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BOOK I - THE OLD ORDER: CHAPTER 8
1.8.
The travellers were to journey by Vettura from Chivasso to Turin; and
when Odo woke next morning the carriage stood ready in the courtyard.
Cantapresto, mottled and shamefaced, with his bands awry and an air of
tottering dignity, was gathering their possessions together, and the
pretty girl who had pillowed Odo's slumbers now knelt by his bed and
laughingly drew on his stockings. She was a slim brown morsel, not much
above his age, with a glance that flitted like a bird, and round
shoulders slipping out of her kerchief. A wave of shyness bathed Odo to
the forehead as their eyes met: he hung his head stupidly and turned
away when she fetched the comb to dress his hair.
His toilet completed, she called out to the abate to go below and see
that the cavaliere's chocolate was ready; and as the door closed she
turned and kissed Odo on the lips.
"Oh, how red you are!" she cried laughing. "Is that the first kiss
you've ever had? Then you'll remember me when you're Duke of
Pianura--Mirandolina of Chioggia, the first girl you ever kissed!" She
was pulling his collar straight while she talked, so that he could not
get away from her. "You will remember me, won't you?" she persisted. "I
shall be a great actress by that time, and you'll appoint me prima
amorosa to the ducal theatre of Pianura, and throw me a diamond bracelet
from your Highness's box and make all the court ladies ready to poison
me for rage!" She released his collar and dropped away from him. "Ah,
no, I shall be a poor strolling player, and you a great prince," she
sighed, "and you'll never, never think of me again; but I shall always
remember that I was the first girl you ever kissed!"
She hung back in a dazzle of tears, looking so bright and tender that
Odo's bashfulness melted like a spring frost.
"I shall never be Duke," he cried, "and I shall never forget you!" And
with that he turned and kissed her boldly and then bolted down the
stairs like a hare. And all that day he scorched and froze with the
thought that perhaps she had been laughing at him.
Cantapresto was torpid after the feast, and Odo detected in him an air
of guilty constraint. The boy was glad enough to keep silence, and they
rolled on without speaking through the wide glowing landscape. Already
the nearness of a great city began to make itself felt. The bright
champaign was scattered over with farm-houses, their red-tiled
pigeon-cots and their granges latticed with openwork terra-cotta
pleasantly breaking the expanse of maize and mulberry; villages lay
along the banks of the canals intersecting the plain; and the hills
beyond the Po were planted with villas and monasteries.
All the afternoon they drove between umbrageous parks and under the
walls of terraced vineyards. It was a region of delectable shade, with
glimpses here and there of gardens flashing with fountains and villa
roofs decked with statues and vases; and at length, toward sunset, a
bend of the road brought them out on a fair-spreading city, so
flourishing in buildings, so beset with smiling hills, that Odo,
springing from his seat, cried out in sheer joy of the spectacle.
They had still the suburbs to traverse; and darkness was falling when
they entered the gates of Turin. This brought the fresh amazement of
wide lamplit streets, clean and bright as a ball-room, lined with
palaces and filled with well-dressed loungers: officers in the brilliant
Sardinian uniforms, fine gentlemen in French tie-wigs and narrow-sleeved
coats, merchants hurrying home from business, ecclesiastics in
high-swung carriages, and young bloods dashing by in their curricles.
The tables before the coffee-houses were thronged with idlers taking
their chocolate and reading the gazettes; and here and there the arched
doorway of a palace showed some gay party supping al fresco in a garden
hung with lamps.
The flashing of lights and the noise of the streets roused Cantapresto,
who sat up with a sudden assumption of dignity.
"Ah, cavaliere," said he, "you now see a great city, a famous city, a
city aptly called 'the Paris of Italy.' Nowhere else shall you find such
well-lit streets, such fair pavements, shops so full of Parisian wares,
promenades so crowded with fine carriages and horses. What a life a
young gentleman may lead here! The court is hospitable, society amiable,
the theatres are the best-appointed in Italy."
Here Cantapresto paused with a deprecating cough.
"Only one thing is necessary," he went on, "to complete enjoyment of the
fruits of this garden of Eden; and that is"--he coughed
again--"discretion. His Majesty, cavaliere, is a father to his subjects;
the Church is their zealous mother; and between two such parents, and
the innumerable delegates of their authority, why, you may fancy, sir,
that a man has to wear his eyes on all sides of his head. Discretion is
a virtue the Church herself commends; it is natural, then, that she
should afford her children full opportunity to practise it. And look
you, cavaliere, it is like gymnastics: the younger you acquire it, the
less effort it costs. Our Maker Himself has taught us the value of
silence by putting us speechless into the world: if we learn to talk
later we do it at our own risk! But for your own part, cavaliere--since
the habit cannot too early be exercised--I would humbly counsel you to
say nothing to your illustrious parents of our little diversion of last
evening."
The Countess Valdu lived on the upper floor of a rococo palace near the
Piazza San Carlo; and here Odo, led by Cantapresto, presently found
himself shown into an apartment where several ladies and gentlemen sat
at cards. His mother, detaching herself from the group, embraced him
with unusual warmth, and the old Count, more painted and perfumed than
ever, hurried up with an obsequious greeting. Odo for the first time
found himself of consequence in the world; and as he was passed from
guest to guest, questioned about his journey, praised for his good
colour and stout looks, complimented on his high prospects, and
laughingly entreated not to forget his old friends when fortune should
advance him to the duchy, he began to feel himself a reigning potentate
already.
His mother, as he soon learned, had sunk into a life almost as dull and
restricted as that she had left Donnaz to escape. Count Valdu's position
at court was more ornamental than remunerative, the income from his
estates was growing annually smaller, and he was involved in costly
litigation over the sale of some entailed property. Such conditions were
little to the Countess's humour, and the society to which her narrow
means confined her offered few distractions to her vanity. The
frequenters of the house were chiefly poor relations and hangers-on of
the Count's, the parasites who in those days were glad to subsist on the
crumbs of the slenderest larder. Half-a-dozen hungry Countesses, their
lean admirers, a superannuated abate or two, and a flock of threadbare
ecclesiastics, made up Donna Laura's circle; and even her cicisbeo,
selected in family council under the direction of her confessor, was an
austere gentleman of middle age, who collected ancient coins and was
engaged in composing an essay on the Martellian verse.
This company, which devoted hours to the new French diversion of the
parfilage, and spent the evenings in drinking lemonade and playing
basset for small stakes, found its chief topic of conversation in the
only two subjects safely discussed in Turin at that day--the doings of
the aristocracy and of the clergy. The fashion of the Queen's headdress
at the last circle, the marked manner in which his Majesty had lately
distinguished the brilliant young cavalry officer, Count Roberto di
Tournanches, the third marriage of the Countess Alfieri of Asti, the
incredibility of the rumour that the court ladies of Versailles had
taken to white muslin and Leghorn hats, the probable significance of the
Vicar-general's visit to Rome, the subject of the next sacred
representation to be given by the nuns of Santa Croce--such were the
questions that engaged the noble frequenters of Casa Valdu.
This was the only society that Donna Laura saw; for she was too poor to
dress to her taste and too proud to show herself in public without the
appointments becoming her station. Her sole distraction consisted in
visits to the various shrines--the Sudario, the Consolata, the Corpus
Domini--at which the feminine aristocracy offered up its devotions and
implored absolution for sins it had often no opportunity to commit: for
though fashion accorded cicisbei to the fine ladies of Turin, the Church
usually restricted their intercourse to the exchange of the most
harmless amenities.
Meanwhile the antechamber was as full of duns as the approach to Donna
Laura's apartment at Pianura; and Odo guessed that the warmth of the
maternal welcome sprang less from natural affection than from the hope
of using his expectations as a sop to her creditors. The pittance which
the ducal treasury allowed for his education was scarce large enough to
be worth diverting to other ends; but a potential prince is a shield to
the most vulnerable fortunes. In this character Odo for the first time
found himself flattered, indulged, and made the centre of the company.
The contrast to his life of subjection at Donnaz; the precocious
initiation into motives that tainted the very fount of filial piety; the
taste of this mingled draught of adulation and disillusionment, might
have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this
perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of
imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life,
that tinged his most personal impressions with a streak of the
philosophic temper. If this trait did not save him from sorrow, it at
least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties
of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the
past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep
moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show
of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless
youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit
that was to destroy one world without surviving to create another.
Of all this none could have been less conscious than the lad just
preparing to enter on his studies at the Royal Academy of Turin. That
institution, adjoining the royal palace, was a kind of nursery or
forcing-house for the budding nobility of Savoy. In one division of the
sumptuous building were housed his Majesty's pages, a corps of luxurious
indolent young fops; another wing accommodated the regular students of
the Academy, sons of noblemen and gentlemen destined for the secular
life, while a third was set aside for the "forestieri" or students from
foreign countries and from the other Italian states. To this quarter Odo
Valsecca was allotted; though it was understood that on leaving the
Academy he was to enter the Sardinian service.
It was customary for a young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at
the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or
pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him
abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented. The old Marquess
of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending
her to select her son's governor with particular care, choosing rather a
person of grave behaviour and assured morality than one of your glib
ink-spatterers who may know the inside of all the folios in the King's
library without being the better qualified for the direction of a young
gentleman's conduct; and to this letter Don Gervaso appended the terse
postcript: "Your excellency is especially warned against according this
or any other position of trust to the merry-andrew who calls himself the
abate Cantapresto."
Donna Laura, with a shrug, handed the letter to her husband; Count
Valdu, adjusting his glasses, observed it was notorious that people
living in the depths of the country thought themselves qualified to
instruct their city relatives on all points connected with the social
usages; and the cicisbeo suggested that he could recommend an abate who
was proficient in the construction of the Martellian verse, and who
would made no extra charge for that accomplishment.
"Charges!" the Countess cried. "There's a matter my father doesn't deign
to consider. It's not enough, nowadays, to give the lads a governor, but
they must maintain their servants too, an idle gluttonous crew that prey
on their pockets and get a commission off every tradesman's bill."
Count Valdu lifted a deprecating hand.
"My dear, nothing could be more offensive to his Majesty than any
attempt to reduce the way of living of the pupils of the Academy."
"Of course," she shrugged-- "But who's to pay? The Duke's beggarly
pittance hardly clothes him."
The cicisbeo suggested that the cavaliere Odo had expectations; at which
Donna Laura flushed and turned uneasy; while the Count, part of whose
marital duty it was to intervene discreetly between his lady and her
knight, now put forth the remark that the abate Cantapresto seemed a
shrewd serviceable fellow.
"Nor do I like to turn him adrift," cried the Countess instantly, "after
he has obliged us by attending my son on his journey."
"And I understand," added the Count, "that he would be glad to serve the
cavaliere in any capacity you might designate."
"Why not in all?" said the cicisbeo thoughtfully. "There would be
undoubted advantages to the cavaliere in possessing a servant who would
explain the globes while powdering his hair and not be above calling his
chair when he attended him to a lecture."
And the upshot of it was that when Odo, a few days later, entered on his
first term at the Academy, he was accompanied by the abate Cantapresto,
who had agreed, for a minimum of pay, to serve him faithfully in the
double capacity of pedagogue and lacquey.
The considerable liberty accorded the foreign students made Odo's first
year at the Academy at once pleasanter and less profitable than had he
been one of the regular pupils. The companions among whom he found
himself were a set of lively undisciplined young gentlemen, chiefly from
England, Russia and the German principalities; all in possession of more
or less pocket-money and attended by governors either pedantic and
self-engrossed or vulgarly subservient. These young sprigs, whose
ambition it was to ape the dress and manners of the royal pages, led a
life of dissipation barely interrupted by a few hours of attendance at
the academic classes. From the ill-effects of such surroundings Odo was
preserved by an intellectual curiosity that flung him ravening on his
studies. It was not that he was of a bookish habit, or that the drudgery
of the classes was less irksome to him than to the other pupils; but not
even the pedantic methods then prevailing, or the distractions of his
new life, could dull the flush of his first encounter with the past. His
imagination took fire over the dry pages of Cornelius Nepos, glowed with
the mild pastoral warmth of the Georgics and burst into flame at the
first hexameters of the Aeneid. He caught but a fragment of meaning here
and there, but the sumptuous imagery, the stirring names, the glimpses
into a past where Roman senators were mingled with the gods of a
gold-pillared Olympus, filled his mind with a misty pageant of
immortals. These moments of high emotion were interspersed with hours of
plodding over the Latin grammar and the textbooks of philosophy and
logic. Books were unknown ground to Cantapresto, and among masters and
pupils there was not one who could help Odo to the meaning of his task,
or who seemed aware that it might have a meaning. To most of the lads
about him the purpose of the Academy was to fit young gentlemen for the
army or the court; to give them the chance of sweating a shirt every
morning with the fencing-master and of learning to thread the
intricacies of the court minuet. They modelled themselves on the dress
and bearing of the pages, who were always ruffling it about the
quadrangle in court dress and sword, or booted and spurred for a day's
hunting at the King's chase of Stupinigi. To receive a nod or a word
from one of these young demigods on his way to the King's opera-box or
just back from a pleasure-party at her Majesty's villa above the Po--to
hear of their tremendous exploits and thrilling escapades--seemed to put
the whole school in touch with the fine gentleman's world of intrigue,
cards and duelling: the world in which ladies were subjugated, fortunes
lost, adversaries run through and tradesmen ruined with that
imperturbable grace which distinguished the man of quality from the
plebeian.
Among the privileges of the foreign pupils were frequent visits to the
royal theatre; and here was to Odo a source of unimagined joys. His
superstitious dread of the stage (a sentiment, he soon discovered, that
not even his mother's director shared) made his heart beat oppressively
as he first set foot in the theatre. It was a gala night, boxes and
stalls were thronged, and the audience-hall unfolded its glittering
curves like some poisonous flower enveloping him in rich malignant
fragrance. This impression was dispelled by the rising of the curtain on
a scene of such Claude-like loveliness as it would have been impossible
to associate with the bug-bear tales of Donnaz or with the coarse antics
of the comedians at Chivasso. A temple girt with mysterious shade,
lifting its colonnade above a sunlit harbour; and before the temple,
vine-wreathed nymphs waving their thyrsi through the turns of a
melodious dance--such was the vision that caught up Odo and swept him
leagues away from the rouged and starred assemblage gathered in the
boxes to gossip, flirt, eat ices and chocolates, and incidentally, in
the pauses of their talk, to listen for a moment to the ravishing airs
of Metastasio's Achilles in Scyros.
The distance between such performances--magic evocations of light and
colour and melody--and the gross buffoonery of the popular stage, still
tainted with the obscenities of the old commedia dell' arte, in a
measure explains the different points from which at that period the
stage was viewed in Italy: a period when in such cities as Milan,
Venice, Turin, actors and singers were praised to the skies and loaded
with wealth and favours, while the tatterdemalion players who set up
their boards in the small towns at market-time or on feast-days were
despised by the people and flung like carrion into unconsecrated graves.
The impression Odo had gathered from Don Gervaso's talk was of the
provincial stage in all its pothouse license; but here was a spectacle
as lofty and harmonious as some great religious pageant. As the action
developed and the beauty of the verse was borne to Odo on the light
hurrying ripples of Caldara's music he turned instinctively to share his
pleasure with those about him. Cantapresto, in a new black coat and
ruffles, was conspicuously taking snuff from the tortoiseshell box which
the Countess's cicisbeo had given him; but Odo saw that he took less
pleasure in the spectacle than in the fact of accompanying the
heir-presumptive of Pianura to a gala performance at the royal theatre;
and the lads about them were for the most part engaged either with their
own dress and appearance, or in exchanging greetings with the royal
pages and the older students. A few of these sat near Odo, disdainfully
superior in their fob-chains and queues; and as the boy glanced about
him he met the fixed stare of one of the number, a tall youth seated at
his elbow, and conspicuous, even in that modish company, for the
exaggerated elegance of his dress. This young man, whose awkward bearing
and long lava-hued face crowned with flamboyant hair contrasted oddly
with his finical apparel, returned Odo's look with a gaze of eager
comprehension. He too, it was clear, felt the thrill and wonder, or at
least re-lived them in the younger lad's emotion; and from that moment
Odo felt himself in mute communion with his neighbour.
The quick movement of the story--the succession of devices by which the
wily Ulysses lures Achilles to throw off his disguise, while Deidamia
strives to conceal his identity; the scenic beauties of the background,
shifting from sculpture-gallery to pleasance, from pleasance to
banquet-hall; the pomp and glitter of the royal train, the melting
graces of Deidamia and her maidens; seemed, in their multiple appeal, to
develop in Odo new faculties of perception. It was his first initiation
into Italian poetry, and the numbers, now broken, harsh and passionate,
now flowing into liquid sweetness, were so blent with sound and colour
that he scarce knew through which sense they reached him. Deidamia's
strophes thrilled him like the singing-girl's kiss, and at the young
hero's cry--
Ma lo so ch' io sono Achille,
E mi sento Achille in sen--
his fists tightened and the blood hummed in his ears.
In the scene of the banquet-hall, where the followers of Ulysses lay
before Lycomedes the offerings of the Greek chieftains, and, while the
King and Deidamia are marvelling at the jewels and the Tyrian robes,
Achilles, unmindful of his disguise, bursts out
Ah, chi vide finora armi piu belle?
--at this supreme point Odo again turned to his neighbour. They
exchanged another look, and at the close of the act the youth leaned
forward to ask with an air of condescension: "Is this your first
acquaintance with the divine Metastasio?"
"I have never been in a play-house before," said Odo reddening.
The other smiled. "You are fortunate in having so worthy an introduction
to the stage. Many of our operas are merely vulgar and ridiculous; but
Metastasio is a great poet." Odo nodded a breathless assent. "A great
poet," his new acquaintance resumed, "and handling a great theme. But do
you not suffer from the silly songs that perpetually interrupt the flow
of the verse? To me they are intolerable. Metastasio might have been a
great tragic dramatist if Italy would have let him. But Italy does not
want tragedies--she wishes to be sung to, danced to, made eyes at,
flattered and amused! Give her anything, anything that shall help her to
forget her own abasement. Panem et circenses! that is always her cry.
And who can wonder that her sovereigns and statesmen are willing to
humour her, when even her poets stoop to play the mountebank for her
diversion?" The speaker, ruffling his locks with a hand that scattered
the powder, turned on the brilliant audience his strange corrugated
frown. "Fools! simpletons!" he cried, "not to see that in applauding the
Achilles of Metastasio they are smiling at the allegory of their own
abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's
finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first
signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell
them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a
maudlin reconciliation of love and glory--but the whole truth, naked,
cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these
bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress,
and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their
masters!" He paused and drew back with a supercilious smile. "But
doubtless, sir," said he, "I offend you in thus arraigning your sacred
caste; for unless I mistake you belong to the race of demi-gods--the
Titans whose downfall is at hand?" He swept the boxes with a
contemptuous eye.
Little of this tirade was clear to Odo; but something in the speaker's
tone moved him to answer, with a quick lifting of his head: "My name is
Odo Valsecca, of the Dukes of Pianura;" when, fearing he had seemed to
parade his birth before one evidently of inferior station, he at once
added with a touch of shyness: "And you, sir, are perhaps a poet, since
you speak so beautifully?"
At which, with a stare and a straightening of his long awkward body, the
other haughtily returned: "A poet, sir? I am the Count Vittorio Alfieri
of Asti."
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