“You must understand,” explained the Count, “that I do not intend to make Fabrice an exemplary priest of the conventional kind.  No, he will above all remain a great noble; he may continue to be absolutely ignorant if he so pleases, and will become a Bishop and an Archbishop just the same—­provided, of course, that I succeed in retaining the Prince’s confidence.”

Ultimately the Duchess agreed, and undertook to persuade Fabrice to enter the Church.  The persuasion was not easy; but at length Fabrice, having been convinced that the clerical yoke would bear but lightly upon him, consented to the step, and as a preliminary spent three years in a theological college at Naples.

When at the end of the three years Fabrice, now a Monsignore, returned to Parma, matters there were at a crisis; the Raversi party were gaining ground, and Count Mosca was in danger.  Nor did the Prince’s interview with the young cleric improve matters.  Ranuce Ernest IV. had two ruling passions—­an ambition to become ruler of united Italy, and a fear of revolution.  Count Mosca, the diplomatist, was the only man who could further his hopes in the one direction; his fears in the other were carefully kept alive by Rassi, the fiscal-general—­to such an extent that each night the Prince looked under his bed to see if by chance a liberal were lurking there.  Rassi was a man of low origin, who kept his place partly by submitting good-humouredly to the abuse and even the kicks of his master, and partly by rousing that master’s alarms and afterwards allaying them by hanging or imprisoning liberals, with the ready assistance of a carefully corrupted judicial bench.

Towards this nervous Prince, Fabrice bore himself with an aristocratic assurance, and a promptness and coolness in conversation that made a bad impression.  His political notions were correct enough, according to the Prince’s standard; but plainly, he was a man of spirit, and the Prince did not like men of spirit; they were all cousins-germane of Voltaire and Rousseau.  He deemed Fabrice, in short, a potential if not an actual liberal, and therefore dangerous.

Nevertheless Count Mosca carried the day against his rivals—­a triumph due less to his own efforts than to those of the Duchess, to whose charms as the court’s chief ornament the Prince was far from insusceptible.  The Count’s success was Fabrice’s; that youth found himself established as co-adjutor to the Archbishop of Parma, with a reversion to the Archbishopric on the demise of its worthy occupant.

On Fabrice’s return from Naples, the Duchess had found him developed from a boy into a young man, and the handsomest young man in Italy; her affection for him became sisterly; she was nearly in love with him.  She had no cause for jealousy, for Fabrice, although prone to flirtation, had no affairs of the heart.  The word love, as yet, had no meaning for him.

II.—­Giletti