12-11-2025, 03:39 PM
TWO Frenchmen, a fair and slender youth of seventeen and a man of thirty odd, had just met and introduced themselves on the summit of Vesuvius. Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen was in the Philosophy First at school in Paris. Robert de Tournel, an amateur poet, had formerly been a cavalry officer. They suspected each other of having something more in common than a taste for climbing mountains; something betrayed in the fact that each had obviously selected his guide for his looks. The discovery that their families were connected seemed to strike them as awkward. But the landscape in which they met, at once infernal and divine, favoured an atmosphere of complicity. Tournel, knowing its secrets, found it easy to captivate a neophyte. He got rid of an individual whose office as “Warden of Vesuvius” entitled him to cheat visitors of a few lire and—this meeting took place on a morning of September 1897—sat down with Jacques at a convenient distance from the fumaroles, prepared to enjoy the delights of an uncovenanted encounter. It was he, rather than his companion, who provided the entertainment; but he had a listener sensitive to the quality and delicacy of his conversation. He expounded the city of Naples, which lay, far and languid, below them in the plain; likewise the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii as they had emerged from the depths of time, the great bay whose outline was hazed by mist, and the race of men, two of whose ingenuous or cynical sons lounged beside them. Thereafter the traveller poet celebrated more distant scenes: Egypt, Syria, Greece. These names were music in the ears of a youth who had, as yet, only read them in his school-books. His brief residence in Italy, a reward for his first baccalaureate, was already fulfilling the yearnings of his artistic soul; but, thanks to his new friend, he began to perceive all that was reflected in the Mediterranean, that middle sea upon whose