The pot of basil

It was a very hot day in Colorno, the petty Versailles of the Dukes of Parma. The little channels irrigating the plains all about, and drawn every one from the near depleted basin of the small river which a few miles northward ran into the Po, were spun as thin as silver wire. The effect from a distance was as of a network of snail-tracks, stiffened in a dry morning, and all making for the oasis of the village, where was to be found at least the shade of trees and gardens. Elsewhere there was little. The domains of Don Philip, wrote the Minister Maulevrier, à propos some hounds “de toute beauté” presented to the duke by his devoted father-in-law, Louis XV., were no huntsman’s paradise, since they possessed “ni bois, ni fauve.” The country was like a green tray, rimmed by the low blue ramparts of the Alps and Apennines far distant. In the midst stood Colorno, a dainty confection, as it were, of puff paste and sugar. It lay basking in the sunlight, very white, very sleepy, very empty. Its duke and court were at the capital, ten miles southward, Madame Louise-Elizabeth, its restless scheming duchess, was hastening towards her cruel end at Versailles--she was to die, like her father, like her husband, like her son, like many another relation, of the common scourge, “la petite vérole”--and only the three children of the marriage remained ensconced, for purposes of health and education, at the “résidence d’été.”

This country house, “élégante et spacieuse,” this Colorno itself, are very meet in these days to point the moral of vainglory. The palace, where the “Well-beloved’s” eldest and only married daughter wasted her heart and her brains in the persistent endeavour to find kingdoms for her offspring, as lesser mothers try to find “situations” for theirs, the despised home, where “ne cesse de parcourir la carte d’Europe,” chasing this or that crown to its imaginary resting-place on the head of husband or child, has been transformed into a lunatic asylum; the balcony, whence our Juliet leaned to whisper honeyed phrases to her Romeo, is either gone, or witnesses to the rhapsodies of a baser madness; the contiguous houses, where officers and ministers and envoys plenipotentiary kept their state, the lodgings where the smaller fry of parasites and courtiers worried out their little excited lives of intrigue and scandal--all are delivered in this twentieth century to the dry prose of commerce, and only the gilt tracery on a wall here and there, or the sombre emblazonment of a ceiling, testifies to the romance which once glowed and fevered there until it perished consumed in its own heart-burnings.

The palace has achieved, one might say, its logical destiny; it survives, but in a bad state of repair mental and material. The ducal gardens also survive, but for the benefit of the “people.” Everywhere, since those days, the flood of democracy has broken through the social dam, and robbed exclusiveness of its most picturesque privileges. It was predestined, it was inevitable; but I prefer, I confess, for my part, to think of Colorno as it lay slumbering, before the vulgarising cataclysm, on that sultry June morning in the year 1759.

There came lumbering up the high road from Florence a great travelling carriage drawn by four bays, with a sober-suited postilion to each pair, and a couple of travellers, no more, within. One might have known that the younger of these men--though plainly enough dressed in a suit of black velvet, with his head in a powdered bag-wig and a simple black beaver set on it--was, from the very serene authority of his expression, a person of particular distinction. He was, in fact, the Archduke Joseph of Austria, heir-apparent to God knew what dominions (the Seven Years’ War was then in the fourth of its perennial stages), and on his way home from a minor diplomatic mission--with which, despite his youth, he had been entrusted--to the Court of Rome. He travelled incognito as the Comte de Falckenstein, and, for the moment, had elected to eschew display. His entourage, his personal equipage, had preceded him on the road; he himself desired to lag a little for purposes of observation. For he was always observing, was Archduke Joseph, and provisionally amending the scheme of things after a process, despotically philosophic, which was all his own.

The archduke, aetat. 18, concluded a pretty prolonged silence with an aphorism:--

“The last acquirement of ambitious minds, my good Tiretta, is simplicity.”

The gentleman at his side, a humorous, interesting-looking young man of twenty-six or so, heaved a profound sigh.

“At last!” he said. “I may talk, then, again?”

Joseph sniggered. His own lean young face was not without humour, but intrinsically of the pedantic order. He was precociously inclined to that form of superior banter, best described as scholastic jocosity, which consists in demanding subservient laughter from the unamused. That was largely the misfortune of his state. He was a serious, well-intentioned young prince; but since no one might question his conclusions, they were forced to be their own single support. He had Platonic ideals of state, but the individual liberty they embraced included no right to question his personal dictation of them. He would make men tolerant by intolerance, which was exactly what the Jacobins, by savager methods, came to attempt; and necessarily like them he failed. He meant very well, and, under the circumstances, did not do so badly in the end; but he died, after all, in the van of pathetic failure, seeing all his hopes of a world converted by force to reason overthrown. That, however, belongs to another story.

The archduke’s aphorism had capped some discussion, terminated by himself, on the notorious dandyism of the Duke of Parma, through whose territories they were then passing.

“You may talk, Tiretta,” he said. “Why not?”

“God and your Highness know,” answered the young gentleman. “I would rather go without food than speech any day. And yet you impose silence on me; and yet you condescend to call me your friend.”

He was a romantic-looking fellow, for all the character he gave himself--slender, shapely, with dusk mournful eyes and well-knit features. His mouth was peculiarly expressive, whether in smile or sobriety, and the voice, whose freedom he so coveted, was low-toned and caressing. He wore the nondescript military harness of his day, scarcely to be called a uniform, consisting prominently of a dark blue coat with white facings, high jack-boots, and a heavy sword at his side. His natural hair, of a deep brown and slightly grizzled with powder, was tied into a knot at the nape with a broad black ribbon, and on his head was a hat like his companion’s, but adorned with a pert black cockade.

“I am your friend, Tiretta,” said the prince. “That is why I will not let you talk too much. You will profit by it some day, when I have inured you to a wise reticence. The man of many words empties his heart of thoughts.”

“I could plead,” answered Tiretta, with a little curious amused glance at his companion, “that thoughts, like pea-blossom, throng the thicker being culled; only I fear----”

“Fear what?”

“That you would wish to think it over.”

Joseph laughed. “Well,” said he, “deliver yourself.”

“I can be reticent,” said Tiretta. “I will talk your Highness an hour by the clock to prove it; and all the time you will never guess the secret I am keeping from you.”

“What is that?”

“That you have a smut on your nose.”

The prince instinctively rubbed that august feature; then, his lips a little stiff, sat looking out of the window. Certainly his indulgence had brought this on himself. He had met and attached this Tiretta to his interests in Rome, where the stranger was known socially as il Trovatore. Already and always a student of humanity, there was something about the man, a mystery, a charm, which had curiously puzzled and attracted the royal young metaphysician. Not that Tiretta had made any mystery about himself. If he was a soldier of fortune, he was still a soldier and a gentleman. He had fought with distinction, on the Spanish side, in the wars of the Austrian succession; he had been present at the battle of Piacenza. It was nothing, in that “general post” of kingdoms and dynasties, that he should find himself presently hobnobbing on friendly terms with a scion of the house whose claims he had helped to contest. The European arena was all a welter of Habsburgs and Bourbons, crossing, interlacing, intermarrying, and having no particular aim in common but, like a litter of pigs, to empty among them the Continental trough. It did not seem much to matter which sat on what throne, so long as all available seats were occupied by themselves. A martial spirit, with no genius for genealogy, might very well, under such conditions, fight for the sake of his sword rather than his cause; and likely that had been the case with Tiretta. He was a mercenary, of the noble and romantic sort; a free-lance, whose independence of mind shone through all his undertakings. There is no permanence in the attachments of princes; but, for the moment at least, it was this very quality of “self-possession” in his friend which interested Joseph; and because it seemed the antithesis of his own. Tiretta possessed his own soul apart, not by philosophy, but by some secret bestowal of it in a dreamy Rosamund’s bower, to which only he knew the clue. When his eyes looked fixed and misty, one might surmise that he was far away in that enchanted spot, the spirit of which always appeared to speak in his voice and manner. There was something magnetic about the man, which, in the philosopher’s view, invited scientific analysis.

And yet the fellow was an irrepressible chatterer--that was the odd thing; and wont, like all chatterers, to blunder into offence. Here was an example.

Archduke Joseph tried to swallow the pleasantry, but his vanity was not equal to the effort. He swelled a moment, then delivered himself, with an icy hauteur:--

“You presume, monsieur, you presume upon my indulgence. That is not to justify my condescension, but to rebuke it. Henceforth I desire you to leave me to my meditations.”

Tiretta, instantly compunctious, ventured to disobey. He was easily attached; he really liked the young man. His expressions of contrition won favour after a time; he earnestly asserted that he was not the irresponsible garrulous magpie the other thought him--that in the causes of loyalty and affection he could be silent unto death. Let his Highness test him and believe. Joseph smiled. Too much protest, too many words.

“I mistrust all excess--even of fidelity,” he said.

“Your Highness begins, your Highness has said it,” cried Tiretta, “where ordinarily old age is content to end--in the last wisdom of simplicity. Be tolerant of us commoner minds, who, being little, cannot afford, like your Highness, to do without some ostentation, even in speech. An emperor can dress plain, can dismiss his escort, can sit in silence self-contained, and remain an emperor. But we must e’en have some garnish of embroidered coats and sounding words to recommend us. Well, talking, like drink, grows on a man. So you give me your liking, sum me up as a wind-bag, only a fond one.”