He resolved never to tell the Duchessa any falsehood, and it was because he loved her to adoration at that moment that he vowed to himself never to say to her that he loved her; never would he utter in her hearing the word love, since the passion which bears that name was a stranger to his heart. In the enthusiasm of generosity and virtue which formed his happiness at that moment, he made the resolution to tell her, at the first opportunity, everything: his heart had never known love. Once this courageous plan had been definitely adopted, he felt himself delivered of an enormous burden. “She will perhaps have something to say to me about Marietta; very well, I shall never see my little Marietta again,” he assured himself blithely.
The overpowering heat which had prevailed throughout the day was beginning to be tempered by the morning breeze. Already dawn was outlining in a faint white glimmer the Alpine peaks that rise to the north and east of Lake Como. Their massive shapes, bleached by their covering of snow, even in the month of June, stand out against the pellucid azure of a sky which at those immense altitudes is always pure. A spur of the Alps stretching southwards into smiling Italy separates the sloping shores of Lake Como from those of the Lake of Garda. Fabrizio followed with his eye all the branches of these sublime mountains, the dawn as it grew brighter came to mark the valleys that divide them, gilding the faint mist which rose from the gorges beneath.
Some minutes since Fabrizio had taken the road again; he passed the hill that forms the peninsula of Durini, and at length there met his gaze that campanile of the village of Grianta in which he had so often made observations of the stars with Priore Blanès. “What bounds were there to my ignorance in those days? I could not understand,” he reminded himself, “even the ridiculous Latin of those treatises on astrology which my master used to pore over, and I think I respected them chiefly because, understanding only a few words here and there, my imagination stepped in to give them a meaning, and the most romantic sense imaginable.”
Gradually his thoughts entered another channel. “May not there be something genuine in this science? Why should it be different from the rest? A certain number of imbeciles and quick-witted persons agree among themselves that they know (shall we say) Mexican; they impose themselves with this qualification upon society which respects them and governments which pay them. Favours are showered upon them precisely because they have no real intelligence, and authority need not fear their raising the populace and creating an atmosphere of rant by the aid of generous sentiments! For instance, Father Bari, to whom Ernesto IV has just awarded a pension of 4,000 francs and the Cross of his Order for having restored nineteen lines of a Greek dithyramb!
“But, Great God, have I indeed the right to find such things ridiculous? Is it for me to complain,” he asked himself, suddenly, stopping short in the road, “has not that same Cross just been given to my governor at Naples?” Fabrizio was conscious of a feeling of intense disgust; the fine enthusiasm for virtue which had just been making his heart beat high changed into the vile pleasure of having a good share in the spoils of a robbery. “After all,” he said to himself at length, with the lustreless eyes of a man who is dissatisfied with himself, “since my birth gives me the right to profit by these abuses, it would be a signal piece of folly on my part not to take my share, but I must never let myself denounce them in public.” This reasoning was by no means unsound; but Fabrizio had fallen a long way from that elevation of sublime happiness to which he had found himself transported an hour earlier. The thought of privilege had withered that plant, always so delicate, which we name happiness.
“If we are not to believe in astrology,” he went on, seeking to calm himself; “if this science is, like three quarters of the sciences that are not mathematical, a collection of enthusiastic simpletons and adroit hypocrites paid by the masters they serve, how does it come about that I think so often and with emotion of this fatal circumstance: I did make my escape from the prison at B⸺, but in the uniform and with the marching orders of a soldier who had been flung into prison with good cause?”
Fabrizio’s reasoning could never succeed in penetrating farther; he went a hundred ways round the difficulty without managing to surmount it. He was too young still; in his moments of leisure, his mind devoted itself with rapture to enjoying the sensations produced by the romantic circumstances with which his imagination was always ready to supply him. He was far from employing his time in studying with patience the actual details of things in order to discover their causes. Reality still seemed to him flat and muddy; I can understand a person’s not caring to look at it, but then he ought not to argue about it. Above all, he ought not to fashion objections out of the scattered fragments of his ignorance.
Thus it was that, though not lacking in brains, Fabrizio could not manage to see that his half-belief in omens was for him a religion, a profound impression received at his entering upon life. To think of this belief was to feel, it was a happiness. And he set himself resolutely to discover how this could be a proved, a real science, in the same category as geometry, for example. He searched his memory
