CORNÉLIE FOUND THE FIRST DAYS in Rome extremely exhausting. She did too much, as everyone does who has just arrived; she wanted to embrace the whole city at once, and the distances, though covered in a carriage, wore her out. In addition she was constantly disappointed, in paintings, in statues, in buildings. At first she did not dare admit those disappointments to herself, but one afternoon, dog-tired, after a painful disappointment in the Sistine Chapel, she admitted it. Everything she saw and already knew from her studies was a disappointment. She decided not to see anything else for the time being. And after her gruelling days of going out in the morning, out in the afternoon, it was a luxury to abandon herself to the subconscious stream of days. She stayed home in the mornings in a peignoir, in her cosy, lofty birdcage of a sitting-room, wrote letters, dreamed a little, her arms folded round her head, read Ovid, Petrarch, listened to some street musicians, who with trembling tenor voices, to the plaintive twang of their guitars filled the quiet street with the sobbing passion of music. At lunch she felt she had been fortunate in her choice of pensione: in her corner at table she found the Baroness Von Rothkirch with her nonchalant condescension towards Rudyard interesting, as she saw how travel can uproot someone from their narrow circle. The young baroness, who did not worry at all about life and just painted and sketched, interested her when she whispered to Rudyard, so that Cornélie did not understand. Miss Hope was so naive, so childishly scatterbrained, that Cornélie could not see how Hope Senior, the rich stocking-manufacturer over there in Chicago, simply let this girl travel alone with her excessive monthly allowance and total lack of worldliness and understanding of people; and Rudyard himself, although she was sometimes repelled by him, fascinated her despite that repulsion. So although she had not struck up a deeper friendship with any of these table companions, there were people around her to whom she could talk, and the table conversation was a diversion from the whole day’s loneliness.
For in these days of weariness and disappointment she took only a short afternoon walk down the Corso or the Pincio, then returned home, made tea for herself in her silver teapot, and daydreamed in front of the wood fire till it was time to dress for dinner.
And the well-lit dining-room with the Guercino ceiling was cheerful. The pensione was fulclass="underline" the marchesa was sleeping in the bathroom, having given up her own room. There was a constant buzz of voices at table, the waiters trotted about and spoons and forks clattered. The melancholy mood of so many restaurants with set menus was absent here. People knew each other and the bustle of Roman life, the oxygen of Roman air, seemed to have injected vitality into their gestures and conversations. Amid that vitality the two scruffy aesthetic ladies stood out with their unchanging attitude: always in evening dress, the woollens, the beads, the reading of the thick tome; the angry looks because people were talking.
And after dinner people sat in the drawing-room, in the hall, getting to know this person and that, and talking of Rome, Rome, Rome … There was always great excitement about the music in the various churches: people consulted the Herald, asked Rudyard, who knew everything, and surrounded him, while he smiled, fat and polite, and distributed tickets, telling them the days and times when there was an important service in such and such church. Now and then, in passing, he gave English ladies who were not au fait, information about the complex formalities and hierarchies of Catholic worship: he told them the nationalities indicated by the various colours of the seminarists whom one met in hordes on the Pincio in the afternoon, staring at St Peter’s, in ecstasy at the mighty symbol of their mighty religion; he told them the difference between a church and a basilica; he told intimate stories about the life of Leo XIII. He talked about all this in a fascinating, insinuating tone: the English ladies, eager for information, hung on his every word, found him most charming, asked him for a thousand details.
These days, then, were a time of recuperation for Cornélie. She recovered from her exhaustion, and became indifferent to Rome. But she had no thought of leaving early. Whether she was here or somewhere else, it was the same: she had to be somewhere. Apart from that the pensione was good, and her table companions were excellent company. She no longer read Hare’s Walks through Rome or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but reread Ouida’s Ariadne. She did not like the book as much as when she had found it in The Hague three years before, and read nothing else. But she enjoyed herself for a whole evening with the Von Rothkirch ladies looking at Miss Hope’s collection of seals and sample album. How keen those Americans were on nobility and royalty. The baroness magnanimously stamped her coat-of-arms in the album. The samples were much admired, gold brocade, silk as heavy as silver, foliage-patterned tulle. Miss Hope told them how she had acquired them: she knew one of the queen’s lady’s maids through her having previously served an American lady and for a high price that maid was able to provide her with the samples: a precious scrap, picked up while the queen was having a fitting, sometimes even cut from a wide seam. The child was prouder of her collection of samples than an Italian prince of his paintings, said Baroness Von Rothkirch. But despite that ridiculousness, that vanity, the beautiful American girl appealed to Cornélie because of the spontaneity and honesty of her nature. In the evenings she looked utterly charming, in a black low-cut dress or a red chiffon blouse. For that matter, it was different every evening. It was a kaleidoscope of outfits, blouses, jewels. She wandered through the ruins of the Forum in a tailored off-white linen suit, lined in orange silk, and her white lace petticoat tripped airily over the foundations of the Basilica Julia or the temple of Vesta. Her busily designed hats provided a dash of the colours of the Avenue de l’Opéra or Regent’s Street amid the tragic earnestness of the Colosseum or in the palace ruins of the Palatine. The young baroness teased her about her orange silk lining, so in keeping with the Forum; about her hats, so in keeping with the seriousness of a site of Christian martyrdom, but she never became angry. “But it’s a lovely hat!” she would reply in her Yankee accent, giving a splendid view of her fine teeth, but opening her mouth wide, as if she were cracking hazelnuts. And the child was delighted, delighted with the “old baroness” and the “young baroness”, delighted at being in a pensione run by a down-at-heel Italian marchesa. And the moment she caught sight of the grey lion’s mane of the Marchesa Belloni, she would leave the others, rush up to her — according to Mrs Von Rothkirch, because a marchioness is above a baroness — pull ‘la Belloni’ into a corner and monopolise her, if possible for the whole evening. Rudyard joined the two of them, the marchioness and Miss Hope, and seeing this Cornélie again wondered what Rudyard was, who he was, and what he was after. But it did not interest the baroness, who had just obtained a ticket to mass in the Papal chapel, and the young baroness said only that he was a good raconteur of saints’ legends, which helped explain some paintings in Doria and Corsini.
V
ON ONE OF THOSE EVENINGS Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family, next to whom the marchesa had first wanted to seat her: Mrs Van der Staal and her two daughters. They were also staying in Rome for the whole winter, they had friends there and went out. The conversation flowed easily, and Mrs Van der Staal invited Cornélie up to her sitting-room for a chat. The following day she went to the Vatican with her new friends, and heard that Mrs Van der Staal was expecting her son from Florence, who was to come to Rome to pursue his archaeological studies.