Helena by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [WAUGH, EVELYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Historical, Fiction / Religious, Fiction / Christian - Historical, Fiction / Biographical, Fiction / Literary
ISBN: 9780316216524
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2012-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Eight

Constantine’s Great Treat

No one had really expected the Empress Dowager to come to the Jubilee. The invitation had been sent as a matter of form. The acceptance caused perturbation among the chamberlains. None of them had ever seen her but one thing was certain; there were far too many women about the court already. There was the Empress Fausta, always a trouble maker. It had been a bad day when Constantine gave the Lateran Palace to the Pope and moved her with all her children to the Palatine. There was Constantia, the Emperor’s half-sister, the widow of Licinius; her presence and her son’s was a continual, painful reminder of the circumstances of his death. There were Anastasia and Eutropia and the wives of Julius Constantius and Dalmatius, four ladies who set problems of precedence. There was no room at the Palatine Palace for the Empress Helena.

After much discussion they hit on the Sessorian Palace, a splendid old house with a large garden, on the walls, near the Theater Royal. The neighborhood was slummy but it was not to be expected that a woman of her years would go out much. The chamberlains set to work filling it with valuable furniture.

To reach this dower-house from the Flaminian Gate Helena had to cross the whole of Rome, up the Corso, under the slope of the Capitol, through the Forum, past the Colosseum, out through the old walls to the Celian hill, through the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, at last to her grand and lonely lodging. The way was cleared for her on her first arrival but everywhere from balconies and side streets rose the hum and chatter of a million and a half Romans, and everywhere behind the façades of the temples and the historic buildings of the Republic stood the huge, new shabby apartment houses, island-blocks ten stories high made of rubble and timber, sublet and sub-divided, tottering with the weight of humanity.

It was spring and everywhere fountains were playing among the falling smuts. But Rome was not beautiful. Compared with Trèves it seemed gross and haphazard. Beauty would come later. For centuries the spoils of the world had flowed into the City, piled up and lost themselves there. For centuries to come they would be dispersed and disfigured. The City would be burned and pillaged and deserted, and the marble stripped for the kiln. The streets would silt up, gypsies would bivouac under her broken arches, and goats pick their path between thorn and fallen statuary. Then Beauty would come. She was on the way, far distant still, saddling under the paling stars for the huge journey of more than a thousand years. Beauty would come in her own time, capricious, adorable wanderer, and briefly make her home on the seven hills.

Meanwhile there was the mob. Not on her first arrival in the curtained litter, but later when, contrary to expectation, she tirelessly followed the tourists’ round, Helena daily saw more men and women than ever before in the total sum of her lifetime.

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