Venetian Life - William Dean Howells

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has paid the house-rent of the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta,—a puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:

      “Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations toward the pit.)

      To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, “Honor?—I know it not! Virtue?—I detest it!” and attempting to pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples against him.

      Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.

      The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is extremely funny. The prima ballerina has all the difficult grace and far-fetched arts of the prima ballerina of flesh and blood; and when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike empressement. I have no doubt the corps de ballet have their private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and legs. The puppets are great in pirouette and pas seul; but I think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of Carthage, is their strong point.

      The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions—I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses in the pit—but the greater number of spectators are young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette. “Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little epistle,—it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling,—and dried away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer—its unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call each other “Ciò!” Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear Antonio? All unconscious, I think,—gallantly posed against the wall, thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly twinkling in the light.

      CHAPTER VI. VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.

      When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants are very dirty—if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the rooms are cold—if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is not because the prices are great—they are really very reasonable; it is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural and insufferable.

      But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of Italian character,—temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare, and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb mangiare remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people, how the crowd amused itself with any thing—music, dancing, walking, talking—any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the cheerful prudence of the South.

      Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black coffee, or an ice, taken at a caffè. The coffee, however, is repeated frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner, it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a piece of boiled beef, a minestra (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: “Venga a mangiar quattro risi con me.” (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)

      But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies offered to strangers.

      The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caffè, and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof. “What caffè do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.” This is frequently your new acquaintance’s promise of friendship. And one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at the caffè, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some pleasant

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