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Each had his little separate hut and garden, and some distance above the convent, on the slopes of the Apennines, they had an establishment called the Eremo, for those who sought for even greater solitude. The people told us that in winter, when deep snow covers the whole place, wolves are often seen prowling about.
One such was pointed out to us, who had never left the Eremo for more than fifty years, a tall, very gaunt, very meagre old man with white hair, hollow cheeks, and parchment skin, a nose like an eagle's beak, and deep-set burning eyes as typical a figure, in its way, as the rosy mountain of a man whom we met travelling down in his ox cart.
At this moment we heard a voice, as of one clamantis in eremo, cry "Fore!" to which paying no heed in the natural agitation of our spirits, we hurried to lift my fallen opponent and examine his wound.
He was being brought down from the Sagro Eremo to the superior comfort of the convent, because he was unwell. At the Sagro Eremo the sacred hermitage is seen the operation of the Camaldolese rule in its original strictness and perfection. At the convent itself it is, or has become, much relaxed in many respects.
About an hour above the monastery, among the pine trees, is the Sacro Eremo, the Holy Hermitage, where in some twenty separate cells the Hermits of Camaldoli live; for, as their arms go to show, the Order is divided into two parts, consisting of monks who live in community, and hermits who live alone.
San Romolo is indeed its invariable designation till the fifteenth century, and it has been conjectured that its present name is owing to no fanciful punning on Romulus and Remus but to a popular contraction of its full ecclesiastical title, "Sancti Romuli in eremo."
He looked round this roomy cell furnished with so many comforts, and compared it with the pictures in his mind of the hideous place, eremus in eremo, a desert in a desert, where holy Jerome, hermit, and the Plutarch of hermits, had wrestled with sickness, temptation, and despair four mortal years; and with the inaccessible and thorny niche, a hole in a precipice, where the boy hermit Benedict buried himself, and lived three years on the pittance the good monk Romanus could spare him from his scanty commons, and subdivided that mouthful with his friend, a raven; and the hollow tree of his patron St.
"Secular priests no doubt!" he said, "but that would not suit one of us!" Our ride up to the Sagro Eremo was a thing to be remembered! I had seen and done it all before; but I had not seen or done it in company with George Eliot. It was like doing it with a new pair of eyes, and freshly inspired mind!
The following morning we were to ride up the mountain to the Sagro Eremo. Convent hours are early, and soon after the dawn we had convoyed our female companion down the hill to the little forestieria for breakfast, where the padre forestieraio gave us the best coffee we had had for many a day.
The Camaldolese, like other Carthusians, are properly hermits, that is to say, their life is not conventual, but eremitical. Each brother at the Sagro Eremo inhabits his own separately built cell, consisting of sleeping chamber, study, wood-room, and garden, all of microscopical dimensions. His food, exclusively vegetable, is passed in to him by a little turntable made in the wall.
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