"I Saw A Fellow Who Had Three Days Before Murdered His
Wife In The Last Month Of Pregnancy, Taking The
Air with great
composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence."
Smollett, it is clear, for all
His philosophy, was no degenerate
representative of the blind, unreasoning seventeenth-century
detestation of "Popery and wooden shoes."
Smollett is one of the first to describe a "conversazione," and
in illustration of the decadence of Italian manners, it is
natural that he should have a good deal to tell us about the
Cicisbeatura. His account of the cicisbeo and his duties, whether
in Nice, Florence, or Rome, is certainly one of the most
interesting that we have. Before Smollett and his almost
contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would
probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England,
though the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later.
Most of the "classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme.
de Stael, Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from
very much later, when the institution was long past its prime if
not actually moribund. Now Smollett saw it at the very height of
its perfection and at a time when our decorous protestant
curiosity on such themes was as lively as Lady Mary Montagu had
found it in the case of fair Circassians and Turkish harems just
thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler. Hence the
word came to be applied punningly to the bow depending from a
clouded cane or ornamental crook. In sixteenth-century Spain,
home of the sedan and the caballero galante, the original term
was bracciere. In Venice the form was cavaliere servente. For a
good note on the subject, see Sismondi's Italian Republics, ed.
William Boulting, 1907, p. 793.] Like so much in the shapes and
customs of Italy the cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic
and partly Oriental. It combined the chivalry of northern
friendship with the refined passion of the South for the
seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest against the
insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal
intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more
tolerant and impartial investigation than it has yet received at
the hands of our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could
hardly be expected to outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth
century. The north wind blew and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a
thing of the past.
Freed from the necessity of a systematic delineation Smollett
rambles about Nice, its length and breadth, with a stone in his
pouch, and wherever a cockshy is available he takes full
advantage of it. He describes the ghetto (p. 171), the police
arrangements of the place which he finds in the main highly
efficient, and the cruel punishment of the strappado. The
garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined with the water-torture
and the rack, represented the survival of the fittest in
the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy
Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. The
strappado as described by Smollett, however, is a more severe
form of torture even than that practised by the Inquisition, and
we can only hope that his description of its brutality is highly
coloured. [See the extremely learned disquisition on the whole
subject in Dr. H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition in Spain,
1907, vol. iii. book vi chap. vii.] Smollett must have enjoyed
himself vastly in the market at Nice. He gives an elaborate and
epicurean account of his commissariat during the successive
seasons of his sojourn in the neighbourhood. He was not one of
these who live solely "below the diaphragm"; but he understood
food well and writes about it with a catholic gusto and relish
(156-165). He laments the rarity of small birds on the Riviera,
and gives a highly comic account of the chasse of this species of
gibier. He has a good deal to say about the sardine and tunny
fishery, about the fruit and scent traffic, and about the wine
industry; and he gives us a graphic sketch of the silkworm
culture, which it is interesting to compare with that given by
Locke in 1677. He has something to say upon the general
agriculture, and more especially upon the olive and oil industry.
Some remarks upon the numerous "mummeries" and festas of the
inhabitants lead him into a long digression upon the feriae of
the Romans. It is evident from this that the box of books which
he shipped by way of Bordeaux must have been plentifully supplied
with classical literature, for, as he remarks with unaffected
horror, such a thing as a bookseller had not been so much as
heard of in Nice. Well may he have expatiated upon the total lack
of taste among the inhabitants! In dealing with the trade,
revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself
the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large
practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of
his vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he
reveals the curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist.
Climate had always been one of his hobbies, and on learning that
none of the local practitioners was in a position to exact a
larger fee than sixpence from his patients (quantum mutatus the
Nice physician of 1907!) he felt that he owed it to himself to
make this the subject of an independent investigation. He kept a
register of the weather during the whole of his stay, and his
remarks upon the subject are still of historical interest,
although with Teysseire's minutely exact Monograph on the
Climatology of Nice (1881) at his disposal and innumerable
commentaries thereon by specialists, the inquirer of to-day would
hardly go to Smollett for his data. Then, as now, it is curious
to find the rumour current that the climate of Nice was sadly
deteriorating. "Nothing to what it was before the war!" as the
grumbler from the South was once betrayed into saying of the
August moon.
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