The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
General
The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. Volume 6 (of 6): Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 6
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de
Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 1768-1848
[Sidenote: Padua.]
San Antonio di Padova, known as _Il Santo_, presents a Grecianized
Gothic monument, a style peculiar to the old churches of Venetia. The
Cappella del Santo is by Giacomo Sansovino[219] and Francesco[220] his
son: one perceives it at once; the ornaments and the form are in the
same manner as the _loggetta_ in the steeple of St. Mark.
A _signora_, in a green gown and a straw hat covered with a veil, was
praying before the Cappella del Santo; a servant in livery was also
praying, behind her: I presumed that she was offering up her prayers
for the relief of some moral or physical ailment; I was not mistaken. I
saw her again in the street: she was a woman of about forty, pale and
thin, walking stiffly and with a look of suffering; I had guessed her
love or her paralysis. She had left the church with hope: during the
space of time while she was sending up her fervent orisons to Heaven,
did she not forget her pain, was she not really cured?
Il Santo abounds in mausoleums, among which Bembo's is famous. In the
cloisters stands the tomb of young d'Orbesan, who died in 1595:
Gallus eram, putavi, morior, opes una parentum!
D'Orbesan's French epitaph ends with a line which a great poet would
like to have written:
Car il n'est si beau jour qui n'amène sa nuit[221].
Charles Gui Patin[222] is buried in the cathedral: his wag of a
father[223] was no longer there to save him, he who had "treated a
gentleman of seven years old, who was bled thirteen times and cured in
a fortnight, as though by a miracle."
The ancients excelled in funeral inscriptions:
"Here lies Epictetus[224]," said his monumental pillar, "who was a
slave, disfigured, poor as Irus, yet a favourite of the gods."
Camoens, among the moderns, composed the most magnificent of epitaphs,
that of John III. of Portugal[225]:
"Who lies in this great sepulchre? What is he whom the illustrious
arms on this massive scutcheon indicate? Nothing! For that is what
all things come to.... May the earth lie as light on him now as he,
formerly, lay heavy on the Moor."
My Paduan _cicerone_ was a chatterbox, very different from my Antonio
of Venice: he spoke to me at every turn of "that great tyrant
Angelo[226];" in the streets, he told me the name of every shop and
every café; at Il Santo, he would absolutely show me the well-preserved
tongue of the preacher of the Adriatic[227]. Might not the tradition
of those sermons come from the songs which, in the middle-ages, the
fishermen, following the example of the Ancient Greeks, used to sing to
the fishes to charm them? A few of these pelagic ballads still remain
to us, in Anglo-Saxon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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