On the Wing. A southern flight

Front matter

% Jjtmtlprtt HHnjjfi. BY THE HON. MRS. ALFRED MONTGOMERY AUTHOR OF " THE BUCKLYN SHAIG," " MINE OWN FAMILIAR FRIEND," "THE WRONG MAN," ETC. IN ONE VOLUME. LONDON : HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1875. The Right of Translation is reserved. CONTENTS. CHAPTER. pack. I. LA BELLE PROVENCE . . . . i II. MONACO— BOLOGNA— FLORENCE— ROME . 42 III. NAPLES AND THE NEAPOLITANS . . 91 IV. A DOMESTIC COMEDY . ... 134 V. LIGHTS AND SHADES OF ITALIAN LIFE . 179 VI. NAPLES AND ITS ENVIRONS . . .224 VII. POMPEII-SORRENTO— CAPRI— AMALFI . f i

Chapter I. La Belle Provence

HAT induced us to pick our way on foot from the railway carriage to the Hotel du Pare et Bordeaux, near eleven o'clock at night, on our arrival at Lyons, I cannot possibly conceive It was the 3rd of January that we performed this unnecessary penance ; and the only explanation I can give is that we were all rather dazed by the long journey from Paris, and had forgotten that of course there was waiting at the station an omnibus B to carry on the passengers. We had been silent and sleepy for some hours, when the bright lights twinkling up and down the heights of the city of Lyons, and across the bridges, and, corruscating at the station, had roused us all up, and made us ex claim at the fairy sight. I had seen it again and again ; but I always look out eagerly for the first peep at that tossed-about town after night has closed in, and I know none more brilliant and picturesque.

I thought we all looked rather rueful as we entered the hotel, and that it suddenly struck us we had come on foot, and might therefore look too economically inclined to suit the views of the buxom lady who advanced to meet us. I saw her cast rather a doubtful eye to the rear ; but her face brightened when she found we had at least been able to afford a porter to carry such luggage as we might want for one night. We had no valid reason to give in reply to her anxious inquiries as to why we had not availed ourselves of the hotel omnibus ; which very soon afterwards came rattling into the yard, quite empty, the guard and coachman viewing us indignantly. Madame, finding we had nothing to say for ourselves, compassionately furnished each with a candle, and allowed us to gather together our scattered wits in sleep.

The " we" consisted of brother Frank, sister Mary, and myself ; also of Ann, our maid. I suppose I must describe the party. I wish I could draw them instead. Frank is dressed all over in a grey tweed. I sometimes tell him he looks like a grey parrot ; but that is absurd, because he is so extremely taciturn, which grey parrots are not. He makes a capital courier. He always knows what we poor women shall want, and how much we can do, which is a great comfort to me ; because, as Mary is delicate, and we are travelling on her account, I should be so worried if Frank insisted on doing fourteen hours of railroad per diem. He is such a good fellow that he would never wish us to over task ourselves. But then he is so strong that I know it must seem very extraordinary to him that we should be such poor creatures, and get tired out so soon.

I sometimes wonder what has made Frank so tender and gentle, and so considerate. Perhaps it is the being so much with Mary. She makes everybody gentle who comes near her. Somehow she seems to stroke everybody's fur the right way. B no matter how ruffled they were before. Poor Mary ! she has for many years been a widow, after a brief and unhappy married life, and having lost both her children, a girl and a boy. She is the eldest of us three, but has a marvellous knack of looking the youngest and the brightest. She has been very beautiful, and is so still in many ways. Now I come! But how shall I describe myself? The more I think of it, the more impossible I find it. As I am the relater of our adventures, I suppose my readers will form for themselves some idea of what I am like. So I will only say that my name is Jane, and that I am an old maid, but that I do not feel old.

As to my looks, I really do not know what to say. I am not always altogether dissatisfied with them ; but then, on the other hand, when I am inclined to judge them leniently, the unlucky feeling comes over me that it is solely owing to my hat, or the way my hair is done, or some fortuitous circumstance upon which I cannot reckon as a permanency, and which may be gone before any one else has had the time to observe it. So that though I have my lucky moments, I have little or no capital to go on. Now, Mary, with her large, soft eyes, her exquisite mouth, and beautiful teeth, attracts strangers wherever she goes ; although she is always insisting upon it that she is quite an old woman. And now comes Ann. She is about my age, but does not at all consider herself an old maid, and therefore always contradicts me when I speak of myself in such disparaging terms.

I generally say something in reply about the observation being six for me and half a dozen for herself. But this she does not like. Ann is a verv good girl, and a capital maid. She has pretty, fuzzy black hair, and bright though small black eyes ; she has a very white skin, and a neat figure. But she does not like travelling, and is especially disgusted when the scenery is very bold and magnificent. Mountains are her abhorrence, distant views her antipathy. This is far from being our first journey ; and whenever we have found ourselves in the railway carriage from Dover to London Bridge, Ann invariably remarks how lovely the country is as we dash through the flat green fields and monotonous cherry-gardens of simple Kent. And her admiration culminates when we pass any gentlemen's seats. The absence of striking features, the unbroken, unaccidented horizon, the universal green, and the level lines, give Ann a sensation of peace and repose ; while I, who have something of an artist's soul, am feeling how very difficult it would be to get an effective subject or a "nice bit of colour" out of the platitudes of dear England's quiet home steads.

We were off the next day by daylight, I feeling like a swallow flying south; and very soon we perceived in the clear air a warmer glow than any to be had the other side of Lyons. Even the desert region of La Crau seemed full of charms to me. The dim, grey expanse of thick-lying stones that Hercules persuaded by his prayers the angry Jove to shower down on the Ligurians, broken only by thin tufts of mint and scant rosemary, themselves also of a grey green, and leading on over thousands of acres to the blue distant hills that were blushing into rosy hues when we crossed the desert, were not without delightful "points," which I could have transferred to my sketch-book had time allowed me. " La Belle Provence" is a very journaliere beauty, and requires a bright sun to clothe her in sparkling jewels, and to dye her dress in blue and violet and rose -madder, to be worthy of the name that centuries have agreed to give her.

When there are no lights, there is apt to be an air of desolation and barrenness. Those hills, arrayed in many tints, give back the lights from rocky and unproductive cliffs ; but down in the valleys, with the exception of La Crau, the culture is rich and varied. The first stunted olive-trees as we approached Marseilles were welcome less on their own account — for they are miserable specimens — than for the association of ideas connected with their pallid leaves, and because they gave promise of the large ones that would gladden our eyes further on. The station of Hyeres is a few miles from the town. We had ordered a carriage to meet us ; and all the way Mary was looking out for the large umbrella pine that she remembered so well years ago, when there was no railway so far south. It had been the great landmark on the road from Hyeres to Toulon.

We measured our rides and walks in that direction by the great pine. There it stood, the same as ever, and brought back all Hyeres and the two Winters spent there, besides other shorter visits, to our memory with one rush. All else was changed. New houses had sprung up on all sides. Mme. Susanne's old tumble-down hotel, where Mary had stopped for a few days on her wedding-tour, is changed into a magnificent building with caryatides supporting the facade like a Genoese palace ; and the palms on La Place des Palmiers, which I had known in their babyhood, have grown to a size that would not disgrace Arabia. The hotel we went to stands in. what used to be Le Jardin Frassinet. It had been full of orange trees when we first knew it, as had all the other gardens in the place But one very severe Winter having greatly injured the trees, the inhabitants have given up the cultivation of oranges, and have planted peach-trees instead, much to the detriment of the beauty of Hyeres.

I found Mary, the day after our arrival, gazing wistfully at a group of tall cypress and one palm-tree that had marked the boundary of the gardens belonging to the house where she lived with her children the second time she came here. We missed La Btlle Provence. 9 her soon afterwards, and refrained from following her, for we knew she wanted to visit alone the scenes of some joys and many sorrows long ag° passed away — so far as anything is really past which is worthy the name of joy or sorrow. She came back with her hands full of the little, dark, mottled arums, with their lance-headed leaves, that grow so profusely on the hills and by the roadside. They are of a dingy-purple hue, shaded off into white ; and we exclaimed against them as she put them into a glass, alleging that they had an un pleasant odour.

" I know they have," she answered ; " but their quaint twisted shape and blossoms, like the head of a snake, are so full of memories that I rather like the smell than otherwise." After that we let her enjoy her arums alone, for we knew how much that meant. Doubtless she had been wandering about, recalling visions of the past : the dead — the lost, but not dead, that worse separation ! — and ali the tangled maze of the years that are gone. Mary's bouquet of arums was redeemed by a handful of the sweet white alyssum ; and these two flowers, with a few of the bold-faced, unflinching daisies of Provence, so unlike our modest northern flowers, were all the wild blossoms we could hope to find in January. We could not leave Hyeres without performing a pilgrimage to Notre Dame de Consolation, the old church on a hill overlooking the coast.

The ascent is marked by the Way of the Cross, rudely painted in small niches of masonry by the side of the road. When we were last here, there was a daily Mass said by a hermit-priest. He had some years previously tried his vocation at the Carmelites', and had not succeeded. But the impulse to seek utter solitude was too strong to be resisted ; and for a long time he had lived in the surrounding mountains, a veritable hermit, subsisting upon the poorest fare, which was brought to him at regular intervals by the peasants. Whether he had erected a hut for himself, or lived in a cave, I never learnt ; but when the bishop of the diocese became aware of the fact, he thought it to be regretted that a priest should not celebrate Mass, and proposed to him that he should live in one of the small rooms of the deserted convent which is attached to the Church of Our Lady of Consolation, take care of the church, and say Mass.

This offer he gladly accepted ; and there he resided for some time. We used to go sometimes, on a bright Spring morning, to attend his Mass. Our breakfast was packed in a basket, and hung to the pommel of my donkey's saddle, to be eaten afterwards on the top of the low, semi-circular wall which encloses a piece of ground in front of the church. I always looked with a special interest, not altogether unmingled with curiosity ; at the slight, bent figure of the priest, who could not be more than forty years of age, as he emerged from the door of the sacristv, and, with eyes so cast down that they seemed closed, passed by us to the altar. Who shall say what had called up that deep thirst for utter solitude and silence which had driven him to so extreme a life ? Was it some calamity, or some crime, or only — as is far more probable — that strange instinct which is implanted in the nature of some men to flee their kind, and be alone with themselves — an instinct which possibly many have felt stirring within them at odd moments, but which, when touched by divine grace, grows into a wonderful and exceptional vocation ; once more common, in the early days of Christianity, when the whole world lay in pagan luxury and gilded vice, and which even our sub duing, taming, common-place civilization fails in some rare cases to smother in the soul.

What became of the hermit of Our Lady of Consolation I could never learn. Perhaps the solitude seemed incomplete when ladies could attend his Mass, and picnic afterwards on his premises. At any rate, he has been gone for many years ; and Mass is only said on certain feasts, when the peasantry come in crowds, and bring flowers and offerings to the Madonna, as represented by a peculiarly ugly and dark-coloured wooden statue, which has grown to be very precious to those who have obtained special favours in answer to their prayers offered here. Many years ago, Mary, in her Protestant days, had brought a lace veil, the gift of a Russian prince, who was leaving Hyeres with a sick wife, and who wanted prayers for their safe journey ; thereby producing a curious admixture of heretical, schis matical, and Catholic feeling, which no doubt had each their separate value and acceptance before God, being all offered in simplicity and good faith ; for it was with no unwilling hands that, mounted on one of the prie-dieux in the church, she had arranged the veil over the statue, and then knelt to say a prayer for the prince's intention.

The church is full of votive offerings. The walls are entirely covered from roof to floor. As many of them have been put up by sailors, thev more or less have reference to the dangers of the deep. There is a model of a ship hanging up near the entrance, probably because its larger original was saved from wreck. The pictures representing recovery from sickness or preservation from peril are often extremely grotesque, and might provoke a smile were it not that they carry one's thoughts direct to the faith and gratitude they repre sent. I had often wandered through the deserted rooms and cells of the old convent. There is no glass left in some of the windows ; but the weather is kept out by the external wooden shutters which are universal in the south. There is a lovely view on all sides. In front, the sea, with Les Isles d'Or hemming it in as if it were a large lake, save to the left, where it opens out into the wide ocean These islands form some of those originally called Les Larins, which name included the group before the coast of Cannes.

And in most of them the first religious houses for men were established by St. Honorius, though only one island, that on which he and all his monks were martyred by the Saracens, bears his name. Les Isles d'Or, or Les Isles d'Hyeres, as they are also called, are now but sparsely inhabited. Years ago, " when we were young," we had landed on one of these islands, where stands a fort, and a few soldiers are stationed. There are also a half-dozen cottages, inhabited by fishermen and shepherds. We were a joyous band, and had sailed from the mainland in the admiral's cutter, the French fleet riding at anchor off our coast. As we scrambled up the sandy beach, and pushed our way through the tangled undergrowth of myrtle, heath, cytisus, and leutisca, we found ourselves face to face with the solitary sentinel pacing in front of the blind walls of the low but solid-looking fort.

His face broke into smiles, and, with a saucy gleam in his dark eyes, he said to the foremost gentlemen of our party, " Comment, Messieurs ! vous nous menez toutes ces belles dames? Mais vous allez revolutionner notre pauvre cure." We could find no remains of monastic houses on the islands ; but there are traces of walls close to the sea, on the mainland, which are said to be the remains of a convent of nuns who met with a severe punishment for an ill-timed jest. Possibly they were not all that as nuns they might have been. At any rate, they seem to have found their life occa sionally dull ; and when the longing for a little excitement became irrepressible, the abbess would toll the great bell of the convent, which by rights was never used save to ring the Hours and the Angelus, or to summon the neighbours for aid when any of the frequent panics about the landing of the marauding Saracens threatened the safety of the Sisters.

The jest had been played too often, and when at length the oft-expected Saracens really came, the poor nuns rang their bell in vain. No one appeared to the rescue, so the Saracens had it all their own way, and the convent was destroyed. The sea must have encroached since those days, for the waters wash over the scanty ruins, and I have picked my way along the foundations with little salt lakes lying between. Far to the left lie Les Salines, where they evaporize the sea-water in shallow square spaces, and thus obtain a coarse grey salt. They say that sometimes flamingoes may be shot among this marshy land ; but I could never obtain one, though I know it abounds in wild fowl of every description. The deep orange-coloured boughs of the large willow-trees gave a peculiar charm to the distant landscape in Winter when the leaves are off ; and close upon the shore is a fine wood of umbrella pines, whereof three giants, standing apart from the rest, had been great favourites of ours.

We had looked out eagerly on our arrival for our three pines. Alas ! one was missing. Years ago these three solitary magnificent pines had a strange fascination for me. I wanted to find my way to where they stood ; but it was beyond the marshes and near the salines. There was no direct road and no one could tell me how to get there ; not even the young French naval officers, who used to come often and spend the evening with us and who must have landed not so very far from where they stood. The craving to see my three pines face to face grew, however, too strong to be resisted ; and so one day I set off on donkey-back, taking Ann with me, and resolved that I would not return till I had accomplished my end. Great were our difficulties. We had to thread our way along narrow raised paths through the marshes, just wide enough for our donkeys to tread ; and as, of course, we dared not leave these paths, which did not wind, but turned at right angles, we as often seemed going away from the pines as the reverse.

At one moment we were pursued by a couple of savage dogs, who tore after us, from the open yard of a farm-house, and who were so very angry at our intrusion that escape along our narrow way, and with our leisurely steeds, seemed questionable. At length I found myself at the base of a high sand-bank, on which the yellow sea-thistle, with its glaucous leaves, found a scanty subsistence and a doubtful root-hold. This I had to scramble up, while for every ten inches I made in advance, I slid back six. At last I was at my longdesired c goal, and my three giants were really magnificent to behold. It was on my fourth visit to Hyeres, with intervals of years between, that I accomplished this feat, and I had always looked at my pines the first thing in the morning, when the strip of sea between the mainland and the isles was still lying grey in the early light.

Then, again, I watched for the red glow of the setting sun on their smooth stems, painted, as it were, in burnt sienna. Again on moonlit nights I had looked for their broad, deep black crests, falling like an ink-spot on the silver sea. And now at last, when they had almost become to me like some mystery, meaning more than met the eye, I could throw my arms about them, and lay my hot cheek on their noble trunks. It was not till then I knew how tired I was. I could not delay long with my old friends. I do not remember anything about the getting home, save that the dogs who had so guarded my garden of the Hesperides, and stood between me and the fulfilment of my desire, now that I had accom plished the feat, let me return in silence. I was very weary ; but I was thoroughly contented and satisfied.

And now one of my old friends was laid low ! How he came to his end I know not. But I felt that he had died, not that he had been cut down. And for a moment a strange, weird melan choly stole over me at finding I had outlived a noble tree. It seemed as if I must be very old to have done that, and that it was hardly natural. I remember I asked myself then, at the very time of my culte of the pine-trees, and I have repeated the question since, whether there was not in my feelings something of that dim instinct which binds man in an obscure affinity with all nature, down to its lower strata and its primeval developments. As man contains something of all in his own being, so must he have sympathy with all ; for, as it has been wisely said, man is a universe in himself, with another universe to wait on him.

Most people have a special attraction to some race of animals. Some have a love for, and a power over, the horse and the dog greater than others; and this not always nor only as the result of habit, but as a natural gift. Certain flowers have a peculiar attraction for many people, in preference to others equal in beauty and perfume. All these c preferences may point to hidden laws of affinity, of which we know very little more than the bare fact that all in creation finds its portion in each man, and that in his own single self he is chemical, vegetable, animal, and spiritual. I am afraid to say any more, lest my readers should think I believe we are in general descended from the little open mouthed sea-squirts called ascidians, but that I claim for myself in particular some higher origin in the shape of a conifer great-grandfather.

I assure them it is nothing of the kind. With regard to my sympathy with animals, of course, being an old maid, I ought to prefer cats and grey parrots. On the contrary, I prefer dogs, and Frank is the onlv grey parrot I ever thought of loving. Before leaving Hyeres, I made a sketch from the top of the hill (which in my younger days, for want of knowing better, I used to call the mountain) on which stand the picturesque ruins of the old chateau that formerly belonged to the French branch of the huge family of Fox ; who, varying their name, if not their nature, according to the sky under which they flourished, had taken root in England, France, and Germany in the old feudal times. They possessed certainly a magnificent abode at Hyeres, and probably kept all the neighbourhood in awe. It is a glorious situation.

It overlooks a long stretch of the road to Toulon, as that winds through the fertile, well-cultivated valley ; and to the right rises the rocky summit of Le Coudon, the point of land that first strikes the sailor's eye as he leaves the coast of Africa, and which on exceptionally clear days is dimly visible even from the coast itself. Next to it comes Le Phare Pharon, a lower mountain crowned by a fort. I know few views which combine such an exquisite variety of form and colour as this. The small cork-trees and the stunted oaks, equally beautiful whether wearing their russet leaves through the brief Winter, or almost matching the cork-trees in dark-green foliage; the olives, here of a very respectable size, with their gnarled trunks and fantastic shapes; and then the patches of vividgreen corn, Winter peas, and the green artichokes ; the undulation of the land, as suming every shade from deep violet to light red — make altogether one of the loveliest views I know anywhere.

But then I am bound to acknowledge that there are not many such in the neighbourhood of our much-loved Hyeres, and that, on the whole, the simple little place has far less beauty to recommend it than many of the towns along the Riviera. Its great merit for invalids arises from the air being a good deal softer than at most of the sea-coast resorts of the sick. Mary could sit out for hours in the open air at Hyeres, when at Cannes, and even at San Remo, she could only have driven in a close carriage ; for, in spite of the brilliant sunshine in those places, the air is apt to be to exciting both for irritable lungs and susceptible nerves. One reason — probably the principal reason — for this is that Hyeres is three miles from the sea, and more in the mountains than are the towns of the Riviera generally.

We had a lovely afternoon journey from Hyeres to Cannes ; passing numerous little bays and creeks where the blue waters lay in deep repose, or fringed with tiny wavelets that but kissed the shingly shore, and died in a gleam of light. As you looked down on them from the railway-carriage, you felt you might have seen a mermaid combing her sea green hair, or a Cupid astride on a dolphin, as quite an ex pected vision. The intensely blue sky and more deeply blue sea, the various-tinted rocks, and perhaps a solitary pine hanging over, and near by a group of the same, with their dense crowns of ever-mur muring boughs, through which the evening air sings like the hum of winged insects, were each so full of harmonious and gorgeous colour that they left on the mind the impression of a Greek idyl, full of serene beauty — mere beauty it may be — but intense, placid, and eternal.

There are scenes in nature that are like the forms in Greek art. They are one ; and they are typical. No wide view, albeit glorious, can produce this effect, however much it may appeal to the imagina tion. But a rock-bound cove on the Mediterranean, with its sparse vegetation and its depth of colour, is as suggestive of thoughts beyond itself as is the pure grace of a Greek statue. It belongs to another world than ours, and to a region of thought rarely lighted on in these times, and then by a few only. When I question myself of the " why," I am at a loss to answer. Perhaps it lies in the fact that, to produce this abstract effect on the mind, the objects in nature must be few, simple, and per fectly beautiful of their kind. Then they recall Greek art, in which there is no multiplicity, no overlaying, but which represents as absolutely a pure idea as it is possible for art to do.

It is without subtlety, as it is without crowding. It can be felt better than described, for the feeling is too deep for words. Nothing in English scenery, no accidental com bination of beauty, has ever brought the Greek Geist before my mind. Never for a second, amid the birchen groves and flower-fringed lanes of my own land, had I thought of old Greece and the old Greek feeling. Pantheism would not be the natural religion of our northern skies. Never had I so strongly felt the tie between nature and art, and, as a necessary sequence, between nature and Grecian thought, till I had wandered on the pale sands by the calm blue waters of the tideless sea. It is like a floating essence, too intangible for words. If I could express it, the expression would perforce be brief and veiled. I would sing my idyl to a three stringed lute, or paint my white nymph against a whiter sky.