The Volcano Lover Read Online Free PDF

nor the dangers too frightening, whereas most people, underestimating the effort, were appalled by its arduousness, frightened by its vision of injury. Upon their return he would hear the stories of the great risks they had run, of the girandoles of fire, the hail (or shower) of stones, the accompanying racket (cannon, thunder), the infernal, mephitic, sulphurous stench. The very mouth of hell, that’s what it is! So people believe it to be here, he would say. Oh, I don’t mean literally, the visitor (if English, therefore usually Protestant) would reply.
    Yet even as he wished for the volcano not to be profaned by the wheezing, the overweight, and the self-congratulatory, he longed—like any collector—to exhibit it. And was obliged to do so, if the visitor was a friend or relation from England or a foreign dignitary, as long as Vesuvius continued to flaunt its expressiveness. It was expected that he would chaperone an ascent. His eccentric friend from school days at Westminster, Frederick Hervey, about to be made a bishop, came for a long month; he took him up on an Easter Sunday, and Hervey’s arm was seared by a morsel of volcanic effluvia; the Cavaliere supposed that he would be boasting about it for the rest of his life.
    Hard to imagine that one could feel proprietary about this legendary menace, double-humped, some five thousand feet tall and eight miles from the city, exposed to the view of everyone, indeed the signature feature of the local landscape. No object could be less ownable. Few natural wonders were more famous. Foreign painters were flocking to Naples: the volcano had many admirers. He set about, by the quality of his attentions, to make it his. He thought about it more than anyone else. My dear mountain. A mountain for a beloved? A monster? With the vases or the paintings or the coins or the statues, he could count on certain conventional recognitions. This passion was about what always surprised, alarmed; what exceeded all expectations; and what never evoked the response that the Cavaliere wanted. But then, to the obsessed collector, the appreciations of other people always seem off-key, withholding, never appreciative enough.
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    Collections unite. Collections isolate.
    They unite those who love the same thing. (But no one loves the same as I do; enough.) They isolate from those who don’t share the passion. (Alas, almost everyone.)
    Then I’ll try not to talk about what interests me most. I’ll talk about what interests you.
    But this will remind me, often, of what I can’t share with you.
    Oh, listen. Don’t you see. Don’t you see how beautiful it is.
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    It is not clear whether he was a natural teacher, an explainer (nobody did the tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum better), or learned to be one because so many people he was close to were younger than he and few were as cultivated. Indeed, it was the Cavaliere’s destiny to have all the important relations of his life, counting or not counting Catherine, with people much younger than himself. (Catherine was the only predictably younger person, by eight years: a wife is expected to be her husband’s junior.) The royal playmate of his childhood had been seven and a half years his junior; the King of Naples was younger by twenty-one years. Younger people were drawn to the Cavaliere. He always seemed so interested in them, in furthering their talents, whatever these might be; so self-sufficient. Avuncular rather than paternal—he had never wanted to have children—he could be concerned, even responsible, without expecting too much.
    Charles, his sister Elizabeth’s son, was twenty when he arrived for the southernmost stop on his Grand Tour. The pale self-assured little boy whom the Cavaliere had glimpsed a few times had become a highly intelligent, rather disablingly fastidious young man, with a modest, prudent trove of pictures and objects of