Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General. Lever Charles James
Turin is a dreary city for a lounger; even a resident finds that he must serve a seven years’ apprenticeship before he gets any footing in its stiff ungenial society – for of all Italians, nothing socially is less graceful than a Piedmontese. They have none of the courteous civility, none of the urbane gentleness of the peninsular Italians. They are cold, reserved, proud, and eminently awkward; not the less so, perhaps, that their habitual tongue is the very vilest jargon that ever disfigured a human mouth. Of course this is an efficient barrier against intercourse with strangers; and though French is spoken in society, it bears about the same relation to that language at Paris, as what is called pigeon-English at Hong-Kong does to the tongue in use in Belgravia.
When I reached the Palazzo Carignan, as the Chamber is called, the séance was nearly over, and a scene of considerable uproar prevailed. There had been a somewhat sharp altercation between General Bixio and the “Left,” and M. Mordini had repeatedly appealed to the President to make the General recall some offensive epithets he had bestowed on the “party of movement.” There were the usual cries and gesticulations, the shouts of derision, the gestures of menace; and, above all, the tinkle-tinkle of the Presidents bell, which was no more minded than the summons for a waiter in an Irish inn; and on they went in this hopeless way, till some one, I don’t know why, cried out, “That’s enough – we are satisfied;” by which it seemed that somebody had apologised, but for what, or how, or to whom, I have not the very vaguest conception.
With all their depreciation of France, the Italians are the most persistent imitators of Frenchmen, and the Chamber was exactly a copy of the French Chamber in the old Louis Philippe days – all violence, noise, sensational intensity, and excitement.
I have often heard public speakers mention the difficulty of adjusting the voice to the size of a room in which they found themselves for the first time, and the remark occurred to me as figuratively displaying one of the difficulties of Italian public men. The speakers in reality never clearly knew how far their words were to carry – whether they spoke to the Chamber or to the Country.
Is there or is there not a public opinion in Italy? Can the public speaker direct his words over the heads of his immediate surrounders to countless thousands beyond them? If he cannot, Parliament is but a debating-club, with the disadvantage of not being able to select the subjects for discussion.
The glow of patriotism is never rightly warm, nor is the metal of party truly malleable, without the strong blast of a public opinion.
The Turin Chamber has no echo in the country; and, so far as I see, the Italians are far more eager to learn what is said in the French Parliament than in their own.
I remember an old waiter at the Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, who got a prize in the lottery and retired into private life, but who never could hear a bell ring without crying out, “Coming, sir.” The Italians remind me greatly of him: they have had such a terrible time of flunkeyism, that they start at every summons, no matter what hand be on the bell-rope.
To be sure the French did bully them awfully in the last war. Never was an alliance more dearly paid for. We ourselves are not a very compliant or conciliating race, but we can remember what it cost us to submit to French insolence and pretension in the Crimea; and yet we did submit to it, not always with a good grace, but in some fashion or other.
Here comes my Garibaldino again, and with a proposal to go down to Genoa and look at the Italian fleet. I don’t suppose that either of us know much of the subject; and indeed I feel, in my ignorance, that I might be a senior Lord of the Admiralty – but that is only another reason for the inquiry. “One is nothing,” says Mr Puff, “if he ain’t critical” So Heaven help the Italian navy under the conjoint commentaries of myself and my friend! Meanwhile, and before we start, one word more of Turin.
A FRIEND OF GIOBERTS: BEING A REMINISCENCE OF SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
Here I am at the “Feder” in Turin – as dirty a hotel, be it said passingly, as you’ll find out of Ireland, and seventeen long years it is since I saw it first. Italy has changed a good deal in the meanwhile – changed rulers, landmarks, systems, and ideas; not so my old acquaintance, the Feder! There’s the dirty waiter flourishing his dirtier napkin; and there’s the long low-ceilinged table-d’hôte room, stuffy and smoky, and suffocating as ever; and there are the little grinning coteries of threes and fours round small tables soaking their rolls in chocolate, and puffing their “Cavours,” with faces as innocent of soap as they were before the war of the liberation. After all, perhaps, I’d have no objection if some friend would cry out, “Why, Con, my boy, you don’t look a day older than when I saw you here in ‘46, I think! I protest you have not changed in the least. What elixir vitæ have you swallowed, old fellow? Not a wrinkle, nor a grey hair,” and so on. And yet seventeen years taken out of the working part of a man’s life – that period that corresponds with the interval between after breakfast, we’ll say, and an hour before dinner – makes a great gap in existence; for I did very little as a boy, being not an early riser, perhaps, and now, in the evening of my days, I have got a theory that a man ought to dine early and never work after it. Though I’m half ashamed, on so short an acquaintance with my reader, to mention a personal incident, I can scarcely avoid – indeed I cannot avoid – relating a circumstance connected with my first visit to the “Hotel Feder.”
I was newly married when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The world at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock of Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to wear the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O’D. and I started with one heart, one passport, and – what’s not so pleasant – one hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the border – once in France – it was enough. So we took up our abode in a very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called “La Cour de Madrid,” where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty centimes per diem – the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking the post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.
There was not much to see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or so Mrs O’D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan’s five hundred wives, protesting that she’d surely be recognised; but she grew out of the delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de Madrid as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if we had taken up our abode in the Catacombs.
Now when one has got a large stock of any commodity on hand – I don’t care what it is – there’s nothing so provoking as not to find a market. Mrs O’D.‘s investment was bashfulness. She was determined to be the most timid, startled, modest, and blushing creature that ever wore orange-flowers; and yet there was not a man, woman, or child in the whole town that cared to know whether the act for which she left England was a matrimony or a murder.
“Don’t you hate this place, Cornelius?” – she never called me Con in the honeymoon. “Isn’t it the dullest, dreariest hole you have ever been in?”
“Not with you.”
“Then don’t yawn when you say so. I abhor it. It’s dirty, it’s vulgar, it’s dear.”
“No, no. It ain’t dear, my love; don’t say, dear.”
“Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish bitter – anisette, I think they call it – are cheap enough, perhaps; but these are all luxuries I can’t share in.”
Here was the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that presaged the first connubial hurricane. A married friend – one of much experience and long-suffering – had warned me of this, saying, “Don’t fancy you’ll escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey – put the evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs be, but postpone;” and, strong with these precepts, I negotiated, as the phrase is, and, with a dash of reckless liberality that I tremble at now as I record it, I said, “You’ve only to say where – nothing but where to, and I’ll take you – up the Rhine, down the Danube, Egypt, the Cataracts – ”
“I don’t want to go so far,” said she, dryly. “Italy will do.”
This was a stunner. I hoped the impossible would have stopped her, but she caught at