The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain


"Ah--what did you say this gentleman's name was?"

"Christopher Colombo!--ze great Christopher Colombo!"

"Christopher Colombo--the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he
do?"

"Discover America!--discover America, Oh, ze devil!"

"Discover America. No--that statement will hardly wash. We are just
from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo
--pleasant name--is--is he dead?"

"Oh, corpo di Baccho!--three hundred year!"

"What did he die of?"

"I do not know!--I can not tell."

"Small-pox, think?"

"I do not know, genteelmen!--I do not know what he die of!"

"Measles, likely?"

"May be--may be--I do not know--I think he die of somethings."

"Parents living?"

"Im-poseeeble!"

"Ah--which is the bust and which is the pedestal?"

"Santa Maria!--zis ze bust!--zis ze pedestal!"

"Ah, I see, I see--happy combination--very happy combination, indeed.
Is--is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust?"

That joke was lost on the foreigner--guides can not master the subtleties
of the American joke.

We have made it interesting for this Roman guide. Yesterday we spent
three or four hours in the Vatican, again, that wonderful world of
curiosities. We came very near expressing interest, sometimes--even
admiration--it was very hard to keep from it. We succeeded though.
Nobody else ever did, in the Vatican museums. The guide was bewildered
--non-plussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary
things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we
never showed any interest in any thing. He had reserved what he
considered to be his greatest wonder till the last--a royal Egyptian
mummy, the best preserved in the world, perhaps. He took us there. He
felt so sure, this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to
him:

"See, genteelmen!--Mummy! Mummy!"

The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as ever.

"Ah,--Ferguson--what did I understand you to say the gentleman's name
was?"

"Name?--he got no name!--Mummy!--'Gyptian mummy!"

"Yes, yes. Born here?"

"No! 'Gyptian mummy!"

"Ah, just so. Frenchman, I presume?"

"No!--not Frenchman, not Roman!--born in Egypta!"

"Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality,
likely. Mummy--mummy. How calm he is--how self-possessed. Is, ah--is
he dead?"

"Oh, sacre bleu, been dead three thousan' year!"

The doctor turned on him savagely:

"Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for
Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose
your vile second-hand carcasses on us!--thunder and lightning, I've a
notion to--to--if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!--or by
George we'll brain you!"

We make it exceedingly interesting for this Frenchman. However, he has
paid us back, partly, without knowing it. He came to the hotel this
morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to
describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant. He
finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics. The observation
was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a
guide to say.

There is one remark (already mentioned,) which never yet has failed to
disgust these guides. We use it always, when we can think of nothing
else to say. After they have exhausted their enthusiasm pointing out
to us and praising the beauties of some ancient bronze image or
broken-legged statue, we look at it stupidly and in silence for five,
ten, fifteen minutes--as long as we can hold out, in fact--and then ask:

"Is--is he dead?"

That conquers the serenest of them. It is not what they are looking for
--especially a new guide. Our Roman Ferguson is the most patient,
unsuspecting, long-suffering subject we have had yet. We shall be sorry
to part with him. We have enjoyed his society very much. We trust he
has enjoyed ours, but we are harassed with doubts.

We have been in the catacombs. It was like going down into a very deep
cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it. The narrow passages
are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pass along, the
hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a
corpse once. There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or
sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every
sarcophagus. The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian
era, of course. Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians
sometimes burrowed to escape persecution. They crawled out at night to
get food, but remained under cover in the day time. The priest told us
that St. Sebastian lived under ground for some time while he was being
hunted; he went out one day, and the soldiery discovered and shot him to
death with arrows. Five or six of the early Popes--those who reigned
about sixteen hundred years ago--held their papal courts and advised with
their clergy in the bowels of the earth. During seventeen years--from
A.D. 235 to A.D. 252--the Popes did not appear above ground. Four were
raised to the great office during that period. Four years apiece, or
thereabouts. It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground
graveyards as places of residence. One Pope afterward spent his entire
pontificate in the catacombs--eight years. Another was discovered in
them and murdered in the episcopal chair. There was no satisfaction in
being a Pope in those days. There were too many annoyances. There are
one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow
passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to
the top with scooped graves its entire length. A careful estimate makes
the length of the passages of all the catacombs combined foot up nine
hundred miles, and their graves number seven millions. We did not go
through all the passages of all the catacombs. We were very anxious to
do it, and made the necessary arrangements, but our too limited time
obliged us to give up the idea. So we only groped through the dismal
labyrinth of St. Callixtus, under the Church of St. Sebastian. In the
various catacombs are small chapels rudely hewn in the stones, and here
the early Christians often held their religious services by dim, ghostly
lights. Think of mass and a sermon away down in those tangled caverns
under ground!

In the catacombs were buried St. Cecilia, St. Agnes, and several other of
the most celebrated of the saints. In the catacomb of St. Callixtus, St.
Bridget used to remain long hours in holy contemplation, and St. Charles
Borromeo was wont to spend whole nights in prayer there. It was also the
scene of a very marvelous thing.

"Here the heart of St. Philip Neri was so inflamed with divine love
as to burst his ribs."

I find that grave statement in a book published in New York in 1808, and
written by "Rev. William H. Neligan, LL.D., M. A., Trinity College,
Dublin; Member of the Archaeological Society of Great Britain."
Therefore, I believe it. Otherwise, I could not. Under other
circumstances I should have felt a curiosity to know what Philip had for
dinner.

This author puts my credulity on its mettle every now and then. He tells
of one St. Joseph Calasanctius whose house in Rome he visited; he visited
only the house--the priest has been dead two hundred years. He says the
Virgin Mary appeared to this saint. Then he continues:

"His tongue and his heart, which were found after nearly a century
to be whole, when the body was disinterred before his canonization,
are still preserved in a glass case, and after two centuries the
heart is still whole. When the French troops came to Rome, and when
Pius VII. was carried away prisoner, blood dropped from it."

To read that in a book written by a monk far back in the Middle Ages,
would surprise no one; it would sound natural and proper; but when it is
seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of
finished education, an LL.D., M. A., and an Archaeological magnate, it
sounds strangely enough. Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for
Neligan's faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

The old gentleman's undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare
freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing
days. Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:

"In the roof of the church, directly above the high altar, is
engraved, 'Regina Coeli laetare Alleluia." In the sixth century
Rome was visited by a fearful pestilence. Gregory the Great urged
the people to do penance, and a general procession was formed. It
was to proceed from Ara Coeli to St. Peter's. As it passed before
the mole of Adrian, now the Castle of St. Angelo, the sound of
heavenly voices was heard singing (it was Easter morn,) Regina
Coeli, laetare! alleluia! quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia!
resurrexit sicut dixit; alleluia!" The Pontiff, carrying in his
hands the portrait of the Virgin, (which is over the high altar and
is said to have been painted by St. Luke,) answered, with the
astonished people, 'Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia!' At the same time
an angel was seen to put up a sword in a scabbard, and the
pestilence ceased on the same day. There are four circumstances
which 'CONFIRM'--[The italics are mine--M. T.]--this miracle: the
annual procession which takes place in the western church on the
feast of St Mark; the statue of St. Michael, placed on the mole of
Adrian, which has since that time been called the Castle of St.
Angelo; the antiphon Regina Coeli which the Catholic church sings
during paschal time; and the inscription in the church."




CHAPTER XXVIII.

From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the
Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the
picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent. We stopped a moment in a
small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St. Michael vanquishing
Satan--a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it
belongs to the reviled "Renaissance," notwithstanding I believe they told
us one of the ancient old masters painted it--and then we descended into
the vast vault underneath.

Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves! Evidently the old masters had
been at work in this place. There were six divisions in the apartment,
and each division was ornamented with a style of decoration peculiar to
itself--and these decorations were in every instance formed of human
bones! There were shapely arches, built wholly of thigh bones; there
were startling pyramids, built wholly of grinning skulls; there were
quaint architectural structures of various kinds, built of shin bones and
the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving
vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were
made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and
toe-nails. Every lasting portion of the human frame was represented in
these intricate designs (they were by Michael Angelo, I think,) and there
was a careful finish about the work, and an attention to details that
betrayed the artist's love of his labors as well as his schooled ability.
I asked the good-natured monk who accompanied us, who did this? And he
said, "We did it"--meaning himself and his brethren up stairs. I could
see that the old friar took a high pride in his curious show. We made
him talkative by exhibiting an interest we never betrayed to guides.

"Who were these people?"

"We--up stairs--Monks of the Capuchin order--my brethren."

"How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?"

"These are the bones of four thousand."

"It took a long time to get enough?"

"Many, many centuries."

"Their different parts are well separated--skulls in one room, legs in
another, ribs in another--there would be stirring times here for a while
if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren might get hold of
the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves
limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer
together than they were used to. You can not tell any of these parties
apart, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, I know many of them."

He put his finger on a skull. "This was Brother Anselmo--dead three
hundred years--a good man."

He touched another. "This was Brother Alexander--dead two hundred and
eighty years. This was Brother Carlo--dead about as long."

Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked reflectively
upon it, after the manner of the grave-digger when he discourses of
Yorick.

"This," he said, "was Brother Thomas. He was a young prince, the scion
of a proud house that traced its lineage back to the grand old days of
Rome well nigh two thousand years ago. He loved beneath his estate. His
family persecuted him; persecuted the girl, as well. They drove her from
Rome; he followed; he sought her far and wide; he found no trace of her.
He came back and offered his broken heart at our altar and his weary life
to the service of God. But look you. Shortly his father died, and
likewise his mother. The girl returned, rejoicing. She sought every
where for him whose eyes had used to look tenderly into hers out of this
poor skull, but she could not find him. At last, in this coarse garb we
wear, she recognized him in the street. He knew her. It was too late.
He fell where he stood. They took him up and brought him here. He never
spoke afterward. Within the week he died. You can see the color of his
hair--faded, somewhat--by this thin shred that clings still to the
temple. This, [taking up a thigh bone,] was his. The veins of this
leaf in the decorations over your head, were his finger-joints, a hundred
and fifty years ago."

This business-like way of illustrating a touching story of the heart by
laying the several fragments of the lover before us and naming them, was
as grotesque a performance, and as ghastly, as any I ever witnessed. I
hardly knew whether to smile or shudder. There are nerves and muscles in
our frames whose functions and whose methods of working it seems a sort
of sacrilege to describe by cold physiological names and surgical
technicalities, and the monk's talk suggested to me something of this
kind. Fancy a surgeon, with his nippers lifting tendons, muscles and
such things into view, out of the complex machinery of a corpse, and
observing, "Now this little nerve quivers--the vibration is imparted to
this muscle--from here it is passed to this fibrous substance; here its
ingredients are separated by the chemical action of the blood--one part
goes to the heart and thrills it with what is popularly termed emotion,
another part follows this nerve to the brain and communicates
intelligence of a startling character--the third part glides along this
passage and touches the spring connected with the fluid receptacles that
lie in the rear of the eye. Thus, by this simple and beautiful process,
the party is informed that his mother is dead, and he weeps." Horrible!

I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this
place when they died. He answered quietly:

"We must all lie here at last."

See what one can accustom himself to.--The reflection that he must some
day be taken apart like an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner
is gone, and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did
not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he
were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well
on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which
possibly they lacked at present.

Here and there, in ornamental alcoves, stretched upon beds of bones, lay
dead and dried-up monks, with lank frames dressed in the black robes one
sees ordinarily upon priests. We examined one closely. The skinny hands
were clasped upon the breast; two lustreless tufts of hair stuck to the
skull; the skin was brown and sunken; it stretched tightly over the cheek
bones and made them stand out sharply; the crisp dead eyes were deep in
the sockets; the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose
being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and
brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a
weird laugh a full century old!

It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can
imagine. Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke
this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done
laughing at it yet. At this moment I saw that the old instinct was
strong upon the boys, and I said we had better hurry to St. Peter's.
They were trying to keep from asking, "Is--is he dead?"

It makes me dizzy, to think of the Vatican--of its wilderness of statues,
paintings, and curiosities of every description and every age. The "old
masters" (especially in sculpture,) fairly swarm, there. I can not write
about the Vatican. I think I shall never remember any thing I saw there
distinctly but the mummies, and the Transfiguration, by Raphael, and some
other things it is not necessary to mention now. I shall remember the
Transfiguration partly because it was placed in a room almost by itself;
partly because it is acknowledged by all to be the first oil painting in
the world; and partly because it was wonderfully beautiful. The colors
are fresh and rich, the "expression," I am told, is fine, the "feeling"
is lively, the "tone" is good, the "depth" is profound, and the width is
about four and a half feet, I should judge. It is a picture that really
holds one's attention; its beauty is fascinating. It is fine enough to
be a Renaissance. A remark I made a while ago suggests a thought--and a
hope. Is it not possible that the reason I find such charms in this
picture is because it is out of the crazy chaos of the galleries? If
some of the others were set apart, might not they be beautiful? If this
were set in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast
galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome? If, up to
this time, I had seen only one "old master" in each palace, instead of
acres and acres of walls and ceilings fairly papered with them, might I
not have a more civilized opinion of the old masters than I have now? I
think so. When I was a school-boy and was to have a new knife, I could
not make up my mind as to which was the prettiest in the show-case, and I
did not think any of them were particularly pretty; and so I chose with a
heavy heart. But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no
glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see
how handsome it was. To this day my new hats look better out of the shop
than they did in it with other new hats. It begins to dawn upon me, now,
that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the
galleries may be uniform beauty after all. I honestly hope it is, to
others, but certainly it is not to me. Perhaps the reason I used to
enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there
were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go
through the list. I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the
Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen
courses. One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen
frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

There is one thing I am certain of, though. With all the Michael
Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos and the other old masters, the sublime
history of Rome remains unpainted! They painted Virgins enough, and
popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost,
and these things are all they did paint. "Nero fiddling o'er burning
Rome," the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred
thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the coliseum, to
see two skillful gladiators hacking away each others' lives, a tiger
springing upon a kneeling martyr--these and a thousand other matters
which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only in
books--not among the rubbish left by the old masters--who are no more, I
have the satisfaction of informing the public.

They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical scene, and
one only, (of any great historical consequence.) And what was it and why
did they choose it, particularly? It was the Rape of the Sabines, and
they chose it for the legs and busts.

I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also
--even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and monks looking down in
meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat--and therefore I
drop ill nature to thank the papal government for so jealously guarding
and so industriously gathering up these things; and for permitting me, a
stranger and not an entirely friendly one, to roam at will and unmolested
among them, charging me nothing, and only requiring that I shall behave
myself simply as well as I ought to behave in any other man's house. I
thank the Holy Father right heartily, and I wish him long life and plenty
of happiness.

The Popes have long been the patrons and preservers of art, just as our
new, practical Republic is the encourager and upholder of mechanics. In
their Vatican is stored up all that is curious and beautiful in art; in
our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics.
When a man invents a new style of horse-collar or discovers a new and
superior method of telegraphing, our government issues a patent to him
that is worth a fortune; when a man digs up an ancient statue in the
Campagna, the Pope gives him a fortune in gold coin. We can make
something of a guess at a man's character by the style of nose he carries
on his face. The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses,
and they bear a deal of character about them.

The guide showed us a colossal statue of Jupiter, in the Vatican, which
he said looked so damaged and rusty--so like the God of the Vagabonds
--because it had but recently been dug up in the Campagna. He asked how
much we supposed this Jupiter was worth? I replied, with intelligent
promptness, that he was probably worth about four dollars--may be four
and a half. "A hundred thousand dollars!" Ferguson said. Ferguson
said, further, that the Pope permits no ancient work of this kind to
leave his dominions. He appoints a commission to examine discoveries
like this and report upon the value; then the Pope pays the discoverer
one-half of that assessed value and takes the statue. He said this
Jupiter was dug from a field which had just been bought for thirty-six
thousand dollars, so the first crop was a good one for the new farmer.
I do not know whether Ferguson always tells the truth or not, but I
suppose he does. I know that an exorbitant export duty is exacted upon
all pictures painted by the old masters, in order to discourage the sale
of those in the private collections. I am satisfied, also, that genuine
old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and
most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm. I
proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it
was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it
considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded
not to take it.

I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it:

"Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth TO MEN OF GOOD WILL!" It is
not good scripture, but it is sound Catholic and human nature.

This is in letters of gold around the apsis of a mosaic group at the side
of the 'scala santa', church of St. John Lateran, the Mother and Mistress
of all the Catholic churches of the world. The group represents the
Saviour, St. Peter, Pope Leo, St. Silvester, Constantine and Charlemagne.
Peter is giving the pallium to the Pope, and a standard to Charlemagne.
The Saviour is giving the keys to St. Silvester, and a standard to
Constantine. No prayer is offered to the Saviour, who seems to be of
little importance any where in Rome; but an inscription below says,
"Blessed Peter, give life to Pope Leo and victory to king Charles." It
does not say, "Intercede for us, through the Saviour, with the Father,
for this boon," but "Blessed Peter, give it us."

In all seriousness--without meaning to be frivolous--without meaning to
be irreverent, and more than all, without meaning to be blasphemous,--I
state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I
have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome:

First--"The Mother of God"--otherwise the Virgin Mary.

Second--The Deity.

Third--Peter.