On a feast day, when the dark gallery of trees leading from Albano to Castel Gandolfo is all full of festively dressed folk, when under its dusky vaults one can glimpse foppish minenti in their velvet finery, with bright sashes and a golden flower on their felt hats; donkeys plod along or rush at a gallop with half-closed eyes, picturesquely carrying the shapely and strong women of Albano and Frascati, whose white headdresses glisten into the distance; or not at all picturesquely, with difficulty and stumbling, they drag along a tall motionless Englishman in a pea-green waterproof mackintosh, who has crooked his legs into a sharp angle, so as not to catch onto the ground with them; or they carry an artist in a smock, with a wooden box on a strap and a cunning Van Dyck beard; and the shadows and the sun pass by turns over the whole group—even then, even on that feast day, it is far better with her present than without her.2 Out of the dusky darkness in the depths of the gallery she emerges, all sparkling, all brilliance. The purple cloth of her Albano finery flashes like a hot coal touched by the sun. A marvelous feast day flies out of her face to meet everyone. And after encountering her they all stop as if rooted to the ground—the foppish minente with the flower behind his hat, who utters an involuntary exclamation; and the Englishman in the pea-green mackintosh, displaying a question mark on his immobile face; and the artist with the Van Dyck beard, who stops in one spot longer than anyone else, thinking: “There you would have a marvelous model for Diana, for proud Juno, for the seductive Graces, and for all women who have ever been transferred to canvas!”—and at the same time thinking audaciously: “There you would have a paradise, if such a marvel were to adorn my humble studio forever!”
And who is that man whose gaze is fixedly following her even more irresistibly? Who is keeping watch over her talk, her movements, and the movements of the thoughts on her face? A twenty-five-year-old youth, a Roman prince, the descendant of a family that at one time was the honor, pride, and ignominy of the Middle Ages, and is now desolately fading away in a magnificent palace filled with frescoes by Guercino and the Caraccis, with a gallery of darkened pictures, with faded damasks, lapis lazuli tables, and a maestro di casa* whose hair is white as snow.3 Not long ago the prince could be seen on the Roman streets, with his dark eyes shooting their fiery lights from behind the cloak thrown over his shoulder, with a nose contoured in a classical line, with the ivory whiteness of his brow and the wafting silky tress cast onto that brow. He had appeared in Rome after a fifteen years’ absence, a proud youth instead of the child he had been only recently.
But the reader absolutely must know how all this came to pass, and so we will hastily run through the story of his life, which was still young but already abundant in many powerful impressions. His early childhood passed in Rome. He was educated in the usual way for Roman grandees whose families are living out their last days. The role of teacher, tutor, under-tutor, and everything else was played by a priest, a strict classicist, an admirer of the letters of Pietro Bembo, the works of Giovanni della Casa, and five or six of Dante’s cantos, which he would read, inevitably accompanying the reading with powerful exclamations: “Dio, che cosa divina!” *—and then two lines later: “Diavolo, che divina cosa!” †—which constituted the whole of his artistic evaluation and critique, after which he would turn the conversation to broccoli and artichokes, his favorite subject, since he knew very well which was the best season to eat veal and in which month one should start eating kid goat, who loved to chat about all this when he met his fellow priest friend on the street, who very cleverly covered his fat calves in tight black silk stockings after first sticking woolen ones under them, and who regularly once a month did a purge with the medicine olio di ricino in a cup of coffee, and who got fatter with every day and hour, as all priests do.4 Naturally, the young prince did not learn much under such tutelage. He learned only that the Latin language is the father of Italian, that there are three sorts of monsignors—one sort who wear black stockings, another who wear lilac stockings, and the third sort who are almost the same as cardinals; he learned several letters from Pietro Bembo to the cardinals of his day, mostly congratulatory ones; he learned very well the Via del Corso, where he went for walks with the priest, and the Villa Borghese, and two or three shops where the priest would stop to buy paper, pens, and snuff, and the apothecary shop where he bought his olio di ricino.5 This constituted the entire horizon of information for the pupil.
The priest hinted in vague and unsteady outlines about other lands and states: that there is the land of France, a rich land, that the English are good merchants and love to travel, that Germans are drunkards, and that in the north there is the barbarian land of Muscovy, where they have such cold frosts that they can cause the human brain to burst. The pupil would probably not have gone further than this in his information until he reached the age of twenty-five, if the old prince had not suddenly gotten it into his head to change the old method of upbringing and give his son a European education, a decision that might partly be attributed to the influence of a certain French lady at whom he had recently started constantly directing his lorgnette in all the theaters and festive gatherings, continually sticking his chin into his huge white lace frill and tidying the black curl of his wig.
The young prince was sent to Lucca to the university. During his six-year stay there, his vivid Italian nature, which had drowsed under the boring supervision of the priest, unfolded. It turned out that the youth had a soul eager for choice delights and an observant mind. The Italian university, where scholarship dragged along, hidden in stale scholastic forms, could not satisfy modern youth, which was already sensing vivid, fragmentary hints of real scholarship that were flying across the Alps. The French influence became noticeable in northern Italy. It was wafted there along with fashions, vignettes, vaudevilles, and the high-strung products of the unbridled French muse, a muse that was monstrous, ardent, but sometimes not devoid of signs of talent.6 The powerful political movement in the newspapers, beginning with the July Revolution, found a response even here. People dreamed of a return to Italy’s perished glory, and they looked with indignation at the hateful white uniform of the Austrian soldier.7 But the Italian nature, which loved peaceful pleasures, did not flare up in a rebellion, the kind a Frenchman would not hesitate to start; everything ended with just an insuperable desire to spend time in Europe beyond the Alps, the real Europe. Its eternal movement and brilliance flashed enticingly in the distance. That is where newness was, the opposite of Italian decrepitude, that is where the nineteenth century and European life were beginning. The soul of the young prince powerfully strove to go there, hoping for adventures and society, and a heavy feeling of sadness overcame him each time he saw how utterly impossible this was. He knew the unbending despotism of the old prince, with whom it was beyond his power to get along—when suddenly he received a letter from him, which commanded him to go to Paris, to finish his studies in the university there, and to wait in Lucca only for the arrival of his uncle in order to set off together with him.
The young prince jumped for joy, kissed all his friends, treated them all in an osteria* outside town, and two weeks later he was on his way, with a heart ready to encounter every object with joyful pounding. When they had crossed the Simplon Pass, a pleasant thought ran through his head: He was on the other side, he was in Europe! The wild hideousness of the Swiss mountains, which were piled up without perspective, without ethereal distances, somewhat horrified his gaze, which was accustomed to the loftily calm, coddling beauty of Italian nature. But he brightened up at the sight of the European cities, the magnificent bright hotels, the conveniences that were arranged for the traveler, who could make himself comfortable as if he were at home. The dandified cleanliness, the brilliance—all of this was new to him.
In the German cities he was somewhat struck by the strange formation of the German’s body, deprived of the shapely harmony of beauty, the feeling for which is innate to the Italian breast; the German language also struck unpleasantly on his musical ear. B
ut already he saw the French border before him, and his heart shuddered. The fluttering sounds of the fashionable European language caressed and kissed his hearing. With secret pleasure he caught their slippery rustle, which back in Italy had seemed to him something lofty, purified of all convulsive movements of the kind that accompany the powerful languages of the southern people, who do not know how to keep themselves within bounds. An even greater impression was made on him by a particular sort of woman—ethereal and fluttering. He was struck by this evanescent creature with her barely defined ethereal forms, with her small foot, with her slender airy figure, with the responsive fire in her gazes, and with her ethereal, almost unarticulated speeches. He awaited Paris with impatience, populated it with towers, palaces, created his own image of it, and finally, with trembling heart, he caught sight of the imminent signs of the capital city: glued-up posters, gigantic letters, multiplying post chaises, omnibuses… finally the houses of the faubourg began to fly by.
And now he was in Paris, disjointedly embraced by its monstrous exterior, struck by the movement, the brilliant streets, the disorder of roofs, the thicket of chimneys, the unarchitectural joined-together masses of houses, of stores all pasted up with dense patchwork, the hideousness of the bare, unsupported side walls, the innumerable mixed-up crowds of golden letters that crawled onto the walls, the windows, the roofs, and even the chimneys, the bright transparency of the lower stories, consisting entirely of mirrorlike panes of glass. There it is, Paris, that eternally agitated volcanic crater, that fountain sending out the sparks of news, enlightenment, fashion, elegant taste, and petty but powerful laws, from which even those who condemn them are powerless to tear themselves away, that great exhibition of everything produced by craftsmanship, artistry, and every talent hidden in the obscure corners of Europe, the thrill and the favorite dream of a twenty-year-old man, the exchange and trade fair of Europe! Like one thunderstruck, unable to collect himself, he started walking through streets that were filled to the brim with all kinds of people and striated by the routes of the moving omnibuses, impressed now by the sight of a café that sparkled with unheard-of kingly decoration, now by the famous covered arcades, where he was deafened by the muffled sound of several thousand noisy steps of the crowd moving in one mass, which consisted almost entirely of young people, and where he was blinded by the throbbing brilliance of stores illuminated by light that fell through the glass ceiling into the gallery; now stopping in front of posters that appeared before his eyes by the millions in a motley crowd, shouting about twenty-four daily performances and an innumerable multitude of all sorts of musical concerts; now finally losing his bearings completely, when this whole magical pile flared up in the evening by the magical illumination of gaslight—all the buildings suddenly became transparent, shining powerfully from below; the windows and panes of glass in the stores seemed to disappear, to vanish completely, and everything that lay inside them was left out on the street unguarded, sparkling and reflected by the mirrors into the depths.8 “Ma quest’è una cosa divina!”* the lively Italian kept repeating.
His life began to flow by in a lively way, in the same way as the life of many Parisians and the crowd of young foreigners who come to Paris. At nine o’clock in the morning, having leaped out of bed, he was already in a magnificent café with fashionable frescoes behind glass, with a ceiling covered in gold, with the long pages of journals and newspapers, with a noble flunky passing among the customers carrying a magnificent silver coffeepot in his hand. There he drank his thick coffee out of an enormous cup with sybaritic delight, lounging on an elastic, springy divan and recalling the low-ceilinged, dark Italian cafés with an untidy bottega carrying unwashed glasses. Then he got started reading the colossal journal pages and recalled the sickly, nasty journals in Italy, the Diario di Roma, Il Pirato, and others like that, where they published harmless political news and anecdotes that might almost have been about Thermopylae and King Darius of Persia.9 Here, on the contrary, a seething pen was visible everywhere. Question after question, exclamation after exclamation—it seemed everyone was bristling with all their might: This one threatened that things were about to change and foretold the destruction of the state. Every barely noticeable movement of the Chambers and of the ministries swelled into a movement of enormous scope between refractory parties and was heard as an almost desperate cry in the journals.10 The Italian even felt terrified as he read them, thinking that a revolution was going to flare up the next day. He left the periodical room as if in a daze, and only Paris itself with its streets could instantly drive this whole burden out of his head.
Its brilliance that fluttered over everything and its motley movement, after this heavy reading, seemed like ethereal little flowers running along the edge of an abyss. In one instant he was entirely transplanted to the street and became an utter gawker, just like everyone else. He gawked at the bright, ethereal saleswomen, just entering their spring prime, who filled all the Paris stores, as if the stern appearance of a man would be unseemly and would flash as a black spot behind the sheet-glass windows. He watched their chic slender hands, washed in all sorts of soaps, alluringly sparkling as they wrapped candy in paper, while their eyes were fixed brightly and attentively on the passersby; in another place he watched the silhouette of a light-haired little head that bent picturesquely, dropping its long eyelashes to the pages of a fashionable novel, not seeing that a swarm of young men had gathered around her, examining her ethereal snowy little neck and every little hair on her head, listening to the very oscillation of her breast produced by her reading. He also gawked at a bookshop, where black vignettes appeared darkly, like spiders, on ivory paper, vignettes that were flung onto the paper boldly, in the heat of the moment, so that sometimes it was impossible to make out what they were, and the strange letters looked like hieroglyphics. He also gawked at a machine that occupied an entire store all by itself and operated behind a mirrorlike glass, rolling an enormous drum to pulverize chocolate. He gawked at shops where the Paris “crocodiles” would stop for whole hours at a time, hands stuck in their pockets and mouths wide open, where a huge red lobster lay on a bed of greens, a turkey stuffed with truffles showed its bulk, with the laconic inscription “300 francs,” and yellow and red fish flashed their golden feathers and tails in glass vases.11 He also gawked at the broad boulevards that regally passed across all of crowded Paris, where in the midst of the city, trees the size of six-story buildings stood, where onto the asphalt sidewalks flocked a crowd of visitors and a swarm of homegrown Parisian lions and tigers, not always accurately depicted in stories. And having gawked to his heart’s content and to satiety, he climbed up to a restaurant where the mirrored walls had long been shining with gaslight, reflecting innumerable crowds of ladies and men, talking loudly as they sat at the small tables scattered around the room.
After dinner he hurried to the theater, only bewildered about which one to choose: Each one of them had its own celebrity, each one had its author, its actor. Newness was everywhere. Over there gleams a vaudeville, lively and flighty as a Frenchman himself, new every day, entirely created during three minutes of leisure, making people laugh from beginning to end thanks to the inexhaustible caprices of the actor’s gaiety; over there is a passionate drama. And he couldn’t help but compare the dry, meager dramatic stage of Italy, where they just kept repeating old man Goldoni, which everyone knew by heart, or new little comedies, so innocent and naive that they would bore a child; he compared that meager group with this lively, hurried dramatic deluge, where everything was forged while the iron was hot, where everyone feared only that newness would grow cold.12 After laughing, getting excited, and looking his fill, weary and exhausted by his impressions, he would return home and fling himself onto his bed, which as everyone knows is the only thing a Frenchman needs in his room; he uses public places for his study, dinner, and evening illumination.
Nevertheless, the prince did not forget to combine all this multifarious gawking with the occupations of the mind, wh
ich his soul impatiently demanded. He undertook to hear all the famous professors. The lively and often ecstatic speech, the new points and aspects noted by the loquacious professor, were unexpected for the young Italian. He felt the scales starting to fall from his eyes, he felt objects he had never noticed before rising before him in a new, bright form, and the odds and ends of knowledge he had picked up, which for most people die for lack of use, awakened and, regarded with a new eye, became firmly established in his memory forever. He also made sure not to miss a single famous preacher, social commentator, orator in Chamber debates, or any of the things Paris makes a loud noise in Europe with. Despite the fact that he didn’t always have the means, and that the old prince sent him an allowance for a student, not for a prince, nevertheless he managed to find the opportunity to be everywhere, to obtain access to all the celebrities the European tabloid newspapers were trumpeting as they repeated one another, he even came face to face with those fashionable writers whose strange works had struck his young, ardent soul as well as the souls of others, and in whom everyone thought they heard strings that had not before been touched, twists of the passions that had not before been captured. In short, the life of the Italian took on a broad, multifarious form, embraced by the whole vast brilliance of European activity. All at once, in a single day—carefree gawking and agitated arousal, easy work for the eyes and a strained mind, a vaudeville in a theater, a preacher in a church, the political whirlwind of journals and parliament Chambers, applause in auditoriums, the overwhelming thunder of the Conservatory orchestra, the airy gleaming of the dancing stage, the loud clatter of street life—what a gigantic life for a twenty-five-year-old youth! There is no better place than Paris; he would not exchange such a life for anything. What happiness and pleasure to live in the very heart of Europe, where as you walk you rise up higher, you feel that you are a member of the great universal society! The thought even began to spin in his head that he would renounce Italy entirely and stay forever in Paris. Italy now seemed to him to be a dark, moldy corner of Europe, where all life and movement had died out.
The Nose and Other Stories Page 25
