Most of the offerings were from what we never got out of the habit of styling “foreigners.” There were a few snobbish-looking English cards,—one with a sentence, considerately scribbled in French—“_Mille et mille compliments_.” So far as our inspection went, there was not one that bore an American address. Nor did we leave ours as exceptions to this deficiency in National appreciation of genius and artistic power—or National paucity of sentimentality.
“DO NOT go to Rome!” friends at home had implored by letter and word of mouth, prior to our sailing from the other side. English acquaintances and friends caught up the cry. In Paris, it swelled into impassioned adjuration, reiterated in so many forms, and at times so numerous and unseasonable that we nervously avoided the remotest allusion to the Eternal City in word. But sleeping and waking thoughts were tormented by mental repetitions that might, or might not be the whispers of guardian angels.
“Do not go to Rome! Do not thou or you go to Rome! Do not ye or you go to Rome!”
Thus ran the changes in the burden of admonition and thought. Especially, “Do not ye or you go to Rome!”
“Go, if you are bent upon it, me dear!” said a kind English lady. “Your husband is robust, and it may be as you and he believe, that your health requires a mild and sedative climate. But do not take your dear daughters. The air of Rome is deadly to young English and American girls. Quite a blight, I assure you!”
Said one of our Paris bankers to Caput:—“I can have no conceivable interest in trying to turn you aside from your projected route, but it is my duty in the cause of common humanity to warn you that you are running into the jaws of danger in taking your family to Rome. We have advices to-day that the corpses of thirteen Americans, most of them women and children,—all dead within the week—are now lying at Maquay and Hooker’s in Rome awaiting transportation to America.”
This was appalling. But matters waxed serious in Paris, too. Indian Summer over, it began to rain. In Scriptural phrase,—“Neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest”—of mist, sleet and showers—“lay upon us.” Deprived of what was my very life—(what little of it remained,) daily exercise in the open air, the cough, insomnia and other terrors that had driven us into exile, increased upon me rapidly and alarmingly. Weakening day by day, it was each morning more difficult to rise and look despairingly from my windows upon the watery heavens and flooded streets. Sunshine and soft airs were abroad somewhere upon the earth. Find them we must before it should be useless to seek them. The leader of the household brigade ordered a movement along the whole line. Like a brood of swallows, we fled southward. “Certainly to Florence. Probably to Rome. Should the skies there prove as ungenial as those of France,—as a last and forlorn hope—to Algiers.” Such were the terms of command.