Gambara | Page 4

to glance at his costume, which was rather more ornate
than the rules of French taste allow. He pulled down his collar and his
black velvet waistcoat, over which hung many festoons of the thick
gold chain that is made at Venice; then, having arranged the folds of his
cloak by a single jerk of his left shoulder, draping it gracefully so as to
show the velvet lining, he started again on parade, indifferent to the
glances of the vulgar.
As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black
enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais-Royal, but as
a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the houses
as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till he
reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street-- a
sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of the
Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a careless servant to

leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the staircase.
The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's
wife craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour
was not unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim.
Earlier, he might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut
out. Tempted by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting,
to have followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for
a day, thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by a
thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to believe
in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under the
promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age when
romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say, an
experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?
The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess, and
among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But this
would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning to
think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.
This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of
suspicion to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had
been welcomed in Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a
man always finds there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name,
two hundred thousand francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To
such a man banishment could but be a pleasure tour; his property was
simply sequestrated, and his friends let him know that after an absence
of two years he might return to his native land without danger.
After rhyming /crudeli affanni/ with /i miei tiranni/ in a dozen or so of
sonnets, and maintaining as many hapless Italian refugees out of his
own purse, Count Andrea, who was so unlucky as to be a poet, thought
himself released from patriotic obligations. So, ever since his arrival,
he had given himself up recklessly to the pleasures of every kind which
Paris offers /gratis/ to those who can pay for them. His talents and his

handsome person won him success among women, whom he adored
collectively as beseemed his years, but among whom he had not as yet
distinguished a chosen one. And indeed this taste was, in him,
subordinate to those for music and poetry which he had cultivated from
his childhood; and he thought success in these both more difficult and
more glorious to achieve than in affairs of gallantry, since nature had
not inflicted on him the obstacles men take most pride in defying.
A man, like many another, of complex nature, he was easily fascinated
by the comfort of luxury, without which he could hardly have lived;
and, in the same way, he clung to the social distinctions which his
principles contemned. Thus his theories as an artist, a thinker, and a
poet were in frequent antagonism with his tastes, his feelings, and his
habits as a man of rank and wealth; but he comforted himself for his
inconsistencies by recognizing them in many Parisians, like himself
liberal by policy and aristocrats by nature.
Hence it was not without some uneasiness that he found himself, on
December 31, 1830, under a Paris