AT THE BATHS OF LUCCA By Neith Boyce

ILLUSTRATIONS BY E. C. PEIXOTTO

DAY of nearly a thousand no, heir presumptive of Pianura, but they years had this Tuscan water­ performed for Michel de Montaigne more ing-place, now in the twi­ than all the most noted springs of France, light of its fame—a twilight as the curious pages of his Journal witness. pleasanter to the contempla­ We may regret that this philosopher was so tive visitor than its gambling absorbed in the study of his own symptoms, and scandalous noon could have been. For and that he put them down in such Pepysian its beauty lies not in the modern places of detail. For he forgets, meanwhile, to tell us pleasure in the dusty valley, but in the sur­ whether the baths cured also that poor Cre- rounding hills, with their uncounted gray monese merchant whose head was so bad that little towns and flowery gorges; and it is this he couldn't remember what he had had for beauty, rather than the gayety the place once dinner; and he gives only brief ghmpses of had, or even the virtue of its waters, that the country and the people, as charming in has been the attraction, to poets and philoso­ that day as in this, evidently, and more phers, of the baths of Lucca. prosperous. But we do learn that he gave The three httle villages, Ponte Seraho, a ball there to one hundred well-dressed Villa and Bagni Caldi, straggKng up the hill­ women—certainly more than could be mus­ sides along the valley of the emerald green tered in the resort to-day! These country Lima, their outlying villas embedded in people spoke the purest Tuscan and ap­ " vines, myrtle-bushes, laurels, oleanders," peared like gentlefolk. And then—in 1581 as Heine describes them, and sentinelled by —some of the gray little towns which now the "solemn green cypresses," have had hang Uke fossil-shells on the hill-tops were many illustrious visitors. The charm of alive and gay. Benabbio, which Montaigne those chestnut-wooded slopes of the lower visited, was so well off that every woman in Apennines is celebrated in some pages of the town had a pair of white stockings. To­ Montaigne's "Journal deVoyage"; in some day they go barefoot and the only proofs of of the best lettersof Shelley and Mrs. Brown­ former opulence are the flaky gold picture, ing; and it inspires an amorous episode of Scuola di Giotto, in the church, and sundry Heine's "Reisebilder." Fewer philosophers columns and door-casings of fine design, and poets visit the place to-day; few gouty built into the rough peasant dwelhngs. Yet English, even. The sunset of its prosperity one should see Benabbio—by preference on came when, after the cession of the duchy a day of late July, when the sky burns into of Lucca to Tuscany, the archducal court purple through the gray of the olives, when made a summer residence at the Baths; built the grape-vines running everywhere have barracks, villas, and roads, and drew crowds. taken a golden tinge and glow against the But now the grand-duke's villa on the hill­ old gray-black walls and the black cypress. side is a hotel with few guests; the barracks There is a good road all the way to Be­ round the httle piazza, whence a fine long nabbio, but to Corsena, a few miles away, flight of stone steps leads up to the terrace, one must go by a foot-path which crosses, have been turned into pensioni, fiUed with on bridges made of halved tree-trunks, frugal Italians come for the baths; the from side to side of a rushing brown brook. casinos in the valley below, once gay with Yet in Montaigne's time the baths of Cor­ gaming and dancing, are deserted; and the sena were more fashionable than those of landlords' noses grow redder with despair Lucca, and its springs were most poetically every year. named,.Savoury, Amorous, Sweet-crowned, the Despairing One. To-day the httle place The water and the scarcely less celebrated on its hill, hidden away at the head of an un- air of Bagni di Lucca failed to cure the ter­ visited valley, almost never sees a stranger. tian fever of the young Marquess of Cerve- 614

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Gray little towns that hang like fossil-shells upon the hill-tops. and is never seen even at a distance, except on the outer edge by a circle of vines, within by those given to exploring. t"rom its un­ which you see another circle of green corn; usual form, however, it attracts the curious; and the slope above this is covered with fruit the church lifted high on the crest of the hill, trees till you come to another circle of vines. and the town encircling it lower down, the And each little pocket of soil on the hill-side whole somehow suggesting a monastery or a or along the brook grows its trifle of wheat." fortress. The path to Corsena skirts the hill The reason for this economy is connected crowned by Lugliano, the picturesque jewel with the fact that the population consists al­ of the whole region; and then penetrates a most entirely of women and babies. In spite longnarrow valley, solitary and looking quite of its smihng look of plenty, its luxuriance of untouched, with its woods and little plats of oUve, fig, and garlanding vine, the country turf and wild flowers among the rocks. Yet is bitterly poor. The women and children in reality the peasant thrift noted by Mon­ can easily till the soil, thin on these rocky taigne still uses every available bit of ground slopes; and the men accordingly are "gone and water. Here one passes a gray old mill, to America." In Corsena there are but there a vineyard or a nursery of young olives, two this side of their dotage, and the aston­ or perhaps a hay-field ten yards square. ishment of the inhabitants at the sight of Now, as in the sixteenth century, and who strangers is oddly marked if one of these hap­ knows how much earlier, the hills, wherever pens to be a man. Cries of " Uomol" and possible, are cultivated and planted to the stares of curiosity greet him. However, these very top. "Each gradation of every hill," women and children—whose multitude re­ as the philosopher observed, "is surrounded ally presents a serious problem—seem ac- 615

PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 616 At the Baths of Lucca five, cheerful, and even prosperous. In mid- images—like the comparison of that old poet July theyare all busy gatheringin,fromnook; to "a withered vine shivering on a wintry and corner, the wheat. In even-laid golden hill-side, while the juice of his grapes is warm­ bundles it is stacked all along the walls of ing hearts far away." And, above all, it is the houses on both sides the main street, an the delightful spirit of youth and freshness irregular lane paved with cobbles, and covers with which Heine threw himself into his four the low gray wall that terraces the hill-side. weeks' adventure. The very air of those hills, A woman in an upper window is winnowing so soft, clear, bright, has got into his pages; her tiny harvest, tossing it in a basket while and even his malodorous remarks about the wind carries away the chaff. The babies Count Platen are naughty rather than bit­ in the street are carrying their bunches of ter. But this blowing up of Platen's poeti­ stalks, and by the bordering wall an old cal pretensionswas certainly an absurd waste woman is picking up the grains that have of time and gunpowder. Heinrich might fallen in the dust. have amused himself to more purpose with Matilda, the "rose sprinkled with pepper," Heine discovered a remarkable fact about or with the ballerina Francesca. Indeed, he this neighborhood of Lucca, when he was came to think so himself, and his apology writing at the Baths the third book of his should be better known than the original "Reisebilder." "There are no Philistine offence. Platen, he admitted, " might have faces here!" And he adds: "If there are been a great poet, if he had only had a breath Philistines, they are at least Italia Q orange- of poetry in him; he possessed everything Philistines, and not the plump, heavy, needful—pride, irritability, poverty, debts, German potato-Philistines." And these knowledge—everything with the exception Lucchese wear their cloaks and their in­ of poetry. In a word, he had thoroughly dividuality with a delightful flourish which learned the art of poetic cookery—he may even extend to the handles of their wanted nothing but meat and fire to be able knives on any provocation; whereas, he to cook. Still, that does not justify the at­ reminds you, if you offend one of a gather­ tack I made upon him." ing of a dozen Germans, they will call with Happily, in the intervals of war, Heinrich one voice for the police. found time to fall in love. It is true that Of that year of 1828 Heine wrote to at his first meeting with Francesca (it was Freda Roberts, "It was the most splendid then he fell in love) he found also that he year of my life." Young, vigorous, and had a rival—the memory of " Cecco," the exuberant, eager for experience and joy, young abate who had loved Francesca when the " German Apollo" had gone down into she was still a little girl, plaiting straw hats Italy, partly after material for the Morgen- in the valley of the Arno. But Heinrich blatt, full of his success and boyishly de­ resembles Cecco a. little, as Francesca in­ termined to make still more noise with his stantly tells him, except that his hair is too next "Travel Pictures." "This third se­ dark and his eyes too small, and green ries," he wrote to Moser, "shall be a man- rather than blue. Still there is a resem­ of-war, far more fearfully equipped; the blance ; and the dialogue which Francesca cannon shall be of greater calibre, and I improvises on the spot (between the red have discovered quite a new powder for shpper, representing Cecco, and the blue them. Neither shall it carry so much bal­ shpper, representing Francesca) does not last as its predecessor." quite shut out hope from Heinrich. It is the "ballast," however, as opposed He is already captive. " The ballerina's to the enginery of destruction, that remains figure was that of the Graces, yet almost interesting to us, and especially when we frivolous in its hghtness. Her countenance have in mind the scene where Heine wrote. was entirely divine, such as we see in Gre­ It is the portrait of Francesca, the dancer, cian statues, the brow and nose forming an with the red slipper and the blue, and of almost perfectly straight line, the skin clear Matilda, the witty Irishwoman; the delicate and gold-yellow like amber. The black bits of landscape and atmosphere painting; hair which framed its temples in a bright the broad picture of the ruined beauty, oval gave it a childlike turn, and it was Letitia, and her two adorers, the philosopher lighted up by two black, abrupt eyes, as if and the poet; and the exquisite Heinesque with a magic light." Moreover, Francesca's

PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED At the Baths of Lucca 617 upper lip was short, not long Hke an Eng­ gra, then two years old, was to be conveyed lishwoman's. " She often," says Heinrich, to her father at Venice, and Shelley was the "leaped up dancing as she spoke, and it is intermediary between the hysterical Miss possible that dancing was her most natural Clairmont and Lord Byron, who firmly re­ language. And my heart danced ever with fused to see or communicate directly with her, executing the most difficult pas. . . . her. Determined that his daughter should And if I, dear reader, cannot tell thee what be " a Christian and a married woman, if love really is, I can at least describe with possible," Byron was eager to get her away,

Ponte Seralio.—Bagni di Lucca. the utmost accuracy how a man behaves and not only from her mother, but from the whole how he feels when he is enamored among artistic and unpractical Shelley household, the Apennines. For he then behaves like a where, he appeared to think, Allegra might fool; he dances on rocks and hills, beheving "perish of starvation and green fruit, or be that the whole world dances with him." taught to believe that there is no Deity." Accordingly, Allegra was sent to Venice in In the spring of 1818, Shelley and his wife, April, and in the same month the Shelleys Mary, with their two children, and Claire established themselvesat the Bathsof Lucca. Clairmont with AUegra, her daughter and Here they stayed until the last of August, Byron's, travelled into Italy together. AUe- living an easy, out-of-door life, and enjoy- VoL. XXXIX.—62

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mg it thoroughly, as Shelley's letters show, peril. The atmosphere here, unlike that of Whether from domestic disturbances—for the rest of Italy, is diversified with clouds, Claire was as usual troublesome, and the which grow in the middle of the day, and Shelley children were ill—or because of the sometimes bring thunder and lightning and sweet relaxing quality of the air, the poet hail, and decrease toward the evening, leav- found himself that summer almost incapa- ing only those finely woven veils of vapor ble of original work. " I have finished," he which we see in English skies, and flocks of wrote to Peacock, "by taking advantageof a fleecy and slowly moving clouds which all few days of inspiration,—which the Camoe- vanish before sunset; and the nights are for- nie have been lately ever serene, and we very backward in see a star in the east conceding—the fit- at sunset. I take tie poem I began great delight in sending to the press watching the in London." This changes of the at­ end of "Rosalind mosphere. In the and Helen,'' and the evening Mary and translation of Pla­ f^m-: I often take a ride, to's "Symposium," for horses are cheap which latter occu­ in this country. In pied ten days, were the middle of the all he accomplished. day I bathe in a pool In the mornings or fountain formed he read Greek and in the middle of the Latin poetry to forests by a torrent. Mary with a view to It is surrounded on forming her taste; all sides by precipit­ and he was con­ ous rocks, and the stantly urging her water-fall of the to original composi­ stream that forms it tion. At Leghorn, falls into it on one he had just found a side with perpetual manuscript account dashing. Close to of the Cenci, and he it on the top of the wanted his wife to The old church, Benabbio. rocks are alders, make a play of it, and above the great having then great confidence in her dramatic chestnut-trees, whose long and pointed ability and none in his own. A letter to leaves pierce the deep blue sky in strong Peacock in July is worth quoting in full for relief. The water of this pool is as trans­ its vivid picture of the poet al jresco, in the parent as the air. It is exceedingly cold, delicious environment of Bagni. also. My custom is to undress and sit on " Our life here is as unvaried by external the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the per- events as if we were at Marlow," he writes, spiration has subsided, and then to leap " We have been over to the Casino, where from the rock into this fountain—a prac- I cannot say there is anything remarkable, tice in the hot weather excessively refresh- the women being far removed from any thing ing. This torrent is composed, as it were, which the most liberal annotator would in- of a series of pools and water-falls, up terpret into beauty or grace, and apparently which I sometimes amuse myself by climb- possessing no intellectual excellence to com- ing when I bathe, and receiving the spray pensate the deficiency. I assure you it is all over my body, whilst I clamber up the well that it is so, for the dances, especially moist crags with difficulty." the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it would be a Httle dangerous to the newly un­ It is perhaps this same hill stream that frozen senses and imagination of us migra- appears in the scene of the declaration in tors from the neighborhood of the pole. As " By the Fireside," for Browning is said to it is—except in the dark—there can be no have taken for this scene a little gorge near

PRODUCED BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED At the Baths of Lucca 619 the Baths of Lucca, where also he wrote year to the hills, hke the flight of swallows, "In a Balcony," and some other portions and the beggars who desert the hot plains of "Men and Women." . . . The 'queen in ordinary' was a Mrs. Colonel Stisted, as she called herself, Look at the ruined chapel again, the ' sea-goddess with tin ringlets and ven­ Half-way up in the Alpine gorge! erable limbs' of the irrepressible Mrs.Trol- Is that a tower, I point you plain. Or is it a mill, or an iron-forge, lope. In one season the Baths collected Breaks solitude in vain ? Lady Blessington, Count D'Orsay, Lady Walpole, and Mrs. E. A turn, and we stand at B. Browning, the poet­ the heart of things; ess, whose tight sacque The woods are round of black silk gave us us, heaped and dim: From slab to slab how it youngsters a series of slips and springs. caricatures." The thread of water sin­ The Brownings went gle and slim. Through the ravage some to Bagni just for a torrent brings! glimpse, but found it so charming that they But this picture stayed the season. "We might be equally true had both of us," the of innumerable nooks poetess writes, " but he in Italy's hills, while chiefly, the strongest there are some prejudice against the phrases in Mrs. Baths of Lucca; taking Browning's letters them for a sort of wasp's from Bagni that paint nest of scandal and the one place clear in gaming, and expecting the memory. to find everything trod­ Before quoting them, den flat by the conti­ however, it is amusing nental English." That to recall the observa­ is one view of the place tions of the English as it was in the middle traveller, Richard Bur­ of the century. And ton, who spent a few here is an exact picture months of his wild of what it is hke to-day. youth at the Baths; and "We have taken a indeed it was here that sort of eagle's nest in the break-up of his this place—the highest family took place, the house of the highest of unmanageable sons the three villages which going in one direction are called Bagni di and the impetuous A peasant girl of Coi'sena. Lucca, and which lie at Irishman, their father, the heart of a hundred in another. Richard writing of 1840, says: mountains sung to continually by a rushing " In those days, the Lucchese baths were mountain stream. The sound of the river the only place in Italy that could boast of a and of the cicale is all the noise we hear. tolerably cool summer climate, and a few of Austrian drums and carriage-wheels cannot the comforts of life. Sorrento, Montenero, vex us, God be thanked for it. The silence near Leghorn, and the hills about Rome, is full of joy and consolation. . . . were frequented by very few; they came "The air of the place seems to penetrate under the category of ' cheap and nasty.' the heart, and not the lungs alone; it draws Hence Bagni collected what was consid­ you, raises you, excites you. Mountain air ered to be the distinguished society. It had without its keenness—sheathed in Italian its parson from Pisa, even in the days be­ sunshine—think what that must be! And fore the travelling Continental clergyman the beauty and the sohtude—for with a few was known, and this one migrated every paces we get free of the habitations of men—

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all is delightful to me. What is pecuharly wild. The mountain tops seem to have been beautiful and wonderful is the variety of the shaped to a purpose, the little gray-brown shapes of the mountains. They are a multi­ villages are set so exactly right between the tude—and yet there is no hkeness. None, deep green of the chestnut forest and the except where the golden mist comes and liquid sky. Their simple forms are inter­ transfigures them into one glory. For the esting and grow ever finer and richer as one rest, the mountain there wrapped in the descends into the Lucchese plain, reaching chestnut forest is not like that bare peak a real beauty at Barga and picturesque which tilts against the sky—nor hke the ser­ Ghivezzano of the towers, and culminating pent twine of another which seems to move in classic Lucca. and coil in the moving, coiling shadow." It was at Lucca that Heine, after a six­ These are the mountains which, Heine teen-mile walk from Bagni, met on a festi­ found, " true to their Apennine nature, are val day his two friends—Francesca and the not magnificently misshapen in extravagant Irish lady, Matilda. One can see the very Gothic forms; but their nobly rounded, tombstones, with their figures carved by cheerful green shapes seem of themselves della Quercia, on which Matilda made inspired with the civihzation of art, accord­ jokes, till Heinrich told her that a pretty ing melodiously with the blue heaven." woman without religion was hke a flower And this quality of gentleness, of harmony, without perfume. And in this same church of the civilization of nature, is the real charm is the altar where Francesca knelt and of this lovely spot. For, go where one will, prayed passionately. She would not speak even into the farthest recesses of the hills, to Heinrich afterward; and he knew from one cannot get away from the civilization of the look in her eyes that she had been art; there nature, however sohtary, is never thinking of Cecco.

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A corner of Villa.

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T was Bonnat who had se­ this being a condition quite in accordance lected the place. Not be­ with the artistic temperament. cause he had ever been " Doesn't look like much of a place to there—more likely because camp here" suggested Van Cleve, dole­ he had not. Bonnat had fully. been to so many places. As The half a dozen village idlers gath­ an excuse, how ever, he offered the fact that ered about curiously, but offered no sug­ one Scott Hardiman, whom he had known gestions. Of these a sparsely whiskered ten years before at college and who had man and a somewhat heavy individual, since made money in constructive specu­ with rather short trousers, seenied to take lations, owned a summer home on the west precedence. slope of the Nantic range, and had, in a "Any hotel here?" asked Bonnat, of recent and chance meeting, recommended the sparsely whiskered citizen. the scenery in that neighborhood. " Nope, ain't none." Van Cleve, who was slender and wore " Livery stable? " glasses, had said : " Nope." "Now what does a man like that know " People don't come here much." about scenery ? " " Nope ; jes' drummers, an' they don't And Denning, who was sometimes stay over." known as "The Baby" because he was " Whose light wagon and team is that plump and smooth and looked hke one, hitched over there ? " had added : " Ole man Bently's. He's waitin' fer " They are probably blasting out build­ the mail." ing-stone across the valley, running a rail­ " Where does he live ? " road grade along the river-bank, and put­ " Back in the hills west o' here. He ting up a round-house on his property." comes in once a week to get letters from Bonnat was undisturbed. He had some­ his folks in Newbrasky. He's got " thing more than two hundred pounds of "Anywhere near Scott Hardiman's flesh, and unfailing amiability. place?" " If they are not doing so already I am " 'Bout four miles from there, I reckon, quite certain they are about to begin," he by road. He " assented, calmly. " Hardiman is a living But a mild discussion arose at this point advance guard of what men are pleased between the sparsely whiskered citizen just now to call progress." and his heavy-set companion as to the dis­ " We aren't obliged to stop with him, I tance named, during which colloquy it ap­ suppose ? " ventured Van Cleve. peared that Mr. Bently owned a few acres "Well, there is no hotel near there, I be­ of land and a cabin anywhere from three lieve, as yet. Hardiman is a sort of a pio­ to six miles from the new Hardiman place neer, I fancy. I suppose, though, there and considerably higher up among the hills. are denizens of the forest who would shel­ " I presume Hardiman lives in the val­ ter us for a consideration. Or we might ley," said Van Cleve. camp out." The citizen nodded assent. Nevertheless they had gone. They had " Railroad building there ? " This from not notified Hardiman, and when one Denning. evening a little before dusk they had land­ " 'Spect to commence this summer. " ed with their bags and sketching traps on " I'll go over and interview Mr. Bent­ the platform of a little railway station ly," suggested Bonnat. "We are strangers some twelve miles distant from Mr. Hardi- •—perhaps he will remember the scriptural man's roof, and over the hills from it at that, example and be willing to profit by it." they were wholly without further plans—• The interest of the citizens was now di- VOL. XXXIX.—63 62 J

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