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Throughout dinner, at the head of the long table where we sat with the Swiss artist and an old German professor of art and an older Italian archæologist, the talk, as at the Nazionale, was of art, so that it also, like Pulcinello, crying his jests through the window or at our elbow, made me feel at home.
The Italian took out an elegant little pocketbook. "Here it is," he said, opening a paper bearing the royal mark. "But how did it come into your hands?" "In a very simple way I bought it." "You and for what reason?" "Can you not suppose that my only motive was to render you a service?" The Vicomte shrugged his shoulders. "You are right," answered Fernando, in reply to this mute protest.
The isolation in which the inhabitants of La Sarthe Chase lived could not be more complete. The Italian parlor had its own slightly pathetic cachet.
The explanation, of course, is that the widespread knowledge of Italian among the reading public in England rendered translation more or less superfluous , while at the same time it should be remembered that in this country Tasso was far surpassed in popularity by Guarini.
It is also said that an early disposition to the popular side distinguished Bonaparte even when at Brienne. He was long afterwards consulted whether means might not be found to engage the commander of the Italian armies in the royal interest. "It will be but lost time to attempt it," said Pichegru.
I had never seen anything like all this, and while I stood gazing around, the drums began to beat, and each man took his place in the ranks, and we were informed, first in Italian and then in French, that we were about to receive our arms, and each one was ordered to stand forth as his name was called. The wagons containing the arms now came up, and the call began.
It is this lack of harmony with Italian life itself which caused Morris and Rossetti and even Browning, with all his admiration for the author, to lay aside the book, unable to read it with pleasure or profit.
He caught it in its fall, fixing her again after she had watched him place it in his buttonhole. "Come down quickly!" he said in an Italian not loud but deep. "Vengo, vengo!" she as clearly, but more lightly, tossed out; and she had left him the next minute to wait for her.
Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhaps because he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keep any of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he so abounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I was left to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eight years later.
All the family meals, too, were eaten together in the solemn old dining-hall, hung with tapestries and dingy with the dust of ages. The order of precedence was always strictly observed, and though the cooking was of a strange kind, no plate or dish was ever used which was not of solid silver, battered indeed, and scratched, and cleaned only after Italian ideas, but heavy and massive withal.
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