In an album of 'Confessions' at his cousin's, the Marchesa d'Ateleta,
against the question--'What would you most like to be?' he had written,
'A Roman prince.'
Arriving in Rome about the end of September, he set up his 'home' in the
Palazzo Zuccari, near the Trinita de' Monti, where the obelisk of Pius
VI. marks with its shadow the passing hours. The whole of October was
devoted to furnishing them. When the rooms were all finished and
decorated to his taste, he passed some days of invincible melancholy and
loneliness in his new abode. It was a St. Martin's summer, a 'Springtime
of the Dead,' calmly sad and sweet, in which Rome lay all golden, like a
city of the Far East, under a milk-white sky, diaphanous as the
firmament reflected in Southern seas.
All this languor of atmosphere and light, in which things seemed to lose
their substance and reality, oppressed the young man with an infinite
weariness, an inexpressible sense of discontent, of discomfort, of
solitude, emptiness and home-sickness, mostly, no doubt, the result of
the change of climate and customs.
It was just this, that he was entering upon a new phase of life. Would
he find therein the woman and the work capable of dominating his heart
and becoming an object in life to him? Within himself he felt neither
the conviction of power nor the presage of fame or happiness.
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