lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children,
who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the
last word on his lips being ‘Vatterlo.’
It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte’s boots were so
wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their
own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and
dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of
all human knowledge, when he was in full speech – mischances which
were not rendered the less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted
in his face. To put an end to one conference with Low, he had to
go to a table, and read a book: when it was the finest spectacle I
ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume, like a bootjack,
and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.
He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his
shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet. So was Dr.
Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
Mawworm’s, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires,
hovered about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions
in the air. He was almost as good as Low, though the latter was
great at all times – a decided brute and villain, beyond all
possibility of mistake. Low was especially fine at the last, when,
hearing the doctor and the valet say, ‘The Emperor is dead!’ he
pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by
exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, ‘Ha! ha! Eleven minutes
to six! The General dead! and the spy hanged!’ This brought the
curtain down, triumphantly.
There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds,
whither we removed as soon as our three months’ tenancy of the Pink
Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the
town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with
statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of
orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias. All
its apartments are beautiful in their proportions and decorations;
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Dickens, Charles – Pictures From Italy
but the great hall, some fifty feet in height, with three large
windows at the end, overlooking the whole town of Genoa, the
harbour, and the neighbouring sea, affords one of the most
fascinating and delightful prospects in the world. Any house more
cheerful and habitable than the great rooms are, within, it would
be difficult to conceive; and certainly nothing more delicious than
the scene without, in sunshine or in moonlight, could be imagined.
It is more like an enchanted place in an Eastern story than a grave
and sober lodging.
How you may wander on, from room to room, and never tire of the
wild fancies on the walls and ceilings, as bright in their fresh
colouring as if they had been painted yesterday; or how one floor,
or even the great hall which opens on eight other rooms, is a
spacious promenade; or how there are corridors and bed-chambers
above, which we never use and rarely visit, and scarcely know the
way through; or how there is a view of a perfectly different
character on each of the four sides of the building; matters
little. But that prospect from the hall is like a vision to me. I
go back to it, in fancy, as I have done in calm reality a hundred
times a day; and stand there, looking out, with the sweet scents
from the garden rising up about me, in a perfect dream of
happiness.
There lies all Genoa, in beautiful confusion, with its many
churches, monasteries, and convents, pointing up into the sunny
sky; and down below me, just where the roofs begin, a solitary
convent parapet, fashioned like a gallery, with an iron across at
the end, where sometimes early in the morning, I have seen a little
group of dark-veiled nuns gliding sorrowfully to and fro, and
stopping now and then to peep down upon the waking world in which