by Ouida
A slender, dainty, girlish thing, she had a name of power even in that age of giants. She dared to wield, and to wield well, the chisel and the burin in the days when Michaelangelo and Marcantonio held them as their sceptres. Her city honoured her, and the envy and injury of Amico gave her the surest warranty of triumph.
And yet, — she had no joy in any of it; she won one by one all the laurels only to find them bitter on her lips; the marbles chilled her as though they were dead children, and the shouts of the Romagnese homage was dull and without music on her ears. For why? for this; — so little and yet all. That one, only in the city’s width, saw no beauty in her, and no wonder in her deeds: and this one, — alone of them all, — she loved.
And he, not knowing, and when knowing, caring nothing, but turning away his beautiful cold face into the light of others’ smiles, Properzia grew weary of her work, and changed to hate her lavish gifts of nature; and left undone the public sculptures she had sought so eagerly; and would not for all the city’s wooing use her power again, but drew herself in from life and light like a sea-flower that is thrown by tempest on the rocks. And so, when Clement came into Bologna to crown great Charles, and asked, as the first of all the wonders of the place, for that Properzia whose fame had spread from sea to sea in Italy, the Bolognese, weeping bitterly, could only lead him to the hospital to look upon the fair dead body of a girl.
I thought of her wistfully as the tawny evening colours spread themselves like an emperor’s pall over the desolate city.
I only saw the beauty and the sadness of the story. What there was of evil in it passed by me; the passion and the shame shadowed out in that terrible sculpture, which was the last her genius wrought, had no meaning for me; of the poison of unrequited desire which had burned up and ruined all the delicate grace and innocent loveliness of her nature and her life, I had no sense or suspicion.
I was only sorry for her — dead all those centuries before — here in the city of Guido. And a strange new wonder awoke and thrilled in me; — what could it be, this marvellous thing called Love which had thus killed her?
And then I thought, — I knew not why, — of the dark and tender eyes of the Florentine Masquer.
The owl had awoke from his watch-tower on the tub, and had begun to boom to and fro hunting bats through the shadows of the angles and roofs.
The deep bell of the Misericordia boomed over Bologna in the stillness. The old woman, spinning at her wheel, stopped to cross herself and say a prayer or two for the poor passing soul.
I saw the stars come out, and thought of how they were shining there away across the plains on those lowly graves beneath the shadow of the Alps; and then I threw myself wearily on the little bed, and cried myself to sleep.
At daybreak I rose and went down and paid my slender score. Then I bade them farewell, and went out into the white and glistening light that heralds morning in the Italian plains.
An hour later I was on my way across the wild gorges of the hills to Florence.
CHAPTER X.
La Reine du Moyenage.
ALL day long, and all night long, the heavy diligenza creaked and rolled upon its course over the grey heights, and through the dusky ravines of the Apennines.
I slept and dreamed, and woke and gazed, and slept and dreamed again; it was all blent to me in a confused tumult of light and darkness, rest and pain.
It was again daybreak, when, with a shock and a dull crash, the great vehicle reeled over on its side and fell broken and crushed upon the stony way, the poor beasts struggling under their entangled weight of leather, rope, and links of brass. It had been urged too swiftly down a steep and angular slope.
I rose with a confused sense of pain, but I had received no hurt There were stir and strife and lamentation. Then some one told me that it would be hours ere the vehicle could be again upon the road, and that it were better to go on foot to Florence: we were on the hill-side, not a league away, and very soon night would have fallen. They pointed me the way; I followed it; a rough road winding between high stone walls, descending always abruptly, and without beauty, white with dust, and rugged to the feet; above, a wondrous sky; sapphire blue in the zenith, all to westward glowing with a million cloud-flecks of intensest rose; the rose of the deep carnation buds when they blush into life with the spring of the year.
I followed patiently the windings of the path, always between the pale stone walls, a little solitary figure, purple and yellow, as though the violets and crocuses of the woods had dressed me.
Suddenly, with a sharp bend, the road sheered downward into a wide valley, white and grey with the blossoming woods of the olive. In the midst of that silvery sea was stretched the fairest city of all the empires of the world.
The sun was setting.
Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethereal golden mist that rose from the water and the woods.
The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires, and domes, and towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, and rising upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset on their pale heights until they flushed to scarlet, glowered to violet, wavered with flame, and paled to whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth, fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in the great stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly in the evening call to prayer.
Thus Florence rose before me.
A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I beheld the reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those marble heights of towers and of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her! — the daughter of flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing mother of liberty and of aspiration.
I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in such a moment, have not done likewise.
My eyes were dim, but my heart was strong, and beat high with hope as I rose and stumbled down the rugged way, onwards, to the entrance of her gates; always with the great dome shining before me in the golden haze; always with the clouds light as a breath, scarlet as a flame, hovering above me in the windless air.
The afterglow was still warm in the heavens when I reached the city walls and entered the shadows of her historic streets.
I wandered all the evening, unconscious of fatigue, until the streets were all ablaze with lights, and all astir with people. I remembered then, for the first time, that it was the last Domenica of the year’s Carnival.
The great white Seasons of the Santa Trinità rose like snow against the golden air. Monte Oliveto towered dark against the rosy glory of the west. There was a sweet sea wind blowing which fanned out as it went all the spiced odours of the pharmacies, and all the scents of the budding woods. The shops of the goldsmiths, and mosaic sellers, and alabaster workers gleamed and sparkled in the light. Everywhere there was some beauty, some fragrance, some treasure; and above it all rose the wondrous shaft of the campanile, glancing like gold and ivory in the sun.
Where lies the secret of the spell of Florence? — a spell that strengthens, and does not fade with time?
It is a strange, sweet, subtle charm that makes those who love her at all love her with a passionate, close-clinging faith in her as the fairest thing that men have ever builded where she lies amidst her lily-whitened meadows.
Perhaps it is because her story is so old, and her beauty is so young.
Behind her lie such abysses of mighty memories. Upon her is shed such radiance of sunlight and of life. The stones of her are dark with the blood of so many generations, but her air is bright with the blossoms of so many flowers; even as the eyes of her people have in them more sadness than lies in tears, whilst their lips have the gayest laughter that ever made music in the weariness of the world.
Rome is terrible in her old age. It is the old age of a mighty murderess of men. About her there is ever the scent of death; the abomination of desolation. She was, in her days of power and of sorcery, a living lie. She called herself
the mother of freed men, and she conceived but slaves. The shame of her and the sin cling to her still, and the blood that she shed makes heavy and horrible the air that she respires. Her head is crowned with ashes, and her lips, as they mutter of dead days, breathe pestilence.
But Florence, where she sits throned amidst her meadows white with lilies, Florence is never terrible, Florence is never old. In her infancy they fed her on the manna of freedom, and that fairest food gave her eternal youth. In her early years she worshipped ignorantly indeed, but truly always the day-star of liberty; and it has been with her always so that the light shed upon her is still as the light of morning.
Does this sound a fanciful folly? Nay, there is a real truth in it The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch it at every step. It is not the dead past that men bury and then forget. It is an unquenchable thing; beautiful, and full of lustre, even in the tomb, like the gold from the sepulchres of the Ætruscan kings that shines on the breast of some fair living woman, undimmed by the dust and the length of the ages.
‘ The music of the old greatness thrills through all the commonest things of life like the grilli’s chant through the wooden cages on Ascension Day; and, like the song of the grilli, its poetry stays in the warmth of the common hearth for the ears of the little children, and loses nothing of its melody..
The beauty of the past in Florence is like the beauty of the great Duomo.
About the Duomo there is stir and strife at all times; crowds come and go; men buy and sell; lads laugh and fight; piles of fruit blaze gold and crimson; metal pails clash down on the stones with shrillest clangour; on the steps boys play at dominoes, and women give their children food, and merry maskers grin in carnival fooleries; but there in their midst is the Duomo all unharmed and undegraded, a poem and a prayer in one, its marbles shining in the upper air, a thing so majestic in its strength, and yet so human in its tenderness, that nothing can assail, and nothing equal it Other, though not many, cities have histories as noble, treasuries as vast; but no other city has them living and ever present in her midst, familiar as household words, and touched by every baby’s hand and peasant’s step, as Florence has.
Every line, every rood, every gable, every tower, has some story of the past present in it. Every tocsin that sounds is a chronicle; every bridge that unites the two banks of the river unites also the crowds of the living with the heroism of the dead.
In the winding dusky irregular streets, with the outlines of their logge and arcades, and the glow of colour that fills their niches and galleries, the men who “have gone before” walk with you; not as elsewhere mere, gliding shades clad in the pallor of a misty memory, but present, as in their daily lives, shading their dreamful eyes against the noonday sun or setting their brave brows against the mountain wind, laughing and jesting in their manful mirth and speaking as brother to brother of great gifts to give the world. All this while, though the past is thus close about you the present is beautiful also, and does not shock you by discord and unseemliness as it will ever do elsewhere. The throngs that pass you are the same in likeness as those that brushed against Dante or Calvacanti; the populace that you move amidst is the same bold, vivid, fearless, eager people with eyes full of dreams, and lips braced close for war, which welcomed Vinci and Cimabue and fought from Montaperto to Solferino.
And as you go through the streets you will surely see at every step some colour of a fresco on a wall, some quaint curve of a has-relief on a lintel, some vista of Romanesque arches in a palace court, some dusky interior of a smith’s forge or a wood-seller’s shop, some Renaissance seal ring glimmering on a trader’s stall, some lovely hues of fruits and herbs tossed down together in a Tre Cento window, some gigantic mass of blossoms being borne aloft on men’s shoulders for a church festivity of roses, something at every step that has some beauty or some charm in it, some graciousness of the ancient time, or some poetry of the present hour.
The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy eggs in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which fell down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a narrow bye-street in a crowd and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which the people so baptised for love of the old painter and the new-born art. Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city flocked, weeping, at midnight to look their last upon the face of their Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps of the palace of the Signorla and you tread the stone that felt the feet of him to whom so bitterly was known “com’ è duro calle, lo scendere e’I salir per l’altrûi scale.” Buy a knot of March anemoni or April arum lilies, and you may bear them with you through the same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo once played amidst the gold and silver garlands that his father fashioned for the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a shoemaker and you shall find the cobbler sitting with his board in the same old twisting, shadowy street way, where the old man Toscanelli drew his charts that served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus. Toil to fetch a tinker through the squalor of San Niccolô, and there shall fall on you the shadow of the bell-tower where the old sacristan saved to the world the genius of the Night and Day. Glance up to see the hour of the evening time, and there, sombre and tragical, will loom above you the walls of the communal palace on which the traitors were painted by the brush of Sarto, and the tower of Giotto, fair and fresh in its perfect grace as though angels had builded it in the night just past, “one? ella toglie ancora e terza e nona” as in the noble and simple days before she brake the “cerchia antica.”
Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and rills of laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if they too, like their Poets, had gazed into the heights of heaven and the depths of hell.
And then you will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, and all around you there will be a radiance and serenity of light that seems to throb in its intensity and yet is divinely restful, like the passion and the peace of love when it has all to adore and nothing to desire.
The water will be broad and gold, and darkened here and there into shadows of porphyrine amber. Amidst the grey and green of the olive and acacia foliage there will arise the low pale roofs and flat-topped towers of innumerable villages.
Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of amethystine hills and mystical depths of seven-chorded light Above, masses of rosy cloud will drift, like rose leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a magic girdle which has shut her out from all the curse of age and death and man’s oblivion, and given her a youth and loveliness which will endure so long as the earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the mountains, purple and white and golden, lying around Florence.
Who, having known her, can forsake her for lesser loves?
Who, having once abode with her, can turn their faces from the rising sun and set the darkness of the hills betwixt herself and them!
CHAPTER XI.
The Midnight Fair.
So beautiful was it all, so strange, so wild, so fantastic, that all hunger, fatigue, and fear were forgotten by me in its curious delight. I wandered on and on, asking nothing, only for ever looking and looking and looking. I thought that I had strayed over the border land that parts us from the past, and was amidst the breathing burning life of the Cinque Cento.
By many and various streets — all made noble with frowning fortress, carven statues, walls massive and lofty as alpine slopes, ornament delicate and wonderful as frost on woven aspen boughs, — I came at length into a great square, which I needed none to tell me was the place where the soul of Savonarola had been sent forth on fire. For there the standard of the people rose on the tower of the Commonwealth, and the lustrous moonlight lay calm and broad about the feet of the bronze Perseus.
The Hercules and the David stood white and serene against the darkness; the battlements of the magisterial palace were set like jaws of iron hard against the night; the moonshine caug
ht the colours on the blazoned shields that edged the walls; the beautiful Judith knit her brows against the world from under the black arch of her loggia. How still it was there, where only the shapes of marble and of bronze kept watch and ward in the gathering-place of the Republic Yet — a stone’s throw, and all Florence laughed, and danced, and reeled, and sang, and gamed, and shouted in the open gallery of the Uffizi. A stone’s throw, — and in the very shadow of the Vecchio standard, under the very gaze of the Donatello, Florence in her wildest gaiety held her riot and her revelry.
It was the midnight Fair of the Carnival. All the length of the arcade was filled with the bright and motley throng. In open spaces on the flagstones the people were dancing to shrill clamour of fife and drum. Here a white Filatrice with powdered face was whirled down by a scarlet Mephisto, and here an Arlecchino all ablaze in squares of colour, spun round a black domino ready masked for the Veglione. There a débardeur, sunny-faced and stout-limbed, toyed with a Neapolitan Pulcinello; and there a lithe contadina, with eyes of jet, galloped like a Friuli filly down the pavement, tiring out a panting and piteous Stenterello.
On either side in the niches between the marble figures were ranged the little gay canteens and stalls of the traders; wines and straw work, and flowers and woollen goods, and all the merchandise of the whole contado, were decked out with coloured lamps and painted devices, and streaming ribbons, and all fanciful follies of gay ornamentation.
Aloft on a barrel, the charlatan, in a flourish of scarlet cloth, screamed forth the praises of his pharmacy and of his life-pills; whilst his compeer of the lottery, in tissue of silver and a conical hat an arm’s length high, with flaunting peacock’s plumes, rattled his dice and shouted forth the winning numbers. Peasant girls with penthouse hats of straw, grave fattori watching the selling of their wares, little children hugging loads of stracciataunta, maskers flying in a blaze of crackers, the people everywhere, in crowds, pushing, shouting, anticking, sporting, but always in glee and always in good humour, while here and there amidst them some patrician idler sauntered with some mistress of the hour, masked, upon his arm, smiling together as they watched the humours of the fair.