This time, it is the man’s turn not to understand Tuscan, so he repeats again in Neapolitan:

  “Temple of Serapis! — Temple of Serapis!

  As you draw near Pozzuoli, the first-grade beggars reappear.

  We will, by your leave, proceed to classify the beggars of Naples into three degrees or grades.

  First Grade — Beggars asking for alms.

  Second Grade — Beggars seeking by force or strategy to show you antiquities or to sell you green idols or rusty medallions.

  Third Grade — Beggars soliciting posts of emolument, decorations, or Court favours.

  Perhaps you will say I ought to have numbered the grades of beggars in the inverse order.

  By all that’s righteous, No! I put the beggar who insists on selling you his green idol, or his rusty coin, above the beggar who would sell his conscience or his vote; and far below the beggar who implores the passer-by, be he French or English, to throw him a grano I class the mendicant who begs a chamberlain’s key, a crown of honour, or the portfolio of a Minister, from Francis II. or from Victor Emmanuel. I hold, therefore, to my system of numbering. To me the professional office-seeker is the very lowest class of mendicant.

  Pardon me for my digression, or rather for the recitation of my creed.

  Let us return to the first-grade beggars.

  Beware of a little chapel on the left of the road, containing a group in earthenware representing Christ on the Cross, blood dropping from every wound, and at His feet a gentleman dressed in a bottle-green coat and holding up his child to look at the distressing sight. It is there that you will find the first-grade beggars, awaiting you in force, provided with a money box, which they rattle as they beg.

  You enter Pozzuoli with a princely escort in the middle of a symphony of laments tuned to every note in the gamut, from lower F to upper D: “Dying of hunger,”

  “Pity a poor blind man,”

  “Do not forget an unhappy cripple,”

  “Spare a copper for a widow with eleven children,”

  “Charity to an old man of seventy-four years of age whose parents are entirely dependent on his exertions! “And above all the chorus sounds the voice of your cicerone crying “Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis! “But worst of all, you find the gateway blocked by empty carriages, waiting there to snap up travellers, as spiders lie in wait to pounce on flies. The police could easily force them into ranks on each side of the road, so as to leave a way in the middle; everybody would feel the benefit of the regulation, none more so than the drivers themselves. But there! there are no police in Pozzuoli, and never have been, since Sylla, to assuage the pains of death, had the Syndic strangled for refusing to pay his contribution to the State.

  Having got through the gate, you think your horses will be able to trot on again. Ah well, yes! but then the road is up in the village of Pozzuoli. I cannot quite understand the phenomenon, but for some reason or other the paving stones are always in process of being taken up there and never being relaid. Then you begin to see that, whether you like it or not, you must get out of your carriage, put your hands inside your pockets and hold your handkerchief tight if you blow your nose, grasp your box firmly if you would take a pinch of snuff, and never let go of your purse if there is any money in it. A gentleman of great respectability and veracity told me that once he had his spectacles stolen off his nose. As he was extremely shortsighted, when his spectacles were gone, he could not see the thief, and this was the end of his glasses.

  Thus you find yourself plunged into a jostling crowd of beggars, paviors, pickpockets, asses, mules, sellers of eggs or carrots, sham cicerones who want to take you, the one to the cathedral, the other to the amphitheatre, coachmen who vociferate “Baja, Mare Morto, Lago Fusaro!” and still you hear, above all these shouts, the voice of your original cicerone, who is yelling, “Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis!”

  Four men lay hold of your carriage, they steady it, push it, lift it; they are not enough; two more join them, making six in all. You lose half an hour’s time, but at last a paved street is reached. This is blocked by a barricade! Why a barricade? Surely we live in the piping times of peace. The object of it is, that five or six urchins, who have constructed the barricade to prevent you from passing, may take it down again to allow you to pass.

  The men who carry, who push, who support your carriage and the boys who construct and demolish the barricade are only two varieties of the great corporation of beggars. Put your hand in your pocket; if you have given nothing to those who have done nothing for you, some remuneration is at least due to those who have worked in your service.

  You again get into your carriage, the sweat of your brow running down; there are some thirty beggars surrounding you.

  Your horses humanely refuse to move; they cannot take a step without treading on a man, a woman, or a child.

  Then it is that, exasperated, out of your mind, panting, furious with rage, you seize the coachman’s whip and lay about you among the mob. This is the tourist’s third manner. The horses start off again at a trot; at last you think yourself free from all the vermin, you draw a long breath, you venture on a long-drawn “Ah!” of relief. All of a sudden you catch, almost in your ear, “Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis! Temple of Serapis! “It is your cicerone, who has entrenched himself upon the box- seat of your carriage, and who braves you with impunity from that point of vantage. You will not get rid of him before you get to the Lucrine Lake.

  IV.

  You have been told, have you not, that the dogs of Constantinople are divided into distinct communities; that each dog as long as he remains in his own’ district is an independent member of his republic, but that if he dares to cross the border, he is immediately torn to pieces by the dogs of the neighbouring community. It is just the same with the cicerones.

  The cicerone of the Temple of Serapis leaves you at the Lucrine Lake, because he is then on the preserves of the cicerones who show Nero’s Ovens, the Wonderful Fishpond, and the ruins of Baiaa. Then you watch him returning thence on foot, and quite out of countenance, to Pozzuoli, where he will seek for another traveller more gullible than you. You have your revenge!

  But in vain do you flatter yourself you have reached the end of your expedition, that is, the old castle of Baja, which guards the passage from the Gulf to the little Creek of Bauli.

  The castle is there, like the City of the Iron Gates, which bars the road from Russia to Persia.

  But at Naples stone walls are not difficult obstacles to surmount. “No town is impregnable, if you can get a mule with a load of gold into it,” was a maxim of King Philip, father of Alexander the Great. You will be able to force the gates of Baise at a cheaper rate than this. Take a half piastre out of your pocket, and the feat is accomplished. No, the walls which are difficult to break through at Naples are the walls of men, the living ramparts.

  Arrived at the extremity of the Lucrine Lake, you will find a triple line of fortification.

  The first: Cicerones showing Nero’s Ovens.

  The second: Cicerones showing the Wonderful Fishpond.

  The third: Cicerones showing the Temples of Venus Genetrix, of Mercury, and of Diana Lucifera, which, as a matter of fact, are not temples at all, but baths.

  There, whether you will or no, even if it is your tenth visit, you are forced to get on a man’s back and ride him through the subterranean passages; you are obliged to run the risk of apoplexy in Nero’s Ovens, and while waiting for the egg, which a broken-winded guide cooks for you in the boiling water, you must listen to his absurd description of the Wonderful Fishpond, which is neither more nor less than the magnificent reservoir which used to supply fresh water to the Grotto of Misenum. After that you are dragged to the Temples of Venus Genetrix, of Mercury and of Diana Lucifera, which, as I have said, are nothing else than the ruins of those enervating baths which caused Propertius to fear for his mistress Cynthia’s sojourn at Baiee. Well then, of this again I say, the matter is one which concerns the Aedile’s Court and the Office of Public Instruction. It is a disgrace to both institutions that foreigners should come away from Baiae with erroneous legends foisted on them by cicerones licensed by the Government.

  It is not the business of the authors of the Corricolo, as the learned M. Niccolini calls us, to set them right.

  As the port of Baja is about as far as your hired horses can take you, you stop for a few minutes to admire the beautiful bay of which Horace says:

  Nullus in orbe sinus Baiis prœlucet amœnis.

  Then getting into your carriage to return, you ask if there is no way of avoiding Pozzuoli. Pozzuoli is unavoidable. You go through Pozzuoli again; you find awaiting you, not the cicerones, for they are on the road from Naples, but your mendicants, your barricade and your carriage porters. Only, this time, as the road beyond the town is downhill, you order the driver to go fast. He whips up his horses, sighing as he does it, and in the twinkling of an eye you reach the establishment of the oyster man.

  At this point the road divides into two. Not for anything in the world would you again go through the martyrdom you suffered in coming, so you say — ” Go by the Grotto of Pozzuoli.” The driver takes the left road and you arrive at the Grotto of Pozzuoli. The Grotto of Pozzuoli resembles the turnstiles at the Louvre in this: you can only go through at a walking pace. As you come out, two beggars spring up at the horses’ heads. One rattles a money box and cries, “Give to the Madonna.” The Madonna — honi soit qui mal y pense — lies in the former Temple of Priapus, whence came the two harpies immortalized by Petronius.

  The other is there to show you, willy-nilly, Virgil’s Tomb, which perhaps is no more the tomb of Virgil than Virgil’s rock is Virgil’s school.

  You give your alms to the Madonna, you climb up, for the fourth or fifth time, to the tomb of Virgil. He must be at least a fairly great poet, considering you have to make so many different pilgrimages to his ashes. You once more pass by your flower-sellers, through your mendicants, and you reach your hotel, bruised, weary, ground to powder, paralysed, impotent, dead, assassinated!

  Assassinated by whom? By the hordes of beggars.

  Henceforth, there is for you no more the limpid sea, the bright clear air, the deep blue sky; no more for you is Vesuvius, or Pompeii, Castellamare, Sorrento, Capri; for you there is no Chiaja, no Posilippo, no Margellina, no Gulf of Pozzuoli, no Bay of Baja; nothing is left you but a hideous spectre, a gibbering ghost, a foul phantom, a fury, a shrew, a harpy; in one word, Mendicancy! And you say:

  “Yes, I will away; I will leave the land; I will escape the fiends! For me, better are the frozen plains of Siberia, better the burning sands of the Sahara, better the mistral, the sirocco, the khamsin, better the mountain blast that drove Gastibelza mad, or the icy breeze of Madrid that will not blow out a candle yet will kill its man; better all and any of these than Naples with its Bay, its sky, its climate, its Vesuvius — and its beggars!”

 

 

  Alexandre Dumas, THE SCOURGE OF NAPLES

 

 

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