However It Was, I Took The Apartment, And Found It, Though
Small, Apt For Me, As Ariosto Said Of His House, And I Dwelt In It With
My Family A Month Or More In Great Comfort And Content.
In fact, it
seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of
passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX.
As they are under
Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the
Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the
fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe
that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero
had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told
me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal
progress. At any rate, I had so long resigned the hope of revisiting the
quiet scene that when I revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of
ages, and one day found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from
something like a hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called
Via del Gambero still existed in that neighborhood. I said that I had
once lodged in it forty-odd years before; but I believed it had been
demolished. Not at all, the shopman said; it was just behind his place;
and what was the number of the house? I told him, and he laughed for joy
in being able to do me a pleasure; me, a stranger from the strange land
of sky-scratchers _(grattacieli),_ as the Italians not inadequately
translate sky-scrapers. If I would favor him through his back shop he
would show me how close I was upon it; and from his threshold he pointed
to the corner twenty yards off, which, when I had turned it, left me
almost at my own door.
In that transmuted Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged,
and there was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had
sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible youth. I had
not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing
across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I
might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious
question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and
what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the
Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to
the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was
no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a
chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there
behind me if I was not careful.
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