Facing The Museum Would Be The Palace Of The
Conservatori, Where In The Noblest Of Its Splendid Halls The Present
Company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the
conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table
And restoring itself from
the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After
this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn,
and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset
light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Sep-timius Severus's
marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.
In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader
ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the
dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or with-otit
to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be,
beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the
presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled
around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the
private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he
can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic
archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long,
velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly
rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.
But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and
intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has
never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such
question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask
him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa
Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its
yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of
associations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and
modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living
somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy
which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy
people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of box; the
blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on
these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an aisle of the grove beside
the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an
old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of
the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once
young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable
morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if
he likes. I cannot do more for him without doing less, and yet I know it
is a palette rather than a picture I am giving him.
All the while I was there, the guest of the French nation by the payment
of fifty centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of
a place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Eepublic with so much
other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the magnanimous
Third Republic is going to restore it to the people rightfully its
owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the Villa Medici will
remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world, even in the very capital
of it, are without some touch of abatement. I could not so much as visit
the Catacombs of Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though
incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As we
drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one of those
domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy alone. Three
peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in controversy which, on his
side, the man supported with both hands flapping wildly at the heads of
the women, who alertly dodged and circled around him in the endeavor to
close in upon him. It was instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that
they were his wife and daughter, and that he was the worse for the
vintage of their home acre, and would be the better for being got into
the house and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts
of the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in no
hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was about to
tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab
descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former
level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end
of that passage of real life,
It was impossible to bid the cabman drive back for the close of the
scene; the abrupt conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof
of the charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal
us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery that for
the moment my bitter sense of loss was assuaged, and it only returns now
at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in this brief scene were
some early Christians might have been, and it must have been the
stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving in the husband and father. He
was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would
have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive
the emperor's gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned
to found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of course,
under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five
levels below the surface.
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