The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [27]
His misery lasted through visits to Berlin and Cologne, where he noted gloomily that 27 October was “the first of my birthdays that it snowed on.” However, the Roosevelts celebrated the occasion with their customary blend of warmth and formality, donning full evening dress for dinner and showering him with such splendid gifts that his mood noticeably improved.
Five days into his twelfth year, the child gives the first of several indications that the man is beginning to develop within him: “We went to a shoe makers [in Brussels] and I saw a girl … the most beautiful but ferocious girl I have ever seen in my life.” Another, more emotional entry, written three weeks later in Paris, records that “Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow and her face stired up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”
TEEDIE REMAINED DEPRESSED and ill in Paris. A doctor was summoned to his bedside three times, and three times changed his medicine; but neither this nor frequent “russian baths” had any effect. When at the end of November the Roosevelts started south to winter on the Riviera, his melancholy spilled out in tears: “I cried for homesickness and a wish to get out of the land where friends (or as I think them enemies) who can not speak my language are forced on me.”
But the inexorable Theodore Senior pressed on down the Route Napoléon. On 6 December, Teedie was cheered by his first “decent” hill-climb in months, but his health was still a cause for concern: “I read till mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish.” As they proceeded east along the Riviera, his powers of observation revived. The diaries have vignettes of cruelty to animals, the military might of Monaco (“a few gendarmes and some dismounted cannon”), primitive house paintings, and a “verry romantic” sunset on the Italian border.
At Finale the Roosevelts amused themselves in jingoistic fashion with a crowd of Italian beggars:
We hired one to keep off the rest. Then came some more fun. Papa bought two baskets of doughey cakes. A great crowd of boys girls and women. We tossed the cakes to them and we fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr Stevens [a fellow traveler] kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a “Coup de Grace” we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings … We made the crowds … give us three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.76
Unfazed by such alarming evidence of Italian poverty, Teedie once again rhapsodized over the beauties of the Mediterranean landscape. His diary entries double or triple in length, to as much as a thousand words a day.
Moving leisurely down the Ligurian coast via Genoa and “Piza,” the Roosevelt family arrived in Rome in time for Christmas. “Hip! hip! hurrah!!!!” rejoiced Teedie. “The presents passed our upmost expectations.”77 Rome, on the other hand, did not: his first impression of it, through rainy windows, was a dirty jumble of old buildings. But when the weather improved he explored the city and its environs enthusiastically, from the depths of the Catacombs to the heights of “rockety papa” (Rocca di Papa).
He showed similar conscientiousness on an excursion to Naples and Pompeii. The temptingly precipitous and icy slopes of Vesuvius enabled him to work off his superabundant energy on the last day of 1869. Reaching the summit long before other members of the family, Teedie happily inhaled sulfur fumes until his bronchii rebelled, and threw pebbles into the lava, careless of the turbulence that spewed them back into his face.
New Year’s Day 1870 came and went, and, from the children’s point of view, the worst part of the Grand Tour was over. Although several months of winter in Europe yet remained, spring was on its way, and