“I suppose he has been raking too much, and wants a little rest.  Lent will be good for him.”

“What, he!  The Marchese Lamberto raking!  You don’t know him.  But he seems quite broken down; I should say, that he had got something on his mind, if it was not impossible.  He never had any trouble in his life; and never did anything he ought not to do, I believe.  But I confess he puzzles me now.  Good-night.  God bless you, Paolina mia!”

That was on the Friday; and the Diva’s last appearance was to take place on the following Sunday.

CHAPTER II

The Corso

The institution of Carnival and Lent in Italy seems very much as if it arose from a practical conviction in the minds of the Italians that they cannot serve two masters,—­at least at the same time,—­ Mammon in all his forms is to be the acknowledged and exclusive lord of the hour during the first period, on condition that higher and holier claims to service shall be as unreservedly recognized when the second shall have set in.

     “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
     Sermons and soda water the day after.”

Byron has given us the rule with the most orthodox accuracy.  Whether the second portion of the prescription is observed as heartily, punctually, and universally as the first, may be doubted.  But in all outward form and ceremony the violence of the contrast between the two seasons is acted out to the letter; is, or was, as may be perhaps more correctly said now-a-days; for both Carnival jollity and licence, and Lent strictness, are from year to year less observed than used to be the case.  At Rome, Mother Church exhorts her subjects to feast and laugh in Carnival, in nowise less earnestly or imperatively than she enjoins on them fasting and penances for having laughed in Lent.  But her subjects will do neither the one nor the other.  And when one hears reiterated complaints in Roman pulpits of pipings to which no dancers have responded, and the vain exhortations of the ecclesiastical authorities to the people to Carnival frolic and festivity, one is reminded of our own Archbishop’s “Book of Sports,” and led to make comparisons, by which hangs a very long tale.

Great Pan died once upon a time.  And Carnival, as it used to be, is with much else dying now in Italy.  But in the days to which the incidents here narrated belong, the difference between Carnival and Lent was as marked as that between day and night.

More marked indeed.  For between day and night there is twilight, but the transition from Carnival to Lent is as sudden as a plunge from sunshine into cold water.  Carnival ends at twelve o’clock on the night of Shrove Tuesday.  And the theory of its observance is, or was, that the fun and revelry should grow ever more fast and furious up to the last permitted moment.  Then, the clock strikes; the lights are put out, Carnival dies amid one last hurrah.  And maskers and revellers go home to rise the next morning with grave and perhaps yellow faces.