The Complete Travel Books of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells

for her presence, he would hardly go, and that there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at her heels—to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation—to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or, turning round at the caffè encounter his pleading gaze—that all this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza! This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.

      Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her father, and after that to make her acquaintance.

      One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to me with a joyous air and said:

      “I am in lofe.”

      The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person, I listened with tempered effusion.

      “It is a blonde again?”

      “Yes, you have right; blonde again.”

      “And pretty?”

      “Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her—come si dice!—immensamente.” “And where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?”

      “I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet—only with the eyes. The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not much—no. But!”

      Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime prudence to know the lady’s fortune better than herself, before herself? These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write nobile after his Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom’s friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence—a boy’s success at school, an advocate’s triumphal passage of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest’s first mass, a nun’s novitiate, a birth, an amputation—is the subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around the victim’s door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break into vivas that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence. The naïve commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as it stole out in different ways. “You know my friend Marco?” asked an acquaintance one day. “Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He doesn’t want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates women, and is very hard to suit. Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!”

      It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the spouses attend five o’clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o’clock. Civil marriage is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard as a President elect in our times at home.

      There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed, she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.

      The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another’s child. Consequently the compare was usually a client of the noble parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane, in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents’ house was introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather’s part, of giving a present,—usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers of tight little glass cases I have noticed,—half bed and half coffin,—containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or solemnity of any kind.

      For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the Scuole del Sacramento, instituted for that purpose. To one of these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the society’s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier,—with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended, and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry it in the procession.

      Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when, according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having seen his body deposited in the church, “fell to weeping and howling, tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.” Decenter customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.

      Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth