How much Signor Mariano
could accomplish in those canals! And it was thus that the idea of
leaving Rome first came to the painter.
Josephina did not object. That daily round of receptions in the
countless embassies and legations was beginning to bore her. Now that
the charm of the first impressions had disappeared, Josephina noticed
that the great ladies treated her with an annoying condescension as if
she had descended from her rank in marrying an artist. Besides, the
younger men in the embassies, the attaches of different nationalities,
some light, some dark, who sought relief from their celibacy without
going outside diplomatic society, were disgracefully impudent as they
danced with her or went through the figures of a cotillion, as if they
considered her an easy conquest, seeing her married to an artist who
could not display an ugly uniform in the drawing rooms. They made
cynical declarations to her in English or German and she had to keep her
temper, smiling and biting her lips, close to Renovales, who did not
understand a word and showed his satisfaction at the attentions of which
his wife was the object on the part of the fashionable youths whose
manners he tried to imitate.
The trip was decided on. They would go to Venice! Their friend Cotoner
said "Good-by," he was sorry to part from them but his place was in
Rome. The Pope was ailing just at that time and the painter, in the hope
of his death, was preparing canvases of all sizes, striving to guess who
would be his successor.
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