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On our arrival in Florence, we took up our abode on the north side of the Arno, in the same house with our friends the de Fauveaus, and many a delightful hour did I pass in Félicie’s studio, watching her beautiful work with deep interest, and sometimes reading aloud to her the works of our best authors, for she was as good an English scholar as I was, although she could not often be tempted to converse in our language. But we did not stay long under the same roof, for it had been arranged that our summer should be spent in Villeggiatura.
Lord Holland, who then possessed the beautiful villa of Careggi de Medici, in the immediate neighbourhood of Florence, kindly placed it at my mother’s disposition for the summer months of the year 1847, and when I look back upon the time we passed there, a dream of beauty, peace and happiness rises up before me, surrounded by the golden haze of memory and regret. The villa, which is in itself a palace, is situated in a charming garden, and the interior contains spacious and lofty apartments, and, at the time of which I am speaking, had just been embellished by frescoes from the master hand of our countryman George Watts, the illustrious Academician. One in particular, at the entrance of the villa, attracted especial notice. It represented the attack made by the servants of Lorenzo the Magnificent on the physician who attended their beloved master in his last hours, and whom they suspected of wilful neglect, or culpable designs on the life of the august prince. The moment chosen by the painter was that in which the retainers seized upon the medical attendant and ruthlessly cast him into the well, which then still existed in the court of the villa. The artist in question, a friend of Lord Holland, was a resident of Careggi when we arrived and most unwillingly drove him away. Assuredly there was room for us all, and many more, in that large and spacious house, but our painter had that love for solitude and that distaste for the society of strangers so frequently to be found in the artistic nature. He had betaken himself to a pavilion in the garden, and courteously but firmly withstood for a time all our advances at nearer companionship. I well remember writing what I considered a coaxing note, asking him to dine with us on Ash Wednesday, as I knew it was more to his taste to fast than to feast. Slowly and gradually we won our way towards his friendship, and, as I once afterwards told him laughingly, how proud I felt when by degrees he grew tame and would eat out of my hand. From that time we have been friends, and I watched with pride and pleasure his rising fame, and gazed with increasing admiration of years on his splendid creations. Our household was a curious medley. Our family consisted of my mother, my sister, my brother Charles and myself, with our three English servants—the faithful Henry and the two lady’s-maids. The domestics we found in the villa were as follows: the porter (an old soldier) and the gardener and his family, the _babbo_, the _mama_, the son and two daughters good, excellent people—the eldest girl Amalia a little hump-back, or _gobbina_, with a tender heart and loving eyes, her sister Violante—always selected on the occasion of any _festa_ or procession to take the principal part therein, on account of her extreme beauty.