Romance of Roman Villas Part 19

But if this be and pain That bringeth joy enricheth often gain; I ask thee not, O Love, To give me gain thy common gains above.

If gentle dear disdains And dulcet coy defeats And strifes fond lovers use To fire their hearts--but close with love's long truce."

NOTE.--The selections from the _Amyntas_ quoted in this article have been selected from the admirable metrical translation of Mr.

R. Whitmore.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER VI

MONDRAGONE

"'Tis a grave responsibility to play the dragon to a pretty woman."

This was the a.s.sertion with which Celio Benvoglio, private secretary of her Highness, Princess Pauline Bonaparte Borghese, invariably prefaced the following story, and had I a like knack in telling it, you would admit the demonstration of that proposition. By dragon you will understand that his Excellency, Prince Camillo Borghese, signified a guardian and protector. To const.i.tute Celio Malespini a spy and reporter was no more in the thought of the Prince than it could have been in Celio's performance. He was young, and as chivalric an admirer of the Princess as he was loyal in his devotion to her husband. Had he discovered anything equivocal in her conduct, wild horses could not have torn her secret from him, and it is possible that the Prince counted upon this when he said:

"Celio, the Princess is very young and impulsive; that she is a foreigner and therefore inexperienced in our strict etiquette will not excuse her slightest mistake in the eyes of our severe Roman dames, who would be prejudiced against the sister of Napoleon were she as circ.u.mspect as the Madonna. Her beauty has already made them envious, her wit and light-heartedness is considered levity. They will delight in wagging their tongues maliciously on the least shadow of suspicion. In appointing you secretary to the Princess I place you in a position where you will be able to guard her from the appearance of evil. Understand well that I have no fear of its reality, but where there are windows overlooking one's garden the neighbours may see more than the owner, more even than actually occurs."

"Have no fear, my lord," the young secretary rashly promised. "You know the Tuscan proverb in regard to avoiding the suspicion of fruit stealing. Ah, well, no visitor shall be allowed to tie his shoestrings among your strawberries or to use his handkerchief under your plum tree."

So the Prince went away to Florence and Celio found that he had more than he had bargained for. Not that Pauline Bonaparte committed actual indiscretions; but she was wild for admiration, loved dress, and knew how to dress well, setting off her marvellous beauty with that combination of style and taste that the French call _chic_, which the heavier intellects of the Roman modistes with all their pretence to fashion can never attain, and which the imperious Roman matrons could never forgive.

One of these, hoping to rob this audacious rival of the advantage of Parisian modishness, gave a fete in which the guests were requested to appear in cla.s.sical costume, whose severe simplicity she fancied would be more becoming to the plenitude of her own Juno-like charms than to the slight figure of the French girl. But the Princess vanquished her hostess for she came as a Bacchante in a robe of her own designing, bordered with vine leaves embroidered in gold and belted beneath the b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a golden girdle. A mantle of panther's fur swept from her shoulders, her arms and her bust were laden with heavy necklaces and bracelets taken from some Etruscan tomb, and she waved a golden thyrsus.

Her entrance illuminated the ball-room and the character which she represented gave her authority for giving free vent to her natural vivacity and dancing with the utmost grace and abandon. Her victory over the male part of the a.s.sembly was complete for they saw no one else that evening.

They were wrong who supposed that her beauty was enhanced by dress; on the contrary it was limited by the clothing which it adorned. The sculptor Canova proved this in his portrait statue of her as Venus Victorious, and then her detractors, affecting to be greatly scandalised, changed their tune and declared that it was false that the Princess was too fond of dress, that on the contrary a greater regard for it would have been more decent.

The young secretary was not a little troubled by the caprice of his patroness to thus display her beauty to the world. "But why not, my Celio?" she had argued. "The Prince, my husband, has bestowed upon me a great t.i.tle for which I feel my obligation to his n.o.ble family, and I shall pay it with interest, for I shall leave the Borgheses this incomparable statue, and the glory of having possessed one Princess whose beauty cannot be denied or equalled."

Why Prince Borghese should have deputed this dragon service to another instead of undertaking it himself, is a question which I cannot answer.

Some misunderstanding doubtless there was, or two people who loved each other would never have agreed that it was better to live apart, but the Prince carried a sore and longing heart with him to Florence, and it may be that the Princess was no happier, though she had more bravado.

"I will come when you send for me and not before," her husband said to her, "and I trust you understand the motives which underlie my self-banishment."

"I am grateful to them at least," was her equivocal retort. "Has your Highness any preference as to my residence during your absence?"

"None," he replied sadly, "but I shall be happier if you do not make choice of your Neapolitan villa."

She flashed at him indignantly, "You wish to estrange me from my family, from my sister Caroline."

"I have only the highest respect for her Majesty, the Queen of Naples,"

he replied; "her devotion to her husband is undoubted. I could wish--"

and here the Prince paused.

"That I were more like her," the Princess finished his sentence.

"I never said so, Pauline," he said impulsively, "or wished that you were like any other than yourself."

His last words should have softened her, but, pained and indignant at his desertion, she hardly heeded them; how was she to know that Camillo Borghese was, under his cold exterior, very honestly in love with his wife and just now cruelly tortured with jealousy of her brother-in-law, the dare-devil Murat? For the latter was as unscrupulous as he was handsome, as Napoleon was to find to his cost, though in recognition of his services as a dashing leader of cavalry he had rewarded him with the hand of his sister Caroline and the crown of Naples.

Hitherto the Princess had not even remarked the bold admiration of her brother-in-law, and after the departure of her husband she wept and sulked for days, when suddenly an event of great political importance, which was also of deep personal interest to herself, threw into the background every other consideration.

Napoleon's abdication and the treaty of Fontainebleau came upon his friends with the shock of an earthquake. Especially to his sister Pauline it was as though the foundations of the earth were tottering.

He had been the Providence of all his family, dividing the nations between them; but Pauline had been his favourite, he had loved her sincerely, and she had responded with the utmost devotion.

"I will go to him in his trouble," she declared, and though her secretary could not see how her presence could aid the deposed Emperor, he could not but approve her generous impulse.

She met her brother at Hyeres near the frontier of France, from which point he embarked for the Island of Elba. The allies had granted him the lordship of the island, with an income to support a pseudo court; but the framers of that treaty, and Napoleon himself, knew well that its terms were a farce and his kingdom in reality a prison.

What transpired between the Princess and her brother in that brief interview Celio did not know. Each pa.s.sed from it calmed and cheerful.

There was a kindlier look in the Emperor's face, a more a.s.sured elasticity in his step as the English sailors who transported him to his exile shouted their, "Better luck next time"; and sparks were lighted in the eyes of the Princess which every one who saw her noted, though none guessed what hidden fires of resolve fed their flashes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

Fountain in Gardens of the Villa Borghese]

They called her that season the Firefly, and many misinterpreted her illy suppressed excitement and the scrutiny of those lambent eyes sending out their flame signals in search of answering lights. Even her secretary did not know that the dark shadows which ringed them were not due to the b.a.l.l.s and other frivolities in which she was so conspicuous; but to complicated and dangerous schemes which robbed her of sleep at night, and were never forgotten as she danced and chatted and coquetted while the most astute diplomats laid their hearts and their secrets at her feet.

She received strange visitors too at the magnificent Villa Borghese, just outside the Porta del Popolo, wild-eyed agitators and suspects who had never before been permitted to enter those aristocratic gates. The first had come disguised in a marble-cutter's blouse as an a.s.sistant of Canova; but he had dropped a word which the n.o.ble model understood, and the fire signals had flashed between them. After the sculptor had left the casino his a.s.sistant tarried, and Celio, dismissed by his mistress but lingering at the threshold, heard fragments of the man's talk: "Liberty, united Italy, and death to the Austrians."

Later, when he attempted to warn the Princess that if the man were not a maniac he was more dangerous, she asked him bluntly if her husband had const.i.tuted him her dragon, and thereafter in half contemptuous banter she gave him the nickname of "Mondragone."

It was the name also of another villa belonging to the Borghese, the most sightly of all the boldly seated summer resorts of the n.o.bility at beautiful Frascati. Not one of these commands a view comparable to the one from its terrace of the Pope's Chimneys, so named from the strange monumental constructions which are so conspicuous that, with a gla.s.s, they are plainly visible from Rome.

So when the Princess announced, "I love Mondragone," her secretary did not flatter himself that the equivocal utterance bore any reference to himself. Had he also had the wit to perceive that if she indeed cared for the villa or for any other object at this time, it was only for some service which it might render her brother, his duties as dragon would have occasioned him far less of mental anguish.

Celio was writing one day in a room adjoining the apartment which Canova had used as his studio in the casino of Villa Borghese, when he was startled by a heavy step in the room which he had supposed unoccupied. Throwing aside the portiere he instantly recognised from report the imposing figure which confronted him. On a lesser man so gorgeous a costume as the one which now dazzled the astonished eyes of the secretary would have suggested the mountebank; but there was something regal as well as Oriental in Joachim Murat's appearance, and the barbarous colour extravagances of his dress became him like those of a sultan.

His curling hair, black and long, fell upon a green velvet cloak heavily embroidered with gold which hung from his shoulders displaying a sky-blue frogged tunic, whose breast was covered with jewelled crosses and beribboned decorations. The crimson breeches which met the high boots of yellow morocco were braided with gold in the Polish fashion and fitted closely his shapely thighs, but the tarnished and battered cavalry sabre clanking at his side occasioned him no inconvenience, and it needed but a glance at the broken plumes of the ruby-clasped aigrette which decorated a shabby wide-brimmed hat to convince the beholder that this was no gala costume but the habitual garb of a soldier. He was spurred and played nonchalantly with his riding-whip as he returned Celio's questioning glance with a smile, half arrogant, half familiar.

Wheeling upon his heel without deigning any explanation of his presence, he returned to his contemplation of the portrait statue of the Princess, and the young secretary's blood boiled as he saw that the expression of contemptuous familiarity on the sensual face had been elicited not by his insignificant self but by the masterpiece of Canova.

"A fair portrait doubtless," he said indifferently, "for I recognise certain points of resemblance to her sister, whose perfections, however, the Princess Borghese cannot hope to emulate."

"Pardon me, sir," stammered the secretary in tones which he vainly strove to render icy,--"but this is the Villa Borghese and not a public museum."

The intruder looked down with amused bonhommie. "I am an acquaintance of the Prince," he vouchsafed, "and have been invited by him to view his art collections."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese

Portrait statue by Canova at Villa Borghese]