The dread of sitting near a fire, and the contempt for carpets expressed by the old inhabitants, are perfectly ludicrous: they mourn over the effeminacy of the rising generation, who, so far as they are permitted, gladly avail themselves of these pernicious indulgences. A gentleman one night came freezing into our drawing-room, and as he stood complacently before the fire, made us laugh at the account of a visit he had just been paying to the Count M——, the admiral of the port—a sinecure office, it is needless to remark. He found him in bed with a slight attack of gout, and his wife and daughter-in-law, with several visitors, were sitting round him, making _la società_: the gentlemen in their hats and cloaks, and the ladies in shawls, handkerchiefs tied over their heads, and the never-absent _scaldino_, filled with live embers, in their hands. Our friend was pressed by the admiral to follow the general example, and cloak and cover himself. He declined at first, being of a very ceremonious disposition; but soon, he admitted, his scruples gave way before the excessive coldness of the room, on a northern aspect, destitute of fire or carpet; and he resumed his out-door apparel like the rest.
It used often to happen, when paying a morning visit, that the drawing-room fire was ordered to be lighted out of compliment to us, in spite of our entreaties to the contrary; the result, as we too well anticipated, after many laborious efforts on the part of the unhappy servitor, with a vast expenditure of breath—a method of ignition seemingly preferred to bellows—being invariably a hopeless abandonment of the enterprise, a stifling amount of smoke, and an unlimited number of apologies.
In the daytime, the Anconitan ladies, even of the first rank, rarely occupy their drawing-rooms, which are merely entered to receive visitors; they mostly sit in their bed-chambers until evening; and hence the formal appearance, the absence of all comfort, that strikes an English eye so much on first entering their houses. From the street you proceed, by a large _porte cochère_, of which the gates are closed at night, into a court or vaulted passage, wide enough to admit a carriage. Of this, evidence is afforded by the appearance of that vehicle in dim perspective; while undoubted proofs arise, through the olfactory nerves, of the immediate vicinity of the stables. You ascend a handsome stone staircase, but rarely swept, and only traditionally whitewashed, on which groups of beggars are stationed in various attitudes, and pause at the first-floor, before a door that has not been painted for thirty years, when the present owner of the palace was married. Your first summons is unheeded; and it is not till after ringing a second time rather impatiently, you are admitted by a dirty manservant, who has evidently been cleaning lamps, and is uneasily settling himself into his tarnished livery-coat, which had been hanging on a clothes-horse in a corner of the hall, in strange contrast with a large genealogical tree in a massive gilt frame, and four carved benches painted with armorial bearings, but literally begrimed with dirt, forming its principal furniture. You next traverse a magnificent apartment—the hall of state in olden times—about fifty feet long and forty wide, still retaining traces of its former splendour. The lofty ceiling is richly painted in those fanciful arabesques which belong to a period between the school of Raphael and the decadence of art at the end of the seventeenth century. The walls are hung with family portraits of various epochs—knights in armour, children in starched ruffs and brocades, cardinals in their scarlet robes; and alternated with these are immense mirrors, dimly reflecting on their darkened surface the changes that have crept over the once gorgeous scene. The rich gilding above and around you, of the frames and candelabra, of the splendid cornices that surmount the inlaid doors, and of the ponderous chairs in their immovable array—all this does not more forcibly bear witness to the lavish profusion that must once have presided here, than do the torn and faded draperies, the broken and uneven pavement, the unwashed and uncurtained windows, to the present neglect and penury which make no effort to ward off the progress of decay.