Giulio Malatesta. A novel

Chapter I

In the Pat.azzo Brancacci . . . . . . 193 CHAPTER IT. The Contessa Zenobia 206 CHAPTER TIT. At the Palazzo Altamari 220

CHAPTER IV.

The Winter Walk at the Cascine .... 235

CHAPTER V.

The Palmieri Family 260

CHAPTER VI.

What Carlo Brancacci intended . . . .284

CHAPTER VII.

Young Eyes 297

CHAPTER VIII.

The Veglione ,[»

BOOK I AT BOLOGNA IN

1828 VOL. I, B

CHAPTER I. STUDENTS AT BOLOGNA.

Those whose ideas of a university town have been formed from an acquaintance, either of many years, or of a single day, with our English Almæ Matres on the banks of Isis or of Cam, are apt to be disappointed with their first visit to any of the celebrated seatsof academical learning on the Continent. No stranger, no foreigner, no country bumpkin could enter Oxford or Cambridge without at once being struck by the fact, that either of them was a town, such as no other that he had ever seen in the world before. The University is what he immediately sees. The towns exist but as appendages to those magnificent estabbshnients. B2 All that meets the stranger's eye at either of our bower' d — though not olived — Academes proclaims the speciality of the place. There but it is needless to tell the English reader what Oxford and Cambridge are.

Suffice it to tell him, that he will see nothing of all that makes our seats of academical learning so striking to the outw-ard eye, at Padua, Pavia, Bologna, Pisa, or Siena. We all know that the idea and essence of a University does not consist in, and may exist without, the outward bodily presentment of magnificent col leges, shaven lawns, and lovely groves. Even gowns of bombazine and silk, and trencher caps, are not essential to it. If it were absolutely re quisite to define the corporeal and local habitat of the academic idea, the same philosophers, w-ho have assigned the pineal gland to the soul as her dwelling, might probably find it in the Vice-Chan cellor's mace, — poker, we used irreverently to call it in the naughty, though very pleasant, old times. But I suppose the present improved generation of ingenuous British youth is more pretty-spoken.

Well, this pineal gland of the academic system no doubt exists in the continental universities. The university poker may, no doubt, be discovered by social anatomists at any of the above-named ancient seats of learning. But even that venerable symbol is not made visible to the eyes of admiring mankind, after the fashion of our English universities. The Paduan or Pisan pokers never parade the streets of their respective cities with conscious pride, while all burgherdom and bumpkindom shade their eyes as the embodied and concentrated majesty of the gown passes. The investigator would need to search perseveringly before he could obtain ocular evidence of the existence of that seat of the academic soul. The stranger in either of the cities which have been named, on inquiring for the University, would very possibly be told by several of the inhabitants that they really did not know where it was situ ated ; much as a Londoner might not know where the church of St. Andrew- Undershaft is.

He would, however, easily find some one who would point out to him, in no specially prominent part of the town, a building little, if at all, distinguished from many of the other " palace" residences of the city. If he entered it, he might observe in the empty court, or arcaded corridors of the building, the sculptured coats of arms of former generations of doctors and " magnificent rectors." * But there would be nothing else to mark the special cha racter of the place. If he persevered so far in his researches as to penetrate into the interior of the building, he would find a series of dreary and shabby-looking rooms, furnished with a pulpit or reading-desk, and a surrounding hemicycle of bare forms, such as may be seen in many a vdlage school room. He would then be informed that he had seen the University.

And though persistent in quiry might, probably, as has been said, succeed in causing some such more or less ornamental metaldc symbol of the academic existence as has been spoken of to be brought forth from its abiding cupboard for the satisfaction of the stranger, it would be the truth, that the inspection of those dismal rooms and their mean fittings had shown him all, and more than all, of the University that the townsfolk of the city in which it is situated ever see. Then, the absence of any distinctive costume worn by the young men attending the classes, the * " Rector magnificus" is the title of the functionary highest in rank, and corresponding with our Chancellor, of the universities in the north of Italy. slenderness of their connexion with the academic body, consisting solely in attendance on certain lectures, the independence of their mode of hfe, which is subject to no rules or regulations what ever differing from those observed by ad the other inhabitants of the city — all these circumstances contribute to despoil the continental universities of all those goodly outward and visible signs of their existence which are so striking and attractive in our own country.

At Bologna, indeed, something has of late years been done towards embellishing the University building. The arcades that run along the interior of the wad which shuts out the main court-yard of the budding from the street have been somewhat gaudily painted with a vast number of the heraldic devices of former ornaments to the University; and the library, which has recently been decorated rather too brilliantly in a similar style, is a fine room. But thousands of strangers might, and do, pass through Bologna without having thenatten tion called to these magnificences; and it is stdl more probable that no special physiognomy in the population crowding the streets would remind them that they were in one of the most celebrated and the most ancient university towns in Europe. The letters of cheap bachelor apartments no doubt are aware that there is a greater demand for such ac commodation in Bologna than in other cities ; and those who know the town and all the corners of it well, may know where, in certain eating-houses and certain cafes, the student class of the popula tion may be found, manifesting, in an unobtrusive manner, its special idiosyncrasies.

It was not, however, in any one of the haunts of that kind, specially frequented by the students, that our present story has to open itself, although the circumstances to be placed before the reader w-id be most conveniently explained by a report of a conversation which took place between two individuals, who were completing the last twelvemonth of their academical course in the year 1828. The conversation in question did not occur in any of the frequented places of resort alluded to, because the matter to be discussed was of a nature which, despite the Italian habit of talking of pri vate affairs across a little marble table at a cafe, in the perfect persuasion that the crowd around are all equally absorbed in their own concerns, and equally inattentive to those of their neighbours seemed to one of the interlocutors to render a greater degree of privacy desirable.

The spot they had selected unquestionably afforded the assur ance of that advantage; besides the further one of commanding one of the most remarkable views in Italy. Bologna stands on the extreme edge of the immense plain of Lombardy, close to the foot of the most advanced spur of the Apennines. The h ills do not unite themselves by gentle and gradual slopes with the flat plain, as is the case in most other simdar localities, but throw out a series of buttresses, forming a variety of isolated eminences and vantage points, the sides of which rise abruptly with great steepness, so as to form a boundary line between the hid country and the plain, as marked and decided as any frontier of man's devising. So that, on passing out of the city gates in one direction, the wayfarer enters immediately on the hill country of the Apennines; and, in the opposite direction, on the flat, dusty roads, with their inter minable avenues of dust-coloured poplars, and the rich alluvial fields of the great plain of Lombardy.

One of the vantage points thus standing out from the chain of mountains immediately above Bologna, has been crowned with a notable specimen of those often-recurring churches, which indicate the curious persistence of the superstition in favour of "high places" for the purpose of worship. It is called "La Madonna di San Lucas and though a handsome building in the Greek Cross and cupola style, is far more remarkable on account of its position, than from any other merit. A continuous arcaded colonnade extends the whole distance from the city gate to the platform, on which the church is built, climbing the steep ascent in some parts by a sloping incline, and at other, where the hill-side is more abrupt, by flights of stairs. This immense colonnade, built by the contributions of the city and the surrounding communes, must be some two miles or more in length, and enables the devotees of " La Madonna di San Luca" to perform the vows or penances, which enjoin the repetition of a prescribed number of psalms or aves at her shrine, without suffering the additional infliction of ex posure to sun or rain.

And the stranger at Bologna, whose attention has been attracted by the striking position of the church, and by the evident promise of a magnificent panoramic view of the plain of Lombardy, is equally thankful for the singular manifestation of devotion, which enables him to make the ascent under shelter. Tempting as such a means of reaching such a spot may seem to the dweders in northern cities, the colonnade is rarely frequented by any others than persons belonging to one or other of the above named categories. The Italians do not take con stitutional walks. So that on a bright sunny after noon of a day in March, the two young men, who had sauntered up to " La Madonna di San Lucd' merely for the sake of a quiet and uninterrupted conversation, had the terrace, and low parapet wall on w-hich they were lounging, entirely to them selves.

For though it was one of the first days in Lent, and the number of devotees at the shrine had been proportionably large in the morning, those duties are generally performed hi the hours before the " Angelus ;" for devotion, like other duties, must not be allowed to interfere with the mid-day meal. And as to the other class of climbers to the shrine of " Nostra Donna di San Luca" the nomad knights of the red book were still in the capital cities, and had not yet commenced their summer circuits. The place would hardly be found so given up to solitude at any day or hour now, as it was on that March afternoon in 1828, for the new needs of Italy have required that this prominent and remarkable hill-side, standing out like an advanced work into the plain, should be turned into a strong defensible military position ; and the succes sive terraces of the mountain have been converted into a series of batteries.

There is a small barrack about half way up the ascent ; and soldiers may be seen at all hours — not only sentries at a variety of salient points all up the hill-side, but loungers on the stone-coped parapet walls of the terraces around the church, and under the interminable vistas of the arcades. The spot which the two students had selected for their colloquy was ill chosen for the purpose of one of them, the principal speaker of the two ; for it cost him infinite trouble to compel the atten tion of his companion, which was evidently ever and anon wandering aw-ay from the earnest dis course of the speaker, to busy itself with the end less details of the immense panorama spread be neath them. They were a singularly contrasted pair, those two students of Bologna ; — the fact that they were such being about the sole point of simi larity about their persons or their social position.

The younger-looking of the two was the Marchese Cesare Malatesta, the only son of the Marchese Salvadore Malatesta of Fermo, a very wealthy no bleman, of ancient lineage, well known at Rome, and in the province, of which he was probably the largest landowner, as one of the few laymen on whose loyalty and devotion to the government the Holy See could rely. Though not yet twenty years old, the young Marchese had none of the boyishness, either of appearance or manner, which strongly characterised his olderdooking companion. He was a tall, well-grown youth, with abundance of dark glossy curls, a well-cared-for moustache to match, large liquid dark eyes, and a well-formed mouth ; unquestionably a very handsome young man. His costume was elegant ; and his manners graceful and easy; more so than might have seemed desirable to a good judge of men some fifteen or twenty years older than himself.

But then the observer must have been that much his senior to have taken note of the objection. By his contemporaries of either sex, Cesare Malatesta was considered to be, and deserved to be, the cynosure of all neighbouring eyes. The brildant young Marchese was very evidently GTULIO MALATESTA. the leading spirit of the strangely associated couple. But a simdar remark would have been almost equally true, had poor Pietro Varani been in company with any other of Ids fellow-students. Poor Pietro Varani — for that was the name of Cesare' s companion — epithet and all, that may almost be said to have been his name, so constantly was the not unkindly yet depreciatory adjective prefixed to it — poor Pietro Varani had quite as decidedly too dttle as Cesare had too much of self-assertion and self-confidence.

And anybody would have said that Pietro was quite right in his estimate of himself ; that in truth there was nothing in him or about him to inspire any feeling of confidence or trust in himself in any way. But that queer self was one of the few things of which Pietro knew absolutely nothing. He was wrong in his estimate of himself; and so were the contemporaries, who were quite ready to accept his own judgment on that, if on no other subject. Poor Pietro Varani was the son of the widow of an officer in the French service, who had returned with her invalided husband to her native city some ten years before the date of the conversation to be recorded. He had died about a year ago, leaving her in very straitened circumstances, which were rendered yet more difficult by the birth of a posthumous daughter a few months after his death.

The chfld was named Francesca ; and though her presence in the widow's home to a certain degree increased the difficulty of making both ends meet, as the phrase is, the sunshine which she seemed to bring with her into that dreary and sdent dwelling was soon found by the widow, and in a yet greater degree by Pietro, to be very abundant compensa tion for any such added difficulties. One of the principal advantages which had in duced Major Varani and his wife Marta to choose Bologna, her native city, rather than Corsica, the country of his birth, as their future home, when he had been compelled by f ailing health to retire from active service, was the means it afforded to their son Pietro of pursuing at very trifling cost the studious career, for which alone he seemed to have any liking or aptitude.

His ambition had been to qualify himself for, and obtain a doctor's degree, or " the laurel," as the more poetic phrase goes in the Itadan universities, hi medicine. And he was now on the point of obtaining that object, after having performed prodigies of self-denial and uphill labour, pursued with ardour in the teeth of obstacles of all lands. But, unhappily, the special branch of all the cognate studies, to w-hich the bent of his mind and inclination impelled him, was that least likely to afford him the very small mo dicum of food and shelter, which was all he asked of the world. He was an enthusiastic naturalist, and, above all, a botanist. Had there existed any herb of the field which could have served as a sub stitute for triticum or avena in keeping body and soul together, he would have discovered it, and been content therewith.

But failing such, it seemed likely that his science might fail to afford the very little that he asked from it beyond its own charms. For the present, however, poor Pietra shared his mother's crust; and while happy amid his books and plants, was tormented by no thought for the morrow. But of all the men in the University of Bo logna, one would least have dreamed of seeing Pietro Varani in company with the gay and gallant Cesare Malatesta ! The contrast between the out ward and visible presentment of the two men was curiously violent. Pietro had not been favoured by Nature with those powerful letters of recommendation, a handsome face and pleasing person. He was somewhat taller than Malatesta ; but the length of limb, which contributed to the beauty of Nature's favourite, made ouly the gawkiness of her stepson.

Loosely put together, and ill knit, poor Pietro shambled in his gait, seemed to use his shoulders as much as his legs for the purpose of progression, and communicated by his every move ment to all who saw him an unpleasant sense of jerking discord and want of harmony between his limbs, which appeared to act each in perfect inde pendence of its fellow. His great big head, with its great big face composed of a harlequin set of ill-assorted features, w-as the fitting complement to his ungainly body. There was very little colour in the pale gaunt cheeks, very little colour in the pale hay-coloured hair and scanty beard, and very little colour in the pale blue eye. The whole face seemed fade and washed out. The mouth was large and ill cut, the ears large and coarse, and the nose broad and flattened.

Yet, with all this, there was a massive squareness about the chin which denoted power of will ; a knotty development of the rugged brow, which promised vigour of intellect ; and some few persons, possessed of a power of sounding the VOL. I. C depths of human character, analogous to that possessed by others of using the divining rod for the discovery of hidden waters deep buried below the arid surface, might have imagined that they could read in those great pale blue eyes, which always seemed as if they were gazing at some far distance, to the exclusion of all cognisance of nearer objects, indications of a vein of poetic sentiment, and dormant capabilities of enthusiasm, hidden far down in the depths of his moral nature, w-hich ordy some violent disturbance of the superincum bent soil could ever bring to the surface.

This absent tendency of his companion's eye, and apparently of his mind in company with it, to divest itself of all speculation concerning the matters immediately before it, and employ itself in wandering over the far distant landscape, had already more than once provoked the irritation of Malatesta. " Oh — e ! friend Pietro ! " he exclaimed, looking at Varani with no very amiable expression of countenance, but forcibly repressing any manifestation of his ill humour; "are you dreaming? Have you any idea of what we came up here to talk of ; or have you forgotten all about it ? " " I was only thinking, Signor Cesare, how far it might be in a straight fine to those snowy moun tain-tops w-e can just see, if you look fixedly towards them, away there beyond the Po." " The devil take the snowy mountain-tops and the Po too !

What have they to do with the matter in hand ? Do you remember all that I have been telling you about Maddalena ? Have you got it into your wool-gathering brains that I mean to act rightly and honourably towards her ? " "And do you not remember, Signor Cesare," said Varani, painfudy cading his mind home from its wanderings on the far horizon, and bringing it to bear upon the matter thus forced upon his attention — "do you not remember that I said I was very glad to hear it ? I told you " " Basta ! never mind what you told me ! There is no need to have your preachment over again. I tell you that I admit you were right, and that I have made up my mind to do what I ought to do." " Bravo ! bravissimo ! Honestly, most esteemed Signor Cesare, I wdl confess that you are a better man than I thought you, honestly now," said poor Pietro, with some emotion; whfle his companion shot a glance at him from under his suddenly conc2 tracted eyebrows, expressive of anything but gratitude for the candour thus evinced.

" I honour your self-denial, with all my heart," Varani con tinued, his mind now thoroughly occupied with the topic in hand ; " you will go no more to the house of La Signora Tacca; you w-ill break off an acquaintance w-hich it would have been safer never to have commenced ! " " Why you but what should you know, my poor Pietro, about such things ! " said Malatesta, jumping off the parapet wall, on w-hich he had been sitting, and taking two or three hasty strides, which brought him back to the spot in front of Varani, who sat on the coping-stone gazing at him with his great blue eyes open to their utmost extent. " Much Maddalena would thank you for settling the matter in that way. Do you think she would, you accomplished defender of damsels' virtue ! No ! that is not it. There would have been no need to bring you up here to tell you that !

" " I thought we had come up to look at the view over the plains. It is so beautiful under the after noon sun," said Pietro, innocently. " Bah ! " growled Cesare, with an intensity of disgust that only an Italian organ and Italian seatures could have expressed in so short a space ; but resuming in the next distant a manner of con descending and patronising good-fedowship, which would have been far more offensive to Varani than his ill temper, if Pietro had at ad compre hended it, he continued : Nb ! Pietro mio ! I don't mean that. And I think that you will agree that what I do mean is better than that. Now listen to me with all your might ! I mean to marry Maddalena Tacca ! " Pietro here opened his mouth also, as well as his eyes, which had been before stretched to the utter most power of the lids ; but no words came from him.

" Can I do better ? Have I not won her heart — and such a heart ! Would it not be baser than all else to break it ? Give up Maddalena ! No ! not if I have to give up all the world beside ! Is she not a wife for a prince ? " Varani still seemed unable to give utterance to his sentiments upon the subject, whatever they were. But he slowly nodded his great head some half-dozen times, as he sat on the low wad looking up into the handsome face of Malatesta standing exactly in front of him ; and at last, with an apparently painful convulsion, jerked out, one by one, the words: " La Maddalena is worthy to be the wife of the best man who is worthy of her." " And as she, I presume, must be the judge on that point, and as I have some little reason to think that she has made up her mind upon the subject, I hope you will agree with me, that my plan is a better one than giving her up.

I intend to make Maddalena Tacca the Marchesa Maddalena Mala testa ! What has your wisdom to say to that?" " It seems to me," said Varani, slowly, " that it would be more to the purpose to ask what the Marchese Salvadore at Fermo, your father, will say to it." " There is no doubt at all what he would say," replied the other, "and therefore there is no need of asking him. Certainly I shall never marry my sweet Maddalena if I wait till he con sents to my doing so. But I did not think, Sig nor Varani, that you would be found among the supporters of the old-fashioned prejudices which would see anything objectionable in such a match. I had been led to expect, more liberal views from you." The Marchese Cesare Malatesta knew perfectly well indeed, not only that his companion had been educated from his cradle upwards in the school of those somewhat ultra-revolutionary ideas which had been fostered and forced upon the inhabitants of Italy, and especially of the Pontifical States, by the intolerable badness of the existing governments, but that his mother and his humble house were especially noted in the black books of the Papal police.

Poor Pietro, indeed, had not made himself conspicuous as a violent politician. He had been too much absorbed by his scientific studies, had lived too solitary a life, and, at the same time, one too fully occupied for such to have been the case. But all his feelings and ad his theories on social questions were, as Malatesta well knew, of a class that would lead him to approve, rather than object, to a marriage which set at nought the old world and conservative theories on the subject. "From me!" he said, in answer to the last words of his companion ; " but what matters my opinion on the matter. You are not of age ; you cannot marry without your father's consent. And even if you were of age, how could you make a marriage which he would never forgive ? " "You must excuse me, Pietro mio" returned Cesare, in a tone that was half genuine sneer and half mock-heroic, "if I tell you that your re marks betray an equal ignorance of canon law, and of the strength of an immense and virtuous passion.

You may be deep in botany ; but of Law or Love you are, forgive me for saying it, pro foundly ignorant. My father's consent is in no wise necessary to my good and lawful marriage, as I shall very easily prove to you from this authority;" — and he drew a smad parchment-bound volume from his pocket as he spoke. "For the irrevocable nature of my determination to make Maddalena mine, at whatever cost of quarrel with my family and eventual sacrifice of my own in terests, I can only refer you to a less easily read volume," he continued, laying his hand very em phatically and gracefully on his heart, as he uttered the concluding words. " Look here," he said, falling into a more business-like tone as he proceeded to turn over the leaves of his volume till he came to the chapter he was in search of ; "here are the canons of the Church respecting the holy sacrament of marriage.

The rule is simple enough and clear enough. Any two persons of marriageable age, not subject to any of the canonical impediments to marriage, appearing before their parish priest, or before the bishop of the diocese, together with two witnesses, and in their presence declaring that they mutually take each other for man and wife, are such indissolubly. Nothing else is needed to make them rightly, le gally, and irrevocably one." " But," said Varani, " surely the law punishes clandestine marriages ? " " Yes ! " returned Malatesta, who had evidently made himself master of the subject ; " that is the beauty of our ecclesiastical government. The civil law punishes what the ecclesiastical law has done. But it don't undo it ! And as for the punishment, in the first place the law inflicts it only on those whom it can catch.

And in the next place, on the principle, I suppose, that it is no use crying over spilt milk, the punishment is not a very terrible one ; — a few months — perhaps only a few weeks — of imprisonment, generally commuted into reclu sion in a monastery. No such very great price to pay for such a wife as Maddalena ! " There was silence between the young men for a few minutes, while Varani was conning the text book, which the other had put into Ids hands. " Yes ! " said Varani, as he returned the little volume, " it seems clear enough that a marriage so made is as indissoluble as any other. But I observe that Mother Church protests her 'detesta tion ' for such marriages." " We have nothing to do with her private likes or dishkes in the matter," said Cesare, dogmati cally. " She does the deed. She makes the marriage, calls it sacred, declares it a holy sacrament, and holds it to be indissolubly binding.