Nineteen years ago! And two years later, after long suffering, like her husband, the last silence fell on this brave and stormy nature. Let us thank God for it as we look out upon Europe and see what her son has made of it. CHAPTER VII THE VILLA BARBERINI. HENRY JAMES It was in the summer of 1898 that some suggestions gathered from the love-story of Châteaubriand and Madame de Beaumont, and jotted down on a sheet of note-paper, led to the writing of _Eleanor_. Madame de Beaumont's melancholy life came to an end in Rome, and the Roman setting imposed itself, so to speak, at once. But to write in Rome itself, played upon by all the influences of a place where the currents of life and thought, so far as those currents are political, historical, or artistic, seem to be running at double tides, would be, I knew, impossible, and we began to make inquiries for a place outside Rome, yet not too far away, where we might spend the spring. We tried to get an apartment at Frascati, but in vain. Then some friend suggested an apartment in the old Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, well known to many an English and French diplomat, especially to the diplomat's wife and children, flying to the hills to escape the summer heat of Rome. We found by correspondence two kind little ladies living in Rome, who agreed to make all the preparations for us, find servants, and provide against a possibly cold spring to be spent in rooms meant only for _villegiatura_ in the summer. We were to go early in March, and fires or stoves must be obtainable, if the weather pinched. The little ladies did everything--engaged servants, and bargained with the Barberini Steward, but they could not bargain with the weather! On a certain March day when the snow lay thick on the olives, and all the furies were wailing round the Alban hills--we arrived. My husband, who had journeyed out with us to settle us in, and was then returning to his London work, was inclined to mocking prophecies that I should soon be back in Rome at a comfortable hotel. Oh, how cold it was that first night!--how dreary on the great stone staircase, and in the bare, comfortless rooms! We looked out over a gray storm-swept Campagna, to a distant line of surf-beaten coast; the kitchen was fifty-two steps below the dining-room; the Neapolitan cook seemed to us a most formidable gentleman, suggesting stilettos, and we sat down to our first meal wondering whether we could possibly stay it out.