very little except that unfathomable
sky overhead, dripping and sprayed with live silver to its
furthest faintest depths, while some gorgeous planet of
our own system wheels its way between crag and crag as
one moves along. Broom and wild rosemary reach out
from the wall of rock to brush your face; a tang of bitter
sweetness, clear as an exclamation, fills your nostrils for
an instant, and you know that you are passing a clump
of immortelles hidden in a cleft you cannot see. And
then the wild power of it all goes to your head; you are
not a modern mortal with a thousand anchors fastening
you to the scrap heap of the workaday world, but a new-born
princess of romance, travelling through the hills of
fairyland to take possession of your unknown, enormous
castle; its thousand windows are glowing gold beyond that
last peak, all lighted up for your reception; in its deep
courts and airy bowers invisible subjects will minister to
your wants. In a high tower looking south all the great
books in the world are waiting to be read; there is a
terrace a hundred feet from the ground, perfumed and
trellised, where you can watch the stars; and not a single
creature in the whole world will ever find the way to the
castle!
“Quì si và a piedi, ‘cellenza!” said Maria, climbing
down from her seat. The little carriage could go no
further, and I returned suddenly to earth and meekly followed
her example. The sound of voices and footsteps
began to fill the air, and we came on shadowy groups
resting by the wayside, pilgrims who had come from far
on foot. Then at a sudden turn we were in the piazza,
and all outer things, sky and stars and peaks, were swallowed
up in blackness, for the piazza was one blaze of
orange light, from hundreds of torches, burning luridly
and outlining the dark façade of the Church with red-gold
gleams that rose and sank like dancing waters; turning
a face here, a costume there, to unearthly brightness and
then leaping away in tall tongues of fire, to be lost in the
mist of smoke overhead. The crowd was so thick that
we could scarcely reach the Church, from the open doors
of which a flood of broad yellow radiance streamed out
over the heads of the pilgrims who knelt in serried ranks
on the portico, all faces turned to the interior, whence
streamed that soft illumination. When we stood on the
threshold I saw that it came from the High Altar, which
seemed to be floating in a vast “mandorla” of light.
Hundreds and hundreds of wax candles, each a tongue of
steady golden flame, surrounded the Tabernacle and
reached, in an oval of fire, almost to the roof. The walls
of the Church were covered with white draperies, to which
were fastened wreaths and garlands and single sprays of
flowers, a delicate ornamentation as old as ancient Rome
and always used in the Penisola; and every pilaster was
panelled from top to bottom with crimson damask
trimmed with gold—those precious strips of drapery
which the well-to-do families hoard from generation to
generation and lend to the different Churches as required.
From door to Altar rails the Church was packed with
kneeling worshippers, and a great hush prevailed, for
midnight had struck and Mass was about to begin.
My companion, threading her way with coaxing apologies,
pulled me along till she found a place where we
could both kneel by a pillar at the top of the Church, and
just as we had settled ourselves a sweet-voiced old organ,
high up in an invisible gallery, sent out the first notes
of the chant, filling the little ancient building with a
flood of music—not the usual gay tunes that Italians
love to hear in Church, but solemn thrilling airs from
some old Mass that I had never heard before. The singers
had been brought from far, and the voices were of
the best, which is saying a great deal in South Italy, where
everybody is born with “a harp in his throat.” Somehow
it was one of the most beautiful services I ever attended.
The absorbed devotion of the people, the reverent manner
of the Celebrant and his assistants, the full-throated
responses that were taken up by the kneeling crowd outside,
where every sound was hushed the moment Mass
began—it was the very essence of whole-hearted, loving
worship.
A number of persons went to Communion; there was
a rousing sermon, and then came much jollification in
the piazza, crammed with little booths that looked like
altars of flame themselves, the wildly flaring torches lighting
up strange wares—long rosaries of yellow nuts that
swung in the wind, artificial roses set in a whirl of spun
glass, each with its pin to stick into hat or braids of hair,
holy pictures in the crude reds and blues that the people
love, sweetmeats and honey-cakes and fruit. Outside and
everywhere beyond, the blackness of night, and on that
tiny plateau of the rocks a little whirlpool of life and
fire.
We crept away, I and my Maria, and after some
trouble found our carrozzella and its driver, and started
for home just as the darkness thinned before the dawn.
It was cold enough in the mountain roads then, and I
was glad to reach the lower levels and the hospitable
gate of the villa by the sea.
I think it was in that same year that my brother’s two
boys, enthusiastically aided by all the sailors, invented
a kind of switchback railway which really carried passengers!
They got four or five little trucks built—without
saying a word to any of us—and, coupling them together,
started at the outer gate of the villa and raced down
the long paved incline which led, between walls covered
with stephanotis and jessamine, to the round garden in
front of the house. Here the encircling walk was also
paved, and the impetus of the downward rush carried
the train once or twice round the whole space, after
which Luigi and Antonio submissively dragged it all the
way to the front gate again. There was quite an excitement
in whirling round the corners, and for some
days every member of the family had to get into the
cars and be carried along, an occasional upset only adding
to the delight of the experience, as far as Harold and
Bertie were concerned. Then they built a “ristorante”
at one point, and installed their sisters to dispense lemonade
and bonbons to the weary travellers, who were
supposed to have come from an immense distance. Of
course the travellers had to pay—such an undertaking
costs money! Then, as the autumn days drew in, there
were night excursions, when the train, with headlights on,
came roaring down the garden to a great accompaniment
of hoots and whistles, quite an alarming thing to meet if
one were taking a stroll in the twilight.
The “ferro-via” was a great success, but the owners
of the line panted for more public recognition. We elders
did not care to risk ourselves in the trucks after dark,
and for two or three evenings, as we sat over our tea
in the drawing-room, we wondered rather at the steady
persistence with which the train rushed backwards and
forwards outside. The boys were unusually silent about
their exploits now, but from their bright eyes and their
sisters’ obstinate refusal to answer questions, we could not
help fancying that some kind of mischief was afoot. Then
one evening, just before dinner, Bonifazio came into the
drawing-room, looking very scared.
“Signora mia,” he exclaimed to my sister-in-law, “do
you know what the Signorini are doing? The entire
town is gathered in the piazzale outside the gate, and the
young gentlemen are taking all the passengers the cars
will hold, twice round the garden—for two sous the
trip! And the young ladies are actually selling refreshments
to these contadini! For the love of Heaven, let the
Signora stop this scandal! The people are fighting to
get into the cars!”
It would be interesting to know what is really going
on in children’s minds—those fairy plans which they
weave steadily through lessons and play and would rather
die than confide to their elders! I remember a surprise
that my small brother and sister sprung upon the family
before I was married—a scheme all worked and irrevocably
launched before accident revealed it to any of the
grown-ups in the house. Daisy was about nine years old,
and Arthur, her submissive slave, just over seven. It
was the height of the winter season, and there was the
usual rush of engagements for weeks ahead, when at some
afternoon reception a friend of my mother’s said to her:
“We are so glad next Thursday is free! We shall be
so much interested to see your children’s play!”
“My children’s play? There must be some mistake,”
my mother replied. “I have not issued any invitations
for theatricals!”
“Your little people have,” the lady retorted. “Look
at this!”
And she produced a card on which was written in a
nice round hand: “Miss Terry and Master Arthur Terry
request the pleasure of Mrs. ——’s company on Thursday
next at nine o’clock. (Theatrakulls.)”
My mother’s feelings were not to be described!
Within ten minutes three or four other people smilingly
informed her that they, too, had been invited and certainly
meant to come. There was nothing for it but to
go straight home and find out what the little monkeys
had committed us to. On being sternly questioned,
Daisy, with the imperturbable calmness that distinguished
her even then, produced a list of some two hundred names,
culled from Mamma’s visiting book, and said: “These
are the people we have asked. We chose the ones we
liked, of course. I have composed the play and it will
be most interesting. Arthur is in love with me, Sofia is
my rival—I have one or two other children in it, but
they are rather stupid, so I shall have to do most of
the acting myself. Don’t worry me, please—you have
nothing to do but order the supper and send for the
chairs!”
Of course we submitted. Everything had been done
in order; Daisy (Arthur could not write well enough as
yet) must have devoted her playtime, for days, to writing
out the invitations, which the servants had carried to
their addresses, never doubting but that the Signora’s
authorisation had been obtained. We were not allowed
to see the last rehearsals even, the drop-curtain of the
little theatre in the ballroom being jealously closed while
they went on. I tried to get taken on as manager—no
use! “I know exactly what I am about,” said my small
sister. “I haven’t watched you grown-ups all these years
for nothing! It’s going to be a great success!”
Which it certainly was! Daisy’s speeches were a little
long, because some of the others forgot their parts
and she had to bridge their silences by expressing their
sentiments for them. “I know what you would say, dear
friend—your heart is true, but you fear the vengeance
of the Marquis! Oh, I understand!” And so on.
Then, at the critical moment of the love scene, Arthur
got stage-fright, and the Marquise, who was naturally
taller than her adorer, stooped towards him and energetically
whispered, “Go down on your knees and kiss
my hand this minute, stupid!” at which a roar of merriment
swept through the room, to end in a storm of
applause as the small boy, dropping on one knee, gave
the hand a smacking kiss and exclaimed ardently, “My
Angel!”
Oh, yes, it was a great success! The little Marquise
was a born actress, and carried it all off so well that
the guests declared they had never enjoyed an evening
so much. But we “grown-ups” had passed some anxious
moments; and when it was all over and the triumphant
performers had had all the applause, as well as all
the cake and goodies they wanted, we extracted a sleepy
promise that we should be at least warned the next time
they asked the town to a play!
CHAPTER X A STORY OF VENICE
A Follower of the Condottieri—The Raw Recruit—Division of the Dukedom
of Milan—Carmagnola’s Turn—Growth in Wealth and Power—Disaffection—Venice
Acquires His Services—War with Milan—A
Leisurely Campaign—Carmagnola at the Height of His Glory—Fortune
Turns Against the Venetians—Stirrings of Suspicion—Reception
in Venice—The Senate Chamber—Growing Dusk—The Attack—End
of His Part in the World—Another Story of the North—St.
Raniero, the Patron of Pisa—The Power of Temperance.
Here is a story of Venice. In the early part of
the Fifteenth Century a Northern soldier, riding
home through the sweet-smelling summer twilight, dreaming
in all probability of some dusky-eyed maiden of the
border states, stopped by the side of a field to look
about him for a shelter for the night. That he would
be welcome at any inn, he was sure, for he was returning
from the wars to spend his not very hard-earned prize
money, of which his saddlebags were full.
One can imagine him, pushing back his helmet and
regarding the fair countryside with the appreciative eye
of the professional marauder, smacking his dusty lips at
the thought of the weeks of hilarious wickedness that
his loot would buy for him. The picture is not overdrawn,
I can assure the reader, for they were little more
than wild beasts, those followers of the great Condottieri,
brought under an iron discipline, the yoke of which
they were willing to bear, for a time, in return for the
ample pay and the opportunities, which their service afforded
them, of sacking unoffending towns and robbing
and spearing harmless and unarmed citizens and ravishing
their wives and daughters. Here and there, stray
flowers in those acres of weeds, a fairly decent character
appeared among them, but, from such accounts as can
be found, these latter never seem to have stayed long
in their ranks.
As it has been said, the rival bands that infested Italy
and Southern France in those merry days never made any
serious attempt to injure each other, unless driven to such
unpleasant measures by the sternest necessity—or, to be
sure, unless some particularly rich bit of loot was between
them. As a general thing, though, they do not
seem to have displayed even the common courage of the
wolf. The longer a campaign could be dragged out the
better for all concerned, was their motto, and they lived
up to it, even to the point of punctiliously letting loose
all the prisoners they took from each other after every
engagement. A safer and more care-free life than theirs
would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine. The people
who hired them were, of course, utterly unable to cope
with their enemies—with their enemies’ bravos, that is
to say—by themselves, and were as completely helpless
against their own servants; it was altogether an ideal
state of things.
To return to our trooper, breathing his horse and,
probably, smacking his lips over the prospect of the
cheer with which his blood-spotted loot would provide
him for the next month or so. Looking around in the
early dusk, he noticed a boy, working desultorily in the
fields, and, while his horse rested, he studied him. There
was something in the way in which he carried his head,
and the set of his chin and jaw, which sounded a sympathetic
echo in the trooper’s breast. This was no common
peasant, he told himself, and called out to the boy
to come over and speak to him. Nothing loath, the youth
obeyed, and the upshot of this conversation was that the
boy elected to take the trooper’s advice and follow him.
The trooper, one imagines, must have been in the service
of Facino Cane, a grizzled, deaf old soldier with a
high reputation, as reputations went in those days, and
it did not take the new recruit long to show his worth.
Even when he was still young, Cane seems to have recognised
in him an equal if not a superior and refused flatly
to promote him, swearing that, if he was given one step,
he would take all the rest for himself.
Francesco Bussone, better known as Carmagnola, retired
into himself, and bided his time. Cane was great,
and with Cane there was always profitable employment
in plenty. So he decided to remain where he was; but,
if Facino Cane continued to behave as he had been doing
of late, it was not likely that he would last for very long,
and in the happy and quite possible event of his being
assassinated before long, Carmagnola would take his
place. There would be no one, he felt sure, who would
wish to oppose him, and, if there were, he thought he
knew how to overcome their opposition. Cane had a
splendid force under him—and they would need a
leader, to be of any use to themselves. They would
choose him for themselves. One can almost hear him
saying to himself, as he leaves the chief’s presence and
looks back at the door: “Eh! chì va piano va sano—chì
va sano va lontano!” (“Who goes slowly, goes
safely—who goes safely, goes far!”)
Cane, for his part, was neither going slowly nor safely.
Giovanni, Duke of Milan, had but recently died. He
had been as good a soldier as any Condottiere that ever
drew sword and he had held his Dukedom together with
his own good right arm. But now, in the hands of his
eldest son, Gian Maria, the inheritance was falling to
pieces. Gian Maria was a degenerate—a lunatic—it
is even said that he fed his hounds with human flesh; and,
in a very short time, the cities of the Dukedom—Piacenza,
Parma, Cremona, Lodi—revolted, and the
several Condottieri, who had formerly served Giovanni,
seized the opportunity of realising their ambition, which
was to become independent rulers themselves. There
was no great difficulty about this, once a division of the
spoil was agreed upon, for each had a small army at
his back and the ability to use it. The inhabitants, helpless
in the face of trained fighters, put forward no opposition,
so that, in six months or less, six or seven Dukes
existed where only one had existed before.
Cane seized upon Pavia, the younger son’s portion,
and kept the heir a prisoner in his own court. Not long
afterwards he dethroned the elder son, and, it is to be
supposed, arranged his end for him at the hands of the
Milanese. He, himself, died in Pavia within a day of
the Duke’s assassination. No remark is made by historians
on the subject of his death save that he died, but
where the character of his ducal prisoner is considered
and the excellent reasons he had for wishing his gaoler
dead are taken into account, the latter’s end may, I think,
be safely laid at Filippo Maria’s door.
So that, in the end, Carmagnola was right in his determination
to wait upon events. Now his turn came. The
soldiers were left leaderless, and Carmagnola seized the
captainship instantly—at the age of twenty-two—while
Filippo Maria as instantly married Cane’s widow, in
order to get the old soldier’s estates, and, these being secured,
brought a false accusation against her and had her
executed.
This worthy couple then joined hands, to recover the
lost cities, and Carmagnola began to show something of
his quality. He recaptured Milan, killing the usurper,
and, one by one, brought back the other cities to his
employer, as a reward for which he was made Count of
Castelmuro and married to a daughter of Giovanni Galleazzo,
one Antonia.
It seemed as though Fortunatus’ purse had been emptied
over him, in the years that followed; wealth, honour,
position all were his, and so rich and powerful did he
become that he was even permitted to invest in the bonded
debt of Venice.
He must have grown careless, after a while, for his
enemies—and they were numbered by the score—continued
to get the Duke’s ear and to poison his mind.
They probably used Carmagnola’s popularity with his
men as an instrument, and played upon Filippo’s morbid
pride and his unhealthy nerves, until he saw in his great
general a Frankenstein of his own creation, which, if
it were not itself destroyed, would presently destroy him.
One cannot think that Carmagnola was anything but
careless, for when Philip demanded some of his bodyguard
from him for a special purpose he protested with
honest vigour against this taking of a weapon from one
who knew how to use it and handing it to one who did
not. Getting no reply, he became impatient, and sought
one in person, by forcing his way into Philip’s presence,
but he was stopped at the gate and then his temper left
him.
His remarks were few and incisive, his opinions of
the courtiers about Philip’s person plain as the tower
at which he shouted them, and he wound up with an open
threat directed at both. That done, he turned and rode
off with his half-dozen attendants, and one brave gentleman
who had ridden out to pursue him was so terrified
at the sight of him, as he galloped across the marshy
fields, his head on his chest, rage like an embodied spirit
beside him, that he thought better of his intention and
made back into the safe shelter of Abbiti. Carmagnola
pursued his way without pausing until he came to the
Court of Amadeus of Savoy, who was his own liege lord,
and here he immediately offered his services, explaining
at the same time what had just happened to him.
Filippo, in the meanwhile, confiscated his estates and
seized his wife and daughter as hostages. That Antonia
was his own sister—or, at least, had always passed as
such—made not the slightest difference to the scoundrelly
Filippo, and Carmagnola does not seem to have
so much as troubled his head about the women.
Yet, for some reason, he seems to have excused Filippo’s
conduct—openly, at least—and to have placed
the blame where most of it belonged—on his surroundings.
Then, casually, as though the idea had only just
occurred to him, he spoke of various and choice pieces
of territory, whose ownership, though nominally Filippo’s,
was, he averred, doubtful.
To his disappointment, Amadeus refused to be drawn
into the affair, and Carmagnola presently set off for Venice,
always a safe resort for warriors of any quality.
He arrived at an auspicious moment, for Venice was
hesitating as to the worth-whileness of an alliance which
had been proposed to her by Florence for the purpose
of attacking Carmagnola’s late master, Filippo of
Milan.
The Venetians, living as they did, in an almost continuous
state of war with one or other of their neighbours,
were only too glad of the opportunity of gaining
the services of the famous free-lance and gave him the
command of their land army, within a very few weeks
of his arrival—Foscari, the Procurator of St. Mark,
in the meantime, pushing forward the alliance with Florence,
in season and out of season. In this he was opposed
by Mocenigo, the Doge, who, in spite of his eighty
years, and even on his deathbed, in the presence of senators
and ministers, uttered a solemn and prophetic warning
against the war. He must have been a truly wonderful
old man, for in that farewell speech of his, delivered
from the edge of the grave, he gave a complete and
accurate account of the State’s finances, and of its employés’,
down to the ship’s caulkers and the manufacturers
of fustian, besides remembering the number of gentlemen
with incomes between seven hundred and four thousand
ducats. At the end of it, he told his hearers that, if
they rejected his advice and quarrelled with Milan, in
a very short while they would find themselves under the
heel of a military despotism which would take the very
coats from their backs—all of which presently came to
pass. Finally he warned them against Foscari, whose
election to the Dogeship some of them, as he knew,
favoured.
But his warnings were in vain, for Foscari was elected
over Loredano, in a conclave the account of which is
curiously like that of a political convention of to-day—the
holding of a number of votes in reserve, the speeches
on both sides, the trick by which Foscari irritated his
noble old opponent into losing his temper and abusing
his adversaries. There is nothing new, of course, under
the sun, but it gives one a queer thrill when one comes
upon things like these.
Soon afterwards, Carmagnola was offered the command
already referred to, and Filippo, on hearing the
news, made an attempt to have his old comrade poisoned,
but the agents were caught and executed after having been
thoroughly and soundly tortured.
There followed visits and embassies from Milan and
Florence—the Milanese gay, careless, assured; the Florentines
grave and soberly clad, leaving no stone unturned,
no mine of favour unworked. Carmagnola stalked
through the Milanese Masque, like a shadow through a
field of poppies, and when the Senators, torn between the
pleadings of the Florentine Ambassador and the easy,
somewhat scornful reply of the Milanese envoy, hesitated,
the Condottiere, enraged by the attempt just made upon
his life, presented his side of the case, pointing out that
Filippo’s apparent strength was only the result of his,
Carmagnola’s, victories, and that of his own he had none
at all, and openly proclaiming his hatred and scorn, both
of the Duke and his soldiers.
That settled the matter, and the league with Florence,
which presently embraced Ferrara, Mantua, the Sienese,
Amadeus VIII of Savoy, and King Alphonso of Naples,
was formed.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discover
the true character of Carmagnola at this time of day.
Some speak of him as being a double-faced villain, some—Sismondi,
for instance—as of a demigod. Great he
was, talented in many directions, and all but invincible;
like others, he may have had several sides to his nature,
and each of these, as it met for the moment the sun of
events, may have represented the whole man for the time
being.
The Duke of Milan now began to feel the weight of
the hand he had turned against himself, although, at the
outset of the war, Carmagnola does not appear to have
exerted himself greatly. Brescia fell—whether to the
Florentine commander or to the Venetian, is a matter of
opinion. Probably the Florentine siege works and the
effect of Carmagnola’s reputation were equally responsible—and
the Duke ceded the conquest on the 30th of
December; not, however, before he had made an attempt
to burn down the Venetian arsenal and another of his
several agents had been caught by the Venetians and carefully
tortured to death.
Carmagnola, from all accounts, seems still to have
been divided between the desire of earning his pay from
the Venetians and an unwillingness, even now and in spite
of everything, to push his old employer more than was
necessary to accomplish the ends he had in mind. This
was difficult, for the Venetians, having paid like the hard-headed
merchants they were, wanted plenty of blood and
destruction for their money, and the amicable habit which
time and practice had crystallised into a precedent, of
returning prisoners after an engagement, in order to keep
the good work going on, was not at all to their minds.
It was not long before Filippo began to tire of the
almost monotonous series of defeats which overtook his
leaders, and, though breathing fire against Carmagnola,
and complaining bitterly of what he was pleased to call
the “bad faith” of the poor Florentines (whom he had
been bullying so heartily and for so long), he was forced
to sue for the good offices of Pope Martin V, who, although
none too pleased at being dragged into such company,
yet helped him, for the sake of the smudged name
he bore.
Of course such a peace could not last for any length
of time. No one of the parties to it trusted any of the
others in the slightest, and Venice had, so far, swallowed
up all the profits of the campaign which included Brescia
and all its castles and territory up to the Lago di Garda,
and a portion of Cremona besides.
This peace was concluded on the 30th of December,
1426, and Carmagnola went into winter quarters, under
the admiring eyes of his temporary fellow-citizens.
His family had contrived to join him, by now, and the
time passed pleasantly away for the grizzled and somewhat
war-worn captain. He had punished Filippo, and
had besides secured what promised to be the most
profitable employment upon which he had ever entered.
He knew the Visconti; he must have been quite sure that
Filippo had no intention of giving up the struggle as
tamely as that, and when it recommenced he would, he
imagined, be able to dictate the terms under which he
could condescend to serve.
He was right in both conjectures. No sooner was the
peace signed than Filippo turned his energies to the accumulation
of a force with which to open a campaign in
the spring. Besides this, he assembled a fleet for the
purpose of attacking Mantua and Ferrara. This the
Venetians destroyed near Cremona on the 21st of May,
1427.
Filippo, who had up till now taken small thought of
anything except numbers and talent, soon began to feel,
as so many others have done before and since, the extreme
difficulty of getting any cohesive action from a
force which, split up into many small bodies, gave its
allegiance to six or seven separate commanders, all of
equal merit, and all claiming, on their records, the right
to administer the whole. Carmagnola, on the other hand,
being a Condottiere himself, allowed no one, however
distinguished his birth or his position, even to approach
his throne, much less share it. The Venetian authorities
themselves he handled as roughly as he dared, and they,
as Mocenigo had prophesied, found themselves under a
despotism which made the rule of the dreaded “Ten” a
kindergarten affair in comparison.
Filippo, exercising a purely imaginary authority, gave
the command of his troops to Nicolo Piccino, a pupil of
the celebrated Braccio, and he attacked Carmagnola at
Casalecco on the 12th of July, but so thick was the dust
under foot that before they had well engaged they became
invisible and separated without shock.
It was a leisurely campaign. Whatever might be the
anxiety of the principals to settle the quarrel, their defenders
were not to be hurried, and it was not until the
11th of October that Carmagnola was called upon to
fight a pitched battle. He had been spending most of his
time in the interval at the baths of Albano, where he took
a cure for rheumatism.
Suspicion is a disease among some people, and, though
its workings are not by any means confined to one class,
it must be owned that power of any kind has always been
a happy breeding ground for it. With the rulers
of Venice it was hereditary, and, since it was unsafe
openly to suspect each other, they invariably lavished
their venomous mistrust upon their servants and instruments.
But, true to their Latinity, they gave their victim
no chance of feeling it or even of defending himself.
In silence they judged, in silence they acted, and always
with such a wealth of deception, cunning, and falsehood
as to proclaim their own cowardice and meanness from
the housetops.
The battle of the 11th of October took place in a
marsh near Macalo, and Carmagnola having lured his
adversary, Carlo Malastata, into the swamps—with
which he himself was perfectly familiar—turned upon
and beat him soundly, capturing, it is said, upwards of
five thousand, including Malastata himself.
He made no attempt to pursue, and immediately released
all of his prisoners, thereby giving the Venetian
Senate a solid handle for the blade of calumny which
they had been forging. When the protests of the Venetians
reached him, he refused to discuss the matter, merely
replying that it was the custom of war and, further, that
it was his wish. His contempt for his employers was a
little too open, and they, though apparently acquiescing
and praising his skill, were already plotting his end.
The gentle habit of executing a defeated general,
wherever possible, was in vogue then and for many
years afterwards. As long as Carmagnola could continue
to win cities and provinces for them, so long could he continue
to live, but no longer.
A new peace was signed on the 18th of April, 1428,
and peace descended upon Venice for nearly three years.
Carmagnola passed the time in Venice with his family
around him; treated with all honour and respect to his
face, laughed at, as he knew, for his low birth and rough
ways, behind his back. Disliked, but courted, under pressure,
for no one could say how long this new peace would
last, and Venice, in the field, was Carmagnola. Without
him, Filippo’s men—Piccino, Tonelli, and the rest—would
strip her to the waterfront.
The Florentines, grown confident and aggressive, now
took the opportunity to attack the Lord of Lucca, Paolo
Quinigi, a one-time ally of Filippo’s, and the Lucchesi,
revolting, deposed Quinigi and sent him to Milan as a
prisoner. The Florentines were, soon afterwards, attacked
and routed by Piccino at Sarchio on the 2d of
December, 1430; and once again the old flame broke out.
Carmagnola, to everybody’s surprise, resigned his commission—or,
rather, attempted to resign it—and the
Senate, in a panic, offered him such terms for another
campaign as were never offered to any Condottiere before
or since.
Carmagnola, who was then, or had been but a short
while before, in communication with Filippo, finally accepted
the command, though with reluctance. Perhaps he
had the prophetic depression which so often seizes commanders
before a disaster; perhaps he had tired of Venice
and her service.
Fortune had turned against the Venetians. First their
admiral, Trevisano, was caught napping at Cremona and
his fleet destroyed under Carmagnola’s furious eyes. His
remarks to the admiral afterwards and to the Venetian
Senate were so mixed and incoherent with rage that the
Senate hurriedly sent down special Commissioners to assure
him of their confidence and love.
Piccino wandered about picking up odds and ends, a
castle here, a town there, but Carmagnola refused to
move. Filippo, wild with delight, hovered in his neighbourhood,
sending taunts and insults to him on every
opportunity, but the old tiger lay in his lair.
He had been defeated at Soncino, and, though that was
a small and unimportant event in itself, yet taken in conjunction
with the disaster to the fleet, it became a disaster,
too. A distemper arose among the horses that year in
Italy, which accounts, in a large degree, for Carmagnola’s
inaction, and, though he roused himself sufficiently to defeat
the Hungarians at Friuli, he relapsed again afterwards
into inactivity.
No signs of impatience or mistrust escaped the Senate,
however. Instead, they sent a splendid deputation,
begging him to give himself the trouble of returning to
Venice for a while to consult with the Signoria as to the
conduct of the coming campaign; and he, never doubting
that his position was unchanged and that, surrounded
by enemies, Venice still looked to him as the one man who
could save her, rode through Lombardy in April, 1432,
accompanied by Gonzaga, the Lord of Mantua, and embarked
on the Brenta, hailed by the populace and loaded
with marks of deference and confidence by the great men
of the Senate who went out to meet him. All along the
waterway, crowds turned out to greet the hope of Venice,
and the rich and noble, whose country houses stood
along the banks of the river, turned out likewise, decorating
their homes and making festas as he passed.
A gay people they were, with their satins and their
music and their dancing and their love-making. April in
Venice is made for kissing, it is the only suitable occupation
for any one with a spark of life in his soul, and
one can imagine the boats on the slow-moving river, as
the evening came on, and the lovers’ moon came out over
the water—music, love—youth and fire.
It was through this that the great Captain journeyed,
leisurely, as became his dignity. At Mestre he was met
by some gentlemen of his acquaintance, all smiles and
bows and compliments, in whose company he crossed the
shadowy lagoons and disembarked.
Nine Senators—red-robed, capped, monuments of the
dignity of the State—were waiting for him here, and
his progress to the Palace of the Doge was almost regal
in its splendour. With all formality he was introduced
into the presence of the Senate, and given a chair of honour.
He was welcomed, praised, and listened to with
deferential attention. It was growing late, by now, and
the Senate Chamber was becoming too dim to distinguish
the faces of those about him. But no lights were called
for, and he, dreaming no doubt, of seeing his wife and
children again that night, sat on, while one Senator after
another rose and spoke and sat down again.
He had other things upon his mind, too. Filippo—old
days—old triumphs; the promise that had been
made him, that if he could but extinguish the Visconti for
ever, his old estates were to be given back to him, besides
new ones here in Venice. It had even been hinted and
hinted strongly that the only obstacle to his becoming
Duke of Milan himself, was the man who called himself
the Duke—Filippo Visconti. There seemed to be no
bar to his advancement to any position he might choose—he,
the son of a peasant, picked up at dusk by a wandering
trooper in Savoy!
Dusk! It was getting towards dark now!
He stirred in his chair and looked about him. The
place seemed less crowded than it had been when he had
last observed it, and, thinking that the moment had arrived
when he could at last fling aside the world and return
to his family, he rose to depart.
What were those dark shapes hovering near his chair?
Those were no Senators! He peered at them as he
passed, but they paid him no attention and he moved on
towards the door.
Instantly he felt himself seized from behind and the
dark shapes materialised into Sbirri—soldier police—as
he struck out right and left, bellowing and roaring
in his fury. But he was only one, and there were twenty
or thirty of them, and he was chained hand and foot before
he had recovered from his first amazement.
The place was deserted now, save for them, and in the
gloom he was hurried along, pushed and hustled, down,
down, until a door creaked open and he was flung into
a cell, pitch-black and damp. The door slammed to
behind him, and his little part in the world was played.
The next day he was “put to the question,” but no
records remain, none being kept, of what passed in the
little cell during the dread ordeal; and twenty days later,
gagged and chained, he was led out to the Piazza, and
there, between the pillars, beheaded.
His grave is in the great Church of St. Francis, in
Milan, beside his wife.
While we are still in the North, the story of the Patron
of Pisa, St. Raniero, may interest my readers.
He was a Scacciari, born in Pisa about the year 1100,
and grew up with the other noble children of the place,
cheerful and pleasure-loving as were they—and as, it
may be noticed in passing, were several of the greatest
Saints in the Calendar.
His conversion came about through a holy man, whose
name has not survived. Raniero, one day, was playing
and dancing with some damsels in the shade of a great
tree, outside the city, when he noticed a man standing
near who seemed to be studying him intently; after a
while, he laid his lyre down on the grass and returned
the gaze, with the intention of bringing home to the
stranger the annoyance which the look was causing him.
But the stranger continued to stare, and presently the boy
arose to approach him.
But, although he had risen to his feet, he made no
attempt to advance, for something in the stern, yet gently
pitying, eyes of the other arrested his movement, and,
before he could recover from the half-hypnotised condition,
the stranger was moving off himself.
Then the boy came to life, and ran after the man of
God, flinging himself upon his knees, and catching at the
hem of his garment, and crying out his sorrow for his
sins; the other lifted him up, and bade him be of good
cheer, but Raniero, by now, was half blind with weeping
and it was some time before he could see or hear clearly.
He did not turn back again towards Pisa, but made
his way, by slow stages, to the Holy Land—no very safe
harbourage in the middle of the Twelfth Century. On
arriving, he took off his own clothes, and received from
a priest the shirt of a slave, which, for the proper humiliation
of the flesh, he continued to wear until he
died.
Now it is the habit, even of the most broad-minded of
our Protesting brethren deliberately to close every avenue
by which information might reach their intelligences, and
to seal them up tightly, before they embark upon any
study of the Saints, or of the Church. In parenthesis,
it must be said of the Germans, doubtless true to the Teutonic
passion for accuracy, that as a general rule they will
and do search after and transcribe the true facts of a happening,
at whatever cost to their own private feelings—as
Haeckel found to his cost. Not so with the English.
They glory in incredulity—and prune their belief daily
until nothing more than the bare tree is left. So that
one is not in the least astonished to find in the middle
of an Englishman’s otherwise fairly faithful tale a
shocked horror—indeed, it cannot be described in any
other terms—at the thought of the desert’s being an
abiding-place for devils. People, on the other hand, find
that people with any real experience of the desert are
quite ready to believe that anything horrible might he
found there. If ever there was a proper ballroom for
Satan, says one, it is the desert!
St. Raniero found them there, aplenty—so did St.
Anthony—and St. Ephrem—and St. Procopius and St.
Jerome, and many, many more.
St. Raniero vowed himself to abstinence, and a hard
struggle he found it to be until one morning, very early,
when after a night of tossing and turning and praying,
he fell asleep and dreamed that a wonderfully wrought
vessel of gold, covered with the most beautiful gems,
stood beside him. It was full of pitch and sulphur, and
these presently ignited, burning fiercely, and threatening
the destruction of the vase. But, just as it seemed to be
on the point of destruction, a little phial containing a
few drops of water appeared, and he was bidden to sprinkle
some upon the fire; he did so with some difficulty,
since it was burning so fiercely, and, behold! the fire was
extinguished in a moment.
On awakening he considered the dream for some time,
trying to read some meaning into it, and presently it
was borne in upon him that the vessel was his body, the
pitch and sulphur his passions and appetites, and that the
water was temperance, which would quench these. From
that time onward he lived altogether upon bread and
water, even performing the most of his miracles with water,
for which he had an especial reverence, so that he
came to be known in Pisa as “San Domini dell’Acqua.”
That he was a water-drinker himself did not affect his
detestation of dishonesty in the matter of wine, however.
Being at one time in Messina, he stayed one night at an
inn there, and, after watching the innkeeper for a little
while, became persuaded that he was mixing water into
the wine which he was selling. Beckoning to him, Raniero
told him to cease, but the host first laughed and then grew
angry, telling him to mind his own business. Then the
Saint took him by the shoulder and turned him round,
and pointed to a cask which was set in a distant corner.
“See there,” he said. Every one by now was looking
in the same direction, and to their terror and amazement
there appeared upon the cask a huge black cat with enormous
wings. The host flung himself at the Saint’s feet,
howling, and the rest of the company began to crowd
and push out of the place, but the Saint directed them
to remain, and dismissed the demon swiftly.
He returned afterwards to Pisa, where he lived for
many years, and performed many wonders, healings, and
conversions before he died, and his tomb is in the wall
of the Duomo, where an altar has been erected to his
memory.
CHAPTER XI QUEEN JOAN OF NAPLES
A Conspicuous Feminine Sinner—Marriage of State—Her Beauty—Her
Hungarian Husband—Petrarch and the Monk—Joan’s Ascent to the
Throne—The Naples Succession—Her Favourites—The Churches of
Naples—Joan’s Lovers—Factions of Naples—Charles of Durazzo—A
Bold Proposal—Charles’ Ambitious Plots—War of the Factions—Disappearance
of Maria—Becomes the Wife of Charles—Joan’s
Horror.
Of all feminine sinners known to history, Joan of
Anjou, Queen of Naples and of Jerusalem, affords,
perhaps, the most conspicuous example of the
perils attendant upon what are known as “marriages of
State”—that is to say, marriages brought about for reasons
of State and without reference to the personal inclinations
of the contracting parties themselves.
The elder of the two daughters born to Charles, Duke
of Calabria and Marie of Valois—both of whom had
predeceased their father and father-in-law, Robert, King
of Naples—Joan was married as a child of fourteen
to her cousin Andrew, the grandson of King Charles of
Hungary, the brother of King Robert; and, on the death
of the latter in the month of January, 1343, succeeded
him as his granddaughter on the throne of Naples. At
that time Joan, although not yet fifteen years old, was
beautiful with the beauty and grace of a grown woman;
her eyes were of a shade of brown so deep as to be
almost black; whilst the pallor of her complexion was
enhanced by the lustrous dark hair of her which she wore,
according to the fashion of the day, in two long and
heavy plaits that fell nearly to her knees, moreover, her
tall, slender figure added several years to her appearance,
whilst the expression of her face, albeit sensitive
and gentle, was one of determination and of a latent
strength of purpose far beyond that of most girls of
her age. For Joan of Anjou had already learned the
meaning both of love and of hate—the hate of her
husband and the guilty love of another than he. The
name of the man for whom she had, even then, betrayed
her Hungarian husband was Robert of Cabano, the son
of Filippa Cabano, and her husband, Raymond, a
Saracen, bought out of slavery by another Raymond
Cabano, who had given him his own name in baptism and
had procured for him the post of head cook to Charles
the Hammer, King of Naples and elder brother of King
Robert, the grandfather and precursor of Queen Joan.
From being head cook, Raymond had since risen to the
most eminent post of Seneschal of the Kingdom of
Naples.
The way of Joan’s loveless marriage—the source of
all her sins and misfortunes—to her cousin Andrew of
Hungary was this: It had been arranged by her grandfather,
King Robert, in the intention of making amends
to Andrew for having usurped the sovereignty of Naples
from Andrew’s father, Carobert of Hungary, the oldest
son of King Robert’s brother, Charles the Hammer.
With this object, King Robert had caused Andrew to be
brought as a child to his Court at Naples, that the boy
might become fitted by education and surroundings to be
the husband of Joan and share with her the crown of
Naples and of Jerusalem. For, be it said, the Hungarian-born
Andrew was by nature uncouth and savage and cold,
and altogether unsuited, both in his temperament and his
views of life, to fulfil King Robert’s expectations of him.
Instead of growing more tender, more responsive and
affectionate in the genial surroundings of the Neapolitan
Court, as had been hoped might prove to be the case, he
seemed, on the contrary, to become daily more reserved,
more imbued with the sense of his own importance, more
generally domineering and less sympathetic towards those
about him. However, his marriage with Joan had been
duly solemnised some months before the death of old
King Robert in order that the latter’s fondest wish might
be accomplished betimes; but, to the rage and disappointment
of Andrew, as soon as the King was dead,
Joan alone had been proclaimed as his successor by her
cousin, Charles, Duke of Durazzo and Albania, who had
presented her as their sole, legitimate sovereign to the
populace assembled below the windows of the Castel
Nuovo in a room of which King Robert’s dead body,
the breath but scarcely gone out of it, lay still warm
upon the bed on which he had died. Moreover, not only
Charles of Durazzo, but others, including principally
Robert of Cabano and another cousin of the Queen,
Louis of Taranto, had absolutely refused to do homage
to Andrew of Hungary; to Joan alone had they bent the
knee and sworn fealty. Only one person of all those
present had protested energetically against the exclusion
of Prince Andrew from the immediate proclamation of
sovereignty; this was a certain Father Robert, a monk,
the tutor of Andrew, whom he had accompanied from
Hungary to Naples and whom he never deserted as long
as the Prince lived. This Father Robert earned the especial
dislike of Petrarch, to whom the monk’s austere
and masterful personality was as gall on the tongue, to
judge from the poet’s description of him.
As has been told then, by the time that King Robert
passed away, leaving his kingdom to Joan and to
Andrew, her consort, these two had been man and wife
for long months; during which period Joan had loved,
not her husband, but the handsome swaggering Saracen,
Robert of Cabano. But by now, when she was become
Queen of Naples by the death of her grandfather, Joan
had grown weary of the insolence of Robert’s dominion
over her and was minded to throw off the yoke of it.
Also, her affections—which, be it said in justice to her,
had formerly been consistently offered to her husband
and as consistently rejected by him—had turned towards
one of the very few completely disinterested and unselfish
persons at the Court. This was Bertrand of
Artois, whose father, Charles of Artois, had been appointed
by King Robert’s will one of the regents of the
kingdom until Andrew and Joan should have attained
their twenty-fifth year.
Joan had only one sister, Mary, a mere child, who was
scarcely thirteen years old when Joan came to the throne;
this Princess Mary, by the terms of King Robert’s testament,
was to inherit the throne in the event of her elder
sister’s dying without issue; in addition, the old King
had expressed a wish that Princess Mary should be affianced
either to Louis, King of Hungary, elder brother
of Andrew, or, failing Louis, to the Duke of Normandy,
eldest son of the King of France. In case of the death
without heirs of both Joan and Mary, the sovereignty
would by rights fall to Charles of Durazzo, eldest son
of King Robert’s younger brother, who had died some
years previously, John, Duke of Durazzo and Albania.
John of Durazzo had left behind him a widow, Agnes,
and two younger sons besides Charles; these were Ludovico,
Count of Gravina, and Robert, Prince of the
Morea. The youngest brother of King Robert, Philip,
Prince of Taranto, who had likewise predeceased him,
had also left a widow, who bore the title of Empress of
Constantinople, inherited from her grandfather, Baldwin
II, and three sons, Robert, Philip, and finally Louis
of Taranto, the handsomest and most accomplished
knight of his day, then but barely turned three-and-twenty.
There had survived King Robert, too, his widow
Sancia of Aragon, a character as noble and holy as the
majority of those composing the Neapolitan Court were
debased and self-seeking and unscrupulous. Before departing
this life King Robert had obtained from Queen
Sancia a promise to the effect that she would remain
in the world and at Court for a whole year, in order to
watch over the young King and Queen, Andrew and Joan—it
being Queen Sancia’s announced intention to enter
as soon as possible into a convent, there to end her days
in peace and prayer—and to protect their relationship
to one another from the perils which, as the dying man
had clearly foreseen, must inevitably menace it. And,
very particularly, he had warned his widow to be on her
guard, where Joan was concerned, against three especial
dangers—the love of Bertrand of Artois, the beauty of
Louis of Taranto, and the ambition of Charles of
Durazzo.
So that, no sooner was King Robert dead, than his
wishes in respect to the mutual sovereignty of Andrew
and John were contemptuously put aside by those who
proclaimed Joan, and Joan alone, as their new Queen to
the Neapolitan people; but Joan’s acquiescence in their
proclamation of her as sole sovereign cannot be overlooked,
foreshadowing as it would almost seem to do
some already half-formed instinctive project of becoming
actually that which she had been proclaimed to be—the
single occupant of the throne.
Instantly, moreover, her Hungarian husband and his
partisans, Father Robert, the Dominican Friar, together
with divers Hungarian nobles and Giovanni Pipino, Count
of Altamura, one of the most powerful lords of the
kingdom and the most hated by the people, held counsel
among themselves as to how they might best defeat
the projects of the Queen’s party. This, they decided,
could only be done by acquainting King Andrew’s mother,
Elizabeth of Poland, and his brother, King Louis of
Hungary, with the terms of King Robert’s last will, and
of how a conspiracy had been set on foot to deprive King
Andrew of his rightful share in the government of Naples.
Also, a complaint in the same terms was to be
sent to the Pope at Avignon, and a request made of the
Holy Father that he would issue a Bull of coronation on
King Andrew’s behalf, thereby duly confirming him in
his rights of, at least, equal sovereignty with Joan, his
wife. At the same time, Father Robert tried to impress
upon Andrew the advisability of coming as soon as possible
to some kind of understanding upon the subject
with Joan herself before her favourites should have
alienated her affections entirely from him.
These favourites whom the good monk had in mind
were some of them men and some of them women. Of
the men—Robert of Cabano, Louis of Taranto, and
Bertrand of Artois—we have already seen something;
of the women we have as yet made acquaintance with only
two—Filippa Cabano, the mother of Robert the half-breed,
and formerly governess to the Princesses Joan
and Mary; and the Empress of Constantinople, their
aunt and the mother of Louis of Taranto and his brothers.
Besides Donna Filippa and the Empress, however,
there were three others who had influence over Joan—the
Countesses of Terlizzi and Morcone, daughters of
Donna Filippa, and, lastly and supremely, a young and
lovely girl of sixteen, known simply as “Cancia,” who
occupied, officially, the position of tiring-woman to the
young Queen.
Cancia had been put into this employment by her protectress,
Donna Filippa, in order that, by her wiles and
companionship, she might corrupt the spirit of Joan and
render her the more averse to the remonstrances of Father
Robert, the Dominican, on behalf of Andrew of
Hungary, his pupil; and so bring her more and more
under the influence of her lover, Robert of Cabano,
Filippa’s own son. And Cancia had played her part so
effectually that, it is said, Joan loved her more even than
she did her own sister, Princess Mary.
And, as it happened, Donna Filippa was beginning
to suspect that, at last, Joan was tiring of her intrigue
with Robert, and that she might at any moment turn
elsewhere for the love denied her by her rightful husband—for
life without love was insupportable to Joan’s
passionately affectionate nature.
Old King Robert—Robert the Wise, as he is commonly
styled—was buried behind the high altar in the
Church of Santa Chiara that he had built himself; where
his splendid Gothic tomb may be seen to this day, having
on it his likeness both as King and as Franciscan
monk; for he was a Tertiary of Franciscans and died, as
becomes one, in their uniform. In the same Church are
to be found the tombs, too, of many of the actors in the
tragedy of Queen Joan; of her father and mother and
her little sister Maria; and of Maria’s children by three
successive husbands, together with the graves of Charles
of Durazzo and of Raimondo Cabano, the Seneschal.
And here, in passing, I would like to say that there are
no Churches in the whole world that can compare with
the old Churches of the city of Naples for the number
and the beauty and the poignant interest of the tombs
that these contain.
Some days after King Robert’s burial in Santa Chiara,
Joan was approached by Filippa Cabano with a request
that she would create Filippa’s son, Robert, Grand
Seneschal of the Kingdom in succession to his father,
who was but shortly deceased; also, that he might receive
the title of Count of Eboli. To both these outrageous
demands the young Queen at first turned a deaf ear; not
until Filippa—who was accompanied by Robert in person—threatened
to make known to all the world the
fact of Joan’s new intrigue with Bertrand d’Artois did
the young Queen surrender to her demands. It would
seem that Filippa had, for some time, suspected the cooling
of Joan’s fondness for her son; and so had determined
to obtain from her for Robert a commanding and
unassailable position in the State.
In that same State of Naples, then, there were already
two increasingly definite factions, each with a different
aim: the party of the Dominican Father Robert and of
the Hungarian nobles, that sought to bring about the
supremacy of King Andrew and the subjugation of Queen
Joan; and the party of Donna Filippa, with their programme
of “Naples for the Neapolitans”—that is,
firstly, of securing sole sovereignty for the Queen, and,
secondly, of making the Queen herself the puppet of their
own will and the instrument of their aggrandisement.
And round about these openly contending factions
there prowled, watchful and ruthless, Charles of Durazzo,
seeking only the opportunity to make himself
master of the situation. There were no lengths to which
Duke Charles was not prepared to go in order to attain
his aim and to satisfy the ambition that devoured him;
no crime, however frightful, from the contemplation of
which he shrank as a means to his end. Cost what it
might, he would be King of Naples and of Jerusalem.
The chroniclers describe him as a pale man with close-cropped
hair and a thick beard; and, when agitated, he
had a trick of frowning. Charles of Durazzo had felt
greatly aggrieved at the bestowal of Joan’s hand in marriage
upon Andrew of Hungary; for he, Charles, had
been the nearest in blood of all King Robert’s nephews
to the throne, and to him, as such, Joan ought to have
been given. But never for an instant had he allowed so
much as a glimpse of his disappointment to be seen by
any one; never once had he suffered a breath of complaint
to escape him.
Nevertheless, his resolve was only the stronger for
the iron self-discipline of the man; and, now that Joan
was Queen, the hour was come for him to try the first
of the two alternatives by which he was to achieve his
object. He was still a bachelor, and Joan had found
favour in his eyes by reason of her loveliness; therefore,
before having recourse to the other expedient that he
had laid out for himself in case of need, Charles had
determined to attempt the enlistment of Joan’s coöperation
in his designs.
With this object he obtained a private audience of
the Queen, and straightway proceeded to lay siege to
her sympathies by every kind of flattery and the most
skilful hints of the dangers that threatened her from
the side of ungrateful and grasping favourites. Though
he named no names, yet Joan understood only too well
whom he meant and could not help evincing signs both
of her comprehension and of her agreement with him.
From that he went on to speak more particularly of
the popular rejoicing at her succession to the throne;
and, finally, of the universal regret that she should be
compelled by an unkind fate to share that throne with
one in every way unworthy both of herself and
of it.
Seeing clearly who it was to whom he referred in these
terms, Joan attempted feebly to protest; but was powerless
to prevent him from continuing with what he had
to say of the certainty he felt that, if Andrew of Hungary
were ever to be admitted to an actual share in the
government, the people of Naples would infallibly rise
in arms against him and the detested Hungarians who
surrounded him. It would, indeed, Duke Charles assured
the unhappy Queen, be only another instance of
the Sicilian Vespers; the Neapolitans would, of a surety,
rise up as one man and exterminate their foreign oppressors,
including Andrew himself and the monk whose
mistaken counsels had inspired him with so suicidal an
ambition.
“But of what fault do they accuse Andrew?” asked
Joan, uncertainly.
In reply, the Albanian said that the people hated the
Prince for his stupidity, his coarseness, and savagery;
that the nobles accused him of violating their privileges
and of surrounding himself to their detriment with the
basest adventurers; and that, lastly, he himself, Charles
of Durazzo, accused Andrew of making Joan’s life a
misery to her.
And then, before she could recover from her amazement
at his boldness, Charles wound up by offering to remove
Andrew from her path by murdering him; whereupon,
the better part in Joan triumphing for a moment
over the lower side of her nature, she dismissed Charles
angrily from her presence, calling him coward and insolent.
Without undue haste or appearance of anger,
Charles left her, merely reminding her that it was not
altogether impossible that, some day, it should be his
turn to condemn and hers to be judged.
So that Duke Charles, having failed in his attempt
to obtain Joan’s consent to the murder of Andrew, must
instead have recourse to the second of the alternatives
that had presented themselves to him.
This was to make himself the husband of the next
heir to the throne—the thirteen-year-old Maria, sister
of Queen Joan. On reaching his own palace, therefore,
he sent for a notary, one Nicholas of Melazzo, whose
fate he held in his hands by means of a certain knowledge,
and ordered him to draw up a contract of marriage
between the Princess Maria, his cousin, and himself,
Charles of Durazzo. This the notary, albeit terrified
at the audacity of the thing (seeing that Maria, as
will be remembered, was intended by the terms of King
Robert’s will to be the wife of either King Louis of Hungary
or of the Duke of Normandy), consented to do;
and then Duke Charles ordered him at the same time to
seek out Tommaso Pace, the valet of King Andrew and
the notary’s own closest friend, and to find out if Pace
had been approached at all by any of Queen Joan’s partisans
with a view to drawing him into any plot against
Andrew’s life. For, as Charles argued, if such a conspiracy
should ever arise, those concerned in it would be
almost sure to endeavour to win over the King’s valet
to their undertaking in order the more easily to carry
it into effect.
From that day on it was noticed that a complete change
had taken place in the manner of the Duke of Durazzo
towards King Andrew—or, to give the latter the only
title hitherto accorded to him, the Duke of Calabria.
For, whereas hitherto Charles had shown himself the
reverse of friendly towards Andrew, and had been ever
the loudest in his denial of Andrew’s right to be crowned
King of Naples, he now overwhelmed the Hungarian
with every kind of courtesy and friendly advance.
Charles even took pains to propitiate Andrew’s shadow,
the honest Dominican, excusing himself to Father Robert
for his outrageous conduct in proclaiming Joan alone as
their new Queen to the people of Naples by pleading
the necessity of making an apparent concession to the
popular dislike of the Hungarian element in the kingdom.
He did not hesitate to declare to Father Robert his detestation
of the persons who were bent upon estranging
the young Queen from her husband for their own ends;
finally he concluded by placing what power he possessed
at the monk’s disposal for the purpose of defeating the
machinations of Joan’s treacherous favourites directed
against her rightful husband and the legal partner of
her throne.
To these assurances Father Robert lent a willing, although
not an entirely believing, ear; for he could only
attribute the change in Duke Charles to some misunderstanding
with the young Queen. At the same time,
Charles and Andrew of Hungary were become the closest
of comrades; never, now, was Andrew seen in public without
his Albanian cousin by marriage; never did he withdraw
himself from the circle of his friends to the
seclusion of his apartments but Charles of Durazzo
walked at his elbow.
And so things went on for a while, until at length the
whole Court was ranged definitely on one side or on
the other: on that of Queen Joan and the Neapolitan
people itself to whom Andrew and his followers were
entirely odious, or, else, on that of Andrew and those
who hoped eventually to make him sole sovereign of Naples
to their own advantage—the Hungarian “Hey-ducs,”
the Count of Altamura, and their kind.
The war of the factions had begun by the omission of
Andrew’s name from all the proclamations, warrants, and
so forth issued by the Queen in her own sole name. In
retaliation for this indefensible slight, Andrew had ordered
his followers to break open all the prisons within
reach and to liberate their tenants, criminal or otherwise,
in his name alone and in honour of his succession
to the throne of Naples. He had also loaded the members
of his own party—and especially the execrated
Altamura—with honours and riches by means of patents
signed by himself, only, as the one supreme temporal
authority in the kingdom. It may be added that, in all
these arbitrary and illegal measures, so admirably calculated
to arouse the bitterest anger and the most murderous
hatred of the Queen’s supporters against him,
Andrew of Hungary’s one confident adviser was none
other than his evil genius, Charles of Durazzo. From
that moment the party of Joan, led by the Counts of
San-Severino, Mileto, Terlizzi, Balzo, Morcone, Catanzaro,
and Sant’ Angelo, and, more especially, by the
Queen’s ex-favourite, Robert of Cabano, Count of Eboli,
and his successor in her affections, Bertrand d’Artois, was
resolved upon ridding the land of Andrew and of his
minions. Of all the angry barons who had rallied to
Joan’s support, the last mentioned, Bertrand d’Artois,
really loved her for herself, and was actuated by no motive
of personal gain, except—alas!—his lawless hope
of becoming united to her in matrimony once her husband
were removed from the path of his criminal passion.
In vain his father, the brave and noble Charles of Artois,
one of the regents of the kingdom, strove to dissuade him
from the perilous course of a love as treasonable as it
was immoral; nothing was of any avail to hold back the
young man from the pursuit of his designs.
More successful, however, was the restraining influence
of another parent over another child in the same
situation—the influence of the Empress of Constantinople
over her youngest-born, the handsome Louis of
Taranto, who, in deference to his mother’s entreaties,
turned away his eyes as well as he could from his lovely,
ill-mated cousin.
After the rupture between Joan and the Duke of
Durazzo, many weeks elapsed without her either meeting
him or hearing much of his doings, beyond that he
was become the inseparable comrade of her husband; although,
indeed, at times she cannot have helped wondering
what shape his enmity towards her might eventually
assume.
One radiant morning of spring, however, as she was
in her room in the Castel Nuovo, looking out over the
town and the sea beyond, all shimmering in the sunlight,
towards Sorrento, there came a knock on the door, and
Donna Filippa Cabano, mother of the Grand Seneschal,
entered precipitately, her face blanched with alarm and
anger, to say that Princess Maria, Joan’s little sister,
was nowhere to be found.
A short while previously the child had been playing
happily by herself in the castle grounds; and then, soon
afterwards, she had simply disappeared, none could say
where or in what direction.
Joan’s consternation may be more easily imagined than
described. Her love for Maria was the one perfectly
innocent, unspoilt love of her whole existence, the very
tenderest spot in all her heart. And now Maria was
gone from her; the horror and grief of it were such
that she shrieked as though a live coal had been laid upon
her breast. That, however, was only in the first anguish
of her loss; recovering herself quickly, she broke out in
a storm of anger upon those responsible by their want
of vigilance for the catastrophe; such was the Queen’s
fury, indeed, that Filippa fled from her in fear for her
life. Instantly, the whole castle was in an uproar, its
inhabitants scouring every nook and cranny, indoors and
out; but without success; and, presently, the whole city
of Naples was bent distractedly upon the same quest,
hunting high and low for the beloved little girl. All,
though, was in vain; and, albeit, during that day and
many days and nights to follow the search was diligently
pursued, yet, in spite of every effort, no trace could be
found of the lost Princess.
The only drop of comfort vouchsafed to Joan, during
all those weary hours of agonising anxiety, came from
Bertrand d’Artois, who had been led, somehow, to suspect
the agency of the Duke of Durazzo in respect to Maria’s
disappearance; a drop, however, that Joan refused to
accept, saying that such a thing was beyond the bounds
of probability. For no one, even, of Duke Charles’ household,
let alone the Duke himself, had so much as set foot
within the castle precincts since the day when he had left
the place in anger. No stranger, even, had set foot,
that morning of Maria’s disappearance, inside the gates,
except Nicholas of Melazzo, for whose integrity Tommaso
Pace, Prince Andrew’s own body-servant, was willing
to answer on his life.
In this manner a month went by, bringing to Joan despair
of ever seeing her sister again, until on April 30,
1343, there occurred an event so amazing as to deprive
her at first of every other sensation; until her astonishment
turned to fury at the insolent daring of it. On first
learning of it, she refused to believe it, and then, as the
certainty of it took the place of incredulity, her indignation
knew no bounds.
For, on the stroke of noon of that day, she learned
that her sister had become the legal wife of Charles
of Durazzo, having been publicly married to him at an
altar erected in the open air and in sight of all the people
before the Church of Saint John by the Sea, not a bow-shot
distant from the great gates of the Palazzo Durazzo.
The marriage had been solemnised by Duke Charles’
chaplain, the necessary dispensation for the marriage of
cousins, one of them being a minor, having been received
from Rome the day before; and, at its conclusion, the
newly wedded pair had faced the spectators hand in hand,
and had solemnly declared that they took one another as
husband and wife, calling upon God and the people to
bear witness to it. Their announcement had been acclaimed
with tumultuous vociferations of applause and
delight; after which the Duke and Duchess of Durazzo
received the Papal benediction, prior to being escorted in
procession round the city by their men-at-arms and the
sympathetic populace to the beating of drums and the
blowing of trumpets.
So that Charles of Durazzo was now the husband—and
it need hardly be said, the master—of the thirteen-year-old
heir to the throne. And when, after curbing
the useless rage in her heart, Joan summoned the pair
to receive her congratulations, she realised her folly in
quarrelling with that all-daring and remorseless man;
also, she understood that nothing short of the throne
itself—let the price be what it might—would ever satisfy
his lust of power and glory and hate.
Thenceforth, the temptation of Joan to be, in very
truth, at once the real ruler of her own dominions and,
at the same time, the arbiter of her own destiny, increased
and grew to terrific powers; the desire to satisfy her
wishes absolutely in everything became a kind of diabolical
possession, sweeping away every consideration of
virtue and of mere worldly prudence; save only when, in
rare intervals of reaction, she would fall upon her knees
in the solitude of her chamber, her face in her hands,
sobbing as though her heart would break with the horror
of her situation.
CHAPTER XII A MEDIÆVAL NIGHTMARE
Pact Between Charles and Andrew of Hungary—Joan’s Homage to the
Papal Legate—Andrew Ignored—Arrival of Andrew’s Mother—Andrew
Upheld by the Pope—His Reprisals—“The Man Must Die”—The
Queen’s Conspiracy—Last Meeting of Charles and Andrew—The
Hunting Expedition—The Banquet in the Monastery—The
Murder—Tempest Breaks Over Joan’s Head—An Evil Blow at
Charles—Trial of Andrew’s Murderers—A Nightmare of Cruelty and
Fear.
To judge from the sequence of events, it would appear
almost certain that, in his amazing marriage
with Princess Maria, Charles of Durazzo must have had
the assistance—or, at least, the tacit approval—of Andrew
of Hungary; and that, in return for this, Charles
had promised Andrew that he would take his part and
support him against the faction of the Queen. Certain
it is, at all events, that, immediately after the marriage
of Charles and Maria, the party of Andrew, his Hungarian
barons and soldiers, redoubled in arrogance towards
the Neapolitans, and their excesses of violence and
rapine which, erstwhile, had been subjected to an intermittent
restraint, now became such as to evoke not only
complaints, but threats as well on the part of the unfortunate
people. Andrew himself, however, took no notice
of such protests, but appeared, rather, to approve the
outrages committed by his underlings.
And as certain was it in the opinion of his enemies
that the time was come when they might strike him with
propriety as well as with impunity.
On August 31, 1344, Queen Joan came, surrounded
by her friends, to the Church of Santa Chiara, there to
do homage for her crown to the Papal legate, Cardinal
San Martino de Monti; for the kingdom of Naples, having
been bestowed by the Pope upon the House of Anjou
after the deposition by them of that of the Hohenstaufen,
was considered as a fief of the Church.
By this ceremony the claims of Andrew of Hungary
to a share in the throne were formally ignored, and the
single sovereignty ceremoniously confirmed to Joan; for
her husband was in no way admitted to join with her in
the act of homage, nor was there any reference to him
by word or deed from first to last; thereafter, his position
in the realm was that of its first subject and nothing
more. In fact, he was simply the Prince Consort of
Naples. During the ceremony—for he, like Joan, had
come to it with a numerous armed retinue—the followers
of the husband and wife not only kept up a brisk
exchange of threats, but had actually to be prevented by
repeated energetic commands from drawing their swords
then and there. When it was over, and Andrew had
returned to the Castel Nuovo, his heart on fire with rage
and humiliation and disappointment, his first act was to
despatch a message to his mother, Elizabeth of Poland,
informing her of his resolution to depart forthwith from
the country which offered him nothing but deception and
betrayal.
Many months passed away, however, without either
his carrying out his avowed intention or any answer reaching
him from his mother; for, had he meant what he
said in the letter, the letter would never have been written
at all; but he would have gone himself instead of
sending it. So he had hesitated in his choice of a course
of action; and, hesitating, was lost.
In place of a return letter, his mother came to fetch
him away with her on the vessel in which she had sailed
from the port of Danzig; and no sooner was it known
what she had come to do than there went up a sigh
of thankfulness from all the Court, most especially from
those who by her advent saw themselves delivered from
the detestable necessity of assassinating the Hungarian
Prince in order to insure their own safety from his
jealousy and resentment. At once, too, the friends—or,
rather, the party—of Joan set themselves to convince
the Queen of Poland of their amiable intentions
towards her ungracious son by overwhelming her with
all manner of undesired civilities and entertainments.
But nothing could procure them the confidence of the
terrified mother, or turn her from her purpose of removing
Prince Andrew from their midst.
The only person, though, who expostulated with Queen
Elizabeth for her project of withdrawing her son from
Naples was his courageous and resolute tutor, the Dominican,
Father Robert, who implored her to have patience
and courage for a little while until he should have
received from the Pope, who was then living at Avignon,
an answer to the entreaty despatched so long before and
in which Prince Andrew’s claims to be the King of Naples—in
accordance with the wishes of the deceased
King Robert—had been submitted to the judgment of
the Holy Father with an entreaty that he would ratify
them.
But all that Father Robert could obtain from the thoroughly
terrified Elizabeth was a delay of three days, at
the expiration of which time, unless a favourable answer
had been received from the Pope, she would set sail once
more for Danzig, taking Prince Andrew with her.
Not until the evening of that momentous third day,
as she was completing her preparations for departure,
did the Dominican come hurrying into Elizabeth’s presence,
having in his hands a sheet of parchment from
which swung a seal upon a cord.
“Now, God be thanked!” he cried, proffering her the
parchment. “You see for yourself, Madam—the Holy
Father consents, and your son is King of Naples and of
Jerusalem! And, if I may say so, I think it is owing to
me more than to any one else!”
And he went on to explain to the delighted Elizabeth
how, without mentioning it to any one, he had taken on
himself the responsibility of promising that certain laws
prejudicial to the Church in the Kingdom of Naples should
be abolished if the Pope would confirm the crown to
Andrew of Hungary. At this juncture Andrew himself
entered the room and was informed of the change in his
situation by being hailed as King of Naples by the Dominican.
At once the young man’s whole nature leapt
out to grasp the splendour of his new power in an outburst
of revengeful exaltation over those who had hitherto
insulted and belittled him. Now, as he swore, they
should indeed have reason to tremble for their former
boldness, their contempt and defiance of him!
A few days later Queen Elizabeth sailed away from
Naples, her head still full of forebodings; try as she
would, she could not shake off the fears that beset her
so increasingly for the safety of her son whom she was
leaving behind with none but a handful of foreign adherents
in the midst of a Court and of a people bent, as she
felt certain, upon his destruction.
But these misgivings were in no wise shared by Andrew
of Hungary, who now proceeded without loss of
time to carry out his intention of punishing his seditious
subjects.
The first of those upon whom his hand fell was one
of the chief Councillors of the Kingdom, a certain Andrew
of Isernia, who had been chiefly concerned in persuading
Queen Joan—who had looked upon him as a
father—to set at naught the provisions of King Robert’s
will and to let herself be proclaimed the sole ruler
of Naples to the detriment of her husband.
In passing be it said that, instead of at once making
public the Pope’s recognition of him as King of Naples,
with, of course, absolute rights of life and death over
its people, Prince Andrew had chosen to keep the fact
of his kingship a secret for a little time in order the
better to enjoy the grim jest of his opponents’ ultimate
discomfiture when they should learn of his real power
over them. Nevertheless, in the meantime, he had not
been able to resist tasting the fruits of sovereignty in
the shape of an “hors d’œuvre” to his banquet of reprisals;
with the consequence that Andrew of Isernia was
found dead one morning, near the Porta Petruccia of
the city, bathed in blood, with a score of sword wounds
on his body.
The news of Isernia’s murder was brought to Joan
by Bertrand of Artois, who had learned also of Andrew’s
confirmation as King by the Pope, as well as of the fact
that a list of persons to be summarily dealt with had been
drawn up by the Hungarian; and, supremely, that his,
Bertrand of Artois’, name was the first upon the list.
This last item it was that finally removed any lingering
scruples from Joan’s heart; for she loved Bertrand with
all the passionate recklessness of her fiery nature, and
the thought that his handsome head should roll upon
the board of a scaffold maddened her against Andrew.
“That decides it,” she is said to have declared to her
lover. “The man must die.”
And, when he left her, Bertrand of Artois went out
to gather together the others who were also of his conspiracy
in the Queen’s service—Robert of Cabano, and
the Counts of Terlizzi and Morcone; Charles of Artois,
the father of Bertrand himself; Godfrey of Marsano,
High Admiral of the realm and Count of Squillace; and
the Count of Catanzaro. With these men were allied several
women—notably Catherine of Taranto, Empress of
Constantinople, mother of that Louis whose beauty was
splendid like the sun; Filippa, the mother of Robert of
Cabano and of his sisters, the Countesses of Morcone and
Terlizzi; those two dusky beauties themselves; and finally
Donna Cancia, the laughing girl-demon and bosom-friend
of the Queen.
To these was joined that same Tommaso Pace, valet
to Prince Andrew, with whom the notary, Master Nicholas
of Melazzo, had of late maintained the closest of
relations in obedience to the orders of Charles of Durazzo.
No wonder, then, that within an hour after the
conference of the plotters Charles of Durazzo was in
possession of every detail of it, as well as of the names
of the plotters themselves.
Now, before the actual ceremony of Andrew of Hungary’s
proclamation as King could take place, it was
unavoidable that a few days should be devoted to making
all suitable preparations for that event; for, so soon
as Isernia’s killing had become known, Andrew had caused
it to be announced that the murder was not a murder at
all in reality, but merely a legal execution duly carried
out by the person—a certain Conrad de Gotis—empowered
to do so by Andrew himself as King of Naples by
favour of the Pope. The unrest and uproar caused by
this news in the city were such that Andrew had thought
it prudent to retire thence into the neighbouring country
until the time were come when, as crowned and
anointed King, he should be endowed with a real and
efficient majesty, the which he was as yet very far from
possessing. In this intention, therefore, he had given
out that he would go with the Court for a while upon
a hunting expedition into the district between Capua
Aversa.
Charles of Durazzo received a personal invitation
from Prince Andrew to join him and the others of the
party, but declined on the ground of his wife’s being
extremely indisposed; this, the last meeting on earth of
the two men, took place on the 19th of August in the
year 1345, towards evening in a hall of the Castel Nuovo;
it is said that, in declining Andrew’s invitation, Charles
begged him to accept a very fine falcon from among
those for which his perch was justly celebrated. The
falcon presented by Charles to Andrew may have been
a jer-falcon; but I cannot help thinking that, in all likelihood,
the bird was a peregrine from the cliffs between
Sorrento and Amalfi. With Charles was also Nicholas
of Melazzo, from whom he had just been receiving the
details of the Queen’s conspiracy; and Charles, as he
himself understood triumphantly, was thenceforth to be
master of the situation in the Kingdom of Naples.
The dawn of the next day saw a numerous cavalcade
pass out from the gate of the Castel Nuovo and file
slowly down through the city and so out into the misty
lowlands towards Melito, where the sport was to begin.
The illustrious company was headed by Andrew of Hungary
in person, and beside him rode Queen Joan on a
white palfrey; whilst close behind them pressed the throng
of those who had sworn to return to Naples only when
Andrew should have ceased to breathe. Never before
had Andrew shown himself so gay, so responsive to all
the delights of life and friendship as on that morning;
although he knew that he, as well as the men who rode
behind him, had death in his heart—the death of many
among those very men who were now preparing to consummate
their treachery by murdering him. But they,
like Andrew of Hungary, were loud in talk and laughter,
exchanging jests incessantly amongst themselves and
even, now and again, with their victim himself as he
turned in his saddle and threw back to them a challenge
of wits.
Of all that festive throng two alone rode silent and
preoccupied. Both were women. One of them, the
Queen, kept her eyes fixed steadfastly on the landscape
before her, from which the vapours were being rapidly
scattered and dispelled by the sunrise, so that none might
read her thoughts; whilst the other was an elderly German
called Isolda, once the nurse of Andrew and now
his mother’s ambassador, who, like Queen Joan, was too
occupied with her own reflections to pay attention to what
was going on about her. For old Isolda’s heart was
heavy with an indefinable presentiment of some evil that
threatened her beloved foster-child; and her powerlessness
to analyse or to avert it was frightful to the faithful
soul of her.
And so the August day grew to its full, hot and windless,
and drew on to afternoon and sank to airless evening,
whilst hawk after hawk soared into the grey-blue
sky all a-quiver with the heat, after heron and duck; or,
else, hung poised there, hovering a little before swooping
down upon crouching hare or rabbit or partridge. But
the main feature of the sport was the hunting of wild
boars with hound and spear; at which Andrew of Hungary
is said to have been an expert.
At dusk the royal party bent its way towards the
town of Aversa, there to pass the night in the monastery
of San Pietro a Maiella, a house of Celestine monks;
for there was at hand no other building capable of sheltering
so many persons and their horses. The choice of
a fitting asylum for the Queen and her Consort and their
followers was the business of the Grand Seneschal, Robert
of Cabano; and he it was who undertook the necessary
arrangements; by his orders a bed was prepared for
Joan and her husband in a room at the end of a corridor
on the third floor of the monastery and about sixty feet
above the ground.
That night, the monks having retired long before to
their cells, the great refectory of the monastery rang with
the jests and laughter of the royal supper-party. Wine
flowed in abundance; and none drank more deeply than
did Andrew of Hungary; until Robert of Cabano rose
and said that a draught of the same wine ought by rights
to be given to each of the Hungarian sentries posted outside
the monastery to compensate them for keeping their
cheerless watch outside in the darkness. Which proposal
was carried out with loud applause, in which the sentries
who had been called into the hall to drink the
health of the royal pair joined heartily, so that the place
echoed to the thunderous shouts of “Long live their
Majesties, the King and Queen of Naples!”
This feasting and good-fellowship was prolonged to
a late hour, until at length the conspirators became impatient
of Andrew’s wakefulness, and Bertrand of Artois remarked
pointedly that the chances were against any of
them rising betimes in the morning after sitting up so
late the night before. To which Andrew answered scornfully
that, speaking for himself, an hour or two of sleep
was amply sufficient, and that in this he hoped he was
not alone. But when the Count of Terlizzi expressed
a doubt of Andrew’s being able to set an example of
early rising under the circumstances, the Prince gave a
challenge to all present, to be up as soon as he in the
morning; after which he withdrew with the Queen
to their apartment, and silence soon fell over all the
building.
Towards two o’clock there came a knock on the door
of the royal bedchamber, followed by a second and a
third; at the last of which Andrew sprang out of bed,
calling out that he was awake and was coming at once.
It is said that Joan, who had not closed an eyelid, was
minded to warn her husband of his danger, but thought
better of it and kept silence whilst he drew on his clothes
and, going to the door, opened it—to find himself confronted
by a group of men, including his valet, Tommaso
Pace, who had knocked on the door, and Nicholas
of Melazzo.
On the instant that Andrew showed himself, Bertrand
of Artois, as some say, seized him by his long hair and
tried to pull back his head; but he contrived to free himself,
exclaiming, “This is a base jest!” Then, perceiving
that the intentions of the group were really hostile,
he endeavoured to retreat into the room for his sword,
but was prevented from doing so by Nicholas of Melazzo,
who thrust his dagger for a bolt through the staples of
the door, whilst others, led by Bertrand of Artois and
Robert of Cabano, flung themselves upon the Prince like
a pack of wolves, trying to pull him down. But Andrew,
now fighting with all his strength, threw them off,
and fled from them, shouting loudly for help, and looking
for an avenue of escape.
There was none, however, to be found; and at length,
turning and twisting from his assailants, Andrew slipped
and fell; so that Bertrand of Artois, the nearest of them,
was enabled to grapple with him, on the floor, calling
for a certain rope with which to strangle him. This
rope, which was of silk twisted with gold threads, they
had had made on purpose to kill the Prince with, because
of a talisman that he was said to have received
from his mother and that was held to render him invulnerable
by steel or poison. It seems to me probable that
Robert of Cabano had the rope ready in his hands and
that, between them, he and Bertrand of Artois contrived
to place it about the Prince’s neck; for, as Gravena tells
us, when Robert of Cabano saw that one of their lot, the
Count of Terlizzi, was turning away from the horrid
scene, he made him take hold of the rope and help them
to draw it tight; saying: “What are you doing, my
brother-in-law? Here, take hold—the rope is long
enough for each of us to put a hand to it. What we want
are accomplices, not witnesses!”
And so, between them all, they dragged Prince Andrew
to a balcony overlooking the garden of the cloister,
and, lifting him up, threw him over, so that he was
hanged. And when they knew that he was dead they let
go of the rope; and the body fell down into the moonlit
garden; and they went away to their beds.
But the din of the murder had awakened Andrew’s
old nurse, Isolda, who now, looking out of her window,
saw him lying there and thought that he was asleep. Going
to the Queen’s room, the door of which was fastened
on the inside, she called out to Joan, saying that the
Prince was asleep in the garden. To which Joan only
made reply, “Let him sleep,” and would not speak
further. Then Isolda went and awakened the monks
and made them go with her into the garden to where
Andrew lay on the grass; and, when she saw that he was
dead, she rent the night with her lamentations. And two
of the monks knelt down by the corpse, one at the head
and the other at the feet, and said the Penitential Psalms
for the repose of the Prince’s soul, while two other monks
went up to the door of the Queen’s room and asked of
her through it:
“Oh, Queen, what are your commands that we should
do with the dead body of your husband?”
But she would not return any answer to them; so
they went away again, very greatly affrighted and troubled
in spirit. And later they sent others of their company
once and twice on the same business; but Joan either
would not or could not speak with them, until at last
the townspeople of Aversa gathered about the monastery
gates, began to howl and to murmur amongst themselves,
calling the Queen a murderess and saying that she was
afraid to look upon the face of her dead husband. Nor
did she show herself at all to them; but, later in the
day, was borne out of Aversa and so back to Naples in
a closed litter guarded by horsemen.
And now, at last, the tempest which had been brewing
for so long in silence broke into lightning over the head
of Joan.
Charles of Durazzo, who as husband to the heir to
the throne, was now, next to Joan herself, the most considerable
person in the kingdom—and, further, by reason
of all he knew, far the most powerful—now took
the chief direction of its affairs.
After leaving the body of Andrew of Hungary where
it lay exposed for two whole days to the battering of the
elements—for the weather had suddenly turned wet and
gusty—at the foot of the monastery wall at Aversa,
in order thereby to arouse to the full the compassion of
the populace that flocked to behold it, as well as to arouse
their indignation against the murderers, Charles ordered
the remains to be brought in state to the Cathedral of
San Gennaro in the city. There having rallied to him
the dead Prince’s Hungarian barons, together with the
Count of Altamura, he met the funeral procession and
caused the coffin containing the body to be placed upon
a catafalque, by which he took his stand.
“Oh, people of Naples, gentle and simple alike, behold
your King, miserably strangled by his murderers!”
he cried, drawing his sword and laying it upon the coffin.
“I appeal to you to help me avenge him!”
And immediately the vast church rang and echoed
with the roar of those to whom he addressed himself.
“Vengeance!” they bellowed, forgetting in their desire
for savagery how, but a short while before, they
had groaned beneath the insolent brutality of that same
Andrew of Hungary. “Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance!”—and
from out the sombre interior of the Cathedral
the roaring gushed in a flood of terrible sound,
filling all the streets with its clamour for blood. And,
when the funeral was over, and the coffin had been put
away in the place prepared for it in the left transept of
the building, Duke Charles withdrew once more to his
own palace, well pleased with what he had done, there
to apply his energies to the work in hand.
Now it so happened that several of those who had
conspired with Joan to make an end of her husband had
lost no time in claiming the various rewards that they
deemed to be due to them from her. Filippa Cabano
and Robert, her son, as well as her daughters of Terlizzi
and Morcone and their husbands, redoubled in arrogance
and in the daring of their clamour for honours and
money; whilst Cancia, their lascivious instrument and the
handmaid of their Sovereign, now secured from punishment
by that Sovereign’s impotence even to protest
against her shamelessness, turned the Castel Nuovo into
a place without a name. But of all Joan’s fellow-conspirators
the one who asked her the most staggering
price was her aunt, Catherine of Taranto, Empress of
Constantinople, who asked that she should consent to announce
her betrothal to Robert of Taranto, the Empress’
eldest son. To this insolent demand Joan could
only summon sufficient strength to reply by asking a delay
of three days, in which to make up her mind upon
the subject; which delay was granted her, the Empress
only stipulating that Prince Robert, in the meantime,
should be allowed to take up his quarters in the Castel
Nuovo and to see and speak with Joan at least once
a day.
No sooner, though, did it reach the ears of Charles
of Durazzo that Robert of Taranto was installed in the
Castel Nuovo as a preliminary to his betrothal to the
Queen than the Duke flung himself on to a horse and
galloped furiously to the castle. On entering Joan’s
presence, he spoke briefly and to the point. To begin
with, she must create him Duke of Calabria in his own
right, thereby acknowledging him to be the heir to the
throne as the husband of her sister. And, as to Robert
of Taranto, Charles absolutely forbade her to marry
him or any other man without his express permission;
threatening that, if she dared to do otherwise, he would
reveal to the whole world his knowledge of her participation
in the murder of Andrew of Hungary. This he
did because he had no intention, whatsoever, of allowing
her to marry again and so providing, possibly, a direct
heir to the throne other than his wife and himself. And
again, Joan, helpless to refuse beneath her burden of
remorse and of terror both for herself and for others,
had no choice but to temporise as best she could.
There was now no other course open to her than that
of an explanation upon the subject of her situation with
the Empress of Constantinople.
The latter, however, on learning of Duke Charles’
opposition to the marriage of her son to Joan, declared
her resolution of striking him a blow that should assuredly
wound him frightfully both in his affections as well
as in the esteem of the public before whom, she assured
Joan, he would be eternally dishonoured by it in the
event of his refusing to listen to the voice of reason.
First of all, advised the Empress, Charles must be
made acquainted with the fact that his veto of Joan’s
espousal to Robert was without reason; for, in very
truth, Joan was expecting shortly to become the mother
of Andrew of Hungary’s posthumous child, who, in the
natural course of things, must eventually succeed to the
throne of Naples. Should Charles, however, in the face
of this persist in placing obstacles in the way of Joan’s
marriage to Robert, then the blow of which mention had
been made—albeit the Empress had not divulged its nature,
precisely—should be launched upon him. Furthermore,
added the Empress, she herself would at once inform
Charles of Joan’s expectation of soon becoming a
mother.
Joan, it must be added, had told her aunt of Charles’
knowledge of the persons primarily responsible for Andrew’s
death; so that the Empress should realise the
peril that menaced her at the Duke of Durazzo’s hands.
Undeterred, though, by learning of his power over her,
Catherine of Taranto betook herself immediately to the
Palazzo Durazzo and boldly faced the arch-schemer. In
wickedness and courage she was a match for him, and
he knew it; so he received her news of the Queen’s condition
with smooth words very delicately barbed and very
poisonous. Thanking the Empress with every show of
respectful gratitude for the honour that she had conferred
upon him by coming thus in person with the all-important
and all-welcome news; for himself he asked only the
title of Duke of Calabria, which alone could enable him
to watch over Joan’s interests properly and those of her
child. Should the Queen, he added, see her way to complying
with his request, then he should no longer feel it
his duty to bring all the accomplices of her husband’s
murder to justice; since, if Andrew of Hungary’s progeny
were, in time, to occupy the throne, the murder itself
would be rendered in a measure of no effect. In the event
of Joan’s refusal, however, the enquiry already instituted
in regard to the King’s assassins would be prosecuted to
the bitter end without respect for any one whosoever—an
eventuality which as Charles pointed out to the Empress,
with a diabolical smile, might be very unpleasant
for several of their mutual friends. By which she was
made to understand that Charles was perfectly aware
of her own share in that detestable transaction.
In answer, the resourceful Empress, careful to appear
suitably frightened by Charles’ hints, declared her willingness
to do all she could to promote his wishes, begging
only a little time in which to bring the Queen round
to a more yielding frame of mind; a favour that Charles
could not help but grant her. And so they parted, with
the mutual assurance of a complete understanding.
On returning to the Castel Nuovo, the Empress, having
reported what had passed to the unhappy Joan, withdrew
to consider her own plan of action in the struggle
with Charles of Durazzo. At length, she hit upon a
scheme so truly infernal as to claim preëminence over
anything that had preceded it in the long list of her
iniquities. She would strike her enemy to the heart; she
would kill his intellect and break him as surely as with
an iron bar upon the wheel, through the one person that
he loved and venerated in all the world—his widowed
mother, the saintly Duchess Agnes of Durazzo.
Now it chanced that, during those days, Agnes of
Durazzo lay sick of a lingering and mysterious malady,
the nature of which it was beyond the ability of her
physician to determine. In all probability the Duchess’
disease was one of an internal tumour; be that as it
may, it was in every symptomatic particular only too well
adapted to the unspeakable purpose of the Empress, who
forthwith set herself to disseminating rumours destructive
to the reputation of the good and gentle Duchess. Not
satisfied with this alone, moreover, she contrived by a
hellish stratagem to deceive even the Duchess’ doctor,
so that he believed himself justified in imparting his opinion
to Charles of Durazzo, in person.
So that mad horror, as of a lost soul, took possession
of Charles, and the desire of the Empress that his mind
should become the prey of devils was fulfilled.
The luckless, blundering physician he dismissed curtly
from his presence after their interview. An hour later
the unfortunate man was discovered in a back street of
Naples, stabbed to death,—but not before he had written
out, by Charles’ orders, the recipe of a certain draught
to be administered to his illustrious patient; which thing
was done in the evening of the same day.
Shortly afterwards, Charles was hastily summoned to
his mother’s bedside from the room in which he had spent
the rest of that awful day alone with his thoughts after
parting from the doctor. On entering that of his mother,
her attendants withdrew, leaving the fast-dying woman
alone with the son who had destroyed her in the interests
of the family honour.
What passed between them no man may say with any
certainty; all that is absolutely sure is that, when a few
minutes had gone by, the scream of a man in intolerable
agony of soul rang out through the stone corridor; and
the Duchess’ servants, rushing to her room, found her
lying dead in the arms of her stricken son, who himself
was entreating her frantically to come back to him, sobbing
as though his heart would break, and imploring the
mercy of Heaven for his misjudgment of her.
From that hour there was something very dreadful
in the look of the Duke of Durazzo, as though he were
afraid of his own thoughts and were for ever struggling
to free himself from their compulsion. The only person
who understood a little of what was in his mind was,
doubtless, the Empress of Constantinople, and, when she
saw that the man was for the first time in all his life the
prey of a hideous remorse, she became gradually afraid
for herself and for her first-born, Robert of Taranto, for
whom she was plotting to secure the hand of the Queen.
Towards the end of the time agreed upon between Joan
and the Empress, for the former to make public her betrothal
to Robert, who was still living in the Castel
Nuovo, and while the whole town was lamenting the mysterious
death of the beloved Duchess Agnes of Durazzo,
there came to pass a thing which utterly set at naught all
the calculations of the Empress and of her eldest son.
It so happened that one day Robert of Taranto had
gone out riding with Charles of Durazzo, whom the astute
mother of Robert had, since the demise of Duchess
Agnes, persuaded her son to conciliate by every possible
means in his power. Now both Robert and his mother
had overlooked, or were in ignorance of, the surpassing
love that Louis of Taranto, the youngest of Robert’s two
brothers, had for some years borne to Joan; which love
Louis had kept in check to the best of his ability while
Andrew of Hungary lived. But, now that Joan was a
widow and the prize of any man bold enough to snatch
it from the rest, Louis of Taranto felt no hesitation in
doing so when the opportunity offered.
Therefore, it came about that, on his return to the
Castel Nuovo, Robert found himself shut out. Despite
his clamour to be admitted, as he termed it, “to his own
house” and his threats to exact bloody retribution from
the sentries within for keeping him waiting, he received
no attention from anybody until his mother came out to
him, trembling and confused, to say that in his absence
his brother Louis had effected an entry into the castle
and had compelled Joan to go through a form of marriage
with him.
The effect of the news upon Robert may be easily imagined.
After staring, speechless, at his informant for a
few minutes, there broke from him a cry of rage and,
turning his horse, he tore off at a gallop towards the
Palazzo Durazzo. Here he found Duke Charles in the
company of the Duchess Maria and informed them as
well as he could, for fury, of what had taken place. It
ended in Charles’ promising him that he would leave no
stone unturned to prevent the necessary confirmation by
the Pope of the union of Louis with the Queen; and that,
so long as he, Charles of Durazzo, lived, no such confirmation
should be put into practice.
That same day he wrote to the Pope at Avignon asking
for a Papal enquiry into the murder of Andrew of Hungary
and laying before the Holy Father the names of
those implicated in it; thus he hoped to obtain the deposal
of Joan from the throne and the reversion of it to himself
as husband of the next rightful heir, Maria of Anjou;
also to insure the destruction of the Empress of Constantinople
as a participant in Andrew’s death.
It was long before the Pope’s answer reached him,
and, when at last it did, it was rather disappointing. For
Clement VI replied with a Bull dated June 2, 1346,
addressed to Beltram des Baux, Count of Monte Scaglioso
and Chief Justice of Sicily, bidding him draw up a charge
against the murderers of King Andrew—who were formally
anathematised—and to punish them with the utmost
severity. A secret codicil to the Bull, however, expressly
forbade the Chief Justice to proceed against or
in any way to implicate in his handling of the case either
the Queen herself or any of her relatives. So, to avoid
causing still more lamentable disorders in the already distracted
kingdom, any such malefactors of the Blood
Royal, added the Pope, would be dealt with later by himself,
alone, as the Supreme Head of the Church and
Suzerain lord of the Kingdom of Naples.
The Count of Monte Scaglioso showed himself no
laggard in discharging the duty thus entrusted to his zeal
and ability.
Within three days from the reception of the Papal
Bull he was able to announce that the trial of the late
King’s murderers would be held on the following day
in the great hall of San Luigi in the Castel Nuovo, the
same vast apartment in which Pope Celestino V had
abdicated the Pontificate in 1294. In the hall were seats
for all the principal nobles of the kingdom round about
that of the Chief Justice himself. The two accused persons
were both men—Tommaso Pace, King Andrew’s
valet, and Nicholas of Melazzo, the confederate of
Charles of Durazzo and the same who had played the
part of Judas as well as that of “Omri who slew his master.”
Both were brought from their prison to the Castel
Nuovo to undergo a preliminary torture that should make
them confess their guilt at once and so save the time
and trouble of their judges.
On the way from the prison to the palace the accused
passed by Charles of Durazzo, to whom the wretched
notary whispered, it is said, a promise to reveal nothing
of what had formerly passed between them on condition
that Charles would provide for the other’s widow and
orphans; to which the Duke assented with a nod of the
head.
And Nicholas of Melazzo kept his word; for, during
all the torments to which he was presently subjected, he
held his mouth and played the man. But with the valet
it was very different; no sooner did Tommaso Pace feel
his arms being dislocated at the shoulder in the torture
known as that “of the Cord” than he shrieked for mercy,
swearing to tell everything and imploring to be conducted
before his judges. And now there ensued the first of
a series of hellish scenes that were to follow each other
in the drama of mediæval reprisal, that nightmare of cruelty
and fear.
As the two prisoners were being taken from the cell
where they had been tortured to the hall of San Luigi,
up a narrow, winding stairway, the Count of Terlizzi,
who was bringing up the doleful procession with several
of his men-at-arms—he having been present at the torturing
of both the accused, and being in terror of what
Tommaso Pace might be about to reveal—suddenly
sprang upon the valet (who was walking behind Nicholas
of Melazzo and their gaolers) and with the help
of one of his soldiers dragged him back into an embrasure
of the stairway and there, taking him by the
throat, forced him to put out his tongue, which they
cut out with a knife. Then, pushing the fainting wretch
before them, they rejoined the procession; but not before
Pace’s howls had drawn the attention of Charles of
Durazzo, who, like Terlizzi, had been a witness of what
had taken place in the torture-chamber. So struck was
he by the horrid energy of Terlizzi’s act, and understanding
its purport as he did, Charles fell for an instant
beneath the spell of the very danger which he had so
laboriously created for the removal of Joan and Louis
of Taranto from his path. It may be that there rang
in his ears, together with the miserable valet’s inarticulate
protests, the words of the Psalm—“he hath digged
a pit for others and is fallen into it himself”; at any rate,
he glanced at Nicholas of Melazzo and, halting the procession,
drew him aside to where they could speak without
being overheard. And Nicholas, reading the half-formed
purpose in his face, once more whispered his
promise of secrecy. Whereupon Charles, recovering his
courage, promised on his part to take care of the notary’s
family, adding a command that Nicholas should name
every person concerned in the King’s assassination to the
Chief Justice, excepting Charles himself, and the Queen
and the members of the royal family.
This command Nicholas obeyed implicitly; but when
the Chief Justice began to question Tommaso Pace
for a confirmation of the notary’s evidence, the mutilated
valet could only open his mouth and point to where
his tongue had been.
Nevertheless, the Chief Justice ordered the immediate
arrest of such of the conspirators as were present in the
hall of San Luigi—Robert of Cabano and the Counts of
Morcone and Terlizzi, the last of whom had thus gained
nothing by his barbarity upon Tommaso Pace. Of the
other conspirators, Filippa Cabano and her two daughters,
together with Donna Cancia, were thrown into prison
immediately afterwards; and the rest, the Lords Mileto,
Catanzaro, and Squillace, being warned in season, saved
themselves by flight; old Charles of Artois and his son
Bertrand being still secure in their fortress of Sant’
Agata of the Goths, near what was probably the real
site of the Caudine Forks and from which, centuries later,
the last Father of the Church, St. Alphonsus Liguori,
was destined to take his episcopal tide as Bishop of Sant’
Agata; where he died in the year 1788.
And, when Nicholas of Melazzo had concluded his
testimony, he was sentenced, with his accomplice, Tommaso
Pace, to be dragged at the tail of a horse throughout
the town and then hanged by the neck in the Mercato,
the great market square, in which square Conradin of
Hohenstaufen and Frederick of Baden had been decapitated
by order of Charles I of Anjou in 1268, after the
battle of Tagliacozzo. It was in this same square of the
Mercato that Masaniello’s rebellion broke out, in the
Seventeenth Century; and here took place also the execution
of the misguided Liberals in 1799.
The sentence upon the notary and the valet having
been forthwith carried into effect, the other prisoners
were on the following day taken out of the Castel Nuovo
and conveyed on to a galley in the bay, their hands tied
behind their backs and having each a hook passed through
their tongue to prevent them from calling out any mention
of some forbidding name in passing to the crowd.
When they had been tortured on the galley—a precaution
for which the Count of Monte Scaglioso would seem
to have been answerable—and their depositions against
one another duly written down and signed, needless to say
they were, one and all, condemned to be burned alive.
The next morning the crowd (composed mainly of
descendants of the slaves of the long-ago Romans) filled
all the ways from the prison to the Mercato, where on
the side towards the Church of Sant’ Eligio—the usual
spot on which executions usually took place being before
the other Church in the piazza, the ancient Church of
Santa Croce—was erected a huge pile of wood and
many bundles of twigs about a number of posts with
staples to them. This was the pyre.
From an early hour the populace had been swarming
the city, tossed and churned hither and thither by its
ravening for blood—no matter of whom—and by its
impatient excitement for the gratification of its lust of
cruelty. At last, however, its waiting was rewarded and
there went up to the heavens a roar of pleasure as the
prison-gates were thrown open and the spectacle began
of the procession to the Mercato. I need not describe
it, save to say that all along the way the condemned, each
in a separate cart, were tortured in a revolting manner
with scourges, razors, and red-hot pincers, so that several
succumbed to their sufferings before reaching the
pyre intended for them. Amongst those who died thus
was Robert of Cabano, Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom,
and the only one of them all who refused to utter the
least sound by which to betray his torments to the mob.
And when, finally, the dying unfortunates were all made
fast to the stakes and fire was put to them, that same
mob rushed over the intervening soldiers, extinguishing
the flames and seizing the still palpitating bodies,
tore them in pieces for the sake of the bones, with which
to make whistles and dagger-handles.
CHAPTER XIII THE VAMPIRE-MONARCH FROM HUNGARY
Charles’ Further Acts as Dictator—Rise of the Favoured Louis of
Taranto—Civil War—A Scheme of the Empress of Constantinople—Interference
of the King of Hungary—The Empress Again to the
Rescue—Hungary’s Advance—Death of the Empress—Flight of the
Neapolitan Nobles—Joan and Her Husband in Provence—Charles’
Well-merited Fate—The King of Hungary’s Vengeance—Government
by Execution.
This detestable butchery, strictly in accord with the
criminal procedure of the day, was but the beginning
of a reign of terror in the city and realm of Naples.
The murder of Andrew of Hungary was soon no more
than a pretext to serve Charles of Durazzo for ridding
himself of all persons who, in any way, dared to manifest
their disapproval of his assumption of the Dictatorship
of the Kingdom or to murmur against his unbearable
tyranny. Nor was it long before Louis of Taranto,
who by now had completely won the heart of Joan, and
was seeking to obtain from the Pope the dispensations
necessary to make lawful their irregular union, began
to consider the high-handed and arrogant conduct of
Charles—whom and all whose works he abominated—as
an intolerable affront to himself. In consequence,
having armed his retainers and increased his forces as
much as he could, Louis raised his standard as King of
Naples and Jerusalem and bade his loyal subjects rally
to him in opposition to the Albanian usurper of his sovereign
rights.
In this manner there broke out a regular civil war
throughout the country; now the victory inclined to
Louis, and now to Charles and his ally, Robert of Taranto,
the elder brother of Louis, and the disappointed
suitor of Joan. But a day soon came when there was
no longer left to Louis any more money; and without
money he was naturally helpless to pay his troops. Both
he and Joan were in despair, when his mother, the Empress
of Constantinople, who was living with them,
showed the true mettle of which she was made.
Bidding the young couple take heart, Catherine of
Taranto promised solemnly that, if they would but lend
her the half of their forces and would content themselves
with remaining for a week on the defensive in the Castel
Nuovo, she would bring them at the end of that time
a treasure such as they had never yet even imagined. To
this proposal they perforce consented; and the Empress,
leading half her son’s army, marched boldly out from
Naples by the Porta Capuana, along the road towards
Benevento, and so came by way of the Caudine Forks
to the castle of Saint Agatha of the Goths, where Queen
Joan’s former lover, Bertrand of Artois, and his father,
old Count Charles, were still skulking from the law.
Now when Count Charles perceived that troops were
preparing to besiege him, and recognised their leader as
the Empress, he sent out messengers to enquire her intentions
in coming thus with a large force into his neighbourhood;
to which Catherine replied, speaking as follows
(her speech is translated literally):
“My most beloved ones (‘Dilettissimi miei’), pray
report to our friend Charles that we desire to speak with
him privately upon a matter of equal interest to us both;
and that he need feel no uneasiness at seeing us come
thus with an armed force to him, for we have done so
expressly for a certain purpose, the which we will explain
to him at our leisure. We know that he is confined to
his bed with an attack of gout and so we were not surprised
that he did not come out in person to greet us.
And so pray salute him from us and reassure him as to
our intentions towards him; and say that we would fain
enter to him—if such be his pleasure—with Master
Nicholas Acciajuoli, our privy councillor, and no more
than ten of our soldiers, in order to confer with him
upon a subject too important to be confided to
messengers.”
Completely deceived by the pernicious woman’s fair
words as reported to him, Count Charles sent out his
son Bertrand to receive her with all due ceremony, and
to escort her to where he himself lay prostrate with illness.
Their meeting was cordial in the extreme; after
expressing the most heartfelt regrets at the venerable
knight’s sad condition, the Empress, so soon as they were
alone together, lowering her voice, said that her object
in so coming to him was to consult him in regard to the
state of affairs in Naples and to enlist his active support
on behalf of the Queen. At the same time, she went on
to say, there being no immediate reason for her return
to the capital, she would be more than grateful for the
favour of being allowed to remain yet a few days with
him at St. Agatha, in order to profit by his advice and
to give him some account of all that had come to pass in
Naples during his absence.
It ended in Count Charles’ head being quite turned by
the Empress’ flattery; so that he not only begged her
to remain his guest for so long as she pleased, but also
gave orders for the gates of the castle to be left open
so that she might be accessible at all times to her officers,
civil and military, that were encamped outside the
walls with her army.
But the fatuous credulity of Count Charles was soon
undeceived. At a late hour of the following night, the
gates of the fortress being still open and its rightful inmates
sound asleep for the most part, the foolish old
Count was suddenly awakened from his slumbers by the
Empress of Constantinople, who, followed by several
of her soldiers, entered his room, a dagger in her hand,
and, advancing to his couch, seized him by the throat.
“Oh, accursed traitor, you are now going to be punished
as you deserve!” she cried. And when he begged
only mercy for his son—thinking the Empress had in
mind to slay them both, lest at any time they should conspire
against the kingship of her son, Louis of Taranto—and
offered to put her in possession of his entire treasury
if only she would spare the life of his adored son,
to all his entreaties she answered only that he must
prepare to part for ever from his son, whom she had
decided to send away to the castle of Malfi; and that,
as for Count Charles himself, the probability was that
he would end his days in the dungeons of that of St.
Agatha of the Goths. Prior to pronouncing these sentences,
however, she had compelled him to show her where
his immense treasures were concealed behind the wall
of his bedchamber—a veritable Aladdin’s cave of gold
in bars and in plate and of precious stones.
The chronicler, Domenico Gravina, relates how that
a few days later Count Charles was found dead in his
prison, the lips covered with a bloody froth, and the
wrists all gnawed away—so we may suppose him to have
died either of rage or of some corrosive poison; or, very
likely, of both. And not long afterwards his son
Bertrand, in despair, hanged himself from a grating in
the vault at Malfi, into which he had been transferred
by order of Catherine of Taranto.
But retribution, as condign as it was merited, was about
to fall upon the head of that wicked woman.
On returning, laden with her ill-gotten spoils, to Naples,
her triumph was dashed to the ground to learn that,
during her absence, Charles of Durazzo, her ancient
enemy and that of her house, had once more sent word
to Joan, demanding that she should instantly create him
Duke of Calabria, and so acknowledge him to be the
rightful heir to the throne as the husband of her sister
Maria. This demand the Queen had rejected with contumely;
and Charles, stung to madness by her refusal,
had thereupon sent back word to inform her that he had
accordingly written to King Louis of Hungary, inviting
him to take possession of the kingdom and promising
to deliver to him the chief murderers of his brother
Andrew, who had so far escaped the just consequences
of their iniquity.
It was now indispensable, as Joan saw clearly, to secure
the public opinion of Europe to her side in the
life-and-death struggle with her implacable foe. Therefore,
she sent ambassadors to plead her cause with the
Florentine Republic and to exonerate her of the crime
generally imputed to her of having caused the murder of
her husband. She even wrote in the same sense to the
Hungarian King himself; but only received for reply a
letter in which Louis of Hungary enumerated the proofs
against her—her disordered life both before and after
marriage; the exclusive power that she had arrogated
to herself; the fact that it had been in no way owing
to her exertions that King Andrew’s murderers had ever
been brought to justice, and that she had so quickly taken
another husband in his place—all of which certainly
pointed to Joan’s aggravated guilt.
Indeed, the King of Hungary had already, on receipt
of Charles of Durazzo’s letter, written back to accept the
offer of the throne and to say that he would at once
set about making preparations for coming down to Naples
at the head of a large army of Hungarians. For,
apart from Charles’ invitation to him, King Louis, stirred
up by love for his murdered brother, as well as by the
tears of their mother, Elizabeth, and the incitement of
the Dominican, Father Robert, who, after Andrew’s demise,
had taken refuge in Budapesth, was now entirely
bent on avenging his brother to the utmost of his ability.
He had in the past made strong endeavours to obtain
from the Pope at Avignon a condemnation of Joan herself
and of her accomplices of the Blood Royal, complaining
that whereas the less prominent members of the
plot against his brother had suffered the just penalty of
their sins, yet the principal authors of it had been let to
go unpunished; and that Joan herself, the most guilty of
all, had been suffered to continue with impunity her
career of shameless immorality. To which the Holy
Father had answered that the Queen’s conduct, both during
and after the murder of her husband, was of a surety
most blameworthy; but that, no tangible proof of complicity
in Andrew’s death having been brought against
her, he, the Pope, although willing to do justice to all
parties in so far as in him lay, could not condemn Joan
upon mere hearsay evidence. Should such good and solid
evidence be produced before him against her, however,
he would not fail to deal with her accordingly; until then
he must suspend judgment.
As before, it was again the Empress Catherine who came
to the rescue of the situation in which her son and his
wife were now placed by the action of Charles of Durazzo
in inviting Louis of Hungary’s intervention against
them. As she saw clearly, the only thing left for them
to do now was to come to terms with their nearest enemy
Charles himself, and to bribe him to combine with them
against the invader who was already hastening to overwhelm
them. Accordingly,, she arranged a truce with
Charles; and, together with Joan and Louis of Taranto,
met him in the gardens of the Castel Nuovo, where it
was agreed between him and Joan that he should be
created Duke of Calabria and formally acknowledged as
the heir to the throne. In return he was to join forces
with Joan and Louis against the King of Hungary. So
soon as this agreement had been carried out, Charles,
who now saw himself within measurable distance of the
throne itself, set out from Naples with all the troops
that could be spared for the purpose, for the city of
Aquila, where the populace was already declaring for
Louis of Hungary. With him went also Robert of
Taranto, who had become reconciled to his brother Louis
in this the hour of the latter’s greatest danger. And,
just as they departed for Aquila, the Empress Catherine,
who was watching the troops defile along the street towards
the Porta Capuana, was taken suddenly ill and
died, without speaking again, in the evening of the same
day.
In the meantime the King of Hungary had already
entered Italy from the north, and had struck into the
Neapolitan territory on the side of Apulia; and the news
of his coming filled the Court of Naples with dismay.
For it had been hoped that his progress might have been
stayed by a legate whom the Pope had sent to meet him
at Fogligno, within a long day’s march of the Neapolitan
frontier, and to bar the way to him with a threat of excommunication
if he dared to advance any further without
the permission of the Holy Father; but the Hungarian
had refused to pay any attention to Papal remonstrances,
and had continued on his way through the States
of the Church into the Kingdom of Naples.
On learning of these events Queen Joan, hastily assembling
such of the nobles as she knew to be loyal to
her, made them swear fidelity to Louis of Taranto, her
husband, and then took ship by night in one of her own
Provençal galleys for Marseilles, the port of Avignon,
which belonged to her—so that she was, in a sense,
the landlady of the Pope. So soon, then, as Joan had
departed to seek refuge at the Papal Court, Louis of
Taranto, taking with him his dead mother’s Counsellor,
Nicholas Acciajuoli, set out with a small force for the
citadel of Capua on the River Volturno, thinking there
to check the enemy. Unhappily, though, the Hungarian
monarch, obtaining information of his adversary’s movements,
turned aside, and, marching round the flank of the
Neapolitan forces by way of the mountains of Alife and
Morcone, seized upon the city of Benevento, in rear of
Louis of Taranto’s army.
At Benevento, however, the King of Hungary was met
by a deputation of Neapolitan subjects, who, frightened
by the rapidity of his advance, as well as by the Queen’s
flight and by the sudden departure of her husband for
they knew not what place, had decided to make the best
terms they could for themselves with the revengeful newcomer.
And so they brought him the keys of the city,
and made submission to him as the rightful successor of
the late King Robert. The news of this event soon
reached Louis of Taranto’s army, and at once a vile panic
set in, and very soon Louis found himself deserted by
all save only the faithful, intrepid Acciajuoli; for there
was more courage beneath the lawyer’s gown than beneath
the breastplates of all the army. Resistance to the Hungarian
was no longer possible for Louis; and, together
with Acciajuoli, he returned to Naples in the evening of
the day on which he had learned of the Hungarian’s
arrival at Benevento. At Naples, Louis was met by his
brother Robert and by Charles of Durazzo, both of
whom, as well as all his other relations, entreated him
to go away at once, lest he should bring down the wrath
of the Hungarian upon them and upon the whole city.
Turning his back upon the cowards, Louis went down to
the seashore and, accompanied as ever by the loyal Acciajuoli,
embarked in a crazy, rotten rowing-boat manned
by four sailors, thanks to whose devotion he ultimately
reached Leghorn; whence he shortly joined Queen Joan
in their kingdom of Provence.
The King of Hungary being encamped at Aversa,
Charles of Durazzo and Robert of Taranto now repaired
there to him with the purpose of turning away his anger
from themselves and their families. They were received,
to their great consolation and encouragement, with every
possible manifestation of benignity; the King even going
so far as to enquire after their youngest brothers, Louis
of Durazzo and Philip of Taranto, and to express the
most lively desire to make their acquaintance as soon
as possible. Finally he begged they might be sent for,
in order, as he put it, “that he might make his entry
into Naples in the midst of all his family.” With these
requests their elders made all speed to comply, so that,
within a few hours, the boy, Louis of Durazzo, and the
young man, Philip of Taranto, were with them in the
castle of Aversa, the Hungarian headquarters. On their
being presented to him, the King embraced them, and
chatted with them a little while; after which he made
them, with their elder brothers, sit down with him to
supper, not parting with them until a late hour of the
night.
Now there were with the King of Hungary two noblemen
of Naples, Lillo of Aquila and the Count of Fondi,
both of them brave and honourable gentlemen and haters
of cruelty and treachery. And, when Charles of Durazzo
went to bed that night, these came to his bedside
and bade him beware, for that the Hungarian was a
tyrant and no gentleman and that, for all his fair words,
he had only that morning taken council with his followers
that he might put Charles himself to death and send
the other Neapolitan princes in captivity into Hungary.
But to these warnings Charles turned a deaf ear, although
Lillo persisted in them and implored him, for the sake
of all he held dear in this world, to save himself with
his brothers and his cousins; until Charles angrily bade
his well-wishers to leave him in peace.
All the next day the demeanour of the King continued
the same until the evening, when, as they were all at supper,
Charles received yet a last warning of his danger
from Lillo of Aquila, who was waiting upon him at
table.
“Oh, why does your Highness refuse to listen to me?”
he whispered. “Fly—fly—there is still time to save
yourself.”
But Charles, irritated by Lillo’s persistency, threatened,
unless he held his peace, to repeat his words aloud
to the King; and Lillo could only bow in submission, whispering
as he did so:
“At least, I have done my duty; and now may the
will of God be done, likewise, in regard to you.”
At that moment the King rose and confronted Charles,
with a terrible countenance; so that the latter was now,
at last, rudely awakened from his dream of security.
“Ah, traitor, now I hold you in my hand!” cried the
King. “Be sure that I will do justice upon you—full
justice—for your crimes,—your daring to march against
my city of Aquila—you, by whose invitation I came to
give peace to this miserable land that has groaned so long
beneath the burden of you and yours.”
He then went on to reproach Charles with having
been, together with his mother’s brother, Cardinal de
Périgord, the means of postponing the coronation of
Andrew, and so of bringing him to his untimely end;
furthermore, he accused Charles of designing to obtain
the kingdom for himself by his abductive marriage with
the Princess Maria, his own, King Louis’, intended bride;
which last delinquency had all along rankled fearfully
in the King’s mind, so that as he referred to it his voice
broke into a shout of fury. And then, turning away from
the excuses and pleadings for mercy of his victim, he
ordered the Voivode, Stephen of Transylvania, to take
charge of all the prisoners and to keep them for the
night in a room near his, the King’s, own apartment.
The next day King Louis, having visited that balcony
in the Castle of Aversa from which the dead body of
his brother Andrew had been hanged and then thrown
into the garden below, sent an order to the Voivode
Stephen that he was to have Charles of Durazzo brought
by soldiers to that same place and that they were to cut
his throat; but the King himself did not stay to witness
the execution. And when word of the King’s order was
brought to the Voivode, he told Charles to follow him;
and, together with some soldiers, they went out to the
room of the balcony. There the Voivode asked of
Charles whether he wished to confess his sins to a priest;
who answered in the affirmative, and so one of the monks
came to him from the monastery, and heard his confession,
and absolved him in so far as he was able to do.
After which Duke Charles knelt down over against the
fatal balcony and commended his poor soul to God, and
was killed by having a very sharp knife drawn across his
throat (so that his head was nearly severed from his
body) by one of the soldiers, whilst another plunged a
sword into his heart that he might die quickly. And
when the thing was done they threw the dead body of
the Duke over the balcony into the garden.
After that, King Louis rode away with all his army
from Aversa to Naples, being met on the way by a large
deputation of nobles and citizens of whom he took no
notice, refusing to acknowledge their greeting or to ride
beneath a canopy they had provided for his entry into
the capital. On arriving in Naples the King at once
gave himself up to the work of vengeance. The first to
die was Donna Cancia, who, ever since the death of the
other regicides, had been lying in prison; she was burned
alive in the Mercato. Soon after Cancia’s death the
King ordered the arrest of the Count of Squillace, Godfrey
of Mansano, promising to spare him if he would
deliver up one of his relations, a certain Conrad of
Catanzaro, accused of having been among those privy
to the murder of Andrew. To this infamy Squillace consented,
saving his life by betraying Conrad to the Hungarian
authorities, who had him broken alive, as is related,
upon a wheel studded with razor-blades,—but I
incline to doubt this for more reasons than one. But,
instead of assuaging the rage of King Louis, these monstrous
executions seem only to have filled him with a
further appetite for blood. As during the usurpation of
power by Charles of Durazzo after King Andrew’s murder,
so now executions multiplied to such an extent that
they threatened soon to become the principal medium of
government; just as, four centuries and a half later, in
the time of suppression of 1799, there set in an epidemic
of frantic denunciation, the general terror making
of society a hot-bed of the basest passions and motives—avarice,
cowardice, and hate. And soon the
people began to think how they might rid them of the
ghastly incubus that had come to prey upon them in the
person of the vampire-monarch from Hungary.
CHAPTER XIV END OF JOAN’S CAREER
Joan Detained at Aix—Greeted as a Queen—Joan Pronounced Innocent—Plans
to Regain Naples—Sale of a City—Return to Naples—Indecisive
War—Proposal for Personal Conflict—Flight of the Royal Family—Maria’s
Narrow Escape—Hungarians Repulsed—Pope Clement as
Intermediary—Departure of the King of Hungary—Festivity in
Naples—Death of Louis and Joan’s Further Marital Adventures—Joan
in Trouble—Her Untimely End.
In those days of the King of Hungary’s assize in
Naples, Queen Joan reached her county of Provence
and began to travel across it from Nice, where she had
landed, towards Avignon.
On coming to the town of Aix, however, to her astonishment
and perplexity, her journey was interrupted
by the townspeople, who, albeit they received her with
every mark of respect, yet set a guard about the castle
of the place, the Château d’Arnaud, in which she stayed;
and refused to let her issue thence until, as they said,
they should have had word from Avignon—but in regard
to what matter they would not tell her at once.
Only after two months had gone by did the Archbishop
of Aix present himself before her with an explanation.
It appeared that, at the very moment of Joan’s landing
in Provence, news had been brought to Aix that the King
of France had sent his son, the Duke of Normandy, to
Avignon to negotiate with Joan as to the cession of
Provence to the French Crown in exchange for a proportionate
territory elsewhere; so that, on seeing Joan
arrive thus timely in their midst, the people of Aix imagined,
not unnaturally, that her presence among them must
be connected with the negotiations in question. And, as
they were determined to die to the last man rather than
pass under the detested rule of the French, they had resolved,
if need be, to keep the Queen a hostage among
them, in order to prevent her from carrying on the
dreaded negotiations. Having however, and to their
great thankfulness, received from the Sovereign Pontiff
himself an absolute denial of any such purpose of negotiation,
they at once and with many apologies restored
the Queen to liberty.
On leaving Avignon, what was her delight on seeing
the beloved Louis of Taranto come out to meet her, accompanied
by all the Cardinals then in attendance upon
the Pope! Joan was now, indeed, greeted as a Queen by
her people, who strewed the way with flowers, the while
a number of mounted pages rode beside the royal pair,
holding above them a canopy of crimson velvet; and,
from every church the bells pealed out a welcome to the
Sovereigns. In the castle they were received with all
pomp and circumstance by the Holy Father, who embraced
and blessed them; after which they took up their
residence in the Ursuline convent; and a little later, to
complete the gladness of Joan, her younger sister, Maria,
now the mother of two baby girls, arrived at Avignon
from the stricken city of Naples. After the death of
her husband in the castle of Aversa, Maria, bearing her
children in her arms, had taken refuge from the reprisals
of the King of Hungary in the monastery of Santa Croce,
where the monks took her in and fed and sheltered her
during some days, although they knew that not only their
lives but the existence of the monastery itself would fall
a sacrifice to the Hungarian’s anger should he ever learn
of their charity to the widow of Charles of Durazzo.
At length she had contrived, thanks to the disguise of
an old monastic gown, to embark with her babies upon
a ship bound for Provence; and her account of the things
that were being done by the Hungarian in Naples made
both Joan and her husband long to get back there with
an army behind them, that they, in their turn, might
satisfy their vengeance.
About this time there arrived, too, at Avignon ambassadors
from the King of Hungary to the Pope, demanding
in no measured terms the formal condemnation of
Joan as an accessory before the fact to the murder of
her husband, and her deposition from the throne of Naples;
and, most especially, that the Holy Father should
give the kingdom instead to Louis of Hungary. And now
the Pope appointed a day for Joan on which to plead
her cause before him and to disprove the charges made
against her if she could; and this she did so ably that
those who heard her broke into loud applause, and the
Pope pronounced her innocent before all the world, and
the Hungarian envoys were compelled to go away empty—although,
to this day, there are those who have their
doubts as to the veracity of Joan’s denial of the sin imputed
to her. At any rate, Pope Clement, who was a
good and truth-loving Pontiff, believed her, and there is
an end of it.
After the discomfiture of the Hungarians, the Pope
confirmed the marriage of the Queen to her cousin, Louis
of Taranto, and bestowed upon the latter the title of
King of Naples and of Jerusalem; he had already, on
March 27, given him the Golden Rose. Simultaneously,
the Holy Father sent an apostolic legate, Cardinal de
Boulogne, to the King of Hungary, at Naples, to persuade
him to cede the kingdom peaceably to its rightful
sovereigns.
While the Cardinal was engaged on this difficult task,
Nicholas Acciajuoli betook himself, likewise, into Naples
and set about raising an army wherewith to drive out
the Hungarians in the event of their refusing to listen
to the Cardinal’s arguments. But, to maintain such an
army, great expenses were unavoidable; and the Queen,
who had sent him in answer to a deputation of Neapolitans
entreating her to return and rule over them, was
now obliged to raise money by every means at her disposal.
For this purpose she sold all her jewels; but,
these proving insufficient, she begged the Pope to buy
of her the city of Avignon. To this he consented, and
on June 19, 1348, gave her for it a sum about equal to
sixty thousand pounds of our money. Which amply disproves
the statement made by Alexandre Dumas,[12] who
says that the sale took place on the day immediately prior
to Joan’s trial, suggesting as he does that the Pope’s
decision was influenced by his eagerness to acquire possession
of the city—for the trial was held almost at
once after Joan’s arrival at Avignon, on March 15.
In the meantime the King of Hungary had declined
to accede to the Pope’s instance that he should retire
from Naples to his own kingdom; and so there was
nothing left for Joan and Louis of Taranto to do but
to dispossess him at the sword’s point. Thanks to the
indefatigable efforts of Acciajuoli—and, in perhaps even
greater measure, to the misrule of the Hungarian himself—matters
were now ripe for an armed intervention
in Naples, where every strong place had surrendered to
the enemy, with the glorious exception of the castle of
Melfi, of which Lorenzo Acciajuoli, the son of Nicholas,
was the commander. From Melfi, where he had conferred
with his son, Nicholas Acciajuoli travelled
throughout the country, crying the Queen’s acquittal and
the confirmation of her union with Louis of Taranto and
proclaiming far and wide the great indulgences and blessings
promised by the Pope to all who should submit themselves
to their lawful rulers, Queen Joan and her consort,
King Louis. And, finding himself everywhere
greeted with tumultuous declamations of loyalty towards
Joan and of detestation of the Hungarian, Acciajuoli
returned to the Queen at Avignon with the news
that she might safely entrust her cause to her own
people.
On September 10, 1348, she left Provence for Naples,
accompanied by her husband and her sister and
the counsellors, Acciajuoli and Spinelli. But, when they
came to the shores of Naples, they could not land in
the harbour because all the castles on that side of the
city were occupied by the Hungarians, so that they had
to go on to where the mouth of the classic river, Sebeto,
was crossed by a bridge, the Ponte Guiscardo; thence
they were escorted by the nobles and townspeople to the
Palazzo Adjutorio by the Porta Capuana, where they
proceeded to establish themselves and their Court.
For many months the fortunes of war inclined first
to one side and then to the other. It began by Nicholas
Acciajuoli’s blockading the Hungarians in their strongholds,
whilst Louis of Taranto employed his energies
in reducing various of the rebellious barons to allegiance.
Little by little, he extended his operations from the city
of Naples into the furthest confines of the kingdom; until,
by dint of perseverance, he had contrived to make
himself, as it appeared, master of it. But suddenly his
good-fortune deserted him, owing to his abandonment by
one of the King of Hungary’s mercenaries whom Louis
had seduced to the side of the Queen by heavy bribes.
This was that Werner who styled himself “the enemy of
God,” and who now resold himself to the Hungarian,
to whose Vicar-General, Conrad Wolf (Conrado Lupo,
as the chronicler makes it), he opened the gates of
Benevento.
The consequence of Werner’s treachery was to force
Louis of Taranto to fall back upon Naples; when the
King of Hungary, on learning of it, made all speed to
rejoin his troops—he had fled from Italy for a while
to escape an epidemic of the plague—before Aversa,
bringing with him heavy reinforcements. Landing at
Manfredonia, he advanced, practically unopposed, so
swiftly as to take his adversary completely by surprise.
Having made himself master of the fortresses of Trani,
Canosa, and Salerno in rapid succession, thus hemming
in Louis of Taranto on the east and on the south, he
proceeded to lay siege to Aversa on the north of Naples.
This new move threatened disaster to Joan and her husband,
who, being forced to remain on the defensive in
Naples, were obliged to witness the spectacle of as gallant
a resistance as was ever made by any beleaguered
garrison; and that without being able to come in any
way to the assistance of Pignatelli, the commandant of
the place, and his heroic soldiers, who only numbered
about five hundred men, as against some seventeen thousand
of the enemy’s forces. During three months
Pignatelli flung back the King of Hungary’s attacks upon
the town; until finally, despairing of taking Aversa by
assault, the Hungarian resolved to reduce it by starvation.
Gradually the circumstances of the little garrison
became hopeless; so that Pignatelli was confronted with
the alternative of surrender or of death either by starvation
or in a last grapple with the besiegers. To add
to the general distress, a fleet of vessels bringing reinforcements
to Queen Joan from Provence under the leadership
of Renaud des Baux—some relation this, I fancy,
of that terrible Chief Justice, the Count of Monte
Scaglioso—and upon the timely arrival of which all
depended, was delayed by contrary winds so that none
could say where it was or whether it would ever arrive
at all.
Under these circumstances, Louis of Taranto, abhorring
the thought of allowing the brave Pignatelli and his
soldiers to sacrifice themselves to no purpose (seeing that
the ultimate surrender of Aversa was inevitable), sent a
message to the King of Hungary inviting him to a personal
encounter, in the same spirit in which the Emperor
Paul Petrovitch sent a similar challenge to King George
III of England. Louis of Taranto’s proposal to the
Hungarian was simplicity itself: that he of them who
should kill the other should be King of Naples and of
Jerusalem. To this the King of Hungary consented, with
the advice of his counsellors, stipulating only that the
combat should take place in the presence of the Emperor
of Germany, as Cæsar and sovereign lord of all
the princes of the West; or of the King of England, as
a friend of both parties; or of the Patriarch of Aquileia,
whose pretensions to equality with the Pope the Hungarian
appears to have been by way of encouraging
in revenge for Clement VI’s decision in favour of
Joan.
These proposals, however, came to naught, for in the
meanwhile Aversa surrendered to the Hungarians; so
that there was no longer any call for him to risk his life
for nothing. He had only to close in upon Naples, and
the doomed city must at once fall into his hands; it was
not more than twelve miles from Aversa to the capital
and the Hungarian advance guard under Lupi was soon
visible to the Neapolitans at the Porta Capuana; for it
was easier for them, being mounted troops, to approach
the city from the direction of Poggia than from that of
Capodimonte, the more direct but more hilly road to
Aversa.
Providentially, it was at this moment that the ships
of Renaud des Baux hove in sight of Naples and speedily
came to anchor in the port. Now it chanced that
Maria of Durazzo with her two children had taken refuge
from a possible sack of the city by the Hungarians
in the Castel dell’ Uovo, that, as the reader will remember,
stands upon a rock surrounded on three sides by
the sea and connected with the mainland by a causeway
on arches. Both John and Louis, being occupied in the
town itself at the time of the fleet’s arrival, and supposing
that Maria had already preceded them on board the
flagship, remained at their posts until the last, encouraging
their people and exhorting them to hold firm against
the foe. But the Neapolitans, preferring surrender to
possible annihilation, sent out a deputation to the King
of Hungary to beg for terms; to the great anger and
sorrow of their rightful sovereigns, who only now, when
all seemed over, reluctantly sought the shelter of Des
Baux’s vessels, off the Castello dell’ Uovo. Here, being
now much pressed for time, they embarked on the nearest
of the ships and, still in the belief that the Duchess of
Durazzo was safe on board that of the Admiral, they
gave the signal to depart and sailed out of the harbour
followed, as they imagined, by the rest of the fleet; for
it was now drawing on to night, and too dark for them
to see clearly what was taking place in rear of them.
Not until they reached Gaeta, towards noon of the
following day, after fighting their way through a dreadful
storm, did they realise that the Admiral’s ship with
the Queen’s sister on board was not with the rest of the
squadron that now came toiling, ship by ship, at long
intervals into the harbour. What had happened to it?
Had it sunk or been flung ashore by the waves during
the night at some lonely spot upon that inhospitable
coast? This was the agonising question that Joan asked
of herself and of Louis and of all about them. And none
could answer her.
Suddenly, as all hope of her ever again holding her
sister in her arms seemed to be on the point of vanishing
from before Joan’s eyes, a cry of joy broke from
her where she was leaning upon the gunwale of the vessel,
her gaze fixed upon the sea and the cloud-scuds to
southward. Hastening to her side, Louis saw that a
ship in difficulties, a considerable distance from them,
was being driven, in spite of persistent “tacking,” towards
them in the harbour of Gaeta. Thinking it must
be the Admiral, Louis hoisted signals to him, that he
should join them; but, to his amazement, no attention was
at first paid to his signals; by which I mean to say that
Louis had flown the Royal Standard and that the other
only continued the more desperately to endeavour to
keep out to sea.
Of a sudden, though, the newcomer’s sails were seen
to collapse and fall to the deck; and, judging from the
way in which she was tossed and rolled about by the
waves, albeit without changing her position, the watchers
could see that she had cast anchor. Without further
delay, Louis, in order to put an end to Joan’s suspense,
ordered a boat to be lowered and, together with several
of his comrades-in-arms, sprang into it and was rowed
out—not without considerable difficulty—to the vessel
in the offing.
On drawing alongside, their feelings may more easily
be imagined than described at hearing the cries of a
woman in distress come to them from out the creaking,
storm-tossed galley which was unquestionably that of Des
Baux. Moreover, the deck was crowded with sailors,
who now called to them to come quickly. Clambering
over the side by means of a rope-ladder thrown down by
the crew, Louis of Taranto and his comrades rushed
towards the Admiral’s quarters at the poop end of the
deck, to find his cabin shut and barred, the while the
voice of Maria of Durazzo called to them from within,
with redoubled energy, to come to her assistance. In
an instant they had broken down the door and, surging
into the roomy cabin, found themselves in the presence
of Maria and of the Admiral, who was endeavouring to
stifle her cries and to push her, with the help of his
son, Robert des Baux, into a cupboard of the apartment.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Louis of Taranto
smote the Admiral with his sword, so that he fell dead,
whilst Maria sank on to a couch, her face in her hands
to shut out the sight of the killing. But, having slain
the Admiral, Louis was content and ordered Robert des
Baux to be merely put in irons and taken with them
back to the other vessel, where Queen Joan was waiting
so feverishly to learn if her sister were alive and on
board or not. And when Maria at last rejoined the
Queen she told her how, having once taken her away
from the Castel dell’ Uovo on his flagship, the Admiral,
instead of sailing in the wake of the rest of the fleet,
had shaped his course for Marseilles; how he had tried
to compel her to marry his son, and how at length the
sailors, learning of it, and angered at his attempt to
make the coast of France instead of following the Queen,
had broken into mutiny on coming within sight of the
ships at Gaeta.
It would seem that the younger Des Baux was less to
blame in the affair than his father. At any rate, there
is no evidence to show that he shared the latter’s fate;
although this may well have been owing to the fact that,
soon after Louis of Taranto’s return with her sister to
the Queen, news was brought to them from Naples of
a sudden change in the situation there. It appeared that,
soon after the departure of the Queen and her husband
from the city, the answer of the King of Hungary to the
deputies sent out to surrender the city to him was received
and made known to the inhabitants. But of such
a nature was it, so atrociously haughty and so sinister
withal, that, rather than submit themselves to so despotic
and so resentful a Prince, the unhappy Neapolitans declared
their intention of dying with arms in their hands
in the defence of their families and their homes. No
sooner did the Hungarians learn of this resolve than a
desperate attack was delivered by them upon the Porta
Capuana, which they succeeded in penetrating, and compelled
the defenders to fall back towards the harbour
and the fortresses in the southern quarter of the city.
As the Hungarians were, however, advancing through
the black, deserted streets upon the Castel Nuovo in the
hope of capturing at least a portion of the royal family,
the amazing rashness of their venturing thus under cover
of night into the midst of an hostile, well-armed, and
well-barricaded populace suddenly became patent to the
Neapolitans; as well as the extreme exhaustion of the
Hungarian men and horses. No sooner had the Neapolitans
recognised their opportunity than they seized
it, flinging themselves upon their enemies, whom they now
beat back to the Porta Capuana and out through it into
the country beyond, amidst great slaughter and an indescribable
confusion, taking no prisoners but killing all
who fell into their hands.
This was practically the end of that war of the Hungarians
against Queen Joan and Louis of Taranto, after
whom messengers were despatched that night to Gaeta,
asking them to return and to lead their subjects once more
against the foreigners, who, said the message, had been
beaten back from Naples and were in full retreat upon
their former eastern base about Benevento. Soon after
the return to Naples of Joan and Louis, however, a truce
for twelve months was arranged between them and the
Hungarian, who was now more willing to listen to reason
than he had been before; so that when the Pope
was invited by Joan to mediate between them, he welcomed
the suggestion thankfully enough. Pope Clement’s
first proposal, though, that Joan should make the King
of Hungary the heir to her crown, and so put her sister
Maria out of the succession, Joan refused even to contemplate;
and then the Pope suggested that she should
pay a lump sum in cash to the King of Hungary as ransom
for all the fortresses that he still held in his hands
in the Kingdom of Naples; in return for which he was
to abandon all further claims upon and to the Crown.
To this Joan agreed willingly; but, when the proposal
was made known to the King of Hungary, he said: “It
is not for money or lands that I have fought, but for
vengeance on my brother’s murderers. But now my work
is done; the angry shades are satisfied, and I am going
back to my own country.” Nor would he accept so much
as a single piece of money for all the strong places and
the power that were still his in the Kingdom of Naples;
but gave all over, undefiled by money, to Joan, and then
departed as he had come, triumphant and unapproachable.
After Louis of Hungary had gone away, there came
a legate from the Pope to crown Louis of Taranto as
King of Naples and to solemnly ratify once more his
marriage with the Queen. All of which was carried out
on May 25, 1351, and the next three days, with an accompaniment
of much feasting and tourneys; also a
general amnesty was issued to all who had in any way
taken part against their lawful sovereigns in the late wars.
The ecclesiastical ceremonies took place in the Chapel of
Justice built by Charles II, to which Joan afterwards
added the Church called “Chiesa dell’ Incoronata,” in
memory of her wedding to Louis of Taranto. Among
the frescoes in the Church are portraits of Joan and of
Louis and of the infant son of the Duke of Calabria,
all painted by Roberto di Oderisio or, as some say, by
his master, the great Giotto himself. It is recorded that
the festivities passed off to the satisfaction of all and
were only marred by a single untoward event. For it
happened that, as King Louis was riding back from his
coronation beside the Queen, and was passing through
the Porta Petruccia towards the Castel Nuovo, a party
of ladies threw down upon him an immense quantity of
flowers, making his horse rear up and break the rein.
To save himself, lest it should fall and crush him, the
King sprang out of the saddle; but in doing so he loosened
the crown so that it fell from his head into the
roadway and was broken into three pieces. And that
same day there fell sick and died his infant daughter
by Joan. However, the King forbade that the festivities
should be spoiled by mourning; and so they were
carried to their conclusion. And in memory of his
coronation King Louis instituted the Order of the Knot.
The short rest of his life, though, was full of wars
and disquiet and disillusionment, for he was constantly
employed in repressing rebellion and in checking the independent
tendencies of his barons. Among the most formidable
of the disturbers of his peace was Louis of Durazzo,
brother of that evil Charles who had perished by
order of the King of Hungary at Aversa. Louis of
Durazzo was defeated, however, and ended his days in
the Castello dell’ Uovo. But he left behind him a son,
Charles, whose life was spared in answer to the pleading
of Joan, who took charge of him and loaded him
with kindnesses and married him to her niece, Margaret,
the daughter of Maria of Durazzo and of that other
Charles.
Worn out by incessant campaigning, King Louis fell
victim to a malarial fever on June 5, 1362, in the forty-third
year of his age.
Soon afterwards Joan married James of Aragon, King
of Minorca, who had first fallen in love with her at
Avignon, where the history of his fortunes and adventures,
combined with the melancholy handsomeness of
him, had made a deep impression both upon Joan and
upon her sister. For James of Aragon had spent no
less than thirteen years of his life as a prisoner in an
iron cage, and was even said to have been reduced to
the necessity of begging his bread. No sooner was he
married to Joan than he devoted himself to making war
upon Pedro the Cruel, the usurper of his throne, and died
near Navarre, in 1375.
After King James’ demise, Joan married again, as her
fourth husband, Duke Otho of Brunswick; by now, having
no children alive of her own, she adopted as her successor
Charles of Durazzo, her nephew by marriage,
whose life she had saved.
During the next few years Joan, as the result of a quarrel
with Pope Urban VI (who as Bartolomeo Prignani
had been formerly one of her own subjects), gave her
support to the anti-Pope, Clement VII, whom she sheltered
in the Castello dell’ Uovo. For this she was promptly
excommunicated, being at the same time declared deposed
from the throne, whilst her subjects were formally
relieved of their allegiance to her. The Crown of Naples
was bestowed by the Holy Father upon Charles
of Durazzo, whom Joan had already proclaimed her successor
and who now showed his gratitude in the following
remarkable manner: Hastily borrowing an army from
his great uncle, old King Louis of Hungary, who was
still alive, Charles set out for Naples, where his wife
and their two children were even then living as honoured
guests and relatives under Joan’s roof. So soon
as she learned of this, Joan sent word to Louis of Anjou,
brother of the King of France, to say that she appointed
him her successor instead of Charles and begging him
to come to her aid against the latter.
On the approach of Charles’ army, Joan sent out his
wife and children to plead with him that he would treat
her generously; but, instead of doing so, Charles laid
siege to Joan in the Castel Nuovo; her husband, Duke
Otho, he had blockaded behind him in the castle of
Aversa. At length, though, the German fought his way
through the containing force before Aversa and fell upon
Charles of Durazzo’s flank and rear guard by way of
Piedigrotta. Long the unequal combat raged, but at
last when Otho himself, after being wounded and having
broken his sword, and, thanks to his leading his men
and becoming separated from them in the midst of the
enemy, had been taken prisoner, the little remnant of his
followers, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, had
no choice but to surrender. Whereupon, Charles of
Durazzo redoubled his efforts against the Castel Nuovo
and, shortly afterwards, succeeded in taking it;
after which he wrote to the King of Hungary to
say that the Queen of Naples was his prisoner and
asking that monarch’s good pleasure in regard to
her.
Some months now passed, during which Otho of
Brunswick, on promising to quit Neapolitan territory for
ever, was given his liberty; and the French army of Louis
of Anjou compelled to abandon its march upon Naples.
At the end of that time an answer was received from
the King of Hungary, commanding that Joan should be
put to death as a last propitiatory sacrifice to his murdered
brother.
Since the taking of Naples the Queen had been sent
for safekeeping to the castle of Muro in Calabria.
On the 5th of May, 1385, as she was praying in her
room there, that looked out over the ravine and the town
below, the door was opened very stealthily, so that the
Queen thought it was one of her maids and did not turn
her head to look at the intruder. Nor did she ever, in
all probability, see who it was that had entered; for,
in the same moment, a cord was slipped over her head
and swiftly drawn tight about her throat as only a man
of strong hands could draw it; so that she died instantly,
her unfinished prayer upon her lips. And the four Hungarian
soldiers, who had seen her die, left her lying
there and went away quietly to report to their commanding
officer that the thing was done as it had been ordered.
And the cord with which they had done it was the same
with which Andrew of Hungary had been strangled at
Aversa; so, at least, it is said.
CHAPTER XV NAPLES UNDER MURAT
Beauty of Naples—Figures of Its History—St. Januarius—Murat, King
of Naples—Achievements as King—The Carbonari—England’s Promises—Napoleonic
Diplomacy—Rise of the Bourbons—Alliance with
Austria—Murat’s Indecision—Distrust of the Allies—Murat’s Statesmanship—Talleyrand’s
Diplomacy—Naples, the Gay—Conspiracy in
the Palace—The Escape from Elba—Ideal Government—War Against
Murat—Advance of the Austrians—Murat Driven to Naples—Interview
with His Wife—Last Instructions to His Ministers—Escape.
The fairest and, in some respects, the wickedest spot
on the face of the earth is that wonder city, that
broods by the “tideless, dolorous, midland sea,” Vesuvius,
smoking like some monstrous chimney of hell behind
her, the deep blue, translucent glory of the sea like
a drift of Our Blessed Lady’s mantle before.
Travelling round that bay and on around the point towards
Calabria, hardly a dreamy mile goes by that some
of the history of thousands of years ago does not present
itself.
It has been the home of saints and of scholars; of
soldiers a few, of statesmen a-many, of some of the most
beautiful characters that ever walked the earth, and of
some of the very worst that ever polluted the world with
their presence. At the top of the list stands St. Januarius,
Bishop of Benevento, who with six of his companions
came to Naples during the ninth persecution to comfort
and strengthen the Faithful, and who being seized with
his companions was taken to Pozzuoli, and there flung to
the wild beasts; who, when they refused to harm him,
was plunged into a blazing furnace, out of which he came
intact, and was thereafter beheaded; but who stands at
the bottom, I should be afraid to say. At this point there
is an “embarras de richesses!”
Of all the landmarks of history with which the Kingdom
of Naples is dotted none, perhaps, is more rich in
Romance or more imbued with the spirit of Tragedy
than a certain straggling, half-ruined castle near the little
village of Pizzo, upon the coast of Calabria.
A round tower, grey and sullen with age, faces the sea;
in the wall of it is set a small, heavily barred window,
through which one of the very few comparatively good
Kings of Naples looked his last upon a world which
had seen him rise from a peasant to a monarch.
There is neither space nor need to recapitulate here
the life of Murat. Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria,
Egypt had felt the tread of his all-shattering squadrons,
whose onset no horse or foot of continental Europe had
ever been able to withstand. The Dictator of Europe
had given him his sister for a wife. Naples had been
proud to own him for her King. Glory, wealth, splendour
had been his, and he could have kept them—I
think it is safe to say that he could have kept them—had
he been able to stand firm. But he had not the strength,
even when he joined the Coalition in 1814. While he
was still fighting Eugène, he could not resist the temptation
to intrigue with the Viceroy, who of course instantly
saw to it that the Allies were notified of the fact. In
those stormy days nobody trusted his neighbour, nor did
any one blame his neighbour particularly for trying to
keep his political balance in any way that he could; so
that Murat’s—inconsistency, let us call it—was not held
against him afterwards. The Bourbons were not popular,
either, and Ferdinand, that perfect product of the
hapless, helpless race, was generally detested. It must
be said for the Bourbons that their sins are, as a rule, of
the negative sort, and cruelty is not one of them. Ferdinand,
however, besides being a spineless king, was a
brute and a coward, which again are not Bourbon traits.
Joachim Murat’s position was always a difficult one, to
be sure. Although King of Naples, he was in Napoleon’s
time only a king at his imperial brother-in-law’s pleasure,
and regarded by the latter as little more than a proconsul,
elevated to a throne in order to carry out his
master’s wishes. At the same time he was conscientious
enough to attempt the task of being a real king—and
a good one. He loved the “flair” of kingship, but he
did recognise some of his responsibilities towards his
subjects and continued, while Napoleon’s back was
turned, to govern fairly well. The Neapolitans loved
show and noise and ceremony, and they liked the handsome,
dashing, open-handed cavalryman. The country
was rich, too. In those days, even if the peasants lived
like cattle, at least they had plenty to eat and drink,
and even now those times are spoken of as a bankrupt
speaks of the fat years behind him.
“Era una schiuma d’oro” (It was a froth of gold),
said one old man to me, some years ago, “before this government
of robbers took possession of it!”
Of all Napoleon’s kinglings, Bernadotte alone contrived
to keep his crown, and that may very well have
been because Napoleon did not choose him, but only acceded
to the popular demand when he let him reign.
Murat came to the throne of the Two Sicilies in 1808,
when poor unlucky Joseph was compelled, much against
his will, to go to Spain. Joachim was not always popular;
indeed, that would have been impossible, in the
condition of things which prevailed in 1810 and 1811.
He could not always be on the spot, and in his absence
he had to trust to his government. This being made
up of Neapolitans—both Liberal and otherwise—and
of the Frenchmen who had come in with him, did not trust
itself, and the King’s authority came to be decentralised
beyond all control from the throne. His life was conspired
against several times. Once in particular a plot
was hatched to assassinate him while he was hunting in
the woods of Mondragone, but one of the conspirators
turned king’s evidence and the plotters were caught.
When they were brought to trial, and their guilt was
proved, their advocate was making the best he could of
a bad job, when the presiding judge stopped the proceedings
to read aloud a paper which he had just received
from the King.
“I had hoped,” it said, “that those accused of conspiring
against my person might have been proved innocent;
but I have heard with regret that the Solicitor-General
has demanded a heavy punishment against them
all. Their guilt may perhaps be real, but I am desirous
of still preserving a ray of hope that they may be innocent,
and I hasten to stop the decision of the Tribunal
and to pardon the accused. I order that upon receipt
of this paper the trial be closed and the unhappy men
set at liberty. As the trial concerns a foolish attempt
upon my life, and the sentence is not yet pronounced, I
do not offend against the law of the State, if without
having received a recommendation to mercy I thus use
the highest and best prerogative of the Crown.”
Murat set many public works on foot, notably during
1812. Roads and bridges and theatres were built,
marshes drained and aqueducts constructed, the most
noteworthy of which achievements were the Strada di
Posilippo, the Campo di Marte, the observatory on the
height of Miradone, and a lunatic asylum. This latter
caused a good deal of surprise as well, for lunatics were
not generally coddled in that fashion in the Naples of
1812.
In the middle of all this activity, Murat was recalled
to Paris, and it was only after many months and many
experiences that he set eyes upon his kingdom again. Had
his advice, which was to halt the 1812 campaign at Smolensk
and establish a settled government in Poland, been
followed, it is possible and more than possible that the
disastrous affair would have had a different termination,
for Napoleon could have kept his communications open;
but the Emperor, at that time, suspected Murat and Ney
and Rapp, believing that a weariness of war and a desire
to reap some of the fruits of their labour was at the
bottom of the really excellent counsel that they offered
him. And so he pushed on to Moscow, partly from
impatience, partly to satisfy the gnawing appetite of the
“folie de grandeurs” which had hold of him, partly
because he did not trust his own men. “Ours is not an
army of position,” he said. “It is an army of attack—not
of defence.”
Murat’s conduct during the campaign was such as to
extract an unwilling praise even from the Emperor,
who was no believer in praise as an agent for anything
but the rank and file. Only when Murat left the wreck
of the army, the command of which Napoleon had entrusted
to him, on the Oder, did the quarrel which the
war had drugged into a false quiet break out again.
Napoleon, on hearing of Joachim’s return to his kingdom,
wrote a frightful letter to Caroline, and this falling
into her husband’s hands drew from him a reply which
threatened to break up the relations between the two for
all time, and it was only Caroline’s self-control and tact
that healed the breach for the time being.
A common danger and the ties of their old comradeship
drew them together again when Murat arrived in
Bohemia, and then he fought stoutly and well. It is
hardly credible and, were it not history, it would be absolutely
inconceivable, that, while battling whole-heartedly
for the French in Bohemia, Murat was engaged, through
his government, in an attempt to unify Italy by the assistance
of Great Britain, which was to supply twenty-five
thousand men, who, with his own troops and the disaffected
Italians in the ranks of the French garrisons, were
to drive the Tricolour over the Alps. He contrived to
persuade himself that he was honest in his intentions, too,
by a process of reasoning peculiar to several of the Emperor’s
lieutenants in those times. As Frenchmen they
marched with the armies of France, and served her to
the best of their splendid ability; as kings and grand
dukes, they served their subjects, or thought they did,
with equal enthusiasm. Bentinck, however, being an
Englishman, failed to understand the presence of their
separate political entities in one person, and withdrew,
so that the unification of Italy, fortunately, one cannot
but think, fell through, and Joachim returned to Naples
in 1813.
It was then that the society, known as the Carbonari,
who had appeared in the kingdom three years before,
began to spread themselves in all classes of society, conspiring
in the sweet Italian fashion, which conspires for
the sake of the pure delight of intriguing. They had no
definite aim. Their professed “raison d’être” was a
vague dream of a vague constitution, “à l’Anglaise.” In
such hands, of course, this would have been about as
fruitful of any real liberty as the Commune, and none
knew this better than Lord William Bentinck; but any
stone will do to throw at the Devil, and Lord William
hastened to communicate with the liberty-loving thieves,
murderers, and brigands who represented the society of
Naples. There were, to be sure, some honest men among
them, whose hearts were stronger than their heads.
There always are a few in these affairs, enticed in by flattery
and utterly uninformed as to the real object of their
associates, who are pushed to the front for the public
to see.
Among these was a certain young gentleman, a man
of fortune and courage—a captain of militia in his own
town, which stood upon the summit of a high and precipitous
mountain. His name was Capobianco (white-head)
and, at the time when he came to the notice of the
authorities, they had discovered the trafficking of the
society with Lord William, who had been sending across
volumes containing the new Sicilian laws which had been
enacted in that island, under the Bourbons, or, to speak
more accurately, had been forced upon the Bourbons by
Lord William, under pain of being left to look after
themselves and being compelled to fight for their own possessions.
The conspirators must have been a simple-minded
people, if they really believed that Ferdinand had
promulgated anything of the kind without compulsion.
Lord William promised the Neapolitans a similar code,
if they would only restore Ferdinand—Lord William
was always rather free with his promises—and the Government
of Naples, finding the horrid thing in their midst,
proscribed the society and threatened with most dreadful
punishments any one who mentioned the word constitution.
Whereupon the Carbonari dropped down into
Calabria and proceeded to shout it aloud, among them
young Capobianco.
As it has been said, his town was practically inaccessible,
so that, despairing of his capture, General Janelli
made a pretence of refusing to believe in his association
with the Carbonari; after several ineffectual efforts to
entrap him (for Capobianco had a native mistrust of
authority under any guise save that of the Church), he
one day invited him to dinner upon the occasion of a
public festival in Cosenza. Capobianco hesitated, but
finally made up his mind to attend, feeling that he would
be safe if he took unfrequented byways and surrounded
himself with a dependable escort.
He would feel safe, he told himself, in Cosenza, for
he intended to arrive when the banquet should be already
begun and leave before it was over, and, in the house of
the General, he would be in the company of all of the
authorities of the province, whose presence he seems
to have conceived to be a safeguard, for some reason or
another.
So he went and was royally entertained. Healths were
drunk, compliments were exchanged, and Capobianco
proposed to depart, followed by the salutations of the
General. He got no further than the ante-room, though,
where the gendarmes were waiting for him. They seized
him and dragged him off to prison, where the next
morning he was tried by a military commission, condemned,
and publicly beheaded before mid-day in the
Square.
When this was bruited abroad, some of the “patriots”
fled to Sicily and the Bourbons, to breathe, as we are
told, “the free atmosphere of Sicily under the Bourbons!”
and Joachim’s unpopularity began to assume the
proportions of a menace.
Still, however, the better elements were upon his side,
perhaps from expediency,—for Murat’s servants would
receive short shrift at Ferdinand’s hands should that
monarch return,—but they gave Joachim some very good
advice among them, even if some of it is rather too
subtle. Napoleon’s hands were too full to allow of his
interference, and he, in his dealings with the Allies, invariably
quoted fifty thousand Neapolitan troops as part
of his own force. The Allies knew better, though. Two
fatal defects in a ruler are over-craftiness and inconsistency.
Murat had both. At one time, as it has been
seen, he hastened to pardon those who had conspired
against his life; a year later he allowed his own resentment
against the Carbonari to lead him into an attempt
to crush them by a severity which merely drove them in
on each other and made a solid body out of a straggling
mob. Before this, with an ideal the meaning of which
very few of them understood, the Carbonari—the leaders
of the movement, that is to say—were fighting the
clouds; but the harrying they received gave them a definite
grievance and one that was shared, for purely personal
reasons, by thousands who would otherwise never
have joined the movement at all.
The craftiness which Murat conceived to be policy
delivered him into the hands of men far cleverer than
himself, whose life’s business it was to overreach one
another.
He was a brave man and a most excellent soldier, but
those were not qualities that could help him in the thimble-rigging,
knife-in-the-boot game of Napoleonic statecraft,
played by men who had not an illusion remaining about
each other, and who, with the possible exception of the
Russians, had each and all betrayed their neighbours over
and over again.
Murat, at Ollendorf upon the shores of Ulm, received
several very polite and pressing invitations to an alliance
from the Austrian Commissioner, Count von Mier, and
he had listened to them, as one of his contemporaries
says, without disdain. Wishing, though, to get an idea
of what his own people might think of such a suggestion,
he consulted two or three of his ministers and generals
on the subject. The result did not help him much, for
they all held different opinions. One held that France’s
welfare was that of Naples, and that with the return of
the Bourbons to Paris everything that the Revolution and
the Empire had done for Italy would he wiped out; another,
that Murat’s duty was to establish himself firmly
and hold fast to his throne, whatever might happen to
his own people and the Emperor. Upon one point they
were all agreed and that was that Murat’s first and most
imperative duty was to so order his relations with the
Powers as to exclude any possible chance of Ferdinand’s
return; it was as to the best way of attaining that desired
condition of things that they differed.
“The old and the new era,” said one, advocating the
continuance of the existing alliance with France, “are
at war with one another, and the victory cannot for the
present be assigned to any particular state or people.
Should the new triumph, all the social institutions of Europe
will, in twenty years’ time, be established upon the
basis of the Civil polity introduced by the French; but,
if the old, all progress will be arrested and the new
States be thrown back towards the hated condition of
the past.”
He goes on to remark upon the reliance to be placed
upon the word of the Kings then struggling against Napoleon,
“for, if kings promise to-day, they will break
their words to-morrow.”
The other finishes his address, in which he advises
Murat to let France bleed to death by herself, thus:
“Above all, I beseech you not to be caught by false
glory, but to believe that there is only one way to preserve
your reputation, which is to preserve your Throne!”
The military element seems to have been of the same
opinion as number two, but Joachim wavered—as well
he might, for both parties to the discussion were right.
Even if he joined himself to the Allies, it was quite likely
that his throne would be taken from him at the first convenient
moment. The Bourbons were everywhere, and
Spain, Italy, Austria, and presently France, would be
filled with them. Their clamour would rise in a hurricane,
and what could those who professed to hold their
own crowns as gifts from the Almighty say in answer
to them? If the Emperor of Austria ruled by Divine
Right, he must believe that Ferdinand did the same. If
the Divine Right could be disregarded in one case, it
could be disregarded in all, and there were plenty of evilly
disposed persons who desired nothing better. It would
be a weapon in their hands, and they had plenty of
weapons already.
In spite of this, and in the face of it, Francis of Austria,
by a treaty concluded on the 11th of January, 1814,
acknowledged Joachim’s dominion and sovereignty over
the States he ruled, and Joachim, as a matter of form,
returned the compliment.
Thus Naples was definitely placed in the ranks of
France’s enemies, Austria agreeing to furnish thirty
thousand men for Italy and Naples thirty thousand, the
allied forces to be under the command of the King of
Naples, or, in his absence, of the officer highest in rank
in the Austrian army.
This, together with a promise that Francis would use
his good offices to bring about a reconciliation between
Naples and England, as well as with Austria’s allies, was
the published treaty, but there were several secret clauses,
some of which seem to indicate a lack of humour in the
high contracting parties.
Francis, having acknowledged Joachim’s sovereignty,
pledged himself to obtain the renunciation of it from
Ferdinand (as though the consent of that individual made
any difference to anybody!), while Joachim promised, on
his part, to indemnify Ferdinand, thereby acknowledging
that his own claim was that of force majeure and nothing
else; and yet the principle of Ferdinand’s Divine Right
was never called into question! But at the same time
Murat was in correspondence with General Miollis, commanding
the French troops in Rome, and with Barbou
and Fouché, assuring them of his devotion and attachment
to France, and endeavouring to explain away his
treaty with Francis on the ground of political necessity!
Miollis withdrew into Sant’ Angelo, and the Neapolitan
troops forced the little body of French under
Lascolette to shut themselves up in the citadel of
Civita Vecchia. But now, after having inaugurated his
campaign, Murat’s indecision prevented him from giving
any definite orders, and his generals instantly began to
suspect him of playing them false.
Proceeding into the States of Rome, he found anarchy
prevailing in every direction, and, already torn with
conflicting emotions, he found himself the target of generals,
magistrates, and Austrian ministers, who maintained
that he had not acted up to his part of the treaty.
That roused him, and he woke up from his lethargy
long enough to start the Neapolitan troops forward and
to settle the civil administration a little. A good many
Frenchmen still remained in the Neapolitan army and,
in order to retain them, and have some company in his
matricidal course, he assured them that the treaty was
a feint and that he was working heart and soul for his
beloved country. But he so entangled himself with lies
that he presently found it difficult to move in any direction
without finding the net of them about his feet.
The Neapolitans disliked and distrusted the French,
because they saw in them a drag upon Joachim’s wheel.
The French despised the Neapolitans and presently departed,
seeing clearly whither they were being led. Since
the only officers of any value in the Neapolitan army
were these Frenchmen, Murat was now compelled to rely
upon the Germans—that is to say, the very men he had
fought against in the preceding year.
The French were not in sufficient numbers to offer
any real resistance and it was not long before Civita Vecchia,
Sant’ Angelo, Florence, Leghorn, Ferrara, and
Ancona were in Murat’s hands.
Bentinck presently landed at Leghorn with fourteen
thousand Anglo-Sicilians, and Eugène, the Viceroy, found
himself with fifty thousand men opposed to forty-five
thousand Austrians, twenty thousand Neapolitans, eight
thousand Germans under Murat and Bentinck’s Anglo-Sicilians.
Of course Murat mistrusted his allies, and the allies
returned the compliment with interest. He had no very
high opinion of them as soldiers, either, in which he
was justified. Bellegarde carried his suspicion so far as
to refuse to build a bridge or two over the Po, lest Murat
might use them against him, and Murat became convinced
that Bellegarde and Bentinck wanted to make him attack
the Viceroy in order to injure his troops and his reputation,
for what were thirty thousand Neapolitans in the
scale against fifty thousand Frenchmen commanded by
good officers and in the hands of such generals as Eugène
had on his staff? He discovered, too, that Bentinck, who
had landed as his ally, was permitting his Sicilians to distribute
pamphlet copies of an edict of Ferdinand’s, reminding
the Neapolitans of his rights and exciting them
to rise against Joachim. Bentinck was not a very clever
man, and here he showed himself to be a fool. He had
already given the Duke of Wellington a good deal of
trouble by ruining the Duke’s market for specie in Spain,
offering a higher price for it than the Duke could afford
to give, and by various other ill-judged and ill-timed
schemes; now, having Joachim on his side—the
one man among them all who could lead an army—he
deliberately attempted to ruin his influence in the moment
of action, by turning his own men against him, and by
siding with Bellegarde in every question of military policy,
wherein neither of them were really worthy to be
allowed to carry out his, Joachim’s, orders.
From the Austrian monarch, Murat might have expected
that sort of thing, for Austria had at one time
and another during the last twenty years broken her word
to about everybody with whom she had had any dealings.
Metternich boasted of it openly, and, had Murat been
gifted with a little more political foresight, he might have
felt even then the hands that were pulling him down.
It may be said that he hoped for Napoleon’s triumph
in the latter’s Homeric fight, nor could he be blamed
where all the circumstances are considered. “In every
transaction,” says one of his staff, “whether emanating
from the rulers of kingdoms or the commanders of the
armies that were sitting about in Italy, some perfidy
transpired or lay concealed.”
The only people who were really happy at this time
were the Neapolitans, who, with the English markets
opened, began to prosper after the long, lean years, and
held their heads high now that their King and their
armies had been, as they thought, distinguishing themselves.
Poor Joachim now received a petition from his
generals, published with the approval of the whole army,
begging him to summon a council of war and hear their
“opinions”! It is a wonder that the veteran of a hundred
pitched battles did not hang somebody for the impertinence,
for from any point of view it is difficult
to understand what they expected of him in the way of
action. But he let the incident pass.
Now the Pope, who had been released by Napoleon,
approached the Papal Dominions and reached Tara before
Joachim, who was in Bologna, was aware of the
fact. Joachim, who had a good part of the Papal States
in his possession and hoped for more—since Francis
of Austria had promised him his assistance in the matter,—sought
by every means to avert the Holy Father’s onward
progress from Reggio; but he had a stronger man
than himself to deal with, and one who had at his back
the enthusiasm of a people. Murat’s own officers helped
to draw the Papal carriage in one place, and his men
broke their ranks, falling over one another for the privilege
of being allowed to approach the returning exile.
In spite of all that Joachim’s envoy, General Carrascosa,
could do, Pius’ determination to proceed was unaffected,
and the general returned to his master, begging
him for his own sake to give way before the popular
enthusiasm, which every day was increasing. Murat,
however, decided upon a middle course. He would render
to the Pope all the honour in his power, but he
would give him no assistance.
At Bologna, the Pope called upon Murat, and, though
alone and helpless in the face of his opponent’s armed
strength, extracted from him the return of the Patrimony
of Peter to the Church. Pius did not relinquish his claim
to the rest of the Papal Possessions, either, and continued
on his way to Cesena, his native place, by the Strada
Emilia, among his own subjects, although Murat, fearing
the excited feeling among the latter, wished him to
go through Tuscany.
Murat’s power was toppling over, for, do what he
might, his interests were the interests of the France that
he was fighting. But what could he do? It would take
a clever man to find his way safely out of such an impasse
as confronted Joachim. Could he have remained
neutral, it is possible that he might have survived the
hurricane, but that was almost impossible, cut off as he
was from France and encircled by the Allies. Besides, the
quarrel with England had brought such misery to his
subjects that this condition alone was reason enough for
attempting the impossible. Napoleon was battling with
his back to the wall, and, even though he fought as man
never fought before or since, the tide was engulfing him.
His own ministers were carrying on secret correspondence
with the enemy, and preparing their own salvation,
careless either of their duty or of their country’s
humiliation.
When on the 15th of April, 1814, Murat received the
news of the capitulation of Paris and the abdication of
the Emperor, he paled as he read the despatch and betrayed
great agitation and nervousness, and for several
days afterwards he was gloomy and unapproachable.
He repaired quietly to Bologna, and, while Italy went
mad and raved in its madness, while the Milanese murdered
Prina and Eugène Beauharnais took refuge with
the King of Bavaria, he returned to Naples, where he
was received like a conqueror and was compelled to bow
his appreciation and render his thanks for a display, not
one word or one smile of which, as he well knew, was
genuine. The people expected very naturally that a new
order of things would bring them a new government, and
Murat’s own suspicions were confirmed when the treaty
of peace was signed at Paris and the Congress of Vienna
was summoned without any mention of him at all. Legitimacy
was now the rage, and Joachim, though without
an invitation, despatched the Duke di Campochiaro
and Prince de Cariati as his representatives to Vienna.
That done, he turned to his kingdom and, taking time by
the forelock, he summoned the most able men of the
country to him and set them to work upon the land, the
finances, and the army, only warning them not to follow
too hard after the latest fashion or to “run backwards
blindfold.”
At the same time, on his own account, he lightened the
heaviest of the taxes, brought in measures for the encouragement
of trade with England, and permitted the free
export of grain. Then he decreed that the offices of State
were to be given only to Neapolitans, and that foreigners
holding them who refused to be naturalised must resign,
after which he sat down to wait upon events.
By these measures he contrived to win over a large
part of the people, and, by degrees, the old Murat began
to emerge from his hiding-place in the personality of the
new. His Council had agreed with him in almost every
question of importance, and the counsels which he received,
while suggesting a constitution, were really sincere
in their hopes for the maintenance of his dynasty.
His army, which he had had time to put into shape again,
was with him; the newspapers were obsequious in their
praises of his virtues; and all the corporate bodies in
the State announced their readiness to pledge their lives
and property in his support.
The Congress of Vienna began to pay some attention
to these signs of popular approval and it was noised
abroad that the Emperor of Russia had let fall the remark
that “it was impossible to restore the ‘Butcher
King’ now that the interests of the people had to be considered.”
Then Caroline of Austria, Ferdinand’s wife,
died suddenly, and so little was her decease lamented that
Francis forbade the Court to go into mourning for
her.
It may well be imagined that Joachim began to feel
safe on his throne, and the fact that, by an agreement concluded
at Charmont some little time before the fall of
Napoleon, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England had
confirmed the principles of the alliance between Austria
and Murat, helped him to hope that, after all and in spite
of everything, he might be allowed to remain. He had
not reckoned, though, with Talleyrand, whose desire it
was, just then, to show himself as a reformed character
who was ready to do anything to prove his detestation of
the fiend whom he had been serving and of all the fiend’s
family, which of course included Joachim.
Talleyrand had besides a private grudge against
Joachim, for the latter had openly mistrusted him for
years, and Napoleon’s parting remarks on the subject
of his late Minister for Foreign Affairs must still have
been tingling in that gentleman’s ears when he set out
for Vienna.
“I should have hung him long ago,” said the Emperor.
“I always knew that he would be the first to
betray me when the occasion offered itself!”
Talleyrand, who had arrived at the Congress as an
apologist both for France and himself, a man with no
claims to consideration from anybody, outside the pale
of Christian intercourse as an excommunicate bishop and
an unfrocked priest, a creature at the sight of whom
Francis and his Catholic princes must have shuddered;
without a friend—or a case—bankrupt of power and
credit, contrived by the sheer force of his own genius
to dominate the whole Congress after the first half-dozen
sittings.
He set Austria and Russia by the ears, and heated up
the quarrel until there was every prospect of war; lined
up their adherents and pushed them into the conflict, and
manœuvred so marvellously that, in a very short while,
France and her friendship were the objects of the diplomacy
of both contending parties. Metternich, Nesselrode,
Hardenberg, Castlereagh, Stewart, and Stackelberg were
little more than children in his hands. His confrères—Noailles,
Dupin, and Dalberg—had no voice in the questions
that arose. Talleyrand was the Congress, and when
he began to use his power to pay off some of his grudges
and enmities, it was on Murat that his hand first fell.
More Legitimist than the Legitimists, he set out to earn
the million francs promised him by Ferdinand for the
throne of Naples.
The first inkling that Murat received of the turn that
affairs had taken was a request, couched in the terms of
a command, from Francis, that he would restore the
Marches to the Pope. Now the Marches in question had
been promised to Murat by Francis himself, not twelve
months before, and Murat in answer proceeded to increase
his garrison and commenced to strengthen the fortifications
of Ancona. He, besides, started a quarrel with
the Pope, and despatched a minister of his called Magella
into the Marches to assist the Carbonari in their plots
against the dominion of the Holy Father.
It was about this time that he began to receive overtures,
couched in the most affectionate and brotherly language,
from Napoleon at Elba. A succession of disguised
conspirators from Paris and other places passed
in and out of the Palace, in Naples, generally under cover
of the spring night, while the city disported itself along
the waterfront, and gay ladies and gay men sat over
their cards in the great, cool rooms or wandered about
in the sleeping gardens.
For Naples was gay in those days. People saw light
ahead after the years of gloom. Hunger had vanished;
real hunger, at any rate. The King’s public works gave
employment. Uniforms glittered everywhere. To their
minds, Naples was a Paris in miniature, so the lights
shone and the world danced and played on, music lay over
the place in a rainbow web of sound, and the blue sea
smiled at the stars.
But up in the Palace, behind closed doors, Murat sat
with his chin in his hand, and his eyes wandering out
to the sea from time to time, as though he expected to
see something there—something whose name was never
mentioned except between him and his wife, and then only
in whispers.
By ones and twos the mysterious figures arrived, coming
in through side doors, and staying a while, talking
with their hands to their mouths, some volubly and
eagerly, some gently and hesitatingly, but one thing could
be observed of all of them, and that was that, somewhere
on their persons, casually as a trifle but plain
enough to eyes that looked for it, was either a small bunch
of violets or a strip of violet coloured ribbon or a bit
of violet coloured silk.
“Are you fond of the violet?” they would ask when
they met. “It will return in the spring,” was the answer—and
it was spring already down there. Spring
breaks in February in Naples. The King was, outwardly,
as gay as any, and only Caroline and a very few devoted
friends saw the other side of him. The ambassadors of
the Allies were watching him, as he knew, and, as was
bound to happen, word came to them that strange visitors
were being entertained at the Palace, among them
Princess Pauline, Napoleon’s sister, who shortly afterwards
returned to Elba.
Ferdinand, free of his rather dreadful Austrian consort,
proceeded to espouse a certain Lucia Migliano, a
lady, it is said, of noble birth but of a vulgar and immoral
character—which is probably true, for how could
any clean and self-respecting woman have ever been induced
to marry Ferdinand?
That monarch now swore to the constitution of 1812.
He opened, dissolved, and reopened a Parliament, and
generally walked in the popular path. Those happenings,
naturally, reacted upon the Neapolitans and helped to
undermine Joachim’s position badly. The Carbonari
broke out again, soon afterwards, and Joachim began to
be afraid lest these popular spasms should come to the
ears of the Congress and affect his interests; so he attempted
to arrange matters with the Carbonari, which
only went to their heads and made them more offensive
than ever.
Things could not remain so for long, and there is no
saying what might have happened had not Napoleon discovered
that the allied Powers had not the slightest idea
of living up to their word with him, that the promised
annuity—promised on the basis of the huge private fortune
which they had looted from him—was never going
to be paid, and that some one whom he had small difficulty
in connecting with the Bourbon Government in Paris
was attempting to poison him.
On the evening of the 4th of March, 1815, Murat,
with some of his family, was amusing himself as best
he could, attempting to divert his mind from the problems
and questions which had harassed him all day, in
his wife’s apartments, when there appeared in the doorway
a bowing attendant, begging the King and Queen
Caroline to give an audience to a messenger who was
awaiting their pleasure in the next room. Murat assented
carelessly and told the attendant to bring him in,
but the former replied that the newcomer had particularly
asked that the King and Queen would give themselves
the trouble to hear what he had to say,
alone.
By this time Murat had an inkling of the news which
awaited him and hurried out of the room, the Queen upon
his arm. In the small apartment, leading out of the
gallery, they found Count Colonna, who came forward
out of the dark corner where he had been waiting and
presented his despatches.
It is a picture that stands out vividly in the imagination:
The Count studying Murat’s face as the latter reads the
message, and glancing from time to time at the Queen,
trying to read something of her husband’s mind in her
face; Murat blinking in the half light over the words,
rejoicing in the news as he thinks of the manner in which
the Congress of Legitimacy has been treating him, but
endeavouring to keep his features composed and his pleasure
out of his voice.
“That will spoil Metternich’s sleep for a while,” one
can almost hear him saying to himself. “And Talleyrand—how
will he get out of this? On guard, Messieurs!
You will have to exercise something besides your
tongues now!”
Napoleon had escaped from Elba, and announced that
he proposed to chase the Bourbons out of France, and
suggested an alliance, begging Murat at the same time
to place a battleship or a frigate at the disposition of his,
the Emperor’s, mother and sister.
Hurrying back to his guests, Murat divulged the news,
and his cheer and excitement were so obvious that some
of them guessed then the course which he would pursue.
The next morning Murat despatched special messengers
to Vienna and London, in which he assured the
governments of Austria and Great Britain that, whatever
might be the result of Napoleon’s raid, he himself
would remain faithful to his treaty obligations.
Neither of his correspondents had the slightest belief
in his protestations, and Francis, without waiting, took
steps to crush him if he moved—or if he did not. But
Murat’s health was high and the memories of the golden
years were like wine. He felt a real remorse for the
part which he had played, and the splendour of Napoleon’s
lone-handed assault upon a world in arms appealed
to every soldier-like instinct in him.
He did not forget his own ambition, though, and he
desired to make himself so powerful that he could treat
with either Austria or France upon terms of something
like equality. It was Italy that he wanted. The great
Powers would have their hands full now, and he hoped
to be able to surprise the Germans while the armies of
Europe were engaged with the Emperor.
Caroline, however, joined with his ministers and his
Council in opposition to war. Naples and Italy had had
enough, and even in the unlikely event of Murat’s correspondents
in the North having been accurate in their figures,
or right in their appreciation of the popular feeling,
it was practically certain that, whether the victor in
the coming contest were to be the Emperor or the Allies,
neither would allow Murat to attack Italy and rule it
undisturbed.
He assured his Council that Italy was ready to rise
on either side of the Po. He explained his mistrust of
the Congress. He agreed that, although it would be
unsafe to diminish the army in the present condition of
Europe, yet Naples could not support the troops unless
fresh taxes were imposed; and that being out of the question,
the only alternative was to quarter them upon somebody
else. He went on to point out that political liberty
was at the last gasp in Italy. But even that battle-cry
failed to arouse the enthusiasm of his audience. Political
liberty, as a theory upon which to speculate over a glass
or two of wine in the cool of the evening, was well
enough, but political liberty as a reason for draining the
country of blood and money any longer was quite another
affair. The common people cared very little, if
anything at all, for it; what they wanted was food and
drink, and a chance to save a little money, and marry, and
be happy. The taste survives in Calabria to this day.
They like an overlord, they like having somebody over
them who will order their ways and provide them with
work and see to their well-being, and knock their heads
together when they misbehave and pat them upon the back
before their fellows when they are good. It is, after
all, the ideal form of Government. No other approaches
in efficiency to a beneficent and intelligent autocracy. The
main trouble is that very few autocracies have any intelligence.
I am sure I do not know why. Logically a man
who has been trained to rulership from the cradle should
make a better ruler than the accident of a convention;
and on the whole, one may say, he does. The Emperor
of Germany, for instance, is a far better ruler than either
Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Taft, or Mr. Wilson, or any President
of the French Republic that ever lived. So was
King Edward VII, so was Queen Victoria; but then, from
nowhere in particular and without any training at all, a
Lincoln emerges and gets elected—that is the mystery
which I have never been able to fathom—by a number of
people whose individual opinions upon any subject of
real importance are worth less than nothing!
Murat, as has been seen, made a habit of mistaking
craft for statesmanship, and his Council, by now, were
beginning to be aware of it. Frenchmen and Neapolitans,
they saw that would be extremely dangerous for both
countries—particularly Naples—and they resolved to
wait to declare themselves until word came from London
and Vienna. Murat, however, paid no heed to their
resolution or their opinion, and broke up the Council,
secretly determined to make the effort.
Some of the troops with which he proposed to undertake
the conquest of Italy were more fit for sneak-thieving
than actual fighting against drilled men. The artillery,
sappers, and cavalry were even worse than the infantry,
and when we are told that the regiments of the latter were
taken from the prisons and from the galleys, and that
half of the generals and colonels were French, and the
dissensions between the natives and the foreigners are
remembered, one cannot but think that Joachim must have
been a little off his head with the strain he had been enduring
for the past year, if he hoped to annex Italy
with such a force as that.
In reply to Murat’s request for permission to pass
through the Papal States, the Holy Father appointed a
regency and betook himself to Genoa, accompanied by
many of the Cardinals. As this occurred in the middle of
Holy Week, the sacred offices were interrupted, many of
the priests leaving the city to follow the Pope, and the
indignation of the Romans knew no bounds. Murat
wisely refrained from approaching the city and proceeded
to Ancona, from whence he instructed the ambassadors at
the Congress to renew his protestations of fidelity to his
treaties.
This quite unnecessary insult roused Francis of Austria
effectually and he despatched Frimont, Bianchi,
Mohr, Neipperg, and Wied, with forty-eight thousand
infantry, seven thousand cavalry, and sixty-four guns, to
repay Joachim for it. Besides these, Nugent had a brigade
in Tuscany, the Po was fortified at Piacenza, Borgoforte,
Occhiobello, and Lagoscuro by the Germans, who
occupied every possible crossing and had at their backs
the fortresses of Pizzighettone, Mantua, and Legnano,
with detachments in Commachio and at the bridge of
Goro. It was a solid affair against which Joachim was
ramming his head.
He, as soon as war had been declared on the 30th
of March, annexed—on paper—the districts of Cerebino,
Pesaro, and Gubbio, and issued edicts vilifying in
the usual manner his opponents, whom he accused of
every fault of which he himself had been guilty. Also,
he addressed the inattentive and careless Italians, reminding
them of such grievances as he could remember and,
when the stock of those ran short, inventing several entirely
new ones.
He had a few partial successes at first before Frimont
arrived upon the scene. Carrascosa managed to drive
some Austrians—it is all but impossible to arrive at the
real figures and facts of these contests, but I should be
inclined to say about fifteen hundred—from Cesena.
Later they came upon some more at Anzola, and these
retired before them probably, or I should say certainly,
under orders. At Spilimberto he had a personal brush
with them, which resulted in a haphazard sort of success
which he seems to have made no attempt whatever
to push. A few days later, after investing Ferrara—the
operation could not have been a very serious one,
for it was only conducted for two and a half days—he
attempted to storm the bridge-head at Occhiobello, but,
finding it to be out of the question, left the array encamped
on the spot and returned to Bologna, where he
learned what had become of two legions of his Guard
which he had sent to Tuscany—for no military reason
that I have been able to discover, save the very problematical
one of “rousing” the Tuscans.
They were commanded by Generals Pignatelli, Strongoli,
and Livron, who, being of equal rank, were to act
in concert, but not to attempt to take precedence of each
other—which, as one historian very truly says, was a
“strange and unusual idea in the composition of the
army.”
These contrived to get as far as Pistoia, where, hearing
that the garrison had designs upon them, they retired
in something of a hurry to Florence.
It was there that Joachim received a communication
from Lord William Bentinck to the effect that, since he
had broken his treaty with Francis, he could consider the
treaty with England broken as well. He might well have
expected this piece of information one would think, but
it seems to have depressed him greatly.
The King’s edicts, too, had fallen flat. They had produced,
we are told, “promises, applause, poetic effusions,
and popular orations, but neither arms nor action; thus
furnishing much future work for the police, and nothing
for war.”
The forces he had counted upon did not materialise,
and Joachim called his ministers together. These had
discovered by now that he never called upon them for
advice unless he was in trouble, and their ardour and
loyalty were shaken. Still, when he laid the facts before
them, they gave him the best they had, in the face of
the rather desperate circumstances. The army was straggled
out over a line between Reggio, Carpi, and Ravenna,
without any supports or reserves, in the face of an enemy
stronger, numerically and morally, and in their position
one blow might be the end; so Joachim’s advisers recommended
him to hold on to the places he had only so long
as it would take to send back the sick and the baggage, and
then look for some point of attack where the result would
be a little less certain.
A few days later the Germans stormed Carpi and
chased General Pepes almost as far as Modena, and only
Murat’s appearance upon the scene halted the pursuit.
On the 15th they seized Spilimberto, the defenders of
which retired in considerable disorder to Sant’ Ambrogio.
By now, however, the advice of the Council had
been carried out and the remains of the army, unhampered,
were able to move about and were directed upon
the Reno, Ravenna, and Forlì. The troops upon the
Reno were, however, attacked by the Germans and, after
a three-hours’ fight, retreated upon Bologna.
Joachim, at Imola, now discovered that the Austrian
army had been divided into two parts—one under
Bianchi, the other under Neipperg.
The former was advancing by the Florentine Road,
the latter by the Strada Emilia, the idea being to enclose
Joachim and force him into a general engagement between
them. They were divided by the chain of the
Apennines, and Murat perceived that Neipperg, at least,
was inferior to him. Fired by the memories of ‘96, he resolved
to attack Bianchi and, if possible, cripple him before
Neipperg could come to his assistance, after which
he would still be able to fight Neipperg, unless things
went very wrong indeed with superior numbers.
Macerata was Murat’s objective, but it was twenty
days’ march for troops who reckoned a day’s work as
lightly as did his. For all that, he contrived the retreat
with creditable skill in spite of a scuffle with Neipperg
near the Roneo.
But when the battle of Macerata was fought, Joachim’s
fortune, which had been so shy and fickle of late, deserted
him entirely. Though he fought a stubborn
enough battle, and though his own dispositions were solid
and well thought out, his instruments failed him. General
Maio and General Lecchi made little or no attempt
to shock their opponents, allowing their men to drift into
action anyhow, and, as the day waned and the Neapolitans
became too listless even to fire, word came to
the King from General Montigny in the Abruzzi, telling
him that the Germans had taken Antrodoco and
Aquila, that the people were rising for the Bourbons,
and that the magistrates had transferred their allegiance,
while he and the few faithful men who had remained
with him had been forced back to Popoli.
At the same time, came a despatch from the Minister
of War, telling him of the enemy’s appearance upon the
Liris, of the horrified feelings of the people, and of the
helpful activities of the Carbonari in Calabria.
Joachim instantly decided to take his troops back into
the Kingdom of Naples, and ordered a general retreat.
Then it was that he became fully aware of the sort of
staff he had been leaning upon. Some of the troops seem
to have been prepared to behave themselves, had their
commanders given them any opportunity of so doing, but
the generals had had enough and more than enough, and,
to use an Americanism, they “lay down upon him”
completely.
When he called a council the next morning, they informed
him that the larger part of their men had deserted
and that the rest would not obey orders. When
one comes to think about it, there does not seem to be
any particular reason why they should have, since no one
made the faintest show of imposing any kind of discipline
upon them.
The enemy advanced on either side while this discussion
was in progress, and one brigade, which had obeyed
the order to march and which Joachim opposed to them,
rested upon their arms, and proved to be utterly indifferent
to the results. On his arrival in the Abruzzi,
Joachim was astounded to discover that Montigny—he
of the “faithful few”—had abandoned his post at Antrodoco
without even waiting for the enemy to appear,
and that his unedifying conduct alone was the cause of
the magistrates’ defection. Also, it was Montigny and
no one else who had deliberately abandoned Aquila, although
the enemy, by reason of the condition of the roads,
could not have brought up the guns necessary to reduce
the place.
Joachim, still dazed with this infamy, now received
word, through Prince Cariati, whom he had sent to the
Congress of Vienna, that the Allies were going to exterminate
him, that no hope of any sort of reconciliation
remained; at the same time, a letter from Napoleon
censured the recklessness of his campaign and went on to
say that it might prove the ruin of his own effort.
In this state of affairs, Murat bethought himself of the
possibilities of a constitution as a prop to his own tottering
throne. It would be funny if it were not so melancholy!
A constitution! With the Austrians at his gates,
an English fleet in the Bay, the entire Kingdom torn to
pieces, the Carbonari in every quarter, his army vanished,
and his friends in flight!
Commodore Campbell had already threatened, unless
the ships and the stores in the arsenal were delivered up
to him, to fire a thousand rockets into the city. Poor
Caroline collected some of the ministers and magistrates
and asked for their advice, whereupon the Minister for
Police informed her that the first assault of an enemy
would ignite a conflagration in the city which nothing
would be able to suppress. They were reminded, too, by
a general officer, that there were still ten double ranges
of batteries wherewith to defend themselves, and he suggested
that Campbell was counting upon the moral effects
of his threat among the people.
So Caroline, after the invariable accusations of treaty-breaking
with which everybody opened verbal fire on
an enemy, and the equally invariable appeal to history,
stipulated for her own and her family’s safe return to
France in an English vessel. Caroline was a Bonaparte,
and she could keep her head, even in a crisis of this sort.
She had ruled wisely and well in her husband’s absence,
backing him up, in spite of her opposition to the war,
stoutly. Now she proclaimed the terms of accommodation,
and, having provided for a temporary peace, she
turned to the immediate needs of the situation, and, having
heartened the city militia with her own courage, she
pacified and quieted the populace. With her in the palace
were her sister Pauline and her uncle, Cardinal Fesch,
besides her four young children, whom she decided to
send to Gaeta.
Stout old Macdonald, the Minister for War, of whom
Napoleon said during the Peninsular Campaign, “I
would not dare to let Macdonald within sound of the
pipes!” was sent to supersede Manhir, and he did presently
succeed in driving the Austrians beyond the Melfa;
but no further advantage was gained, because the troops
with which Murat was hoping to effect a junction were
stampeded at Mignano.
Murat’s reign was over. The Bourbons were upon
the top of him, and all that he could do now was to escape
before they closed every road. He believed that
the Bourbons wished to capture him and wreak their
vengeance upon him for the lean and restricted years.
Leaving the wreck of his army to Carrascosa, he made
his way into Naples as the sun was dropping over the
hills, and hurried by round-about ways towards the
Palace. He was in civilian dress, having discarded his
uniform when he left the army, but he was recognised
and, to his surprise, treated by those whom he met with
all the respect which had been his as a king. In the
harbour he could see the British fleet, lying at anchor,
and perhaps the sight was not altogether an unwelcome
one, for he had learned of Caroline’s treaty with Campbell,
and, little as the English might be to his taste,
at least they had been worthy and steadfast enemies
and infinitely better company for him than the Bourbons.
A little pleased, even through the fogs of his depression,
at the manner in which he had been received by the
people, he ran into the Palace, seeking for his wife. Her
he found in her own apartment, in the same room where
they had first heard of Napoleon’s departure from Elba,
two short months before, and in which he had left her
to depart upon this last disastrous campaign.
It must have been rather dark in there now that the
twilight had come down, and the memories of the past
must have crowded thickly about him as he entered. He
found Caroline alone, save for a lady-in-waiting, and he
went straight to her and caught her in his arms, his voice
at first too choked for utterance.
At last, when he could master his voice, he spoke,
calmly enough, and his tremendous self-restraint was
worthy of the old Murat of Jena and Eylau.
“We are betrayed by fortune, my dear,” he said, “and
all is lost!”
Caroline was even steadier than he, and she smiled
into his eyes.
“Not all,” she answered quickly, “if we preserve our
honour and our constancy!”
Sitting down together, they dismissed the lady-in-waiting
with instructions to gather together the few
proved friends who still remained to them, and then set
themselves to the preparations for their departure. An
hour or more they spent together, and then Murat
emerged, his head high and his face alight from the contact
with his splendid wife. His ministers had assembled,
and with them he arranged such of the affairs of
the kingdom as admitted of arrangement, and placed
them in such a shape that the Bourbon could not help
but keep them so, for his own sake, and every last one
of his acts and thoughts was directed towards the future
welfare of his people. Nothing else appeared to
have any place in his mind at all. He was cool, quiet,
cheerful, and collected, heartening those around him, and
as free-handed to the French who were leaving him, and
the servants whom he was leaving, as though he were
taking the crown instead of laying it down.
He had regained the priceless possession of hope. Napoleon’s
star was still shining. France had taken him
to her arms. Without the shedding of a single drop of
blood he had regained the throne and, though all the
world might be in arms against him, he had faith in
himself, the faith that moveth mountains. Murat had
resolved to go and join him, and, when the world war
was over, and Napoleon’s foot was again upon the neck
of his enemies, to return to Naples and drive Ferdinand
into the sea and under it.
Caroline knew of his intention, for she let him go
alone, and his instructions to Carrascosa (before the latter
departed to the little house, three miles out of Capua,
where Lord Burghersh, Bianchi, and Neipperg waited
to arrange the terms of the treaty of Casa Lanza) show
her hand plainly, for Carrascosa was told to stipulate
that the property sold or given away by Murat must be
guaranteed to its possessors, in order, as Joachim said,
to leave him the character of a good king and that the
Neapolitans might cherish his memory. He knew, and
so did Caroline, exactly how long it would take Ferdinand
to make himself loathed and abominated by the people
whose yoke Joachim had lifted.
That these did not trust Ferdinand’s eloquent vow to
abstain from retaliation against those who had served
Murat, was made plain in the very beginning of the
negotiations, for they refused to take his personal word
for the fulfilment of any part of the treaty, and demanded
the guarantee of the Emperor of Austria. It
was little security enough, in all conscience, for the guarantees
of Francis had been the jest of Europe for years
past, but they seemed to think that it might bind the
hands of the “Butcher King” for a while.
On the same evening that the treaty was ratified,
Joachim departed incognito for Pozzuoli. From there he
went on to Ischia, where he was received with all the
respect due to a monarch, and on the 22d he sailed for
France with a few friends. Caroline, as regent, still
remained in the Palace, and the Neapolitan populace,
in the absence of the troops, went off their heads. They
had been hard held lately, and now they made up for
it. They broke open the prisons and committed atrocities
that do not bear writing about. Even the presence
of three hundred marines from the British fleet could
do little to control the mob, but they produced a temporary
calm, during which Caroline embarked on one of
the British men-of-war with Macdonald and two others.
CHAPTER XVI MURAT’S LAST DAYS
Naples in Anarchy—Entrance of Austrians—Murat’s Repulse by Napoleon
and by Louis—His Demon of Ill-luck—Ship-wrecked—Aid in Corsica—Emperor
of Austria’s Proposal—Attempt Against Naples—Murat
Betrayed into Ferdinand’s Hands—Murat’s “Trial”—Letter to His
Wife—Before His “Judges”—A Brave Death—Ferdinand, the
“Butcher King.”
No sooner was Caroline on board than the city broke
out again and anarchy reigned, until the Austrians
sent in some troops in answer to the frantic appeals of
the magistrates, and these, with the British marines, set
upon the mob, killing a hundred or more of the worst
of them before order was restored.
The riot and the subsequent slaughter had apparently
no effect upon the people’s feelings, for on the very next
day they illuminated the city gorgeously and the sound
of their merriment could be heard out at sea. All the
ships in the harbour were dressed, even that one which
sheltered Caroline and her followers, and on the 23d
the Austrians entered with Crown Prince Leopold of
Bourbon at their head, who graciously acknowledged the
howls of the crowd. Everything that suggested Murat—flags,
statues, pictures—was destroyed, and Caroline,
from the deck of the British ship, watched the general
jubilation over her husband’s fall.
Joachim, passing Gaeta, saw his standard still flying
from that fortress, and, even then, would have landed
and joined the garrison had he been permitted to do
so, but the port was blocked up with vessels and he was
forced to proceed on his way.
He reached Fréjus on the 28th of May, but, as the
shore became clearer and the outline of the coast grew
into the horizon, the hopes with which he had left Caroline
began to weaken, and he became oppressed with a
sense of helplessness, seeming to feel that he was struggling
against hopeless odds. The sight of the country
he had once served so well, and where his name had
been a household word—he was known as “the Achilles
of France”—struck chill upon his heart. He had loved
his mistress, and had never counted the cost, but he had
sided against her, too, and, as he well knew, a country,
like a woman, forgets a thousand acts of devotion in
the face of one affront. He had no friends there any
more, save, perhaps, his brother-in-law; but Napoleon
had a woman’s memory for past wrongs, too, and, though
his letters had been full of affection while the issue of
his own attempt was still problematical, now that he had
succeeded, he could repay to the uttermost farthing.
He might need Murat to lead the cavalry—nay, as
it seemed, he must need him, for he could not, surely,
allow a personal spite to prevent him from using that
weapon of weapons when the hilt of it was held out to
him! Murat was not the only one, either. Ney had
sworn to bring the Emperor back in a cage like a wild
beast—and he had taken Ney to his heart as soon as
they met. Marmont had deliberately gone over to the
enemy—taking his corps with him. Indeed, of all Napoleon’s
former adherents it might be said that only Soult
had proved to be the true mettle, for he had not laid
down his arms till after the Emperor had descended
from the throne, and he had fought his last fight, with
as high a courage and as steadfast a heart as his
first.
Soult had never surrendered, nor had he ever allowed
it to be said that force of arms had compelled him to
submit to the Allies. He had obeyed the decision of his
countrymen, and that was all.
The evil days upon which he had fallen had eaten into
Murat’s self-confidence badly, and he dared not even
proceed to Paris, but remained at Toulon. From there
he wrote to Fouché, whom he still imagined to have kindly
feelings towards him—Fouché—because in his prosperity
he had befriended him.
“You know,” he wrote, “the motive and the result
of the war in Italy. Arrived in France, I now offer my
arm to the Emperor and trust that Heaven may allow me
to atone for the disasters of the King by the success of
the Captain.”
Fouché presented the letter to Napoleon without comment,
and the latter read it. “What treaties of peace
have I concluded with the King of Naples since the war
of 1814?” he asked, handing it back, and Fouché bowed
himself out.
Murat remained at Toulon, growing daily more hopeless,
although the inhabitants treated him with great respect.
But he had passed the point where the respect
or otherwise of private citizens could affect him. Then
came Waterloo, and the South of France took on the political
aspect of the unhappy kingdom which he had just
quitted. The Monarchists rose and smote out right and
left, massacring their political opponents and looting
everything that those unfortunates left behind them.
Marshal Brune, who had previously been sent by the
Emperor to maintain order in the South, was torn to
pieces by a mob, and Joachim was forced to hide himself
as best he could from the “White Terror,” which
was overrunning the land.
From his hiding-place, he wrote again to Fouché, but
that adaptable gentleman was now Minister to Louis
XVIII, and vouchsafed no answer. Fouché was one of
those human chameleons that fit themselves into any
colour-scheme, and all the wars, plots, revolutions, and
Armageddons of the past years had passed him by. He
had just succeeded in betraying Wellington, to whom he
had promised Napoleon’s plan of campaign, by sending
the plans and then taking steps to see that the messenger
was delayed long enough on the frontier to make the
delivery of them useless; and now he was more monarchist
than the poor old monarch himself, hunting out
his late associates mercilessly. Murat begged for a passport
to England, but no notice was taken of his appeal.
In despair and having escaped, by what seemed to be a
miracle, from the hands of the Marquis de la Rivière,
who owed his life to Joachim’s favour, he wrote to Louis
himself, requesting Fouché to deliver his letter. But
Fouché sent no word, and no answer came from Louis,
who probably never saw the letter at all; and, seeing no
other hope for him, Murat resolved to go to Paris and
place himself in the hands of the Allied Sovereigns.
They could not, in reason, blame him for doing to them
that which they had all, at various periods during the
past twenty years, done to one another. He had been
a great figure—a greater figure than any of them. They
had now no reason for betraying his confidence; and they
were neither vengeful nor bloodthirsty. He would be
safer with them than among his own countrymen. His
idea was to travel by sea—for to attempt a land journey
would have been something not far removed from
suicide—to Havre de Grâce, whence he could make his
way to Paris with little risk. So, having made arrangements
for a vessel, and chosen a wild and unfrequented
part of the coast and a dark night for his embarkation,
he set out.
But the vessel, for some reason or other, did not
arrive at the spot that night and Murat was compelled
to retire among the rocks and vineyards for shelter, and
here he remained, hoping against hope, until the darkness
gave way to the summer dawn, and the light from
the faint topaz-coloured east on the waters showed
nothing that looked like the craft he had bargained
for.
Perhaps it was meant, that crushing disappointment,
for there is no saying, in the light of the conditions which
reigned at the Capital, whether he would ever have
reached the Sanctuary of the Allies at all. The White
Terror, a plague as fierce and irresponsible as the Red
one of a quarter of a century earlier, was raging uncontrolled
and uncontrollable, and the deeds of Murat, as
King of Naples in 1814, would not have counted then,
for the Emperor’s broken Marshal. Fouché’s agents
very nearly caught him that time, and he had to fly from
cover to cover like a hunted hare; but he escaped from
them, and a while later slipped away in a little ship that
was bound for Corsica.
Even now the demon of his ill-luck, still unsatiated,
continued to pursue him, for after two days a storm
overtook them which forced them to lower their single,
three-cornered sail, and let the boat run under bare poles
for a day and a half, at the end of which time, when
the little ship was filling rapidly, they were picked up by
the Corriera, on her way to Bastia. A large French
vessel which they had spoken a few hours earlier had
refused to have anything to do with them, and when this
other one, more charitable, came alongside, Murat, uncovering
his face, told the Captain his name.
“A Frenchman,” he said. “I speak to Frenchmen,
and, nearly shipwrecked, I ask aid from those who are
themselves out of danger.”
Greatly to his surprise and his gratification, he was
treated with every honour and welcomed on board as
a king, and, the next day, he landed at Bastia.
He had come at a moment when Corsica was in the
throes of a civil war of its own, between the followers
of the Bourbons, the adherents of Napoleon, and a party
who, sitting on the fence between, called themselves Independents.
Many of Murat’s old-time companions-in-arms
had been natives of Corsica, and, the Napoleonists
and Independents being in the majority, they called upon
Joachim to help them crush the remainder and rule over
the island afterwards. This was the sort of invitation
which the fiery cavalryman was always only too ready
to accept, and his heart soared into the heavens!
One begins to understand the reason why Napoleon
could hold all Europe down, when one reads the adventures
of Murat and Ney and Soult. Even when the Great
Force behind them was removed, and they were struggling
single-handed, while the least and weakest chance
remained to continue fighting, they would fight. They
never counted the odds, they never parleyed with a compromise,
repeated defeats never cooled their courage;
they would follow as hard upon the faintest ray of hope
as they had galloped into the blazing sunlight of an
assured victory.
It was not long before Joachim became the object of
the deepest suspicion to such authorities as still remained
in Corsica and he removed himself to Vescovado, and
thence to Ajaccio, with the enthusiastic assistance of the
discontented element in the island. Once more, under
the action of the popular support, he began to feel a
king, and frequently remarked that, if strangers rallied
to him in this fashion, the Neapolitans might be expected
to rise en masse at his appearance. “I accept it
as a happy augury!” he exclaimed.
It seems incredible that, after his experience among
them, Joachim should have an illusion left about his late
subjects. But he evidently had, and he determined to
descend upon Salerno, where three thousand of his former
troops were quartered. They were, he was sure,
discontented with the Bourbons—being what they were,
they were bound to be discontented with any sort of
established authority—and with these he expected to
march towards Avellino, increasing his following as he
went, throwing a panic into the capital before him; in
fine, repeating the Napoleonic performance, and seating
himself firmly upon the throne before the Austrians could
descend upon him.
He had completed his arrangements, when he received
a letter from Maceroni, informing him that the latter
was upon his way to Ajaccio, and that he was bringing
good news with him.
He waited a day for him, and Maceroni, when he appeared,
presented Murat with a note written in French:
“His Majesty the Emperor of Austria [it ran] will
grant an asylum to King Joachim on the following conditions:
“First. That the King shall assume a private name;
and the Queen having taken that of Lipano, the same
is proposed to the King.
“Second. That the King shall reside in one of the
cities of Bohemia, Moravia, or Upper Austria, or, if he
should prefer it, in the country; but in one of these
provinces.
“Third. That he shall pledge his word of honour not
to quit the Austrian territory without the express permission
of the Emperor, and to live as a private individual,
subject to the laws of the Austrian Monarchy.”
It was signed by Metternich, and dated from Paris,
on the 1st of September.
But Joachim, in spite of his friend’s entreaties, would
have none of it.
“Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.” Joachim’s
soul was aflame now and he spoke contemptuously
of the offer.
“A prison, then,” he cried, “is to be my asylum! A
prison is a tomb, and nothing remains for a King who
has lost his throne but the death of a soldier. You have
come too late, Maceroni. I have already determined on
my fate.... If I fail, imprisonment must be the natural
consequence, but I will never consent to drag out the
miserable remnant of my days in slavery. Bonaparte
resigned the throne of France, yet he returned to it in
the same way which I now attempt.... I have not resigned
my throne or forfeited my right, therefore a fate
worse than imprisonment would be contrary to human
justice; but be assured that Naples shall be my St.
Helena!”
On the night of the 28th of September, the forlorn
hope embarked at Ajaccio. The weather was mild and
clear, the sea calm, and both the troops and their leader
happy and confident. They did not know that Ferdinand
had had intelligence of every move that Joachim had
made since his landing in Corsica, through one of
Joachim’s own servants, a man of the name of Cabarelli.
This man, who owed everything that he possessed to
Murat’s kindness, accosted him at Ajaccio, and, while
offering himself to his old master’s service, begged him
not to attempt the crazy enterprise. In this he was acting
according to his orders, for the Neapolitan Government
was frightened; but, having discovered, doubtless
from Joachim’s own rash words, that he was bent upon
the affair and would allow nothing to stop him, Cabarelli
forwarded to his employers Joachim’s entire plans, preparations,
and movements.
The only thing that he did not learn was the destination
of the little force, and the lack of that knowledge
prevented Ferdinand from taking any steps towards
dealing with Joachim when he should arrive. Ferdinand
was afraid, too, of any rumour spreading, for Murat
had still many friends in the Kingdom and he, Ferdinand,
had none.
For a week all went well with the expedition, but on
the seventh day a storm arose which lasted for three
days and which scattered the little fleet hopelessly.
Joachim’s boat chanced to find its way into the Gulf of
Santa Eufemia, and Joachim, after some hesitation, resolved
to stake all upon the throw and land at Pizzo,
with the twenty-eight men remaining to him.
This was on the 8th of October. It was a festa and,
in consequence, the militia were paraded in the market
place, when the party came ashore. No sooner were
these on land than they raised Murat’s standard and advanced
upon the town, shouting, “Long live King
Murat!”
But there was no response and the onlookers remained
silent. It was as though a cold mist had settled upon
the sunny morning, and Murat hastened on to Monteleone,
where he trusted to the gratitude of the citizens
for many favours which he had done them in the past.
But two Bourbon adherents—a certain Captain Trentacapilli
and an agent of the Duke dell’ Infantado—hastily
collected a following of men and weapons and
met Joachim on the road, where they opened fire upon
him.
He, however, did not return their fire, but only saluted
them, whereupon, taking heart from his inaction, they
fired again, killing one and injuring another of his followers.
The remainder prepared to defend themselves,
but Joachim prevented them.
Now a crowd began to collect, and very soon the only
avenue of escape for Joachim was by the steep cliff, down
which he ran, hailing, as he arrived upon the beach, his
ship, which was still but a little distance from the land.
His captain, Barbara, though—another upon whom
Joachim had lavished every sort of kindness and whom
he had raised from nothing at all to the rank of a Baron—paid
no heed to him and sailed away with the booty
which he had on board.
Then Joachim, despairing at last, attempted to make
his escape in a small skiff which lay on the beach; but
it was too heavy for him to move, and the next moment
Trentacapilli and his rabble were upon him, striking
him in the face and tearing off the jewels which he wore
upon his cap and breast, and bellowing their insults at
him while he was being led up to the grey, straggling
castle; and only when he was inside the gates and out
of sight did their howling cease.
A tiny light penetrated through the gloom that surrounded
him when Captain Stratti, upon hearing who the
prisoner was, treated him with marked deference and
respect, addressing him as “Majesty” and securing for
him the best room that he could. General Nunziante
also, upon arriving, paid him every mark of respect, and
endeavoured, as far as it was possible for him to do,
to show his sympathy for the unfortunate and betrayed
captive.
This treatment appears to have restored Murat considerably,
and that night he slept soundly and peacefully.
No idea of the sort of vengeance which Ferdinand and
his abominable government were preparing for him appears
to have entered his head, and he still seems to have
thought it possible to come to some arrangement with
that royal hyena, for he remarked to Nunziante, the day
before his execution, that it would be easy to come to
an accommodation with Ferdinand by the latter yielding
to him the Kingdom of Naples and by his yielding to
Ferdinand his claims to Sicily.
Ferdinand, in the meanwhile, having recovered from
the nightmare of terror which had seized him upon the
receipt of the news of Joachim’s landing at Pizzo, allowed
his joy and relief full play. At first he wanted to
imprison every one who could even be suspected of a
suspicion in the direction of Muratism, but his courage
failed him, and he had to content himself with despatching
Canosa—who may I think, without injustice, be
classed among the three or four worst and most despicable
characters that ever infested that sunny land—into
Calabria with carte blanche to represent his master.
The order for Murat’s execution was sent down by
signal telegraph, and, that done, a court-martial was composed
to try him! Seven “judges” were chosen, three
of whom, besides the Procurator General, had been raised
from poverty and obscurity and loaded with money and
honours by Murat himself; and, in order to save themselves
from any taint of common gratitude or even decency,
which might bring them into disfavour with their
present sovereign lord, they first of all thanked the latter
humbly for deigning to make use of them, and, by
their bearing and remarks during the trial, made it impossible
for Murat to sit in the same room with them,
even had he desired to do so.
In the round tower, Joachim spent the last night of
his life, mercifully undisturbed by the knowledge of the
Court which was to go through the farce of trying him.
It was long after daylight when Nunziante entered, so
softly that the sleeping man did not awaken. Nor did
Nunziante arouse him—an act of charity which must
surely have been put to his credit when the long roll-call
summoned him in his turn!
On Joachim’s awakening and opening his eyes, Nunziante
broke the news of his approaching trial as gently
as possible.
“I am lost, then!” exclaimed Murat. There were
tears in his eyes, and Nunziante himself was unable to
speak for emotion, but he brought his prisoner pen and
paper.
“My dear Caroline [wrote Murat]: My last hour
has struck. Within a few moments I shall have ceased
to live and you will have lost your husband. Do not
forget me! My life has never been stained by an act
of injustice. Adieu, my Achilles, my Letitia, my Lucian,
and my Louisa. Show yourselves worthy of me. I leave
you without a Kingdom, without wealth, in the midst of
many enemies. Be united and rise above misfortune.
Look upon yourselves as you are, not as you might be,
and God will bless your humility. Do not curse my memory.
Know that my greatest misery in this last hour of my
life is to die far from my children. Receive your father’s
blessing—receive my embraces and my tears.
May the memory of your unhappy father be ever present
with you.
“Joachim.“
In the letter he placed some locks of hair.
With infamous cynicism, a defender had been appointed
for him before the Court, but Murat, rising above
his misery, rejected the melancholy foolery with a contempt
the expression of which must have cut into the
horny feelings of his Judges and left them sore for many
a long day.
He was their King, he told them, but went on to
observe: “If I am to be tried in the light of a Marshal
of France, I may be tried by a Council of Marshals; if
as a General, by Generals. But before I descend so low
as to submit to the decision of the Judges who have been
selected many pages must be torn from the history of
Europe!”
To Storace, who had been appointed to defend him,
and who now begged to be allowed to do what he could,
Joachim replied:
“You cannot save my life. Allow me to save my dignity.
I forbid you to speak in my defence.”
Storace, who, with Stratti and Nunziante, appears as
one of the three rays of human light in the whole horrid
affair, left him sadly, as the magistrate entered and
with gusto proceeded to torment the victim with questions.
But he did not get very far before Joachim turned
upon him.
“I am Joachim Murat,” he replied, “King of the Two
Sicilies and your King. Leave me and relieve my prison
of your presence!”
It seems to have occurred to him that, possibly, Ferdinand
was revenging himself now for the murder of the
Duc d’Enghien—for he mentioned the tragedy and
swore to Stratti that he had had no hand in it. He had
been Governor of Paris when the young Duke was kidnapped
and shot, but he could have done nothing to save
him. Murat was speaking the truth. The Duc d’Enghien
was murdered by Talleyrand, who devised the whole
affair and drove Napoleon into giving the order by suggesting
the result of it upon the Royalists who had, then,
made several attempts upon the First Consul’s life.
Murat then thanked Stratti for his kindness and begged
to be left alone, when he crossed his arms on his breast
and stared at the portraits of his family. His first notice
of the sentence which had been pronounced upon him
came through a priest, whose name was Masdea. The
latter, as he told Joachim, had had cause to be grateful
to him in the past for some unexpected help in the building
of a Church, and it was that which had induced him
to brave the displeasure of Joachim’s enemies now. He
assured Joachim that his prayers would be offered up
for the repose of his soul, and begged him to prepare
himself as a Christian to appear before his Maker; and
Joachim did so, Masdea says, with philosophic resignation.
The “Court” by now had its sentence ready:
“Joachim Murat, by the fortune of arms, having returned
into that private life in which he was born, and
having ventured with twenty-eight comrades to attempt
this rash enterprise, not trusting to the force of arms
[this, by the way, seems to be a queer sort of grievance]
but to rebellion, has excited the people to rise against
the lawful sovereign, endeavoured to revolutionise the
Kingdom and Italy, and is therefore condemned to die as
a public enemy, by the law made during the Decennium,
and which is still maintained in full vigour.”
Joachim seemed to be very little interested in the reading
of his doom. Except for an occasional glance of cold
contempt, he paid no attention to the herald or his
message.
Then he was led down some stone steps into a sort
of court, which may be seen to this day, and placed
against the wall on the left of the foot of the stairs.
He refused to have his eyes bound and looked calmly
on while the muskets of the firing party were being
loaded. When all was ready, he straightened himself
up and looked steadily at his executioners.
“Spare my face,” he said, “and aim at my heart.”
So died Joachim Murat, in the forty-eighth year of
his life, and he met his end with a fearlessness and dignity
which shone the brighter for the squalid surroundings
in which he displayed them.
There is a story still current in the Penisola that, after
his death, his head was cut off, by Ferdinand’s order,
and carried to Naples, in order that the “Butcher King”
might be sure that his gallant enemy was no more.
One would have imagined that the gruesome proof
would have satisfied him and, having seen it, he would
have been content to bury it decently. But the report
goes on to say that nothing would induce him to part
with it afterwards and that he kept it in a specially constructed
case, under lock and key, by the side of his bed.
Here, whenever his crazy panics seized him, he could
open the box and finger the head and reassure himself
again.
And all this happened, not in the time of Caligula or
Tiberius, but three years before the birth of Queen
Victoria.
CHAPTER XVII ITALIAN SEAS
Our Moods and the Seas—Memories in Landscapes—The Healing of the
Sea—A Vision in the Bay of Naples—Marion Crawford’s Yacht
Expected—The Family Together at Leghorn—Lady Paget—A Bathing
Scene—Hugh Fraser—“Spannocchi” for Dinner—The Avenging
Boatman—Livorno, an Anomaly—Sunset on the Mare Ligure—Bay
of Spezia, a Splurge of Colour and Light—A Hail Storm in Venice—The
Joy of a Gondola—Moods of Venice—A Giorgione Beauty—The
Nurseries of Venice—Her Shops—Saints and Heresies of the Thirteenth
Century.
Let us come back to happier themes! Many and
enchanting books have been written about Italian
cities and Italian country, but none about our Italian seas.
People who look at the map may think this a limited subject;
there is the Mediterranean and there is the Adriatic,
what more can be said? Amici miei, to a sea-lover there
are as many seas as ports; the dear salt water and the
sunrise and the sunset know it, and have a separate caress
for each. They make—or fit into—the thousand moods
of mind that colour a pilgrim’s life, and the pictures of
them in my gallery of remembrance are clearer than any
of my landscapes and more helpful—because they never
hurt. The landscapes, all except the loveliest ones where
the spirit poised for one longing instant—like a bird
on the topmast of a ship and, like the bird, was given no
more than time to take breath and wing away again—are
mostly inhabited. Here your friend quarrelled with
you; there your true love kissed you and betrayed;
further on your child was sick and every aspect of the
most beautiful scenery in the world brings back only the
poignant watches when a flush of colour in the little face
sent you crazy with joy and something wrong again with
the little pulse froze your heart with fear. On land we
cannot get away from ourselves and others; earth is greedily
dominant, monstrously exacting. But the sea repudiates
all individual ties. You must be empty of yourself
or it will not speak to you at all. Its laws are not
our laws, and the first thing it does, if you are docile
to its magic, is to wash out your personality, and, oh, how
glad some of us are—or would be—if we only could
utterly forget that irritant, insistent factor of existence!
In our long wanderings most paths, as we look back
on them, show the little red stains where we cut our feet;
we have left shreds of our soul’s garments on many a
thorn by the way; but for me, and I fancy for some of
you others, the breath and the sound and the touch of
the sea has been nothing but coolness and healing, a sunbath
for life’s chillinesses, a fountain of strength in its
languors. I think I should know now the right point
to make for, according to the distemper that might be
assailing me; and, though twenty years ago I sought and
loved the onslaught of the Atlantic and the Valhalla of
the March tides in the Channel, to-day I would fare no
further than my home seas, those that lap and sing on the
Italian shores.
I was sailing up into, the Bay of Naples once, just as
the morning had conquered the last star; the sky was a
faint milky blue, and the mountains were cowled outlines,
very dark and still. Not a breath stirred the sea, not
a sound came from the land. Suddenly from the shadows
that were neither land nor sea, I saw coming towards
me a tall glorious form, floating on the water, pointing
to the sky, clothed in long straight robes of white, making
for open sea with the steady rush of a seabird on
rested pinions. It took all the growing daylight to itself—it
was the daylight, for a few breathless seconds—a
vision of the Immaculate Conception, it seemed to me;
then the music of ripple on prow whispered across the
water, the sun leapt up behind Sant’ Angelo; I rubbed my
eyes and, lo, a slender vessel with snowy sails, tall and
narrow, from some strange port, such sails as our seamen
never unfurled. She brought the wind as she had
taken the daylight, and a moment later she swept past
in her immaculate pride and was gone.
I always rather resented the advent of battleships and
royal yachts and gaudy truck of that kind in our Southern
waters, but the private yachts inspired us with a
pleasant, mysterious interest that was not unwelcome.
Once, when we were watching anxiously for my brother,
during his venturesome sail from New York to Naples,
the children were cruising round the Bay not far from
Naples. A large beautiful yacht was seen to come in
and cast anchor off Santa Lucia, and at once the greatest
excitement prevailed on the Crawford felucca. Was
that the Alda? Oh, surely it must be! At once the
Margherita headed for the port, and the nearer she came
to the new arrival the surer was everybody that the Alda—which
none of them had seen, as Marion had just
bought her—had reached port at last. How well she
had stood the voyage! No sign of the heavy weather
mentioned in the wire from Gibraltar! No sign of the
Padrone either, but, of course, he would have had to go
on shore to report himself and get his harbour papers
from the Consul. What was this? Dark-faced sailors
in fezes? How like Marion to pick up a Lascar crew in
New York! Let us row round her and hail somebody—good
Heavens! The first shout brought a dozen lovely
Turkish ladies to the cabin windows, smiling, interested,
only too ready to ask the pretty boatful on board. The
children stared, open-mouthed! Then a burst of uncontrollable
laughter shook the Margherita from stem to
stern. Papa had certainly not brought a harem from
New York! “A casa,” came the order to the grinning
sailors, and the Margherita turned tail and ran for home.
There is a busy unromantic seaport called Livorno, a
long way up the coast from Naples, a Tuscan town of
white streets and shadeless squares, all alive with commerce,
and, until I came to years of reason, represented
to me by the huge flapping straw hats, fine as silk and
pale gold in colour, which we children regarded as signals
of summer when, on the first hot day, the ribbons
that held them were tied under our chins, and we were
admonished, on pain of sunstrokes and spankings, not
to take them off. I had among my possessions a toy Swiss
cottage all made of the same pretty straw, and I imagined
that “Leghorn” was a straw city with bunches of
red poppies and blue ribbons on the house-tops for ornament.
It was rather a blow to discover, on being taken
there when I was seven years old, to find that the only
traces of my toy city were the thin golden strings which
most of the women were plaiting with lightning quickness
as they walked in the streets or sat in the doorways.
After that, as I grew older, Leghorn meant just
the sea in some of its most enchanting aspects, for it
was very rarely that we missed our few weeks of bathing
there in September, if we had spent the summer in
the North. It was the beginning of the autumn homecoming;
we took an apartment on the long bright boulevard
that faces the sea, the cook and one or two of the
servants came up from Rome to look after us, and, always,
we had a royally good time. The last, I think,
was the best of all, happening after a memorable summer
in the Bagni de Lucca, which I have described elsewhere.
My sister had just become engaged, and her
fiancé, Erich von Rabe, of course followed us to Leghorn.
Hugh Fraser was there, occupied mostly, it seemed
to me, in saving the Paget children from getting drowned,
since they would attempt to follow their indomitable
young mother in her long swims out in the deep. Lady
Paget did everything beautifully; she was built like a
goddess and could not do anything else, whether she rode
or danced or glided about in great old rooms or flowery
gardens; but she never seemed more of a goddess than
when she stood for an instant in her clinging draperies
with her arms above her head and then leapt, like a
curved arrow, out and down into the sun-kissed waves.
One held one’s breath while they engulfed her—and
then, yards beyond, up came that proud small head, and
away she would go, with long easy strokes, a being at
one with the sun and the sea—a joy to behold.
All that was in the morning, when the spaces under the
big tents on the outrunning piers of the “stabilimenti”
were crowded to the very edge with cheery, chattering
groups, the ladies embroidering as fast as they talked, the
children romping, the young men making love, and the
old people, who would not face the cold joy of a plunge,
smiling benignly on it all. The piers were low, and a
sudden gust of wind would fling the salt water up without
warning; then there were shrieks mingled with laughter,
flurrying of skirts and scraping of chairs and snatching
up babies, and all the fun of settling down again,
only to renew the game at the next shower. This gathering
only took place in the morning. As soon as the sun
was right overhead, the ladies packed their fancy work
into their reticules, wiped the remains of “ciambelle”
from the children’s mouths, straightened their hats—all
with an incessant fire of chatter like that of a tree full
of roosting sparrows suddenly disturbed—and away
everybody trailed along the blazing white boulevard for
home, mid-day dinner, and the rapturous quiet of the
siesta afterwards.
I believe I was a little jealous, even then, of the kind
of official ownership which the Ambassador and his family
seemed to claim in the man who, though neither of
us dreamed it yet, was very soon to be my husband.
Anyway, I permitted myself an occasional mood of pleasant
melancholy towards evening when my own dear people,
like all the others who had any deference at all for
public opinion, were driving round and round the public
gardens, listening to the band. Two of our party had
agreed to slap public opinion quite brutally in the face;
these were my erratic sister and her equally erratic fiancé.
They hired a little sailing boat, and day after day, towards
four o’clock, went off by themselves, unchaperoned
save by the boatman, for long expeditions, whence
they returned, gloriously happy and hungry, just in time
for a very late dinner. Once and once only they lured
me out—why, I could not imagine at the moment, as I
was a bad sailor in those days and did not in the least
want to go, but I soon found out their wicked motive.
I had taken it upon myself to order the meals while
we were at Leghorn, as my mother thought it would be
good practice for me. Now there was one dish which
we all, except Annie and Erich, particularly disliked, a
fry of very bony, very rank-smelling crayfish, called
“spannocchi.” After one trial I had steadily refused
to have it brought to the table. But those two young
monsters liked “spannocchi,” and they laid their plot
quite cleverly and everything turned out just as they
intended. We beat out to sea, the weather was squally,
and in a short time I was lying, a seasick heap, in the
bottom of the boat, begging with tears to be taken home.
This was what they had been waiting for. “Not unless
you promise us spannocchi for dinner to-morrow!” they
exclaimed in a breath, grinning down at me in my misery.
They looked as big and wicked as the pictures of
the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is sailing
the faithless wife to hell!
Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular
person with the rest of the family at dinner-time the
next night. But their boatman avenged me in the end.
The day before we returned to Rome they took leave
of him with a little present, and he, who had all along
imagined them to be a young married couple, because
they came unaccompanied, testified his gratitude and good-will
in true Italian fashion, by crying enthusiastically:
“Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be a
fine boy!”
Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich
was not allowed to come to dinner that night.
Livorno is an anomaly, an Italian city with no history,
no ancient monuments, no works of art. In fact, it always
seemed to me less Italian than any spot I knew in
the whole country, but in the days when we used to frequent
it I took that, as one took everything else in that
cheerful age, for granted, and it was only long afterwards
that I gave myself the trouble to hunt up the causes of the
phenomenon. Then I learnt that down to the days of the
Medici it was a small fishing village with a few hundred
inhabitants, bearing, for some unknown reason, the name
of another tiny place further north, Livorno Vercellese.
The Medici first noted its possibilities, and set to work
to make it the real port of Florence, till then largely
dependent for such a commodity on Pisa, a little further
up the coast. Pisa, the ancient rival of Genoa and Venice,
still sick with memories of her past greatness and,
since 1405, the bought-and-paid-for fief of Florence, was
always seething with disaffection and conspiracy. Its last
desperate effort at retrieving its independence was made
in 1494, and the Florentines were put to the trouble
of besieging it and taking it by force. It was some
sixty or seventy years later (I think during the reign of
Francesco, the father of Marie de Medici) that Livorno
recommended itself to the ruler of the Republic as a
fine spot for a port that would have no disturbing memories
of independence to interfere with its usefulness. In
order to insure this they did not colonise it with Italians
at all, but craftily invited the more commercially-minded
among the malcontents of all Europe to come and open
up trading houses there. The invitation was eagerly accepted:
persecuted Catholics from England and Germany,
Moors from Spain, Jews in great numbers from all parts
came, settled, and flourished, the Jews of course outnumbering
all the rest, so that the Leghorn population is
largely Jewish to this day. But there are also several
old English merchant houses that, while still affecting
to regard England as “home,” are deeply rooted in
the bright little city on the Ligurian Sea, and very kind
and hospitable were their representatives to us. I remember
certain commodities—great chests of tea, rolls
of English flannel, and fine table linen—my mother always
sent for to one of these Leghorn merchants, and I
fancy it is due to the little English-speaking community
that the town is generally known by that barbarous travesty
of its Italian name. In our times it has, of course, all
the unsightly riches of a great modern military and commercial
centre—foundries, docks, ship-yards, fortifications,
naval arsenals, and all the rest of it—but its real
attractions lie in the marvellous freshness of its air and
its unbroken sea-line, changing in tint at every hour of
the day and taking on certain splendours that I never
remember seeing elsewhere. Livorno always seems cool,
for when the sun is shining his hottest the breeze never
fails, and the billows roll in and break in laughter and
thunder on the rocks and toss their spray almost to the
windows of your room, where the light comes up in a
glow of green and gold through the Venetians and the
wind plays games with the clean white curtains all day
long.
But it is at evening that the Mare Ligure takes you
and holds you with a spell of its own. At sunset the wind
generally dies down, and then the sun sinks slowly over
a softly-moving but untroubled sea. The sky clears of
its dancing clouds and becomes—not sky, somehow, but
a fathomless infinity of breathing rose and topaz, transparent
and liquid like jewelled wine. And every ripple
and dimple of the water soaks up the transcendent flush,
swaying rhythmically, and smoothing out into vast pools
of melting mother-of-pearl, in which that living wet crimson
seems to lie like a transparent veil over deeper tints
that float beneath. When the sun is gone, the red deepens
to the velvet of a dark June rose, and the western
sky is flame, not light; but hurrying night has chilled the
east behind you, and now every ripple is violet blue on
its hither side, the golden glow recedes further and
further towards the west, is sucked away in the trail of
the sun at last, and then nothing is left of the day but
a forsaken sweep of primrose and the wraith of a new-born
star.
For sheer splurge of colour and light one must go
further north and be out in the Bay of Spezia some September
noon, when the harbour is full of white battleships
all beaconed with signals like strung flowers, and
the bands are playing madly and salutes are crashing
through the music for some royal holiday. The white
town and the green hills behind it seem to thrill visibly
in unison, and the sea is cobalt that would make your
eyes ache but for the fringe of feathery white ripples
that the breeze combs up all over its surface, and the
sky is transparent turquoise, and night seems a thousand
years away. Further on yet Genoa the Superb has a sea
as blue, sky as stainless, but she dominates in her white
and emerald loveliness so that her setting is almost effaced.
One forgets to notice the steps of the throne
where Sovereign Beauty queens it so royally.
Then cross the plain to Venice, the witch who holds
East and West in her soft hands and plays with their
riches as a millionaire’s child might slip a rain of gold
pieces from one palm to another, in idleness, recking nothing
of their value. Sea and sky, priceless palace and
empty island—it is all hers—she can never exhaust her
past, and our century, jejune and vulgar as it is, only
seems to touch her to a scornful smile. But Venice can
tremble still. Once in many years there sweeps down on
her one of Nature’s handfuls of retribution—a storm
that makes her quake to her artificial incredible foundations.
I saw one such. It was in May, Venice’s most
perfect month. We had been out to the Lido that morning,
bathing in water smooth as cream; there was not
a cloud in the sky. We had barely got home when inky
darkness descended, and out of it burst a gale that lashed
the Grand Canal to fury, and a machine-gun fire of hail
was flung against the windows, to result, an instant later,
in a crash of broken glass and tumbling bricks that was
truly appalling. Through the tumult came shrieks and
cries. Every window in the Ducal Palace was smashed,
and most of the others in the town; when it was over—the
whole thing did not last more than twenty minutes—I
went out on our balcony and picked up, from
the thick layer lying there, hailstones as big as pigeons’
eggs. The next day we went out again to the Lido, and
where a long green pergola of vines had shaded the way
to the bathing establishment now stood a bare tracery of
dry branches. Not a single leaf was left.
But generally the Adriatic waits on Venice with subservient
calm, and one can float over those vast yet not
unpictured lagoons in still assurance that one’s reveries
will not be disturbed. I doubt whether such lengths of
languorous idling be good for young strong people, but
as a rest-cure for tired ones there can be nothing more
complete. The shape and build of the gondola (what a
perfect name for the gliding sinuous thing!) was evolved
by an artist in comfort; the enormous leather cushions
let you sink into their thickness as far as you please without
ever touching the limit of their pleasant elasticity.
Whether cowled in to keep off the sun’s rays in the day
or uncovered to give you all the coolness of the evening,
the gondola seat relieves you of all responsibility for
your body; it holds you as an experienced nurse holds a
tired child; and in its silent swan-like rush through the
water you get just the sense of motion necessary to keep
your nerves employed yet soothed. With the right companion,
what talks are possible, as you glide out in the
last flush of evening towards the more distant lagoons
and wait for the moon to come up out of Istria, across
the sea! Your gondolier, silent as Charon, is behind you
and you forget his existence. And all the rest is behind,
too, but very far behind: daily life with its horrid strident
claims and calculations that won’t even leave honeymooning
couples alone! Time has ceased, and the world
is standing still to let you look at life in its beauty and
kiss its face in its peace. When at last you say, without
turning your head, “A casa, Sandruccio!” your black
swan quivers an instant from low stern to dark arched
prow, swings round in the smallest space any boat did
ever turn in, and you float back to the regular rhythm
of Sandruccio’s twenty-foot oar, till a necklace of lights
lies low on the land and the faintest of songs—a very
mist of music—is wafted over the water. “Alla Pizzetta?”
enquires Sandruccio, speaking for the first time
and in a voice expressing much amused indulgence for
dreaming lovers. A few minutes later he is imperiously
ordering fellow-gondoliers out of his way to the steps,
is holding the side of the swan the eighth of an inch off
the grind of the stone, and you and your other self dance
on shore to become light-hearted young people, keeping
time surreptitiously to the gay waltz of the band and
laughing at everything and nothing because all the festive
crowd around you is doing the same thing.
Witch and tyrant as she is—and perhaps for that
very reason, since tyrants must know how to yield as
well as how to rule—Venice will meet you in almost
all your moods, and create new ones for you if you have
none of your own.
I used to get dazzled with all the splendour of palaces
and Churches; these last are so full of the glorification
of great men—the monuments and ornamentation
are so obtrusive that there seems scarcely any room for
prayer. San Marco itself, dream of beauty as it is, inspires
less devotion than many a humble country Church
without a single work of art to recommend it. Without
the ineffable Presence in the Tabernacle I should have felt
more piously disposed at the foot of the lonely shrine
out in the Lagoon, where the Blessed Madonna’s picture
smiles down from its tall tarred post on the flowers
that one or other of her children brings there every day.
The water laps gently at her feet, the sky arches blue
overhead, and one can dream very good and happy
dreams as one gazes up at her. But in San Marco, just
as in the Doges’ Palace, one is teased by two things—the
necessity of thought and appreciation, and that horrid
sense one has in so many places in Italy, of all the
prying irreverence that expert—sceptic—heretics of the
Ruskin tribe have brought to bear on it—as if the cleverest
ant that ever crawled and builded underground could
measure the courses of the stars!
To forget, and rest from, other people’s thoughts, I
used to walk a good deal through those narrow, noiseless
streets where never hoof or wheel comes to break the
stillness, where old houses lean close to share old secrets,
and the shadows lie clear and cool through most of the
daylight hours. When the sun does strike down he turns
the grey to gold, seems to gather up all the perfume of
the small hidden gardens and fling it to you with a laugh
on a spray of jessamine that has tossed itself over some
ancient wall, or a tangle of red carnations spilling down
through the scrollwork of a balcony projecting the wide
curve of its iron bars far overhead, above the street.
Through a half-open portone, dull green, like the narrow
canals in the shade, you catch a glimpse of a courtyard
deep sunk between high walls that are dimpled and lichened
to indescribable richness of colour, and gleaming
here and there with some lovely fragment of bas-relief.
Cupid with one wing gone and half a bow—a row of
bursting pomegranates trailing off into nothing—a few
letters of some once pompous inscription—who knows,
who cares? They served out their own uses centuries ago
and were stuck in here to corner a window frame, to key
an arch, to replace a brick, but the sun and the rain and
the salt sweetness of Adriatic airs have fused and mellowed
them to the gold-white tint of fresh curds, smoothed
their marbled surface to the velvet uniformity of magnolia
petals. There is a fountain in the courtyard, of
course, a rough half shell of stone set into the wall, where
a slow jet trickles all day long and is just now spilling
over the brim of the red copper “conca” that some
woman has set a-tilt below it—and forgotten, perhaps,
to run upstairs and pull in the wire that dangles overhead
between two windows, flapping with garments of
many colours like a string of signals at sea. For there
are windows that look into the courtyard, row above
row—and there she is, looking out of one, a red-haired,
brown-eyed young creature with broad shoulders and sunburnt
throat, a strapping baby trying to wriggle out of
its swaddling bands in her arms. In a minute she comes
down, and clatters over the broad damp stones in her
wooden clogs with yellow velvet toe-caps—and the sight
of them sets me dreaming of the Venetian ladies three
hundred years ago, picking their way to Mass through
the narrow twisting “calle” on clogs, too, but such clogs!
A narrow stein, twelve or fourteen inches high, resting
on a base not more than two inches wide, and spreading
at the top into a pretty little slipper, lined with velvet,
and the whole thing was covered with crimson velvet and
gold lace held in place by dozens of gold-headed nails!
How any grown woman ever balanced herself on these
stilts is a mystery to me still. My father at one time collected
ancient footgear, and then forgot all about it; so
it came to pass that in a corner of our old nursery at
the Villa Negroni there lay the strangest heap of toys
that any modern child ever had to play with—several
pairs of these exquisitely ornamented “sabots” tumbled
in with pink and scarlet silk slippers of the Watteau
period—and later. One pair, I remember, with heels
like knitting pins, so high that only the very point of
the foot touched the ground at all. But, oh, how the little
feet that wore them must have suffered! They had
certainly walked in such shoes from childhood, for the
foot had sunk down and lost shape until, pathetically
small as the little slipper was, it was as lumpy and shapeless
as a clenched fist and almost as broad as it was
long.
By the time I remembered her again, after my mental
excursion, my Giorgione beauty had twisted a towel into
a turban, placed it on her red hair, and, lifting the
“conca” on to her head with a turn of the hand and
without spilling a drop, had disappeared up the dark
stairway, all in less time than it takes to tell. Then,
after stealing one fat, pink oleander blossom from the
tree in the corner, I went on my way, sniffing its nutty
sweetness, to lose myself in the silent labyrinth of those
little-trodden alleys and then be suddenly brought to a
standstill by a deep narrow canal, unbridged, green, silent,
serving as the water door to the rooms of dark old
houses that frowned at each other across it. At every
few yards stone steps led down, the water lapping confidentially
over the lowest ones. From far away comes
the long warning cry, “O, Premí”—that has puzzled
generations of etymologists unable to give even a guess
at its derivation. But everybody knows its meaning—you
hear it a hundred times a day at every angle of the
canals, telling those whom it concerns that a gondola is
coming round the corner. The next moment it has swung
into sight, the long, sinuous black thing cutting through
the water so smoothly and imperiously, pulling up suddenly
without jerk or sound beside the steps to let its
fare slip on shore or its gondolier deliver a message—in
the soft lisping dialect that sounds like insects’ wings
in a summer noon—to some one waiting for it on a
balcony above.
It is the little things that are so real and charming in
Venice, I think; the glimpses of life among the unchanging,
persistent, common people, who live as they have
always lived in the discreet still atmosphere of the back
streets and the forgotten waterways.
Sometimes grown-up Venice is a little overpowering;
one feels called upon to note every turn and building, for
fear of missing some exquisite bit of architecture, some
play of light and shade that must be remembered. Then
one is glad to get away to one or another of the islands
that lie around her, the nurseries where she played, and
dreamed of the future, a thousand years ago. The dearest
of them all to me is Torcello. We rowed out there
one morning in August, when the sea was very calm
and the sun a little veiled by clouds sweeping slowly up
from the south. As we approached the island it seemed
as if its few buildings were flush with the water; so low
does it lie that the grasses and wild roses on the shore
were dipping in the wash of the ripples. Some peasants
had been cutting the grass, the scent of new-mown hay
filled the air, and two great boats pushed out from some
inlet and passed between us and the land, laden ten feet
high with a cargo of fragrant green gold. As they met the
breeze, up went the tawny sails and they skimmed away
over the blue water like bees heavy with pollen. Then there
was the cool rush of the turning prow, our gondola ran
in softly to the strand, some one held up an arm, and I
sprang on shore—to find myself in another age and another
clime. I had to wait a few minutes to realise what
it all meant, for the “ambiente” was new to my senses.
A stretch of turf and wild roses—that explained itself—youth
and roses never need introduction—but the still
white Church, so long and low, with its slender columns
like altar candles, its grave Byzantine lines—that made
me pause. It seemed as if some Saint had turned from
his prayers to ask me what I came for, and I could only
reply: “You must tell me—there is nothing here that
I have a name for, but there is something that was mine—give
it back to me!”
When I walk through a familiar room in the dark,
a peculiar warning like a ghostly touch is laid on my
forehead as I come near any object on a level with it,
and that same feeling came to me there at Torcello, I
remember. It seemed as if it all were known to me,
as if every flower and blade of grass called out, “We
were here with you before!”—as if the small forsaken
basilica had meant the heart of home in some lapsed
period that life, as I knew it, could in no way account for.
Its loveliness was so removed, so ascetic that one held
one’s breath for fear of disturbing its peace; the marble
seats, the central throne, seemed all peopled by grave
shades of presbyters, surrounding their Bishop, their long
straight vestments marked with the gold cross from shoulder
to shoulder and from neck to feet; I could almost
fancy I heard their deep chant, first from this side of
the mounting tribune and then from that, echoing in the
cold spaces overhead and dying away down the nave
among the columns. I believed the old story then, that
Torcello had been the first resting-place of the hunted
exiles fleeing seaward from the Huns; it was not that; I
doubt whether the basilica was really built in the Seventh
Century as the guidebooks say; Rialto had its Church
long before Torcello; but Rialto has been the artery of
Venice’s throbbing vitality too long for any associations
to cling to it now, while Torcello has stood aside, a
recluse that has never wavered in its loyalty to the Past,
and the Past is enshrined there for all time. I was surprised
to find that it and I were friends. There are only
two of all the dead and gone centuries of Europe that
seem really my own besides the one I was born in—and
they do not belong to the chaotic times of Barbarian invasion
and Byzantine supremacy. But the nameless sweetness
of the airs that play so gently over the forsaken island
said something that day that could never be forgotten,
and the impression was so strong and so perfect that
I have never wished to tamper with it by a second
visit.
Strangely enough Torcello dismissed us with contumely,
for as we left it in the late afternoon we encountered
a fearful storm and came, I think, very near to being
swamped. The thunder simply hurled itself from every
quarter at once, the sea rose in inky billows of terrifying
dimensions, and between them and the rain we were
drenched to the skin, and very thankful when Sandruccio,
who behaved splendidly, finally landed us on the slippery
steps of our hotel.
For a day or two after that we stayed within call, so
to speak, and had no fancy for putting out to the Lagoons.
There were mornings when it was pleasant to be
utterly and frankly frivolous and do nothing but wander
under the arcades of the Piazzetta and in and out of the
bewilderingly pretty shops. Such a spread of colour and
glitter they were, and so tempting was it to pick up some
of the alluring trifles for the new home we were going
to make in Peking! The Murano glass at Salviati’s I
still think the most beautiful product of our own or any
other time. Every tint of sea and sky and jewel gleamed
in the ethereal beakers and vases; I remember a tall
goblet of transparent topaz, shot with gold, that twisted
and curled on its tendril stem like a newly opened convolvulus,
spreading at last into a cup too ethereal for
earthly lips to touch, so full of light that the most sparkling
wine would have darkened it; and all round, for
handles, were blown wreaths of milky iridescent foam, so
faint that it seemed as if they must run down its sides
and wet your fingers with salt spray. It was like getting
into the Sea-King’s palace under the sea to spend an hour
at Salviati’s; every lovely freak and fancy of sun and
water, from the brooding sapphire of secret caves to the
last bubble of spray on a curling wave, it was all there,
caught and crystallised for mortals to love and handle.
Those were the days of beads—one wore as many
chains as one liked, the more the better—and for years
I went round with a little Venetian rosary of blue and
gold flecked with fairy roses round my neck. The mother-of-pearl
overcame me altogether—long garlands of the
tiny shells strung in fanciful patterns—each perfect in
itself and shot with rainbows through its moonlight sheen—but
the dignity of a married woman forbade the wearing
of such things now. For years they lay about on my
dressing-table reflected in the depths of a Venetian mirror
which also accompanied me everywhere, a big oval
set in a frame of translucent flowers and leaves, neither
white nor silver nor pearl, but just the colour of the foam
when the sun shines through it.
We went out to Murano once and saw all the processes
of glass-blowing, and they made a little vase for
me while I was there; but the secrets of those marvellous
colours were not explained, and I came away with one
cherished illusion intact—I am still sure that the glass-blowers
have a tributary tribe of nymphs and fairies who
gather their tints for them out at sea, in nets woven of
sunbeams and moonrays!
During that honeymoon summer, Venice indoors, with
all its matchless art treasures, appealed to me less than
Venice out of doors. At the time of my first stay there
I was only sixteen, but mature enough to appreciate what
I was seeing, and my dear old stepfather was a splendid
guide and allowed us to miss nothing. He was a strange
combination, dear man—an expert at explaining beauty
of colour and technique and stonily impervious to impression
or atmosphere. All that remained to him of his
Calvinistic New England education was a giant conscience,
to which other people’s inclinations had to bow
wherever he took the lead, as he did, imperiously, in
matters of sightseeing. Often I would have begged off
some expedition, feeling surfeited already with beauty
and history, and longing to be healthily frivolous for a
few hours, as youth needs to be sometimes. But it was
of no use—go with him I must, and very glad I was
of it afterwards, for, returning in later years to the
places where he had piloted me about, I could make at
once for the things I wanted to see again, without troubling
my head about the others. One of these, alas! was
gone when Hugh and I, just married, came to Venice.
The St. Peter Martyr of Titian had perished in a fire.
I had lingered before it long, as a girl, for there was
something more than mere beauty in the painting; one
felt there was truth, relatively as absolute as that for
which the Saint gave his life—a picture not only of
himself but of what he died for, loyalty to the unalterable
essence of things as they are.
It is as hard to describe a beloved picture as a beloved
face, but this one had been seldom copied or reproduced,
and it is gone, now, so I will try. In a dark glade of
the woods through which flamed red bars of sunset, two
ruffians were attacking the Saint and his companion; Peter
knelt between them in the foreground, looking up to
Heaven, ere the last blow fell, with a wonderful expression
of mingled pain and joy. The sweep of the drapery,
the slight sinking to one side, showed that his strength
was gone already, but through the physical anguish on
his face there shone such radiance that one knew Heaven
was already opened to his eyes—it was not trust, it was
certainty. The assassins, great bulky brutes, towered
over him, but their figures were shadowed and dark and
formless as evil itself; all the light, all the reality, were
centred on the bending head, the dying eyes, the praying
hands, the mystic cross that barred the priestly garment.
I think there were palms and angels hovering overhead;
but in a very old drawing, half life-size, of this picture—to
all appearance contemporary with the painting—that
I found among my dear father’s possessions they were
absent. In the background lay the body of the martyr’s
slain companion, martyred, too, but all the glory and the
promise seemed to be for Peter—none for him. As I
have said, I was only sixteen then, and knew less about
Peter the Martyr than I did about Confucius or Genghis
Khan, and for many years I wondered why the other
martyr had remained nameless and unsainted. It shows
the incompleteness of my education when I confess that
it was only a year or two ago that I pieced his story together
for myself. Let some one correct me if I am
wrong, but I think the neglected companion was Conrad,
the confessor of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a man of high
learning and much piety, but to whom, on account of his
harsh treatment of the “dear Saint,” the Church refused
the honours of canonisation. But we know that Conrad
was murdered for the Faith, and may be equally sure
that it was owing to St. Elizabeth’s prayers that Heaven
allowed him to expiate his fault by a heroic death.
The Thirteenth Century, so rich in Saints, was appallingly
prolific in heresies, too, and of these the
Manichæan, ancient as the Devil himself, was just then
the most aggressive. It had gained much ground in
the north of Italy, and when Peter was born in Verona
his whole family had been led away by it. But the true
faith was still taught in the schools, and by the time the
boy was seven years old he had learnt the Apostles’
Creed, and neither blows nor caresses at home could shake
him in his loyalty to it. Later he was sent to Bologna
to pursue the studies considered necessary for a gentleman
in those days, but Providence had other designs and
uses for him. He was yet in his teens when the call
came; he answered it at once, renounced the world, and
took the Habit of the Preachers, the sons and followers
of St. Dominic. The Breviary says, “With great splendour
did his virtues shine in Religion,” especially in his
gifts of preaching, which brought the strayed lambs back
to the Fold by thousands at a time. He had always
prayed for the crowning grace of martyrdom, and when
it approached he told those who loved him that his end
was close at hand. The Manichæans feared him as much
as they hated him, for he was as stern with the recalcitrant
as he was tender to the contrite. He was returning,
in the exercise of his ministry, from Como to Milan,
when they murdered him. With his last breath he repeated
the Apostles’ Creed. The antiphon for his feast
repeats the words used by Innocent IV in the Bull of his
canonisation, which took place the year after his death,
an immense number of authentic miracles having already
testified to the honour and glory God had bestowed upon
him in Paradise. “As purest flame leaps up from the
depths of smoke, as the rose blooms on the thorny branch,
so Peter, Teacher and Martyr, is born of faithless parents.”
“Soldier in the Preachers’ camp, he stands now
in the ranks of the warriors triumphant.” “His soul
was all-angelic, his tongue fruitful, his life apostolic, and
his death precious.” “The unconquered athlete battles
strong in death, professing aloud the Faith for which he
bleeds. It is thus that the martyr triumphs as he does
for the Faith.”
To all but us benighted Catholics “the Faith,” in these
latter days, is a mere sun-myth, and the blackest heresy
a disease that has lost all its terrors—as harmless as
chickenpox or a cold in the head. Let us who know
better at least have the grace to acknowledge our debt to
the great ones who fought for our heritage and kept it
clean with their blood!
CHAPTER XVIII SOUTHERN SHORES — FOOTNOTES:
Melancholy Ravenna—Early Byzantine Architecture—Forests of Stone-pine—Smiles
and Tears—The Need of a Little Misfortune—Monte
Gargano—Millions of Spanish Merinos—Primæval Forest—A Forest
Miracle—Church of the Apparition of St. Michael—Other Apparitions
of the Archangel—The Revelation to St. Aubert—The Great Round
Church—Order of the Knights of St. Michael—A “Maiden” Fortress
of France.
The real life of the Adriatic coast seems to diminish
visibly when one leaves Venice and drops down
towards Ravenna; it has been drawn away inland to busy
cities that turn their backs on the sea, and the sea itself
has sullenly withdrawn, leaving ancient ports empty
and useless, like stranded wrecks that will never feel
the leap of the waves beneath their keels again. One
should visit Ravenna either in the heyday of irrepressible
youth or much later in life when twilight is companionable
and sympathetic; otherwise, its melancholy is too
all-pervading, too depressing to be healthy. It is a city
of ghosts, big-eyed, hard-featured Byzantine ghosts; the
great mosaics are full of their portraits, and, with all
the beauty of gold and colour, there is something sinister
and deathly in those tall straight figures, stiff of gesture,
rapacious of eye—likenesses caught unawares of people
who in their hearts prized power and wealth above all
other things in this life or the next.
I do not think any one Italian-born can feel much more
than judicial admiration of the severe early architecture,
perfect though it be. The sharp square outlines, the sulky
red—that might be rosso antico, so little has it yielded
in tint or surface to the touch of Time,—all this, to me,
seems misplaced under the dreamy blue of the Italian sky.
Within the Churches the long aisles of double-storied arches
cramp the spaces where fancy might soar and prayer take
wing. They make an impression of narrowness, almost
of Puritanism, that stifles emotion and frowns at joy.
Of course, all this is rank artistic heresy, or will seem
so to the crowd of submissive art experts who tumble
over each other in their haste to repeat the dictums of a
few famous specialists; but I fancy there are many simple-minded
people who will agree with me, all the same. It
has always puzzled my own ignorance to understand how
anything so un-Italian as the early Byzantine style came
to take root and flower successfully on Italian soil. The
radiant, light-flooded climate does so much to soften and
humanise the alien growth that it buys its pardon for
it in the end; but when some enthusiast, thrilled with
admiration for what he has seen basking in southern sunshine,
undertakes to reproduce it under the cold and lowering
English skies, its true character is shown at once.
It is all too akin to them. One escapes from the prison
gloom of Westminster Cathedral to fly to the Brompton
Oratory and sink down in a corner and thank Heaven
that St. Philip Neri was a Roman, and that his sons
and followers can still give us Churches with big airy
domes and broad smooth naves where the light flows
free, and transepts that open wide for worshippers
and pool up the blessed sunshine like any bay in the
Mediterranean.
But there was one point on which Ravenna, in my day
at least (for it has suffered since then), yielded the palm
to no Mediterranean port—the stately forest of stone-pines
that stood like troops at rest, for miles along the
shore. The stone-pine is always beautiful, whether as a
solitary, striking up, one shaft of grace and strength,
against the sky, or as in great companies sunk to the
knees in the deep turfy mould that their needles have
piled below them in the course of centuries. They grow
thus in the South over many a green acre of villa land,
sheltering an unending profusion of the delicate wild
flowers that thrive in that rich soil. But for real forests
of stone-pines you must go further north and skirt
the coast. There you will see them in their glory, miles
of them together, and, if you are quiet and will listen,
you will learn a great deal. For, like the sons of the
Prophets, they have secrets of their own that have never
been shared with other tribes, secrets that have only
been confided to them, and that is why the solitary pine
is such a true solitary; he invites no companions from the
gregarious world around; towering and alone, he seems
to gaze at unseen horizons, to praise the Lord in the murmur
of the far-spreading branches that crown the fretted
column of his stem; as for Elijah on Mount Carmel,
so for him the past and the present and the future blend
into one great chord of trusting acceptance that no passing
storms can shatter, no warm caress lure from its
allegiance.
Have you, in some fleeting moment, caught the opening
bars of an air that has haunted you afterwards for
years, and then been led to where some great orchestra
gave it to you in all its completeness? That was what
happened to me when I first stood in the “Pineta” of
Viareggio and heard the full-voiced chant of the pines
and the sea. I realised that they were part of one another,
so to speak, that the whisper of the villa pine in
the South is an echo and a greeting, brought by the wind
from the family home in the North, where all the secrets
of tree music are guarded as in some jealous ancient academy—no
outsiders are ever privileged to carry them
away! Psalms and marches and dirges, the wild call of
the Laga, the C Major of the “Te Deum,” the wail of
the De Profundis—the trees overhead and the surges
on the shore will let you hear it all, and once heard it can
never be forgotten.
It seems strange that Viareggio, the most prosaic and
unpicturesque of all the Italian watering-places on the
Ligurean shores, should possess this wonder still in its
perfection, while the sister forest on the Adriatic side
has been forsaken by the sea and devastated both by fire
and by the frosts of that terrible winter of 1878-1879.
We once abandoned Leghorn and went instead to Viareggio
for our September bathing—a great mistake, only
made up to us by the drives through the Pineta in the
evenings. The discomforts and the ugliness of the town
have long since been forgotten—perhaps because the ups
and downs of existence have shown me far less bearable
ones—and now the most vivid recollection is that of
the enchanted air and fragrances of the Pineta. I think
it will be so in the next life; if we win through all right,
we shall remember nothing of earth but its sweetnesses,
and the very wise people refuse to look at anything else,
even now! The real philosophers, who are the real
Saints, always seem to smile, though sometimes it is
through tears. And there is one queer thing about tears—the
people who have never wept don’t begin to know
even how to smile, much less how to laugh. I am always
sorry and frightened for them if they are nice good people,
for we all have to pay our little tribute to trouble,
our tithe to humanity’s debt; some get it spread all over
a lifetime, some all in a moment, and these are the spoiled
ones of the nursery on whom I suppose long discipline
might have lain too heavily for their courage. I remember
one startling case that impressed me very deeply,
that of a nice American family—father, mother, and
daughters twain—pleasant, harmless, good-looking people
with plenty of money and perfect health. I liked
being with them, though our views of life were severed
as the Poles, mine reaching out to the impossible and
sensational (I was very young!), and theirs so satisfied
with the comfortable half lights of their own surroundings
that they simply could not imagine anything desirable
beyond.
One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me
about yourself, Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother.
“You look just as young as your own daughters. I don’t
think you can ever have had a trouble!”
“I never have,” she replied, turning on me her
mild, satisfied gaze. “I cannot remember a single sorrow
in all my life, not a death in my family, not an hour’s
sickness even, amongst us all. We have all, always, had
everything we could wish for.”
It was the first time I had ever heard any one say
such a thing, and I felt awe-struck and envious. A few
months afterwards they all went back to America, at least
they started to go. Their ship went down in mid-ocean,
and the dear people reached home sooner than they had
expected. But, for that sharp short suffering, it is just
possible that life and its unending pleasantnesses might
have made it hard for them to get to Heaven at all.
There was more than mere fun in Thackeray’s tale of
“The Rose and the Ring.” When the Fairy Blackstick
frowned at Prince Giglio and said, “What you need,
young man, is a little misfortune!” she asserted a most
obvious and irritating fact. But it has one delightful side
to it—that bitter draught that wise Doctor Fate insists
on our taking from time to time; the good things, even
tiny little ones that we never noticed before, do taste so
wonderfully sweet afterwards!
But we were talking of shore forests. There is one,
not of pine but beeches, on the Adriatic, exactly opposite
Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea.[13] Here a great promontory
runs out towards the east, rising into mountains
which have caused the whole to be called the “Monte
Gargano,” though each peak has its own name besides.
People call the isolated district (which really belongs to
the Province of Molise) Manfredonia, from the name
of its chief town, long a pet stronghold of Suabian King
Manfred, who founded and fortified it in the Thirteenth
Century. But Nature protected the Monte Gargano in
another way and a very effectual one. It was meant to
be an island; on the western side the Abruzzi shrinking
back in the real mainland, and the Adriatic, withdrawing
slowly from the coast, have left a strip of land many
miles wide—flat, marshy, abominably feverish—as a
kind of defensive trench to cut off the Gargano promontory
from the rest of Italy, and, as it were, remind it for
ever that by formation it does not belong to her at all,
but to the limestone plateau of Dalmatia, across the way.
This vast plain (for it stretches far and far past the
promontory, towards the south) refuses to nourish a single
tree on the few feet of soil which cover the mother-rock,
but it provides such splendid food for sheep that,
since time immemorial, it has been given up to them.
Alphonsus I annexed it as a royal meadow in 1445, and
imported his Spanish merinos with such success that two
hundred years later four and a half millions of the beautiful
creatures were herded by Neapolitan peasants on
these pastures. Even now, though only a scanty half
million graze on them, the sheep are lords and owners
of all that ground. During the summer they are led to
the mountains, partly for their own sake, partly for that
of their keepers, who could not live in the miasma-haunted
plains in August and September. In crossing, even by
train, the twenty-two miles that separate Foggia from
Manfredonia, the traveller is always warned to close the
carriage windows; but in October the sheep are all driven
back, and for weeks the three great roads that converge
towards the flats are just broad ribbons of dust, through
which comes the drumming of invisible millions of little
hoofs. Along the edges of the yellow cloud phantom
figures of shepherds dressed in sheepskins take shape at
intervals and disappear again; and the dogs, dear faithful
things, fly round and herd up the stragglers and nip at
the legs of truants with the noisy joy that even long
marches through the scorching plains can never quite
suppress.
From every point on those plains Monte Gargano can
be seen, raising its peaks against the blue, and clothed
down to the very water’s edge in magic beechwoods,
homes of light and shadow and flickering gold, musical
with song, fragrant with wild flowers, and carpeted with
the rich mould that a thousand autumns have spread
along its ways. Nothing is ever disturbed on Monte
Gargano. But for the sea and the fever-land, the forest
would long ago have been cut down, its riches dispersed,
its very site perhaps forgotten; but now all stands as it
did from the first, and winter and summer have their
own way there, and the herdsmen fold their cattle in the
deep caves of the hills even as they did fourteen hundred
years ago, in the reign of the holy Pope, St. Gelasius,
when Heaven’s gates opened one May morning to let
through a flash of wings and the gleam of an Archangel’s
sword, and the fairest of Gargano’s peaks became Monte
Sant’ Angelo.
And this was the way of it. While the rest of Italy
was torn with the struggles of rival barbarians, and desolated
by the rapacity of men like the Galla who drove
his poor captives before him to the feet of St. Benedict
at Monte Cassino, the peasants of Monte Gargano, safe
in their isolation, lived as they live to-day, obscure, contented,
minding their own affairs—which are chiefly their
own cattle—with all their mind. In that wild place the
cattle stray sometimes and it is hard to find them again,
and so it happened that on the 8th of May, towards 493,
or thereabouts, a young herdsman went climbing into the
hills with some companions to look for a valuable steer
that he had lost. Having wandered and searched for
some time in vain, they were feeling deeply discouraged,
when they perceived the creature hopelessly entangled
in a thicket of briars at the entrance of a deep cavern. In
fear, or irritation, one of the pursuers drew his bow and
let fly an arrow at the animal, but, to the man’s amazement,
the missile turned in the air and struck him who
had shot it. Terrified at this portent, they all fled and
did not stop till they reached the town of Sipontum, far
below, where they related what had happened to them.
Fear fell on the inhabitants, and no one had the courage
to go and examine the cavern, though all were consumed
with curiosity to know what, or who, it contained. In
this dilemma they referred the case to their Bishop, and
he replied that he must lay the thing before the Lord,
and ordained three days of fasting and prayer for all
the population, during which they were to join him in
begging that Heaven’s will in the matter might be made
clear.
And the petition was granted, for on the third day
the great Archangel Michael appeared to the Bishop and
told him that the portent of the returning arrow was
intended to show that he wished to have a sanctuary consecrated
in that cave to the glory of God and in honour
of the Angels. So immediately the Bishop came forth
and, gathering all the people to him, led them, with prayers
and chants, into the heart of the hills to the mysterious
cavern, and, entering in, they found it hollowed out
and disposed in the form of a Church, with all things
ready, so that the Bishop at once said Mass there; and
from that hour so many wonderful miracles took place
on that spot that all men knew certainly that it was greatly
favoured by Heaven. And from that day to this it has
been a place of holy pilgrimage, where many sinners have
been converted, and many afflicted with terrible diseases
cured.
The Church celebrates the Apparition of St. Michael
the Archangel on Monte Gargano on the 8th of May, but
the feast of that spring morning is not the only one in
which she commemorates his glorious interventions on
her behalf. Far away in the North, another promontory,
strangely like that of Monte Gargano, once encircled by
forests, too, but now cut off from the land at each return
of the tide, the Mont Saint-Michel, stands as the last outpost
of France, flinging defiance at its twin peak across
the water in Britain. There is something strangely significant
in the choice of these two points for the most
notable apparitions of the great Archangel, who commands
the heavenly hosts and watches with such sublime
benignity over the destinies of men. One in the North
and one in the South, the great lonely rocks rise sheer
from the sea as if set apart as resting-places where the
glorious pinions might be folded for a while, and the effulgence
of the angelic countenance, too overwhelming
for man to bear as it comes straight from the Presence
of God, a little tempered and veiled by the mists of sorrowful
earth. But one feels, too, that the purity of the
lonely rock, the brave song of the wind, the long roll
of Atlantic surge, and the chant of Adriatic billows were
dear and welcome to the Warrior Angel, who holds our
world in his hands as the Creator’s chief Minister, who
carries out His mandates, chastising when he must, but
so tender to the contrite, so inspiring to the valiant, so
royal in protection to the oppressed!
Of all the peaks that bear his name through the length
and breadth of Europe none has been more signally his
own than this one on the coast of Brittany. The East has
its own, in Phrygia, where also the Archangel deigned
to manifest his love for us poor mortals by his visible
presence, and where the marvel of that love is commemorated
under the title of “The Synax of Michael, Prince
of the Army and of the other Incorporeal Powers.” The
Greeks always give such thunderously full tides to their
Friends in Heaven! But I am sure they cannot honour
their great protector half so heartily as he has been
honoured on the Mont Saint-Michel ever since he touched
it and consecrated it for all time, in the Eighth Century.
The details that have come down to us of that apparition
are somewhat less full than those of the one at Monte
Gargano, but the subsequent history of the French Sanctuary,
which stood for just a thousand years as an impregnable
fortress, is connected, right through, with
humanity as the lonely shrine of the South has never
been. Its name alone is like a war-cry—“Saint Michel
au Péril de la Mer”—St. Michael of the Peril of the
Sea—and bespeaks the invincible ally of the race that
was once the ardent apostle of Christianity and its most
valiant champion. It was to St. Aubert that the revelation
came, when he was Bishop of Avranches, in the reign
of Childebert III. The Archangel appeared to him in
his sleep, says the Breviary, and bade him build a Church
on the sentinel rock, round which already many pious
hermits were gathered to serve God in solitude. Now
St. Aubert was a man who reflected much before taking
any new step, and he hesitated so long that the Archangel
had to repeat his visit three times before he was
obeyed—a great encouragement, this, to timid souls!—but
then the Saint went to work valiantly enough. The
rock was of a strange rounded shape, and he built on
its summit a great round Church, as closely resembling
the holy cave at Monte Gargano as possible. Then he
sent to that place to fetch stones and relics from it, all
of which he set with great honour in the newer sanctuary;
and when all was done he established and endowed
there a monastery of twelve “holy clerks for the perpetual
service of the Blessed Archangel.” But Richard I,
Duke of Normandy, wished still further to honour St.
Michael, so he sent away the clerks and established the
Benedictines in their place; and the fame of the Shrine
and of the many miracles performed there drew a great
concourse of pilgrims from all over the world, especially
royal pilgrims, from England and Europe generally, so
that when the order of the Knights of St. Michael was
instituted, this was their Chapter House. By that time
it was already one of the most ancient and one of the
few “maiden” fortresses of the realm, and never, until
the monarchy succumbed to the Revolution, did a single
foe to France succeed in setting foot within its walls.
For a thousand years, seven times a day, the praises of
God had rang out from it over the sea; for a thousand
years the standard of France floated stainless above its
battlements. “Monsieur Saint-Michel, Archange, premier
Chevalier, qui pour la querelle de Dieu victorieusement
batailla contre le dragon” (it is thus that his titles
are given in the Institutes of the Order founded in 1469)
took care of his own—till France drove him away.
3. This term requires explanation. The two great sins of the Church
in Gaul were first Simony, and secondly, the practice of admitting
unprepared laymen to Holy Orders and often to the Episcopate. This
last vice Gregory called “The heresy of Neophytes.”
4. In a former volume I stated that Pius IX had for a short time served
in the Noble Guards. This was an error, for he never obtained admittance,
although I believe a portrait of him in the uniform was extant
in the earlier years of the Nineteenth Century. It may have been altogether
a “fake” or else taken to please his father when there appeared
to be some hope of the latter’s ambition being fulfilled.
5. “Reminiscences of a Diplomatist’s Wife” (Dodd, Mead & Co.); “The
Looms of Time” (Isbister).
6. The Islands, about a hundred in number, but most of them very
small, and uninhabited, have been the cause of sharp contention and
have changed hands several times since their discovery in 1592—France,
Spain, England, and the United States have variously claimed them.
Twice the matter has been decided by an Englishman’s landing and
running up the Union Jack. The last time this occurred was in 1833,
when, in the middle of the quarrel, Captain Falkland took possession
of them on his own responsibility. Great Britain has held them ever
since as one of her recognised colonies. They are self-governing and
have a population altogether of two thousand souls; the capital, Stanley,
claiming nearly half of the number.
7. “A Popular Life of Pius IX,” Rev. Richard Brennan. (Benziger,
1877.)
8. St. Peter the exorcist, martyred with the Priest Marcellinus, under
Diocletian. His name occurs in the Canon of the Mass.
9. “Le Pape Pie VII à Savone,” p. 83. H. Chatard. Plon, Nourrit et
Cie. (Paris, 1887.)
10. “Unchangeable principles,”—unchangeable, that is to say, until, of
course, 1870, since when——!
13. In our parlance all that it not the Adriatic is the Mediterranean, but
the Italians only give this name to the waters that separate Italy and
Spain from Africa, and differentiate the remainder as the Ligurean Sea—in
the Bay of Genoa, the Tyrrhenian that Rome and Naples contemplate,
and the Ionian, which washes up from Sicily under Italy’s instep
in the Gulf of Taranto.
Transcriber's Notes
Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved as much as possible. Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Cover created by Transcriber and placed into the Public Domain.
