Hauntings | Page 8

find three huge half-furnished rooms, with bare brick floors,
petroleum lamps, and horribly bad pictures on bright washball-blue and
gamboge walls, and in the midst of it all, every evening, a dozen ladies
and gentlemen seated in a circle, vociferating at each other the same
news a year old; the younger ladies in bright yellows and greens,
fanning themselves while my teeth chatter, and having sweet things
whispered behind their fans by officers with hair brushed up like a
hedgehog. And these are the women my friend expects me to fall in
love with! I vainly wait for tea or supper which does not come, and
rush home, determined to leave alone the Urbanian beau monde.
It is quite true that I have no amori, although my friend does not
believe it. When I came to Italy first, I looked out for romance; I sighed,

like Goethe in Rome, for a window to open and a wondrous creature to
appear, "welch mich versengend erquickt." Perhaps it is because
Goethe was a German, accustomed to German Fraus, and I am, after all,
a Pole, accustomed to something very different from Fraus; but
anyhow, for all my efforts, in Rome, Florence, and Siena, I never could
find a woman to go mad about, either among the ladies, chattering bad
French, or among the lower classes, as 'cute and cold as money-lenders;
so I steer clear of Italian womankind, its shrill voice and gaudy toilettes.
I am wedded to history, to the Past, to women like Lucrezia Borgia,
Vittoria Accoramboni, or that Medea da Carpi, for the present; some
day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don
Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to
drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me
so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the
race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover
nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it
only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of
that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, I do believe I could
love her, even to the Day of Judgment, like any Oliverotto da Narni, or
Frangipani or Prinzivalle.
Oct. 27th.--
Fine sentiments the above are for a professor, a learned man! I thought
the young artists of Rome childish because they played practical jokes
and yelled at night in the streets, returning from the Caffè Greco or the
cellar in the Via Palombella; but am I not as childish to the full--I,
melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet and the Knight of the
Doleful Countenance?
Nov. 5th.--
I can't free myself from the thought of this Medea da Carpi. In my
walks, my mornings in the Archives, my solitary evenings, I catch
myself thinking over the woman. Am I turning novelist instead of
historian? And still it seems to me that I understand her so well; so
much better than my facts warrant. First, we must put aside all pedantic
modern ideas of right and wrong. Right and wrong in a century of

violence and treachery does not exist, least of all for creatures like
Medea. Go preach right and wrong to a tigress, my dear sir! Yet is there
in the world anything nobler than the huge creature, steel when she
springs, velvet when she treads, as she stretches her supple body, or
smooths her beautiful skin, or fastens her strong claws into her victim?
Yes; I can understand Medea. Fancy a woman of superlative beauty, of
the highest courage and calmness, a woman of many resources, of
genius, brought up by a petty princelet of a father, upon Tacitus and
Sallust, and the tales of the great Malatestas, of Caesar Borgia and
such-like!--a woman whose one passion is conquest and empire--fancy
her, on the eve of being wedded to a man of the power of the Duke of
Stimigliano, claimed, carried off by a small fry of a Pico, locked up in
his hereditary brigand's castle, and having to receive the young fool's
red-hot love as an honor and a necessity! The mere thought of any
violence to such a nature is an abominable outrage; and if Pico chooses
to embrace such a woman at the risk of meeting a sharp piece of steel in
her arms, why, it is a fair bargain. Young hound--or, if you prefer,
young hero--to think to treat a woman like this as if she were any
village wench! Medea marries her Orsini. A marriage, let it be noted,
between an old soldier of fifty and a girl of sixteen. Reflect what that
means: it means that this imperious woman is soon treated like a chattel,
made roughly