Italy Revisited
Henry James
I WAITED in Paris until after the elections for the new Chamber (they took place on the 14th of
October); for only after one had learned that the odious attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers
to drive the French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the white ticket of an
official candidate round his neck, had not achieved the success which the unscrupulous violence of the
process might have indicated, - -only then was it possible to draw a long breath and deprive the
republican party of such support as might be derived from one's sympathetic presence. Seriously
speaking, too, the weather had been enchanting, and there were Italian sensations to be encountered
without leaving the banks of the Seine. Day after day the air was filled with golden light, and even those
chalk-toned vistas of the Parisian beaux quartiers assumed the most tenderly iridescent and
autumnal tints. Autumn weather in Europe is often such a very sorry affair that a fair-minded American
will have it on his conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant October.
The echoes of the electoral strife kept me company for a while after starting upon that abbreviated
journey to Turin, which, as you leave Paris at night, in a train unprovided with encouragements to
slumber, is a singular mixture of the odious and the charming. The charming, however, I think, prevails;
for the dark half of the journey is, in fact, the least interesting. The morning light ushers you into the
romantic gorges of the Jura, and after a big bowl of café au lait at Culoz you may compose
yourself comfortably for the climax of your spectacle. The day before leaving Paris I met a friend who
had just returned from a visit to a Tuscan country-seat, where he had been watching the vintage. "Italy,"
he said, "is more lovely than words can tell, and France, steeped in this electoral turmoil, seems no better
than a bear-garden." That part of the bear-garden through which you travel as you approach the Mont
Cenis seemed to me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to the absence of rain, had
been vivid and crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands between the mulberries, in the
neighbourhood of Chambery, looked like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier station of
Modane, on the further side of the Mont Cenis tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even the most
irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be disposed to consider it good-naturedly.
There is far too much bustling and scrambling, and the facilities afforded you for the obligatory process
of ripping open your luggage before the officers of the Italian custom-house are much scantier than
should be; but, for myself, there is something that deprecates irritation in the shabby green and grey
uniforms of all the Italian officials who stand loafing about and watching the northern invaders scramble
back into marching order. Wearing an administration uniform does not necessarily spoil a man's temper,
as in France one is sometimes led to believe; for these excellent, underpaid Italians carry theirs as lightly
as possible, and their answers to your inquiries do not in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons, and
cockades. After leaving Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy of your desire; and there is
something very picturesque in the way the road edges along those great precipices which stand shoulder
to shoulder, in a long perpendicular file, until they finally admit you to a distant glimpse of the ancient
capital of Piedmont.
Turin is not a city to make, in vulgar parlance, a fuss about, and I pay an extravagant tribute to subjective
emotion in speaking of it as ancient. But if the place is not as Italian as Florence and Rome, at least it is
more Italian than New York and Paris; and while the traveller walks about the great arcades and looks at
the fourth-rate shop windows, he does not scruple to cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively
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