steps, its
endless corridors, its immense galleries and halls. All was sovereign
pomp blended with death. An icy, penetrating chill fell from the walls.
With a discreet smile the _attache_ owned that the embassy was frozen in
winter and baked in summer. The only part of the building which was at
all lively and pleasant was the first storey, overlooking the Tiber,
which the ambassador himself occupied. From the gallery there, containing
the famous frescoes of Annibale Caracci, one can see the Janiculum, the
Corsini gardens, and the Acqua Paola above San Pietro in Montorio. Then,
after a vast drawing-room comes the study, peaceful and pleasant, and
enlivened by sunshine. But the dining-room, the bed-chambers, and other
apartments occupied by the _personnel_ look out on to the mournful gloom
of a side street. All these vast rooms, twenty and four-and-twenty feet
high, have admirable carved or painted ceilings, bare walls, a few of
them decorated with frescoes, and incongruous furniture, superb pier
tables mingling with modern _bric-a-brac_. And things become abominable
when you enter the gala reception-rooms overlooking the piazza, for there
you no longer find an article of furniture, no longer a hanging, nothing
but disaster, a series of magnificent deserted halls given over to rats
and spiders. The embassy occupies but one of them, where it heaps up its
dusty archives. Near by is a huge hall occupying the height of two
floors, and thus sixty feet in elevation. Reserved by the owner of the
palace, the ex-King of Naples, it has become a mere lumber-room where
_maquettes_, unfinished statues, and a very fine sarcophagus are stowed
away amidst all kinds of remnants. And this is but a part of the palace.
The ground floor is altogether uninhabited; the French "Ecole de Rome"
occupies a corner of the second floor; while the embassy huddles in
chilly fashion in the most habitable corner of the first floor, compelled
to abandon everything else and lock the doors to spare itself the useless
trouble of sweeping. No doubt it is grand to live in the Palazzo Farnese,
built by Pope Paul III and for more than a century inhabited by
cardinals; but how cruel the discomfort and how frightful the melancholy
of this huge ruin, three-fourths of whose rooms are dead, useless,
impossible, cut off from life. And the evenings, oh! the evenings, when
porch, court, stairs, and corridors are invaded by dense gloom, against
which a few smoky gas lamps