EDMONDO DE AMICIS

The Translation by Edith Wharton.

The G—­s were living in the country, near Florence, when the Italian army began preparations to advance upon Rome.  In the family the enterprise was regarded with disapproval.  The father, the mother, and the two grown daughters, all ardent Catholics and temperate patriots, talked of moral measures.

“We don’t profess to understand anything about politics,” Signora G—–­ would say to her friends; “I am especially ignorant; in fact, I am afraid I should find it rather difficult to explain why I think as I do.  But I can’t help it; I have a presentiment.  There is something inside me that keeps saying:  ’This is not the right way for them to go to Rome; they ought not to go, they must not go!’ I remember how things were in forty-eight, and in fifty-nine and sixty; well, in those days I never was frightened, I never had the feeling of anxiety that I have now; I always thought that things would come right in the end.  But now, you may say what you please, I see nothing but darkness ahead.  You may laugh as much as you like... pray heaven we don’t have to cry one of these days!  I don’t believe that day is so far off.”

The only one of the household who thought differently was the son, a lad of twenty, just re-reading his Roman history, and boiling over with excitement.  To mention Rome before him was to declare battle, and in one of these conflicts feeling had run so high that it had been unanimously decided not to touch upon the subject in future.

One evening, early in September, one of the official newspapers announced that the Italian troops had actually entered the Papal States.  The son was bursting with joy.  The father read the article, sat thinking awhile, and then, shaking his head, muttered:  “No!” and again:  “No!” and a third time:  “No!”

“But I beg your pardon, father!” shouted the boy, all aflame.

“Don’t let us begin again,” the mother gently interposed; and that evening nothing more was said.  But the next night something serious happened.  The lad, just before going to bed, announced, without preamble, as though he were saying the most natural thing in the world, that he meant to go to Rome with the army.

There was a general outcry of surprise and indignation, followed by a storm of reproaches and threats.  No decent person would willingly be present at such scenes as were about to be enacted; it was enough that, as Italians, they were all in a measure to blame for what had happened, without deliberately assuming the shame of being an eye-witness; there was nothing one could not forgive in a lad of good family, except (it was his mother who spoke) this craze to go and see A poor old man bombarded. A fine war!  A glorious triumph, indeed!

When they had ended the lad set his teeth, tore in bits the paper clutched between his fingers, and, lighting a candle, flung out of the room, stamping his feet like an Italian actor representing an angry king.