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Thus, during my third visit to Florence, having read Manzoni's "Promessi Sposi," which still seems to me the most beautiful historical romance ever written, I was greatly impressed by that part of it which depicts the superstitions and legal cruelties engendered by the plague at Milan.
The passage describing this epidemic can stand beside Defoe's or Poe's or Manzoni's similar descriptions, for power in setting forth the horrors of the plague.
But I knew; for in the garret at home there's an old, old copy of "The Betrothed," which is Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi in English, and I found and read it when I was a small girl.
It is a lesson of forgiveness. It is noblest to forgive. Forgiveness is divine. Forgive seventy times seventy times, again and again. In Manzoni's story, the saintly Frederick Borromeo preaches and acts that sublime lesson in his scene with the Innominato with compelling eloquence.
If the count's story had surprised me, the simplicity with which he told it had given me pleasure; and I was resolved to do honour to Madame Manzoni's introduction, feeling that it was my duty to serve a fellow-countryman, who was really guilty of nothing worse than gross thoughtlessness. "Begin," said I, "by bringing your small belongings to the room next to mine, and get your meals there.
His mother told him to look upon me as his father from henceforth. The lad recognized me; he remembered, much to my delight, seeing me in the May of 1753, in Venice, at Madame Manzoni's. He was slight but strong; his limbs were well proportioned, and his features intellectual. He was thirteen years old. His sister sat perfectly still, apparently waiting for her turn to come.
We were divided about the sauce with which the hare should be dressed, and, in the heat of argument, lost sight of this little fact, that a hare, to be dressed at all, must first be caught. The first reverses overtook us thus occupied. They did not sober us; quite the contrary; we fell to doing what Manzoni's capons did.
Especially interesting to me were the scenes depicted in the first part of Manzoni's "Promessi Sposi." An eminent Italian told me at this time that Manzoni never forgave himself for his humorous delineations of the priest Don Abbondio, who figures in these scenes after a somewhat undignified fashion.
When she becomes interested in the old Indian campaigner, Miles, she is able to procure his admission to Chelsea through the influence of "my brother, Colonel Dutton." She lightens her watches by reading Manzoni's novel, I Promessi Sposi, she quotes Lord Bacon, and compares the hospital-nurses to the witches in Macbeth.
Barrymore explained to Aunt Kathryn that this was the country of I Promessi Sposi because the scenes of Manzoni's romance had been laid in the neighbourhood, I could see as plainly as if they lay before my eyes the quaint woodcuts representing the beautiful heroine, Lucia, her lover, Renzo, and the wicked Prince Innominato.
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