Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 1. — Reading Companion

The Pilgrim's Eye: Hawthorne Among the Faithful

Hawthorne's Rome entries are punctuated by encounters with pilgrims and religious spectacle, but his interest is less in devotion than in the collision of ancient forms with present-day behavior. He notes pilgrims 'with their pilgrim staves, in the fashion of a thousand years ago' near the Forum, then immediately records a woman who, failing to pray to a saint, prays to him instead. The joke—'being thus treated as a canonized personage, I thought it incumbent on me to be gracious'—is characteristic. At St. Peter's on Easter Sunday, he observes the papal procession with detachment: the pope 'floated slowly along' under a canopy, while the crowd prevented detailed view. Hawthorne's attention shifts to the 'officials in antique Spanish dresses' and 'Swiss guards, in polished steel breastplates,' noting that papal ceremonies 'forego little or nothing that belongs to times past, while it includes everything appertaining to the present.' The entry ends not with the benediction but with a walk over the Ponto Rotto and a glimpse of the Cloaca Maxima—a sewer arch beside a temple. The sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, are held in a single frame.

The Artist's Studio: Gibson, Miss Hosmer, and the Commerce of Fame

Hawthorne's visit to the studio of the American sculptor Miss Hosmer, a pupil of the English neoclassical sculptor John Gibson, yields a compact meditation on artistic patronage and reputation. He describes her as 'a frank and pleasant little person' and notes that her works are shown to the 'throngs of people who go to see Gibson's own'—an audience, he remarks, that 'an artist would most desire to meet, and might never see in a lifetime, if left to himself.' The observation is precise: Gibson's fame draws the crowd, and Hosmer's proximity to him provides exposure, but Hawthorne does not assess her talent. Instead, he registers the asymmetry of the arrangement—the pupil's dependence on the master's reputation—and the way artistic success is mediated by social and commercial networks. The entry is brief, almost offhand, but it captures a tension between individual genius and the mechanics of recognition that Hawthorne, as a novelist who had struggled for an audience, would have recognized intimately.

Cold, Fog, and the Texture of Discomfort

Throughout the French and Italian notebooks, Hawthorne returns to the physical sensations of travel: the cold that 'takes the vivacity out of everybody,' the fog that 'cloud the windows' of the train, the 'shingly beach' at Folkestone. These details are not merely atmospheric; they structure the narrative of movement. The journey from London to Paris is a series of discomforts—a foot-warmer that fails, a bitter wind, a sea passage that makes the Channel boats 'pitch and roll with an ugly and irregular motion.' Even the white cliffs of Albion are dismissed as 'very dusky white' and 'too even an outline to be picturesque.' Hawthorne resists the expected language of the sublime or the beautiful. Instead, he records what he actually sees and feels: the green fields 'immortally green, whatever winter can do against them,' the ice forming on pools, the snow 'scattered and almost invisible.' This fidelity to the ordinary, the uncomfortable, and the unremarkable gives the notebooks their particular authority. They are not a tourist's impressions but a writer's raw data.

Readers coming to these notebooks for plot or character will find instead a record of attention—to the way a beggar kneels, a pickpocket crosses himself, a pope floats above a crowd. Hawthorne's prose is unadorned, his judgments withheld. The value of the volume lies in its accumulation of such moments, each one a fragment that might have been worked into a tale. Approach it as a writer's sketchbook, not a finished picture, and the gaps between entries become as telling as the entries themselves.

Some afternoons I think of Hawthorne’s hotel ledger in Rome, noting the rain against the glass, and then recall the long river-road in The Discovery of Muscovy — Text and Context. Both books share that patient, unhurried eye for strange customs, for men who walk past familiar landmarks as if they’re reading a quiet letter. It’s a certain stillness, really—the pleasure of simply watching.