What I Remember, Volume 2

nglish colony at Florence to the baths of Lucca during the summer months. Almost all Italians, who can in anywise afford to do so

which partly lived with foreigners, and had adopted in many respects their modes and habits. Those Italians, however, who did leave their F

e was no good sleeping-place between Florence and Lucca-nor indeed is there such now-and the journey from the capital of Tuscany to that of the little Duchy of Lucca, now done by rail in less than two hours, was quite

iderable village gathered round the lower bridge over the Lima, at which travellers from Florence first arrived. Here were the assembly rooms, the reading room, the principal baths, and the gaming-tables-for in those pleasant wicked days the remote little Lucca baths wer

the Duke's villa was situated there. The Villa had more the pretension-a very little more-of looking something like

oods. The whole surrounding country indeed is one great chesnut forest, and the various little villages, most of them picturesque in the highest degree, which crown the summits of the surrounding hills, are all of them closely hedge

in the peninsula. Servants from the Lucchese, and especially from the district I am here speaking of, were, and are still, I believe, much prized. Lucca,

t woods, seemed to have been created solely for artistic and picnic purposes. The Saturnian nature of the life lived in them may be conceived from the information once given me

ifferent groups of the English rusticating world, according to the selection of their quarters in either of the above three little settlements. The "gay" world preferred the "Ponte," where the gaming-tables and ballrooms were

ding Tuscan wine, and was as much a fixed and invariable matter as a penny for a penny bun. Those who wanted other wine generally bro

four-score years is apt to inspire one with; but I used to find it amazingly pleasant once upon a time. It is a singular fact, which the remembrance of those days suggests to me, and which I recommend to the attention of Mr. Galton and h

e of Parma should become vacant, the reigning Duke of Lucca should succeed to it, while his duchy of Lucca should be united to Florence. This change took place while I was still a Florentine. The Duke of Lucca would non

summer there, and give constant very pleasant, but very little royal, balls at his villa. The Tuscan satirist Giusti, in the celebrated little poem in which he chara

uke's Protestantism, I suspect, limited itself to, and showed itself in, his dislike and resistance to being bothered by the rulers of neighbouring states into bothering anybody else about their religious opinions. As for his place in the "roll of tyrants," he was always accused of (or praised for) liberalising ideas and tendencies, which would in those days have very soon put an end to him

by the exertions of a lady, who assuredly cannot be forgotten by any one who ever knew the Baths in those days, or for many years afterwards-Mrs. Stisted. Unlike the rest of the world she lived neither at the "Ponte," nor at the "Villa," nor at the "Bagni Caldi," but at "The Cottage," a little habitation on the bank of the stream about half-way between

e comes the Queen of the Baths!" "He calls me his Queen," said she, turning to the surrounding circle with a magnificent wave of the hand and del

raised for performance on her favourite instrument. The arm probably was, or had once been, a handsome one. The large grey head, and the large blue eyes, and the drooping curls, were also raised simultaneously, and the player looked singularly like the picture of King David similarly employed, which I have seen as a frontispiece in an ol

among her subjects-her subjects, for neither I nor anybody else ever heard him called King of the Baths!-in an old-fashioned, very shabby and very high-hung phaeton, sometimes with her niece Charlotte-an excellent

bring back his body to be buried in the place they had inhabited for so many years, and with which their names were so indissolubly entwined in the memory of all who knew them-which means all the generations of nomad frequenters of the Baths for ma

a servant of hers to the baths of Lucca, who would be in charge of goods which would occupy the entire interior of the carriage. She then obtained, what was often accorded without much difficulty in those days, from both the Pontifical and the Tuscan Governments, a lascia passare for the contents of the carriage as bona fide roba usata-"used up, or second-hand goods." And under this denomination the poor old colonel, packed in the carriage together with his beloved violoncello, pass

deception as regarded the custom-house officials; for that if any article was

laced at the head of the grave, in order that she might be present without standing during the service. The chair was well known, because the queen, both at the Baths and at Florence, was

of the baths of Lucca, all pleasant or laughable. But I must conclude by the story of a tragedy,

r, one English and one Irish-chamberlains, and a third, who, though a German, was, from having married an Englishwoman, and habitually speaking English, and living with Englishmen, much the same, at least

rongly attached to him. It is not necessary to print his name. He has gone to his account. But it might neve

as she is, I believe, still living, and as the memory of that time cannot but be a painful one to her, it is as well to suppress it. The lady, as I have said, was handsome and young, and of course all the young fellows who got a chance flirted

name I mention in telling my story because much blame was cast upon him at the time by people in Rome, in Florence, and at the Baths, who did not know the facts as enti

o it was that the chamberlain sent a challenge to the banker. The latter declined to accept it on the ground that he was a banker and not a fighting man, and that his business position would have been materially injured by his fighting a duel. The Irishman might have made the most of this triumph, such as i

was personally strongly opposed to it. In the case of his own favourite chamberlain, too, his displeasure was likely to be extreme. But in the neighbourhood of the Baths the frontier line which divides the Duchy of Modena from that of Lucca is a very irregular and intricate one. A little below the "Ponte" at the Baths, the Lima falls into the Serchio, and the up

morrow, except the Duke himself. Many of the women even knew it perfectly well. The chamberlain getting the Duke into conversation on the subject of the frontier, learned from him that a certain h

hs. Plowden, who, as a sedate business man was less intimate with the generality of the young men at the Baths, was accompanied only by his second; his adversary was attended by a

ere earnest with him during their drive to the ground not to take his adversary's life, beseeching him to remember how heavy a load on his mind would such a deed be during the whole future of his own. Not a soul of the whole society of the Baths, who by this t

to distress themselves; he had no intention of killing the fellow, but would content hi

rishman's well-directed bullet whistled close to Plowden's head, but

ey of the Serchio, at no great distance from the mouth of the Turrite Cava gorge. There was a young medical man among tho

iety of the place. But it struck me that he was the man for the occasion. So I rushed off to the Baths in one of the bagherini (as the little light gigs of the country are called) which had conveyed the parties to the ground, and knocked up Sir

d placed himself in it-not before he had taken the precaution of slinging a bottle of pale ale to either pole of his equipage. He wore a very wide-brimmed straw hat, a suit of professional black, and carried a large white sunshade. And thus accoutred, and accompanied by fou

o pronounce the case an absolutely hopeless one. After a few hours of agony, the b

atastrophe; also the English clergyman officiating at the Baths came out. And the scene in that large, nearly bare, upper chamber of the little inn was a strange one. The clergyman began praying by

nutes after the catastrophe. But the Duke strove by personal application to induce the Grand Duke of Tuscany to banish Plowden from his dominions, which, to the young banker, one branch of whose business was a

d whenever I have since visited that singularly romantic glen of Turrite Cava, its deep