Military life in Italy : sketches - Societa italiana di storia militare

DEPARTURE AND RETURN. 3O/
thoroughly aware of my existence.
Besides, my poetic exclamations,
which were heard in the street, I used to pass the entire
evenings on the terrace in the court ;
and every one knows
what the courts are like in the new houses at Turin. (We
lived in one of the three great palaces in Via Nizza, opposite
the railway station.) They are great pigeon-houses, where
there are more people than stones, and after dinner ail
rush to
the windows, and those above look at those below, those below
look at the legs of those above ; up in the attics they make love,
on the terraces the children play, the employes read the newspapers,
and from the roof to the ground-floor, from the groundfloor
up to the roof, those on one floor talk illy of those on another,
and all bow to and smile at each other like the best
friends in the world. We lived on the second floor. We had
on one side a charming, cultivated, and clever Neapolitan lady,
a great friend of ours ;
a woman a la Cairoli, full of energy and
dash, imaginative and prolific, who, one day when her son was
to fight a duel, had filled my mother with admiration and surprise
in saying to her quietly : " He will do his duty ! "
On
the other side lived an old engineer, a painter and octogenarian,
who was blind, and a veteran of Napoleon I, surrounded by
a half dozen dear little grandchildren, who were my delight.
He was a handsome old man, with a good heart, was fond
of me, called me his son, and when I
was away and delayed
replying to him for a couple of days, would go timidly to ask
my mother if I could have taken offence at any thing in his
last letter. On the same floor, opposite us, lived a widow, about
forty, who was elegant, languid, thin, ugly, a rabid devourer of
novels, and had the habit of
going to the window every time I
was there, casting certain long, languishing glances, drawing