第 46 页

paper which they needed. And this the Government at last did, appalled by

the possibility of universal bankruptcy. Naturally, however, the five or

six millions could not be paid back at maturity, as the newly built

houses found neither purchasers nor tenants; and so the great fall began,

and continued with a rush, heaping ruin upon ruin. The petty speculators

fell on the builders, the builders on the land companies, the land

companies on the banks of issue, and the latter on the public credit,

ruining the nation. And that was how a mere municipal crisis became a

frightful disaster: a whole milliard sunk to no purpose, Rome disfigured,

littered with the ruins of the gaping and empty dwellings which had been

prepared for the five or six hundred thousand inhabitants for whom the

city yet waits in vain!

Moreover, in the breeze of glory which swept by, the state itself took a

colossal view of things. It was a question of at once making Italy

triumphant and perfect, of accomplishing in five and twenty years what

other nations have required centuries to effect. So there was feverish

activity and a prodigious outlay on canals, ports, roads, railway lines,

and improvements in all the great cities. Directly after the alliance

with Germany, moreover, the military and naval estimates began to devour

millions to no purpose. And the ever growing financial requirements were

simply met by the issue of paper, by a fresh loan each succeeding year.

In Rome alone, too, the building of the Ministry of War cost ten

millions, that of the Ministry of Finances fifteen, whilst a hundred was

spent on the yet unfinished quays, and two hundred and fifty were sunk on

works of defence around the city. And all this was a flare of the old

hereditary pride, springing from that soil whose sap can only blossom in

extravagant projects; the determination to dazzle and conquer the world

which comes as soon as one has climbed to the Capitol, even though one's

feet rest amidst the accumulated dust of all the forms of human power

which have there crumbled one above the other.

"And, my dear friend," continued Narcisse, "if I could go into all the

stories that are current, that are whispered here and there, you would be

stupefied at the insanity which overcame the whole city amidst the

terrible fever to which the gambling passion gave rise. Folks of small

account, and fools and ignorant people were not the only ones to be

ruined; nearly all the Roman nobles lost their ancient fortunes, their

gold and their palaces and their galleries of masterpieces, which they

owed to the munificence of the popes. The colossal wealth which it had

taken centuries of nepotism to pile up in the hands of a few melted away

like wax, in less than ten years, in the levelling fire of modern

speculation." Then, forgetting that he was speaking to a priest, he went

on to relate one of the whispered stories to which he had alluded:

"There's our good friend Dario, Prince Boccanera, the last of the name,

reduced to live on the crumbs which fall to him from his uncle the

Cardinal, who has little beyond his stipend left him. Well, Dario would

be a rich man had it not been for that extraordinary affair of the Villa

Montefiori. You have heard of it, no doubt; how Prince Onofrio, Dario's

father, speculated, sold the villa grounds for ten millions, then bought

them back and built on them, and how, at last, not only the ten millions

were lost, but also all that remained of the once colossal fortune of the

Boccaneras. What you haven't been told, however, is the secret part which

Count Prada--our Contessina's husband--played in the affair. He was the

lover of Princess Boccanera, the beautiful Flavia Montefiori, who had

brought the villa as dowry to the old Prince. She was a very fine woman,

much younger than her husband, and it is positively said that it was

through her that Prada mastered the Prince--for she held her old doting

husband at arm's length whenever he hesitated to give a signature or go

farther into the affair of which he scented the danger. And in all this

Prada gained the millions which he now spends, while as for the beautiful

Flavia, you are aware, no doubt, that she saved a little fortune from the

wreck and bought herself a second and much younger husband, whom she

turned into a Marquis Montefiori. In the whole affair the only victim is

our good friend Dario, who is absolutely ruined, and wishes to marry his

cousin, who is as poor as himself. It's true that she's determined to

have him, and that it's impossible for him not to reciprocate her love.

But for that he would have already married some American girl with a

dowry of millions, like so many of the ruined princes, on the verge of

starvation, have done; that is, unless the Cardinal and Donna Serafina

had opposed such a match, which would not have been surprising, proud and

stubborn as they are, anxious to preserve the purity of their old Roman

blood. However, let us hope that Dario and the exquisite Benedetta will

some day be happy together."

Narcisse paused; but, after taking a few steps in silence, he added in a

lower tone: "I've a relative who picked up nearly three millions in that

Villa Montefiori affair. Ah! I regret that I wasn't here in those heroic

days of speculation. It must have been very amusing; and what strokes

there were for a man of self-possession to make!"

However, all at once, as he raised his head, he saw before him the

Quartiere dei Prati--the new district of the castle fields; and his face

thereupon changed: he again became an artist, indignant with the modern

abominations with which old Rome had been disfigured. His eyes paled, and

a curl of his lips expressed the bitter disdain of a dreamer whose

passion for the vanished centuries was sorely hurt: "Look, look at it

all!" he exclaimed. "To think of it, in the city of Augustus, the city of

Leo X, the city of eternal power and eternal beauty!"

Pierre himself was thunderstruck. The meadows of the Castle of Sant'

Angelo, dotted with a few poplar trees, had here formerly stretched

alongside the Tiber as far as the first slopes of Monte Mario, thus

supplying, to the satisfaction of artists, a foreground or greenery to

the Borgo and the dome of St. Peter's. But now, amidst the white,

leprous, overturned plain, there stood a town of huge, massive houses,

cubes of stone-work, invariably the same, with broad streets intersecting

one another at right angles. From end to end similar facades appeared,

suggesting series of convents, barracks, or hospitals. Extraordinary and

painful was the impression produced by this town so suddenly immobilised

whilst in course of erection. It was as if on some accursed morning a

wicked magician had with one touch of his wand stopped the works and

emptied the noisy stone-yards, leaving the buildings in mournful

abandonment. Here on one side the soil had been banked up; there deep

pits dug for foundations had remained gaping, overrun with weeds. There

were houses whose halls scarcely rose above the level of the soil; others

which had been raised to a second or third floor; others, again, which

had been carried as high as was intended, and even roofed in, suggesting

skeletons or empty cages. Then there were houses finished excepting that

their walls had not been plastered, others which had been left without

window frames, shutters, or doors; others, again, which had their doors

and shutters, but were nailed up like coffins with not a soul inside

them; and yet others which were partly, and in a few cases fully,

inhabited--animated by the most unexpected of populations. And no words

could describe the fearful mournfulness of that City of the Sleeping

Beauty, hushed into mortal slumber before it had even lived, lying

annihilated beneath the heavy sun pending an awakening which, likely

enough, would never come.

Following his companion, Pierre walked along the broad, deserted streets,

where all was still as in a cemetery. Not a vehicle nor a pedestrian

passed by. Some streets had no foot ways; weeds were covering the unpaved

roads, turning them once more into fields; and yet there were temporary

gas lamps, mere leaden pipes bound to poles, which had been there for

years. To avoid payment of the door and window tax, the house owners had

generally closed all apertures with planks; while some houses, of which

little had been built, were surrounded by high palings for fear lest

their cellars should become the dens of all the bandits of the district.

But the most painful sight of all was that of the young ruins, the proud,

lofty structures, which, although unfinished, were already cracking on

all sides, and required the support of an intricate arrangement of

timbers to prevent them from falling in dust upon the ground. A pang came

to one's heart as though one was in a city which some scourge had

depopulated--pestilence, war, or bombardment, of which these gaping

carcases seem to retain the mark. Then at the thought that this was

abortment, not death--that destruction would complete its work before the

dreamt-of, vainly awaited denizens would bring life to the still-born

houses, one's melancholy deepened to hopeless discouragement. And at each

corner, moreover, there was the frightful irony of the magnificent marble

slabs which bore the names of the streets, illustrious historical names,

Gracchus, Scipio, Pliny, Pompey, Julius Caesar, blazing forth on those

unfinished, crumbling walls like a buffet dealt by the Past to modern

incompetency.

Then Pierre was once more struck by this truth--that whosoever possesses

Rome is consumed by the building frenzy, the passion for marble, the

boastful desire to build and leave his monument of glory to future

generations. After the Caesars and the Popes had come the Italian

Government, which was no sooner master of the city than it wished to

reconstruct it, make it more splendid, more huge than it had ever been

before. It was the fatal suggestion of the soil itself--the blood of

Augustus rushing to the brain of these last-comers and urging them to a

mad desire to make the third Rome the queen of the earth. Thence had come

all the vast schemes such as the cyclopean quays and the mere ministries

struggling to outvie the Colosseum; and thence had come all the new

districts of gigantic houses which had sprouted like towns around the

ancient city. It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San

Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights

of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were

already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two

thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be

exhausted. Even as in very old fruit gardens newly planted plum and

cherry trees wither and die, so the new walls, no doubt, found no life in

that old dust of Rome, impoverished by the immemorial growth of so many

temples, circuses, arches, basilicas, and churches. And thus the modern

houses, which men had sought to render fruitful, the useless, over-huge

houses, swollen with hereditary ambition, had been unable to attain

maturity, and remained there sterile like dry bushes on a plot of land

exhausted by over-cultivation. And the frightful sadness that one felt

arose from the fact that so creative and great a past had culminated in

such present-day impotency--Rome, who had covered the world with

indestructible monuments, now so reduced that she could only generate

ruins.

"Oh, they'll be finished some day!" said Pierre.

Narcisse gazed at him in astonishment: "For whom?"

That was the cruel question! Only by dint of patriotic enthusiasm on the

morrow of the conquest had one been able to indulge in the hope of a

mighty influx of population, and now singular blindness was needed for

the belief that such an influx would ever take place. The past

experiments seemed decisive; moreover, there was no reason why the

population should double: Rome offered neither the attraction of pleasure

nor that of gain to be amassed in commerce and industry for those she had

not, nor of intensity of social and intellectual life, since of this she

seemed no longer capable. In any case, years and years would be

requisite. And, meantime, how could one people those houses which were

finished; and for whom was one to finish those which had remained mere

skeletons, falling to pieces under sun and rain? Must they all remain

there indefinitely, some gaunt and open to every blast and others closed

and silent like tombs, in the wretched hideousness of their inutility and

abandonment? What a terrible proof of error they offered under the

radiant sky! The new masters of Rome had made a bad start, and even if

they now knew what they ought to have done would they have the courage to

undo what they had done? Since the milliard sunk there seemed to be

definitely lost and wasted, one actually hoped for the advent of a Nero,

endowed with mighty, sovereign will, who would take torch and pick and

burn and raze everything in the avenging name of reason and beauty.

"Ah!" resumed Narcisse, "here are the Contessina and the Prince."

Benedetta had told the coachman to pull up in one of the open spaces

intersecting the deserted streets, and now along the broad, quiet, grassy

road--well fitted for a lovers' stroll--she was approaching on Dario's

arm, both of them delighted with their outing, and no longer thinking of

the sad things which they had come to see. "What a nice day it is!" the

Contessina gaily exclaimed as she reached Pierre and Narcisse. "How

pleasant the sunshine is! It's quite a treat to be able to walk about a

little as if one were in the country!"

Dario was the first to cease smiling at the blue sky, all the delight of

his stroll with his cousin on his arm suddenly departing. "My dear," said

he, "we must go to see those people, since you are bent on it, though it

will certainly spoil our day. But first I must take my bearings. I'm not