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Chapter 23:
Leaving
London on the 23d of October, with intent to pass the winter in
Dresden, the first point of pause on the Continent was
Brussels, where
Mr. Ticknor arrived on the 6th of November, but, to his regret, found that his friend,
Mr. Hugh S. Legare,—then
United States Charge d'affaires in
Belgium, —was in
Paris.
The season, of course, was dull, the
Court absent, and little of interest in the local society.
Mr. Ticknor, however, saw
M. Quetelet and one or two other persons whom he was glad to know, and describes, in the following entry in his journal, the beginning of a delightful acquaintance with a charming circle.
Journal.
One day I passed very agreeably with the
Marquis Arconati and his family, including the
Count Arrivabene1 and two other Italian exiles.
They live, except in winter, at the
Castle of Gaesbeck, about eight miles from
Brussels, a fine, large old pile of building, connected in history with the troubles of
Holland, and full of recollections of that disastrous period.
It is pleasantly situated on the edge of a valley, upon which it looks down, and there they live as happily as exiles can. They were all implicated in the revolutionary movements in
Italy, of which
Pellico,
Confalonieri, etc., were a part, and for the last twelve years
Arconati and
Arrivabene have been under sentence of death.
They are all people of most agreeable intellectual culture, and
Arrivabene,
Berchet, and Salviati are authors of reputation; but the fortunes of all of them were confiscated or sequestered when sentence was issued against their persons.
Arconati, however, had large estates and means beyond the reach
