ONE:Approchez-vous, Nron, et prenez votre place!Vous vous tutoyez. [92]
FORE:There was no time to lose; the furniture, &c., was sold at a loss, they packed up in haste, found a carriage with great difficulty, and on a cold, bright day in December they set off, they knew not whither.The walls and fortifications were demolished within the last fifty years, and before and since then many a beautiful historic tower and gateway, many a lovely old house and interesting bit of architecture has vanished before the destroying mania of a stupid town council devoid of either education to comprehend or taste to appreciate and preserve the characteristic beauty which, if they had carefully restored and maintained all that was possible of the old, and carried out the new buildings in harmony with them, would have made their city the pearl of Belgium, as Nuremberg is of Germany.
FORE:She had only to choose amongst the great personages who wanted their portraits painted; and she spent the time when she was not working in wandering amid the scenes to visit which had been the dream of her life. Ruins of temples, baths, acqueducts, tombs, and monuments of the vanished Empire, gorgeous churches and palaces of the Renaissance, huge never-ending galleries of statues and pictures, the glories of Greek and of medi?val art; Phidias and Praxiteles, Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, and Leonardo; the picturesque beauty of Rome, as it was then, the delicious gardens, since swept away by the greedy vandalism of their owners; the mighty Colosseum; the solemn desolate Campagna; all filled her mind and imagination and distracted her thoughts from France and the horrors going on there. At Rome in those days there certainly seemed to be everything that could be wished for to make life a paradise upon earth. Besides the natural beauty, the historical and arch?ological interest, and the treasures of art, the magnificence of the ecclesiastical functions, church services, stately processions, and entrancing music were a perpetual delight to her. There is no city in the world, she wrote to a [96] friend, in which one could pass ones time so deliciously as in Rome, even if one were deprived of all the resources of good society.At the beginning of August, Pauline, after making up the accounts, told her father-in-law that she had enough money left only to carry on the household for three months longer, but that if they returned to Brussels it would last twice as long, for they could live there much better at half the cost.
