On the first day of the New Year, according to long-established custom, there was a grand reception in the evening at the palace of the Cardinal Legate.  It was to be, as always on that occasion, a very grand affair.  All the diamonds, and all the old state carriages, and all the liveries in Ravenna were put in requisition.  Old coats, gorgeously bedizened with broad worsted lace of brilliant colours, and preserved for many a year carefully, but not wholly successfully, against time and moth, were taken by fours and fives from, the cypress-wood chests in old family mansions, where they lay in peace from year’s end to year’s end if no marriage or other great family solemnity intervened to give them an extra turn of service, and were used to turn dependants of all sorts into liveried servants for the nonce; and nobody imagined or hoped that anybody else would look upon this display as anything else than absolute and frank ostentation.  Nobody supposed that any human being would be led into believing that this state indicated the ordinary mode of life of the persons who exhibited it.  Everybody in Italy has been for so many generations so very much poorer than his forefathers were, that such a state of things has long since been accepted by universal consent as a normal one; and it is understood on all hands that these fitful displays of the remnants of former grandeur, this vain revisiting of the glimpses of the moon by the ghosts of long-departed glories, shall be taken and allowed as protests on behalf of the bearers of old noble names to the effect that their ancestors did really once live in a style conformable to their ideas—­that they perfectly know how these things should be done, and would be found quite prepared to resume their proper state, if only the good old days of prosperity should come again.

And there is the good as well as the seamy side (not, alas, to the old liveries! for they had been mostly turned and turned again too often); but to the feelings and social manners which prompted such a manifestation of them.  At least, in such a condition of social manners and feelings mere wealth was not installed on the throne of Mammon in the eyes of all men.  If one of the old coaches was more pitiably rickety than the rest; if the ancient-fashioned coat of some long-descended marchese was itself as threadbare as the old family liveries; if some widowed contessa had crept out from the last habitable corner of her dilapidated palazzo, where she was known to live on a modicum of chicory-water, brought in a tumbler from the nearest cafe, and a crust; not on any such account was there the smallest tendency towards a derisive smile on the lip, or in the mind of any man, at these pitiable attempts to keep up appearances, which everybody considered it right to keep up.  Not on any such account was the stately courtesy of the Legate’s reception in the smallest degree modified.  It was subject, indeed, to many modifications; but these were wholly irrespective of any such circumstances.