Percy's bookplate carried the motto 'fidelis ad urnam' which I had the temerity to translate to 'faithful to the half amphora', perhaps an illusion to Percy's fondness for a jar, but simply asking the Professor reveals it to be more sensibly translated as 'faithful to the end', as an urna can be a pot for a person's ashes as well as a pot for his beer.
It took a while to get into the book, but in the end an engaging tale of the adventures of two rich ladies from the US, a married aunt and an unmarried niece, both young and beautiful, with their adventures being mainly among the posh (as opposed to the parvenus) rich of Paris and Rome. A sort of Henry James job, but done from the French angle.
The male lead is one Lelo, otherwise known as the Comte Sant'Anna, a very seductive but otherwise uninteresting specimen of the Roman aristocracy of the day, this last being rather different from the Italian aristocracy generally, the story being set not that long after Rome and what was left of the Papal States got taken over by the Italians. Lelo makes a pitch for the aunt and fails but goes on to marry the niece, with whom he initially carried on with to annoy the aunt who had spurned him. The aunt then falls in love with him but restrains herself, the balance of the book being her ultimately successful effort to purge herself of love for Lelo. Lelo takes great pleasure and pride in having caused all this commotion, while Coulevain takes the line that Italians who are good at this game take a lot more pleasure in causing hurt of this sort than is proper. A lot more than an Englishman, who would not play the game at all, and rather more than a Frenchman who would play it with a more decent restraint.
Interesting sub-plots concerning the attitude of the two ladies the Catholic Church, particularly interesting for me following, as it does, the book about Archbishop Lang noticed on 14th December. The niece has acquired a cardinal, a possible Pope, for an uncle, with whom she gets on very well, but stops well short of conversion, while the aunt gets herself converted as part of her battle against her obsession with Lelo. But the coup de grâce for the obsession is actually administered by a charismatic Hindu guru. And we of the sixties thought that we invented gurus.
Along the way I find some curious snippets.
That the rather splendid word fleuretage seems to mean flirtation. Oddly, the word attracts very few hits in Google and none of my dictionaries admit to it at all.
That our word nurse comes from the French nourrice or wet-nurse, using a completely different word for the hospital sort of nurse.
That the locution 'well I never' is properly in two parts with 'well' being a free standing exclamation and the 'I never' bit being the truncated start of a sentence about how I never saw such a thing before, or some such.
All good fun. On my next visit to Hall's I shall look to see if the others, declined first time around, are still there.
PS: the Professor knows a lot about Percy Ashton Jonsons. Bit of work needed to sort out the right one from all the dross.
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