The Pot of Basil
9781465677952
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was a very hot day in Colorno, the petty Versailles of the Dukes of Parma. The little channels irrigating the plains all about, and drawn every one from the near depleted basin of the small river which a few miles northward ran into the Po, were spun as thin as silver wire. The effect from a distance was as of a network of snail-tracks, stiffened in a dry morning, and all making for the oasis of the village, where was to be found at least the shade of trees and gardens. Elsewhere there was little. The domains of Don Philip, wrote the Minister Maulevrier, à propos some hounds “de toute beauté” presented to the duke by his devoted father-in-law, Louis XV., were no huntsman’s paradise, since they possessed “ni bois, ni fauve.” The country was like a green tray, rimmed by the low blue ramparts of the Alps and Apennines far distant. In the midst stood Colorno, a dainty confection, as it were, of puff paste and sugar. It lay basking in the sunlight, very white, very sleepy, very empty. Its duke and court were at the capital, ten miles southward, Madame Louise-Elizabeth, its restless scheming duchess, was hastening towards her cruel end at Versailles—she was to die, like her father, like her husband, like her son, like many another relation, of the common scourge, “la petite vérole”—and only the three children of the marriage remained ensconced, for purposes of health and education, at the “résidence d’été.” This country house, “élégante et spacieuse,” this Colorno itself, are very meet in these days to point the moral of vainglory. The palace, where the “Well-beloved’s” eldest and only married daughter wasted her heart and her brains in the persistent endeavour to find kingdoms for her offspring, as lesser mothers try to find “situations” for theirs, the despised home, where “ne cesse de parcourir la carte d’Europe,” chasing this or that crown to its imaginary resting-place on the head of husband or child, has been transformed into a lunatic asylum; the balcony, whence our Juliet leaned to whisper honeyed phrases to her Romeo, is either gone, or witnesses to the rhapsodies of a baser madness; the contiguous houses, where officers and ministers and envoys plenipotentiary kept their state, the lodgings where the smaller fry of parasites and courtiers worried out their little excited lives of intrigue and scandal—all are delivered in this twentieth century to the dry prose of commerce, and only the gilt tracery on a wall here and there, or the sombre emblazonment of a ceiling, testifies to the romance which once glowed and fevered there until it perished consumed in its own heart-burnings. The palace has achieved, one might say, its logical destiny; it survives, but in a bad state of repair mental and material. The ducal gardens also survive, but for the benefit of the “people.” Everywhere, since those days, the flood of democracy has broken through the social dam, and robbed exclusiveness of its most picturesque privileges. It was predestined, it was inevitable; but I prefer, I confess, for my part, to think of Colorno as it lay slumbering, before the vulgarising cataclysm, on that sultry June morning in the year 1759. There came lumbering up the high road from Florence a great travelling carriage drawn by four bays, with a sober-suited postilion to each pair, and a couple of travellers, no more, within. One might have known that the younger of these men—though plainly enough dressed in a suit of black velvet, with his head in a powdered bag-wig and a simple black beaver set on it—was, from the very serene authority of his expression, a person of particular distinction.
