One of Cleopatra's Nights (13 page)

Thus they came to the villa of Arrius Diomedes, one of the finest
residences in Pompeii. It is approached by a flight of brick steps, and
after entering the door-way, which is flanked by two small lateral
columns, one finds himself in a court resembling the
patio
which
occupies the centre of Spanish and Moorish dwellings, and which the
ancients termed
impluvium
or
cavædium.
Fourteen columns of brick,
overlaid with stucco, once supported on four sides a portico or covered
peristyle, not unlike a convent cloister, and beneath which one could
walk secure from the rain. This courtyard is paved in mosaic with brick
and white marble, which presents a subdued and pleasing effect of color.
In its centre a quadrilateral marble basin, which still exists, formerly
caught the rain-water that dripped from the roof of the portico. It was
a strange experience, entering thus into the life of the antique world,
and treading with well-blacked boots upon the marbles worn smooth by the
sandals and buskins of the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius.

The cicerone led them through the
exedra
or summer parlor, which
opened to the sea, to receive its cooling breezes. It was there that the
family received company, and took their siesta during those burning
hours when prevailed the mighty zephyr of Africa, laden with languors
and storms. He brought them into the basilica, a long open gallery which
lighted the various apartments, and in which clients and visitors erst
awaited the call of the Nomenclator. Then he conducted them to the white
marble terrace, whence extended a broad view of verdant gardens and blue
sea. Then he showed them the
Nymphæum
, or Hall of Baths, with its
yellow-painted walls, its stucco columns, its mosaic pavement, and its
marble bathing-basin which had contained so many of the lovely bodies
that have long since passed away like shadows; the
cubiculum
, where
flitted so many dreams from the Ivory Gate, and whose alcoves contrived
in the wall were once closed by a
conopeum
or curtain, of which the
bronze rings still lie upon the floor; the
tetrastyle
, or Hall of
Recreation; the Chapel of the Lares; the Cabinet of Archives; the
Library; the Museum of Paintings; the
gynæceum
or women's apartment,
comprising a suite of small chambers, now half fallen into ruin, but
whose walls yet bear traces of paintings and arabesques, like fair
cheeks from which the rouge has been but half wiped off.

Having fully inspected all these, they descended to the lower floor, for
the ground is much lower on the garden side than it is on the side of
the Street of the Tombs. They traversed eight halls painted in antique
red, whereof one has its walls hollowed with architectural niches, after
that style of which we have to-day a good example in the vestibule of
the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra, and finally they came to a
sort of cave or cellar, whose purpose was clearly indicated by eight
earthen amphoræ propped up against the wall, and once perfumed,
doubtless, like the odes of Horace with the wines of Crete, Falernia, or
Massica.

One solitary bright ray of sunshine streamed through a narrow aperture
above, half choked by nettles, whose light-traversed leaves it
transformed into emeralds and topazes, and this gay natural detail
seemed to smile opportunely through the sadness of the place.

"It was here," observed the cicerone, in his customary indifferent tone,
"that among seventeen others was found the skeleton of the lady whose
mould is exhibited at the Naples Museum. She wore gold rings, and the
shreds of her fine tunic still clung to the mass of cinders which have
preserved her shape."

The guide's commonplace phrases deeply affected Octavian. He made the
man point out to him the exact spot where the precious remains had been
discovered, and had it not been for the restraining presence of his
friends, he would have abandoned himself to some extravagant lyrism. His
chest heaved, his eyes glistened with a furtive moisture. Though blotted
out by twenty centuries of oblivion, that catastrophe touched him like a
recent misfortune. Not even the death of a mistress or a friend could
have affected him more profoundly; and while Max and Fabio had their
backs turned, a tear, two thousand years late, fell upon the spot where
that woman, with whom he felt he had fallen retrospectively in love, had
perished, suffocated by the hot cinders of the volcano.

"Enough of this archæology," cried Fabio. "We do not propose to write
dissertations upon an ancient jug or a tile of the age of Julius Cæsar
in order to obtain memberships in some provincial academy. These classic
souvenirs give me the stomachache. Let us go to dinner—if such a thing
be possible—in that picturesque hostelry, where I fear we shall be
served with fossil beefsteaks and fresh eggs laid prior to the death of
Pliny."

"I will not exclaim with Boileau:

'Un sot, quelquefois, ouvre un avis important,'"

exclaimed Max, with a laugh. "That would be ill-mannered, but your idea
is a good one. Still, I think it would have been pleasant to banquet
here, on some triclinium, reclining after the antique fashion, and
waited upon by slaves according to the style of Lucullus or Trimalchio.
It is true that I see no oysters from Lake Lucrinus, the turbots and
mullets from the Adriatic are wanting, the Apuleian boar cannot be had
in market, and the loaves and honey-cakes on exhibition in the Naples
Museum lie, hard as stones, beside their green-gray moulds. Even raw
macaroni sprinkled with
cacciacavallo,
detestable as it may be, is
certainly better than nothing. What does friend Octavian think about
it?"

Octavian, who was deeply regretting that he had not happened to be in
Pompeii on the day of the eruption, so that he might have saved the lady
of the gold rings, and thereby merited her love, had not heard a
syllable of this gastronomic conversation. Only the last two words
uttered by Max had fallen upon his ears, and feeling no desire to broach
a discussion, he gave a random nod of assent, upon which the amicable
party retraced the road along the ramparts to the inn.

The table was placed under a sort of open porch which served as a
vestibule to the hostelry, whose rough cast walls were decorated with
various daubs that the host entitled "Salvator Rosa," "Espagnolet,"
"Cavalier Massimo," and other celebrated names of the Neapolitan School,
which he deemed himself bound to extol.

"Venerable host," cried Fabio, "do not waste your eloquence to no
purpose. We are not Englishmen, and we prefer young women to old
canvases. Better send us your wine-list by that handsome brunette with
the velvety eyes whom I just now perceived on the stairway."

Finding that his guests did not belong to the mystifiable class of
Philistines and
bourgeois
, the
palforio
ceased to vaunt his gallery
in order to glorify his cellar. To begin with, he had all the best
vintages: Château Margaux, Grand Lafitte which had been twice to the
Indies, Sillery de Moët, Hochmeyer, scarlet wine, port and porter, ale
and ginger beer, white and red Lachryma-Christi, Caprian, and Falernian.

"What, you have Falernian wine,
animal!
And put it at the end of your
list! And you dare to subject us to an unendurable oenological litany!"
cried Max, leaping at the inn-keeper's throat with burlesque fury. "Why,
you have no sentiment of local color. You are unworthy to live in this
antique neighborhood. Is it even good, this Falernian wine of yours? Was
it put in amphoræ under the Consul Plancus—
Consule Planco?
"

"I know nothing about the Consul Plancus, and my wine is not put in
amphoræ, but it is good, and worth ten carlins a bottle," answered the
inn-keeper.

Day had faded away and the night came, a serene, transparent night,
clearer, assuredly, than full midday in London. The earth had tints of
azure, and the sky silvery reflections of inconceivable sweetness. The
air was so still that the flames of the candles on the table did not
oscillate.

A young boy, playing a flute, approached the table, and standing there,
with his eyes fixed upon the three guests, performed upon his sweet and
melodious instrument, one of those popular airs in a minor key which
have a penetrating charm.

Perhaps that lad was a direct descendant of the flute-player who marched
before Duilius.

"Our repast is assuming quite an antique aspect. We only need some
Gaditanian dancing women and ivy garlands," exclaimed Max, as he helped
himself to a great bumper of Falernian wine.

"I feel myself in the humor for making Latin quotations like a
feuilleton
in the
Débats
. Stanzas of odes come back to my memory,"
added Max.

"Keep them to yourself!" cried Fabio and Octavian, justly alarmed.
"Nothing is so indigestible as Latin at dinner."

Among young men with cigars in their mouths and elbows on the table, who
find themselves contemplating a certain number of empty flagons,
especially when the wine has been capitally good, conversation never
fails to turn upon women. Each explained his own system, whereof the
following is a fair summary:

Fabio cared only for youth and beauty. Voluptuous and positive, he found
no pleasure in illusions, and had no preferences in love. A peasant
girl would have pleased his fancy as well as a princess, provided she
were beautiful. The body rather than its apparel attracted him. He
laughed much at certain of his friends who were enamored of so many
yards of lace and silk, and he declared it were more rational to fall in
love with the stock of a fashionable
marchand des nouveautés
. These
opinions, which were rational enough in the main, and which he made no
attempt to conceal, caused him to pass for an eccentric.

Max, less of an artist than Fabio, cared only for difficult
undertakings, complicated intrigues. He sought resistances to vanquish,
virtues to seduce, and played at love as at a game of chess, with
long-premeditated moves, reserved ambuscades, and stratagems worthy of
Polybius. In a drawing-room he would always choose the woman who seemed
least in sympathy with him for the object of attack. To make her pass by
skilful transition from aversion to love afforded him delicious
pleasure. To impose himself upon characters which strove to repel him,
and master wills that rebelled against his influence, seemed to him the
sweetest of all triumphs. Like those hunters who, through rain,
sunshine, or snow, through fields and woods, and over plains, pursue
with excessive fatigue and unconquerable ardor some miserable quarry
which in three cases out of four they would not deign to eat, so Max,
having once captured his prey, troubled himself no further about it, and
at once started off on another chase.

As for Octavian, he confessed that reality itself had little charm for
him, not because he indulged in student-dreams, all moulded of lilies
and roses like one of Demoustier's madrigals, but because there were too
many prosaic and repulsive details surrounding all beauty, too many
doting and decorated fathers, coquettish mothers who wore natural
flowers in false hair, ruddy-faced cousins meditating proposals,
ridiculous aunts in love with little dogs. An acquatinta engraving after
Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung up in a woman's room, would have been
sufficient to check a growing passion within him. More poetical even
than amorous, he wanted a terrace on Isola-Bella, in Lake Maggiore,
under the light of a full moon to frame a rendezvous. He would have
wished to elevate his love above the midst of common life, and transport
its scenes to the stars. Thus he had by turns fallen fruitlessly and
madly in love with all the grand feminine types preserved by history or
art. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and would have wished that the
undulations of the ages might bear to him one of those sublime
personifications of human desires and dreams, whose forms, to mortal
eyes invisible, live immortally beyond Space and Time. He had created
for himself an ideal seraglio, with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana
of Poitiers, Jane of Arragon. At times also he had fallen in love with
statues, and one day, passing before the Venus of Milo in the Museum, he
cried out passionately: "Oh, who will restore thy arms that thou may'st
crush me upon thy marble bosom!" At Rome, the sight of a matted mass of
long thick human hair, exhumed from an antique tomb, had thrown him into
a fantastic delirium. He had attempted, through the medium of a few of
those hairs, obtained by a golden bribe from the custodian, and placed
in the hands of a clairvoyant of great power, to evoke the shade and
form of the dead; but the conducting fluid—the subtle odyle—had
evaporated during the lapse of so many years, and the apparition could
no more come forth out of the eternal night.

As Fabio had divined before the glass cabinet in the Studii Museum, the
imprint discovered in the cellar at the villa of Arrius Diomedes had
excited in Octavian wild impulses toward a retrospective ideal. He
longed to soar beyond Life and Time and transport himself in spirit to
the age of Titus.

Max and Fabio retired to their room, and being somewhat heavy-headed
from the classic fumes of the Falernian, were soon sound asleep.
Octavian, who had more than once suffered the full glass to remain
before him untasted, not wishing to disturb by a grosser intoxication
the poetic drunkenness which boiled in his brain, felt from the
agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the
hostelry on tiptoe that he might cool his brow and calm his thoughts in
the night air.

His feet bore him unawares to the entrance which leads into the dead
city. He removed the wooden bar that closed it, and wandered into the
ruins beyond.