Yet, at the same
time, it was bitter to her, and ministered an unwholesome aliment to
her morbid self-depreciation.
CHAPTER XI
The Cardinal's Reception, and the Marchese's Ball
On the first day of the New Year, according to long-established
custom, there was a grand reception in the evening at the palace of
the Cardinal Legate. It was to be, as always on that occasion, a
very grand affair. All the diamonds, and all the old state
carriages, and all the liveries in Ravenna were put in requisition.
Old coats, gorgeously bedizened with broad worsted lace of brilliant
colours, and preserved for many a year carefully, but not wholly
successfully, against time and moth, were taken by fours and fives
from, the cypress-wood chests in old family mansions, where they lay
in peace from year's end to year's end if no marriage or other great
family solemnity intervened to give them an extra turn of service,
and were used to turn dependants of all sorts into liveried servants
for the nonce; and nobody imagined or hoped that anybody else would
look upon this display as anything else than absolute and frank
ostentation. Nobody supposed that any human being would be led into
believing that this state indicated the ordinary mode of life of the
persons who exhibited it. Everybody in Italy has been for so many
generations so very much poorer than his forefathers were, that such
a state of things has long since been accepted by universal consent
as a normal one; and it is understood on all hands that these fitful
displays of the remnants of former grandeur, this vain revisiting of
the glimpses of the moon by the ghosts of long-departed glories,
shall be taken and allowed as protests on behalf of the bearers of
old noble names to the effect that their ancestors did really once
live in a style conformable to their ideas--that they perfectly know
how these things should be done, and would be found quite prepared
to resume their proper state, if only the good old days of
prosperity should come again.
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