never left the house unattended; he was forbidden to look at a woman or to stir a step out of doors without having at his heels an abbé who had trained him for the service of God and who, after having been the last amico of the marquise, now ruled her household with an authority that was almost despotic.
The next morning Don Ottavio, accompanied by the Abbé Negroni, the individual who the day before had mistaken me for his pupil, came with a carriage and offered me his services as cicerone.
The first monument that we stopped to inspect was a church. There Don Ottavio, following the example of his abbé, kneeled, beat his breast and made innumerable signs of the cross. Upon arising he pointed out to me the various frescoes and statues and discoursed upon them like a man of taste and good sense. I was agreeably surprised. We began to converse and his talk pleased me. We had been speaking Italian for some time; all at once he said to me in French:
"My tutor does not understand a word of your language; let us talk French; we shall be more at our ease."
It seemed as if the young man in changing his idiom had suffered a change of nature. Nothing in his conversation savored of the priest. I seemed to be listening to one of our provincial politicians of a liberal turn. I noticed that he rattled off everything in one unvarying monotonous tone of voice, and that this tone was frequently in strange contrast with the liveliness of his expressions. This was apparently a habit assumed for the purpose of mystifying Negroni, who kept asking us from time to time what we were
