The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6

Arrival of Madame de Bauffremont in Venice--Catajo--The Duke of Modena--Petrarch's Tomb at Arqua--The land of poets--Tasso--Arrival of Madame la Duchesse de Berry--Mademoiselle Lebeschu--Count Lucchesi-Palli--Discussion--Dinner--Bugeaud the gaoler--Madame de Saint-Priest, M. de Saint-Priest--Madame de Podenas--Our band--I refuse to go to Prague--I yield at a word--Padua--Tombs--Zanze's manuscript--Unexpected news--The Governor of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom--Letters from Madame to Charles X. and Henry V.--M. de Montbel--My note to the Governor--I set out for Prague.

Between VENICE and FERRARA, 16 to 17 September 1833.

There was an immense interval between those dreamings and the truths to which I returned when calling at the Princesse de Bauffremont's hotel; I had to jump from 1806, with the memories of which year I had been occupied, to 1833, the year in which I found myself in reality: Marco Polo[146] fell from China into Venice, after an absence of exactly twenty-seven years.

Madame de Bauffremont displays the name of Montmorency wonderfully in her face and manner: she might very well, like that Charlotte, the mother of the Grand Condé and the Duchesse de Longueville, have been loved by Henry IV. The princess told me that Madame la Duchesse de Berry had written me a letter from Pisa which I had not received: Her Royal Highness was arriving at Ferrara, where she hoped to see me.

It cost me a pang to leave my retreat; I needed another week to complete my survey: I especially regretted that I was not able to carry through the adventure of Zanze[147]; but my time belonged to the mother of Henry V., and, whenever I am following a certain road, there comes a jolt that flings me into another path.

I departed, leaving my luggage at the Hôtel de l'Europe, counting on returning with Madame. I found my calash at Fusina: they took it out of an old coach-house, like a jewel from the Crown Wardrobe. I left the bank which perhaps takes its name from the three-pronged fork of the King of the Sea: Fuscina.

On arriving at Padua, I said to the postillion:

"The Ferrara Road."

This road is charming, as far as Monselice: extremely graceful hills, orchards of fig-trees, mulberry-trees and willows festooned with vines, gay meadows, ruined castles. I passed the Catajo, all dressed out with soldiers: the Abbé Lenglet[148], a very learned man otherwise, mistook that manor-house for China. The Catajo does not belong to Angelica[149], but to the Duke of Modena[150]. I ran plump up against His Highness, who was deigning to go on foot along the high-road. This Duke is the scion of the Princes invented by Machiavelli[151]: he has the spirit not to recognise Louis-Philippe.

The village of Arqua shows Petrarch's tomb, sung, together with its site, by Lord Byron[152]:

"Che fai, che pensi? che pur dietro guardi Nel tempo, che tornar non pote omai, Anima sconsolata?"

[Sidenote: The poet's country.]

All this country, within a diameter of forty leagues, is the native soil of the writers and poets: Livy[153], Virgil[154], Catullus[155], Ariosto[156], Guarini[157], the Strozzis[158], the three Bentivoglios[159], Bembo[160], Bartoli[161], Bojardo[162], Pindemonte[163], Varano[164], Monti[165] and a crowd of other celebrated men owe their birth to this land of the Muses. Tasso himself was of Bergamasque origin[166]. Of the later Italian poets, I have seen only one of the two Pindemontes. I have known neither Cesarotti[167] nor Monti; I should have been happy to meet Pellico and Manzoni, the parting rays of Italian glory.

The Euganean Hills, which I crossed, were gilded by the gold of the setting sun with an agreeable variety of shapes and a great purity of outline: one of those hills resembled the chief pyramid of Sakkarah, when it imprints itself at sunset on the Libyan horizon.

I continued my journey at night through Rovigo; a sheet of mist covered the earth. I did not see the Po, except when crossing at Lagoscuro. The carriage stopped; the postillion summoned the ferry-boat with his bugle. The silence was complete; only, on the other side of the river, the baying of a dog and the distant cascades, with their treble echo, made answer to his horn: the proscenium of Tasso's Elysian empire, which we were about to enter.

A ripple on the water, through the mist and the darkness, announced the coming of the ferry-boat; it glided along the towing-rope fastened to boats at anchor. I reached Ferrara between four and five o'clock, on the morning of the 16th; I alighted at the Three Crowns Hotel: Madame was expected there.

Wednesday 17.

As Her Royal Highness had not arrived, I visited the church of San Paolo: I saw nothing but tombs there; for the rest, not a soul, except those of a few dead men and mine, which is hardly living. At the back of the choir hung a picture by Guercino[168].

The cathedral is deceptive: you see a front and sides encrusted with bas-reliefs representing sacred and profane subjects. Over this exterior run other ornaments usually placed in the interior of Gothic edifices, such as rudentures, Arab corbels, nimbused soffits, galleries with small columns, pointed arches and trefoils, disposed in the thickness of the walls. You enter, and you stand dumbfounded at the sight of a new church with spherical vaults, with massive pillars. Something of that incongruity exists in France, both physically and morally: in our old castles, they are contriving modern closets, with plenty of pigeon--holes, alcoves and clothes-presses. Break into the souls of a good many of those men tabarded with historic names: what do you find there? Backstair tendencies.

I was quite abashed at the sight of that cathedral: it seemed to have been turned, like a gown worn inside out; a burgess' wife of the time of Louis XV. cloaked as a castellan's lady of the twelfth century[169].

[Sidenote: Ferrara.]

Ferrara, formerly so much fretted by its women, its pleasures and its poets, is almost uninhabited: in places where the streets are wide, they are deserted and sheep could browse there. The dilapidated houses do not gather fresh life, as at Venice, from the architecture, the ships, the sea and the native gaiety of the place. Standing at the gate of the so unfortunate Romagna, Ferrara, under the yoke of an Austrian garrison[170], has something of the face of a persecuted victim: it seems to wear everlasting mourning for Tasso; ready to fall, it is bent like an old woman. As the only monument of the day, rises half from the ground a criminal court, with unfinished prisons. Whom will they send to those cells of recent construction? Young Italy. Those new gaols, topped with cranes and bound with scaffoldings, like the palaces in Dido's city, touch hands with the old cell of the singer of the Gerusalemme.

FERRARA, 18 September 1833.

If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky:

"My adversities," he says, "began with my life. Cruel fortune snatched me from my mother's arms. I remember her kisses moist with tears, her prayers which the winds have carried away. I was not again to press my face to her face. With an uncertain step, like Ascanius or young Camillus, I followed my wandering and outlawed father. I grew up in poverty and exile."

Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father.

Drawn from obscurity by the publication of _Rinaldo_[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty.

"I saw," says the poet, describing, in _Aminta_[173], the first Court of Ferrara, "I saw charming goddesses and nymphs, without veils, without clouds: I felt the inspiration of a new virtue, of a new divinity, and I sang of war and heroes."

Tasso read the stanzas of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his Gerusalemme in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris.

Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. Aminta was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of Rinaldo admired the author of Orlando to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew:

[Sidenote: Tasso at Ferrara.]

"This laurel which you offer me," he wrote, "the judgment of wise men, of men of the world and my own judgment have laid on the head of the man to whom you are bound by ties of blood. Prostrate before his image, I give him the most honourable titles that affection and respect are able to dictate to me. I will loudly proclaim him my father, my lord and my master."

This modesty, so little known in our time, did not disarm jealousy. Torquato beheld the feasts given by Venice to Henry III. returning from Poland, when a manuscript of the Gerusalemme was printed by stealth: the minute criticism of the friends whose tastes he consulted alarmed him. Perhaps he showed himself too sensitive; but perhaps he had built the success of his love-affairs on his hopes of fame. He imagined himself set about by pitfalls and treasons; he was obliged to defend his life. His stay at Belriguardo, where Goethe evokes his shade, failed to calm him. Says the great German poet, who makes the great Italian poet speak:

Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade, From his love-laden breast he fills the air And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaint: His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief Charm every ear, enrapture every heart[176]. . . . . . . . . And what is more deserving to survive, And silently to work for centuries, Than the confession of a noble love Confided modestly to gentle song[177]?

Says Goethe again, interpreting Leonora's sentiments:

How charming is it in the mind's clear depths One's self to mirror . . . . . . . . . . . . To feel his presence, and with him to near, With airy tread, the future's hidden realm! Thus should old age and time their influence lose. . . . . . . . . All that is transient in his song survives; Still art thou young, still happy, when the round Of changeful time shall long have borne thee on[178].